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BY

R. W. CHURCH, MA,

: LATE FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

Le eaten til

$

- PUBLIS

THE FRIENDS AT WHOSE INSTANCE

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS HAVE BEEN REPRINTED

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED
BY THE WRITER,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF ALL THAT HE HAS OWED,
IN PAST YEARS OF MUCH ANXIETY BUT deni HAPPINESS,
TO THE INTIMACY OF ice, AND |

THE KINDNESS OF ALL.

ADVERTISEMENT,

Or the following Essays, the two on St. Anselm were
contributed to the British Critic: the rest have ap-
peared in the Christian Remembrancer.

They are republished nearly as they were first
printed. I have not leisure to make them what I
should wish them to have been; and I have no sub-
stantial alterations to introduce in the views and
statements contained in them. The colouring of
each belongs to the time when it was written. Few
men, probably, who try to profit by the multiplied
and various lessons which years bring with them,
would write on any subject in exactly the same
way, if they had to write on it again after a con-
siderable interval; but there is no sufficient reason
to change that colouring in some of the earlier Essays,
to what it might have been if they had been written
later. :

November, 1853.

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CONTENTS.

Dantes (Christian Remembrancer, January, 1850) - -

St. ANSELM AND Wiiu1am Rurus (British Critic, January,

1843) - 2 ‘ . :

Sr. ANSELM AND. Henry I. (British Critic, July, 1843)

Brittany (Christian Remembrancer, January, 1846) -
Avupiw’s Lzo X. (Christian Remembrancer, October, 1846)

FRENCH REvoLuTION oF 1848 (Christian Remembrancer,

July, 1848) — - F :

Farinrs Roman Strats (Christian Remembrancer, October,

1851) - : ; ;

PascAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM (Christian Remembrancer,

July, 1852)} —- : . ‘

343

402

481

Bea > Aloe

DANTE.*
(Jan. 1850.]

Tue “ Divina Commedia” is one of the landmarks of history.
More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a
language and the opening of a national literature, more than
the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one
of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind’s power,
which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, marking out its
advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted
as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands
with the Iliad and Shakspere’s Plays, with the writings of
Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Prin-
cipia, with Justinian’s Code, with the Parthenon and §S.
Peter’s. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens Euro-
pean literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome.
And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it
accompanies in undiminished freshness, the literature which
it began.

We approach the history of such works, in which genius
seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit, witha
kind of awe. The beginnings of all things, their bursting out
from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and
shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too

* Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno; a literal Prose Translation, with the
Text of the Original. By J, A. Cartyie, M.D. London: 1849.
B

2 DANTE.

near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling
sensible of the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and
familiar world —as we enter into the cloud. And as with
the processes of nature, so is it with those offsprings of man’s
mind, by which he has added permanently one more great
feature to the world, and created a new power which is to
act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive
and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations
by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are
out of the reach of investigating thought. Often the idea
recurs of the precariousness of the result : — by how little the
world might have lost one of its ornaments— by one sharp
pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among the count-
less accidents among which man runs his course. And then
the solemn recollection supervenes, that powers were formed,
and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions
controlled, that thus it should be: and the work which man
has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child too
of that ** Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly
and sweetly disposing all things.”

It does not abate these feelings, that we can follow in some
cases and to a certain extent, the progress of a work. Indeed,
the sight of the particular accidents among which it was
developed—which belong, perhaps, to a heterogeneous and
widely discordant order of things, which are out of propor-
tion, and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it,
which have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be con-
nected with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its
accomplishment, — to which we feel, as it were, ashamed to
owe what we can least spare—yet on which its forming
mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had
to conspire—affects the imagination even more. than cases
where we see nothing. We are tempted less to musing and

wonder by the Iliad, a work without a history, cut off from

its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age, unexplained in
its origin and perfection, than by the ‘‘ Divina Commedia,”
destined for the highest ends, and most universal sympathy,

DANTE. 3

yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly
from its chance incidents.

The “ Divina Commedia” is singular among the great works
with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character
and history. We associate in general little more than the
name,—not the life,—of a great poet with his works; per-
sonal interest belongs more usually to greatness in its active
than in its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose
of the Commedia, as well as its filling up and colouring, is
determined by Dante’s peculiar history. ‘The loftiest, per-
haps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also the most
individual ; the writer’s own life is chronicled in it, as well as
the issues and upshot of all things—it is at once the mirror
to all time of the sins and perfections of men, of the judg-
ments and grace of God, and the record, often the only one,
of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambi-
tions, and forgotten crimes of the poet’s own day; and in
that awful company to which he leads us, in the most un-
earthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And
when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the
poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature,
hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the
deliberate design of its author. History indeed here, as
generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in
a great mind and great ideas: —it shows us early a bent and
purpose,—the man conscious of power and intending to use
it,—and then the accidents among which he worked: but
how that current of purpose threaded its way among them,
how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened, by them, we
cannot learn from history. It presents but a broken and
mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper
grows up into youth ina dream of love. The lady of his
mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a
wonder of earth, but as a Saint in Paradise, and relieves his
heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of
fiction; quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical con-
ceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine
and deep feeling. It is a first essay ; he closes it abruptly,

B 2

f DANTE, |

as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of
her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a
ereat work. Buta prosaic change seems to come over this
half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student, the
student of the 13th century —struggling painfully against
difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eye-sight
and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and san-
guine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms,
loose in premiss and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered
by the refinements of half-awakened taste, and the mannerisms
of the Provencals. Boethius and Cicero, and the mass of
mixed learning within his reach, are accepted as the conso-
lation of his human griefs: he is filled with the passion of
universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it. Phi-
losophy has become the lady of his soul—to write allegorical
poems in her honour, and to comment on them with all the
apparatus of his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating
her. Further, he marries; it is said, not happily. The an-
tiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that
Beatrice, also, was married some years before her death. He
appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the
father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a
partizan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day. At
length we see him, at once an exile, and the poet of the
Commedia. Beatrice reappears—shadowy, melting at times
into symbol and figure—but far too living and real, addressed
with too intense and natural feeling, to be the mere personi-
fication of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni
has vanished. The student’s dream has been broken, as the
boy’s had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened
by sorrow, overleaping the student’s formalities and abstrac-
tions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy,
and brooded once more on that Saint in Paradise, whose pre-
sence and memory had once been so soothing, and who now
seemed a real link between him and that stable country,
** where the angels are in peace.” Round her image, the re-
flection of purity and truth, and forbearing love, was grouped

DANTE. 5

that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it
arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a meta-
physical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by
sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of
years, of Beatrice Portinari— no figment of imagination, but
God’s creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by
study and business, and revived in memory by heavy sorrow—
a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling — inter-
rupted, though it would be hazardous to say in Dante’s case,
laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea
and suggested the form of the “ Sacred poem of earth and
heaven.” ;

And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic
gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy, into the
keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader
of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a
source of poetical inspiration,— the political life. The boy
had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and pas-
sionate nature; the student added to this, energy, various
learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities
and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which
made Dante a great poet. But for them, he might have
been a modern critic and essayist, born before his time, and
have held a high place among the writers of fugitive verses ;
in Italy, a graceful but trifling and idle tribe, often casting a
deep and beautiful thought intoa mould of expressive diction,
but oftener toying with a foolish and glittering conceit, and
whose languid genius was exhausted by a sonnet. He might
have thrown into the shade the Guidos and Cinos of his day,
to be eclipsed by Petrarch. But he learned in the bitter
feuds of Italy not to trifle; they opened to his view, and he
had an eye to see, the true springs and abysses of this mortal
life— motives and passions stronger than lovers’ sentiments,
evils beyond the consolations of Boethius and Cicero; and
from that fiery trial which without searing his heart, annealed
his strength and purpose, he drew that great gift and power,

B 3

§ DANTE.

by which he stands pre-eminent even among his high com-
peers, the gift of being real. And the idea of the Commedia
took shape, and expanded into its endless forms of terror and
beauty, not under the roof-tree of the literary citizen, but
when the exile had been driven out to the highways of the
world, to study nature on the sea or by the river or on the
mountain track; and men, in the courts of Verona and
Ravenna, and in the schools of Bologna and Paris— perhaps
of Oxford.

The connexion of these feuds with Dante’s poem has given
to the middle age history of Italy an interest, of which it is
not undeserving in itself,as full of curious exhibitions of
character and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot
lay claim, amidst the social phenomena, so far grander in
scale and purpose and more felicitous in issue, of the other
western nations. It is remarkable for keeping up an antique
phase; which, in spite of modern arrangements, it has not
yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all
that is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities ;
civilisation and empire were concentrated within walls; and
it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be
possessed and wielded, by numbers larger than might be
collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire
indeed aimed at being one in its administration and law;
but it was not a nation, nor were its provinces nations.
Yet everywhere but in Italy, it prepared them for becoming
nations. And while everywhere else, parts were uniting,
and union was becoming organisation—and neither geogra-
phical remoteness, nor unwieldiness of numbers, nor local
interests and differences, were untractable obstacles to that
spirit of fusion, which was at once the ambition of the few,
and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most
powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and join-
ing forces, knots in the political network—while this was
going on more or less happily, throughout the rest of
Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered, in its sim-
plicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any
political activity. The history of Southern Italy indeed is,

——- >

DANTE, 7

mainly a foreign one; the history of modern Rome merges in
that of the Papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its
own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities
—points of mutual and indestructible repulsion, and within,
theatres of action, where the blind tendencies and traditions
of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of indi-
vidual character, and citizens could watch and measure and
study one another with the minuteness of private life.

Two cities were the centres of ancient history, in its most
interesting time. And two cities of modern Italy represent,
with entirely undesigned but curiously exact coincidence, the
parts of Athens and Rome. Venice, superficially so unlike,
is yet in many of its accidental features, and still more in its
spirit, the counterpart of Rome; in its obscure and mixed
origin, in its steady growth, in its quick sense of order and
early settlement of its polity, in its grand and serious public
spirit, in its subordination of the individual to the family,
and the family to the state, in its combination of remote
dominion with the liberty of a solitary and sovereign city.
And though the associations, and the scale of the two were
so different—though Rome had its hills and its legions, and
Venice its lagunes and galleys — the long empire of Venice,
the heir of Carthage and predecessor of England on the seas,
the great aristocratic republic of 1000 years, is the only
empire that has yet matched Rome, in length and steadiness
of tenure. Brennus and Hannibal were not resisted with
greater constancy than Doria and Louis XII.; and that
great aristocracy, long so proud, so high spirited, so intelli-
gent, so practical, who combined the enterprise and wealth
of merchants, the self-devotion of soldiers and gravity of
senators, with the uniformity and obedience of a religious
order, may compare without shame its Giustiniani, and
Zenos, and Morosini, with Roman Fabii and Claudii. And
‘Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens, than
Venice with Italian and contemporary Florence — stability
with fitfulness, independence impregnable and secure, with a
short-lived and troubled liberty, empire meditated and
achieved, with a course of barren intrigues and quarrels.

B4

8 DANTE.

Florence, gay, capricious, turbulent, the city of party, the
head and busy patroness of democracy in the cities round
her— Florence, where popular government was inaugurated
with its utmost exclusiveness and most pompous ceremonial ;
waging her little summer wars against Ghibelline tyrants,
revolted democracies, and her own exiles; and further, so
rich in intellectual gifts, in variety of individual character, in
poets, artists, wits, historians — Florence in its brilliant days
recalled the image of ancient Athens, and did not depart
from its prototype in the beauty of its natural site, in its
noble public buildings, in the size and nature of its territory.
And the course of its history is similar, and the result of
similar causes—a traditional spirit of freedom, with its
accesses of fitful energy, its periods of grand display and
moments of glorious achievement, but producing nothing
politically great or durable, and sinking at length into a
resigned servitude. It had its Pisistratide more successful
than those of Athens; it had, too, its Harmodius and Aris-
togeiton; it had its great orator of liberty, as potent, and as
unfortunate, as the antagonist of Philip. And finally, like
Athens, it became content with the remembrance of its
former glory, with being the fashionable and acknowledged
seat of refinement and taste, with being a favoured dependency
on the modern heir of the Cesars. But if to Venice belongs
a grander public history, Florentine names and works, like
Athenian, will be living among men, when the Brenta shall
have been left unchecked to turn the Lagunes into plough-
land, and when Rome herself may no longer be the seat of
the Popes.

The year of Dante’s birth was a memorable one in the
annals of Florence, of Italy, and of Christendom, The year
1265 was the year of that great victory of Benevento, where
Charles of Anjou overthrew Manfred of Naples, and destroyed
at one blow the power of the house of Swabia. From that

time till the time of Charles V., the emperors had no footing

in Italy. Further, that victory set up the French influence
in Italy, which, transient in itself, produced such strange
and momentous consequences, by the intimate connexion to

ae le Ne

DANTE. 9

which it led between the French kings and the Popes. The
protection of France was dearly bought by the captivity of
Avignon, the great western schism, and the consequent secu-
larisation of the Papacy, which lasted on uninterrupted, till
the Council of Trent. Nearly three centuries of degradation
and scandal, unrelieved by one heroic effort among the suc-
cessors of Gregory VII., connected the Reformation with
the triumph of Charles and the Pope at Benevento. Finally,
by it the Guelf party was restored for good in Florence; the
Guelf democracy, which had been trampled down by the
Uberti and Manfred’s chivalry at Monteaperti, once more
raised its head, and fortune, which had long wavered between
the rival lilies, finally turned against the white one, till the
name of Ghibelline became a proscribed one in Florence,
as Jacobite was once in Scotland, or Papist in England, or
Royalist in France.

The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the inheritance
of a contest which, in its original meaning, had been long
over. The old struggle between the priesthood and the
empire was still kept up traditionally, but its ideas and
interests were changed: they were still great and important
ones, but not those of Gregory VII. It had passed over
from the mixed region of the spiritual and temporal, into the
purely political. The cause of the popes was that of the in-
dependence of Italy—the freedom and alliance of the great
cities of the north, and the dependence of the centre and
south on the Roman See. To keep the Emperor out of
Italy —to create a barrier of powerful cities against him
south of the Alps—to form behind themselves a compact
territory, rich, removed from the first burst of invasion, and
maintaining a strong body of interested feudatories, had now
become the great object of the popes. It may have been a
wise policy on their part, for the maintenance of their spi-
ritual influence, to attempt to connect their own indepen-
dence with the political freedom of the Italian communities ;
but certain it is, that the ideas and the characters, which
gave a religious interest and grandeur to the earlier part of
the contest, appear but sparingly, if at all, in its later forms.

10 DANTE.

The two parties did not care to keep in view principles
‘which their chiefs had lost sight of. The Emperor and the
Pope were both real powers, able to protect and assist; and
they divided between them those who required protection
and assistance. Geographical position, the rivalry of neigh-
bourhood, family tradition, private feuds, and above all,
private interest, were the main causes which assigned cities,
families, and individuals to the Ghibelline or Guelf party.
One party called themselves the Emperor’s liegemen, and
their watchword was authority and law; the other side were
the liegemen of Holy Church, and their ery was liberty ;
and the distinction as a broad one is true. But a democracy
would become Ghibelline, without scruple, if its neighbour
town was Guelf; and among the Guelf liegemen of the
Church and liberty, the pride of blood and love of power
were not a whit inferior to that of their opponents. Yet,
though the original principle of the contest was lost, and the
political distinctions of parties were often interfered with by
interest or accident, it is not impossible to trace in the two
factions differences of temper, of moral and political incli-
nations, which though visible only on a large scale, and in the
mass, were quite sufficient to give meaning and reality to their
mutual opposition. These differences had come down, greatly
altered of course, from the quarrel in which the parties took
their rise. The Ghibellines, as a body, reflected the world-
liness, the licence, the irreligion, the reckless selfishness, the
daring insolence, and at the same time the gaiety and pomp,
the princely magnificence and generosity and largeness of
mind of the house of Swabia; they were the men of the
court and camp, imperious and haughty from ancient lineage
or the Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the frankness and
courtesy of nobility; careless of public opinion and public
rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public objects and
public services. Among them were found, or to them in-
clined, all who, whether from a base or a lofty ambition,
desired to place their will above law*—the lord of the

* “Maghinardo da Susinana (i/ Demonio, Purg. 14.) fu uno grande e savio
tiranno.... gran castellano, e con molti fedeli: savio fu di guerra e bene

DANTE. 1]

feudal castle, the robber-knight of the Apennine pass, the
magnificent but terrible tyrants of the cities, the pride
and shame of Italy, the Visconti and Scaligers. That re-
nowned Ghibelline chief, whom the poet finds in the fiery
sepulchres of the unbelievers with the great Ghibelline
emperor and the princely Ghibelline cardinal —the disdain-
ful and bitter, but lofty spirit of Farinata degli Uberti, the
conqueror, and then singly and at his own risk, the saviour
of his country which had wronged him, represents the good
as well as the bad side of his party.

The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of the
middle classes; they rose out of, and held to, the people;
they were strong by their compactness, their organisation in
cities, their commercial relations and interests, their command
of money. Further, they were professedly the party of
strictness and religion, —a profession which fettered them as
little, as their opponents were fettered by the respect they
claimed for imperial law. But though by personal un-
scrupulousness and selfishness, and in instances of public
vengeance they sinned as deeply as the Ghibellines, they
stood far more committed as a party to a public meaning and
purpose—to improvement in law and the condition of the
poor, to a protest against the insolence of the strong, to the
encouragement of industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was
austere, frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its
home and Church, and of those celebrations which bound
together Church and home; but withal, very proud, very in-
tolerant ; in its higher form, intolerant of evil, but intolerant
always, to whatever displeased it. Yet there was a grave
and noble manliness about it, which long kept it alive in
Florence. It had not as yet turned itself against the prac-
tical corruptions of the Church, which was its ally; but this
also it was to do, when the popes had forsaken the cause of

avventuroso in piu battaglie, e al suo tempo fece gran cose. Ghibellino era di
sua nazione e in sue opere ; ma co’ Fiorentini era Guelfo e nimico di tutti i loro
nimici, o Guelfi o Ghibellini che fossono.” — G. Vill. vii. 149. A Ghibelline by

birth and disposition ; yet, from circumstances, a close ally of the Guelfs of
Florence.

12 DANTE,

liberty, and leagued themselves with the brilliant tyranny of
the Medici. Then Savonarola invoked, and not in vain, the
stern old Guelf spirit of resistance, of domestic purity and
severity, and of domestic religion, against unbelief and li-
centiousness even in the Church; and the Guelf “ Piagnont”
presented, in a more simple and generous shape, a resemblance
to our own Puritans, as the Ghibellines often recal the
coarser and worse features of our own Cavaliers.

In Florence, these distinctions had become mere nominal
ones, confined to the great families who carried on their
private feuds under the old party names, when Frederick II.
once more gave them meaning. ‘ Although the accursed
Guelf and Ghibelline factions lasted among the nobles of
Florence, and they often waged war among themselves out
of private grudges, and took sides for the said factions, and
held one with another, and those who called themselves
Guelfs desired the establishment of the Pope and Holy
Church, and those who called themselves Ghibellines fa-
voured the Emperor and his adherents, yet withal the people
and commonalty of Florence maintained itself in unity, to
the well-being, and honour, and establishment of the common-
wealth.”* But the appearance on the scene of an emperor
of such talent and bold designs revived the languid contest,
and gave to party a cause, and to individual passions and
ambition an impulse and pretext. The division between Guelf
and Ghibelline again became serious, involved all Florence,
armed house against house, and neighbourhood against neigh-
bourhood, issued in merciless and vindictive warfare, grew on
into a hopeless and deadly breach, and finally lost to Florence,
without remedy or repair, half her noble houses, and the love
of the greatest of her sons. The old badge of their common
country became to the two factions the sign of their im-
placable hatred; the white lily of Florence, borne by the
Ghibellines, was turned to red by the Guelfs, and the flower —
of two colours marked a civil strife as cruel and as fatal, if
on a smaller scale, as that of the English roses.t |

* G. Villani, vi. 33. 7 G. Villani, vi. 33, 43, ; Parad. 19.

DANTE. 13

It was waged with the peculiar characteristics of Italian
civil war. There the city itself was the scene of battle. A
13th century city in Italy bore on its face the evidence
that it was built and arranged for such emergencies. Its
crowded and narrow streets were acollection of rival castles,
whose tall towers, rising thick and close over its roofs, or
hanging perilously over its close courts, attested the emulous
pride and the insecurity of Italian civic life. There, within
a separate precinct, flanked and faced by jealous friends or
deadly enemies, were clustered together the dwellings of the
various members of each great house—their common home
and the monument of their magnificence and pride, and capable
of being, as was so often necessary, their common refuge,
In these fortresses of the leading families, scattered about the
city, were the various points of onset and recovery in civic
battle: in the streets barricades were raised, mangonels and
crossbows were plied from the towers, a series of separate
combats raged through the city, till chance at length con-
nected the attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the
resistance of the other, or a conflagration interposed itself
between the combatants, burning out at once Guelf and Ghi-
belline, and laying half Florence in ashes. Each party had
their turn of victory; each, when vanquished, went into
exile, and carried on the war outside the walls; each had
their opportunity of remodelling the orders and framework
of government, and each did so relentlessly at the cost of
their opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed
families, they confiscated property, they sacked and burned
warehouses, they levelled the palaces, and outraged the pride
of their antagonists. To destroy was not enough, without
adding to it the keenest and newest refinement of insult.
Two buildings in Florence were peculiarly dear,— among
their “ cart luoghi” —to the popular feeling and the Guelf
party; the Baptistery of S. John, “il mio bel S. Giovanni, ”
‘to which all the good people resorted on Sundays,”* where
they had all received baptism, where they had been married,

* G. Villani, vi. 33., iv. 10.; Inf. 19. Parad. 25.

14 DANTE,

where families were solemnly reconciled; and a tall and
beautiful tower close by it, called the ‘ Torre del Guarda-
morto,” where the bodies of the “good people,” who of old
were all buried at S. Giovanni, rested on their way to the
grave. The victorious Ghibellines, when they levelled the
Guelf towers, overthrew this one, and endeavoured to make
it crush in its fall the sacred church, “ which,” says the old
chronicler, “was prevented by a miracle.” The Guelfs,
when their day came, built the walls of Florence with the
stones of Ghibelline palaces.* One great family stands out
pre-eminent in this fierce conflict as the victim and monu-
ment of party war. The head of the Ghibellines was the
proud and powerful house of the Uberti, who shared with
another great Ghibelline family, the Pazzi, the valley of the
upper Arno. They lighted up the war in the Emperor's
cause. They supported its weight and guided it. In time of
peace, they were foremost and unrestrained in defiance of law
and scorn of the people—in war, the people’s fiercest and
most active enemies. Heavy sufferers, in their property,
and by the sword and axe, yet untamed and incorrigible,
they led the van in that battle, so long remembered to their
cost by the Guelfs, the battle of Monteaperti, —

* Lo strazio, e ’l gran scempio
Che fece ? Arbia colorata in rossa.” (Inf. 10.)

That the head of their house, Farinata, saved Florence
from the vengeance of his meaner associates, was not enough
to atone for the unpardonable wrongs which they had done
to the Guelfs and the democracy. When the red lily of the
Guelfs finally supplanted the white one as the arms of Flo-
rence, and badge of Guelph triumph, they were proscribed
for ever, like the Pisistratide and the Tarquins. In every
amnesty their names were excepted. The site on which
their houses had stood was never again to be built upon, and
remains the Great Square of Florence; the architect of the
Palace of the People was obliged to sacrifice its symmetry,
and place it awry, that its walls might not encroach on the

* G. Villani, vi. 39. 65.

DANTE. 15

accursed ground,* ‘They had been,” says a writer, cotempo-
rary with Dante, speaking of the time when he also became
an exile; “they had been for more than forty years outlaws
from their country, nor ever found mercy nor pity, remaining
always abroad in great state, nor ever abased their honour;
seeing that they ever abode with kings and lords, and to great
things applied themselves.”+. They were loved as they were
hated. When under the protection of a cardinal one of them
visited the city, and the chequered blue and gold blazon of
their house was, after an interval of half a century, again seen
in the streets of Florence; “ many ancient Ghibelline men
and women pressed to kiss the arms,” { and even the common
people did him honour.

But the fortunes of Florentine factions depended on other
causes than merely the address or vigour of their leaders.
From the year of Dante’s birth and Charles’s victory, Florence,
as far as we shall have to do with it, became irrevocably
Guelf. Not that the whole commonalty of Florence
formally called itself Guelf, or that the Guelf party was co-
extensive with it; but the city was controlled by Guelf
councils, devoted to the objects of the great Guelf party, and
received in return the support of that party in curbing the
pride of the nobles, and maintaining democratic forms. The
Guelf party of Florence, though it was the life and soul of
the republic, and irresistible in its disposal of the influence
and arms of Florence, and though it embraced a large number
of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as something
distinct from, and external to, the governing powers, and the
whole body of the people. It wasa body with a separate and
self-constituted existence ;—1in the state, and allied to it, but
an independent element, holding on to a large and compre-
hensive union without the state. Its organisation in Florence
is one of the most curious among the many curious combina-
tions which meet us in Italian history. After the final
expulsion of the Ghibellines, the Guelf party took form as an
institution, with definite powers, and a local existence. It

* G. Villani, vi. 33. viii, 26.; Vasari, arnolfo di Lapo, i. 255. (Fir. 1846.)
t Dino Compagni, p. 88. ft Ib. p. 107.

16 DANTE.

appears with as distinct a shape as the Jacobin Club, or the
Orange Lodges, side by side with the government. It was
a corporate body with a common seal, common property, not
only in funds but lands — officers, archives, a common palace *,
a great council, a secret committee, and last of all, a public
accuser of the Ghibellines; of the confiscated Ghibelline
estates one-third went to the republic, another third to com-
pensate individual Guelfs, the rest was assigned to the Guelf
party.+ <A pope had granted them his own arms{; and their
device, a red eagle clutching a serpent, may be yet seen, with
the red lily, and the party-coloured banner of the commonalty,
on the battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio.

But the expulsion of the Ghibellines did but little to re-
store peace. The great Guelf families, as old as many of the
Ghibellines, had as little reverence as they for law or civic
rights. Below these, the acknowledged nobility of Florence,
were the leading families of the “ people,” houses created by
successful industry or commerce, and pushing up into that
privileged order, which, however ignored and even discredited
by the laws, was fully recognised by feeling and opinion in
the most democratic times of the republic. Rivalries and
feuds, street broils and conspiracies, high-handed insolence
from the great men, rough vengeance from the populace, still
continued to vex jealous and changeful Florence. The popes
sought in vain to keep in order their quarrelsome liegemen ;
to reconcile Guelf with Guelf, and even Guelf with Ghibelline.
Embassies went and came, to ask for mediation and to proffer
it; to apply the healing paternal hand; to present an ob-
sequious and ostentatious submission. Cardinal legates came
in state, and were received with reverential pomp; they
formed private committees, and held assemblies, and made
marriages; they harangued in honied words, and gained the
largest promises; on one occasion the Great Square was
turned into a vast theatre, and on this stage 150 dissidents |
on each side came forward, and in the presence and with the

* Giotto painted in it: Vasari, Vit. di Giotto, p. 314.
+ G. Villani, 7. 2. 17.
ft G. Villani, vii. 2.

DANTE. 17

benediction of the cardinal kissed each other on the mouth,*
And if persuasion failed, the pope’s representative hesitated
not to excommunicate and interdict the faithful but obdurate
city. But whether excommunicated or blessed, Florence
could not be at. peace ; however wise and subtle had been the
peace-maker’s arrangements, his departing cortége was hardly
out of sight of the city before they were blown to the winds.
Not more successful were the efforts of the sensible and mo-
derate citizens who sighed for tranquillity within its walls.
Dino Compagni’s interesting, though not very orderly narra-
tive, describes with great frankness, and with the perplexity
of a simple-hearted man puzzled by the continual triumph of
clever wickedness, the variety and the fruitlessness of the ex-
pedients devised by him and other good citizens against the
resolute and incorrigible selfishness of the great Guelfs —
ever, when checked in one form, breaking out in another;
proof against all persuasion, all benefits; not to be bound by
law, or compact, or oath; eluding or turning to its own ac-
count the deepest and sagest contrivances of constitutional
wisdom. |

A great battle won against Ghibelline Arezzof, raised the
renown and the military spirit of the Guelf party; for the
fame of the battle was great; the hosts contained the choicest
chivalry of either side, armed and appointed with emulous
splendour. ‘The fighting was hard; there was brilliant and
conspicuous gallantry, and the victory was complete. It
sealed Guelf ascendency. The Ghibelline warrior-bishop of
Arezzo fell, with three of the Uberti, and other Ghibelline
chiefs. It was a day of trial. ‘ Many that day who had
been thought of great prowess, were found dastards; and
many who had never been spoken of, were held in high
esteem.” It repaired the honour of Florence, and the citizens
showed their feeling of its importance, by mixing up the
marvellous with its story. Its tidings came to Florence, so
runs the tale in Villani, who declares that he ** heard and saw”
himself, at the very hour in which it was won. The Priors

* G. Villani, vii. 56.
t Campaldino, in 1289. G. Viil. 7. 131. ; Dino Comp. p. 14.
Cc

18 DANTE.

of the republic were resting in their palace during the noon-
day heat, suddenly the chamber door was shaken, and the cry
heard, ‘Rise up! the Aretini are defeated.” The door was
opened, but there was no one; their servants had seen no
one enter the palace, and no one came from the army till
the hour of vespers, on a long summer’s day. In this battle
the Guelf leaders had won great glory. The hero of the day
was the proudest, handsomest, craftiest, most winning, most
ambitious, most unscrupulous Guelf noble in Florence —one
of a family who inherited the spirit and recklessness of the
proscribed Uberti, and did not refuse the popular epithet of
*¢ Malefami” —Corso Donati. He did not come back from
the field of Campaldino, where he had won the battle by
disobeying orders, with any increased disposition to yield to
rivals, or court the populace, or respect other men’s rights.
Those rivals, too, —and they also had fought gallantly in the
post of honour at Campaldino,—were such as he hated
from his soul—rivals whom he despised, and who yet were
too strong for him. His blood was ancient, they were up-
starts; he was a soldier, they were traders; he was poor, they
the richest men in Florence. They had come to live close to
the Donati, they had bought the palace of an old Ghibelline
family, they had enlarged, adorned, and fortified it, and kept
great state there. They had crossed him in marriages, bar-
gains, inheritances. They had won popularity, honour, in-
fluence; and yet they were but men of business, while he
had a part in all the political movements of the day. He
was the friend and intimate of lords and noblemen, with great
connexions and famous through all Italy; they were the
favourites of the common people for their kindness and good
nature; they even showed consideration for Ghibellines. He
was an accomplished man of the world, keen and subtle,
“full of malicious thoughts, mischievous and crafty;” they
were inexperienced in intrigue, and had the reputation of
being clumsy and stupid. He was the most graceful and
engaging of courtiers; they were not even gentlemen. Lastly,
in the debates of that excitable republic he was the most
eloquent speaker, and they were tongue-tied.*

* Dino Comp, 82.75, 94 183.

:
;
7

Ee

DANTE. 19

There was a family,” writes Dino Compagni, “ who
called themselves the Cerchi, men of low estate, but good
merchants and very rich; and they dressed richly, and main-
tained many servants and horses, and made a brave show;
and some of them bought the palace of the Conti Guidi, which
was near the houses of the Pazzi and Donati, who were more
ancient of blood but not so rich; therefore, seeing the Cerchi
rise to great dignity, and that they had walled and enlarged
the palace, and kept great state, the Donati began to have a
great hatred against them.” Villani gives the same account
of the feud.* ‘It began in that quarter of scandal the Sesto
of Porta S. Piero, between the Cerchi and Donati, on the one
side through jealousy, on the other through churlish un-
thankfulness. Of the house of the Cerchi was head Messer
Vieri de’ Cerchi, and he and those of his house were people of
great business, and powerful, and of great relationships, and
most wealthy traders, so that their company was one of the
greatest in the world; men they were of soft life, and who
meant no harm; boorish, and unthankful, like people who had
come in a short time to great state and power. The Donati
were gentlemen and warriors, and of no excessive wealth...
They were neighbours in Florence and in the country, and
by the conversation of their jealousy with the ill-tempered
boorishness of the others, arose the proud scorn that there was
between them.” The glories of Campaldino were not as oil on
these troubled waters. The conquerors flouted each other all
the more fiercely in the streets on their return, and ill-treated
the lower people with less scruple. No gathering for festive
or serious purposes could be held without tempting strife. A
marriage, a funeral, a ball, a gay procession of cavaliers and
ladies, —any meeting, where one stood while another sat,
where horse or man might jostle another, where pride might
be nettled or temper shown, was in danger of ending in blood.
The lesser quarrels meanwhile ranged themselves under the
greater ones; and these, especially that between the Cerchi
and Donati, took more and more a political character. The

* G. Vill. viii. 39.
oe 2

20 DANTE.

Cerchi inclined more and more to the trading classes and the
lower people; they threw themselves on their popularity, and
began to hold aloof from the meetings of the “ Parte Guelfa,”
while this organised body became an instrument in the hands
of their opponents, a club of the nobles. Corso Donati, besides
mischief of a more substantial kind, turned his ridicule on
their solemn dulness and awkward speech, and his friends the
jesters, one Scampolino in particular, carried his gibes and
nicknames all over Florence. ‘The Cerchi received all in
sullen and dogged indifference. “hey were satisfied with
repelling attacks, and nursed their hatred. *

Thus the city was divided, and the attempts to check the
factions only exasperated them. It was in vain that, when at
times the government or the populace lost patience, severe
measures were taken. It was in vain that the reformer,
Gian della Bella, carried for a time his harsh “orders of
justice ” against the nobles, and invested popular vengeance
with the solemnity of law and with the pomp and ceremony
of a public act—that when a noble had been convicted of
killing a citizen, the great officer, ** Standard-bearer,” as he
was called, ‘‘ of justice,” issued forth in state and procession,
with the banner of justice borne before him, with all his
train, and at the head of the armed citizens, to the house of
the criminal, and razed it to the ground. An eye-witness
describes the effect of such chastisement : — “I, Dino Com-
pagni, being Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293, went to their
houses, and to those of their relations, and these I caused to
be pulled down according to the laws. This beginning in
the case of the other Gonfaloniers came to an evil effect;
because, if they demolished the houses according to the
laws, the people said that they were cruel; and if they did
not demolish them completely, they said that they were
cowards; and many distorted justice for fear of the people.”
Gian della Bella was overthrown with few regrets even on
the part of the people. Equally vain was the attempt to keep
the peace by separating the leaders of the disturbances.

* Dino Compagni, pp. 32. 34. 38,

ae i.

DANTE. 21

They were banished by a kind of ostracism; they departed
in ostentatious meekness, Corso Donato to plot at Rome,
Vieri de’ Cerchi to return immediately to Florence. An-
archy had got too fast a hold on the city; and it required
a stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory of the
republic to keep it down.

Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew richer, more
intellectual, more refined, more beautiful, more gay. With
its anarchy there was no stagnation. ‘Torn and divided as it
was, its energy did not slacken, its busy and creative spirit
was not deadened, its hopefulness not abated. The factions,
fierce and personal as they were, did not hinder that interest
in political ideas, that active and subtle study of the questions
of civil government, that passion and ingenuity displayed in
political contrivance, which now pervaded Northern Italy,
everywhere marvellously patient and hopeful, though far
from being equally successful. In Venice at the close of the
13th century, that polity was finally settled and consolidated,
by which she was great as long as cities could be imperial, and
which, even in its decay, survived the monarchy of Louis
XIV, and existed within the memory of living men, In
Florence, the constructive spirit of law and order only
resisted, but never triumphed. Yet it was at this time
resolute and sanguine, ready with experiment and change,
and not yet dispirited by continual failure. Political interest,
however, and party contests were not sufficient to absorb and
employ the citizens of Florence. Their genial and versatile
spirit, so keen, so inventive, so elastic, which made them
such hot and impetuous partisans, kept them from being
only this. The time was one of growth; new knowledge,
new powers, new tastes were opening to men; new pursuits
attracted them. There was commerce, there was the School
philosophy, there was the science of nature, there was ancient
_ learning, there was the civil law, there were the arts, there
was poetry, all rude as yet, and unformed, but full of hope
— the living parents of mightier offspring. Frederick II.
had once more opened Aristotle to the Latin world, had

given an impulse which was responded to through Italy to
c 3

22 DANTE.

the study of the great monuments of Roman legislation ;
himself a poet, his example and his splendid court had made
poetry fashionable. In the end of the 13th century a great
stride was made at Florence. While her great poet was
srowing up to manhood, as rapid a change went on in her
streets, her social customs, the wealth of her citizens, their
ideas of magnificence and beauty, their appreciation of
literature. It was the age of growing commerce and travel ;
Franciscan missionaries had reached China, and settled there*;
in 1294, Marco Polo returned to Wenice, the first successful
explorer of the East. The merchants of Florence lagged
not; their field of operation was Italy and the West; they
had their correspondents in London, Paris, and Bruges;
they were the bankers of popes and kings.f And their city
shows to this day the wealth and magnificence of the last
years of the thirteenth century. The ancient buildings, con-
secrated in the memory of the Florentine people, were
repaired, enlarged, adorned with marble and bronze — Or
San Michele, the Badia, the Baptistery; and new buildings

rose ona grander scale. In 1294 was begun the Mausoleum ©

of the great Florentine dead, the Church of 8. Croce. In
the same year, a few months later, Arnolfo laid the deep
foundations which were afterwards to bear up Brunelleschi’s
dome, and traced the plan of the magnificent cathedral. In
1298, he began to raise a Town-hall worthy of the Republic,
and of being the habitation of its magistrates, the frowning
mass of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1299, the third circle of
the walls was commenced, with the benediction of bishops,
and the concourse of all the “ lords and orders ” of Florence.
And Giotto was now beginning to throw Cimabue into the
shade, — Giotto, the shepherd’s boy, painter, sculptor, archi-
tect, and engineer at once, who a few years later was to
complete and crown the architectural glories of Florence by
that masterpiece of grace, his marble Campanile.

* See the curious letters of John de Monte Corvino, about his mission in
Cathay, 1289—1305, in Wadding, vi. 69.

T #. g. the Mozzi, of Greg. X.; Peruzzi, of Philip le Bel; Spini, of Boni-
face VIII. ; Cerchi del Garbo, of Benedict XI. (G. Vill. vii. 42. viii. 63.71. Dino
Comp. p. 35.)

ne

ae ewe) ee

DANTE. 23

Fifty years made then all that striking difference in
domestic habits, in the materials of dress, in the value of
money, which they have usually made in later centuries.
The poet of the fourteenth century describes the proudest
nobleman of a hundred years before “with his leathern
girdle and clasp of bone ;” and in one of the most beautiful
of all poetic celebrations of the good old time, draws the
domestic life of ancient Florence in the household where his
ancestor was born : —

** A cosi riposato, a cosi bello
Viver di cittadini, a cosi fida
Cittadinanza, a cosi dolce ostello
Maria mi dié, chiamata in alte grida,” — Par. c. 15.

there high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff and the
loom; still rocked the cradle with the words which their own
mothers had used; or working with their maidens, told them
old tales of the forefathers of the city, * of the Trojans, of
Fiesole, and of Rome.” Villani still finds this rudeness within
forty years of the end of the century, almost within the limits
of his own and Dante’s life; and speaks of that “old first
people,” 7 primo Popolo Vecchio, with their coarse food
and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain close
gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, as if they
were the first founders of the city, and not a generation
which had lasted on into his own.* Twenty years later, his
story is of the gaiety, the riches, the profuse munificence,
the brilliant festivities, the careless and joyous life, which
attracted foreigners to Florence as the city of pleasure; of
companies of a thousand or more, all clad in white robes,
under a lord, styled “of Love,” passing their time in sports
and dances; of ladies and knights, “ going through the city
with trumpets and other instruments, with joy and gladness,”
and meeting together in banquets evening and morning;
entertaining illustrious strangers, and honourably escorting
them on horseback in their passage through the city ; tempt-
ing by their liberality, courtiers, and wits, and minstrels,

* G. Vill vi. 69. (1259.)
ca4

24 DANTE.

and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence.* Nor
were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined and coarse
merriment. How variety of character was drawn out, how
its more delicate elements were elicited and tempered, how
nicely it was observed, and how finely drawn, let the racy
and open-eyed story-tellers of Florence testify.

Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid music
and song, and in the pleasant places of social and private
life, belonging to the Florence of arts and poetry, not to the
Florence of factions and strife, should we expect to find the
friend of the sweet singer, Casella, and of the reserved and
bold speculator, Guido Cavalcanti ;—the mystic poet of the
Vita Nuova, so sensitive and delicate, trembling at a gaze
or a touch, recording visions, painting angels, composing
Canzoni and commenting on them; finally devoting himself
to the austere consolations of deep study. To superadd to
such a character that of a democratic politician of the middle
ages, seems an incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it
was a real one in this instance. The scholar’s life is, in our
idea of it, far separated from the practical and the political ;
we have been taught by our experience to disjoin enthusiasm
in love, in art, in what is abstract or imaginative, from keen
interest and successful interference in the affairs and conflicts
of life. The practical man may sometimes be also a dilettante ;
but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently, keeps
out of the rough ways where real passions and characters meet
and jostle, or ifhe ventures, seldom gains honour there. ‘The
separation, though a natural one, grows wider as society be-
comes more vast and manifold, as its ends, functions, and
pursuits are disentangled, while they multiply. But in Dante’s
time, and in an Italian city, it was not such a strange thing
that the most refined and tender interpreter of feeling, the
popular poet, whose verses touched all hearts and were in
every mouth, should be also at once the ardent follower of
all abstruse and difficult learning, and a prominent character
among those who administered the state. In that narrow

* G, Vill. vii 89, (1283.)

DANTE. 25

sphere of action, in that period of dawning powers and cir-
cumscribed knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope, or
unwise ambition, to attempt the compassing of all science,
and to make it subserve and illustrate the praise of active
citizenship.* Dante, like other literary celebrities of the
time, was not less from the custom of the day, than from his
own purpose, a public man. He took his place among his
fellow-citizens ; he went out to war with them; he fought, it
is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory of
Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy,
he enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the people, and
was matriculated in the “ Art” of the Apothecaries; he
served the state as its agent abroad; he went on important
missions to the cities and courts of Italy—according to a
Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct
embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the memorable
year of Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the
Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co-
operation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the
market-place and council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and,
as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and
characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes
of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an
interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real
spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous
page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such
feeling — no astronomer ever watched the stars with more
eager inquisitiveness. ‘The whole man opens to the world
around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense,
diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free
and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmo-
nious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate
objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that ad-
mirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour
and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.

In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podesta tf

* Vide the opening of the De Monarchia.
t Now a prison, the Bargello. Vide Vasari, Vit. di Giotto, p. 311.

26 DANTE.

at Florence, is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of
his cotemporary Giotto. He is represented as he might have
been in the year of Campaldino. The countenance is youth-
ful yet manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings
of the picture; but it only suggests the strong deep features
of the well-known traditional face. He is drawn with much
of the softness, and melancholy pensive sweetness, and with
something also of the quaint stiffness of the Vita Nuova —
with his flower and his book. With him is drawn his master,
Brunetto Latini*, and Corso Donati. We do not know
what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the
great “ Baron.” Dante was, indeed, closely connected with
the Donati. The dwelling of his family was near theirs,
in the “Quarter of Scandal,” the Ward of the Porta 8S.
Piero. He married a daughter of their house, Madonna
Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more
affection than the companion of his light and wayward days,
remembered not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with
love and hope, Corso’s brother, Forese./ No sweeter spirit
sings and smiles in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she
whom Forese remembers as on earth one,

“ Che tra bella e buona
Non so qual fosse pit —” t

and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches the
poet that in the lowest place among the blessed there can be
no envy § — the sister of Forese and Corso, Piccarda. The
Commedia, though it speaks, as if in prophecy, of Corso’s
miserable death, avoids the mention of his name. Its silence
is so remarkable as to seem significant. But though history
does not group together Corso and Dante, the picture repre-
sents the truth—their fortunes were linked together. They
were actors in the same scene —at this distance of time
two of the most prominent; though a scene very different
fron that calm and graye wacicabsles which Giotto’s placid
pencil has drawn on the old chapel wall.

* He died in 1294. G. Vill. viii. 10. {+ Purgat. c. 23,
{ Purgat. c. 24, § Parad. ¢. 3.

DANTE. 27

The outlines of this part of Dante’s history are so well
known that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than
the outlines we know not. The family quarrels came to a
head, issued in parties, and the parties took names; they
borrowed them from two rival factions in a neighbouring
town, whose feud was imported into Florence; and the
Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led
by the Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with the
Cerchi. It still professed to be but a family feud, confined
to the great houses; but they were too powerful and
Florence too small for it not to affect the whole Republic.
The middle classes and the artizans looked on, and for a time
not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men ; but it
grew evident that one party must crush the other, and
become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi
and their White adherents were less formidable to the
democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati,
with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not
merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal
champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary asser-
tors of the great Guelf cause. The Cerchi with less character
and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of
rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the common
people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the
‘Parte Guelfa;” and, of course, the Ghibellines wished
them well. Both the cotemporary historians of Florence lead
us to think that they might have been the governors and
guides of the Republic — if they had chosen, and had known
how; and both, though condemning the two parties equally,
seemed to have thought that this would have been the best
result for the State. But the accounts of both, though they
are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders
of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud,
-vain, and coarse minded: and they dared to aspire to an
ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to
pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to
rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons
were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the

28 DANTE.

lovers of republican government, and for the most part the
magistrates; but they shrunk from their fortune, ‘more
from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly
feared their adversaries.” * Boniface VIII. had no prepos-
sessions in Florence, except for energy and an open hand ;
the side which was most popular he would have accepted and
backed; but “he would not lose,” he said, “the men for the
women.” Jo non voglio perdere gli uomini per le femmi-
nelle.” If the Black party furnished types for the grosser
or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet’s Hell, the White
party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and
cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and
are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with
the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but
“were for themselves;” and whoever it may be who is
singled out in the “ setta dei cattivi,” for deeper and special
scorn — he,

“ Che fece per vilta il gran rifiuto,” —

the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.

A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and
make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso
Donati came with him. The magistrates were overawed and
perplexed. The White party were, step by step, amused,
entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in the
elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery,
of Italian intrigue—finally chased out of their houses and
from the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in
name and property, by the Pope’s French mediator.
With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold the
balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the
Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two
extant lists of the proscribed —condemned by default, for
corruption and various crimes, especially for hindering the
entrance into Florence of Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine
and banishment, then, two months after, for contumacy,

* Dino Comp. p. 45. t Dino Comp. p. 62.

oe8

DANTE. 29

to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the
Republic, — appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and
more than this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we
know not.* |

Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the
general character. He acted for a time in concert with the
expelled party, in attempting to force their way back
to Florence; and gave them up at last, in scorn and despair:
but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new
home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile
to his death, he was a wanderer. ‘The character is stamped
on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or
dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing
here and there, we are not told how or why. One old
record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in
a village church near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi
and the White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs.
In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace
between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of
a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote
spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined
tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
recollections of the following generation, his solemn and
melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in
the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women,
as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their
doors in the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to
the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to
“Oxford. But little certain can be made out about the places
where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be,
not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered,
cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of
Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel,
built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, “ that
mother of little love,” asked for his bones; but rightly asked
in vain. His place of repose is better in those remote and

* Pelli, pp. 105, 106.

30 DANTE.

forsaken streets ‘by the shore of the Adrian Sea,” hard by
the last relics of the Roman Empire, —the mausoleum of the
children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian — than
among the assembled dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnifi-
cence of S. Maria del Fiore.*

The Commedia, at the first glance, shows the traces of
its author’s life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very
form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toil-
some, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a work-
ing out of that touching phraseology of the middle ages, in
which “the way” was the technical theological expression
for this mortal life; and “ viator,” meant man in his state of
trial, as “‘comprehensor,” meant man made perfect, having
attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely
this. The writer’s mind is full of the recollections and defi-
nite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery
of the Inferno and Purgatorio, very variously and distinctly
marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of
the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one
familiar with such scenes—one who had climbed painfully
in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow
ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of
the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the
Riviera. Local reminiscences abound ;—the severed rocks
of the Adige valley—the waterfall of 5. Benedetto—the
crags of Pietra-pana and S. Leo, which overlook the plains
of Lucca and Ravenna—the “fair river” that flows among
the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri—the marble quarries
of Carrara—the “rough and desert ways between Lerici
and Turbia,” and those towery cliffs, going sheer into the
deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some

* These notices have been carefully collected by Pelli, who seems to have left
little to glean (Memorie, &c. Ed. 2%, 1823). A few additions have been made
by Gerini (Mem. Stor. della Lunigiana), and Troya ( Veltro Allegorico), but they
are not of much importance. Arrivabene (Secolo di Dante), has brought to-
gether a mass of illustration which is very useful, and would be more so, if he
were more careful, and quoted his authorities. Balbo, arranges these materials
with sense and good feeling ; though, as a writer, he is below his subject. A
few traits and anecdotes may be found in the novelists —as Sacchetti.

ae

DANTE. 31

thirty years ago, may yet remember with fear. Mountain
experience furnished that picture of the traveller caught in
an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the
vapours grow thin, and the sun’s orb appear faintly through
them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain
top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores
below : —

« Ai raggi, morti gia nei bassi lidi: ”— Purg. 17.

or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
the Alpine fir, —

“ Un’ ombra smorta
Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
Sovra suoi freddi rivi, ? Alpe porta: ”—Purg. 33.*

or of the large snow-flakes falling without wind, among the
mountains,—
“dq un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde,
Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.”— Inferno, 14.f

He delights in a local name and local image —the boiling
pitch, and the clang of the shipwrights in the arsenal of
Venice —the sepulchral fields of Arles and Pola—the hot-
spring of Viterbo—the hooded monks of Cologne—the
dykes of Flanders and Padua —the Maremma, with its rough
brushwood, its wild boars, its snakes and fevers. He had
listened to the south wind among the pine-tops, in the forest
by the sea, at Ravenna. He had watched under the Cari-
senda tower at Bologna, and seen the driving clouds “ give
away their motion” to it, and make it seem to be falling;
and had noticed how at Rome the October sun sets
between Corsica and Sardinia.{ His images of the sea

7m “ A death-like shade —

Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green

O’er the cool streams in Alpine glens display’d.” — Wricnr.
t “Over all the sandy desert, falling slow,

Were shower’d dilated flakes of fire, like snow

On Alpine summits, when the wind is low.”— Wricur.
+ Inf. 31. 18,

32 DANTE.

are numerous and definite—the ship backing out of the
tier in harbour, the diver plunging after the fouled anchor,
the mast rising, the ship going fast before the wind, the
water closing in its wake, the arched backs of the porpoises
the forerunners of a gale, the admiral watching everything
from poop to prow, the oars stopping altogether at the sound
of the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when the
mast snaps and falls.* Nowhere could we find so many
of the most characteristic and strange sensations of the tra-
veller touched with such truth. Hwery one knows the lines
which speak of the voyager’s sinking of heart on the first evening
at sea, and of the longings wakened, in the traveller at the
beginning of his journey, by the distant evening bell}; the tra-
veller’s morning feelings are not less delicately noted —the
strangeness on first waking in the open air with the sun high;
morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes nearer home; the
morning sight of the sea-beach quivering in the early light;
the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the
morning {— }
“* Noi eravam lunghesso ’1 mare ancora,
Come gente che pensa al suo cammino,
Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora.”

He has recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, the sus-
picion with which, in those times, stranger met and eyed
stranger on the road; and a still more characteristic trait is
to be found in those lines where he describes the pilgrim’s
gazing around in the church of his vow, and his thinking how

he shall tell of it: —

“ E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
E spera gia ri dir com’ ello stea :”—Parad. 31.||

* Inf. 17. 16. 31.; Purg. 24. ; Par. 2.; Inf. 22.; Purg. 30.; Par. 25. ; Inf. 7.
t Purg.8. “Era gia l’ ora,” &c.
+ Purg. 19. 27. 1. 2.
§ “ By ocean’s shore we still prolong’d our stay

Like men, who, thinking of a journey near,

Advance in thought, while yet their limbs delay.” — Wie
| “ And like a pilgrim who with fond delight

Surveys the temple he has vow’d to see,

And hopes one day its wonders to recite.” — WRIGHT.

ee

DANTE. 33 -

or again, in that description, so simple and touching, of his
thoughts while waiting to see the relic for which he left his
home : —

* Quale é colui che forse di Croazia
Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
Che perl’ antica fama non si sazia,
Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra ;
Signor mio Gesu Cristo Dio verace,
Or fu si fatta la sembianza vostra? ” — Parad. 31.*

Of these years then of disappointment and exile the “ Di-
vina Commedia” was the labour and fruit. A story in Boc-
caccio’s life of Dante, told with some detail, implies indeed that
it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was
yet in Florence —begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of
it— continued afterwards in Italian. This is not impossible ;
indeed the germ and presage of it may be traced in the Vita
Nuova. ‘The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her
pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the
poet’s soul. She is already in glory with Mary the queen
of angels. She already beholds the face of the Everblessed.
And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the
Commedia. <“ After this sonnet,” (in which he describes
how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld
a lady receiving honour, and dazzling by her glory the un-
accustomed spirit)—‘ After this sonnet there appeared to
me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made
me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one, until such
time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her. And
to attain to this, 1 study to the utmost of my power, as she
truly knows. So that, if it shall be the pleasure of Him, by
whom all things live, that my life continue for some years,
I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any

* “Tike one who, from Croatia come to see
Our Veronica, (image long adored)
Gazes, as though content he ne’er could be,—
' Thus musing, while the relic is pourtray’d,—
‘ Jesus my God, my Saviour, and my Lord,
© were thy features these I see display’d?’” — Wriaur.
b

34 DANTE.

woman. And afterwards, may it please Him, who is the
Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory
of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously
gazes on the countenance of Him, gui est per omnia secula
benedictus.”* It would be wantonly violating probability and
the unity of a great life, to suppose that this purpose, though
transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet
knew not indeed what he was promising, what he was pledging
himself to—through what years of toil and anguish he would
have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what
form his high venture should be realised. But the Commedia
is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised
at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the
poet’s life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the
words of the Vita Nuova. The spell of boyhood is never
broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of
thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From
youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the
same idea abides with him, “even from the flower till the
grape was ripe.”
of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other
world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy, — but still it holds, in
self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile
and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep
and strong a mind to fade and come to nought —to be other
than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But,
with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may
doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that
which was done by the man without a home. Beatrice’s
glory might have been sung in grand though barbarous
Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem
of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened
the literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have
been the Commedia. That belongs, in its date and its great-
ness, to the time when sorrow had become the poet’s daily
portion, and the condition of his life.

-

* Vita Nuova, last paragraph, See Purg. 30.; Parad. 30. 6. 28—33.

It may assume various changes, —an image

DANTE. 35

The Commedia is a novel and startling apparition in lite-
rature. Probably it has been felt by some, who have ap-
proached it with the reverence due to a work of such renown,
that the world has been generous in placing it so high. It
seems so abnormal, so lawless, so reckless of all ordinary
proprieties and canons of feeling, taste, and composition. It
is rough and abrupt; obscure in phrase and allusion, doubly
obscure in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually
kept distinct: scandal of the day and transcendental science,
politics and confessions, coarse satire and angelic joy, private
wrongs, with the mysteries of the faith, local names and
habitations of earth, with visions of hell and heaven. It is
hard to keep up with the ever changing current of feeling,
to pass as the poet passes, without effort or scruple, from
tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter scorn or querulous
complaint, from high-raised devotion to the calmness of pro-
saic subtleties or grotesque detail. Each separate element
and vein of thought has its precedent, but not their amalga-
mation. Many had written visions of the unseen world, but
they had not blended with them their personal fortunes.
S. Augustine had taught the soul to contemplate its own
history, and had traced its progress from darkness to light *;
but he had not interwoven with it the history of Italy, and
the consummation of all earthly destinies. Satire was no
new thing; Juvenal had given it a moral, some of the Pro-
vencal poets a political, turn; S. Jerome had kindled into
it fiercely and bitterly even while expounding the Prophets ;
but here it streams forth in all its violence, within the
precincts of the eternal world, and alternates with the hymns
of the blessed. Lucretius had drawn forth the poetry of nature
and its laws; Virgil and Livy had unfolded the poetry of the
Roman empire; §. Augustine, the still grander poetry of the
history of the City of God; but none had yet ventured to
_ weave into one the three wonderful threads. And yet the
scope of the Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue
of all things, universal as the government which directs

* See Convito, 1, 2.
i 2

36 DANTE.

nature and intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to the
lowest caitiff he has ever despised, the minutest fact in nature
that has ever struck his eye, the merest personal association
which hangs pleasantly in his memory. Writing for all
time, he scruples not to mix with all that is august and per-
manent in history and prophecy, incidents the most transient,
and names the most obscure; to waste an immortality of
shame or praise on those about whom his own generation
were to inquire in vain. Scripture history runs into pro-
fane; Pagan legends teach their *lesson side by side with
Scripture scenes and miracles: heroes and poets of heathen-
ism, separated from their old classic world, have their
place in the world of faith, discourse with Christians of
Christian dogmas, and even mingle with the Saints; Virgil
guides the poet through his fear and his penitence to the
gates of Paradise.

This feeling of harsh and extravagant incongruity, of
causeless and unpardonable darkness, is perhaps the first
impression of many readers of the Commedia. But probably,

as they read on, there will mingle with this a sense of

strange and unusual grandeur, arising not alone from the
hardihood of the attempt, and the mystery of the subject,
but from the power and the character of the poet. It will
strike them that words cut deeper than is their wont; that
from that wild uncongenial imagery, thoughts emerge of
singular truth and beauty. Their dissatisfaction will be
chequered, even disturbed — for we can often bring ourselves
to sacrifice much for the sake of a clear and consistent view
—by the appearance, amid much that repels them, of proofs
undeniable and accumulating of genius as mighty as it is
strange. ‘Their perplexity and disappointment may grow
into distinct condemnation, or it may pass into admiration
and delight; but no one has ever come to the end of the
Commedia without feeling that if it has given him a new
view and specimen of the wildness and unaccountable way-
wardness of the human mind, it has also added, as few other
books have, to his knowledge of its feelings, its capabilities,
and its grasp, and suggested larger and more serious thoughts,

ee

DANTE. 37

for which he may be grateful, concerning that unseen world
of which he is even here a member.

Dante would not have thanked his admirers for becoming
apologists. Those in whom the sense of imperfection and
strangeness overpowers sympathy for grandeur, and enthu-
siasm for nobleness, and joy in beauty, he certainly would
have left to themselves. But neither would he teach any
that he was leading them along a smooth and easy road.
The Commedia will always be a hard and trying book; nor
did the writer much care that it should be otherwise. Much
of this is no doubt to be set down to its age; much of its
roughness and extravagance, as well as of its beauty — its
allegorical spirit, its frame and scenery. The idea of a
visionary voyage through the worlds of pain and bliss is no
invention of the poet—it was one of the commonest and
most familiar medieval vehicles of censure or warning; and
those who love to trace the growth and often strange fortunes
of popular ideas, or whose taste leads them to disbelieve in
genius, and track the parentage of great inventions to the
foolish and obscure, may find abundant materials in the
literature of legends.* But his own age—the age which
received the Commedia with mingled enthusiasm and wonder,
and called it the Divine, was as much perplexed as we are,
though probably rather pleased thereby than offended. That
within a century after its composition, in the more famous
cities and universities of Italy, Florence, Venice, Bologna,
and Pisa, chairs should have been founded, and illustrious
men engaged to lecture on it, is a strange homage to its
power, even in that time of quick feeling; but as strange
and great a proof of its obscurity. What is dark and for-
bidding in it was scarcely more clear to the poet’s contem-
poraries. And he, whose last object was amusement, invites
no audience but a patient and confiding one.

“QO voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Desiderosi di ascoltar, seguiti
Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

* Vide Ozanam, Dante, pp. 535. sqq. Ed. 2°.
D3

38 DANTE.

Tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
Non vi mettete in pelago, che forse
Perdendo me rimarreste smarriti.

L’ acqua ch’ io prendo giammai non si corse :
Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo, |
E nuove muse mi dimostran I’ Orse. |

Voi altri pochi, che drizzaste ’1 collo
Per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale
Vivesi qui, ma non si vien satollo,

Metter potete ben per I’ alto sale
Vostro navigio, servando mio solco
Dinanzi all’ acqua che ritorna eguale. |

Que’ gloriosi che passaro a Colco, |
Non s’ ammiraron, come voi farete,

Quando Jason vider fatto bifoleo.” — Parad. 2.*

The character of the Commedia belongs much more, in its
excellence and its imperfections, to the poet himself and the
nature of his work, than to his age. That cannot screen his
faults, nor can it arrogate to itself—1it must be content to
share, his glory. His leading idea and line of thought was
much more novel then than it is now, and belongs much
more to the modern than the medieval world. The “ Story
of a Life,” the poetry of man’s journey through the wilder-

a —e

* “O ye who fain would listen to my song,
Following in little bark full eagerly
My venturous ship, that chanting hies along,
Turn back unto your native shores again ;
Tempt not the deep, lest haply losing me,
In unknown paths bewildered ye remain.
I am the first this voyage to essay ;
Minerva breathes— Apollo is my guide ;
And new-born muses do the Bears display.
Ye other few, who have look’d up on high
For angels’ food betimes, e’en here supplied
Largely, but not enough to satisfy, —
Mid the deep ocean ye your course may take, ~
My track pursuing the pure waters through,
Ere reunites the quickly-closing wake.
Those glorious ones, who drove of yore their prow
To Colchos, wonder’d not as ye will do,
When they saw Jason working at the plough.” —
. Wricut’s Dante,

ae

DANTE. 39

ness to his true country, is now in various and very different
shapes as hackneyed a form of imagination, as an allegory,
an epic, a legend of chivalry were in former times. Not, of
course, that any time has been without its poetical feelings
and ideas on the subject; and never were they deeper and
more diversified, more touching and solemn, than in the ages
that passed from S. Augustine and S. Gregory to S. Thomas
and §. Bonaventura. But a philosophical poem, where they
were not merely the colouring, but the subject, an epos of
the soul, placed for its trial in a fearful and wonderful world,
with relations to time and matter, history and nature, good
and evil, the beautiful, the intelligible, and the mysterious,
sin and grace, the infinite and the eternal, —-and having in
the company and under the influences of other intelligences,
to make its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to gain the
light, or be lost —this was a new and unattempted theme.
It has been often tried since, in faith or doubt, in egotism,
in sorrow, in murmuring, in affectation, sometimes in joy,—
in various forms, in prose and verse, completed or frag-
mentary, in reality or fiction, in the direct or the shadowed
story, in the “ Pilgrim’s Progress,” in the “ Confessions,” in
“Wilhelm Meister” and ‘* Faust,” in the “ Excursion.” It
is common enough now for the poet, in the faith of human
sympathy, and sense of the unexhausted vastness of his
mysterious subject, to believe that his fellows will not see
without interest and profit, glimpses of his own path and
fortunes—hear from his lips the disclosure of his chief
delights, his warnings, his fears — follow the many-coloured
changes, the impressions and workings of a character at once
the contrast and the counterpart to their own. But it was
a new path then; and he needed to be, and was, a bold
man, who first opened it —a path never trod without peril,
usually with loss or failure.

And certainly no great man ever made less secret to him-
self of his own genius. He is at no pains to rein in or to
dissemble his consciousness of power, which he has measured

without partiality, and feels sure will not fail him. “ Fi-
D4

40 DANTE.

dandomi di me pit che di un altro” * — is a reason which he
assigns without reserve. We look with the distrust and
hesitation of modern days, yet, in spite of ourselves, not
without admiration and regret, at such frank hardihood. It
was more common once than now. When the world was
young, it was more natural and allowable —it was often
seemly and noble. Men knew not their difficulties as we
know them — we, to whom time, which has taught so much
wisdom, has brought so many disappointments — we who
have seen how often the powerful have fallen short, and the
noble gone astray, and the most admirable missed their per-
fection. It is becoming in us to distrust ourselves — to be
shy if we cannot be modest —it is but a respectful tribute to
human weakness and our brethren’s failures. But there was
a time when great men dared to claim their greatness — not
in foolish self-complacency, but in unembarrassed and majestic
simplicity, in magnanimity and truth, in the consciousness of
a serious and noble purpose, and of strength to fulfil it.
Without passion, without elation as without shrinking, the

poet surveys his superiority and his high position, as some- —

thing external to him; he has no doubts about it, and affects
none. He would be a coward, if he shut his eyes to what
he could do; as much a trifler in displaying reserve as osten-
tation. Nothing is more striking in the Commedia than the
serene and unhesitating confidence with which he announces
himself the heir and reviver of the poetic power so long lost
to the world — the heir and reviver of it in all its fulness.
He doubts not of the judgment of posterity. One has arisen
who shall throw into the shade all modern reputations, who
shall bequeath to Christendom the glory of that name of
Poet, “che pid dura e pid onora,” hitherto the exclusive

boast of heathenism, and claim the rare honours of the
laurel : —

“Si rade volte, padre, se ne coglie
Per trionfare o Cesare o poeta,
(Colpa e vergogna dell’ umane voglie, )

* Convito, 1. 10.

Se —

DANTE. 41

Che partorir letizia in su la lieta |
Delfica deita dovria la fronda
Peneia quando alcun di sé asseta.”— Parad. 1. *

He has but to follow his star to be sure of the glorious port +:
he is the master of language: he can give fame to the dead —
no task or enterprise appals him, for whom spirits keep watch
in heaven, and angels have visited the shades—‘* tal si parti
dal cantar alleluia :”— who is Virgil’s foster child and familiar
friend. Virgil bids him lay aside the last-vestige of fear,
Virgil is to “crown him king and priest over himself,”t for
a higher venture than heathen poetry had dared; in Virgil’s
company he takes his place without diffidence, and without
vain-glory, among the great poets of old—a sister soul. §

“‘ Poiché la voce fu restata e queta,
Vidi quattro grand’ ombre a noi venire:
Sembianza avean né trista né lieta :

* - * * x
Cosi vidi adunar la bella scuola
Di quei signor dell’ altissimo canto

“For now so rarely Poet gathers these,
Or Cesar, winning an immortal praise,
(Shame unto man’s degraded energies)
That joy should to the Delphic God arise,
When haply any one aspires to gain
The high reward of the Peneian prize.” — Wricur.
+ Brunetto Latini’s Prophecy, Inf. 15, >
t See the grand ending of Purg. 27.
“ Tratto t? ho qui con ingegno e con arte:
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce:
Fuor se’ dell’ erte vie, fuor se’ dell’ arte.
Vedi il sole che ’n fronte ti riluce,
Vedi l erbetta i fiori e gli arboscelli
Che questa terra sol da se produce.
Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli
Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno,
Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.
Non aspettar mio dir piu né mio cenno:
Libero, dritto, sano é tuo arbitrio,
E fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
Perch ’io te sopra te corono e mitrio.”
§ Purg. c. 21.

42 DANTE.

Che sovra gli altri come aquila vola. ~
Da ch’ ebber ragionato insieme alquanto
Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno
E ’| mio maestro sorrise di tanto.
E pit @’ onore ancora assai mi fenno:
Ch’ essi mi fecer della loro schiera,
Si ch’ io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.”— Inf. 4.*

This sustained magnanimity and lofty self-reliance, which
never betrays itself, is one of the main elements of the
grandeur of the Commedia. It is an imposing spectacle
to see such fearlessness, such freedom, and such success
in an untried path, amid unprepared materials and rude in-
struments, models scanty and only half understood, powers
of language still doubtful and suspected, the deepest and
strongest thought still confined to unbending forms and the
harshest phrase; exact and extensive knowledge, as yet far
out of reach; with no help from time, which familiarizes all
things, and of which, manner, elaboration, judgment, and
taste are the gifts and inheritance ;—to see the poet, trusting
to his eye * which saw everything”+ and his searching and
creative spirit, venture undauntedly into all regions of
thought and feeling, to draw thence a picture of the govern-
ment of the universe.

But such greatness had to endure its price and its counter-
poise. Dante was alone: — except in his visionary world,

solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng

* “Ceased had the voice —when in composed array
Four mighty shades approaching I survey’d ;—

Nor joy, nor sorrow did their looks betray.
* * * * *

Assembled thus, was offered to my sight

The school of him, the Prince of poetry,

Who, eagle-like, o’er others takes his flight.
When they together had conversed awhile,

They turned to me with salutation bland,

Which from my master drew a friendly smile :
And greater glory still they bade me share,

Making me join their honourable band —

The sixth united to such genius rare.” —Wricut.

{ “ Dante che tutto vedea.” —Sacchetti, Noy. 114.

-

DANTE. . 43

of listeners ; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of
his daughters ; Shakspere had his free associates of the stage ;
Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to
applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are
already in the region of spirits, and meet him there — Casella,
Forese ;— Guido Cavalcanti will soon be withthem. In this
upper world he thinks and writes as a friendless man, —to
whom all that he had held dearest was either lost or embit-
tered —for himself.

And so he is his own law; he owns no tribunal of opinion
or standard of taste, except among the great dead. He hears
them exhort him to “let the world talk on—to stand like a
tower unshaken by the winds.”* He fears to be “a timid
friend to truth,” “‘—to lose life among those who shall call
this present time antiquity.” + He belongs to no party. He
is his own arbiter of the beautiful and the becoming; his own
judge over right and injustice, innocence and guilt. He has
no followers to secure, no school to humour, no public to
satisfy; nothing to guide him, and nothing to consult, nothing

© Parg. 5.
t Parad. 17.
* La luce in che rideyva il mio tesoro
Ch’ io troyai li, si fe’ prima corrusca,
Quale a raggio di sole specchio d’oro ;
Indi rispose: coscienza fusca
O della propria o dell’ altrui vergogna
Pur sentira la tua parola brusca ;
Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna,
Tutta tua vision fa manifesta,
E lascia pur grattar dov’ é la rogna :
Che se la voce tua sara molesta
Nel primo gusto, vital nutrimento
Lascera poi quando sara digesta.
Questo tuo grido fara come vento
Che le pit alte cime pit percuote:
E cio non fa d’ onor poco argomento.
Pero ti son mostrate, in queste ruote,
Nel monte, e nella valle dolorosa,
Pur I’ anime che son di fama note:
Che T animo di quel ch’ ode non posa
Né ferma fede, per esemplo ch’ aja
La sua radice incognita e nascosa,
Né per altro argumento che non paja.”

44 DANTE.

to bind him, nothing to fear, out of himself. In full trust in
heart and will, in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he
gives himself free course. If men have idolized the worth-
less, and canonized the base, he reverses their award without
mercy, and without apology ; if they have forgotten the just
because he was obscure, he remembers him: if ** Monna Berta
and Ser Martino,”* the wimpled and hooded gossips of the
day, with their sage company, have settled it to their own
satisfaction that Providence cannot swerve from their general
rules, cannot save where they have*doomed, or reject where
they have approved—he both fears more and hopes more.
Deeply reverent to the judgment of the ages past, reverent to
the persons whom they have immortalised for gocd and even
for evil, in his own day he cares for no man’s person and no
man’s judgment. And he shrinks not from the auguries and
forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. Men
reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, and without _
much scruple; but not with such deliberate and discriminating
sternness. ‘The most popular and honoured names in Flo-
rence,
“ Farinata e ’1 Tegghiaio, che fur si degni,
Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e 1 Mosca,
E gli altri, ch’ a ben far poser gl’ ingegni ;”

have yet the damning brand: no reader of the Inferno can
have forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet’s
questionings about their fate :

“ Ki son tra I’ anime piu nere.” ¢

If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality : friendship and old
affection do not venture to exempt from its fatal doom the
sin of his famous master, Brunetto Latini t+; nobleness and

* Parad, 13.
* Non creda Monna Berta e Ser Martino
Per veder un furare, altro offerere,
Vederli dentro al consiglio divino:
Che quel puo surger, e quel pud cadere.”

+ Inf. 6.
t ** Che in la mente m’ é fitta, ed or m’ accuora,

La cara buona imagine paterna.” — Inf. 15.

DANTE. 45

great deeds, a kindred character and common wrongs, are not
enough to redeem Farinata; and he who could tell her story
bowed to the eternal law, and dared not save Francesca. If
he condemns by a severer rule than that of the world, he ab-
solves with fuller faith in the possibilities of grace. Many
names of whom history has recorded no good, are marked by
him for bliss; yet not without full respect for justice. The
penitent of the last hour is saved, but he suffers loss. Man-
fred’s soul is rescued; mercy had accepted his tears, and
forgiven his great sins; and the excommunication of his
enemy did not bar his salvation :

“Per lor maladizion si non si perde
Che non possa tornar l’ eterno amore

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.”— Purg. 3.
r ;

Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for long
years from the perfection of heaven.* And with the same
‘independence with which he assigns their fate, he selects
his instances —instances which are to be the types of cha-
racter and its issues. No man ever owned more unreservedly
the fascination of greatness, its sway over the imagination
and the heart; no one prized more the grand harmony and
sense of fitness which there is, when the great man and the
great office are joined in one, and reflect each other’s greatness.
The famous and great of all ages are gathered in the poet’s
vision; the great names even of fable—Geryon and the
giants, the Minotaur and Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes
and Troy. But not the great and famous only: this is too
narrow, too conventional a sphere; it is not real enough. He
felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that wonderful
histories are latent in the inconspicuous paths of life, in the
fugitive incidents of the hour, among the persons whose faces
we have seen. The Church had from the first been witness
to the deep interest of individual life. The rising taste for
novels showed that society at large was beginning to be alive

* Charles of Anjou, his Guelf conqueror, is placed above him, in the valley of
the kings (Purg. 7.), “ Colui dal maschio naso”—notwithstanding the charges
afterwards made against him, Purg. 20.

46 DANTE. ad

to it. And it is this feeling —that behind the veil there may
be grades of greatness but nothing insignificant, —that led
Dante to refuse to restrict himself to the characters of fame.
He will associate with them the living men who. have stood
round him; they are part of the same company the
greatest. That they have interested him, touched him, mo d
his indignation or pity, struck him as examples of great vicis-
situde or of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved him—
this is enough why they should live in his poem as they have
lived to him. He chooses at wilt; history, if it has been
negligent at the time about those whom he thought worthy
of renown, must be content with its loss. He tells their
story, or touches them with a word like the most familiar
names, according ashe pleases. ‘The obscure highway robber,
the obscure Steaver of his sister’s honour— Rinier da Gorneto
and Rinier Pazzo, and Caccianimico—are ranked, not
according to their obscurity, but according to the greatness of
their crimes, with the famous conquerors, and “ scourges of
God,” and seducers of the heroic age, Pyrrhus and Attila,
and the great Jason of “royal port, who sheds no tear in his
torments.”* He earns as high praise from Virgil, for his
eurse on the furious wrath of the old frantic Florentine
burgher, as if he had cursed the disturber of the world’s
peace.t And so in the realms of joy, among the faithful
accomplishers of the highest trusts, kings and teachers of the
nations, founders of orders, sainted empresses, appear those
whom, though the world had forgotten or misread them, the
poet had enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for their sweetness,
their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the penitent, the
nun, the old crusading ancestor, the pilgrim who had deserted
the greatness which he had created, the brave logician, who
*‘syllogised unpalatable truths” in the Quartier Latin of
Paris. ¢

* See the magnificent picture Inf. 18. } Inf. 8.
¢ Cunizza, Piccarda, Cacciaguida, Roméo. (Parad. 9. 3. 15. 6. 10.)
— “La luce eterna di Sigieri

Che leggendo nel vico degli Strami
Sillogizz6 invidiosi yeri —— ”

aX
“

DANTE. 47

There is small resemblance in all this—this arbitrary and
imperious tone, this range of ideas, feelings, and images, this
unshackled freedom, this harsh reality —to the dreamy gentle-
ness of the Vita Nuova, or even the staid argumentation of the
more mature Convito. The Vita Nuova is all self-concentration
—ab 00 ing, not unpleased, over the varying tides of feeling,
which are little influenced by the world without; where every
fancy, every sensation, every superstition of the lover is detailed
with the most whimsical subtlety. The Commedia, too, has its
tenderness—and that more deep, more natural, more true, than
the poet had before adapted to the traditionary formule of the
* Courts of Love,”-—the eyes of Beatrice are as bright, and
the “conquering light of her smile;” * they still culminate, but
they are not alone, in the poet’s heaven. And the professed
subject of the Commedia is still Dante’s own story and life ;
he still makes himself the central point. And steeled as he
is by that high and hard experience of which his poem is the
projection and type, —“ Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura,” —
a stern and brief-spoken man, set on objects, and occupied
with a theme, lofty and vast as can occupy man’s thoughts, he
still lets escape ever and anon some passing avowal of delicate
sensitiveness{, lingers for a moment on some indulged self-
consciousness, some recollection of his once quick and change-

in company with S. Thomas Aquinas, in the sphere of the Sun. Ozanam gives a
few particulars of this forgotten professor of the “ Rue du Fouarre,” pp. 320—
323.

* “Vincendo me col lume d’ un sorriso.” — Parad. 18.

1 For instance, his feeling of distress at gazing at the blind, who were not
aware of his presence —

“ A me pareva andando fare oltraggio
Vedendo altrui, non essendo veduto :” — Purg. 13,

and of shame, at being tempted to listen to'a quarrel between two lost spirits :—
“ Ad ascoltarli er’ io del tutto fisso,
Quando 71 Maestro mi disse: or pur mira,
Che per poco é, che teco non mi risso.
Quando io ’] senti’ a me parlar con ira
Volsimi verso lui con tal vergogna,
Ch’ ancor per la memoria mi si gira,” &c,— Inf. 30,
and the burst,
“ O dignitosa coscienza e netta,

>»

Come ¢’ é picciol fallo amaro morso.” — Purg. 3.

48 DANTE.

ful mood —*‘io che son trasmutabil per tutte guise ”* —or
half playfully alludes to the whispered name of a lady+,
whose pleasant courtesy has beguiled a few days of exile.
But he is no longer spell-bound and entangled in fancies of
his own weaving —absorbed in the unprofitable contemplation
of his own internal sensations. The man is indeed the same,
still a Florentine, still metaphysical, still a lover. He returns
to the haunts and images of youth, to take among them his
poet’s crown; but “ with other voice and other garb,” a pe-
nitent and a prophet — with larger thoughts, wider sympathies,
freer utterance; sterner and fiercer, yet nobler and more
genuine in his tenderness—as one whom trial has made
serious, and keen, and intolerant of evil, but not sceptical or
callous; yet with the impressions and memories of a very dif-
ferent scene from his old day-dreams.

“ After that it was the pleasure of the citizens of that fairest
and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth
from her most sweet bosom, (wherein I had been nourished up to
the maturity of my life, and in which, with all peace to her, I long

with all my heart to rest my weary soul, and finish the time which -

is given me,) [ have passed through almost all the regions to which
this language reaches, a wanderer, almost a beggar, displaying,
against my will, the stroke of fortune, which is ofttimes unjustly
wont to be imputed to the person stricken. Truly, I have been a
ship without a sail or helm, carried to divers harbours, and gulfs,
and shores, by that parching wind which sad poverty breathes ;
and I have seemed vile in the eyes of many, who perchance, from
some fame, had imagined of me in another form; in the sight of
whom not only did my presence become nought, but every work of
mine less prized, both what had been and what was to be wrought.”
— Convito, Tr. i. c. 3.

Thus proved, and thus furnished, — thus independent and
confident, daring to trust his instinct and genius in what was
entirely untried and unusual, he entered on his great poem,
to shadow forth, under the figure of his own conversion and
purification, not merely how a single soul rises to its perfec-

* Parad, 5. + Purg. 24. t Parad. 25.

<<

DANTE.

tion, but how this visible world, in all its phases of nature,
life, and society, is one with the invisible, which borders on
it, actuates, accomplishes, and explains it. It is this vast
plan,—to take into his scope, not the soul only in its struggles
and triumph, but all that the soul finds itself engaged with
in its course; the accidents of the hour, and of ages past ;
the real persons, great and small, apart from and without
whom it cannot think or act; the material world, its
theatre and home, — which gives so many various sides to the
Commedia, which makes it so novel and strange. It is nota
mere personal history, or a pouring forth of feeling, like the
Vita Nuova, though he is himself the mysterious voyager,
and he opens without reserve his actual life and his heart ;
he speaks indeed in the first person, yet he is but a character
of the drama, and in great part of it with not more of distinct
personality than in that paraphrase of the penitential Psalms,
in which he has preluded so much of the Commedia. Yet
the Commedia is not a pure allegory; it admits, and makes
use of the allegorical, but the laws of allegory are too narrow
for it; the real in it is too impatient of the veil, and breaks
through in all its hardness and detail, into what is most
shadowy. History is indeed viewed not in its ephemeral look,
but under the light of God’s final judgments; in its comple-
tion, not in its provisional and fragmentary character; viewed
therefore but in faith ; — but its issues, which in this confused
scene we ordinarily contemplate in the gross, the poet brings
down to detail and individuals: he faces and grasps the
tremendous thought that the very men and women whom we
see and speak to, are now the real representatives of sin and
goodness, the true actors in that scene which is so familiar to
us as a picture — unflinching and terrible heart, he endures
to face it in its most harrowing forms. But he wrote not for
sport, nor to give poetic pleasure; he wrote to warn; the
seed of the Commedia was sown in tears, and reaped in
misery: and the consolations which it offers are awful as they
are real.

Thus, though he throws into symbol and image, what can
only be expressed by symbol and image, we can as little

E

50 DANTE.

forget in reading him this real world in which we live, as we
can in one of Shakspere’s plays. It is not merely that the
poem is crowded with real personages, most of them having
the single interest to us of being real. But all that is
associated with man’s history and existence is interwoven
with the main course of thought — all that gives character to
life, all that gives it form and feature, even to quaintness, all
that occupies the mind, or employs the hand — speculation,
science, arts, manufactures, monuments, scenes, customs,
proverbs, ceremonies, games, punishments, attitudes of
men, habits of living creatures. The wildest and most un-
earthly imaginations, the most abstruse thoughts take up
into, and incorporate with themselves the forcible and familiar
impressions of our mother earth, and do not refuse the
company and aid even of the homeliest.

This is not mere poetic ornament, peculiarly, profusely, or
extravagantly employed. It is one of the ways in which his
dominant feeling expresses itself—spontaneous and instinctive
in each several instance of it, but the kindling and effluence
of deliberate thought, and attending on a clear purpose— the
feeling of the real and intimate connexion between the
objects of sight and faith. It is not that he sces in one the
simple counterpart and reverse of the other, or sets himself to
trace out universally their mutual correspondences; he has
too strong a sense of the reality of this familiar life to reduce
it merely to a shadow and type of the unseen. What he
struggles to express in countless ways, with all the resources
of his strange and gigantic power, is that this world and the
next are both equally real, and both one— parts, however
different, of one whole. The world to come we know but in
“a glass darkly ;” man can only think and imagine of it in
images, which he knows to be but broken and. faint re-
flections: but this world we know, not in outline, and
featureless idea, but by name, and face, and shape, by place
and person, by the colours and forms which crowd over
its surface, the men who people its habitations, the events
which mark its moments. Detail fills the sense here, and is
the mark of reality. And thus he seeks to keep alive the

sy

DANTE. 51.

feeling of what that world is which he connects with heaven
and hell; not by abstractions, not much by elaborate and
highly-finished pictures, but by names, persons, local features,
definite images. Widely and keenly has he ranged over and
searched into the world — with a largeness of mind which
disdained not to mark and treasure up, along with much un-
heeded beauty, many a characteristic feature of nature,
unnoticed becausesocommon. All his pursuits and interests
contribute to the impression, which, often instinctively it
may be, he strives to produce, of the manifold variety of our
life. Asaman of society, his memory is full of its usages,
formalities, graces, follies, fashions, — of expressive motions,
postures, gestures, looks, — of music, of handicrafts, of the
conversation of friends or associates, — of all that passes, so
transiently yet so keenly pleasant or distasteful, between
man and man. As a traveller, he recals continually the
names and scenes of the world ; — as a man of speculation,
the secrets of nature — the phenomena of light, the theory of
the planets’ motions, the idea and laws of physiology.” As a
man of learning, he is filled with the thoughts and recollec-
tions of ancient fable and history; as a politician, with the
thoughts, prognostications, and hopes, of the history of the
day ; as a moral philosopher he has watched himself, his ex-
ternal sensations and changes, his inward passions, his mental
powers, his ideas, his conscience; he has far and wide noted
character, discriminated motives, classed good and evil deeds.
All that the man of society, of travel, of science, of learning,
the politician, the moralist, could gather, is used at will in
the great poetic structure ; but all converges to the purpose,
and is directed by the intense feeling of the theologian, who
sees this wonderful and familiar scene melting into, and
ending in another yet more wonderful, but which will one
day be as familiar,—who sees the difficult but sure progress

of the manifold remedies of the Divine government to their

predestined issue; and, over all, God and His saints.

So comprehensive in interest is the Commedia. Any
attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics,
philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove

BE 2

52 DANTE.

inadeqaate. Theology strikes the key-note; but history,
natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in
their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering
to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for
a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place
of religion in it, the plain spoken prose of the Convito would
show how he placed “ the Divine Science, full of all peace, and
allowing no strife of opinions and sophisms, for the excellent
certainty of its subject, which is God,” in single perfection
above all other sciences, ‘‘ which are, as Solomon speaks, but
queens, or concubines, or maidens; but she is the ‘ Dove,’
and the ‘perfect one’—‘ Dove,’ because without stain
of strife — ‘ perfect,’ because perfectly she makes us behold
the truth, in which our soul stills itself and is at rest.” But
the same passage * shows likewise how he viewed all human,
knowledge and human interests, as holding their due place in
the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man’s
perfection. No account of the Commedia will prove suffi-
cient, which does not keep in view, first of all, the high
moral purpose and deep spirit of faith with which it was
written, and then the wide liberty of materials and means ©
which the poet allowed himself in working out his design.
Doubtless, his writings have a political aspect. The
“reat Ghibelline poet” is one of Dante’s received syno-
nymes ; of his strong political opinions, and the importance
he attached to them, there can be no doubt. And he meant
his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all ages
of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed.
That he should take the deepest interest in the goings on of
his time, is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped
at them, or that he subordinated to political objects or
feelings all the other elements of his poem, is to shrink up
that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet this has been
done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
read the Commedia in their own mother-tongue. It has
been maintained as a satisfactory account of it,—maintained

* Convito, Tr. 2. c. 14, 15.

DANTE. 53

with great labour and pertinacious ingenuity, — that Dante
meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal
triumph of a political party. The hundred cantos of that
Vision of the Universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline
propaganda, a sort of Ghibelline and medixval Histoire de
Dix Ans, designed, under the veil of historic images and
scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and
Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of
the jargon, cant, and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. To
Professor Rosetti must belong the distinction of having
degraded the greatest name of his country to a depth of
laborious imbecility, to which the triflmg of schoolmen and
academicians is as nothing; of having solved the enigma of
Dante’s works, by imagining for him a character in which it
is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank,
or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire’s sneers with
patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of
Father Hardouin’s Historic Doubts. The fanaticism of a
perhaps outraged, but essentially foolish liberalism, is but a
poor excuse for such dulness of heart and perverseness of
intellect.*

Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the
interposition of an Imperial power. Historically, he was
not. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he
had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom
he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged and
lost in the Ghibelline party +; and he acted with them for
a time.{ But no words can be stronger than those in which
he disjoins himself from that ‘evil and foolish company,”
and claims his independence —

* A te fia bello
Averti fatto parte per te stesso.” §

* In the “Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam” is a paper, in which he
examines and disposes of this theory with a courteous and forbearing irony,
_ which would have deepened probably into something more, on thinking over it
a second time.

+ Dino Comp. pp. 89—91.

{ His name appears among the White delegates in 1307. Pelli, p. 117.

§ Parad. 17.

E 3

Ss of fee 1s (re ee ee = Ly pee oe 4 at a oe
Aretigg gag nes " ts ae Le cee eee on r eee * a Fe it.

54 | DANTE. ‘

And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partizan putting
into the mouth of Justinian, the type of law and empire,
a general condemnation of his party as heavy as that of their
antagonists ;—the crime of having betrayed, as the Guelfs
had resisted, the great symbol of public right —

“Omai puoi giudicar di que’ cotali
Ch’ io accusai di sopra, e de’ lor fallé
Che son cagion di tutti i vostri malr.

L’ uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli
Oppone, e quel s’ appropria [altro a parte,
Si ch’ é forte a veder qual pit si falli.

Faccian li Ghibellin, faecian lor arte
Sott altro segno; che mal segue quello
Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte.” *

And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he
found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among
Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue were free to the end.
And in character and feeling, in his austerity, his sturdiness
and roughness, his intolerance of corruption and pride,
his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was much less |
a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed
Savonarola,

But he had a very decided and complete political theory,
which certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it
was not much more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of
men would have more vigorously resisted the attempt to
realise his theory, would have joined more heartily with all
immediate opponents — Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or
even Boniface VIIT., to keep out such an emperor as Dante
imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates.

Dante’s political views were a dream; though a dream
based on what had been, and an anticipation of what was, in
part at least, to come. It was a dream in the middle ages, in
divided and republican Italy, the Italy of cities, — of a real
and national government, based on justice and law. It was
the dream of a real state. He imagined that the Roman

* Parad. 6.

ee = Oe Bini ae > aa war SS ees 7 _ 2, de ri Pe
an oe : Z ra “ss

DANTE. 55

empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that
Christendom might be such;—he was wrong in both
instances; but in this case, as in so many others, he had
already caught the spirit and ideas of a far distant future ;
and the political organisation of modern times, so familiar to
us that we cease to think of its exceeding wonder, is the
practical confirmation, though in a form very different from
what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those
expectations which are in outward form so chimerical —
“7% miei non falsi errort.”

He had studied the “infinite disorders of the world”
in one of their most unrestrained scenes, the streets of an
Italian republic. Law was powerless, good men were power-
less, good intentions came to nought; neither social habits
nor public power could resist, when selfishness chose to have
its way. The Church was indeed still the salt of the nations;
but it had once dared, and achieved more; it had once been
the only power which ruled them. And this it could do no
longer. If strength and energy had been enough to make
the Church’s influence felt on government, there was
a Pope who could have done it—a man who was un-
doubtedly the most wondered at and admired of his age,
whom friend or foe never characterised, without adding the
invariable epithet of his greatness of soul—the “ magnanimus
peccator,” * whose Roman grandeur in meeting his unworthy
fate fascinated into momentary sympathy even Dante.+ But
among the things which Boniface VIII. could not do, even

* Benvenuto da Imola.

+ “ Veggio in Alagna entrar lo fiordaliso
E nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto ;
Veggiolo un’ altra volta esser deriso ;
Veggio rinnovellar l’aceto e ’| fele,
E tra vivi ladroni essere anciso.” — Purg. 20.

G. Vill. 8. 63. “Come magnanimo e valente, disse, Dacché per tradimento,
come Gest Cristo voglio esser preso e mi conviene morire, almeno voglio morire come
Papa;” e di presente si fece parare dell’ ammanto di S. Piero, e colla corona di
Costantino in Capo, e colle chiayi e croce in mano, e in su la sedia papale si
pose a sedere, e giunto a lui Sciarra e gli altri suoi nimici, con villane parole lo
scherniro,” | .

E4

56 DANTE.

if he cared about it, was the maintaining peace and law in
Italian towns. And while this great political power was
failing, its correlative and antagonist was paralysed also.
“Since the death of Frederic IL,” says Dante’s con-
temporary, “the fame and recollections of the empire were
well nigh extinguished.”* Italy was left without government
— come nave senza nocchiero in gran tempesta” — to the
mercies of her tyrants: —

“ Che le terre d'Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan, che parteggiando viene.” — Purg. 6.

In this scene of violence and disorder, with the Papacy
gone astray, the empire debased and impotent, the religious
orders corrupted, power meaning lawlessness, the well-dis-
posed become weak and cowardly, religion neither guide nor
check to society, but only the consolation of its victims —
Dante was bold and hopeful enough to believe in the Divine
appointment, and the possibility, of law and government —
of a state. In his philosophy, the institutions which provide

for man’s peace and liberty in this life are part of God’s |

great order for raising men to perfection ;—not indispensable,
yet ordinary parts; having their important place, though but
for the present time; and though imperfect, real instruments
of His moral government. He could not believe it to be the
intention of Providence, that on the introduction of higher
hopes and the foundation of a higher society, civil society
should collapse and be left to ruin, as henceforth useless or
prejudicial in man’s trial and training; that the significant
intimations of nature, that law and its results, justice, peace,
and stability, ought to be and might be realised among
men, had lost their meaning and faded away before the
announcement of a kingdom not of this world. And if the
perfection of civil society had not been superseded by the
Church, it had become clear, if events were to be read as
signs, that she was not intended to supply its political offices

* Dino Compagni, p. 135.

DANTE, 57

and functions. She had taught, elevated, solaced, blessed,
not only individual souls, but society; she had for a time
even governed it; but though her other powers remained,
she could govern it no longer. Failure had made it certain
that, in his strong and quaint language, “ Virtus authorizandi
regnum nostre mortalitatis est contra naturam ecclesie ; ergo
non est de numero virtutum suarum.” Another and distinct
organisation was required for this, unless the temporal order
was no longer worthy the attention of Christians.

This is the idea of the “ De Monarchia;” and though it
holds but a place in the great scheme of the Commedia, it is
prominent there also — an idea seen but in a fantastic shape,
encumbered and confused with most grotesque imagery, but
the real idea of polity and law, which the experience of modern
Europe has attained to.

He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy, the
theory of merely human society; and raising its end and
purpose, “finem totius humane civilitatis,” to a height and
dignity which Heathens could not forecast, he adopted it in
its more abstract and ideal form. He imagined a single
authority, unselfish, inflexible, irresistible, which could make
all smaller tyrannies to cease, and enable every man to live
in peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is simply
what each separate state of Christendom has by this time
more or less perfectly achieved. The theorizer of the middle
ages could conceive of its accomplishment only in one form,
as grand as it was impossible,—a universal monarchy.

But he did not start from an abstraction. He believed
that history attested the existence of such a monarchy. ‘The
prestige of the Roman empire was then strong. Europe still
lingers on the idea, and cannot even yet bring itself to give
up its part in that greatest monument of human power. But
in the middle ages the Empire was still believed to exist.
It was the last greatness which had been seen in the world,
aud the world would not believe that it was over. Above
all, in Italy, a continuity of lineage, of language, of local

. * De Monarch. lib. iii, p. 188. Ed. Fraticelli.

58 DANTE.

names, and in part of civilisation and law, forbad the thought
that the great Roman people had ceased to be. Florentines
and Venetians boasted that they were Romans: the legends
which the Florentine ladies told to their maidens at the loom
were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman element,
little understood, but profoundly. reverenced and dearly
cherished, was dominant; the conductor of civilisation, and
enfolding the inheritance of all the wisdom, experience, feel-
ing, art, of the past, it elevated, even while it overawed, op-
pressed, and enslaved. A deep belief in Providence, added
to the intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred character.
The flight of the eagle has been often told and often sung ;
but neither in Livy or Virgil, Gibbon or Bossuet, with
intenser sympathy or more kindred power, than in those
rushing and unflagging verses in which the middle-age poet
hears the imperial legislator relate the fated course of the
“sacred sign,” from the day when Pallas died for it, till it
accomplished the vengeance of heaven in Judea, and after-
wards, under Charlemagne, smote down the enemies of the
Church.*

The following passage, from the “De Monarchia,” will
show the poet’s view of the Roman empire, and its office in
the world: —

“To the reasons above alleged, a memorable experience brings
confirmation: I mean that state of mankind which the Son of God,
when He would for man’s salvation take man upon Him, either
waited for, or ordered when so He willed. For if from the fall of
our first parents, which was the starting point of all our wanderings,
we retrace the various dispositions of men and their times, we
shall not find at any time, except under the divine monarch Au-
gustus, when a perfect monarchy existed, that the world was
every where quiet. And that then mankind was happy in the
tranquillity of universal peace, this all writers of history, this famous
poets, this even the Scribe of the meekness of Christ has deigned
to attest. And lastly, Paul has called that most blessed condition,
the fulness of time. ‘Truly time, and the things of time, were full,
for no mystery of our felicity then lacked its minister. But how the

* Paradiso, c. 6.

DANTE. 59

world has gone on from the time when that seamless robe was first
torn by the claws of covetousness, we may read, and would that we
might not also see. O race of men! by how great storms and losses,
by how great shipwrecks hast thou of necessity been vexed, since,
transformed into a beast of many heads, thou hast been struggling
different ways, sick in understanding, equally sick in heart. The
higher intellect, with its invincible reasons, thou reckest not of; nor
of the inferior, with its eye of experience ; nor of affection, with the
sweetness of divine suasion, when the trumpet of the Holy Ghost
sounds to thee—‘ Behold, how good is it, and how pleasant,
brethren, to dwell together in unity.’” — De Monarch. lib. i. p. 54.

Yet this great Roman Empire existed still unimpaired in
name -—— not unimposing even in what really remained of it.
Dante, to supply a want, turned it into a theory, —a theory
easy to smile at now, but which contained and was a begin-
ning of unknown or unheeded truth. What he yearns after
is the predominance of the principle of justice in civil society.
That, if it is still imperfect, is no longer a dream in our day;
but experience had never realised it to him, and he takes
refuge in tentative and groping theory. The divinations of
the greatest men have been vague and strange, and none
have been stranger than those of the author of the “ De
Monarchia.” The second book, in which he establishes the
title of the Roman people to Universal Empire, is as startling
a piece of medizval argument as it would be easy to find.

“ As when we cannot attain to look upon a cause, we commonly
wonder at a new effect, so when we know the cause, we look down
with a certain derision on those who remain in wonder. And I
indeed wondered once how the Roman people had, without any re-
sistance, been set over the world; and looking at it superficially, I
thought that they had obtained this by no right, but by mere force
of arms. But when I fixed deeply the eyes of my mind on it, and
by most effectual signs knew that Divine Providence had wrought
this, wonder departed, and a certain scornful contempt came in its
_ stead, when I perceived the nations raging against the pre-eminence
of the Roman people: —when I see the people imagining a vain
thing, as I once used to do; when, moreover, I grieve over kings and
princes agreeing in this only, to be against their Lord, and his
anointed Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, not without a

60 DANTE.

certain grief, I can ery out, for that glorious people and for Cesar,
with him who cried in behalf of the Prince of Heaven, ‘ Why did
the nations rage, and the people imagine vain things; the kings of
the earth stood up, and the rulers were joined in one against the
Lord, and his anointed.’ But because natural love suffers not
derision to be of long duration, but, — like the summer sun, which,
scattering the morning mists, irradiates the east with light, —so
prefers to pour forth the light of correction, to break the bonds of
the ignorance of such kings and rulers, to show that the human race
is free from their yoke, therefore I will exhort myself, in company
with the most holy Prophet, taking up his following words, ‘ Let
us break their bonds, and cast away from us their yoke.’”—De
Monarch. lib. ii. p. 58.

And to prove this pre-eminence of right in the Roman
people, and their heirs, the Emperors of Christendom, he
appeals not merely to the course of Providence, to their high
and noble ancestry, to the blessings of their just and con-
siderate laws, to their unselfish guardianship of the world —
* Romanum imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis ;”—not merely
to their noble examples of private virtue, self-devotion, and
public spirit—* those most sacred victims of the Decian house,
who laid down their lives for the public weal, as Livy, —not
as they deserved, but as he was able,—tells to their glory ; and
that unspeakable sacrifice of freedom’s sternest guardians, the
Catos;” not merely to the “judgment of God” in that great
duel and wager of battle for empire, in which heaven declared
against all other champions and “ co-athletes ”— Alexander,
Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and by all the formalities of judicial combat
awarded the great prize to those who fought, not for love or
hatred, but justice — “ Quis igitur nune adeo obtuse mentis
est, qui non videat, sub jure duelli gloriosum populum coronam
totius orbis esse lucratum?”—not merely to arguments derived
*‘ from the principles of the Christian faith”—but to miracles,
* The Roman Empire,” he says, “ was, in order to its per-
fections, aided by the help of miracles; therefore it was willed
by God; and, by consequence, both was, and is, of right.”
And these miracles, “ proved by the testimony of illustrious
authorities,” are the prodigies of Livy — the ancile of Numa,

DANTE. 61

the geese of the Capitol, the escape of Clelia, the hail-storm
which checked Hannibal.*

The intellectual phenomenon is a strange one. It would
be less strange if Dante were arguing in the schools, or
pleading for a party. But even Henry of Luxemburgh cared
little for such a throne as the poet wanted him to fill, much
less Can Grande and the Visconti. The idea, the theory,
and the argument, are of the writer’s own solitary meditation.
We may wonder. But there are few things more strange
than the history of argument. How often has a cause or an
idea turned out, in the eyes of posterity, so much better than
its arguments. How often have we seen argument getting
as it were into a groove, and unable to extricate itself, so as
to do itself justice. The every day cases of private experi-
ence, of men defending right conclusions on wrong or con-
ventional grounds, or in a confused form, engaged with
conclusions of a like yet different nature; — of arguments
theories, solutions, which once satisfied, satisfying us no
longer on a question about which we hold the same belief —
of one party unable to comprehend the arguments of another
—of one section of the same side smiling at the defence of
their common cause by another, —are all reproduced on a
grander scale in the history of society. There too, one age
cannot comprehend another; there too it takes time to
disentangle, subordinate, eliminate. Truth of this sort is not
the elaboration of one keen or strong mind, but of the secret
experience of many; “xzhzl sine etate est, omnia tempus
expectant. But a counterpart to the “ De Monarchia” is
not wanting in our own day; theory has not ceased to be
mighty. In warmth and earnestness, in sense of historic
grandeur, in its support of a great cause and a great idea, not
less than in the thought of its motto, Eis xoipavos ctw, De
Maistre’s volume “Du Pape,” recals the antagonist “ De
Monarchia ;” but it recals it not less in its bold dealing with
facts, and its bold assumption of principles, though the know-
Iedge and debates of five more busy centuries, and the

* De Monarch, lib. ii. p, 62. 66. 78 . 82. 84. 108—114. 116. 72—76,

62 DANTE.

experience of modern courts and revolutions, might have
guarded the Piedmontese nobleman from the mistakes of the
old Florentine. |

But the idea of the “De Monarchia” is no key to the
Commedia. The direct and primary purpose of the Com-
media is surely its obvious one. It is to stamp a deep im-
pression on the mind, of the issues of good and ill doing here,
—of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do this forcibly, it
is done in detail — of course it can only be done in figure.
Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as
he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the
numberless spirits who have ever lived here — spirits still
living and sentient as himself: parallel with our life, they too
are suffering or are at rest. Without pause or interval, in
all its parts simultaneously, this awful scene is going on —
the judgments of God are being fulfilled — could we but see
it. It exists, it might be seen, at each instant of time, by a
soul whose eyes were opened, which was carried through it.
And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is
the working out, which is peculiar to him. It is nota barren
vision. His subject is, besides the eternal world, the soul
which contemplates it; by sight, according to his figures—in
reality, by faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe,
then through the tempered chastisements and resignation of
Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the course of
the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning itself from it, —
of its purification, and preparation for its high lot, by converse
with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by efforts
of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some
single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institu-
tion, or thought. Nor will we say but that beyond this
earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp and
imagine to himself something of that awful process and
training, by which, whether in or out of the flesh, the
spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief
Good.

Thus it seems that even in its main design, the poem has
more than one aspect; it is a picture, a figure, partially a

DANTE 63

history, perhaps an anticipation. And this is confirmed, by
what the poet has himself distinctly stated, of his ideas of
poetic composition. His view is expressed generally in his
philosophical treatise, the “ Convito;” but it is applied
directly to the Commedia, in a letter, which, if in its present
form, of doubtful authenticity, without any question re-
presents his sentiments, and the substance of which is in-
corporated in one of the earliest writings on the poem,
Boccaccio’s commentary. The following is his account of
the subject of the poem: —

“ For the evidence of what is to be said, it is to be noted, that
this work is not of one single meaning only, but may be said to
have many meanings (‘polysensuum’). For the first meaning is
that of the letter —another is that of things signified by the letter ;
the first of these is called the literal sense, the second, the alle-
gorical or moral. This mode of treating a subject may for clearness
sake be considered in those verses of the Psalm, ‘ Jv exitu Israel.
‘When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from
the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his
dominion.’ For if we look at the letter only, there is here
signified, the going out of the children of Israel in the time of
Moses—if at the allegory, there is signified, our redemption
through Christ —if at the moral sense, there is signified to us, the
conversion of the soul from the mourning and misery of sin to the
state of grace—if at the anagogic sense*, there is signified, the
passing out of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption,
to the liberty of everlasting glory. And these mystical meanings,
though called by different names, may all be called allegorical as
distinguished from the literal or historical sense. ... . This
being considered, it is plain that there ought to be a twofold
subject, concerning which the two corresponding meanings may
proceed. ‘Therefore we must consider first concerning the subject
of this work as it is to be understood literally, then as it is to be con-
sidered allegorically. The subject then of the whole work, taken
literally only, is the state of souls after death considered in itself.
For about this, and on this, the whole work turns. But if the
work be taken allegorically, its subject is man, as, by his freedom

* « Litera gesta refert, quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quid speres anagogia.”
De Witte’s note from Buti.

64 DANTE.

of choice deserving well or ill, he is subject to the justice which
rewards and punishes.” *

The passage in the Convito is to the same effect; but his
remarks on the moral and anagogic meaning may be quoted: —

* The third sense is called moral; this it is which readers ought
to go on noting carefully in writings, for their own profit and that
of their disciples: as in the Gospel it may be noted, when Christ
went up to the mountain to be transfigured, that of the twelve
Apostles, he took with him only three; in which morally we may
understand, that in the most secret things we ought to have but
few companions. The fourth sort of meaning is called anagogic,
that is, above our sense; and this is when we spiritually interpret
a passage, which even in its literal meaning, by means of the
things signified, expresses the heavenly things of everlasting glory :
as may be seen in that song of the Prophet, which says, that in
the coming out of the people of Israel from Egypt, Judah was
made holy and free ; which although it is manifestly true according
to the letter, is not less true as spiritually understood ; that is, that
when the soul comes out of sin, it is made holy and free, in its
own power.” ¢

With this passage before us, there can be no doubt of the
meaning, however veiled, of those beautiful lines, already
referred to, in which Virgil, after having conducted the poet
up the steeps of Purgatory, where his sins have been one by
one cancelled by the ministering angels, finally takes leave of
him, and bids him wait for Beatrice, on the skirts of the
earthly Paradise : —

“ Come la scala tutta sotto noi
Fu corsa e fummo in su ’1 grado superno,
In me ficcd Virgilio gli occhi suoi,

K disse : ‘Il temporal fuoco, e I’ eterno
Veduto hai, figlio, e se’ venuto in parte
Ov’ io per me pit oltre non discerno.

Tratto t? ho qui con ingegno e con arte :
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;
Fuor se’ dell’ erte vie, fuor se’ dell’ arte.

Vedi il sole che ’n fronte ti riluce :
Vedi I’ erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli

* Ep. ad Kan Grand. § 6, 7. + Convito, Tr. 2. ¢ 1.

DANTE. 65

Che quella terra sol da se produce.
Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli
Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno,
Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.
Non aspettar mio dir pit né mio cenno:
Libero, dritto, sano é tuo arbitrio,
E fallo fora non fare a suo senno :—
Perch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio.’” *

The general meaning of the Commedia is clear enough.
But it certainly does appear to refuse to be fitted into a con-
nected formal scheme of interpretation. It is not a homo-
geneous, consistent allegory, like the Pilgrim’s Progress and
the Fairy Queen. The allegory continually breaks off, shifts
its ground, gives place to other elements, or mingles with
them—like a stream which suddenly sinks into the earth,
and after passing under plains and mountains, reappears in a
distant point, and in different scenery. We can, indeed,
imagine its strange author commenting on it, and finding or
marking out its prosaic substratum, with the coldblooded
precision and scholastic distinctions of the Convito. How-

* ‘¢ When we had run
O’er all the ladder to its topmost round,
As there we stood, on me the Mantuan fix’d
His eyes, and thus he spake : ‘ Both fires, my son,
The temporal and the eternal, thou hast seen :
And art arrived, where of itself my ken
No further reaches. I, with skill and art,
Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take )
For guide. Thou hast o’ercome the steeper way,
O’ercome the straiter. Lo! the sun, that darts
His beam upon thy forehead : lo! the herb,
The arborets and flowers, which of itself
This land pours forth profuse. Till those bright eyes
With gladness come, which, weeping, made me haste
To succour thee, thou mayest or seat thee down,
Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more
Sanction of warning voice or sign from me,
Free of thine own arbitrement to choose,
Discreet, judicious. To distrust thy sense
Were henceforth error. I invest thee then
With crown and mitre, sovereign o’er thyself.’ ”
Purg. ¢.27. (Cary.)

¥F

66 DANTE.

ever, he has not done so. And of the many enigmas which
present themselves, either in its structure or separate parts,
the key seems hopelessly lost. The early commentators are
very ingenious, but very unsatisfactory ; they see where we
can see, but beyond that they are as full of uncertainty as
ourselves. It is in character with that solitary and haughty
spirit, while touching universal sympathies, appalling and
charming all hearts, to have delighted in his own dark say-
ings, which had meaning only to himself. It is true that,
whether in irony, or from that quaint studious care for the
appearance of literal truth, which makes him apologise for
the wonders which he relates, and confirm them by an oath,
“ on the words of his poem,” * he provokes and challenges us;
bids us admire “ doctrine hidden under strange verses ;”} bids
us strain our eyes, for the veil is thin: —

“* Acuzza, qui, lettor, ben Il’ occhi al vero:
Che il velo é ora ben tanto sottile,
Certo, che il trapassar dentro é leggiero.”—Purg. c. 8.

But eyes are still strained in conjecture and doubt. :

Yet the most certain and detailed commentary, one which
assigned the exact reason for every image or allegory, and
its place and connexion in a general scheme, would add but
little to the charm or the use of the poem. It is not so
obscure but that every man’s experience who has thought
over and felt the mystery of our present life, may supply the
commentary—the more ample, the wider and more various
has been his experience, the deeper and keener his feeling.
Details and links of connexion may be matter of controversy.
Whether the three beasts of the forest mean definitely the
vices of the time, or of Florence specially, or of the poet

° “Sempre a quel ver, ch’ ha faccia di menzogna,
De’ P uom chiuder le labbra, quanto puote,
Pero che senza colpa fa vergogna. |
Ma qui tacer nol posso ; e per le note
Di questa Commedia, lettor, ti giuro
S’ elle non sien di lunga grazia vote,” &c.— Inf. 16.
+ Inf. 9.

DANTE. 67

himself —‘‘ the wickedness of his heels, compassing him
round about,”—may still exercise critics and antiquaries ;
but that they carry with them distinct and special impres-
sions of evil, and that they are the hindrances of man’s salva-
tion, is not doubtful. And our knowledge of the key of the
allegory, where we possess it, contributes but little to the
effect. We may infer from the Convito* that the eyes of
Beatrice stand definitely for the demonstrations, and her
smiles for the persuasions of wisdom; but the poetry of the
Paradiso is not about demonstrations and persuasions, but
about looks and smiles; and the ineffable and holy calm —
“* serenitatis et eternitatis afflatus,” — which pervades it, comes
from the sacred truths, and holy persons, and that deep spirit
of high-raised yet composed devotion, which it requires no
interpreter to show us.

Figure and symbol, then, are doubtless the law of compo-
sition in the Commedia; but this law discloses itself very
variously, and with different degrees of strictness. In its
primary and most general form, it is palpable, consistent,
pervading. There can be no doubt that the poem is meant
to be understood figuratively —no doubt of what in general
it is meant to shadow forth—no doubt as to the general
meaning of its parts, their connection with each other.
But in its secondary and subordinate applications, the
law works—to our eye at least—irregularly, unequally,
and fitfully. There can be no question that Virgil, the
poet’s guide, represents the purely human element in the
training of the soul and of society, as Beatrice does the
divine. But neither represent the whole; he does not sum
up all appliances of wisdom in Virgil, nor all teachings and
influences of grace in Beatrice; these have their separate
figures. And both represent successively several distinct
forms of their general antitypes. They have various degrees
of abstractness, and narrow down, according to that order of
things to which they refer and correspond, into the special
and the personal. In the general economy of the poem,

* Convito, Tr. 3. ¢. 15.
F 2

68 DANTE.

Virgil stands for human wisdom in its widest sense; but he
also stands for it in its various shapes, in the different parts.
He is the type of human philosophy and science.* He is,
again, more definitely, that spirit of imagination and poetry,
which opens men’s eyes to the glories of the visible, and
the truth of the invisible; and to Italians, he is a definite
embodiment of it, their own great poet, “vates, poeta
noster.+” In the Christian order, he is human wisdom,
dimly mindful of its heavenly origin,—presaging dimly
its return to God— sheltering in heathen times that
“vague and unconnected family of religious truths, origi-
nally from God, but sojourning without the sanction of
miracle or visible home, as pilgrims up and down the
world.” + In the political order, he is the guide of law-
givers, wisdom fashioning the impulses and instincts of men
into the harmony of society, contriving stability and peace,
guarding justice ; fit part for the poet to fill, who had sung
the origin of Rome, and the justice and peace of Augustus.
In the order of individual life, and the progress of the indi-
vidual soul, he is the human conscience witnessing to duty, its
discipline and its hopes, and with yet more certain and fearful
presage, to its vindication; the human conscience seeing and
acknowledging the law, but unable to confer power to fulfil it
wakened by grace from among the dead, leading the living
man up to it, and waiting for its light and strength. But he
is more than a figure. To the poet himself, who blends with
his high argument his own life, Virgil had been the utmost
that mind ean be to mind, —teacher, quickener and revealer
of power, source of thought, exemplar and model, never dis-
appointing, never attained to, observed with “long study and
great love :”— |

“Tu duca, tu signor, e tu maestro.” —Jnf. 2.

And towards this great master, the poet’s whole soul is
poured forth in reverence and affection. To Dante he is no

* “O tu ch’ onori ogni scienza ed arte.”— Inf. 4. “Quel savio gentil che
tutto seppe.”—Jnf. 7. “Il mar di tutto ’] senno.”— Inf 8.
¢ De Monarch, $ Newman’s Arians.

DANTE. 69

figure, but a person—with feelings and weaknesses—over-
come by the vexation, kindling into the wrath, carried away
by the tenderness, of the moment. He reads his scholar’s
heart, takes him by the hand in danger, carries him in his
arms and in his bosom, “like a son more than a companion,”
rebukes his unworthy curiosity, kisses him when he shows a
noble spirit, asks pardon for his own mistakes. Never were
the kind, yet severe ways of a master, or the disciple’s diffi-
dence and open-heartedness, drawn with greater force, or less
effort; and he seems to have been reflecting on his own
affection to Virgil, when he makes Statius forget that they
were both but shades : —

* Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell amor ch’ a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento la nostra vanitate
Trattando ? ombre come cosa salda.” — Purg. 21.

And so with the poet’s second guide. The great idea which
Beatrice figures, though always present, is seldom rendered
artificially prominent, and is often entirely hidden beneath
the rush of real recollections, and the creations of dramatic
power. Abstractions venture and trust themselves among
realities, and for the time are forgotten. A name, a real
person, a historic passage, a lament or denunciation, a tragedy
of actual life, a legend of classic times, the fortunes of friends
—the story of Francesca or Ugolino, the fate of Buonconte’s
corpse, the apology of Pier delle Vigne, the epitaph of Ma-
donna Pia, Ulysses’ western voyage, the march of Roman
history — appear and absorb for themselves all interest: or
else it is a philosophical speculation, or a theory of morality, or
a case of conscience,—not indeed alien from the main subject,
yet independent of the allegory, and not translatable into any
new meaning— standing on their own ground, worked out each
according to its own law; but they do not disturb the main
course of the poet’s thought, who grasps and paints each de-
tail of human life in its own peculiarity, while he sees in each
a significance and interest beyond itself. He does not stop in
each case to tell us so, but he makes it felt. The tale ends,

the individual disappears, and the great allegory resumes its
F 3

70 DANTE.

course. It is like one of those great musical compositions
which alone seem capable of adequately expressing, in a limited
time, a course of unfolding and change, in an idea, a career,
a life, a society —where one great thought predominates,
recurs, gives colour and meaning, and forms the unity of
the whole, yet passes through many shades and transitions;
is at one time definite, at another suggestive and mysterious;
incorporates and gives free place and play to airs and me-
lodies even of an alien cast; strikes off abruptly from its
expected road, but without ever losing itself, without breaking
its true continuity, or failing of its completeness.

This then seems to us the end and purpose of the Com-
media;—to produce on the mind a sense of the judgments of
God, analogous to that produced by Scripture itself. They
are presented to us in the Bible in shapes which address
themselves primarily to the heart and conscience, and seek
not carefully to explain themselves. They are likened to the
“creat deep,” to the “ strong mountains,”— vast and awful,
but abrupt and incomplete, as the huge, broken, rugged piles
and chains of mountains. And we see them through cloud ~
and mist, in shapes only approximating to the true ones.
Still they impress us deeply and truly, often the more deeply
because unconsciously. A character, an event, a word, isolated
and unexplained, stamps its meaning ineffaceably, though ever
a matter of question and wonder; it may be dark to the in-
tellect, yet the conscience understands it, often but too well.
In such suggestive ways is the Divine government for the
most part put before us in the Bible—ways which do not
satisfy the understanding, but which fill us with a sense of
reality. And it seems to have been by meditating on them,
which he certainly did, much and thoughtfully—and on the
infinite variety of similar ways in which the strongest im-
pressions are conveyed to us in ordinary life, by means short
of clear and distinct explanation—by looks, by images, by
sounds, by motions, by remote allusion and broken words,
that Dante was led to choose so new and remarkable a mode
of conveying to his countrymen his thoughts and feelings
and presentiments about the mystery of God’s counsel. ‘The

DANTE. 71

Bible teaches us by means of real history, traced so far as is
necessary along its real course. The poet expresses his view
of the world also in real history, but carried on into figure.
The poetry with which the Christian Church had been in-
stinct from the beginning, converges and is gathered up in
the Commedia. The faith had early shown its poetical
aspect. It is superfluous to dwell on this, for it is the charge
against ancient teaching that it was too large and imaginative.
It soon began to try rude essays in sculpture and mosaic ;
expressed its feeling of nature in verse and prose, rudely also,
but often with originality and force; and opened a new vein
of poetry in the thoughts, hopes, and aspirations of rege-
nerate man. Modern poetry must go back, for many of its
deepest and most powerful sources, to the writings of the
Fathers, and their followers of the School. The Church
further had a poetry of its own, besides the poetry of lite-
rature ; it had the poetry of devotion—the Psalter chanted
daily, in a new language and a new meaning; and that
wonderful body of hymns, to which age after age had contri-
buted its offering, from the Ambrosian hymns, to the “ Venz,
Sancte Spiritus” of a king of France, the “ Pange lingua” of
‘Thomas Aquinas, the “ Dies ire,” and * Stabat Mater,” of
the two Franciscan brethren. The elements and fragments
of poetry were everywhere in the Church,—in her ideas of
life, in her rules and institutions for passing through it, in
her preparation for death, in her offices, ceremonial, celebra-
tions, usages, her consecration of domestic, literary, com-
mercial, civic, military, political life, the meanings and ends
she had given them, the religious seriousness with which the
forms of each were dignified—in her doctrine, and her dog-
matic system,—her dependence on the unseen world—her
Bible. And from each and all of these, and from that public
feeling, which, if it expressed itself but abruptly and inco-
herently, was quite alive to the poetry which surrounded it,
the poet received due impressions of greatness and beauty,
of joy and dread; then the poetry of Christian religion
and Christian temper, hitherto dispersed, or manifested in act

only, found its full and distinct utterance, not unworthy to
v4

72 DANTE.

rank in grandeur, in music, in sustained strength, with the
last noble voices from expiring Heathenism.

But a long interval had passed since then. The Commedia
first disclosed to Christian and modern Europe that it was to
have a literature of its own, great and admirable, though in
its own language and embodying its own ideas. ‘It wasas if,
at some of the ancient games, a stranger had appeared upon
the plain, and thrown his quoit among the marks of former
casts, which tradition had ascribed to the demi-gods.”* We
are so accustomed to the excellent and varied literature of
modern times, so original, so perfect in form and rich in thought,
so expressive of all our sentiments, meeting so completely our
wants, fulfilling our ideas, that we can scarcely imagine the
time when this condition was new—when society was beholden
toa foreign language for the exponents of its highest thoughts
and feelings. But so it was when Dante wrote. The great
poets, historians, philosophers of his day; the last great works
of intellect, belonged to old Rome, and the Latin language.
So wonderful and prolonged was the fascination of Rome.
Men still lived under its influence; believed that the Latin
language was the perfect and permanent instrument of thought
in its highest forms, the only expression of refinement and
civilisation ;——and had not conceived the hope that their own
dialects could ever rise to such heights of dignity and power.
Latin, which had enchased and preserved such precious remains
of ancient wisdom, was now shackling the living mind in its
efforts. Men imagined that they were still using it naturally
on all high themes and solemn business; but though they used
it with facility, it was no longer natural; it had lost the elas-
ticity of life, and had become in their hands a stiffened and
distorted, though still powerful, instrument. The very use of
the word “ latino,” in the writers of this period, to express
what is clear and philosophical in languagef, while it shows
their deep reverence for it, shows how Latin civilisation was
no longer their own, how it had insensibly become an external

* Hailam’s Middle Ages, c. ix. vol. iii. p. 563.

t Parad. 3.12.17. Convit. p. 108. “ A piii Latinamente vedere la sentenza
letterale.”

DANTE. 28

and foreign element. But they found it very hard to resign
their claim to a share in its glories; with nothing of their own
to match against it, they still delighted to speak of it as “our
language,” or its writers as “ our poets,” “ our historians,” *
The spell was indeed beginning to break. Guido Cavalcanti,
Dante’s strange, stern, speculative friend, who is one of the
fathers of the Italian language, is characterised in the Com-
media} by his scornful dislike of Latin, even in the mouth of
Virgil. Yet Dante himself, the great assertor, by argument
and example, of the powers of the Vulgar tongue, once dared
not to think that it could be other to the Latin, than as a
subject to his sovereign. He was bolder when he wrote ‘De
Vulgari Eloquio :” but in the earlier Convito, while pleading
earnestly for the beauty of the Italian, he yields with reve-
rence the first place to the Latin—-for nobleness, because the
Latin is permanent, and the Vulgar subject to fluctuation and
corruption; for power, because the Latin can express concep-
tions to which the Vulgar is unequal; for beauty, because the
structure of the Latin is a masterly arrangement of scientific
art, and the beauty of the Vulgar depends on mere use.t The
very title of his poem, the Commedia, contains in it a homage
to the lofty claims of the Latin. It is called a Comedy, and
not Tragedy, he says, after a marvellous account of the essence
and etymology of the two, first, because it begins sadly, and
ends joyfully; and next, because of its language, that humble
speech of ordinary life, “in which even women converse.” §

* Vid. the “De Monarchia.”

¢ Inf 10., and compare the Vit. N. p. 334. ed Fraticelli.

ft Convito, i. 5.

§ Ep. ad Kan Grand. § 9.,—a curious specimen of the learning of the time :
“Sciendum est, quod Comedia dicitur a xwun, villa, et w5n, quod est cantus
unde Comeedia quasi villanus cantus. Et est Comeedia genus quoddam PAs
narrationis, ab omnibus aliis differens. Differt ergo a Tragcedia in materia per
hoc, quod Tragcedia in principio est admirabilis et quieta, in fine foetida et horri-
bilis ; et dicitur propter hoc a rpayos, i.e. hircus, et wdn, quasi cantus hircinus
i.e. foetidus ad modum hirci, ut patet per Senecam in suis tragcediis, Coinondin
vero inchoat asperitatem alicujus rei, sed ejus materia prospere terminatur, ut
patet per Terentium in suis Comeediis. . . . . Similiter differunt in silos? lo-
quendi; elate et sublime Tragoedia, Comeedia vero remisse et humiliter sicut
vult Horat. in Poét. . . . Et per hoc patet, quod Comeedia dicitur preesens opus,

74 DANTE.

He honoured the Latin, but his love was for the Italian.
He was its champion, and indignant defender against the
depreciation of ignorance and fashion. Confident of its power
and jealous of its beauty, he pours forth his fierce scorn on the
blind stupidity, the affectation, the vain-glory, the envy, and
above all, the cowardice of Italians who held lightly their
mother tongue. ‘ Many,” he says, after enumerating the
other offenders, “from this pusillanimity and cowardice dis-
parage their own language, and exalt that of others; and of
this sort are those hateful dastards of Italy — abbominevolt
cattivt d@ Italia — who think vilely of that precious language ;
which, if it is vile in anything, is vile only so far as it sounds
in the prostituted mouth of these adulterers.”* He noted
and compared its various dialects; he asserted its capabilities
not only in verse, but in expressive, flexible, and majestic
prose. And to the deliberate admiration of the critic and the
man, were added the homely but dear associations, which no
language can share with that of early days. Italian had been
the language of his parents;— ‘‘ Questo mio Volgare fu il
congiugnitore delli miet generanti, che con esso parlavano ;” —
and further, it was this modern language, ‘‘ questo mio Volgare,”
which opened to him the way of knowledge, which had intro-
duced him to Latin, and the sciences which it contained. It
was his benefactor and guide ;— he personifies it — and his
boyish friendship had grown stronger and more intimate by
mutual good offices. ‘* There has also been between us the

Nam si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et foetida est, quia In-
fernus: in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata, quia Paradisus. Si ad modum
loquendi, remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio Vulgaris, in qua et mulier-
culz communicant. Et sic patet quia Comeedia dicitur.” Cf. de Vulg. Eloq. 2. 4.
Parad. 30. He calls the Atneid, “1 alta Tragedia,” Inf. 20,113. Compare also
Boceaccio’s explanation of his mother’s dream of the peacock. Dante, he says, is
like the Peacock, among other reasons, “ because the peacock has coarse feet,
and a quiet gait ;” and “ the vulgar language, on which the Commedia supports
itself, is coarse in comparison with the high and masterly literary style which
every other poet uses, though it be more beautiful than others, being in con-
formity with modern minds. The quiet gait signifies the humility of the style,
which is necessarily required in ‘ Commedia,’ as those know who understand
what is meant by ‘ Commedia.’ ”
* Convito, i. 11.

DANTE. aS

goodwill of intercourse ; for from the beginning of my life I
have had with it kindness and conversation, and have used
it, deliberating, interpreting, and questioning; so that, if
friendship grows with use, it is evident how it must have
grown in me.” *

From this language he exacted a hard trial; —a work
which should rank with the ancient works. None such had
appeared; none had even advanced such a pretension. Not
that it was a time dead to literature or literary ambition.
Poets and historians had written, and were writing in Italian.
The same year of jubilee which fixed itself so deeply in Dante’s
mind, and became the epoch of his vision—the same scene of
Roman greatness in its decay, which afterwards suggested to
Gibbon the “ Decline and Fall,” prompted, in the father of
Italian history, the desire to follow in the steps of Sallust and
Livy, and prepare the way for Machiavelli and Guicciardini,
Davila and Fra Paolo.}+ Poetry had been cultivated in the
Roman languages of the West —in Aquitaine and Provence,
especially — for more than two centuries; and lately, with
spirit and success, in Italian. Names had become popular,

* Convito, i. 13.

¢ G. Villani was at Rome in the year of jubilee, 1300, and describes the great
concourse and order of the pilgrims, whom he reckons at 200,000, in the course
of the year. “ And I,” he proceeds, “ finding myself in that blessed pilgrimage
in the holy city of Rome, seeing the great and ancient things of the same, and
reading the histories of the great deeds of the Romans, written by Virgil, and
by Sallust, and Lucan, and Titus Livius, and Valerius, and Paulus Orosius, and
other masters of histories, who wrote as well of the smaller matters as of the
greater, concerning the exploits and deeds of the Romans; and further, of the
strange things of the whole world, for memory and example’s sake to those who
should come after—TI too, took their style and fashion, albeit that, as their
scholar, I be not worthy to execute such a work. But, considering that our city
of Florence, the daughter and creation of Rome, was in its rising, and on the
eve of achieving great things, as Rome was in its decline, it seemed to me con-
venient to bring into this volume and new chronicle all the deeds and beginnings
of the city of Florence, so far as I have been able to gather and recover them ;
and for the future, to follow at large the doings of the Florentines, and the other
notable things of the world briefly, as long as it may be God’s pleasure; under
which hope, rather by His grace than by my poor science, I entered on this
enterprise : and so, in the year 1300, being returned from Rome, I began to
- compile this book, in reverence towards God and S. John, and commendation
of our city of Florence.” —G,. Vill. viii. 36.

76 DANTE.

reputations had risen and waned, verses circulated and were
criticised, and even descended from the high and refined circles
to the workshop. A story is told of Dante’s indignation, when
he heard the canzoni which had charmed the Florentine ladies
mangled by the rude enthusiasm of a blacksmith at his forge.*
Literature was a growing fashion; but it was humble in its
aspirations and efforts. Men wrote like children, surprised
and pleased with their success; yet allowing themselves in
mere amusement, because conscious of weakness which they
could not cure. .

Dante, by the “ Divina Commedia,” was the restorer of
seriousness in literature. He was so, by the magnitude and
pretensions of his work, and by the earnestness of its spirit.
He first broke through the prescription which had confined
great works to the Latin, and the faithless prejudices which,
in the language of society, could see powers fitter for no
higher task than that of expressing, in curiously diversified
forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in im-
portance; the Commedia checked it. The Provencal and
Italian poetry was, with the exception of some pieces of poli-
tical satire, almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic
and affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the merit
of being natural; in purpose it was trifling; in the spirit which
it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought
a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
at a high price, by intellectual distortion, and moral insensi-
bility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick
II., for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief.
However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth
century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least
in Italy, without seeing that the idea of infidelity —not heresy,
but infidelity — was quite a familiar one; and that side by
side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was
working among those who influenced fashion and opinion,
among the great men, and the men to whom learning was

* Sacchetti, Nov. 114.

DANTE. 77

a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost
monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in
Frederick’s refined and enlightened court. The genius of the
great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin Schools, but
not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the
language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian
Commedia had not seized on all minds. It would have been
an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European literature, if
the siren tales of the Decameron had been the first to occupy ~
the ear with the charms of a new language.

Dante has had hard measure, and from some who are most
beholden to him. No one in his day served the Church more
highly, than he whose faith and genius secured on her side
the first great burst of imagination and feeling, the first
perfect accents of modern speech. The first fruits of the
new literature were consecrated, and offered up. There was
no necessity, or even probability in Italy in the 14th century
that it should be so, as there might perhaps have been earlier.
It was the poet’s free act—free in one, for whom nature and
heathen learning had strong temptations—that religion was
the lesson and influence of the great popular work of the time.
That which he held up before men’s awakened and captivated
minds, was the verity of God’s moral government. To rouse
them to a sense of the mystery of their state; to startle their
common-place notions of sin into an imagination of its variety,
its magnitude, and its infinite shapes and degrees; to open
their eyes to the beauty of the Christian temper, both as
suffering and as consummated; to teach them at once the
faithfulness and awful freeness of God’s grace; to help the
dull and lagging soul to conceive the possibility, in its own
case, of rising step by step in joy without an end,—of a
felicity not unimaginable by man, though of another order
from the highest perfection of earth;—this is the poet’s
end. Nor was it only vague religious feelings which he
wished to excite. He brought within the circle of common
thought, and translated into the language of the multitude,
what the Schools had done to throw light on the deep
questions of human existence, which all are fain to muse

78 DANTE.

upon, though none can solve. He who had opened so much
of men’s hearts to themselves, opened to them also that secret
sympathy which exists between them and the great mysteries
of the Christian doctrine.* He did the work, in his day, of
a great preacher. Yet he has been both claimed and con-
demned, as a disturber of the Church’s faith.

He certainly did not spare the Church’s rulers. He
thought that they were betraying the most sacred of all
trusts; and if history is at all to be relied on, he had some
grounds for thinking so. But it is ‘confusing the feelings of
the middle ages with our own, to convert every fierce attack
on the Popes into an anticipation of Luther. Strong language
of this sort was far too common-place to be so significant.
No age is blind to practical abuses, or silent on them; and
when the middle ages complained, they did so with a full-
voiced and clamorous rhetoric, which greedily seized on every
topic of vilification within its reach, It was far less singular,
and far less bold, to criticise ecclesiastical authorities, than is
often supposed; but it by no means implied unsettled faith,
or a revolutionary design. In Dante’s case, if words have
any meaning —not words of deliberate qualification, but his
unpremeditated and incidental expressions— his faith in the
Divine mission and spiritual powers of the Popes was as
strong as his abhorrence of their degeneracy, and desire to see
it corrected by a power which they would respect —that of
the temporal sword. It would be to mistake altogether his
character, to imagine of him, either as a fault or as an ex-
cellence, that he was a doubter. It might as well be sup-
posed of Aquinas.

No one ever acknowledged with greater seriousness, as a
fact in his position in the world, the agreement in faith among
those with whom he was born. No one ever inclined with
more simplicity and reverence before that long communion
and consent in feeling and purpose, the “ publicus sensus”
of the Christian Church. He did feel difficulties; but the
excitement of lingering on them was not among his enjoy-

* Vide Ozanam,

DANTE. 79

ments. That was the lot of the heathen; Virgil, made wise
by death, counsels him not to desire it : —

«¢¢ Matto é chi spera, che nostra ragione

Possa trascorrer la ‘nfinita via
Che tiene una sustanzia in tre Persone.

State contenti, umana gente, al gua ;
Che se potuto aveste veder tutto,
Mestier non era partorir Maria:

E disiar vedeste senza frutto
Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
Ch’ eternamente é dato lor per lutto;

T dico d’ Aristotile e di Plato,
E di molti altri: ’—e qui chin6 la fronte,
E pit non disse, e rimase turbato.”—Purg. c. 3. *

The Christian poet felt that it was greater to believe and to
act. In the darkness of the world, one bright light appeared,
and he followed it. Providence had assigned him his portion
of truth, his portion of daily bread; if to us it appears blended
with human elements, it is perfectly clear that he was in no
position to sift them. ‘To choose was no trial of his. To ex-
amine and seek, where it was impossible to find, would have
been folly. The authority from which he started, had not yet
been seriously questioned ; there were no palpable signs of
doubtfulness on the system which was to him the representa-
tive of God’s will; and he sought for none. It came to him
claiming his allegiance by custom, by universality, by its com-
pleteness as a whole, and satisfying his intellect and his
sympathies in detail. And he gave his allegiance — reason-

* *Tnsensate he, who thinks with mortal ken
To pierce Infinitude, which doth enfold
Three Persons in one Substance. Seek not then,
O mortal race, for reasons, — but believe,
And be contented ; for had all been seen,
No need there was for Mary to conceive. ,
Men have ye known, who thus desired in vain ;
And whose desires, that might at rest have been,
Now constitute a source of endless pain ;
Plato, the Stagirite ; and many more,
I here allude to ;’—then his head he bent,
Was silent, and a troubled aspect wore.” — WRIGHT.

80 DANTE.

ably, because there was nothing to hope for in doubting, —
wisely, because he gave it loyally and from his heart.

And he had his reward —the reward of him who throws
himself with frankness and earnestness into a system; who is
not afraid or suspicious of it; who is not unfaithful to it. He
gained not merely power— he gained that freedom and large-
ness of mind, which the suspicious or the unfaithful miss. His
loyalty to the Church was no cramping or blinding service ;
it left to its full play that fresh and original mind, left it to
range at will in all history and all “nature for the traces of
Eternal wisdom, left it to please itself with all beauty, and
pay its homage to all excellence. For upon all wisdom,
beauty, and excellence, the Church had taught him to see, in
various and duly distinguished degrees, the seal of the one
Creator. She imparts to the poem, to its form and progressive
development, her own solemnity, her awe, her calm, her se-
renity and joy; it follows her sacred seasons and hours; repeats
her appointed words of benediction and praise; moulds itself
on her belief, her expectations, and forecastings.* Her intima-
tions, more or less distinct, dogma or tradition or vague hint,
cuide the poet’s imagination through the land where all eyes
are open. ‘The journey begins under the Easter moon of the
year of jubilee, on the evening of Good Friday; the days of
her mourning he spends in the regions of woe, where none
dares to pronounce the name of the Redeemer, and he issues
forth to “behold again the stars,” to learn how to die to sin
and rise to righteousness, very early in the morning, as it
begins to dawn, on the day of the Resurrection. The whole
arrangement of the “ Purgatorio” is drawn from Church
usages. It is a picture of men suffering in calm and holy
hope the sharp discipline of repentance, amid the prayers,
the melodies, the consoling images and thoughts, the orderly
ritual, the hours of devotion, the sacraments of the Church
militant. When he ascends in his hardiest flight, and imagines
the joys of the perfect and the vision of God, his abundant
fancy confines itself strictly to the limits sanctioned by her
famous teachers,— ventures into no new sphere, hazards no

* See an article in the Brit. Critic, No. 65. p. 120.

DANTE. Si

anticipations in which they have not preceded it, and is con-
tent with adding to the poetry which it elicits from their
ideas, a beauty which it is able to conceive apart altogether
from bodily form—the beauty, infinite in its variety, of the
expression of the human eye and smile, —the beauty of light,
of sound, of motion. And when his song mounts to its las’
strain of triumph, and the poet’s thought, imagination, and
feeling of beauty, tasked to the utmost, nor failing under the
weight of glory which they have to express, breathe themselves
forth in words, higher than which no poetry has ever risen,
and represent in images transcending sense, and baffling it,
yet missing not one of those deep and transporting sympathies
which they were to touch, the sight, eye to eye, of the Creator
by the creature, —he beholds the gathering together, in the
presence of God, of “all that from our earth has to the skies
returned,” and of the countless orders of their thrones mirrored
in His light —
“ Mira
Quanto é 1 convento delle bianche stole,” —

under a figure already taken into the ceremonial of the
Church,— the mystic Rose, whose expanding leaves image
forth the joy of the heavenly Jerusalem. *

* See the form of benediction of the “Rosa d’ oro.” He alludes to it in the
Convito, iv. 29.

“O isplendor di Dio, per cu’ io vidi
L’ alto trionfo del regno verace,
Dammi virti a dir com’ io lo vidi.
Lume é lassu, che visibile face
Lo creatore a quella creatura,
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace :
E si distende in circular figura
In tanto, che la sua circonferenza

Sarebbe al Sol troppo larga cintura.
* * * * *

E come clivo in acqua di suo imo

_ $i specchia quasi per vedersi adorno,
Quanto é nel verde e ne’ fioretti opimo ;

Si soprastando al lume intorno intorno

G

/

. SF DANTE.

But this universal reference to the religious ideas of the
Church is so natural, so unaffected, that it leaves him at full
liberty in other orders of thought. He can afford not to be
conventional — he can afford to be comprehensive and genuine.
It has been remarked how, in a poem where there would
seem to be a fitting place for them, the ecclesiastical legends
of the middle ages are almost entirely absent. The sainted
spirits of the Paradiso are not exclusively or chiefly the Saints
of popular devotion. After the Saints of the Bible, the holy
women, the three great Apostles, the Virgin mother, they are
either names personally dear to the poet himself, friends whom
he had loved, and teachers to whom he owed wisdom — or
great men of masculine energy in thought or action, in their
various lines ‘compensations and antagonists of the world’s
evils ”— Justinian and Constantine, and Charlemagne,—the
founders of the Orders, Augustine, Benedict, and Bernard,
Francis and Dominic — the great doctors of the Schools,
Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, whom the Church had
not yet canonized. And with them are joined —and that
with a full consciousness of the line which theology draws
between the dispensations of nature and grace — some rare
type of virtue among the heathen. Cato is admitted to the

Vidi specchiarsi in pit di mille soglie,
Quanto di noi lasst: fatto ha ritorno.
E se I’ infimo. grado in se raccoglie
Si grande lume, quant’ é la larghezza
Di questa rosa nell’ estreme foglie ?
* * * * *
Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol, che sempre verna,
Qual’ é colui, che tace e dicer vuole,
Mi trasse Beatrice, e disse ; mira
Quanto é ’1 convento delle bianche stole!
Vedi nostra Citta quanto ella gira!
Vedi li nostri seanni si ripieni,
Che poca gente omai ci si disira.
* * * * *
In forma dunque di candida rosa
Mi si mostrava la milizia santa,
Che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa.” — Parad. 30, 31.

a

DANTE, 83

outskirts of Purgatory; Trajan, and the righteous king of
Virgil’s poem, to the heaven of the just.*

_ Without confusion or disturbance to the religious character
of his train of thought, he is able freely to subordinate to it
the lessons and the great recollections of the Gentile times.
He contemplates them with the veil drawn off from them; as
now known to form but one whole with the history of the
Bible and the Church, in the design of Providence. He
presents them in their own colours, as drawn by their own
writers —he only adds what Christianity seems to show to be
their event. Under the conviction, that the light of the
Heathen was a real guide from above, calling for vengeance
in proportion to unfaithfulness, or outrage done to it, —
** He that nurtureth the heathen, it is He that teacheth man
knowledge—shall not He punish?” —the great criminals
of profane history are mingled with sinners against God’s
revealed will — and that, with equal dramatic power, with
equal feeling of the greatness of their loss. The story of
the voyage of Ulysses is told with as much vivid power and
pathetic interest as the tales of the day.t{ He honours un-
feignedly the old heathen’s brave disdain of ease; that spirit,
even to old age, eager, fresh, adventurous, and inquisitive.
His faith allowed him to admire all that was beautiful and
excellent among the heathen, without forgetting that it
fell short of what the new gift of the Gospel can alone impart.
He saw in it proof that God had never left His will and
law without their witness among men. Virtue was virtue
_ still, though imperfect, and unconsecrated — generosity, large-
ness of soul, truth, condescension, justice, were never unworthy

e “ Chi crederebbe giti nel mondo errante,
Che Riféo Trojano! in questo tondo
Fosse la quinta delle luci sante ?
Ora conosee assai di quel, che ’l mondo
Veder non puo della divina grazia ;
Benché sua vista non discerna il fondo.” — Parad. ¢. 20,

¢ Inf. c. 26.

: “ Rhipeus justissimus unus
Qui fuit in Teucris. et servantissimus sequi.” — An. ii.

94 : - DANTE,

of the reverence of Christians. Hence he uses without fear
or scruple the classic element. The examples which recal
to the mind of the penitents, by sounds and sights, in the
different terraces of Purgatory, their sin and the grace they
have to attain to, come indiscriminately from poetry and
Scripture. The sculptured pavement, to which the proud are
obliged ever to bow down their eyes, shows at once the
humility of S. Mary and of the Psalmist, and the condescension
of Trajan; and elsewhere the pride of Nimrod and Sennacherib,
of Niobe, and Cyrus. The envious hear the passing voices of
courtesy from saints and heroes, and the bursting cry, like
crashing thunder, of repentant jealousy from Cain and
Aglaurus; the avaricious, to keep up the memory of their
fault, celebrate by day the poverty of Fabricius and the li-
berality of S. Nicolas, and execrate by night the greediness
of Pygmalion and Midas, of Achan, Heliodorus and Crassus.

Dante’s all-surveying, all-embracing mind, was worthy
to open the grand procession of modern poets. He had
chosen his subject in a region remote from popular thought
—too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly
the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with
even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold
and so undoubting — her spirit of certainty, and her deep
contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in litera-
ture, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism
and all appeal, the classical writers. Yet with his mind
full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and
theology, and his poetical taste always owning allegiance to
Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, —keen and subtle as a Schoolman
—as much an idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the
men of the renatssance,— his eye is as open to the delicacies
of character, to the variety of external nature, to the wonders
of the physical world — his interest in them as diversified and
fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of
them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened or con-
fused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
elastic, and as completely under his command, his choice of
poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been

DANTE. 83

born in days which claim as their own such freedom, and such
keen discriminative sense of what is real, in feeling and image ;
—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem
of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the
Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet
come when the classics could be really understood and appre-
ciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring
them with a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he
had caught their spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His
poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the
poet’s claim to borrow from all science, and from every. phase
of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and
he showed that those images and associations did not lose their
poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.

But let no reader of fastidious taste disturb his temper by
the study of Dante. Dante certainly opened that path of
freedom and poetic conquest, in which the greatest efforts of
modern poetry have followed him—opened it with a mag-
nificence and power which have never been surpassed. But
the greatest are but pioneers; they must be content to leave
to a posterity, which knows more, if it cannot do as much, a
keen and even growing sense of their defects. The Commedia
is open to all the attacks that can be made on grotesqueness
and extravagance. ‘This is partly owing, doubtless, to the
time, in itself quaint, quainter to us, by being remote and ill-
understood; but even then, weaker and less daring writers
than Dante do not equally offend or astonish us. So that an
image or an expression will render forcibly a thought, there
is no strangeness which checks him. Barbarous words are
introduced, to express the cries of the demons or the con-
fusion of Babel—even to represent the incomprehensible
song of the blessed * ; inarticulate syllables, to convey the
impression of some natural sound—the cry of sorrowful
surprise —

* Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in hui ;”—Purg. 16.

*: Parad. 7. 1—3,
G3

86 ~ DANTE,

or the noise of the cracking ice —

“ Se Tabernicch
Vi fosse su caduto, o Pietra-pana
Non avria pur del orlo fatto ericch ;”—Inf. 32.

even separate letters—to express an image, to spell a name,
or as used in some popular proverb.* He employs without
scruple, and often with marvellous force of description, any
recollection that occurs to him, however homely, of everyday
life; —the old tailor threading his needle with trouble (Jnf-
15.);—the cook’s assistant watching over the boiling broth
(Inf. 21.); —the hurried or impatient horse-groom using his
curry-comb (Inf. 29.);—or the common sights of the street
or the chamber — the wet wood sputtering on the hearth—

“Come d’ un stizzo verde che arso sia
Dall’ un de’ capi, che dall’ altro geme
E cigola per vento che va via ;” —Jnf. 13.7

the paper changing colour when about to catch fire : —

-

** Come procede innanzi dall’ ardore
Per lo papiro suso un color bruno

Che non é nero ancora, e ’1 bianco muore:” —Inf. 25.}-

the steaming of the hand when bathed, in winter: —

“Fuman come man bagnata il verno :”—

* To describe the pinched face of famine ; —

“ Parean I’ occhiaje anella senza gemme.
Chi nel viso degli uomini legge OMO
Ben avria quivi conosciuto P emme (M).” — Purg. 23.
Again,
“ Quella reverenza che s’ indonna
Di tutto me, pur per B e per ICE.” —Parad. 7.

“ Né O si tosto mai, né I si scrisse,
Com’ ei s’ accese ed arse.” — Inf. 24.

+ * Like to a sapling, lighted at one end,
Which at the other hisses with the wind,
And drops of sap doth from the outlet send ;
So from the broken twig, both words and blood flow’d forth.” —.Wxienr.

t “ Like burning paper, when there glides before
The advancing flame a brown and dingy shade,
Which is not black, and yet is white no more.” —- WRIGHT-

OE a 2

DANTE. 87

or the ways and appearances of animals—ants meeting on
their path :—

“ Li veggio d’ ogni parte farsi presta
Ciascun’ ombra, e baciarsi una con una
Senza restar, contente a breve festa:
Cosi per entro loro schiera bruna
S’ ammusa 0 una con C altra formica,
Forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna ;”— Purg. 26.*

the snail drawing in its horns (Inf. 25.);—the hog shut out
of its sty, and trying to gore with its tusks (inf. 30.);—
the dogs’ misery in summer (Jnf. 17.);—the frogs jumping
on to the bank before the water-snake (Inf. 9.), —or showing
their heads above water : —

“Come al orlo dell’ acqua d’ un fosso
Stan gli ranocchi pur col muso fuori,
Si che celano i piedi, e I’ altro grosso.” —Inf. 22.¢

It must be said, that most of these images, though by no
means all, occur in the Inferno; and that the poet means to
paint sin not merely in the greatness of its ruin and misery,
but in characters which all understand, of strangeness, of vile-
ness, of despicableness, blended with diversified and monstrous
horror. Even he seems to despair of his power at times —

* Qn either hand I saw them haste their meeting, -
And kiss each one the other — pausing not, —
Contented to enjoy so short a greeting.
Thus do the ants among their dingy band,
Face one another —each their neighbour's lot
Haply to scan, and how their fortunes stand.” — Wrieur.

+ “As in a trench, frogs at the water side
Sit squatting, with their-noses raised on high,
The while their feet, and all their bulk they hide —
Thus upon either hand the sinners stood.
But Barbariccia now approaching nigh,
Quick they withdrew beneath the boiling flood.
I saw —and still my heart is thrill’d with fear —
One spirit linger; as beside a ditch,
One frog remains, the others disappear.” — Wnicut.
G4

88 DANTE.

“ S$’ io avessi le rime e aspre, e chiocce,

Come si converrebbe al tristo buco,
Sovra ’l qual pontan tutte I’ altre rocce ;

Io premerrei di mio concetto il suco
Pit pienamente; ma perch’ io non I’ abbo,
Non senza tema a dicer mi conduco:

Che non é ’mpresa da pigliare a gabbo
Descriver fondo a tutto l’ universo,
Né da lingua, che chiami mamma, o babbo.” — Inf. 32.*

°

Feeling the difference between sims, in their elements and,
as far as we see them, their baseness, he treats them variously.
His ridicule is apportioned with a purpose. He passes on
from the doom of the sins of incontinence —the storm, the
frost and hail, the crushing weights,—from the flaming
minarets of the city of Dis, of the Furies and Proserpine,
* Donna dell’ eterno pianto,” where the unbelievers lie, each
in his burning tomb—from the river of boiling blood —the
wood with the Harpies—the waste of barren sand with fiery
snow, where the violent are punished,—to the Malebolge,
the manifold circles of Falsehood. And here scorn and
ridicule in various degrees, according to the vileness of the
fraud, begin to predominate, till they culminate in that grim
comedy, with its dramatis persone and battle of devils,
Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where the
peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by the demon:
from the boiling pitch, but even there overreach and cheat
their tormentors, and make them turn their fangs on each
other. The diversified forms of falsehood seem to tempt the
poet’s imagination to cope with its changefulness and in-
ventions, as well as its audacity. The transformations of the

* “Wad Ia rhyme so rugged, rough, and hoarse

As would become the sorrowful abyss,
O’er which the rocky circles wind their course,

Then with a more appropriate form I might
Endow my vast conceptions ; wanting this,
Not without fear I bring myself to write.

For no light enterprise it is, I deem,
To represent the lowest depth of all ;
Nor should a childish tongue attempt the theme.” — Wrieut.

~ DANTE. 89

wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over language
is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in those cantos,
which describe the punishments of theft—men passing
gradually into serpents, and serpents into men : —

«Due e nessun I’ imagine perversa
Parea.” — Inf. 25.

And when the traitor, who murdered his own kinsman, was
still alive, and seemed safe from the infamy which it was the
poet’s rule to bestow only on the dead, Dante found a way
to inflict his vengeance without an anachronism :— Branca
D’Oria’s body, though on earth, is only animated by a fiend,
and his spirit has long since fled to the icy prison.*

These are strange experiments in poetry ; their strangeness
is exaggerated as detached passages; but they are strange
enough when they meet us in their place in the context, as

* “Ed egli a me: Come ’1 mio corpo stea
Nel mondo su, nulla scienzia porto.
, Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolommea,
: Che spesse volte l’ anima ci cade .
Innanzi, ch’ Atropds mossa le dea.
E perché tu piu volontier mi rade
Le’ nvetriate lagrime dal volto, -
Sappi, che tosto che I’ anima trade,
Come fee’ io, il corpo suo I’ é tolto
Da un Dimonio, che poscia il governa,
Mentre che ’1 tempo suo tutto sia volto.
Ella ruina in si fatta cisterna ;
E forse pare ancor lo corpo suso
Dell’ ombra, che di qua dietro mi verna.
Tu ’1 dei saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso :
Egli é ser Branca d’ Oria, e son pid anni
Poscia passati, ch’ ei fusi racchiuso.
Io credo, diss’ io lui, che tu m’ inganni,
Che Branca d’ Oria non mori unquanche,
E mangia, e bee, e dorme, e veste panni.
Nel fosso su, diss’ ei di Malebranche,
La dove bolle la tenace pece,
Non era giunto ancora Michel Zanche ;
Che questi lascid ’1 Diavolo in sua vece
Nel corpo suo, e d’ un suo prossimano,
Che ’] tradimento insieme con lui fece.”— Jnf, 33.

90 DANTE.

parts of a scene, where the mind is strung and overawed by
the sustained power, with which dreariness, horror, hideous
absence of every form of good, is kept before the imagination
and feelings, in the fearful picture of human sin. But they
belong to the poet’s system of direct and forcible represen-
tation. What his inward eye sees, what he feels, that he
means us to see and feel as he does; to make us see and feel
is his art. Afterwards we may reflect and meditate; but
first we must see——-must see what he saw. Evil and de-
formity are in the world, as well ds good and beauty; the
eye cannot escape them, they are about our path, in our
heart and memory. He has faced them without shrinking
. or dissembling, and extorted from them a voice of warning.
In all poetry that is written for mere delight, in all poetry
which regards but a part or an aspect of nature, they
have no place —they disturb and mar; but he had conceived
a poetry of the whole, which would be weak or false without
them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in nature
—subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque is allowed to
intrude itself—if the horrible and the foul, undisguised and
unsoftened, make us shudder and shrink, they are kept in
strong check and in due subjection by other poetical influences ;
and the same power which exhibits them in their naked
strength, renders its full grace and glory to beauty ; its full
force and delicacy to the most evanescent feeling.
Dante’s eye was free and open to external nature in
a degree new among poets; certainly in a far greater degree
than among the Latins, even including Lucretius, whom he
probably had never read. We have already spoken of his
minute notice of the appearance of living creatures; but his
eye was caught by the beautiful as well as by the grotesque.
Take the following beautiful picture of the bird looking
out for dawn : —
“Come laugello intra l’amate fronde,
Posato al nido de suoi dolci nati,
La notte, che le cose ci nasconde,
Che per veder gli aspetti desiati, _
K per trovar lo cibo, onde li pasca,
In che i gravi labor gli sono aggrati,

~ DANTE. 91

Previene ’1 tempo in su l’ aperta frasca,
E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
Fiso guardando, pur che lalba nasca.— Parad. 23. *

Nothing indeed can be more true and original than his images
of birds; they are varied and very numerous. We have the
water-birds rising in clamorous and changing flocks —

“ Come augelli surti di riviera
Quasi congratulando a lor pasture,
Fanno di sé or tonda or lunga schiera;”—Parad. 18.7

the rooks, beginning to move about at day-break—

* FE come per lo natural costume,
Le pole insieme, al cominciar del giorno
Si muovono a scaldar le fredde piume,
Poi altre vanno via senza ritorno,
Altre rivolgon sé onde son mosse
Ed altre roteando fan soggiorno ; ”— Parad. 21.t

the morning sounds of the swallow—

* “¥en as the bird that resting in the nest

Of her sweet brood, the shelt’ring boughs among,

While all things are enwrapt in night’s dark vest,—
Now eager to behold the looks she loves,

And to find food for her impatient young

(Whence labour grateful to a mother proves),
Forestals the time, high perch’d upon the spray,

And with impassion’d zeal the sun expecting,
Anxiously waiteth the first break of day.” —Wricur.

+ “And as birds rising from a stream, whence they
Their pastures view, as though their joy confessing,
Now form a round, and now a long array.” —— Wricur.

{ “And as with one accord, at break of day,
The rooks bestir themselves, by nature taught
To chase the dew-drops from their wings away ;
Some flying off, to reappear no more—
Others repairing to their nests again, —
Some whirling round — then settling as before.” —Wnricur,

92 DANTE.

“ Nell’ ora che comincia i tristi lai
La rondinella presso alla mattina
Forse a memoria de’ suoi primi guai;”— Purg. 9.*

the joy and delight of the nightingale’s song, (Purg. 17.); the
lark, silent at last, filled with its own sweetness —

“Qual lodoletta, che ’n aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e pot tace contenta
Dell ultima dolcezza che la sazia ;” — Parad. 20.4

the flight of the starlings and storks (Inf. 5. Purg. 24.); the
mournful cry and long line of the cranes (Inf. 5. Purg. 26.);
the young birds trying to escape from the nest (Purg. 25.) ;
the eagle hanging in the sky—

“Con I’ ale aperte, e a calare intesa ; ”—
the dove, standing close to its mate, or wheeling round it—

« Si come quando ’1 colombo si pone
Presso al compagno, Y uno e I’ altro pande
Girando e mormorando Y affezione ;” — Parad. 25.

or the flock of pigeons, feeding—

“ Adunati alla pastura,
Queti, senza mostrar [ usato orgoglio.” —Purg. 2.

Hawking supplies its images: — the falcon coming for its
food—

* What time the swallow pours her plaintive strain,
Saluting the approach of morning grey,
Thus haply mindful of her former pain.” — Wriaut.

+ “E’en as the lark high soaring pours its throat
A while, then rests in silence, as though still
It dwelt enamour’d of its last sweet note.” —— Wricur.

{ “As when unto his partner’s side, the dove
Approaches near,—both fondly circling round,
And cooing, show the fervour of their love ;
So these great heirs of immortality
Receive each other ; while they joyful sound
The praises of the food they share on high. —- WRIGHT,

7

ab, as

DANTE. 93

“Tl falcon che prima a pié si mira,
Indi si volge al grido, e si protende, _
Per lo disio del pasto, che 1a il tira;”— Purg. 19.*

or just unhooded, pluming itself for its flight—

«‘ Quasi falcon, ch’ esce del cappello,
Muove la testa, e con I’ ale s’ applaude,
Voglia mostrando, e facendo si bello ;” — Parad. 19. +

or returning without success, sullen and loath—

“ Come ’1 falcon ch’ é stato assai su I’ ali,
Che senza veder logoro, o uccello,
Fa dire al falconiere: Oimé tu cali!
Discende lasso onde si muove snello
Per cento ruote, e da lungi si pone
Dal suo maestro, disdegnoso e fello.— Inf. 17.}

It is curious to observe him taking Virgil’s similes, and
altering them. When Virgil describes the throng of souls,
he compares them to falling leaves, or gathering birds in
autumn—

“ Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo,
Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto,
Quam multz glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus
Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis ”—

Dante uses the same images, but without copying ;—

“Come d’ Autunno si levan le foglie,
L’ una appresso dell’ altra, infin che ’1 ramo

* “ And, as a falcon, which first scans its feet,
Then turns him to the call, and forward flies,
In eagerness to catch the tempting meat. — WRIGHT.

t “Lo, as a falcon, from the hoed released,

Uplifts his head, and joyous flaps his wings,

His beauty and his eagerness increased,” — WriGHrT.
~ “Een as a falcon, long upheld in air,

Not seeing lure or bird upon the wing,

So that the falconer utters in despair

‘ Alas, thou stoop’st !’ fatigued descends from high ;
And whirling quickly round in many a ring,
Far from his master sits —disdainfully.” — Wrieut.

94 DANTE.

Rende alla terra tutte le sue spoglie ;
Similemente il mal seme d@’ Adamo:

Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una

Per cenni, com’ augel per suo richiamo.
Cosi sen vanno su per |’ onda bruna,

Ed avanti che sien di 1a discese,

Anche di qua nuova schiera s’ aduna.” — Inf. 3. *

Again, — compared with one of Virgil’s most highly-finished
and perfect pictures, the flight of the pigeon, disturbed at
first, and then becoming swift and smooth—

* Qualis spelunca subito commota columba,
(Gi domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi,
Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis
Dat tecto ingentem, mox aere lapsa quieto
Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas—”

the Italian’s simplicity and strength may balance the “ ornata
parola” of Virgil—

* Quali colombe dal disio chiamate,
Con ? ali aperte e ferme al dolce nido
Volan per I aer dal voler portate.”— Inf. 5.+

* As leaves in autumn, borne before the wind,
Drop one by one, until the branch laid bare,
Sees all its honours to the earth consign’d :
So cast them downward at his summons all
The guilty race of Adam from that strand —
Each as a falcon answering to the call.” — Wricut.

t “As doves, by strong affection urged, repair
With firm expanded wings to their sweet nest,
Borne by the impulse of their will through air.”— Wricut.

It is impossible not to be reminded at every step, in spite of the knowledge
and taste which Mr. Cary and Mr. Wright have brought to their most difficult
task, of the truth which Dante has expressed with his ordinary positiveness.

He is saying that he does not wish his Canzoni to be explained in Latin to
those who could not read them in Italian ;—“ Che sarebbe sposta la loro sen-
tenzia cola dove elle non la potessono colla loro bellezza portare. E pero sappia
ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico (i.e. poetico) armonizzata, si.pud
della sua loquela in altra trasmutare senza rompere tutta la sua dolcezza e
armonia. E questa é la ragione per che Omero non si mutd mai di Greco in
Latino, come I’ altre scritture che avemo da loro.” — Convito, i. c. 8. p. 49.

Mr. Carlyle has given up the idea of attempting to represent Dante’s verse

DANTE. 95

Take, again, the times of the day, with what is character-
istic of them— appearances, lights, feelings—seldom dwelt on
at length, but carried at once to the mind, and stamped upon
it sometimes by a single word. The sense of morning, its In--
spiring and chatexivisl strength, softens the opening of the
Inferno; breathes its refreshing calm, in the interval of repose
after the last horrors of hell, in the first canto of the Purga-
torio ; and prepares for the entrance into the earthly Paradise
at its close. In the waning light of evening, and its chilling
sense of loneliness, he prepared himself for his dread pilgrim-
age : —

* Lo giorno se n’ andava, e l’ aer bruno
Toglieva gli animai che sono ’n terra
Dalle fatiche loro; ed io sol uno
M’ apparechiava a sostener la guerra
Si del cammino, e si della pietate.”—Inf. 2.

Indeed there is scarcely an hour of day or night, which has
not left its own recollection with him ;—of which we cannot
find some memorial inhis poem. Eveningand night have many.
Evening, with its softness and melancholy — its exhaustion
and languor, after the work, perhaps unfulfilled, of day —its
regrets and yearnings, — its sounds and doubtful lights, — the
distant bell, the closing chants of Compline, the “ Salve Re-
gina,” the “ Te lucis ante terminum,” —with its insecurity, and
its sense of protection from above, — broods over the poet’s
first resting-place on his heavenly road, — that still, solemn,
dreamy scene,—the Valley of Flowers in the mountain
side, where those who have been negligent about their
salvation, but not altogether faithless and fruitless—-the
assembled shades of great kings and of poets — wait, looking
upwards, “pale and humble,” for the hour when they may
begin in earnest their penance. (Purg. 7. and 8.). The level,
blinding evening beams (Purg. 15.); the contrast of gathering
darkness in the vallod or on the shore with the lingering lights

by English verse, and has confined himself to assisting Englishmen to read him

in his own language. His prose translation is accurate and forcible. And he
has added sensible and useful notes,

96 ; DANTE.

on the mountain (Purg. 17.); the rapid sinking of the
sun, and approach of night in the south (Purg. 27.); the
flaming sunset clouds of August; the sheet lightning of
summer (Purg.5.); have left pictures in his mind, which an
incidental touch re-awakens, and a few strong words are
sufficient to express. Other appearances he describes with
more fulness, The stars coming out one by one, baffling at

first the eye—

“ Ed ecco intorno di chiarezza pari
Nascer un lustro sopra quel che v’ era,
A guisa d’ orizzonte, che rischiari.
FE si come al salir di prima sera
Comincian per lo Ciel nuove parvenze,
Si che la cosa pare, e non par vera;” — Parad. 14.*

or else, bursting out suddenly over the heavens —

“ Quando colui che tutto il mondo allume,
Del’ emisperio nostro si discende,
E | giorno d@’ ogni parte si consuma ;
Lo ciel che sol di lui prima s’ accende,
Subitamente si rifa parvente
Per molte luci in che una risplende ;” — Parad. 20. +

or the effect of shooting stars —

“ Quale per li seren tranquilli e puri
Discorre ad ora ad or subito fuoco

* And lo, on high, and lurid as the one
Now there, encircling it, a light arose,
Like heaven when re-illumined by the sun :;
And as at the first lighting up of eve
The sky doth new appearances disclose,
That now seem real, now the sight deceive.” — Wriaar.

+ “When he, who with his universal ray
The world illumines, quits our hemisphere,
And, from each quarter, daylight wears away ;
The heaven, erst kindled by his beam alone,
Sudden its lost effulgence doth repair
By many lights illumined but by one.” —: WrieHT.

DANTE. 97

Movendo gli occhi che stavan sicuri,
E pare stella che tramuti loco,
Se non che dalla parte onde s’ accende
Nulla sen perde, ed esso dura poco ;”— Parad. 15.*

or, again, that characteristic sight of the Italian summer
night,— the fire-flies : —

* Quante il villan che al poggio si riposa,

Nel tempo che colui che ’1 mondo schiara

La faccia sua a noi tien men ascosa,

Come la mosca cede alla zenzara,
Vede lucciole git per la vallea,
Forse cola dove vendemmia ed ara.” — Inf. 26.7

Noon, too, does not want its characteristic touches —the
lightning-like glancing of the lizard’s rapid motion —

“ Come il ramarro sotto la gran fersa
Ne’ di canicular cangiando siepe
Folgore par, se la via attraversa ;” — Inf. 25. t

the motes in the sunbeam at noontide (Par. 14.); its clear,
diffused, insupportable brightness, filling all things —

“KE tutti eran gia pieni
Dell’ alto di i giron del sacro monte.” — Purg. 19.

and veiling the sun in his own light—
“To vegzio ben si come tu f annidi

Nel proprio lume.
* * * *

? “ As oft along the pure and tranquil sky
A sudden fire by night is seen to dart,
Attracting forcibly the heedless eye ;
And seems to be a star that changes place,
Save that no star is lost from out the part
It quits, and that it lasts a moment’s space.” — WriGut.

Tt “ As in that season when the sun least veils
His face that lightens all, what time the fly
Gives place to the shrill gnat, the peasant then,
Upon some cliff reclined, beneath him sees
Fire-flies innumerous spangling o’er the vale,
Vineyard or tilth, where his day-labour lies.” — Cary.
tf “ As underneath the dog-star’s scorching ray
The lizard, darting swift from fence to fence,
Appears like lightning, if he cross the way.” — Wricur.
H

98 DANTE.

Si come ’1 sol che si cela egli stessi
Per troppa luce, quando ’1 caldo ha rose,
Le temperanze de’ vapori spessi.” — Parad. 5.

But the sights and feelings of morning are what he touches
on most frequently; and he does so with the precision of one
who had watched them with often-repeated delight: the
scented freshness of the breeze that stirs before daybreak —

“i quale annunziatrice degli albori
Aura di maggio muovesi ed olezza
Tutta impregnata dall’ erba e da’ fiori ;

Tal mi senti’ un vento dar per mezza
La fronte ;”— Purg. 24. *

the chill of early morning (Purg.19.); the dawn stealing on,
and the stars, one by one, fading “‘infino alla pit bella” (Parad.
30.); the brightness of the “ trembling morning star,” —

“Par tremolando mattutina stella ;” —

the serenity of the dawn, the blue gradually gathering in
the east, spreading over the brightening sky (Parad.1.); then
succeeded by the orange tints,—and Mars setting red, through
the mist over the sea—

« Ed ecco, qual sul presso del mattino
Per li grossi vapor Marte rosseggia
Git nel ponente, sopra ’] suol marino,
Cotal m’ apparve, s’ io ancor lo veggia,
Un lume per lo mar venir si ratto
Che ’1 muover suo nessun volar pareggia;”—Purg. 2. f

“ As when, announcing the approach of day,
Impregnated with herbs and flowers of Spring,
Breathes fresh and redolent the air of May —
Such was the breeze that gently fann’d my head ; ~
And I perceived the waving of a wing
Which all around ambrosial odours shed.” — Wricur.

Tt “ When lo! like Mars, in aspect fiery red
Seen through the vapour, when the morn is nigh
Far in the west, above the briny bed,
So (might I once more see it) o’er the sea
A light approach’d with such rapidity,
Flies not the bird that might its equal be.” — Wriaur.

DANTE. 99

the distant sea-beach quivering in the early hght—

“T? alba vinceva I’ ora mattutina
Che fuggia innanzi, si che di lontano
Conobbi il tremolar della marina ;” —Purg. 1.*

the contrast of east and west at the moment of sunrise, and.
the sun appearing, clothed in mist —

To vidi gid nel cominciar del giorno
La parte oriental tutta rosata,
E P altro ciel di bel sereno adorno ;
E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata
Si che per temperanza di vapori
L’ occhio lo sostenea lungo fiato ;”— Purg. 3.7

or breaking through it, and shooting his beams over the
sky —
“ Di tutte parti saettava il giorno
Lo sol ch’ avea con le saette conte
Di mezzo ’| ciel cacciato ’1 Capricorno.”— Purg. 2. f

But light in general is his special and chosen source of
poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such sin-
gular sensibility to its varied appearances,—has shown that he
felt it in itself the cause of a distinct and peculiar pleasure,
delighting the eye apart from form, as music delights the ear
apart from words, and capable, like music, of definite cha-
racter, of endless variety, and infinite meanings. He must
have studied and dwelt upon it like music. His mind is

“ Now ’gan the vanquish’d matin hour to flee; —
And seen from far, as onward came the day,
I recognised the trembling of the sea.” — Wricurt.

Tt ** Erewhile the eastern regions have I seen
At daybreak glow with roseate colours, and
The expanse beside all beauteous and serene ;
And the sun's face so shrouded at its rise,
And temper’d by the mists which overhung,
That I could gaze on it with steadfast eyes.” — Wricur.

ft “ On every side the sun shot forth the day,
And had already with his arrows bright
From the mid-heaven chased Capricorn away.” —- Wricnr,

H 2

100 _ DANTE.

charged with its effects and combinations, and they are
rendered with a force, a brevity, a precision, a heedlessness
and unconsciousness of ornament, an indifference to circum-
stance and detail; they flash out with a spontaneous readiness,
a suitableness and felicity, which show the familiarity and
grasp given only by daily observation, daily thought, daily
pleasure. Light everywhere—in the sky and earth and
sea—§in the star, the flame, the lamp, the gem—broken in
the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted pure through
the glass, or coloured through the edge of the fractured
emerald—dimmed in the mist, the halo, the deep water—
streaming through the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, qui-
vering in the lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby,
veiled behind the pure alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself
in the pearl,—light contrasted with shadow—shading off
and copying itself in the double rainbow, like voice and echo
—light seen within light, as voice discerned within voice,
“quando una é ferma, el altra va e riede” —the brighter
“ nestling” itself in the fainter—the purer set off on the less
clear, “ come perla in bianca fronte” —light in the human
eye, and face, displaying, figuring, and confounded with its
expressions — light blended with joy in the eye—

“luce
Come letizia in pupilla viva ;”

and in the smile —
‘‘ Vincendo me col lume d’ un sorriso ;”
joy lending its expression to light —

“ Quivi la donna mia vidi si lieta
Che pit lucente se ne fé il pianeta,
E se la stella st cambio, e rise,
Qual mi fee’ io; ”— Parad. 5.

light from every source, and in all its shapes, illuminates,
_irradiates, gives its glory to the Commedia. The remem-

brance of our “ serene life” beneath the “ fair stars” keeps up
continually the gloom of the Inferno. Light, such as we see
it and recognise it—the light of morning and evening,

\y _ ut
=~

DANTE, 101

growing and fading —takes off from the unearthliness of the
Purgatorio; peopled, as it is, by the undying, who, though suf-
fering for sin, can sin no more, it is thus made like our familiar
world,—made to touch our sympathies® as an image of our
own purification in the flesh. And when he rises beyond
the regions of earthly day, light, simple, unalloyed, un-
shadowed, eternal, lifts the creations of his thought above all
affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the ex-
pression of the gradations of bliss; never reappears the same,
never refuses the new shapes of his invention, never becomes
confused or dim—though it is seldom thrown into distinct
figure, and still more seldom coloured. Only once, that we
remember, is the thought of colour forced on us ; — when the
bright joy of heaven suffers change and eclipse, and deepens
into red at the sacrilege of men.*

Yet his eye is everywhere, not confined to the beauty or
character of the sky and its lights. His range of observation
and largeness of interest prevent that line of imagery, which |
is his peculiar instrument and predilection, from becoming,
in spite of its brightness and variety, dreamy and monotonous ;
prevent it from arming’ against itself sympathies which it
does not touch. He has watched with equal attention, and
draws with not less power, the occurrences and sights of
Italian country life; the summer whirlwind sweeping over
the plain — “ dinanzi polveroso va superbo” (Inf. 9.); the
rain-storm of the Apennines (Purg. 5.); the peasant’s alter-
nations of feeling in spring : —

“In quella parte del giovinetto anno

Che ’! sole i erin sotto ? Aquario tempra,

E gia le notti al mezzo di sen vanno;
Quando la brina in su la terra assempra

L’ imagine di sua sorella bianca,

Ma poco dura alla sua penna tempra,
Lo villanello a cui la roba manca

Si leva e guarda, e vede la campagna

Biancheggiar tutta; ond ’ei si batte P anca;
Ritorna a casa, e qua e 1a si lagna

* Parad, 27.
H 3

102

DANTE.

Come ’| tapin che non sa che si faccia :
Poi riede e la speranza ringavagna

Veggendo ’1 mondo aver cangiata faccia

In poco d’ ora, e prende il suo vineastro
I, fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia: ”—Jnf. 24.*

the manner in which sheep come out from the fold ;: —

“Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso

A una a due a tre, eT altre stanno,

Timidette atterrando [ occhio el muso;
Fi cid che fa la prima, e 0 altre fanno,

Addossandosi a lei s ella 8 arresta

Semplici e quete, e lo ’mperché non sanno :
Si vid’ io muover a venir la testa

Di quella mandria fortunata allotta,

Pudica in faccia e nell’ andare onesta.
Come color dinanzi vider rotta

La luce ares Ce
Ristaro, e trasser se indietro alquanto,

E tutti gli altri che veniano appresso,

Non sappiendo il perché, fero altrettanto.” — Purg. 3.

So with the beautiful picture of the goats on the mountain,
chewing the cud in the noontide heat and stillness, and the
goatherd, resting on his staff and watching them —a picture
which no traveller among the mountains of Italy or Greece
can have missed, or have forgotten : —

*

“In the new year, when Sol his tresses gay
Dips in Aquarius, and the tardy night
Divides her empire with the lengthening day, —
When o’er the earth the hoar-frost pure and bright
Assumes the image of her sister white,
Then quickly melts before the genial light—
The rustic, now exhausted his supply,
Rises betimes—looks out— and sees the land
All white around, whereat he strikes his thigh —
Turns back —and grieving — wanders here and there,
Like one disconsolate and at a stand ;
Then issues forth, forgetting his despair,
For lo! the face of nature he beholds
Changed on a sudden —takes his crook again,
And drives his flock to pasture from the folds.” — Waricur.

DANTE. 103

“ Quali si fanno ruminando manse
Le capre, state rapide e proterve
Sopra le cime avanti che sien pranse,

Tacite al ombra mentre che ’l sol ferve,
Guardate dal pastor che ’n su la verga |
Poggiato s’ é, e lor poggiato serve.” —Purg. 27. *

So again, with his recollections of cities: — the crowd, running
together to hear news (Purg. 2,), or pressing after the winner
of the game (Purg. 6.); the blind men at the church doors, or
following their guide through the throng (Purg. 13. 16.); the
friars walking along in silence, one behind another, —

“ Taciti, soli, e senza compagnia
N’ andavam, 7 un dinanzi, eL altro dopo
Come i frati minor vanno per via.” — Inf. 23.

He turns to account in his poem, the pomp and clamour of the
host taking the field (Inf. 22.) ; the devices of heraldry ; the
answering chimes of morning bells over the city; the inven-
- tions and appliances of art, the wheels within wheels of clocks
(Par. 24.), the many-coloured carpets of the East (nf. 17.);
music and dancing —the organ and voice in church, —

—‘ Voce mista al dolce suono
Che or si orno s’ intendon le parole,” —Purg. 9.

the lute and voice in the chamber (Par. 20.); the dancers prepar-

* “ Like goats that having over the crags pursued
Their wanton sports, now, quiet pass the time
In ruminating — sated with their food,
Beneath the shade, while glows the sun on high—
Watch’d by the goatherd with unceasing care,
As on his staff he leans, with watchful eye.” — Wriaut.

* “Indi come orologio che ne chiami
Nell’ ora che la sposa di Dio surge
A mattinar lo sposo perché I’ ami,
Che l una parte e I’ altra tira ed urge
Tin tin sonando con si dolce nota
Che ’1 ben disposto spirto d’ amor turge ;
Cosi vid’ io la gloriosa rnota
Muoversi e render voce a yoce, in tempra
Ed indolcezza ch’ esser non pud nota
Se non cola dove I gioir s’ insempra.”— Parad. 10.

H 4

104 DANTE.

ing to begin*, or waiting to catch a new strain.} Or, again,
the images of domestic life, the mother’s ways to her child, re-
served and reproving—“che al figlio par superba,”— or
cheering him with her voice, or watching him compassion-
ately in the wandering of fever, —

“ Ond’ ella, appresso d’ un pio sospiro
Gli occhi drizzO ver me, con quel sembiante
Che madre fa sopra figliuol deliro.”—Parad. 1.

Nor is he less observant of the more delicate phenomena of
mind, in its inward workings, and its connection with the
body. The play of features, the involuntary gestures and
attitudes of the passions, the power of eye over eye, of hand
upon hand, the charm of voice and expression, of musical
sounds even when not understood — feelings, sensations, and
states of mind which have a name, and others, equally nume-
rous and equally common, which have none,—these, often
so fugitive, so shifting, so baffling and intangible, are ex-
pressed with a directness, a simplicity, a sense of truth at
once broad and refined, which seized at once on the con-
genial mind of his countrymen, and pointed out to them the
road which they have followed in art, unapproached as yet
by any competitors. t

4 “ E come surge, e va, ed entra in ballo
Vergine lieta, sol per farne onore
Alla novizia, e non per alcun fallo.” — Parad. 25.

+ “ Donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte,
Ma che gs’ arrestin tacite ascoltando
Fin che le nuove note hanno ricolte.” — Parad. 10.

{ For instance: — thoughts upon thoughts ending in sleep and dreams :
** Nuovo pensier dentro de me si mise,
Dal qual piu altri nacquero e diversi;
E tanto &@ uno in altro vaneggiai
Che gli occhi per vaghezza ricopersi,
E ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai.” —Purg, 18.

sleep stealing off when broken by light :
“ Come si frange il sonno, ove di butto

Nuoya luce percuote ’1 viso chiuso,
Che fratto guizza pria che muoja tutto.” —DPurg. 17.

DANTE. 105

And he has anticipated the latest schools of modern
poetry, by making not merely nature, but science tributary

the shock of sudden awakening :
“ Come al lume acuto si disonna,
* * * * *
E lo svegliato cid che vede abborre,
Si nescia é la subita vigilia,
Finché la stimativa nol soccorre.”—Parad, 26.

uneasy feelings produced by sight or representation of something unnatural :
“ Come per sostentar solajo o tetto
Per mensola talvolta una figura
Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto,
La qual fa del non ver vera rancura
Nascer a chi la vede; cosi fatti
Vid’ io color.”——Purg. 10.

blushing in innocent sympathy for others :

* FE come donna onesta che permane

Di se sicura, e per [ altrui fallenza

Pure ascoltando timida si fane :

Cosi Beatrice trasmutd sembianza.”— Parad. 27.

asking and answering by looks only :

* Volsi gli occhi agli occhi al signor mio ;

Ond’ elli m’ assenti con lieto cenno

Cio che chiedea la vista del disio.”—Purg. 19.

watching the effect of words :
“ Posto avea fine al suo ragionamento
L’ alto dottore, ed attento guardava
Nella mia vista s’ io parea contento.
Ed io, cui nuova sete ancor frugava,
Di fuor taceva e dentro dicea: forse
Lo troppo dimandar ch’ io fo, li grava.
Ma quel padre verace, che s’ accorse
Del timido voler che non s’ apriva,
Parlando, di parlare ardir mi porse.”—Purg. 18.

Dante betraying Virgil's presence to Statius, by his involuntary smile :
“ Volser Virgilio a me queste parole
Con viso che tacendo dicea: ‘ taci ;’
Ma non pu6 tutto la virti che vuole;

Che riso e pianto son tanto seguaci
Alla passion da che ciascun si spicca,
Che men seguon voler ne’ pit veraci.

Lo pur sorrisi, come [ uom ch’ ammicca:;
Perché ? ombra si tacque, e riguardommi
Negli occhi ove 'l sembiante pit si ficca.

E se tanto lavoro in bene assommi,

~

106 DANTE.

‘

to a poetry with whose general aim and spirit it has little
in common — tributary in its exact forms, even in its

Disse, perché la faccia tua testeso
Un lampeggiar d@ un riso dimostrommi?”—Purg. 21.
smiles and words together :
“ Per le sorrise parolette brevi.”—Parad. 1.
eye meeting eye:
“ Gli ocechi ritorsi avanti
Dritti nel lume della dolce guida
Che sorridendo ardea negli occhi santi.”—Parad. 3.

“ Come si vede qui alcuna volta
L’ affetto nella vista, s’ ello é tanto
Che da lui sia tutta Y anima tolta:
Cosi nel fiammeggiar del fulgor santo
A cui mi volsi, conobbi la voglia
In lui di ragionarmi ancore alquanto.”—Parad. 18.
gentleness of voice :
“E cominciommi a dir soave e piana
Con angelica voce in sua favella.”—Jnf. 2.
*“ K come agli occhi miei si fe’ pit bella,
Cosi con voce pit dolce e soave,
Ma non con questa moderna fayella,
Dissemi ;”—Parad, 16.
chanting :
“ Te lucis ante si divotamente
Le usci di bocca e con si dolce note,
Che fece me a me uscir di mente.
E I altre poi doleemente e divote
Seguitar lei per tutto Il’ inno intero,
Avendo gli occhi alle superne ruote.”—Purg. 8.

chanting blended with the sound of the organ :
“To mi rivolsi attento al primo tuono,
E Te Deum laudamus mi parea
Udire in voce mista al dolce suono.
Tale imagine appunto mi rendea
Cio ch’ io udiva, qual prender si suole
Quando a cantar con organi si stea ;
Ch’ or si, or no, 8’ intendon le parole.”—Purg. 9.
voices in concert :
“‘ E come in voce voee si discerne
Quando una é ferma, e’l altra va e riede,”—Parad. 8.

attitudes and gestures : e.g. Beatrice addressing him,
“Con atto e voce di spedito duce.”—Parad. 30.
Sordello eyeing the travellers :
“Venimmo a lei: o anima Lombarda

DANTE. 107

technicalities. He speaks of the Mediterranean Sea, not
merely as a historian, or an observer of its storms or its
smiles, but as a geologist*; of light, not merely in its
beautiful appearances, but in its natural laws.+ ‘There is a
charm, an imaginative charm to him, not merely in the sen-
sible magnificence of the heavens, ‘in their silence, and
light, and watchfulness,” but in the system of Ptolemy and
the theories of astrology; and he delights to interweave with
the poetry of feeling and of the outward sense, the grandeur
—so far as he knew it—of order, proportion, measured mag-
nitudes, the relations of abstract forces, displayed on such a
scene as the material universe, as if he wished to show that
imagination in its boldest flight was not afraid of the com-
pany of the clear and subtle intellect.

Indeed the real never daunts him. It is his leading principle
of poetical composition, to draw out of things the poetry which
is latent in them, either essentially, or as they are portions,
images, or reflexes of something greater—not to invest them
with a poetical semblance, by means of words which bring
with them poetical associations, and have received a general
poetical stamp. Dante has few of those indirect charms
which flow from the subtle structure and refined graces

Come ti stavi altera e disdegnosa

E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda.
Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa,

Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando,

A guisa di leon quando si posa.”—Purg. 6.

the angel moving “ dry-shod” over the Stygian pool :
“ Dal volto rimovea quell aer grasso
Menando la sinistra innanzi spesso,
E sol di quell’ angoscia parea lasso.
Ben m’ accorsi ch’ egli era del ciel messo,
E volsimi al maestro ; e quei fe’ segno
Ch’ io stessi cheto ed inchinassi ed esso.
Ahi quanto mi parea pien di disdegno.
* * * * *
Poi si rivolse per la strada lorda,
E non fe’ motto a noi, ma fe’ sembiante
D’ uomo cui altra cura stringa e morde
Che quella di colui che gli é davante.”—Inf. 9.

“ La maggior valle, in che 1 acqua si spandi.”—Parad, 9.
; e. g. Purg. 15.

108 DANTE.

of language—none of that exquisitely fitted and self-
sustained mechanism of choice words of the Greeks —
none of that tempered and majestic amplitude of diction,
which clothes, like the folds of a royal robe, the thoughts of
the Latins—none of that abundant play of fancy and senti-
ment, soft or grand, in which the later Italian poets delighted.
Words with him are used sparingly, never in play —never
because they carry with them poetical recollections —never
for their own sake; but because they are instruments which
will give the deepest, clearest, sHarpest stamp of that image
which the poet’s mind, piercing to the very heart of his sub-
ject, or seizing the characteristic feature which to other men’s
eyes is confused and lost among others accidental and com-
mon, draws forth in severe and living truth. Words will
not always bend themselves to his demands on them; and
make him often uncouth, abrupt, obscure. But he is too
much in earnest to heed uncouthness; and his power over
language is too great to allow uncertainty as to what he
means, to be other than occasional. Nor is he a stranger
to the utmost sweetness and melody of language. But
it appears, unsought for and unlaboured, the spontaneous
and inevitable obedience of the tongue and pen to the im-
pressions of the mind; as grace and beauty, of themselves,
‘command and guide the eye” of the painter, who thinks
not of his hand but of them. All is in character with the
absorbed and serious earnestness which pervades the poem;
there is no toying, no ornament, that a man in earnest might
not throw into his words ;—whether in single images, or in
pictures, like that of the Meadow of the Heroes (Inf. 4.), or the
angel appearing in hell to guide the poet through the burning
city (Inf. 9.)— or in histories, like those of Count Ugolino,
or the life of S. Francis (Parad. 11.)—or in dramatic scenes
like the meeting of the poets Sordello and Virgil (Purgat.
6.), or that one, unequalled in beauty, where Dante himself,
after years of forgetfulness and sin, sees Beatrice in glory,
and hears his name, never but once pronounced during the
vision, from her lips.*

* “To vidi gia nel cominciar del giorno
La parte oriental tutta rosata,

DANTE. 109

But this, or any other array of scenes and images, might
be matched from poets of a far lower order than Dante: and
to specimens which might be brought together of his audacity
and extravagance, no parallel could be found except among
the lowest. We cannot, honestly, plead the barbarism of
the time as his.excuse. That, doubtless, contributed

EI altro ciel di bel sereno adorno,
E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata,
Si che per temperanza di vapori
L’ occhio lo sostenea lunga fiata;
Cosi dentro una nuyola di fiori,
Che dalle mani angeliche saliva,
E ricadeva git dentro e di fuori,
Sovra candido vel cinta d’ oliva
Donna m’ apparve sotto verde manto
Vestita di color di fiamma viva.
E lo spirito mio, che gia cotanto
Tempo era stato con la sua presenza,
Non era di stupor, tremando, affranto.
Sanza degli occhi aver piu conoscenza,
Per occulta virtu, che da lei mosse,
D’ antico amor senti’ la gran potenza.
* * * * *
Volsimi alla sinistra col rispitto,
Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma,
Quando ha paura, o quando egli é afflitto,
Per dicere a Virgilio: Men che dramma
Di sangue m’ é rimasa, che non tremi :
Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma.
Ma Virgilio n’ avea lasciati scemi
Di se, Virgilio dolcissimo padre,
Virgilio, a cui per mia salute diemi :
* y * * * *
Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada,
Non piangere anche, non piangere ancora;
Che pianger ti convien per altra spada.
% * ia i * *
Regalmente nell’ atto ancor proterva
Continud, come colui che dice,

E ’1 pit caldo parlar dietro riserva:
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice:
Come degnasti d’ accedere al monte ?

Non sapei tu, che qui é l uom felice ?”— Purg. 30.

But extracts can give but an imperfect notion of this grand and touching
canto.

110 DANTE.

largely to them; but they were the faults of the man. In
another age, their form might have been different; yet
we cannot believe so much of time, that it would have
tamed Dante. Nor can we wish it. It might have made
him less great: and his greatness can well bear its own
blemishes, and will not less meet its due honour among men,
because they can detect its kindred to themselves.

The greatness of his work is not in its details—to be
made or marred by them. It is the greatness of a compre-
hensive and vast conception, sustaining without failure the
trial of its long and hazardous execution, and fulfilling at
its close the hope and promise of its beginning; like the great-
ness,— which we watch in its course with anxious suspense,
and look back upon when it is secured by death, with deep
admiration—of a perfect life. Many a surprise, many a dif-
ficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange reverse and
alternation of feelings, attend the progress of the most patient
and admiring reader of the Commedia; as many as attend
on one who follows the unfolding of a strong character in
life. We are often shocked when we were prepared to ad-
mire— repelled, when we came with sympathy ; the accus-
tomed key fails at a eritical moment—depths are revealed
which we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound
us. But the check is for a time—the gap and chasm does
not dissever. Haste is even an evidence of life—the brief
word, the obscure hint, the unexplained, the unfinished, or
even the unachieved, are the marks of human feebleness, but
are also among those of human truth. The unity of the
whole is unimpaired. The strength which is working it out,
though it may have at times disappointed us, shows no hollow-
ness or exhaustion. Thesurprise of disappointment is balanced
—there is the surprise of unimagined excellence. Powers do
more than they promised; and that spontaneous and living
energy, without which neither man nor poet can be trusted,
and which showed its strength even in its failures, shows it
more abundantly in the novelties of suecess—by touching sym-
pathies which have never been touched before, by the un-
constrained freshness with which it meets the proverbial and

a

DANTE. 111

familiar, by the freedom with which it adjusts itself to a new
position or an altered task— by the completeness, unstudied
and instinctive, with which it holds together dissimilar and
uncongenial materials, and forces the most intractable, the
most unaccustomed to submission, to receive the colour of
the whole — by its orderly and unmistakeable onward march,
and its progress, as in height, so in what corresponds to
height. It was one and the same man, who rose from the
despair, the agony, the vivid and vulgar horrors of the In-
ferno, to the sense and imagination of certainty, sinlessness,
and joy ineffable—the same man whose power and whose
sympathies failed him not, whether discriminating and enu-
merating, as if he had gone through them all, the various
forms of human suffering, from the dull, gnawing sense of
the loss of happiness, to the infinite woes of the wrecked and
ruined spirit, and the coarser pangs of the material flesh ;
or dwelling on the changeful lights and shades of earnest re-
pentance, in its hard, but not unaided or ungladdened struggle,
and on that restoration to liberty and peace, which can change
even this life into paradise, and reverse the doom which
made sorrow our condition, and laughter and joy unnatural
and dangerous—the penalty of that first fault, which

“In pianto ed in affanno
Cambio onesto riso e dolce giuoco ; ”—

or rising finally above mortal experience, to imagine the free-
dom of the saints, and the peace of eternity. In this con-
sists the greatness of his power. It is not necessary to read
through the Commedia to see it —open it where we please, we
see that he is on his way, and whither he is going; episode
and digression share in the solemnity of the general order.
And his greatness was more than that of power. That
reach and play of sympathy ministered to a noble wisdom,
which used it thoughtfully and consciously for a purpose to
which great poetry had never yet been applied, except in the
mouth of prophets. Dante was a stern man, and more than
stern, among his fellows. But he has left to those who
never saw his face an inheritance the most precious; he has

112 | DANTE.

left them that which, reflecting and interpreting their minds,
does so, not to amuse, not to bewilder, not to warp, not to
turn them in upon themselves in distrust or gloom or sel-
fishness; not merely to hold up a mirror to nature; but to
make them true and make them hopeful. Dark as are his
words of individuals, his thoughts are not dark or one-sided
about mankind; his is no cherished and perverse severity —
his faith is too large, too real, for such a fault. He did not
write only the Inferno. And the Purgatorio and the Para-
diso are not an afterthought, a‘feebler appéndix and com-
pensation, conceived when too late, to a finished whole, which
has taken up into itself the poet’s real mind. Nowhere else
in poetry of equal power is there the same balanced view of
what man is, and may be; nowhere so wide a grasp shown of
his various capacities, so strong a desire to find a due place and
function for all his various dispositions. Where he stands
contrasted in his idea of human life with other poets, who
have been more powerful exponents of its separate sides,
is in his large and truthful comprehensiveness. Fresh
from the thought of man’s condition as a whole, fresh from
the thought of his goodness, his greatness, his power, as
well as of his evil, his mind is equally in tune when re-
joicing over his restoration, as when contemplating the ruins
of his fall, He never lets go the recollection that human life,
if it grovels at one end in corruption and sin, and has to pass
through the sweat and dust and disfigurement of earthly toil,
has throughout, compensations, remedies, functions, spheres
innumerable of profitable activity, sources inexhaustible of
delight and consolation —and at the other end a perfection
which cannot be named. Noone ever measured the greatness
of man in all its forms with so true and yet with so admiring
an eye, and with such glowing hope, as he who has also por-
trayed so awfully man’s littleness and vileness. And he went
further — no one who could understand and do homage to
greatness in man, ever drew the line so strongly between
greatness and goodness, and so unhesitatingly placed the hero’
of this world only — placed him in all his magnificence, ho-
noured with no timid or dissembling reverence —at the dis-
tance of worlds, below the place of the lowest saint.

DANTE. 113

Those who know the “ Divina Commedia” best, will best
know how hard it is to be the interpreter of such a mind ;
but they will sympathise with the wish to call attention to
it. They know, and would wish others also to know, not by
hearsay, but by experience, the power of that wonderful poem.
They know its austere, yet subduing beauty; they know
what force there is, in its free and earnest and solemn verse,
to strengthen, to tranquillise, to console. It is a small thing
that it has the secret of Nature and Man; that a few keen
words have opened their eyes to new sights in earth, and sea,
and sky; have taught them new mysteries of sound; have
made them recognise, in distinct image or thought, fugitive
feelings, or their unheeded expression, by look, or gesture, or
motion; that it has enriched the public and collective memory
of society with new instances, never to be lost, of human
feeling and fortune; has charmed ear and mind by the music
of its stately march, and the variety and completeness of its
plan. But, besides this, they know how often its seriousness
has put to shame their trifling, its magnanimity their faint-
heartedness, its living energy their indolence, its stern and
sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling tenderness
overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its strong faith
quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp im-
parted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing truths.
They know how often they have found, in times of trouble, if
not light, at least that deep sense of reality, permanent, though
unseen, which is more than light can always give—in the
view which it has suggested to them of the judgments and
the love of God.*

* It is necessary to state, that these remarks were written before we had seen
the chapter on Dante in “Italy, Past and Present, by L. Mariotti.” Had we
become acquainted with it earlier, we should have had to refer to it often, in the
way of acknowledgment, and as often in the way of strong protest.

114 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.*

[Jan. 1843.]

WHEN a man has played a great part in his generation, and
in the course of years the cause of quarrel in which he was
engaged becomes obsolete and is forgotten, his name often
survives, and is handed on with a certain vague reverence,
people know not why : —volitat per ora virum; but the sound
is lifeless and unmeaning; he has become a sort of shadowy
eidwdov, without substance or distinguishable feature. The
name of St. Anselm is thus preserved among us; when it is
mentioned, we recognise it as one which is not quite new to
us ; but who he was, when he lived, what he did, whether he
was Archbishop of Canterbury or Constantinople, are ques-
tions about which a great proportion of readers would feel no
shame in confessing ignorance.

Yet St. Anselm was a great man; he was looked upon as
the man of his time in the Western Church; he was one who
in his day fought most nobly the good fight, and drew to
himself the hearts of Christendom. Among all who have sat
on the throne of Canterbury, none used to be looked upon as
greater, or more deserving of lasting remembrance in the
English Church.

But it was his fortune to be called to defend the cause of
religion, by deed and suffering, against the pride and licen-
tiousness of the feudal system, and to be one of the foremost
in the contest. And this, which so endeared him to English-
men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, has made

* The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury; a Contribution. to a
Knowledge of the Moral, Ecclesiastical, and Literary Life of the Eleventh and
Twelfth Centuries. Translated from the German of J. A. Mohler, D. D., &c.
by H. Rymer, Student of St. Edmund’s College, Old Hall Green. London:
T. Jones. 1842.

ag ta

— Ee

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 115

—_

Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth forget him.
The cause, to which he devoted himself so earnestly has ceased
to be looked upon as the religious or the popular one ; where
it does not call forth feelings of bitter hostility, it is regarded
with suspicion or indifference.

Partly from ignorance, partly from inveterate prejudice, we
cannot get ourselves to look upon the great struggles between
the Church and the Crown, in the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, as other than political. From our childhood we have
been used to consider the efforts of the reforming party among
the clergy as little short of rebellion; as mere ambitious and
hypocritical aggressions on the state, for the lowest and most
selfish ends. We have connected with their cause, disloyalty,
superstition, lust of gain, narrowness of mind, and a hateful
union of abject servility and domineering tyranny. “ Those
dark times of priestcraft, when popes and monks bearded the
king, and conspired to keep mankind in slavery both of body
and soul,”—such is our idea of the days of St. Anselm. At
the best, the policy of the Church is regarded as mistaken; as
an interference with matters beyond her sphere, savouring of
worldliness and want of faith. But that the party of Gregory
VII. and St. Anselm was the religious one,—that they were
contending for objects not of this world, —that they were the
champions of truth and holiness, the reformers of their day,
—that they were on the right side, the side which good men
now would have taken in those circumstances, —and that the
kings and nobles were in the wrong, were cruel and dangerous
aggressors, — this, we think, many of us find hard to believe,
many more even to fancy. The notion is too much for their
imagination: they can no more master it, than they can con-
ceive the French Revolution to have been right.

This state of feeling has come about naturally, as many
other things, good and evil, have come about in our genera-
tion ; as most of us have ceased to believe in ghost stories, or
suspect old women of witchcraft, or value a priest’s blessing.
This is not the place to discuss its deep and manifold causes ;
for we are writing not of the nineteenth century, but of the
eleventh; of Anselm and his cause, not of English national

1 2

116 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

character. But we are anxious that this cause should be
judged fairly ; and there are one or two sources of prejudice
against it, which, while they are manifestly fatal to all true
and high views of history, are also so very common and
powerful, that we cannot refrain from spending a few words
on them, before proceeding to the main subject of our review.

1. One of these sources of prejudice is the irreligious cha-
racter of our popular historical traditions, and of the literature
which embodies and perpetuates them. Men go by tradition
in most things, and in none more than in history; and the
feelings and even the judgments with which it has prepossessed
us, often last long after opinion has ceased to support them.
We have been brought up in familiar acquaintance with a
history, which may well have taken a strong hold on our
imagination. But in that magnificent line of traditions —
the “ Gesta Regum Anglorum”—a series which for interest
and sustained grandeur has no parallel but in the history of
Rome—in the imposing picture presented by the unfolding
and progress of the fortunes of the state and realm of England,
we may look in vain for anything of higher stature or diviner
mould than what belongs to this world. Our historians
speak as they might of a great heathen empire; as if the
most august and awful object in history, the Christian Church,
deeply involved too as its fortunes have been with those of
our own country, had no existence, or were but a mere title
or abstraction. The theory on which they write, recognises
not religion as a standard or motive of public action; it is
one which looks not beyond things temporal, for greatness or
reality ; which holds no power entitled to exercise a direct and
visible control on society, but that of the crown or the con-
stitution: —a theory, on which the claim of the Church to
speak and be listened to in the councils of kings, and to
thwart, if need be, the policy of nations, is a simple absurdity.
It is not too much to say, that there is less in the popular
history of the Christian kingdom of England which implies
the reality of religion—less acknowledgment of the laws
and agents of a Divine government, partly concealed and
partly manifested, to which the temporal rulers of the world

a

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 117

are even here amenable—than in the legends, or even the
political history, of Greece and Rome.

Nor is there much to wonder at in this, considering that
our great authorities on the subject of European history have
been such as Hume and Robertson. Christians and Church-
men have consented to receive as oracles the dicta of the
unbeliever and the cold-hearted Jitérateur on the duties and
objects of man and society, and to listen with obsequious
patience, while they superciliously gave judgment on the
temper and relations of the Church, and the conduct of her
prelates. Their influence, no doubt, is somewhat shaken; yet
their view and colouring of things still remain among us, as
the acknowledged and received one. Their tone of tranquil
and deliberate contempt, scarcely disturbed even by bitterness,
has become the keynote of the general feeling in England
about Churchmen and their cause. They have reconciled us
to the belief, that, in the earlier times of modern history,
those ages of reality, of young and exuberant life, there were
nothing but hollow forms, sickening hypocrisies, uncouth and
unmeaning technicalities; and taught us to measure purposes
which stirred all Christendom as one man, by the formule of
an impertinent and shallow philosophy — the hopes of saints,
by the selfishness of fashionable society. It speaks ill for the
character of any age, when such writers could gain and keep
the ascendant in history ; ill for its genuineness of feeling, ill
for its Christianity. The influence which Hume had on the
public was given by the public, which had long been ready
for him, and felt as he did. Indeed, between him and his
predecessors in English history, there is not much to choose
in their way of viewing ecclesiastical matters. He was an
unbeliever, and they professed to be Christians: but there is
in both the same ignorant contempt for what they call the
dark ages, the same sneers at “superstition” and “ priestcraft;”
the same invariable leaning to the worldly side, however un-
deniably bad its show, and worthless its supporters; the same
inability to conceive of any higher motives in the clergy than
selfishness and ambition; the same insensibility to nobleness

and height of character in them, however obvious. Nay, we
13

118 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

may see the same spirit at work in deeper and more manly
writers than the “polite and ingenious” of our Augustan
age. Account for it as we may, ever since the Reformation,
the feeling of our most Catholic writers, whenever they are
led across the great contests of our early history, is, for the
most part, on the side of the King and the State against the
Church. The world has brought them to believe, that in
these struggles it was always the injured, if not the oppressed
party, and an unequal match for the craft of its antagonist:
it has insulted religion, and blackened the memory of its
defenders, and then called upon Christians to admire and
honour its policy; and Christians have been weak and
faithless enough to allow themselves for its sake to be
estranged from their fathers and fellow champions in the
faith, and have even rivalled it in its bitterness against them.

Nowhere does this low morality and dislike of the Church
appear more offensively and more mischievously, than in
those books from which we first learn history, and which
may be taken as fair exponents of popular notions upon
the subject. The household traditions of England are now
to be found, not in ballads and chronicles, but in the assem-
blage of unpretending little volumes which we see advertised
in the school catalogues of Messrs. Whittaker and Simpkin
& Marshall, and some of which are to be met with in most
nurseries and juvenile libraries in the United Kingdom. We
have all of us been once familiar with them,—a series of
small books none of them aspiring beyond 12mo., and bound
in a sort of official livery —blue, red, and green, or brown
sheep with blue edges;—prim and starched little skeleton
compilations, the very essence of propriety and dryness,
carefully starving, as far as they can, all appetite for the
grand, or poetical, or romantic, and with all the decided con-
ciseness, infallibility, and philosophical absence of feeling, of
a statistical report, or treatise on political economy. These
manuals of the “ Textus receptus” of English history, give a
view of their subject more remarkable for its uniformity
than its consistency. For though they all fix on the same
great men, the same good and bad kings, the same patriots

4 nigral

8ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 119

and traitors, they are not nice as to principles; loyalty and
disloyalty, republicanism and high monarchical views, are
each, in their turn, grounds both of praise and censure: —
just as Locke and Venerable Bede, Milton and Hooker,
King Alfred and William ITI. find themselves in company ina
«Temple of British Worthies.” But with all their anomalies,
these books follow one rule at least steadily and intelligently :
they invariably take part with the political power, whatever
it be, against the Church. In the contests between the
ecclesiastical and civil powers, at whatever period, we are
taught, when children, to take it for granted that all right
and wisdom lay with the latter; to look upon all leading
Churchmen with aversion, and to doubt systematically in
them alone, purity of motive, or reasonableness of purpose.
Sympathy and admiration are claimed for political great-
ness, or successful soldiership; for Christian faith, and
magnanimity, and self-devotion, it is well if there is not a
sneer. And these bad prejudices, which we thus drink in
almost with our mother’s milk, colour our view, even in
spite of ourselves, of the ecclesiastical questions of past
history.

2. And our indifference or aversion to the cause of the
Church in the middle ages, is fostered by the strangely unreal
notions which are afloat on the subject of ecclesiastical history ;
notions which have arisen, not merely from an inability to
alter our focus of vision, in order to contemplate what is both
very distant, and set to a different scale of greatness from our
own, but from a most baseless and fantastic idea, of what was
to be looked for beforehand in Church history. Many persons
seem to think that they had a right to find it all along a fair
and calm picture of holiness and purity: there should be no
disturbances, no troubles, no quarrels about lands and rights;
nothing but meekness and peace, at least within. Not of
course that there should be no suffering or difficulties, but
they ought to be of the clearly heroic kind. Martyrdom and
confession plainly add to the interest of any history; martyrs
and confessors of course there ought to be; but then they

ought to be abstract ones, without anything of commonplace
14

120 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

real human nature about them. And the rest of the history
ought to be made up solely of the angelic virtues and high
deeds of saints, the beautiful lives and sayings of heavenly-
minded teachers, the calm unobtrusive dutifulness, the fervent
piety, and unwearied zeal of the flock at large. Such, to
judge from the way in which we often hear Church history
spoken of, as it has been, would seem to be the common
notion of what zt ought to have been, in order to be worth
anything for a Christian of our day to study heartily and with
interest. | :

Now it is a light thing to assure such theorists, that in the
most despised periods of ecclesiastical history, they will find
abundance, if they will take the trouble to search for it, to
satisfy their demands for religion, all but disengaged from the
world. But they must not lay it down as a canon, that
nothing can be religious except what is, as it were, disembodied,
and exhibited apart from the realities of lifeas we see it; that
the highest principles and most saintly feelings cannot be at
work in the business of the court or the market-place. For
it is not, for the most part, according to the existing order of
things, to find qualities or elements in an unmixed state: if
we want them in a simple form, we must disengage them by
thought and skill for ourselves; or it may be, they are not to be
disengaged at all; if we seek for electricity, for galvanic or
magnetic power, we must be content to possess their subtle
virtues in Leyden jars, muscles of dead frogs, and bars of iron.
When the Church was founded, there was no new world
created, as a stage for Christians to act upon. They were
still to be men, each with a different face and figure and cha-
racter, living a certain number of years, every year made up
of a certain number of days and seconds, of which each was
to have its own object, feeling, and thought— a countless
number, and of an infinite variety — to tempt, or soothe, or
guide, or harass. Life was with them to be no poetical
dream, but in its main circumstances and conditions, exactly
as commonplace, as real, as long, as each of us finds it. Their
Christian principles were not to be like propositions of Euclid
or legal formule, things to be thought of by themselves and

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 121

paraded on certain occasions; but they were to work im and
under the every-day realities of life, high and low; to hide
themselves in all feelings and actions, to possess and inform
character, to leaven insensibly whatever stirs and warms men’s
hearts. They were not meant for a gala robe, but for a
working-day dress, and that for no fancy labour, but for the
rough and dusty encounters of this (outwardly) very matter-
of-fact and unromantic world.

Yet people seem to forget these truisms when they come to
study Church history. They forget also that the Bible history
itself had its outside face, not very different in appearance from
what they object to in ecclesiastical history ; only in one we
are brought within the veil of Providence, and are excluded for
the most part in the other.

It is therefore really no great wonder that, from first to
last, Church history, like all other history of man, presents a
series of conflicts — conflicts between real men, carried on as
contests are carried on now, with much in them that is bad,
much that is ambiguous, and difficult to disentangle and
explain, much that is merely practical and very unpoetical,
and what some call very unspiritual. That is to say, men
were in earnest; they did not play at controversy; they
carried on no paper war with imaginary and harmless anta-
gonists, but a keen struggle with living opponents, who felt
as strong an interest in the events as themselves: and the
strife was accompanied, as all real strifes are, with excitement
and pain, with trouble, risk, and anxious uncertainty.

Yet the very reality and earnestness of these controversies
seem in our eyes a sufficient reason for not considering
them of importance or interest; and this is especially the
case with respect to the history of the Church of the middle
ages, which we in England seem scarcely to consider religious
history at all. Even the theological student neglects it: in
his course of Church history, he reads down to the end of
the fourth or fifth century, and then with a huge bound,
passes over ten centuries, and begins again with the six-
teenth. And the implied reason of this remarkable pro-
ceeding is, that in those days of wonderful religious energy,

122 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS,

when every question was a religious one, the history of the
Church was but external and secular. For the controversies
of the third and fourth centuries, the said student can see
reason ; for those of the eleventh and twelfth, none.

The great controversies of the early Church, and those of
the middle ages, differed in two points. Those of the first
five centuries were for the most part carried on with persons
out of the pale of the Church, and on points of faith and
doctrine: those of the middle ages were mainly connected
with life and morals, and were with men who knew no
spiritual authority but hers. Her first opponents, quarrel-
ling with her as a teacher of religion, broke off from her, and
set up parallel and antagonistic systems of their own; they
were heretics and schismatics, self-condemned, and clearly
marked out as such by their own formal and deliberate acts:
there was no mistaking the grounds or the importance of the
dispute. But in the eleventh century, these heresies were
things of a past age in the West — lifeless and inoperative
carcasses of old enemies, from whom the Church had little,
comparatively, to fear for the present. She had living an-
tagonists to cope with, but they were of a different sort.
They were no longer the sophist and declaimer of the schools,
but mail-clad barons. Just as she had subdued the intel-
ligence and refinement of the old Roman empire, it was
swept away, and she was left alone with its wild destroyers.
Her commission was changed; she had now to tame and rule
the barbarians. But upon them the voice which had rebuked
the heretic fell powerless. While they pressed into her fold,
they overwhelmed all her efforts to reclaim them, and filled
her, from east to west, with violence and stunning disorder.
When, therefore, she again roused herself to confront the
world, her position and difficulties had shifted. Her enemy
was no longer heresy, but vice;—wickedness, which wrought
with a high hand ; — foul and rampant, like that of Sodom,
or the men before the Flood. It was not the Faith, but the
first principles of duty —justice, mercy, and truth — which
were directly endangered by the unbridled ambition and
licentiousness of the feudal aristocracy, who were then

8ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 123

masters of Europe. These proud and resolute men were no
enemy out of doors; they were within her pale, professed
allegiance to her, and to be her protectors; claimed and
exercised important rights in her government and internal
arrangements, plausible in their origin, strengthened by pre-
scription, daily placed further out of the reach of attack by
ever-extending encroachments, and guarded with the jealousy
of men who felt that the restraints of. Church discipline, if
ever they closed round them, would be fetters of iron. And
with this fierce nobility she had to fight the battle of the
poor and weak; to settle the question, whether Christian
religion and the offices of the Church were to be anything
more than names, and honours, and endowments, trappings
of chivalry and gentle blood; whether there were yet strength
left upon earth to maintain and avenge the laws of God,
whoever might break them. She had to stand between the
oppressor and his prey ; to compel respect for what is pure
and sacred, from the lawless and powerful.

The various forms which this great struggle took, touched
as truly the reality and permanence of religion, as any of the
earlier controversies with heresy. But its nature made it at
the time, and makes it still, a difficult one. For a great
practical controversy like the present, whether the feudal or
the ecclesiastical, the military or the religious principle,
should have its rightful predominance in European society,
though as real in its grounds as that former contest, which
the Church waged against worldliness in the form of heresy,
is less capable of being presented in a definite and clearly
limited form, with all its due oppositions and distinctions, its
complete detail of feature and circumstance, than a dogmatic
controversy. Such ascene of conflict must from the number
of extraneous elements mixed up in it, present an appearance
of vagueness, or at least confusion: it must have many sides,
and so be difficult to take in at once: it must be full of
occasions for mistake and error, both for actors and spec-
tators. or in such a case, the great principles in debate
are scarcely ever presented in a pure and unembarrassed
form; the contest is carried on not by opposing statements

124 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS,

and arguments, but, so to speak, by moves, the meaning and
effect of which are not always obvious, even to him who
makes them; which harmonise with and involve principles,
but which do not necessarily disclose them. It is put upon
issues, and battled upon points, which are often of dispro-
portionately small importance to the real question which is
felt to turn on them. The great interests at stake appear
but accidentally on the face of the dispute; and we wonder
at the eagerness and zeal which the ostensible objects of the
contest call forth, till we come to See, as the combatants saw,
that trifling as they may be, they are, from the force of cir-
cumstances, the key of a whole position. Such a contest,
moreover, must appear personal: for the real causes of dispute
lying out of sight, and being represented not so much by
words as by the character and deeds of men; — and further,
the different sides not being marked off by plain and broad
lines, and the combatants being intermixed, we are tempted
to see nothing but individual interests and aims, in cases
where in reality a great cause has been fought for, and lost or
won. Wecontemplate only Henry and Gregory, their policy,
their errors, and their success as men, and put out of sight
the worldly or spiritual power which stood or fell with them.
And further, where all parties have, or claim, specific rights
in a common society, with some legitimate, some prescriptive,
or held by sufferance, some in abeyance — rights between
Christian and Christian, clerk and layman, bishop and lord
—rights possibly ill-defined and ill-adjusted —the conflict
could be carried on for a long time, without apparently
touching those deeper and more real grounds of opposition
which lay beneath: and instead of a controversy about the
most active principles and most vital interests of society, it
would present outwardly the appearance of a series of tech-
nical and legal questions.*

* Our remarks scarcely need illustration: but we are tempted to refer by way
of instance, to the struggle now going on in Lower Canada between the English

and French population.' The English are pouring in upon the French holders, _ .

1 Vide “ The Times,” Oct. 1. 1842.

a

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 125.

We shall now proceed with our main subject, and en-
deavour to give in some detail one of the scenes in this
contest, as it was viewed from the side of the Church, and
by persons who had it before their eyes, and were engaged
in it; taking from their own mouths what they believed and
meant, what were their objects, how they felt, and what
they hoped for. It is obviously as vain to expect to gain in
any other way a real view of their position, as it would be to
look for a fair account of the stand lately made in defence of
Church property, from a liberal who hates everything eccle-
siastical. Our position towards those times ought not to be
an external one; we ought to look at them neither as advo-
cates nor as mere critics, but as Churchmen. And indeed it
is high time to do so, if we wish posterity to do justice to our
own motives in resisting Church spoliation. We too are
embarked in the same cause, and we certainly have not more
to show than they had, to prove our disinterestedness.

Anselm’s time was an era in the history of the English
Church; and the transactions in which he was engaged are
rendered yet more interesting by his personal character.
For we must not forget that the great champion of ecclesi-
astical liberty was also the profoundest and most original
writer that had appeared in the Latin Church since St. Au-
gustine; or that he was the great model in his time of high
Christian character, in its most winning and graceful as well
as in its severest aspect. Yet his history has never been
treated, at least in England, with the special attention it
deserves. Exceptin the heavy pages of Collier, we know not
where the English reader would find a full account of him.

of the soil, endeavouring to establish themselves, and to get the land into their
own hands. The French feel that their religion, their language, their habits and
ways of life—all that is dear to them, and has hitherto made them happy, must
be swept away, if their rough and enterprising neighbours, who have but small
sympathy with them, should, by dint of greater capital, gain their footing. With
the French, the effort to keep the English out, is a struggle for existence. Now
the great obstacle to the English purchaser is the cumbrous and intricate system
of French law to which property in Lower Canada is subject: and it is on the
minutiz and technicalities of this law that the battle is fought between the two
races,

126 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

The work which originally suggested these remarks, was
the first attempt to supply the deficiency,—a translation of
a posthumous essay of Dr. Mohler by Mr. Rymer. Dr.
Mohler’s object was to draw attention to what really was
the state of religion and thought in the times of the great
struggle between the Church and the Empire, and to
exhibit the “moral, ecclesiastical, and literary life” of the
period in the history of its greatest and most complete re-
presentative. It was the work of one who thoroughly
appreciated Anselm and his times: but it is much to be re-
gretted, that coming from a man who viewed his subject so
thoughtfully, and with so clear and steady an eye, it should
have appeared in so very unattractive a form. It could
scarcely have been intended for publication as it stands.
As a composition, it is loose and rambling; too discursive
for a history, and without arrangement enough for a disserta-
tion. Important views suggested by the course of the story
are continually breaking its thread by the length to which
they are pursued: yet they are never distinctly worked out.
The narrative is spiritless and flat, in a history which has
interest enough for a romance; and there is throughout a
carelessness in statements of fact, which is unaccountable in
one who evidently had his authorities before him. Nor were
the defects of the original supplied in the translation. The
most careful part of the work is the essay at the end on the
“¢ scholastic philosophy of St. Anselm.”

The contemporary materials for a life of Anselm are un-
usually full and interesting. He held correspondence with
persons in every part of Europe, and even in Asia, and in every
vocation and grade of society; and of this correspondence,
which brings out in a most striking manner his character and
objects, a large portion is preserved, extending over part of
his private, and almost the whole of his public life. Further,
we have two singularly interesting and graphic accounts of
his public and private life, by an eye-witness, Eadmer, an
English monk of Canterbury, who was his companion and
most intimate friend all through his troubles and exile, and
was afterwards Archbishop of St. Andrews; a man of sense

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 127

and great observation, somewhat disposed to gossip, but re-
markably simple and natural in his accounts, and apparently
quite entitled to the deference which has always been paid to
his authority. He wrote under the eye and correction of the
archbishop *; and his account is borne out, and referred to,
by his contemporaries, Ordericus Vitalis, who wrote in Nor-
mandy, and William of Malmesbury, whose work was dedicated
to a son of Henry I. (one of Anselm’s opponents). Such are
our main sources of information.

The two contests in which Anselm was successively engaged
with William Rufus and Henry L., are sufficiently distinct to
be considered separately. His antagonist in the first was the
lawless violence of feudalism, in the second its craft and un-
scrupulous intrigue. The grounds, too, of the dispute, which
in the first appear in a vague and general form, were brought
to a distinct question in the second. These two contests will
form the subjects, respectively, of the present, and the follow-
ing essay.

To understand what these struggles really meant and in-
volved, we must keep before our eyes throughout, that idea of
the Church— of its nature and position in the world —which
men in those days had received from their fathers, and took for
granted, supposing that they saw it in every line of Scripture.

The Church, as set up by the Apostles, was an organised
society, destined to pursue zm the world objects beyond the
world; with laws and a polity, not of man’s ordering; governed
by powers, delegated indeed to men, but not from men. It
was a real and visible kingdom; distinct from the kingdoms
of this world and independent of them, as well when embracing
as when confronting them; with objects and ends, over all
earthly ones, paramount. With these unearthly ends, or with
the powers granted to the Church to carry them out, by her
invisible yet ever-present King, the powers of this world can
never innocently interfere. However the Church’s essential na-
ture may be obscured by the sin of her members, yet while she
exists, her rights and claims must be indefeasible; for they
are truly His, “to whom the heathen have been given for His

* Wharton, Angl'a Sacra, ii, 182, 183.

128 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

inheritance.” Princes of the earth,— whatever may have
been yielded to them for honour’s sake or convenience, may
have been usurped by wrong, inherited or acquired by usage,
betrayed by cowardice, or sold by worldliness,—can never
gain rights over the Church in her own province; rights to
set aside her laws, to wield her powers, or alter her objects;
for these laws, powers, and objects are beyond the sphere to
which earthly power can as such extend. Many things, —
policy, compacts, justice, — may prevent the Church at any
particular moment from reclaiming what is her own; but
forfeit it finally to the State she cannot. The convenience of
time may not set itself in competition with the claims of what
is eternal.

Further, this Church, as it was not of the earth, knew no
distinctions — no essential ones at least — of rank or country.
Giving honour where honour was due, it did so only in subor-
dination to its own fundamental laws. Two of those laws
were unity and purity. Be men what they might, they were
to be made one in the Church, and in her to remain one. Be
they what they might, if they openly and deliberately com-
mitted sin, they were, without respect of persons, to be
punished by her. To the Apostles had power been given by
our Lord to punish and pardon, to engraft and cut off; by
them had this power been passed on to others, who transmitted
it in their turn; and besides these, other rightful judges and
rulers in the kingdom of God and its concerns, there were
none.

Every one knows how the kingdom of God continued
separate in its outward position, till the kingdoms of the
world broke before it, and it stood in the midst of the wreck
of the Roman empire, the one great object of deep interest and
awe to all men, conquerors and conquered, Greek and Latin,
German and Lombard, Frank and Goth. The princes of the
nations and their multitudes were forced to bow before its
majesty, and become its subjects. But then came trouble.
They would be in z¢, what they were in their own earthly

kingdoms : honoured in its pale as kings, they found it hard to
be in any sense subjects. Those times, which it is the fashion

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 129

to represent as the era of ecclesiastical usurpation, will, as we
have already said, be found to have been periods of systematic
and unceasing encroachment on the rights of the Church by
the lay powers. The Gospel Law had come to be acknow-
ledged as the one ruling principle in Europe; and therefore
of course the Church had power, and that which comes with
power: her princes sate in high places; she had her broad
lands and her palaces, her honours and royalties. But she
held all this in the face of a world which grudged, the moment
it had given. Oppression, fraud, or compromise were con-
tinually at work, abridging her apostolic rights, and confound-
ing them, in order to weaken them, with those of a merely
temporal origin and reference; step by step effacing her inde-
pendent and unearthly character, and bidding fair to dispense
altogether with her divinely-imposed laws of unity and
holiness.

At length the intolerable license which reigned through
the Church, and the utter powerlessness of her rulers to
check it, in the pass to which things had come, produced, as
we know, the great reaction and reform of the eleventh
century ;—a reaction which, whatever means it may have
used, or whatever other effects it may have produced,
humanly speaking, saved Christianity itself in the West. Its
leaders boldly reverted to the ancient truths of the Church’s
intrinsic independence, and the divine origin and really
unearthly nature of her powers; and keeping their eyes
steadily on these, they risked a conflict with the armed might
of Europe. Their cause rested on the following points : —

1, That the Church is not only the appointed witness of
the faith, but also the guardian of holiness and justice in the
world ; and is as much bound to act on the offensive, and to
make sacrifices, in behalf of the latter, as of the former.

2. That the rebuke of John the Baptist to Herod is a pre-
cedent for Christian bishops in dealing with the great of the
earth; whose rank ought no more to exempt them, than the
lowest, from the rebukes and punishments of the Church.

3. That the powers of the Church, as they were not of
men, ought not to be holden of men; that her rebukes and

K

130 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

punishments, as they are no part of earthly power, ought
neither to be directed nor held back by that power; and that
the only way of escaping this interference in any degree, was
by securing to the Church that independence which her Lord
had Jeft her. Hence it was that the questions of simony and
lay investiture became so prominent.

To restore strength and efficiency to the Church, by estab-
lishing and applying these principles in their various details,
was the work to which the religious party of St. Anselm’s
day thought themselves called; and they set about it bravely
and like men. ‘The world has seldom seen such depth and
unity of character: we may call it one-sided, but it was one-
sidedness which pursued its noble and Christian enterprise
with a steadiness of aim, witha breadth and grandeur of
plan, with an inflexible earnestness, with a completeness of
execution, in comparison of which our efforts to do good seem
often but of mixed purpose, and uncertain fulfilment. And
of this great party in its various aspects—social, political,
intellectual, and religious—the foremost and most perfect
representative was Anselm.

“When the storms from without ” (we quote Dr. Mohler) “had
been laid, then commenced in the Church the happy struggle for
regeneration. Anselm was one Of the first who entered into this
conflict with prudence and with firmness, and of few can it be said
that they exercised so universal an influence. The great exertions
of his age had only one internal profound motive: to this unity of
object they must all be referred, else they would all and each be
without a real signification. But when we have considered this
one and true spring of action, we see that it divides itself into
various manifestations, of which each called into life a particular
power, a distinct talent of the human mind. It was only during
the entire period that it was fully developed. The entire body of
the contemporaries of Anselm displayed it in its whole, but he united
in himself so many talents and powers, that in every regard he
represented the whole, in which so many formed a part. ‘This
whole, divided into a multiplicity of manifestations, was the
religious enthusiasm, the renewed yearning after divine and
eternal things, which had been so long stifled in the miseries and
melancholy woes of the times. The flame of religion struggled for

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 131

freedom, and in the glow which it produced, the chains by which
the human mind had been held captive melted away.” — Introd.
pp. ix. x.

Their contest with the civil powers was but one part of
their vast and connected movement, but it was an integral
part of it. For the real point at issue between the rulers of
the Church, and the feudal princes of Europe, at the period
of which we are speaking, was, whether the Gospel law was
in very deed to be considered the supreme law of the Church,
and of every member of it; or whether, on the other hand,
Christians, when entrusted by God with the temporal govern-
ment of their fellow-Christians, acquired thereby a certain
right of exemption from the obedience to the Christian law
to which their brethren were bound, and a control over the
powers and sanctions by which that obedience was to be
enforced. ‘The existence of such a law, binding on the whole
body politic (for all were members of the one Catholic Church, )
and the abstract rights and powers of those persons in
whom the administration of that law was vested, were not
denied. But there was another law, of military obedience
and service, which the new population of Europe had brought
- with them from their forests, and which was strongly and
deeply fixed in their minds; and the question was, whether
this was not a check or even bar to the Church’s law;
whether the powers of the Christian dispensation, the reality
of which no one then questioned, were not by this antagonist
law to be controlled and fenced off; whether the obedience
and fealty due to a feudal superior—ties which were cer-
tainly felt to be of a most stringent kind—were not to
dispense or debar a clergyman from doing what other-
wise would be his clear and undoubted duty, as standing in
the place of the Apostles, towards those who professed to be
disciples of the Apostles.

This struggle did not begin in England till the time of An-
selm. For though the Church policy of William the Con-
queror was in theory perhaps the most tyrannical of any in
Europe, its evils were practically kept in check by the per-

K 2

132 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

sonal characters of the king, and the archbishop, Lanfranc ;
men very similar in temper—severe, earnest, and practical ;
each the other’s equal in resolution and ability, and who
thoroughly understood and trusted one another. William
seconded heartily Lanfranc’s measures to restore discipline and
learning in the English Church ; —he had political as well as
other reasons for doing so;—and Lanfranc, though in his
reforms determined and unyielding, even to the ny stu-
diously kept aloof from the party and policy of Gregory Wil.
By a sort of tacit compromise, no point seems ever to have
been raised between the two, which might open the great
questions at issue on the continent. In their day these ques-
tions remained in abeyance.

The Conqueror’s church policy, which, as we have said,
certainly had in part for its object to promote vigour, regu-
larity, and strictness in the Church, is marked by two main
features. One is, the disposition to give and guarantee to
the Church, within certain limits, a separate and independent
jurisdiction. In the important Council, or rather Parliament
of Lillebonne, 1080, this was done for Normandy.* From
the floating mass of precedents and customs, definite laws
were extricated and fixed in writing; the province of the
episcopal courts marked out with tolerable equity ; questions
about traditionary rights between the feudal and eccle-
siastical powers adjusted, and provision made for settling
future claims. In the enactments at Lillebonne, all offences
against the Church and her ministers, all crimes of impurity
and irreligion, and all offences committed by persons in holy
orders, were reserved for the judgment of the bishop. In
England, the same disposition to recognise and guard the
jurisdiction of the Church, appears in the separation of the
bishop’s court from the secular court of the hundred, and the
distinct and clear admission of the independence of that law
by which the bishop was to judge. The king’s mandate}, by
virtue of which this separation was to take place, expresses a
strong desire for the restoration of Church laws to their purity

* Orderic, Vital. v. 552. et seg. (c. 5. ed. Le Prevost.)
+ Wilkins’ Coneil. i. 368, 369. Thorpe, Anc. Laws, i. 495,

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 133

and force, and secures their exercise from the secular inter-
ference to which it had hitherto been subject. And the
frequent councils held during William’s reign prove that he
meant what he said.

But if William, for a feudal sovereign whose will was law,
went out of his way to make the Church more active and
powerful than she had been, he did so under the full con-
sciousness, and with the distinct and jealous assertion, of his
absolute control over her at the moment. Few points of
ecclesiastical supremacy were claimed by Henry VIII. which
were not also claimed and possessed, though, it may be, dif-
ferently used, by Norman William. “All matters in Church
and State,” says Eadmer, “ waited on his beck.” He had, in
England, at least, the absolute nomination of bishops and
abbots ; and though his appointntents were in general good
ones, at least in his later years, he never lost sight of his
political interests, and had no scruple in making use of his
power of election to keep in order a troublesome city, or a
refractory Anglo-Saxon monastery.* The practice of inves-

* See his conversation with his chaplain Samson about the bishopric of Le
Mans, Orderic. Vital. iv. 531.!: see also W. Malms. Vit. S. Aldhelm. (Wharton,

1 Defuncto Ernaldo Cenomannorum episcopo, Guillelmus rex dixit Samsoni
Bajocensi capellano suo: “ Cenomannensis episcopatus sedes suo viduata est
autistite, in qua volente Deo te nunc volo subrogare. Cenomannis a canina
rabie dicta, urbs est antiqua, et plebs ejus finitimis est procax et sanguinolenta,
dominisque suis semper contumax et rebellionis avida. Pontificales igitur
habenas tibi tradere decerno, quem a pueritia nutrivi et amavi sedulo, et nunc
inter maximos regni mei proceres sublimare desidero.” Samson respondit :
“Secundum apostolicam traditionem oportet episcopum irreprehensibilem esse.
Ego autem in omni vita mea sum valde reprehensibilis, omnibusque mentis et
corporis ante conspectum deitatis sum pollutus flagitiis, nec tantum decus con-
tingere possum, pro sceleribus meis miser et despicabilis.” Rex dixit: “ Calli-
dus es et perspicaciter vides quod tu rite peccatorem te confiteri debes. Fixam
tamen in te statui sententiam, nec a te statutum convellam, quin episcopatum
suspicias, aut alium, qui pro te presul fiat, porrigas.” His anditis gavisus
Samson ait: “ Nunc, domine mi rex, optime locutus es, et ad hoc agendum
adminiculante Deo me promptum invenies. Ecce in capella tua est quidam
pauper clericus, sed nobilis et bene morigeratus. Huiec presulatum commenda
in Dei timore, quia dignus est (ut estimo) tali honore.” Regi autem per-
cunctanti quis esset, Samson respondit; “ Hoellus dicitur et est genere Brito;
sed humilis est et revera bonus homo.” (c. 11. vol. ii. 248. ed. Le Prevost.)

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134 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

titure, which had come down to him from his Saxon
predecessors, assumed under him a new and much more
definite meaning, when it came to be interpreted by the prin-
ciples of the feudal law. But the position in which he
established himself towards the Church, is seen most clearly
in three very important “ Constitutions” mentioned by Ead-
mer,—no random acts of power, but parts of a systematic
and well-understood policy. These “innovations,” as Eadmer
calls them, were (1.) that no one might recognise a pope in
England till the king had ordered sien to be acknowledged ;
or receive letters Fea him till they had been seen by the
king; (2.) that the English Church in council assembled under
the primate, might pass no laws or canons but such as were
*‘ agreeable to "et pleasure, and first ordained by him;” (3.)
that no bishop might implead, or punish any of the king’s
vassals, even for incest, adultery, or any other such great sin,
except ‘ by the king’s precept.” *

These principles, of which we see the fruit in the following
reign, struck at once at the independence and at the legislative
and executive power of the Church, and implied her absolute
subjection to the feudal law. She was absorbed and incorpo-
rated into the feudal system at a time when it was most
important that she should stand clear of it, on ground of her
own, in evident possession of authority, underived from any
child of man; protesting against and resisting the injustice
and impurity of the world. In William’s policy the feudal
sovereign was the source of ecclesiastical as of civil authority ;
as he had his feudatory barons, so he had his feudatory
bishops; both invested with their office and dignity by him;

ii. 39.) Turold was first appointed Abbot of Glastonbury. “ Idem Turoldus,
dum tyrannidem in subjectos ageret, ad Burh (Peterborough) a rege translatus
est, abbatiam opulentam, sed quee tunc a latrunculis, duce quodam Herevardo,
infestaretur ; quia inter paludes sita erat. ‘Per splendorem Dei,’ inquit, ‘ quia
Magis se agit militem quam abbatem, inveniam ei comparem, qui assultus ejus
accipiat.’“’ Abbot Brand, Turold’s predecessor, and his Saxon monks, had

refused to acknowledge William, and were in league with Hereward. — Thierry,
book v. p, 105. Eng. Transl.

* Eadm. Hist. Nov. p. 29.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 135

both bound to him by the same oath of homage. This tie of
feudal allegiance and fealty, then the strongest bond between
man and man, had been thrown over the rulers of the Church
not only as subjects and holders of land, but as bishops ; and
by virtue of it, the king claimed from them, as of right,
feudal obedience, without reserve and without appeal, in the
discharge of their office as bishops. They were the great
Church officers of the crown, appointed to govern the Church
for the king ; and according to his wisdom and policy, to make
laws and to execute them, not by their own authority, but by
his. The last appeal was not to the law of the Gospel, but
to the customs and precedents of feudalism. The powers of
the Church were surrendered against all but the weak and
helpless; and a large body of her members, and those the
most licentious and unruly —the mass of the soldiery of the
kingdom— were avowedly withdrawn from that control and
discipline, which she was to exercise at her own discretion
and peril, without respect of persons.

Such was the condition in which the Conqueror left the
Church to his successor. He had carried out his policy without
meeting any opposition from the clergy. It is not difficult
to understand their acquiescence in it, even on the part of
such men as Lanfranc. For good certainly came of it, great
and manifest good, in a most wild and lawless time. The
strongest arm in England, the only power which could make
itself felt in such a break-up of society, was, on the whole, on
their side. Why should they, at such a distance from the
scene of conflict between the Church and the Empire on the
continent, and, moreover, so much perplexed* by its events,

* After the Emperor had set up the Antipope Guibert against Gregory VII.
at Brixen, Lanfranc could write thus to Cardinal Hugo, who wished to draw
England to the Emperor’s side. After disapproving of Hugo’s bitter language
against Gregory, he goes on: “It is as yet unknown to man, what they (Gre-
gory VII. and Guibert) are and will be in God’s sight; yet I believe that the
Emperor would not have ventured on so serious a step without good reason, or
have been able to gain so great a victory without great help from God. I do
not recommend your coming to England without first having received the King’s
leave ; for our island has not yet disavowed the former (Gregory VII.), nor
given judgment whether it ought to obey the latter. When we have heard the

K 4

136 ST, ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

—with fierce and unscrupulous Norman soldiers to deal with
on the one hand, and a jealous Anglo-Saxon population, of
whose language they were ignorant, on the other — why
should they turn it against themselves? Certain it is, that
the only voice that was raised against William’s policy
towards the English Church was Guitmund’s, a Norman
monk, whose name Anselm couples with Lanfranc’s in point
of reputation in his day.* Guitmund refused preferment
in England, on the ground that William had no right to
dispose of the English sees and abbeys against the wishes of
the people. ‘Search the Scriptures,” he said to William,
“and see by what law it is allowed, that a pastor elected by
their enemies should be placed by force over the Lord’s
flock? An ecclesiastical election ought first to be honestly
made by the faithful themselves, who are to be governed;
and then, if canonical, confirmed by the assent of fathers
and friends; if otherwise, in all charity amended.”t But
Guitmund’s boldness met with no sympathy in England or
Normandy.

It was well, perhaps, that the struggle between the English
Church and Feudalism did not fall on the days of a king
who, by the force of circumstances, bore rule in her hour
of greatest helplessness, and who, with all the foresight, poli-
tical talent, and unscrupulousness of his successors, had an
iron firmness of will which no opposition could have turned
from its purpose. ‘ He was a very stark man,” says the
Saxon Chronicle t{, ‘‘and very savage, so that no man durst
do anything against his will, He had earls in his bonds,
who had done against his will; bishops he set off their
bishoprics, abbots off their abbotries, and thanes in prisons;
and at last he did not spare his own brother Odo. Him he
set in prison.” But as it was, the Church had time to re-

case on each side, if so it happen, we shall be able to see more clearly what
ought to be done.”— Lanfranc, Ep. 59. This was in or after 1080, when Gre-
gory had been Pope for seven years. — Vide Baron, ad ann. 1080, Num. xxiii.

* Anselm, Ep. i. 16..

{ Orderic. Vital. iv. 542, (c. 8. ed, Le Prevost.)

{ Quoted in Lingard, ii. 68.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

cover during his reign from the weakness and want of tone
which prevailed before the Conquest, and from the frightful
disorders and overthrow which attended it. She had foasid
a protector and fayourer in one who might have been her
most terrible enemy.

But on the 9th Sept. 1087, the “ famous Baron,” who had
wrought greater things and caused more misery * than any of
his fellows in Europe, was “ taken away from human affairs.”
He died almost alone. Those whose attendance he most
desired, Lanfranc and Anselm, were kept from his death-bed
by distance or sickness. When his corpse had been deserted
by his children and servants, and left without covering on
the bare floor, he was indebted for his burial to an obscure
country knight, who “ for the love of God” brought his body
to Caen; and his grave in his own noble Monastery of
St. Stephen was at the moment of burial forbidden him by a
boor from whom he had of old violently taken the ground on
which it stood. His friend and coadjutor, the great arch-
bishop, great not in having founded an empire, but reformed
a Church, followed him shortly ; he had seen but too certainly
the troubles that were coming, and left their full weight for
his successor.

That successor was Anselm. He was not a man fitted
seemingly, by nature and training, for such a lot. Like
Lanfranc, he was the son of an Italian noble. He was born
at Aosta in Piedmont, where his parents lived in affluence.
His mother was a woman of warm and quiet piety ; and her
lessons early exerted a strong influence on his mind. As
a boy, he was full of the strange simple faith of childhood ;
brought up among the Alps, he “‘ used to fancy that Heaven
rested on the mountain-tops;” and, sleeping, or waking, his
thoughts were ever running on what it held. He soon

* “King William was a very wise man, and very rich, more worshipful and
strong than any of his foregangers. He was very mild to good men who loved
God, and stark beyond all bounds to those who withsaid his will... .. Truly
in his time men had mickle suffering, and very many hardships. Castles he
caused to be wrought, and poor men to be oppressed. He was so very stark.

. His rich men moaned, and the poor men murmured ; but he was so hard,
he recked not the hatred of them all.” — Saxon Chronicle, in Lingard, ii. 68. 70.

138 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

distinguished himself in the public schools and showed a
strong disposition for the life of the cloister; but his wishes
were checked by his father, and gave way at last before his
opening prospects of rank and wealth. As he grew up, his
love of religion, and even of literature, was damped by
the amusements and pursuits of his station. His mother
died early in his youth, and then “the ship of his heart,”
says his biographer* , ‘* having lost its sole anchor, drifted off
almost entirely into the waves of the world.” What seemed
to await him was the life of coarse and uneasy riot, the
authority, importance, and brawls of a village noble,—ending,
perhaps, in the death of a dog,—at the foot of the Alps. But
Providence, which had marked out for him so high a destiny,
drove him from his home and country by the unappeasable
harshness of his father. With one companion he crossed
Mont Cenis, and, after three years spent in Burgundy and
France, came to Normandy.

At the time of his arrival, all nations which spoke the Latin
tongue, say the Chronicles, were ringing with the fame of the
Abbey of Bec, in Normandy, and its Prior Lanfranc. Twenty
years before a few cells of the homeliest kind were rising
beside a mill, in the wooded valley of the Rille, not far from
Rouen. A rude old soldier, named Herluin, had with some
trouble obtained permission of his feudal lord to devote
himself and his patrimony to religion; and had retired to
this spot with his mother and a few companions, over whom
he presided as superior. All day long he was employed
in building: most of the night he spent in learning to read,
and in getting the Psalter by heart; his mother baked
for the monks, washed their clothes, and performed all
the menial offices of the house. Herluin was with his own
hands building the bakehouse of the monastery, when a
Lombard stranger applied for and received admission. This
was Lanfranc. He was the son of a nobleman at Pavia;
eminent there as a lawyer, then an exile, a travelling stu-
dent, a disappointed teacher, — at last robbed of every-
thing, and left penniless by the road side, — he had inquired

* Fadmer.

ss
>)

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 139

for the meanest monastic establishment in the neighbourhood,
and had been directed to Bec. To raise money for his
brethren, who could not even afford oil to burn in their
church at night, the Lombard had reluctantly opened a
school. He taught as none had taught in Normandy before.*
The few mean cells grew into a noble abbey, the great light
of the West, the rival of Clugny in discipline, and its
superior in learning. Lanfranc’s school was filled with
disciples of all nations, of high and low degree, laymen and
clerics; among his pupils were some of the most distinguished
continental churchmen of the time, Pope Alexander II., Ivo
of Chartres, Guitmund of Aversa +; and to archbishops and
bishops mainly trained in the cloisters of Bec, the task
was shortly to be committed of remoulding and revivifying in
England the Church of St. Augustine.

Thither among the throng of students came Anselm,
another Lombard wanderer, travelling, according to the
fashion of those days, to acquire knowledge. He soon far
outstripped his fellow-pupils; and his genius and untiring
industry gained him the especial regard of Lanfranc, who
employed him to teach under himself. Meanwhile the wish
of his boyhood revived for a religious life: but such a step
was not to be taken hastily, and long and anxiously did
he think about it, and about the best plan of such a life.
Should he become a hermit? or live under rule and vow on
his patrimony, dispensing it all, for the benefit of the poor? or
enter a monastery? If he entered a monastery, Bec was the
most natural place for him; but his unconscious ambition
suggested, (so he confessed afterwards, ) that at Bec he would
be lost, and be of no use while Lanfranc taught there.
Clugny, again, was as strict as Bec, but discouraged learning.
At last he put his case unreservedly into the hands of
Lanfrane and the Archbishop of Rouen. Under their advice
he resolved to devote himself to a monastic life; and at length
assumed the habit at Bec.

Three years after his admission, the virtual government

* Order, Vit. iv. c. 6. (ii. 210. ed. Le Prevost.)
{ Gallia Christiana, xi, 219.

140 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

of the monastery passed into his hands, on his succeeding
Lanfranc as prior: and fifteen years later, on the death of

Herluin, the simple-hearted and venerable founder, he was |

elected abbot.* Bec lost nothing under his rule of what it
had gained under Lanfranc. Very different in character and
cast of mind from his great predecessor, he worked in the
same cause, and with equal earnestness and success. His
monastery still continued one of the chief centres of religious
and intellectual activity, to England, Normandy, and even
France; awakening thought, and restoring a practical and
' strict sense of Christian duty, in their wild and unsettled
population, by its own example of holiness, and by the
numerous pupils which it was continually sending forth from
its school. The pursuits to which Lanfranc had given the
first impulse by his clear and eloquent lectures, and his great
erudition, Anselm carried forward by his freshness and vigour
of thought, and his native genius for refined metaphysical
speculation. He governed his monastery with skill; no such
easy task, in days when the abbot had to exercise more
personal superintendence and more severity over grown men
of all ages, than the master of a large school would now ven-
ture upon towards his boys. Lanfranc was famous for his
powers of government: Anselm, by his clear insight into
character, his patience and firmness, and his winning affec-
tionateness, had as much hold on his monks as Lanfrane had
gained by his knowledge of the world, and his forcible and
commanding character. ‘'To those in health,” says Kadmer,
*¢ Anselm was a father, to the sick a mother.”

He seemed to have found the sphere for which he was in-
tended. In the quiet of his monastery, his subtle and active
intellect could pursue without interruption that striking line
of speculation, full of devotion, though so abstract and me-
thodical, the love of which haunted him like a passion}, and
which began a new era in Latin theology. He had pupils
round him, whose minds were kindling at his own; and
friends to whom he could open his heart with the frankness

* Admitted, 1059; prior, 1063 ; abbot, 1078. Gall. Christ. xi. 223, 4.
{7 Eadmer, Vit. S. Anselmi, p. 6.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 141

and warmth which were such strong features of his character
— features of which we see so much in his letters, and which
would almost have seemed softness, except in one under such
stern and strong self-discipline. And further, the presence
and society of a large body of men, all of them more or less
sincerely engaged in efforts after a religious life, dependent
on his care, and necding his succour and counsel, gave
infinitely varied play to a character peculiarly delicate and
skilful in its appreciation and treatment of others. He found
also in his monastery what answered to and satisfied his deep
feeling of devotion, in those services of unwearied praise and
prayer, and those opportunities for self-recollection, by which
men were permitted in those days to realise, in so vivid a
manner, the Communion of Saints, and the presence of the
Invisible.

His influence reached far beyond the walls of his cloister.
His high and self-devoted religion, and his name as a writer
and teacher, told even upon the world without; and to these
he added popular qualities of a singularly engaging kind.
His striking reality and simplicity of character, set off by a
strong dash of humour, his good sense and considerateness,
his graceful condescension to the weak and poor, his gentle-
ness and evenness of temper, veiling such unquestionable
seriousness of purpose, and sternness towards himself, won
upon all hearts, even that of the iron-minded Conqueror.
* When he used to teach or give advice,” says Eadmer,
‘he was especially careful to be most plain-spoken, avoiding
all pomp and generalities, and illustrating his meaning as best
he could, by any homely or familiar example. All men
rejoice at his converse; he gained the love of young and old,
of men and women, of rich and poor, and all were glad to
minister to him; of so frank and glad a spirit was he to all,
and so readily did he enter into their ways, as far as he might
without sin. He was the darling of France and Normandy,
known and welcome also in England.” * After his first visit
to England “ there was no earl or countess, or great person
there, who did not think that they had missed favour in the

* Vit. Anselm. p.11. Hist. Nov. p. 33,

142 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

sight of God if they haply had not had an opportunity of:
rendering some service to Anselm, Abbot of Bec.” *

Such was the course to which Anselm seemed to be called;
to the calm and meditative life of the cloister, where he might
influence his generation by his example and writings, and by
the minds which he formed there; to be the counsellor and
doctor of his age, calling forth seriousness around him; to be
the father of a great religious brotherhood; and, in the
world, to be an example of primitive saintliness, carrying
blessing and commanding veneration and love, wherever he
appeared.

Anselm was twenty-seven} when he finally resolved to
‘leave all,” and entered for good on what seemed to be his
work in life. He had done for ever with the world, with its
consolations and joys; as he thought, with its storms also.
Thirty-three years of peace were granted him, during which
he served God and his brethren in gladness of heart, without
thought or fear of change. But they were only to be a long
respite. The last of them found him still at Bec, an old man,
expecting to die there; but in reality with the great work
and trial of his life, not yet begun nor looked for. .

In the year 1092 William Rufus had been four years on
the throne, and had let loose feudalism, in all its lawlessness,
upon England. The hearty frankness, high spirit, and gene-
rosity of his youth, had degenerated, especially since the
death of Lanfranc, from whom he had received his education
and knighthood {, into a brutal passion for the wildest de-
bauchery, and a savage impatience of every kind of restraint.
Not that even now he was without the remains of what
might have been a fine character; gleams of nobleness and
generosity broke out at times in the midst of his boisterous
orgies, and his fiercest bursts of rage. In his rough and
cruel merriment he did not want for humour, which seems:
even sometimes to have been a veil, under which he ex-
pressed self-reproach. But he was frantic with his excessive
power. ‘ The truth must be told,” is the reluctant avowal of
William of Malmsbury, who can scarcely help making him a

* Vit. Anselm. p. 11. + Gall. Christ. xi. 223.
+ Will. Malmsb. 1. iv. § 305.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 143

hero, and who would be inclined to think, “ if our Christianity
allowed ” the doctrine of metempsychosis, that the soul of
Julius Cesar had reappeared in William;—‘‘the truth
must be told; he feared God very little, and men not at all.” *

His government was a full-blown specimen of that worldly
and cruel system which was in various ways endeavouring to
undermine the power which Christianity still maintained over
society ; a government which, while it allowed any amount
of wickedness and oppression among the powerful—the barons
and their dependents—repressed with a strong hand and un-
sparing severity any breach of the “king’s peace” among the
poor and weak. William,” says Ordericus +, a contempo-
rary, “took great delight in military distinctions, and showed
their possessors much favour for worldly pomp’s sake. He
took no care to defend the country-people against the soldiers,
and suffered their property to be laid waste with impunity
by his retainers and armed followers. He was of a strong
memory and ardent will, both to good and toevil......
He was terrible in his vengeance against thieves and
petty robbers, and with a high hand enforced unbroken
peace throughout all his dominions; all the inhabitants of
his realm he either won over by his bounty, or kept down
by his valour and terror, so that no one dared to mutter a
word against him.” Appeal to the Church was yain;
William, who openly and avowedly hated religion, trampled
upon her, and plundered her to support his profuse expendi-
ture, which was on the same wild scale as everything else in
his character. The higher clergy suffered, and heard the
groans of the poor and defenceless in silence. However
some of the best of them may have been ashamed of their
feebleness, they all feared to measure their strength with so
rough an antagonist, and commit themselves to an untried
and perilous struggle, in which even the highest and most
undaunted faith could scarcely hope to be allowed to witness
its own victory.

William therefore proceeded to treat Church property and
offices as his own. In his father’s time, the revenues which

* Will. Malmsb. iv. § 320, 312.
T Ordericus Vitalis, viii. 680. (c. 8. iii, 315. ed. Le Prevost.)

144 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

accrued to a see or abbey, during a vacancy, were handed

over in full to the next holder; the appointment to the

offices, though almost always made by the crown, was yet
looked on as a trust. But William Rufus asserted the king’s
full and exclusive right of property in every possession of
the Church, and he acted systematically on this claim. As
soon as a church became vacant, a king’s commissioner went
down and took possession, and it was either disposed of to
the highest bidder, for the king’s profit, or kept vacant al-
together, the revenue going meafwhile to the Exchequer.*
Church benefices were treated as if they were simply royal
domains, to be granted or withheld at the king’s pleasure.

It is not however to William alone that the credit of these
proceedings isdue. ‘The man whose influence was supreme in
England during most of his reign, and who was the contriver
and agent of these and other financial measures of the same
sort, was a low-born Norman ecclesiastic, named Ralph Pas-
saflabere, or, as he was surnamed, Flambard, the Firebrand —
personage whom his contemporaries seemed to have looked
a at with a mixture of horror, indignation, and amusement.
What Cleon was to the Athenian democracy, Ralph Flam-
bard was to the feudal king. By his talent for coarse and
boisterous jokes, and his noisy and unfailing merriment, he
had become William’s chief boon companion; but the king
soon found in him a servant as fierce-tempered, unscrupulous,
and fearless as himself, and possessed of far superior talents
for intrigue and legal chicane. Impudent, cunning, and
ready, with a tongue which nothing could silence, and ac-
tivity and resolution which set at nought all opposition, he
simply laid himself out to enrich his master. He was placed
at the head of the Exchequer, and rose to be Justiciary of
England and Bishop of Durham. In these high offices no
class was secure from him, and he cared as little for the
hatred of the Court as he did for the curses of the poor.

* “ Videres insuper quotidie, spreta servorum Dei religione, quosque nefan-
dissimos hominum regias pecunias exigentes per claustra monasterii torvo et
minaci vultu procedere, hinc inde precipere, minas intentare, dominationem
potentiamque suam in immensum ostentare.”—— Eadm. Hist, NV. p. 34.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 145

Among William's proud barons, the upstart cleric was prouder
and more overbearing than they; and his address, boldness,
and good-fortune, carried him safe through their plots against
him.* Even after William’s death, in spite of the universal
detestation in which he was held, in spite of Henry’s per-
sonal hatred of him and the part he had taken against
Henry, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Pope, he contrived to retain his bishopric till his death; and
when confined to it, his restlessness and uncontrollable energy
found a vent in great works, for the defence of his princi-
pality and the adornment of his cathedral.+ He carried out
his plans against the Church with heart and spirit: —* I
robbed the Church, and overbore her customs,” said he,
many years after, when laid a dying penitent before the
high altar of Durham; “I did all this not from stress of
poverty, but from wanton lust of gain. My wish to do
mischief was greater than my power.” Into this man’s
hands, as king’s commissioner, had the see of Canterbury
fallen, since the death of Lanfranc; and in spite of every
remonstrance, William refused to fill it. Men looked on
indignantly —bishops, barons, and people, for mixed or dif-
ferent reasons—at this new and unheard of injury; to see
the “mother church of all England” lying in widowhood —
the sacred throne of St. Austin, “the stay of Christian
religion in the realm,” under the feet of Ralph Flambard.
Such was the state of things in England, when, at the
earnest request of Hugh le Loup, Earl of Chester, one of
the most powerful and magnificent of the Conqueror’s barons,
Anselm crossed from Normandy. The earl was a specimen
—and a favourable one—of that wild and terrible aris-
tocracy at whose mercy the Church found herself, and whom
she had to reclaim or combat. He was entrusted with the
defence of the western frontier against the Welsh, and he
well maintained the name of the Norman sword by his fierce-

* Monach. Dunelm. in Wharton, i. 706—708.

{ “ Taliter impulsu quodam impatiente otii, de opere transibat ad opus, nil
reputans factum, nisi factis nova jam facienda succederent.” — Monachus
Dunelm. in Wharton, i. 708.

L

146 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

ness and cruelty. A keen and tried soldier, bred up from
his youth in bodily exercises, and in the midst of danger and
license, —lawless and undisciplined, yet generous, — with
arms in his hands, and absolutely uncontrolled by law,
opinion, or force,—he was what might be expected from
such a training; heedless of anything but his caprice, self-
indulgence, or amusement, and reckless of the means by
which he compassed them; hearty, jovial, and open-handed
among his boisterous followers,squickly irritated, and utterly
careless about life and suffering; yet not without a wild
nobleness and freedom of character, and a rude and imperfect
faith. |

«* He was a lover of the world and its pomps,” says his con-
temporary Ordericus*, “and accounted them the highest
portion of human bliss; he loved sports and luxuries—jesters
horses and dogs. He used daily to ride over and lay waste
his own lands, caring less for priests and husbandmen than
for fowlers and huntsmen. He pampered his appetite, till he
became so corpulent that he could scarcely walk; he cared
not what he gave away, nor what he took. He was always
surrounded with an enormous company of retainers, and his
hall was ever in an uproar with a numerous and noisy
crew of boys of high and low degree. He entertained also a
great number of honourable clerks and knights, whom he
delighted to have about him, to share his labours as well as
his riches.”

The chaplain of this rough baronial court, a priest named
Gerold, whom Hugh had brought with him from Avranches,
presented a strange contrast of high saintliness and devotion,
in the midst of the turbulence and licentiousness of the
household where he ministered. Yet he was not without
influence and weight in it; and many, we are told, listened
with attention to the histories of the holy warriors in the
Old Testament, and the legends of the martyr-soldiers of the
Church — St. George and St. Sebastian, St. Maurice the
leader of the Thebzan legion, St. Eustace and St. William —

* Orderic. Vital. p. 598, 522. (1. vi. 2. p. 4. 1. iv. 7. p. 219. ed. Le Provost.) }

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 147

by which he endeavoured to reclaim his rude hearers to seri-
ousness and self-restraint.

The Earl of Chester was, in his way, a patron and friend
of religious men. He had an old-standing friendship with
Anselm, and there can be little doubt that it was with the
view of procuring his election to the primacy, that he sent
for him to England, to superintend—so he said—a new
monastery which he had just founded in his county.
Such certainly was the talk of the day; and Anselm had
such misgivings on the subject, that he at first positively
refused to go; and it was not till Earl Hugh, who had mean-
while been attacked with a dangerous sickness, and earnestly
besought his counsels in the hour of need, had pledged him-
self on his honour that the reports about Anselm’s intended
promotion were unfounded, that he was induced to visit
England. He was received with honour by the king and
the court: at Canterbury, the clergy and people met him
with enthusiastic welcome as their future archbishop; but
he immediately left the town, and nothing more was said or
done for the present to make him expect the primacy. Yet
when he had accomplished the immediate objects of his visit,
he found himself still detained, and the king refused his
permission for him to return to Normandy.

It is not easy to understand William’s motives for detain-
ing Anselm. Whatever might have been the wishes of the
court, he certainly had no present intention of filling up the
archbishopric. When Anselm’s holiness was praised in his
presence, and the speaker remarked that “the Abbot of Bec
had no wishes for anything earthly,” William added scoff-
ingly, “* No, not even for the archbishopric;” “ but * by the
Holy Face of Lucca,” he continued fiercely, “ other arch-
bishop besides me there shall be none.”

He had occasion, however, soon after to change his mind.
When he kept his court at Gloucester, at Christmas, 1092,
his great men had petitioned, “that at least he would give

* “ Per Sanctum Vultum de Luca,” —his usual oath. The “Holy Face”
was a wooden image of our Lord.— Vide Will. Malmsb. ed. Hardy, p. 499. note.
It is still exposed on certain festivals at Lucca.

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148 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

leave that prayers should be offered up throughout England,
that God would be pleased to put it into the king’s heart
to institute a worthy pastor to the church of Canterbury.”
William, though highly offended at the petition, granted it.
Let the Church ask what she pleases,” he said, “I shall
not cease to work my will.”

Shortly after this he sickened; his danger became immi-
nent; in a moment of remorse and terror, he was induced,
among other acts of penitence and amendment, to fill up the
archbishopric: and he nominated Anselm.

With our modern notions about preferment, we can scarcely
enter into the scene that followed, when the moment of trial
which Anselm had for some time foreseen, without the power
of escaping from it, was at length arrived, and he saw himself,
after a life of quiet, on the point of being cast forth in his old
age to buffet with the storms of the world —in those days, a
wild and rough one. Many years before this, when only
Prior of Bec, and complaining of his inadequacy for his office,
Maurilius, Archbishop of Rouen, had forewarned him that he
must expect to be called to yet heavier burdens, and had
solemnly charged him on his “ holy obedience,” not to refuse
them. In compliance with this command, he had become
abbot. But he was now summoned to be the restorer of the
English Church, and the colleague of William Rufus in its
government*; to make head against a state of things which
the English bishops, frightfully evil as many of them felt
it to be, had not the heart to resist. He grew pale and
trembled, when he heard the acclamations which announced
the king’s election. When the bishops came to lead him to
the king, to receive investiture, he refused to go: “ he was
too old,” he said, “ and knew nothing of business ; —and fur-
ther, his allegiance, his canonical obedience, his counsel and
services, were already vowed to others.” He was dragged

* “ Aratrum Ecclesiam perpendite. Hoc aratrum in Anglia duo boves czteris
precellentes regendo trahunt, et trahendo regunt, Rex videlicet, et Archiepis-
copus Cantuariensis: iste seculari justitia et imperio, ille divina doctrina et
magisterio.” — Anselm’s address to the Bishops and Nobles at Gloucester ; in
Eadm. Hist. Nov. p. 36.

i

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 149

into the king’s sick chamber. William, hard man as he was, was
moved even to tears: but his bitter entreaties to Anselm to
save him from dying in the guilt of sacrilege, with the arch-
bishopric still in his hands, and the angry remonstrances of
the bystanders, that Anselm was troubling the king’s dying
hours, and betraying the cause of the Church, were all in
vain. Anselm refused to receive the archbishopric. ‘ Might
it have been the will of God,” said he afterwards of those
moments, ** I would gladly have died on the spot.” In his
distress of mind, he burst into an agony of tears, and blood
gushed from his nostrils. The king became impatient. The
old man was dragged to the bed-side, and his right arm held
out by the bishops to receive from the king the pastoral staff.
But he kept his hand firmly clenched: they tried by main
force to wrench it open, and when the pain they put him to
caused him to ery out, the bishops held the staff against his
still closed hand. He was borne forth, rather than led, with
hymns and acclamations, to a neighbouring church, crying
out, “ It is nought that ye are doing, it is nought that ye are
doing.” “It would have been difficult to discover,” writes
he afterwards to his monks at Bec*, “ whether madmen were
dragging along one in his senses, or the sane a madman, save
that they were chanting, and I looking more like a corpse than
a living man, with amazement and anguish: and on the
afternoon of the same day, when I had time to recollect my-
self, and to realise your affection, and the burden imposed on
me, sorrow —so unusual with me-—overcame my reason to
such a degree, that people thought I was dying or fainting,
and brought holy water to sprinkle me, or make me drink it.”
In spite of what had passed, he persisted in refusing to
acknowledge the validity of his appointment ; and the matter
was, meanwhile, referred to the decision of those to whose
obedience and service he was already bound—the Archbishop

of Rouen, the Duke of Normandy, and the monastery of Bee.

Their consent was gained, not without difficulty on the part
of the monks of Bec. We give the letter he received from
the archbishop, as a specimen of the sober and measured tone

* Anselm, Epist. iii. 1.
Ls

150 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

with which serious men in those days addressed a brother
who was called to a high office in the Church—a tone, not
of congratulation for honours won, but of grave and sub-
dued sympathy for a comrade going to his post of increased
hazard and toil.

“ Brother William, archbishop, to his lord and friend Anselm ;
God’s blessing and his own.

“ T have considered long and carefully, as was due in so im-
portant a matter, the subject of the king’s letter and yours, and I
have asked the advice of my own friends and yours upon it. The
wish on all sides is, were it possible, to keep you still among us,
and yet not to do anything to oppose the Divine will. But as
matters stand, both cannot be fulfilled, and we, therefore, as is
fitting and right, submit our will to His; and in the name of God
and St. Peter, and of all my friends and yours, who love you for
God’s sake, I command you to undertake the pastoral care of the
Church of Canterbury, and to receive, according to the custom of
the Church, the episcopal benediction, and thenceforward to watch
over the welfare of your sheep, by Divine providence, as we
believe, committed to you. Farewell, my beloved.” *

Anselm’s nomination took place at Gloucester, on the
first Sunday in Lent, 1093 (March 6.); but it was not till the
autumn of the same year, that he was at length prevailed
upon by William’s fair promises to undertake the primacy.
He did homage f, according to custom, and on the 4th of
December he was consecrated at Canterbury by the Arch-
bishop of York, in the presence of nearly all the bishops of
England.

At his consecration, when, according to the Roman ritual,
the book of the Gospels was opened at random, and laid on
his shoulders, the passage which turned up was the following:
— “He bade many, and sent his servant at supper time to
say to them that were bidden, Come, for all things are
now ready. And they all with one consent began to make
excuse.” t Men took this as an omen of the course of his

* “ Valete, viscera mea.”

+ “ Homo regis factus est.” — Eadm. Hist. Nov. p. 37.
t St. Luke, xiv. 16—18.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. Lon

Episcopate. It was no untrue augury. He stood on
the verge of twelve years of anxious and unwearied service,
to be repaid by unsympathising lukewarmness, or fierce per-
secution.

The following year witnessed, in England, the first move-
ments in the great struggle between the Church and the tem-
poral power, which was to last in various forms, and with
various fortunes, long after Anselm and his antagonists were
removed from it. With the revival of strictness, intelligence,
and sense of duty, which had taken place in the Norman
Church since the middle of the century, it was become ina-
evitable. Such wild folly and wickedness as that of William
and his court, must, sooner or later, have called forth rebuke
and systematic opposition ; and feudal barons were not men to
submit tamely to rebuke and opposition from priests and
monks. The contest must begin, openly and in earnest,
as soon as any churchman should have heart and faith to
realise and fulfil his duty: Anselm had foreseen this, and
that it must begin with him.

He had done what he could with a good conscience to
avoid the primacy, and he had been overruled. But those
powers which he had not sought, which had been forced into
his hand, he was not going to wield in vain or feebly.
William found, that instead of an unpractical recluse, whose
natural force had been abated by his monastic life, and who
was incapable of energetic and decisive action, a bishop had
ascended the throne of Canterbury, who could deal with
men, and who, when once his path was plain, knew neither
despair nor fear. Anselm had not left his Norman monas-
tery, and altered in his old age, in anxiety and sorrow, his
whole course of life, to become a mitred cypher or tool in the
impure and boisterous court of William Rufus. The agony
of change cence over, he had calmly mastered what he was
henceforth called to, and prepared himself for the worst.
« From the first,” says Kadmer, “he perceived and foretold,
that many would be the troubles he should have to suffer
during his pontificate. Coming, therefore, to a new, and
to him an unwonted way of serving God, according to

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152 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

Solomon’s precept, he stood in fear, and prepared his soul for
temptation, knowing that all who will live godly in Christ,
must needs suffer tribulation.”

He had given fair warning. Before he would accept the
primacy, he laid before William, explicitly and in the pre-
sence of witnesses, the conditions on which alone he could
consent to take it. These were, that the property of the see
should be restored in full, and without trouble; that the
obedience which, as Abbot of Bec, he had vowed to Pope
Urban, whom William had not yet acknowledged, should not
be questioned; and, thirdly, “I will,” said he, “ that in
those things that pertain to God and Christian religion, thou
trust thyself to my counsel before all others; and as I am
willing to have thee for my earthly lord and defender, so
that thou shouldest have me for thy spiritual father and
soul’s guardian.” He had small hopes that his counsel would
be taken. ‘* The untamed bull to whom ye have yoked me,”
said he to the bishops who were so eager for his election at
Gloucester, ‘ will gore and trample upon the old and feeble

sheep, his yoke-fellow. And,” he continued, “when he

has crushed me, of yourselves there will be no one who will
dare oppose him in anything; and then, rest assured, he will
not scruple at his pleasure to trample upon you also.”

His anticipations were soon realised. When the contest
began, he had to fight alone. Of the English higher clergy,
two bishops only * seem to have shown him any sympathy ;
the rest either stood aloof, or openly opposed him. From
some of them this was to be expected;— from men like
John of Bath, who had purchased his see as a good invyest-
ment of capital, or the intriguing courtier William of Durham,
the king’s favourite, or Herbert the Wheedler (Losinga) + of

* Gundulf of Rochester, the archbishop’s “ ever new and true friend” (Ep. iv.
44.); and Ralph of Chichester, a man of blunt humour, of great simplicity of
life, of unflinching courage, and of apostolic zeal in preaching, and visiting his
diocese : “ Proceritate corporis insignis, sed et animi efficacia famosus, qui con-
tuitu sacerdotalis officii Willielmo II. in faciem pro Anselmo restitit.” — Will.
Malmsb. de Gest. Pontiff. ii. p. 257.

¢ “ Quod nomen ei ars adulationis impegerat.” — Vide Will. Malmsb. Gest.
Reg, iv. § 338—340.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 153

Norwich. Yet, acting with these men, were several of
Lanfranc’s bishops; men selected from the Norman monas-
teries for their earnestness and ability, loved and honoured in
their generation. But even these remained neutral, or sided
with the world, and that, in the person of William Rufus,
against the cause of the Church, though maintained by Anselm.

It is not necessary to suppose them more than usually weak
or selfish in order to explain their conduct. They had but
ordinary clear-sightedness and courage, in a time which re-
quired more. The great revolution which had been working
for years on the continent was at last coming on in the farthest
West; and they were not yet ready for it. With much of
earthly alloy, with much also of keen and genuine sensibility
to the heavenly calling of the Church, the conviction was
fast spreading that the rights and powers which had been
tacitly yielded to feudalism, must at all hazards be reclaimed.
But, in times like these, when new or forgotten opinions are
gradually forming themselves under old ones, when new
principles are silently gathering way, there are but few who
from the first desecry what is approaching, and master in time
the true position and drift of things. Most men go on as
usual, unconscious of the powers that are awake and abroad,
secretly stirring society. Custom is the stay and guide of
life, and to realise change as a fact is hard. And even when
it is in itself desirable, few feel sufficient confidence in them-
selves, to warrant it to their own minds that the time is
come for moving. It was a new thing for the English bishops
to see a deliberate and resolute opposition to the king; a new
and hard prospect, to make up their minds to a life of conflict.
Probably there was not one of Anselm’s principles, which
they would have denied in the abstract; but they had not
realised them as he had, and could only look at them as, under
their circumstances at least, unpractical and romantic. They
had been brought up under William the Conqueror’s system ;
under it they had seen cathedrals raised, monasteries restored,
the majesty of the church and the dignity of her prelates
honoured by the world. And whatever evils and abuses ex-
isted under it, a desperate conflict with the king would scarcely

154 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

seem the most likely way to mend them. Moreover, Lanfranc,
still the greatest name in England, the restorer of the English
Church, under whom the best of her bishops had been trained,
had given, as far as we can see, his countenance and hearty
concurrence to the Conqueror’s general policy towards the
Church.* This may explain in some measure the part which
the bishops took in the struggles of Anselm’s episcopate. So
it is however,—it was not till after his death, that the rulers
of the English Church acknowledged him as their champion.

The storm, which Anselm had looked for, soon broke.
Symptoms of it had shown themselves even before his con-
secration. On the very day of his enthronement at Canter-
bury, the joy of the people was disturbed by the appearance
of the hateful and dreaded Ralph Flambard, who came to
institute a suit against the archbishop in the king’s name.
And they were soon irreconcileably separated.

William’s extortions from the clergy, heavy and cruel as
they were, had been submitted to tamely; and he treated
their remonstrances as the feeble murmurs of men who were
too selfish to resist his injustice in earnest. Thus the -
money of the Church was squandered, to secure his capricious
favour, and support his wastefulness. Grievous, too, as the
burden was to the higher clergy, they were not the chief
sufferers. It was on the oppressed tenantry of the Church,
from whom the money had to be wrung, and on her depen-
dents and pensioners, that the tyranny fell most bitterly ; on
the poor who found refuge in the monasteries, or were sup-
ported by their alms; on the houseless, the sick, and the
stranger.

Anselm, on his consecration, had with difficulty raised
500 marks on his wasted estates, for a present to William,

* During his contest with Henry I., Anselm thus writes to Gundulf :—“ Some
evil-disposed persons in their ill-nature have put a false meaning on my letter
to the king ; as if I boasted of having always kept God’s law, and accused the
king’s father and Archbishop Lanfranc of having lived without regard to it.
Certainly the wit of these men is too fine, or else too slender. What I say is,
that things were done, in their day, by the king’s father and Archbishop Lan-
franc — both of them great and religious men — which J cannot do at this time
according to God’s will, or without peril of my soul’s salvation.” — Anselm, Ep.
ly. 44,

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 155

who was in want of money for one of his Norman wars.
The king thought the sum too small, and, as his wont
was when he was offended, refused it. Anselm went to
him and pressed him to accept it;—-though small, it was
offered freely, nor would it be the last;—but he inti-
mated plainly, that he would not fall in with the king’s
system of extortion. ‘“ Asa friend,” he said, “you may do
what you like with me and mine; on the footing of a slave
neither me nor mine shall you have.” ‘ Keep your money
and foul tongue to yourself; I have enough for myself; go, get
you gone,” was the king’s answer, in his rough and broken
way.* Anselm left him. He thought, says Eadmer, of the
words of the Gospel, which had been read on the day when
he first entered his cathedral, “No man can serve two
masters.” No one now, at least,” he said, “can accuse me
ofsimony. The present which I meant for him shall go now,
not to him, but to Christ’s poor, for the benefit of his soul.”
He tried, however, once more to regain the king’s favour,
but he was told that the only way was to double his present ;
about this he was firm, and he left the court in disgrace.

William was beyond measure irritated at this resolute
opposition from a clergyman,—an old feeble monk, —one,
too, whom he himself had in a moment of weakness placed
in the position to annoy him: but nothing was done for the
present to molest Anselm. He held on his course, discharging
the duties of his office; in the country, living among his
tenants, and writing on theology; at court, preaching against
luxury and effeminate fashions, and refusing absolution to
the disobedient; doing whatever he could to repair the
mischiefs of the last six years. But his single efforts were
vain against the frightful license which prevailed, and the
other bishops kept aloof from him. His only hope was a
synod. Could a council be summoned, men might speak
and act in concert, who would not act separately. The
court was at Hastings, waiting for a wind to carry over the

* Will. Malmsb., De Gest. Reg. p. 504., “ titubantia lingue notabilis, maxime
cum ira succresceret ;” which Rob. of Glouc. paraphrases, p. 414. :—

“ Reinable ne was he nought of tongue, but of speech hastyf (hasty),
Boffing ” (7. e. spluttering), “ and most when he was in wrath or in strife.”

156 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

king to Normandy; and the bishops had been summoned
thither to give him their blessing when he sailed. Anselin
resolved to make one more effort to move William. He went
to him, and solemnly laid before him the state of things in
England: “ Christian religion,” he said, ‘* had well nigh
perished among the people, and the land was become almost a
Sodom,—the only remedy was in a council of the Church.”
William refused to hear of it. Anselm then entreated him at
least to appoint abbots to the vacant and disorganised mon-
asteries. ‘ What are they to you?” was the fierce answer;
«‘ the abbeys, are they not mine? May I not do what I please
with them, as you do with your manors?” ‘* Yours they are,”
said Anselm, “ to protect, but not to lay waste; for they belong
to God, —to maintain his servants, not to support your wars.”
‘«‘ Your predecessor dared not have held such language to my
father,” was the reply; go, I will do nothing for you.”
Anselm retired, and consulted the bishops. ‘They could
suggest no other advice that that of purchasing the king’s
favour. The archbishop indignantly rejected it; for the
honour of the Church,—in justice to his poor tenants,—on
mere grounds of policy, he could not listen to so unworthy an
expedient. My vassals,” said he, “have been plundered
and made a prey since Lanfranc’s death, and I have nothing
to give them: shall I further go on to flay them alive?” The
bishops recommended him to give at least the 500 marks
which he had originally offered; “No,” said he, ‘he has
refused it once —it is gone to the poor now.”

William was furious when this was reported to him.
“‘ Go tell him,” was his message, “ that I hated him yesterday:
henceforth I will hate him daily more and more. Father
and Archbishop he shall be to me no longer. Let him not
wait here to give me his blessing. I will cross without it.”

Such was the opening of the great trial of strength between
the Church and feudalism in England. When opposite
principles, which have been for some time silently growing
up together in society, at length come into collision, they do
not usually meet at first, except in a confused and partial
manner. The war begins with skirmishes about petty posts,

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 157

with disputes about trifles, and quarrels seemingly personal.
Conflicting tendencies touch each other and struggle in their
distant results. In time, things clear: issues show them-
selves more distinctly, and are reduced into definite and
tangible questions ; —reasons, given and answered, bring up
new views of things, disengage and disentangle what was
misunderstood or dimly seen, in men’s own position, and that
of their opponents; and so the main battle is pushed farther
and farther back on those great points, upon which the whole
movement rests and centres. This apparently petty dispute
about 500 marks, —involving, as it did, very sacred principles
of that Christian law which was committed to the Church’s
keeping, and for the observance of which the Church, when-
ever she has understood her true position, has always made
herself responsible,—led on, by a series of close and obvious
consequences, to the opening of those great questions between
the spiritual and temporal powers,— questions among the
highest that can engage men’s thoughts,— which, even in our
own day, remain unsettled.

Phere was enough in what had passed, to open the eyes
of all parties to the state of things with which they had
to deal: to make it clear to Anselm, that if the law and
powers of the Church were to continue among the most solemn
realities of society, her independence must be at once and
unequivocally asserted in the face of all England: and to
William, that the Archbishop was resolved at all hazards to
make that effort.

There are more than 700 years, with their burden of
events — of sins and their punishments — between us and
St. Anselm: and this vast interval of time, with the fears
and jealousies which are its legacy, make it necessary to say a
word, not in defence or excuse of his line of conduct, for that
it needs not, but in explanation of it. For in maintaining
the claims of the spiritual power, he maintained them, as
involved and expressed in the claims of the Pope: and this
at once prejudices his cause in modern eyes. In the present
unhealthy and shattered state of Christendom, we people
past history with phantasms, and colour it with hues, which

=

158 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

belong to our own days. Here in England, to have at any
time supported the cause of the popes, shuts a man out from
sympathy, and even justice. But without going into the
doctrinal part of the question, it is plain that we cannot speak
of the Western Church of the eleventh century, as if its
circumstances and history were the same as those of the same
Church in the nineteenth. The union of European Chris-
tendom under the Pope was the arrangement which had
lasted under God’s providence ever since the barbarians had
been Christianised ; it was the dispensation which was natural
and familiar to men—the only one they could imagine—a
dispensation, moreover, under which religion had achieved
its conquests. The notion of being independent of the see
of St. Peter was one which was never found among the
thoughts of a religious man, even asa possibility ; which never
occurred even to an irreligious one, except as involving dis-
obedience and rebellion. We would have people reflect,
who shrink from looking with favour on any person or any
policy which strengthened the see of Rome, that there was a
time when the authority of the popes was no controverted
dogma— when it was as much a matter of course, even to
those who opposed its exercise — as much an understood and
received point, as the primacy of Canterbury, and the king’s
supremacy, is with us: and that in such times, men fought
for the Church, as they must do always, under the forms —
it may be temporary or faulty ones—2in which her cause
came into their hands. We cannot conceive how the keenest
and most jealous Protestant can refuse to admit as much as
this, when he calmly realises, that what is history to him,
was the unknown future, or the confused and hurried present
to other men. And moreover, supposing the state of things
we are speaking of to have been as corrupt and disordered
as he deems it, we have but little right to judge those who
worked with faith and a high heart under a faulty traditional
system, which involved and upheld unity in the Church,
when we acquiesce so easily in our state of division and iso-
lation from the great body of believers. Nor was it only
custom and association which bound men in those days to

-

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 159

the order of things under which they had been born; what-
ever evil there may have been in it, there was also good, on
a great and noble scale, to which they were keenly alive.

The unearthly origin of the Church, its unity and essential
independence, the superiority of its claims to those of any
power of this world —the idea of the Church as the “ kingdom
of heayen,”— a universal spiritual empire; all this found an
adequate memorial and expression in the Papacy. In those
times, men could not conceive of a law, which had not a person
to administer it; they could not realise an authority or power
which had not its representative: and they saw in the Pope,
not merely the type, but also the real and highest earthly
organ of a power not of this world : — not the symbol only,
but the divinely-ordained guardian and minister of the great
law of unity. Add to this, what is not matter of theory or
doctrine, but a fact of history, that in the time of which we
speak, the cause of the Popes was that of religion and holiness.
With whatever amount of mistake, misdoing, or corruption
among its supporters — however feebly they may often have
realised their own principles — it was based on faith in the
Unseen; it resisted and rebuked the world; it set a true value
on the things of time. It is no wonder then,—it would bea
strange thing had it been otherwise, — that such men as St.
Anselm should have been found in its ranks.

Certainly nothing so hampered the free working of the
lawless and arbitrary spirit of feudalism, as the existence of
this system in the Church. Nations and their rulers could not
feel that moral irresponsibility which they have since gained.
They were members of Christendom, as well as distinct poli-
tical bodies; united as Christians to others, and accountable
as Christians to the whole Chureh. There was a standard
recognised by all, higher than that of political expediency ; a
commonly acknowledged law, able to reach and visit crimes
which national laws were ready to screen, or were too weak
to punish. ‘There was an appeal from all earthly tribunals
to one, not merely higher, but different in kind. An appeal
to the See of Rome was not only virtually an appeal to the

160 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

whole of Christendom, it was also an appeal to the judgment-
seat of our Lord.

It was to break loose from the restraints imposed by the
still real unity of the Church, that the feudal princes opposed
so vigorously the power of the Popes. It was not that they
resisted or doubted their claim to be the divinely appointed
presidents of the Church: that they acknowledged as much
as they did the local claims of their own bishops; it was the
authority of religion and the Church, which they felt to be
represented by the Popes, which excited their impatience and
hatred. They acknowledged the law while they disobeyed it :
they thought to escape the invisible powers of the Church, by
fettering her Ministers, or refusing to hear her sentence; but
they never doubted either the reality of those powers, or her
right, in the abstract, to use them.* Their opposition was
based, not on any religious scruples, scarcely on any distinct
views of political greatness, but on the privileges of the feudal
military law; on precedents exempting them from the law of
the Church. They recognised its jurisdiction; what they
fought for was, unlimited dispensation from it in their own
persons.

The results of his quarrel with Anselm had taught William,
that the Church, humbled as she was, might yet, under able
and resolute guidance, such as she had gained in the archbishop,
be able to check and thwart him. And her power of main-
taining her ground against him, was visibly strengthened by
her union with the rest of the Western Church, and with the
Pope. Whatever measures William might pursue in England,
he could not prevent Anselm from ultimately falling back
on an authority to which it was impossible, without avowed

* William, Count of Poitiers, had taken another man’s wife. ‘ Cum Petrus
Pictavorum Episcopus eum liberius argueret, et detrectantem palam excom-
municare inciperet, ille preecipiti furore percitus, crinem antistatas invyolat,
strictumque mucronem vibrans, ‘ Jam,’ inquit, morieris nisi me absolvens.’ Tum
vero preesul, timore simulato, inducias petens loquendi, quod reliquum fuerat excom-
municationis fidenter peroravit.

“Tta officio suo peracto, martyriumque sitiens, collum protendit : ‘ Feri,
inquit, ‘feri.’ At Willelmus, refractior, consuetum leporem intulit, ut diceret,

‘Tantum certe te odio, ut nec meo te digner odio, nec ccelum unquam intrabis
mez manus ministerio,’”—Will. Malms. 1. y. § 439.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 16L

disobedience, to refuse to listen. It became William’s object,
therefore, to perplex and weaken the archbishop by detaching
him, indirectly, if possible, from the Pope, and isolating him
from the rest of Christendom. The circumstances of the
times were favourable to his attempt. There were at the
moment two claimants of the throne of St. Peter, Urban the
Second, and the Antipope Guibert ; and the English Church
had hitherto acknowledged neither. Without therefore deny-
ing the rights of the apostolic see, William, acting on the
precedent established by his father, might require the bishops
to suspend their obedience, till he had decided which of the
two rivals had really a claim to it.

But there was a difficulty in the case of the archbishop;
he had already acknowledged Urban, and had distinctly
reserved his obedience to him, before he would accept the
primacy. William, however, was not to be turned aside
from his purpose easily. The point soon came to an issue
between him and the archbishop; in what manner, and with
what results, will be seen from the following transaction, the
details of which are given by Eadmer.

On Mid-lent Sunday, 1095 (March 11.), the prelates and
nobility of England, with a large concourse of the lower
orders, met at the hour of prime in the Church of Rocking-
ham Castle, to hold a solemn council. The peers had been
summoned to answer an appeal made to them by the arch-
bishop, for their judgment and council in a very important
question lately raised between himself and the king. When
he had applied to the king for leave to make the customary
journey to Rome, in order to receive the metropolitan pall,
the king had asked him, “from which Pope he meant to ask
it?” and on being told, “ from Urban,” he had charged the
archbishop with a breach of his fealty and allegiance, in
daring to recognise a Pope not yet acknowledged by the
realm, and told him, that he must either disclaim Urban till
the king’s pleasure were known, or leave England. His
obedience to Pope Urban, the king said, was incompatible
with his duty as a subject. It was on this point that the
archbishop had asked and received permission to seck the

M

162 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

advice of his peers. He laid his case fully before them,
reminding them that they had forced him into his present
position, with full warning from him of the difficulties which
were likely to ensue, and with a pledge on their part of
sympathy and aid. “It is a grievous thing for me,” he con-
cluded, ‘to despise and disown the vicar of St. Peter; it is a
grievous thing to break the faith which I promised to keep
to the king according to God’s law: nevertheless it is a
grievous thing to be told, that I cannot do my duty to either
one of these, except at the expense of my allegiance to the
other.”

The bishops, to whom he had especially addressed himself,
declined to give him any counsel for the present, except on
condition of his submitting unconditionally to the king; but
they offered to report what he had said to William, who was
waiting the issue in another part of the castle, and communi-
cate what he might say in answer; and thus the question was
put off till the next day.

The following morning the assembly met again. The
archbishop took his seat in the midst, and repeated his re-
quest to the bishops for their counsel. But he again asked
in vain. They replied as they had done the day before—they
would give no counsel on religious grounds (secundum Deum),
which should in any respect oppose the king’s will. They
gave their answer like men who felt the shame and cowardice
of their position — “ they hung down their heads in silence,”
says Eadmer, “‘ expecting what was coming on them.” An-
selm’s countenance lighted up, when he heard their deter-
mination, and raising his eyes to heaven, he solemnly ad-
dressed his protest to the assembled bishops and nobles : —

“ Since you,” he said, “who are called the pastors of Christ’s
flock, and you who are styled chiefs among the people, refuse your
counsel to me your chief, except according to the will of one man,
I will betake myself to the Chief Shepherd and Prince of all, I
will fly to the ‘ Angel of Great Counsel,’ and from Him I will
receive the counsel which I will follow in this my cause—yea,
rather, His cause, and that of His Church. He says to the most
blessed of the apostles, Peter, ‘ Thou art Peter, and upon this rock

oe )t ee -
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ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 163

I will build my Church,’—and again to all the apostles jointly,
‘He who hears you hears Me; and he who despises you despises
Me.’ It was primarily to St. Peter, and in him to the other
apostles — it is to the vicar of St. Peter, and through him to the
other bishops who fill the apostles’ places,—that these words, as
we believe, were addressed ; but to no emperor whatsoever, to no
king, or duke, or earl. In what point we must be subject to earthly
princes, the same Angel of Great Counsel has taught us, saying,
‘Render to Cesar the things that are Czsar’s. These are the
words and counsels of God, and by them I will abide. Know ye
therefore all of you, that in the things that are God’s, I will
render obedience to the vicar of St. Peter; in those that belong
of right to the earthly dignity of my lord the king, I will render
him both faithful counsel and service, to the best of my knowledge
and power.”

The bishops had a difficult part to play: they had to sup-
port the king’s cause in the face of their own convictions, in
the face of what they believed to be the plain meaning of
texts of Scripture, in the face of their vow of canonical
obedience; with the full consciousness that the eyes of all,
allies and opponents, were open to their false position; that
they would find sympathy neither in England nor in Christ-
endom, and that by none were they.so thoroughly seen
through and despised as by the king, whose tools they had
consented to make themselves. The archbishop’s speech
was received in clamour and tumult; no one ventured to
answer it; no one would report it to the king; and the as-
sembly broke up in confusion. Anselm was not daunted;
he went himself to the royal chamber, and repeated his
words in William’s presence. |

The day was spent by the king’s party in angry and fruit-
less deliberation. William looked to the bishops to defeat
Anselm on his own ground; the bishops, irritated at once by
the hopelessness of their case, and by their fear of disappoint-
ing William, were unable to agree among themselves upon
the course to be pursued. The archbishop meanwhile had
returned to the church to wait the result: while his opponents,
broken up into knots of two and three, were engaged in
eager and fruitless discussion, he remained in his seat ; and at

M 2

164 | ST, ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

last, wearied out with the delay, “leaning his head against
the wall, he fell into a calm sleep.” Towards the end of the
day, the bishops, with some of the nobility, came to him from
the king. ‘Their advice to him,” they said, “ was, that he
should submit, without further hesitation, to the customs of
the realm, which the king valued as highly as his crown, and
at once give up Urban.” Anselm asked till the next day to
return a formal answer. They thought he was wavering, or
at a loss for an immediate reply, and urged the king to take
advantage of his indecision. William, Bishop of Durham,
who had throughout taken the lead against the archbishop,
and who had engaged to force him, either to commit himself
to a disavowal of Urban, or to resign his ring and crosier,
now came to him, and called on him peremptorily to yield to
the king his dignity and prerogative, or to prepare at once for
his own just sentence. But he had overstepped his mark.
Anselm answered quietly and briefly, “« Whosoever wishes to
prove that, because I will not renounce the obedience of the
chief bishop of the’ venerable Holy Roman Church, I am
therefore breaking faith and allegiance to my earthly king, let
him come forward, and he shall find me ready, as I ought,
and where I ought, to render my answer.”

They had nothing to reply, and retired to the king. A
suppressed murmur of indignation ran through the crowd of
the lower orders, which had filled the body of the church the
whole day, and had hitherto looked on in silent sympathy, not
daring to express their feelings. At length a soldier stept out
of the throng, and knelt before the archbishop: “ Lord and
Father,” said he, “ thy children humbly beseech thee by me
that thy heart be not troubled by what thou hast heard; but
remember blessed Job, who vanquished the devil on a dung-
hill, and avenged Adam, whom the devil had conquered in
Paradise.”

William of Durham had to report to the king “tamely and
faintly”* the complete failure of his attempt. Evening was
closing in, and the assembly again adjourned. The king was

* « Tepide et silenter.”— EKadm. a

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 165

exasperated* in the highest degree with the archbishop, and
scarcely less so with the bishops. At last William of Durham
proposed that Anselm should be deprived by violence, and
driven out of England. But against this the lay barons, who
had been moved by the archbishop’s calm self-possession and
readiness in answering, protested strongly. “If this then
pleases you not,” said the king, “‘ what w7/l please you? In
this realm I will endure no equal. It is by following your
counsel and plans that things have been brought to this pass.
Away with you: get you gone, and lay your heads together,
for by God's countenance if ye condemn him not, according
to my will, I will condemn you.”

William found it impossible to prevail upon the bishops to
pass sentence on Anselm; but he found them willing to re-
nounce his obedience. The lay barons, on the other hand
firmly refused to follow their example. Asa feudal superior,
he did not claim their obedience; as their archbishop and
spiritual father, he had done nothing to forfeit it. This refusal
left the bishops alone in their miserable position; and their
confusion was increased by William’s calling on them severally
to declare whether they renounced their obedience to the
archbishop unconditionally, or only so far as it implied the
claims of Pope Urban. ‘They were divided in their answers:
those who refused an unconditional renunciation were driven
from William’s presence, and had to regain his favour by
large gifts, But it was an impolitic step on his part; for it
broke up his party among the bishops, and by forcing them
to this disgraceful alternative, he brought to a head the grow-
ing feeling of disgust and scorn with which their conduct was
viewed even by the nobility. Those especially among them
who had entirely renounced the archbishop, were openly
insulted even in the court: it was plain that their influence
would no longer weigh with any one, or their concurrence
give plausibility to any measure. There remained nothing
farther to be done against the archbishop, except in the way
of open violence; and men were not yet ripe for that. It

* “ Usque ad divisionem spiritus sui.”-— adm.

M3

<i

166 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

was agreed therefore that matters should be left as they were
for the present, and should stand over till after the following
Whitsuntide.

William immediately despatched two of his chaplains,
Gerard, afterwards archbishop of York, and William Warel-
wast, to intrigue at Rome. What they said or did there,
does not appear. They were men who, as they showed after-
wards, would not be scrupulous in serving their master: but
the result of their negociation was the mission, by Pope
Urban, of Cardinal Walter of Albano, to the king, secretly
bearing with him the metropolitan pall. On landing in Eng-
land, the legate took no notice of the archbishop, though he
had to pass through Canterbury, but went straight to the
court. Of his proceedings there, which were looked upon at
the time with great distrust and dissatisfaction by the arch-
bishop’s friends*, all we know is, that William was induced,
by the grant, Eadmer says, of special privileges from the
Roman See, to acknowledge Urban; but that when he
demanded in return the deposition of Anselm, by the authority,
or at least with the consent, of the legate, he was at once and
peremptorily refused. Disappointed and baffled, he seems to
have resolved to put the best face upon matters, and consent
to a reconciliation with the archbishop, which took place
shortly after, but not without another vain attempt, on the
part of the bishops, to induce Anselm, by concealing from
him the real state of things at court, to purchase the king’s
favour by a large present.

William’s party wished the archbishop to receive the pall

* Anselm certainly was but little mdebted in any way to the legate’s good
offices, whose wish seems to have been to do as little as he could for the English
Church and to save his own character by trying to put Anselm in the wrong.
In a letter of Anselm’s to him, after the reconciliation (Ep. iii. 36.), written
under considerable self-restraint, and in a tone of measured politeness, which
scarcely disguises the writer’s indignant contempt for his correspondent’s insin-
cerity, the archbishop meets the charge of want of hearty concurrence, and
remarks with quiet severity upon the legate’s affected difficulties about Anselm’s
consecration, his readiness to listen to stories, and his “ defence of the archbishop
as far as he could,” against accusations which he could not but know to be
untrue,

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. - 167

from the hands of the king. Anselm objected, for the
privileges and powers, which it symbolised and conveyed, be-
longed not to the king to give, but to the spiritual ruler of
the Church. It was determined therefore that it should be
laid on the high altar of Canterbury, from whence the arch-
bishop should take it. On the third Sunday after Trinity, the
legate, bearing it in a silver casket, was met at Canterbury by
the archbishop and bishops of England in procession, bare-
footed, but in their sacerdotal vestments, and conducted to
the cathedral, where Anselm, wearing for the first time the
symbol of his metropolitan dignity, celebrated the holy Ku-
charist. The gospel read in the service was the same passage
which had been taken as the presage of his episcopate at his
consecration, the parable of the great supper.* Those moni-
tory words were still to be fulfilled; the work in which he
was engaged, though so far he had been successful, was not
yet over.

The reconciliation did not last long. William continued
as profligate and oppressive as ever, and soon began to molest
the archbishop personally. For some alleged neglect of
feudal service, he was summoned to appear before the king’s
court. “ We looked for peace,” said he on receiving the
order, “ and there is no good, —for the time of healing, and
behold trouble.” It was become plain that the king was
resolved to crush him; in England he was fighting single-
handed; there was nothing left for him but to refer matters
to the Pope. We will give his own account of his position
about this time, in an extract from a letter written by him
to Pope Urban, shortly after he had received the pall.

“ Holy father,” he writes, after having explained why he had
not been able yet to visit Rome, “it grieves me that Iam what I
am,—that I am not what I was. It grieves me that I am a bishop,
for my sins prevent me from doing the work of a bishop. When
I was in a humble station, I seemed to be doing something ; now
that Iam exalted to high place, Iam weighed down with a load
which is too heavy for me, and I do no good either for myself or
ners...» . I long to escape from an intolerable charge, and

* This is read in the Sarum Missal on the 2d Sunday.

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168 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS,

to lay down my burden: on the other hand, I fear to offend God.
The fear of God, which made me undertake it, compels me to keep
it. If I knew God’s will, I would direct my will and conduct
according to it; but it is hidden from me, and I know not what
to do: I cannot see my way, or make out what conclusion I ought
to come to.”

He goes on to entreat Urban’s prayers, “lest, tossed by
the waves of such thoughts, he should altogether sink, or
attain to nothing ;” and prays, that, if at last “in shipwreck
he should have to seek refuge from the storm in the bosom
of his mother the Church, he may, for the sake of Him who
shed His blood for us, find there ready and compassionate
aid and solace.” *

Such were his feelings and prospects in 1096. Shortly
after, in that same year, he was forced by William to quit
England as a banished man. The causes of his exile are
thus stated in a letter written by him two years after, to
Paschal II., Urban’s successor.t

... “I had before my eyes in England a multitude of evils

which it was my province to correct. I could neither correct

them, nor yet tolerate them without sin. The king required me,
on the score of duty, to consent to his will and pleasure, in matters
which were against the law and will of God. For without his
command, he would not that any successor of the Apostles should
be received, or be so styled, in England: nor that I should hold
communication with him, or obey his decrees. Since he came to
the throne, which is now thirteen years, he has not allowed a
council to be held. The lands of the Church he gave to his
vassals: and if, in these and such like matters, I sought counsel,
every one refused it to me, even my own suffragans, except ac-
cording to his will. Seeing then these, and many other violations
of the will and law of God, I asked leave of him to visit the
Apostolic See, that I might receive advice from thence touching
my own soul, and the office enjoined me. ‘The king answered
that I had committed a crime against him in merely thus asking
leave, and gave me the choice, either of making amends for this as
for an offence, and giving him security, that I would never ask this

* Ep. iii, 37. + Ep. iii. 40.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 169

leave again, or appeal to the Apostolic See ; —or else, of taking my
speedy departure from his realm. I chose rather to depart, than to
agree to such a scandalous act. I came to Rome, as you know, and
laid the whole matter before my Lordthe Pope. The king, as soon
as I had left England, laid hands on the whole archbishopric, and
leaving just enough to clothe and feed our monks, turned it to
his own purposes. Warned and intreated by my Lord the Pope
to alter his conduct, he has scorned to do so, and to this day holds
on in tke same course. It is now the third year since I thus left
England: the little that I brought with me, and the large sums
which I have borrowed and not yet repaid, are all spent; and
thus deeply in debt, but possessed of nothing, I am living on the
bounty of our venerable father, the Archbishop of Lyons.” . . .

As the letter states, the king, though he had acknowledged
Urban, had treated Anselm’s application as a breach of his
oath of allegiance. The nobility took part against the arch-
bishop, and his suffragans again deserted him. Their address
to him is too remarkable to be omitted:

“¢Qord father, we well know that thou art a pious and holy
man, and hast thy desires in heaven. We, by our relatives, whom
we support, by temporal circumstances in which we are engaged,
are withheld from ascending to your magnanimity, and from
making sport of the world. But if you are willing to descend to
us and imitate our conduct, we will assist you with the same counsel
with which we assist each other, and will succour you in your em-
barrassments. But should you abide by your former principles,
we will not desert our fidelity to the king, nor separate ourselves
from him.’ Anselm replied, ‘You have answered well: go to
your lord—lI will hold to my God.’” Mohler, (from Eadm.) p. 82.*

On his refusing to comply with the king’s wishes, he was
ordered to be ready to quit England in ten days. Before he
left the court, he went to the king, “ with a cheerful and
pleasant countenance,” and offered him his benediction. “I
know not when I shall see you again,” he said, ‘and, if you
refuse it not, I would fain give you my blessing—the blessing
of a father to his son, of the Archbishop of Canterbury to

* We have altered a few words in this translation.

170 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

the King of England.” The rough king was for a moment
touched, perhaps awed, by Anselm’s calm but solemn way of
closing their personal intercourse. He could not refrain
from bowing his head, while the Archbishop made the sign
of the cross over him, and departed: and they never met
again.

Anselm was persecuted to the last with insult and annoy-
ance. As he was embarking at Dover, William Warelwast,
the king’s chaplain, who had been living for several days at
the archbishop’s board, caused ‘his luggage to be broken open
on the beach, and searched, in the hope of finding treasure.
Thus he went forth to his exile; it was the issue he had
foreseen from the first; to pass his old age in destitution, and
“without certain dwelling-place; in journeyings often, in
perils of robbers, in weariness and painfulness, in hunger and
thirst, in cold and nakedness.”

The part of a confessor was no easy or safe one: yet in
those days, in spite of the wickedness and misery so rife in
them, the promise made to.those who leave all for the
Gospel, of finding, even here, “houses and brethren, an
hundred fold,” was still amply fulfilled. Travellers, especially
if they bore a religious character, were generally sure of
a welcome—not as foreigners, but as Christians; — toilsome
and dangerous as their road usually was, they might reckon
on a monastery at the end of each day’s journey, where they
would find not only rest but sympathy. And moreover, in
spite of imperfect civilisation, and fierce wars, Christendom
was, In a very great measure, even politically, one body;
and national distinctions were often forgotten in the com-
mon citizenship of the Church. Thus it was no strange
thing for a native of the South to connect his name and
fortunes for ever with a people of the North. We have in
Lanfranc, for instance, an Italian, first the ruler, and all but
the founder of the most famous Norman monastery, and then,
as primate of England, master of the sympathies, and guiding
the ecclesiastical action of these same Normans among their
newly conquered Saxon subjects: — and shortly after, we see
another Italian, trained in the same Norman abbey, returning

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 171

in his old age to his native land, a stranger, and an exiled
Archbishop of Canterbury. |

Along his road, and in Italy, Anselm was received, as
was due to his name and cause, with honour by the great,
with almost enthusiastic love by the poor. Nothing is more
striking in Eadmer’s minute, but unstudied narratives, than
his account of the intercourse between the archbishop and the
lower orders, and the interest he excited among them. Over
and above his untiring sympathy for their wants and wishes,
bodily and spiritual, there was a charm in his singular elas-
ticity of character, and graceful bearing, in his easy gaiety,
and hearty condescending kindness, which drew them in
throngs around him. ‘“ His countenance alone,”* says his
companion, “ even where he was not known, arrested their
admiring attention.” While staying in the camp of the
Duke of Apulia, the very Saracens of the army, some of
whom had shared his bounty, used to bless him with uplifted
hands, and salute him after their national fashion, ‘kissing
their own hands and bending their knees before him,” as he
passed through their quarters. +

But his quarrel was taken up feebly at Rome. He waited
through two years of negociation, but nothing was done. His
able and seasonable defence of the Latin Creed against the
Greeks at the council of Bari, together with his uncomplain-
ing cheerfulness, had won him the sympathy of the Italian
bishops; and by many of them, the indecision and lukewarm-
ness of the Roman Court were felt strongly. At the Council
of Lateran, 1099, this feeling showed itself. We quote Dr.
Mohler’s account of the proceedings, with a few verbal alte-
rations :

“At Easter, the customary Roman Synod was held; many
Gallic and Italian bishops were present; at the conclusion, the
canons which had been passed, were again to be read. As the
synod was held publicly in the church, in the same manner as the

* Ead. Vit. S. Anselmi, p. 20.

{ Id. p.21. Many of them, he adds, would have received Anselm’s instruc-

tions, and become Christians, but for their lord, the Count of Sicily, who would
suffer none of them to embrace the faith with impunity.

172 sT. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

assembly of the lords and bishops, which Anselm had convened (?)
at the commencement of his contest, many of the people flocked to
the important discussion. It was desirable that the resolutions
should be distinctly read; the Bishop of Lucca, who had a power-
ful voice, was therefore selected for this office. He had read but
a few decrees, when he suddenly paused, and under violent internal
excitement, manifested by his agitated appearance, and by the
various expressions of his countenance, addressed the Pope in
these violent words: —‘ What are we doing? We are loading
our people with decrees, and we offer no resistance to the des-
potism of tyrants. Their oppressions and robberies of the church
are daily reported to this See. As the head of all, you are called
upon for counsel and assistance ; but with what success is known
and deplored by the whole world. From the ends of the earth
there sits one among us, in meek and humble silence. But his
silence is a loud cry. ‘The greater his humility, the milder his
mood, the more powerful is he with God, and the more should he
inflame us. It is now two years since his arrival, and what
assistance has he received? Know ye not all to whom I allude?
It is to Anselm, the Primate of England.’ With these words he
raised his staff, and struck it so violently upon the pavement, that
the church re-echoed around. ‘The Pope looked towards him and.
said, ‘It is sufficient, Reinger, it is sufficient ; good counsel shall
soon be adopted.’ ”— Mohler, pp. 86, 87.

The council however broke up without any further steps
being taken, and Anselm at length left Italy in despair, and
took refuge, as he states in the letter quoted above, with the
Archbishop of Lyons.*

The death of the Pope, which happened shortly afterwards,
relieved William from the difficulty into which he had brought
himself by acknowledging Urban. “ Evil be with him who
cares for it,” was his remark on hearing the news. He was
resolved not to repeat the mistake, especially as the new Pope
was reported to be “one of Anselm’s sort.” ‘ His popedom,”

* It must be said in fairness that Dr. Mohler, not from any blind partiality,
approves Urban’s “ moderation.” The Pope, he says, “could not act otherwise.”
Anselm, however, certainly did feel that Urban might have done something for
him, but showed no disposition to do it.—Sce Epist. iii, 40. Dr. Mohler is
mistaken in saying that the Bishop of Lucca called for William’s “ uncondi-
tional deposition :” there were many measures of punishment short of that.

ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS. 173

he said with an oath, “shall not override me this time; now
that I am free, I will remain so.”

But the career of this miserable man was coming to a close.
Men shuddered at his frightful blasphemies, and his ferocious
hatred against everything connected with religion; they
waited with awe to see where his reckless course would end,
and looked out for visible signs of the presence and power of
the evil one to whom he had sold himself. He had sworn
with an oath on recovering from his last sickness*, ‘that
God should never have any good in him, for all the evil which
he had brought upon him.” “ From that time,” says Kadmer,
“he succeeded in everything he wished for or attempted. The
very wind and sea seemed to serve his will, as if God would
leave him without excuse, by granting all that he wished for.”
“Yet,” said those around him, “never a night came but he
lay down a worse man than he rose; and never a morning
but he rose worse than he lay down.”

He heard of Urban’s death in October, 1099. On the 2d
of August following he rode out at midday, after a wild de-
bauch, to hunt in the New Forest —the chase, which his
father had made by laying waste hearth and burial ground,
and in which two of his family had already perished; —1in the
evening his body was found pierced with an arrow through
the heart. This is all that is certainly known of his end. The
account commonly received was, that he was killed by a chance
arrow from Sir Walter Tyrrell.; Wild and strange tales
were circulated respecting the circumstances of his death —
the warnings which he had received — the weapon with which
he was slain—the invocation of the name of the evil one with
which he called for the fatal discharge; showing at least the

* When Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, expressed a hope that he would take
warning by what had happened, his answer was, “ Scias, O Episcope, quod
per Sanctum Vultum de Luca, nunquam me Deus bonum habebit, pro malo
quod mihi intulit ” — which is strangely mistranslated in Mohler, Engl. Transl.
p. 67.

+ Doubt is thrown upon it by Eadmer, and by Abbot Suger, who writes that
he had often heard Tyrrell declare on his oath, that he had not been in the same
part of the forest with the king during the whole day. (Quoted in Hardy’s ed. of
W. Malms. p. 508.) No one ever professed to have been an eye witness of
William’s death.

174 ST. ANSELM AND WILLIAM RUFUS.

~

deep and peculiar awe with which his contemporaries regarded
his mysterious end, and which even at this distance of time we
ean hardly help sharing, while we read their accounts. In
the full tide of his triumph, on the eve of adding Poitou and
Aquitaine to his dominions, of all princes of the West the
most wicked, yet the most prosperous, he was struck down in
a moment, “impenitent and unshriven,” with the spoils of
sacrilege, which he had relinquished in sickness, once more in
his hands. His body was found by some charcoal burners,
who threw it into their cart “as if it had been the carcase of
some savage beast of chase,” and carried it into Winchester, —
“his blood dropping along the road as they went.” He was
buried the next day in the Cathedral choir, for he had been a
King of England; but his funeral was a hurried and unwept
one. The church bells in many places, which “toll,” says
Ordericus, “‘for the poorest beggars and basest women, tolled
not for him; and”— he continues—* out of the vast heaps
of treasure which he had wrung from rich and poor, no alms
were given for his soul.”

175

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.*

[Jury, 1843.]

In the efforts of the reforming party in the Church in the
eleventh and twelth centuries, one of the most prominent
points, as every one knows, was their pertinacious war
against the practice of laymen investing clergymen with
church benefices and offices. For nearly a century this was
the cause of strife, the fons malorum; in the eyes of church-
men, the unendurable grievance, the foul and deadly abomi-
nation which darkened their day, the all but heretical cor-
ruption which foreboded Antichrist. It was a slight matter
in itself. A ceremony—a trifling act of state and show —a
form, symbolical in its origin, of simply arbitrary and disputable
meaning, by long practice come to bea mere matter of course,
a technicality of feudal etiquette — the delivery of a gold
ring and a bent staff by a layman to a priest—this was the
point in debate —this it was which employed the lives of such
men as Pope Gregory VII. and the Emperor Henry LV., and
threatened to shiver Christendom into fragments, soon to
return to their old barbarian heathenism. But what seemed
the cause was only the symbol of the quarrel, a serious and
real one. As in many other instances before and since,
principles which were life or death to the world had attached
themselves to some paltry fragment of human pageantry,
some device or fancy of the hour, thenceforth the gage or
prize of battle, and were to stand or fall with it. The fate
of Europe, perhaps of the Church, ung on the decision of
the investiture question. It was the struggle—a confused and
entangled, but areal one—of faith against self-will—of purity
against Jawlessness— of spiritual power against force and the
sword.

* Le Rationalisme Chrétien a la fin du XIe Siécle, ou Monologium et Proslo-

gium de S. Anselme: traduits et précédés d'une Introduction; par H. Bouchitté,
&e. Paris: 1842.

176 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

This and no other, as far as man can separate and oppose
parties and their motives, is the meaning of the contest in
those times between “royalty and the priesthood,” as we
should now term it, between Church and State. The Church
could not reform itself—could not do its work—could not
insure its own permanence in Europe, while its present re-
lations to the rulers of the world, the growth of three hundred
years of misdoing, continued; if it was to hope for purity, it
must strive and, if necessary, suffer for liberty. And by
the joint instinct of both parties the issue was put upon the
question of lay investiture.

This issue was first raised in England by St. Anselm.
The present essay is intended to present a sketch of the con-
test upon it. But the subject itself of investiture, though it
cannot be fully investigated here, requires a few words to
trace its connection with the great struggle in which it was
so prominent a feature.

In the tumultuary beginnings of society in modern Kurope,
the claims of the Church and of the barbarian kings, both
equally great, ran side by side, clashing, or in turn prevailing
by the force of circumstances or personal character, without any
serious attempt, as there was no pressing need, to harmonise
or guard them. Thus it was till the union of Western Chris-
tendom under the empire of Charlemagne. This great event
was, as it were, a new beginning to European history. This
empire was a mighty religious monarchy, which aimed at re-
viving, in Christian times and on a grander scale, the kingdoms
of Solomon and Josiah —a power thought to be received by
consecration from above, as truly as the priesthood—the
guardian of the Catholic faith, and of truth, duty, and peace
among all Christian men. It rose among the new nations of
the West, awakening ideas, and opening prospects hitherto
unknown to them. Then for the first time they realised
their own greatness and dignity ; they had not only conquered
Rome, but inherited her grandeur. ‘Till Charlemagne -they
had felt themselves intruders—they called themselves barba-
rians. But now the “glorious and religious emperor of the
Christians,” so valorous, so wise, so potent that he over-

Pd —

8ST, ANSELM AND HENRY I. 177

shadowed all the old heathen Cesars, was one of their own
blood and language: he had been crowned at Rome, “ the
Mother of the Empire, where Cesars and emperors were
wont always to sit”—they had seen the “worship” and
heard the acclamations of the Roman people—‘“ Carolo
Augusto & Deo coronato, magno et pacifico Imperatori, vita et
victoria.” * He became to them as a national ancestor, a sort
of mythic hero, sung in legends which took their place among
those old songs-— barbara et antiquissima carmina, quibus
veterum regum actus et prelia canebantur+, which he had loved
so much himself. Aix-la-Chapelle became almost a hallowed
city. He had fixed and embodied to Europe the idea of
Christian royalty, and was henceforth its great model and
type.

The idea of Charlemagne’s empire was a severe all-absorbing
despotism, serving the cause of justice and the Christian faith:
—set up not for mere secular government, but in order to
make earthly power bend to the revealed designs of God.
The emperor bore a sacred office; he was the “figure: of
God’s majesty,” the image and instrument of God’s power —
power without stint or appeal, guided by inflexible goodness.
He was raised up to be the advocatus ecclesie: to his honour
and good sword was committed the Bride of the Holy One
while sojourning on earth; for her safety and purity his im-
perial faith was pledged. Nations and individuals — the
whole multitude of the faithful, small and great —the Church
in her spiritual and temporal interests, were given into his
hands—there was nothing for which he was not directly
responsible. Bishops as well as counts “bore a part, and
but a part, in the ministry which in its fulness centered in
him,” { And because spiritual things are above temporal,
he would be betraying his trust, unless in every matter, spl-
ritual even more than temporal, he was most jealously watchful
—unless while he honoured bishops as God’s especial servants,
he kept them most strictly to their duty. Hence, while
their place was the nearest to his throne, while he secured

* Eginhard, Ann, Frane. 801. _ T Eginhard, Vit. Kar, Imp. ec. 29.

t Capit. Lud. Pi. anno 823, ¢. 3,

N

178 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

their fair and free election, and gave them wealth and honour
it was he who “committed the bishoprics to their hands”
before they could be consecrated: he watched over and ad-
monished his ecclesiastical as well as his lay “helpers”
(adjutores) —holding councils with them—collecting and pro-
mulgating through Christendom the canons of the Church—
inquiring into and ruling everything, from the business of a
synod to that of an archdeacon or parish vestry—points of
faith, morality, discipline, ecclesiastical convenience—the
Catholic creed, names of angels, apocryphal works, festivals
and tithes, furniture of the altar, church building, the use and
preparation of chrism and holy water, the duties of the con-
fessor to his penitents—publishing in juxtaposition laws about
the assembling of councils or the education of the people, and
regulations that ‘‘ priests should ring their bells at due times,”
that “scribes should not write faultily,” and that “no man
should force another to drink wine against his will.”

Thus did Charlemagne read his commission. <A theory in
strong hands is, or creates, what it supposes; and, with the
allowances required by every age and every kind of rule, he
was a true and earnest Christian emperor—his monarchy
looks still, as the Middle Age Church considered it, a provi-
dential order. But his great and leading idea, the empire
of Law based upon the Church, issuing from one, binding
together and controlling men and kingdoms—his “ regnandi
disciplina,” was soon lost in the tumults and violence which
were not yet to cease in Europe. His empire continued in
name and theory and pretensions the same, but its religious
character ceased to be a reality under his feudal successors.

In the eleventh century, feudalism, the joint result of the
temper and native customs of the barbarians, and of their
position in Roman Europe*, was the recognised political
system of Christendom—a system daily shaping itself into
greater distinctness and consistency of detail, and to whose
precedents and forms every thing was adjusting itself. Its
characteristic feature was vassalage, as the necessary and
universal condition of social life. Where it prevailed, men

* Palgrave’s Anglo-Saxons, ¢. xvii.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 179

‘were held together, not so much by public law and power as
by a kind of network, a mutually connected series of personal
and private ties, of a formal and solemn character, between
the weak and the powerful. And a strong tie it was. There
was no earthly bond between man and man more stringent
in its idea than that between lord and vassal; not that
between master and slave, general and soldier, king and
subject — nay, even between parent and child. It ran parallel
to the relation between man and wife; and accordingly the
feudal law, at least in England, excused a woman from the
full profession of vassalage*, ‘because it is not fitting that
a woman should say, that she will become a woman to any
man, but to her husband when she is married.” It was in all
its forms and terms a military relation, supposing a state of
continual war. In days when men were not born into a self-
acting system of order and law, when every man must look
to himself and none could stand alone, the weak could do
nothing better than link himself unconditionally to one more
powerful and noble, who could give him a standing-place in
the confusion; while to the strong, there was nothing more
useful than the free service of a stout vassal. Thus the
lord and vassal were bound together by the honour and frank
generosity of soldiers. Such was vassalage in its theory and
forms, even after they had become legal fictions. “ Between
lord and man there is only faith,” say the old feudal customs ;
a fief was not bargained for and sold, but given; the return
was, not rents, but a man’s unstinted devotion; the formal
crime which forfeited it, was “ ingratitude.” When the
compact was sealed by the vassal’s homage, “the most
honourable service, and most humble service, that a free
tenant may do his lord,” he came before him in the guise of
a helpless supplant, without arms or spurs, and surrendered
up person and fortunes into his hands. ‘The tenant shall
be ungirt and his head uncovered, and his lord shall sit, and
the tenant shall kneel before him on both his knees, and hold
his hands jointly together between the hands of his lord, and
shall say thus, ‘I become your man from this day forward
* Litt. ii. 87.
N 2

180 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

of life and limb, and earthly worship, and unto you shall be
true and faithful—saving the faith that I owe to our sove-
reign lord the king ;’ and his lord so sitting shall kiss him.”*
The reservation at the end was no idle or superfluous one.
Feudal law by no means took it as a matter of course that
duty to the king superseded duty to the lord.f

Feudalism, in spite of its generous maxims—in spite of the
noble and gallant character which, to a certain extent justly,
is associated with it—the compensation for the turmoil and
suffering which nursed it—soon stiffened into a hard system
of customary law, interpreted and administered by those who
had the stoutest arm and fewest scruples. It became the
strength of a great military aristocracy. And truly those
noble barons were a rough sort of governors and shepherds
of the people. Our poetical notions of a gay and gentle
chivalry fade away cruelly, we had almost said ludicrously,
before the frightful realities of European life as drawn by the
Middle Age historians. Their picture is, of a gradation
of chiefs, with their rude ferocious soldiery, posted through
the country; each in his own county or honor or castlewick,
able safely to do as he pleased; men of ungovernable passions,
living for the stormy excitements of battle, or of their own
scarcely less terrible castles; savagely vindictive, and way-
ward as children, holding scruples of all kinds in very un-
affected contempt, and increasing their broad lands and ready
money by every means in their power. Portraits of them
meet us at every turn in the contemporary chroniclers. In
the early years of the Conqueror, Ivo Taillebois played
tyrant in Hoyland; and though the Hoylanders “ most wor-
shipfully honoured him, and bent the knee before him, and
paid him all the honours they could, and all the service they
ought,” his hard mind was not moved thereby; ‘‘ he did not
love them with reciprocal confidence,” but drove them out of
their senses or their lands, especially the monks, against
whom he had an especial spite, by his ruthless deeds — torquens
et tribulans, angens et angarians, incarcerans et excrucians

© Litt. ii, 85. |
¥ Allen, Royal Prerog. p. 74. Hallam, Midd. Ages, i. 174,

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 181

—1in very wantonness cutting off the ears and tails of their
cattle, or chasing them into the fens with his hounds, or break-
ing their backs and legs, and so making them “ altogether
useless.” Such were the multitude of lords great and small,
and not less redoubtable countesses and ladies, who shared
in various measures whatever of power there was in Europe,
and made it a hard time for all, clergy or laity, who had not
a good sword to trust to. And at the head of this aristo-
cracy, identified with its customs and feelings, battling hard
with it for his place, stood the king or the emperor; no
longer feeling himself the divinely appointed guardian of the
Church and her canons,—though Charlemagne’s grand theory
might survive, as it does still, in coronation services and court
etiquette, —but the feudal chief of a confederacy of ambi-
tious barons ;—bullied by them, if weak ; —if strong, carry-
ing out to the utmost the feudal maxims which favoured his
power.

Charlemagne had linked the episcopate to. the crown, and
so it had remained; and now the crown had changed its
character, and with it the episcopate had become a feudal
order. ‘Two things were the practical belief of the day; first,
that a bishop was the king’s nominee, and secondly, that he
was simply the king’s vassal, deriving his authority from him,
bound to his obedience and service, with as little qualifica-
tion as a lay noble. Whatever other laws or authority a
bishop had to acknowledge, his relation to the king and the
great feudal body, had a reality, a2 common sense palpable
truth about it, a consistency with the order of things, which
in matters of serious business would decide a man’s conduct.
It was a tie which made it mere romance and wildness for
him to rebuke and punish vice, to defend the poor, to stir in
good earnest against the corruption and worldliness of a
system, of which his lord and patron was head. For such a
proceeding there would have been no name known but trea-
son, the unpardonable crime of feudal days.

Further, the feudal relation which had grown up between

* Ingulph, a. 1071, p. 71.
N 3

182 ‘ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I,

the bishop and the crown, besides its influence on the epis-
copal office, affected very seriously the security of Church
property. This became a distinct but very important point
in the dispute. Part of this property was from the first
given and accepted on feudal conditions; but the bulk of it
was in a different case. It had been offered and consecrated
to God and His service with a reality of sacrifice and sur-
render which we can hardly feel now. In the most solemn
way possible all earthly claim to resume it had been re-
nounced. But in time the conditions which were fairly
attached to part were extended to the whole. It was not
merely charged with certain services, such as were often
reserved in the original grant, but claimed for a feudal su-
perior in the same sense as a temporal fief. The king had
become not merely the trustee, but the lord of the Church
lands: it might be sacrilege, but on feudal principles it was
not usurpation, when on the death or disobedience of a bishop,
he seized the revenues of the see. ‘To this lordship, under
the circumstances, the king had no right. It is hard, indeed,
to say in the abstract where the right over property stops in
the supreme power of the state, granting that it is irrespon-
sible; but rights are created and governed by the admitted
principles of the day, and at that time it was an admitted
principle, that the king was a responsible member of the
Church, and that Church property was sacred. It was going,
therefore, against the convictions and feelings of the time—
it was indirectly regaining a hold on what he was supposed
to have surrendered—it was taking away a safeguard he
professed to have given—when the king claimed feudal do-
minion over the lands of the Church.

Of these relations, the expression and warrant was the
form of investiture, with the attending homage. ‘ Prudent
antiquitie,” says our English lawyer, “did for more solem-
nitie and better memorie of that which was to be done,
express substances under ceremonies.” ‘The “ substance” in
this case was that the king gave away, not merely the roy-
alties or the temporalities of the see, or a certain worldly
honour or jurisdiction, but the bishopric; he put into the

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY TI. 183

bishop’s hands, not a sword or a sceptre, but the symbols of
his spiritual functions, the ring and the pastoral staff.

Such was the state of things when the contest about in-
vestitures began, in the middle of the eleventh century. The
attack on them was a new line, on the part of the Church party.
Investiture was one of those practices which have their im-
portance from the system in which they are found, altering
their meaning as that system insensibly passes into another
It had begun early in connection with Charlemagne’s theory .
of a Christian empire, and had continued as a ceremony,
unopposed and unnoticed; its meaning was vague—it was
sanctioned by the almost ecclesiastical office of the king or
emperor; and doubtless there was many a bishop who liked
the feudal effect thus given to Church dignities, who had no
objection to call “the alms and munificence of ancient kings,
his barony and royal fief,” so that he might ride at the head
of his chivalry — an array as brave and gallant as the neigh-
bouring earl’s whom he had to keep at bay. The Church
had acquiesced in the custom, for she had seen no evil in it.
Her old recognised policy against the world had been, to try
to check directly the interference of the secular power in
elections of the higher clergy. So things had gone on for
above 200 years: canons had been framed; princes had re-
sisted, yielded, made promises, and broken them: bishoprics
were important offices—chaplains and court-clerks were
useful, were importunate, and had ready money to offer: —
it was the old story over and over again; when the king
was weak or threatened by danger, the theory at least of a
free and canonical election was graciously acknowledged;
when he was strong, laughed at. Churchmen protested
loudly and hotly, or complained in secret. Still matters
went on as before; but a free and canonical election was
ever their hope, their watchword—the palladium of the
purity of the Church: to be secured some day or other, on
the faith of feudal kings; who were becoming more and more
indisposed to part with any of their power, as great political
objects, which gave increased value to that power, were,

generation after generation, opening more distinctly to view.
N 4

184 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY 1.

There could be no doubt which side was really gaining: free
and canonical election was becoming more and more a dream
—for bishops were not merely subjects, but vassals; what
had free and canonical election to do with the king’s vassals?
Popes and councils and divines might preach and argue and
decree about it to the end of time—but the phrase had come
to sound like a worn-out formula; power was power, in spite
of their protests, and it was not in their hands. And, mean-
while, as the terms on which a bishop received his office iden-
tified him more and more with the state nobility, the very
notion of a bishop became degraded and secularised.

Such seems to have been the view of the earnest and
clear-sighted men who headed the movement of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. What good was it repeating year
after year ineffectual claims — asserting rights which were not
denied but simply laughed at—even gaining concessions,
which were to exist only on parchment? To restore the
lost feeling of the sanctity and heavenly mission of the epis-
copate—the tokens and cognisances— divini signa decoris —
which connected it with the Apostles—this was what the
times required, What matter who elected, if they were
merely to elect an ecclesiastical baron? Distinctly and un-
equivocally, before it was too late, the Church must be de-
tached from feudalism; popular and kingly notions about
bishops must be broken down—a point which would bring
matters to issue must be fixed on and carried, and carried at
all hazards and without mistake—carried through evil report
and good report; if necessary, and it was necessary, through
war, exile, and even death. If any thing was to be done,
they must strike a blow—must prove that priests as well as
soldiers could act. They could not keep kings from med-
ling in elections; but they might keep bishops from receiv-
ing their offices on terms which fettered and lowered them.
Abstract rights might not help them much; but they might
fix on a practice, and draw upon it the strong and indignant
feeling of Christendom. Investiture and homage, as they
had long been exacted from the clergy, created not merely
a spell and prestige in favour of feudal claims, but, according

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY TI. 185

to prevailing principles, a real undeniable right. They were
the links which bound the Church; and cost what it might,
—the Church was above all price—they must be snapped.
It was no safe experiment, but they had hit the blot; nothing
shows it plainer than the rage and reluctance with which
their opponents at length yielded. ‘The emperor Henry V.,
when he had the Pope in prison, “holding him fast,” says
his panegyrist, “as Jacob did the Angel, and not letting him
go till he gave him a blessing,” could afford to let his captive
bargain about free election—the “ blessing ” which he wanted
was, to give him the right of investiture.*

Such was the effort made against investiture. It was the
effort necessary for the time to save the Church from falling
—the course into which faithfulness and self-devotion in
that day threw itself—the cause in which all high religious
feelings, by instinct oftener than by any clear reason, found
their symbol and representative. There were ideas of purity
which were revolted, when hands consecrated to the holiest
service were placed between those of the filthy and blood-
stained, and surrendered also to them. There were yearnings
after freedom— enthusiastic glimpses of the unutterable glory
even of the Church militant, which spurned at the notion of
her being a “ handmaid,” to mortal greatness. There were
thoughts of our Lord’s actual presence in the rites and
voice of the Church, which made the interference of secular
power feel like a profanation. All these rose up in men’s
minds as the movement went on, and turned themselves with
more or less success and consistency into arguments. They
at least showed what was in men’s minds— what was identi-
fied with the contest. And, in spite of irrelevant reasoning
and weak points, the question was what it was felt to be,
one of the deepest principle—a matter which could not rest
any longer as it had done—whose consequences, of one kind
or another, had come to the birth, and could no longer be
delayed. If investiture continued now, it was equivalent to
surrendering the Christian law to those who hated it.

It was in vain, when the Church became alive to the real

* Quoted in Will, Malms, Gest. Reg. 1. v. §. 420.

186 ST, ANSELM AND HENRY T.

meaning of the dispute, that moderate and peaceful men,
suspicious of great movements, keenly alive to what was
wrong or questionable on their own side, appalled at the
terrors of a struggle, and hopeless of the strength of the
Church to overthrow a custom so tenaciously held—took a
middle line—drew distinctions and formed theories to elude
its meaning. What did feudal kings care for theories?
Canonists might refine in their schools on the possible or
original meaning of the symbols, and urge that the staff might
mean only temporal jurisdiction—that the ring could not
mean anything sacramental in the hands of a layman —that
symbols were but matters of opinion, and were of little con-
sequence, so that right doctrines on the subject were main-
tained; doubtless by due limitations and distinctions, a
strong, perhaps irresistible, position might be taken on paper,
if the war was only on paper. But their distinctions could
not alter facts, or force the practical belief of the multitude.
Argue and explain as they would, William the Conqueror
and the German emperors knew very well what they meant
by investiture, and the opinion of their age bore them out.
When William told Lanfrane that he ‘would have all the
crosiers in England in his own hand,” it was in no meagre and
restricted sense that he intended his words to be taken. The
Church had to deal not with abstractions and theories, but
with a great established practical system, acted out day after
day by living men. She was in danger of becoming feud-
alized in spirit and outward form. SBishoprics and canonries
were being made the prey, not of a considerate legislature
providing for vested interests, but of the more summary and
urgent avarice of spendthrift soldiers. The higher clergy were
becoming more and more worldly and profligate. If this was
to be checked, it must be by other means, than by explaining
away the meaning of investiture. Ivo, bishop of Chartres,
who was one of the representatives of this moderate party —
Anselm’s friend, and fellow-pupil at Bec—a brave and earnest
churchman, too—reasoned plausibly enough in the abstract,
that there was a ground on which investiture was defensible* ;

* Tyo Carnot. Ep. 60.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 187

—that it was folly to sacrifice religion to a point of positive
order. Doubtless, as he said, St. Augustine made great
account of the claims of human law ;—doubtless the Phari-
sees in their day “ strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel ;”
probably also he only spoke the truth when he complained
that great scandals were left unredressed during the struggle,
and that the ministers of the Roman See often behaved very
badly ; but the question on which all hinged yet remained,
whether he or the Pépe’s party best understood the feelings
and necessities of the time. He only proved—what they
had good reason to know as well as he—that they were
playing a strong game, were making great sacrifices. It might
be, that the object was worth them, and required them; it
might be, that it did matter whether investiture were granted
by this or that symbol. It certainly did so happen that those
most interested, the feudal lords, thought so. Ivo, however,
himself, as the contest went on, came to see that the point
was not so indifferent or secondary, as he had once repre-
sented it. *

It was on this question that, after the death of William
Rufus, Anselm carried on his battle against feudalism, under
the new king, Henry I. As far as we can see, it was
William’s tyranny in driving Anselm out of England, that
gave him this new ground. Jor it was during his exile that
the canons against investiture, which hitherto the Popes
had not cared to enforee in England, were brought under
his notice: and in them he gained a distinct expression for
his principles, the want of which he had felt in his resistance
to William.

It was a strange destiny which seemed to pursue him. His
old enemy was dead, but the conflict-was to be renewed at once,
with scarce a breathing time, against afresh one. Dispute and
turmoil were still to be his lot. The contrast is indeed a striking
one,—it is suggested by the work referred to at the beginning
of these remarks, a translation of his two most celebrated
works— between Anselm the writer, and Anselm the arch-

* Id, Ep. 236.. De Marca, viii. xx, 5.

-

188 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY Tf.

bishop. Most great men have one sphere and one function ;
and accordingly, however diversified their powers or history,
every thing about them seems subordinate to this one end.
Whatever bears not on it, may be matter for curiosity, or give
life and reality to the broad popular notion of them; but it is
no essential feature of their portrait. The statesman may be
a scholar—the orator have an ambition to shine also as a man
of science, or a poet, or, it may be, as a theologian; but
their feats or failures alike are absorbed into or drop off from
their memory, and will be forgotten before the fashion of their
clothes, the look of their face, or the tone of their voice.
The law of their course forbids them the coveted place in
another fraternity besides their own. Many men indeed have,
like St. Athanasius, worked out their peculiar task, both by
their writings and by the influence of a powerful character
during an eventful life; but their actions and writings have
been the one the complement and illustration of the other ;
they have led directly to the same point of sight; they cannot
be separated; they are promise and fulfilment, text and
commentary. And again, there is sometimes a kind of contrast
between men’s lives and writings, which arises from a want of
harmony between them,— painful or amusing, as the case may
be — where the deed is inconsistent with the word, or where a
man’s feebleness and helplessness of speech, his rude phrase and
stammering lips, stand out in ludicrous juxtaposition with his
practical clearness and energy. But this is not the contrast
we are speaking of in the case of St. Anselm; it is the contrast
of different and almost opposite characters in the same person.
He is at once the deep and original metaphysician, intensely
absorbed with abstract problems, the most baffling to men’s
reason and trying to their faith—in a rude age and with
slender appliances, by the help of St. Augustine and his own
thoughts, facing them boldly, and marking out a new and
definite course which was to be followed in schools of the
Church for centuries: and he is also the active champion and
leader of the Church party in the West, who has at once to bear
the “stress and burden” of the English primacy in a newly
organised and unsettled Church—to carry on the routine and

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 189

detail of business—and further, to contend singly against over-
whelming odds for an obnoxious principle, to raise a feeling,
and form a party, where at starting he was alone. There is
a sort of instinct which disjoins and opposes the speculative
and the practical, and where it finds the one is surprised to
find the other. Such works as the Monologium and Pros-
logium seem to fix their author’s place. Calm profound &
priort speculations on the most sacred foundations of all
religion,— which issuing from the densest gloom of the Middle
Ages, and clothed in their grotesque though scientific diction,
arrested the attention of Leibnitz, and are making their
writer’s name a familiar and respected one in the schools of
Germany and France, —they mark him out as belonging to
those who live apart, who work for mankind in secret; whose
memories, known to the world by their writings, are shrouded
from popular curiosity in a sort of mythical vagueness; as a
subtle teacher, whose very sentences are weighed with heed:
—fitly placed where the great poet has placed him—in the
consecrated brotherhood of those, who have especially minis-
tered God’s gifts of reason— prophets and preachers, historians
and philosophers, men of the schools and the cloister —

** Natan profeta, e 1 Metropolitano
Crisostomo, ed Anselmo, e quel Donato,
Che alla prim’ arte degnd poner mano—”

But such an one we do not expect to meet with also on the
turbulent stage of English history ; in company with the
practical, the intrepid, the far-sighted rulers of the multitude
— influencing and encountering the powers of the world —
the fellow-champion of Hildebrand and Becket—the mate
and rival of our Norman kings. The effect is much as if we
could imagine that Bishop Butler had fought and suffered for
the Church against the Puritans, or Archbishop Laud had

written the “ Analogy.”

Not that there is any great mystery in this, or that Anselm
possessed any very wonderful versatility or variety of talent.
Well as he acquitted himself when called to act in public, he
never changed the character which he had formed in his days

190 sT. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

of peace. He always continued to look on his vocation in the
world as that of the theologian and the ascetic. In the very
tug and crisis of the battle, when standing face to face with
what we call the realities of life,—man of business and ac-
tion as he seemed, he was still in reality the devout and
enthusiastic metaphysician. In the hall at Rockingham, or
the cloister of Canterbury, or the palace of the Lateran —
journeying along the “rugged and ruinous ways” to Italy —
as well as in his Campanian monastery, with its mountains
and sweet cool air*, his thoughts without effort disengaged
themselves from those absorbing interests which seemed at
stake, to ‘fly back to their sacred and remembered spring,’ —
the deep things of God and the soul. To the last, on his
death-bed, it was evident that he considered it his especial
work to unravel and communicate high and difficult truths.
Nor was he wrong. He was not a statesman, but a monk.
The secret of his victory —of his high and noble bearing in
the world—of his dignity and self-possession— of his clear-
sighted decision—of his firmness and readiness—of that
unbroken calm which seemed in so undefinable a way to be
about him—the secret of all this lay not in any unusual pro-
portion of those powers which enable men of the world to
charm or overawe their fellows, but in his thorough earnest-
ness and self-devotion; in that completeness of character which
by dint of continual and genuine self-mastery, has become
fitted for every kind of service, because it has really surren-
dered every end but one. And so when called to a new
sphere, he was ready and qualified for it—he at once
recognised his place and took it. The scene was changed,
but the man was the same. All that he brought to meet it
was his former fidelity and patience — his unexcited and com-
monplace sense of duty —the unconscious heroism which had
been growing up in him in secret —fortezza, ed umiltate, e largo
core —and the vivid and constant certainty that, come what
might, he had chosen the winning side. And thus, monk and
schoolman as he was, he was not discomfited by the jeers of

* Eadmer, de Vit. Ans, p. 20.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY TI. 191

William Rufus and his court, nor surprised to find himself
wresting from the “great King Henry” one of the dearest
privileges of feudal royalty.

The fact of this contrast—that there is so little visible
connection between Anselm the theologian and Anselm the
archbishop—is an instructive one. ‘The cause of “ eccle-
siastical liberty” was not of interest only to men of statesman-
like powers—whose line was action, command, and policy—in
whom a great and noble cause, to be battled for in the world
against selfishness and power, was of itself sufficient to rouse
- enthusiasm and enlist their whole souls—for Anselm certainly
belonged not to this class. Yet no man fought more sturdily
or heartily, with less doubt as to the importance of his
quarrel, with greater readiness to risk and suffer every thing
for it, than he did; and that, not as a tool, or blind partisan ;
for no one prompted him, and the court of Rome, as well as the
English bishops, left him very much to fight his own battle.
In his case, certainly, it was no political ends, howeyer good
and high, which moved him. The excitements of the strife,
the certaminis gaudia, had little charm for him. Nothing can
account for his line of conduct, but the calm, ever-present
conviction, that those high interests which filled his thoughts
in the cell, and before the altar, were in visible and open
jeopardy in the feudal palace.

Our readers, however, know something of Anselm, and we
need not say more about him: his antagonist we must intro-
duce at somewhat greater length.

Henry Beauclerk was the youngest of the Conqueror’s
sons, and not the least remarkable of that remarkable family,
who collectively present a fair specimen of the race of stirring
and adventurous men, of whom they were the head—a race
whose banners, in the eleventh century, had been seen in
almost every country round the Mediterranean—gens fere
orbem terrarum bello pervagata—who had met and humbled
alike Greek and Latin emperors, soldans of Syria and Africa,
and had set up their thrones east, west, and south,—in Russia
and England, in Naples, Palermo, and Antioch; at once the
unscrupulous persecutors of the Church, and its most enthu-

*

192 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

siastic liegemen and soldiers. The three brothers were all of
them restless, daring, and ambitious; full of that wild eager-
ness of character, which threw itself, with the same reality
for the moment, into devotion, crime, and romantic enterprise,
and changed at once from merriment and pleasantry into
brutal ferocity. But otherwise they were very different.
Robert,.the model of courtesy, the fiery and dashing knight,
who had never met his match in “ Paynim land or Christen-
dom,” the hero of the first crusade—with a soldier’s kind-
heartedness and frankness, had all a soldier’s licence, and,
except in war, was a general laughing-stock for his incon-
ceivable weakness and indolence. William, as brave and
enterprising, and far more profligate, had none of his feeble-
ness ; in his headlong vehemence there was foresight, quick
intelligence, and steady decision. Henry had been schooled
by his fortunes. In his youth he was the scholar of the
family, the man of peace and studious tastes; the frequenter
of learned companies; the dabbler in classical quotations and
snatches of philosophy; whose attainments, if they were some-
what “ tumultuary,” — if, like Charlemagne, he seldom
ventured ‘to read aloud, or to chant, except in an under-
tone,”* were yet sufficient—in a prince—to vindicate the
fair clerk’s” right to his name. Yet he was no mere idle
dilettante or pedant. However loudly his rough brothers
might laugh, when they heard the saws about “ illiterate kings
being crowned asses,” with which he used to entertain his
practical, but not very accomplished parent, the dealer in
proverbs was shrewd and wily withal. His was not a specula-
tive and abstract love of philosophy, which would be contented
in the retirement of the bower or cloister; he was not without
hopes that England would some day be Plato’s blissful
commonwealth, azheve a philosopher should be king, or the
king a philosopher. His father was alive to his talents —
“Never mind, child, you will be king yet,” was the con-
solatory prediction with which he bade his son dry his -tears,

* William of Malmsbury copies Eginhard’s words about Charlemagne. Will...
Malms. I. v. § 390. Eginh. Vit. C. M, §. 26,

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 193

when he found him once weeping at some affront from: his
brothers. I

His father’s death left him a person of some consequence,
either as a friend or a prize. ‘ He had his father’s blessing,
and his mother’s inheritance, and much treasure withal to
depend upon”—and with this, though without any territory,
he thought he could defy his brothers, and hold the balance
between them. His plan was to support Robert ; he was the
least formidable, and was easily worked upon; Henry’s
firmness and longsightedness might temper his softness. But
Robert, though gentle and weak, knew well the value of
money, and could listen -to slanderers. Henry made the
inexcusable mistake of leaving his secret of strength, his
3000 marks, within Robert’s grasp, while he went over into
England on his brother’s service; when he returned he
found that Robert had made use of him in another way, —
the 3000 marks were gone irrecoverably — squandered on
Robert’s mercenaries. His hopes of influence thus rudely
put an end to, “perhaps,” says William of Malmsbury, * he
took it unkindly, but he held his peace.” After experiencing
more of Robert’s ingratitude, he accepted an invitation from
William; but William was satisfied when he had got him
away from Normandy; and after a year of want and disap-
pointed expectation, he escaped across the channel to Robert,
whose flattering tone changed as soon as he was once more
in his power. Thus he lived, bandied about from one
brother to the other, each disliking him equally, but afraid
to trust him with the other. It was in vain that he tried to
win Robert’s confidence, that he saved Rouen for him, that
he tossed traitors over the walls into the Seine, so zealous
was he in his cause; Robert requited him by turning him
out of the city he had preserved. In the end both brothers
joined against him.— “ And so,” says his historian, “ having
shown himself loyal and active on behalf of each of them,
they plundered the young man of all he had, and trained
him up to greater prudence by lack of victuals.”

He took to his lesson kindly and learned it well. At
length William was killed. Robert was at the time far away.

O

*

194 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

He had gone some years before to the East. The bravest of
the Christian host, he had gained great glory against the
infidels; the crown of Jerusalem was pressed upon him, but
home and rest were dearer; he was now on his way back,
wooing a fair lady in Italy, and refreshing himself after his
toils. Meanwhile his quiet brother had been gaining popu-
larity, forming a party, and biding his time in England.
The news of William’s death brought with it the expectation
of universal confusion; most of the court dispersed hurriedly
to their homes to prepare for the worst. Henry was.
on the spot and ready. The day William was killed, he
claimed the keys of his treasury: the keeper opposed him,
and reminded him that he had sworn homage to Robert.
Henry answered by drawing his sword; he was not going
to lose his father’s sceptre by “ frivolous procrastination.”
Robert’s title, after all, was an imperfect one; his father
had expressly excluded him from the crown of England; and,
any how, it rested with the bishops and great men to accept
or refuse him. Personally there were many things against
him — his indolent spendthrift ways, his childish feebleness.
Above all, he was away; “the great men knew not what had
become of him,” and England wanted a governor at once.
Henry was willing to be king of England; he was a fit man
to be a king, resolute and steady, and, except with the riot-
ous companions of King Rufus, popular. Even the Saxons
felt kindly towards a born Englishman, a son too of William
the King: and he was a friend of justice and quiet; his soul
abhorred the loud, coarse, impudent profligacy which had
been rampant in his brother’s palaces. The whole crew of
the dead king’s companions, male and female, were at once
mercilessly chased away; “ the use of lights at night restored
in the court.” He promised a strong and righteous govern-
ment, fair customs to the crown vassals, to the people the
“old laws of King Edward,” and liberty to the Church.
The clergy and great men unanimously agreed to have
Henry. Three days after William’s death he was “ conse-
crated to be king” at Westminster, with great “ rejoicings

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 195

of the people.” * Robert hastened home, but it was too late ;
his chance was gone, and his place filled by one who could
keep it. The smooth, pleasant, clerkly youth, “of fairest
form and manners, and most gentyl and free,” f who had so
assiduously courted his service, and been flouted by him in
return so lightly, was now master of the game—a king in’
good earnest, no trifler with titles, or hero of forays or tilt-
yards; and he had not forgotten what he had learned or
suffered of Robert. He was still the man of smiles and
decencies; he could wait for his object, but not forgive or
relent. ‘ Silly Robelin Courte-hose”—he had but to be
left to himself, to work out ample vengeance for his brother.
He first sold his claim to England for a pension of 3000
marks; but he was a gallant and courteous knight, and could
not refuse a lady —at the suit of Henry’s queen he gave it
up. Robert knew not how to govern his dukedom. Nor-
mandy was in wild disorder, and he helpless and listless; it
was a sore sight, and Henry took it much to heart; his
brother was disgracing himself and ruining a noble province,
*‘ playing the monk instead of the count;” he expostulated —
“once blandly by words, more than once roughly by war ;”
—but Robert was incorrigible. Henry was at last prevailed
upon—it was very painful, but necessary —to sacrifice his
** indiscreet brotherly affection to endangered justice :” there
were maxims of Cesar to justify him;—one after another
he won the towns and castles of Normandy. Robert wan-
dered about, deserted, begging his bread; at last he made
one desperate effort; it ended in a captivity of thirty years.
* He was kept in free custody till the day of his death,” says
Henry’s astute and ironical panegyrist, “by his brother’s
laudable kindness (pietate); for he suffered no evil except
solitude, if it could be called solitude where his keepers were
all attention to him, and where he had plenty of jollities and
dainty dinners.”{ Poor Robert doubtless had a keen relish
for “jollities and dainty dinners;” but coupled with “ free

* Ord. Vit. x. c. 14. p. 88. ed. Le Prevost. Will. Malmsb.
t Robert of Gloucester. ft Will. Malmsb. §. 389. 395.
Oo 2

196 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY T.

custody ”—stories too there are of something rougher still, of
‘* strong prison” and blindness ;— but even with free custody,
they could have been but a poor solace to the fiery spirit of
the most gallant of the crusaders. He dragged on through
the thirty years in miserable fretfulness, and at last—so the
story went—-in a burst of rage at some fancied insult from
Henry—the “ dastard clerkling who had outwitted him”— he
vowed that he would never taste food again, and died “ pining
and angry with himself, cursing the day of his birth.”* Dreary
finish of his brilliant and gay career ; melancholy waste of gal-
lantry and enterprise, of talent, eloquence, and ike Lor,
for these also Robert was famous in his time. The “clerk-
ling’s” revenge was a stern and complete one. Robert sur-
vived all his fellow-travellers to Palestine. ‘* Alas,” says
the old English chronicler, moralising on the change since he
fought with them at Antioch and Ascalon, “him had better
have been king of the Holy Land;” he refused to be “the
highest prince in Christendom when God would, and took to
rest ; therefore did God send him rest in prison.”

Henry had his difficulties; but he was fully able to cope
with them. The line that he had taken—his unmilitary
character—his reforms and popular concessions—the pro-
spect of a strict government—his professed sympathy with
the clergy and the Anglo-Saxon population—his quiet
Saxon queen, with her monastic education and tastes —drew
on him the angry contempt of the great Norman nobility.
They had been taken by surprise —many of them at least —
in electing him. MRobert’s easy sway was much more suited
to their unruly independence. ‘Till after the conquest of
Normandy, ‘‘ both while a youth and as king,” says a con-
temporary, “‘ Henry was held in the utmost contempt.” But
. he was not a king to be despised, as his barons found to their
cost: the “ Lion of Justice” t could use his fangs and claws
on occasion. High aristocratical Montgomerys, and Grent-
maisnils, and De Warennes, might sneer in his presence at

sober “* Godric Godfadyr and his wife Godiva,” t and feel very

* Matt. Paris, a. 1134, and note to Hearne’s Robert of Gloucester, ii. 426.
+ John of Salisb. Polycr. vi, 18. ft Will. Malmsb. §. 394, 409. 406.

Sr. ANSELM AND HENRY Tf. 197

little respect for a king who had a taste for natural history
and collected a menagerie at Woodstock-— who encouraged
his young nobility to puzzle cardinals in logic, instead of up-
setting knights in the lists: —he was not put out of temper ;
he only received their sarcasms with an “ ominous laughter”
(formidabiles cachinnos ejiciebat)—laughter, which, like his
praise, was the sure forerunner of mischief—and in due time
showed them, either by war, or “ modestly and in courts of
justice,” that Godric Godfadyr could do other things than
amuse himself with his camels and porecupines at Woodstock.
But Henry deserves his own praise; he made himself felt in
England for good as well as for evil. He at least allowed
no oppression but his own. The castles, “ filled with devils
and evil men,” which were the curse of England in Stephen’s
time, were not raised in Henry’s. If the poor felt his
severity, they also felt his protection :
“ He was in thought, day and night,
To save poor men from rich men’s unright.” *

The Saxon chronicler, who records the Leicestershire assize,
where the king’s justiciary “hanged more thieves than
were ever known before,”—many of them, true men said,
very unjustly,—and who complains of the misery of that
“heavy year” —* first the wretched people are bereaved of
their property, and then are they slain” —speaks probably
the voice of the lower orders in his concluding eulogy on
Henry. A good man he was, and there was great dread |
of him; no man durst do wrong with another in his time.
Peace he made for man and beast. Whoso bore his burden
of gold and silver, no man durst say ought to him but good.”

His position, in respect of the aristocracy, dictated his
Church policy. His jealous and quarrelsome nobility, with
their feuds and seignorial rights, threatened to split up the
kingdom into a number of independent principalities like
the great fiefs of France. He saw clearly enough that this
would be ruinous—that the thing for England was to make
the crown all-powerful, and next, as far as could be, respect-

* Robert of Gloucester,
03

198 §T. ANSELM AND HENRY 1.

able and popular. And for this he could not spare the
‘Church. To a certain point she was his natural ally — a force,
powerful, both from its activity and from its dead weight
also, on the side of order. Her higher clergy were an aristo-
cracy of peace, contrasted with the military aristocracy —
not, like the barons, hereditary, but continually replenished
from the tried servants of the crown, and defenceless if re-
fractory. Moreover, the great want of kings is money, and

money was more easily to be drawn from the Church than .

from the spendthrift and pugnacious barons. Henry was
quite content that the Church should be strong and honour-
able as in the days of his father; he did not mean to seize
or farm her bishoprics and abbeys, and had no notion of
encouraging disreputable clerks like Ralph Flambard to
bring shame on their patron by their impudent profligacy.
Almost his first measure was one of justice on this grand
delinquent. Ralph, now Bishop of Durham, was seized and
shut up in the Tower of London—“ the people rejoicing as
if a raging lion had been caught:”*—but he shortly after
escaped, to play fresh pranks in Normandy. We cannot
dismiss him without giving the account of his escape, from
the Norman monk Ordericus. f

“The crafty prelate managed to get forth from the rigour of
the prison-house, and by means of friends cunningly contrived his
escape. For he was deft and a man of words, and though cruel
and fierce tempered, yet was he bountiful withal, and generally of
a merry humour, so that to many he was pleasant and right dear.
By the king’s order he had daily two shillings to his board, where-
with, by the help of his friends, he did disport himself (¢ripudiabat)
in the prison, and ordered a noble banquet to be served daily for
himself and his guards. On a certain day a rope was brought in
to him in a flagon of wine,” (proh dolus !—exclaims the shocked
librarian of Malmsbury tf, in his account of the adventure), —“ and
a dainty feast was made of the bishop’s bounty. The guards ate with
him, and were made merry by deep draughts of potent wine ; who
being exceeding drunk, and snoring carelessly, the bishop fastened
the rope to the pillar which was in the middle of the tower window,

* Anselm. Ep. iv. 2. J Order. Vit. x. 18. ¢ W. Malmsb. §. 394,

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 199

and taking his pastoral staff with him, he slid downthe rope. But
because he had forgotten to guard his hands with gloves, they were
cut to the very bone by the roughness of the rope ; and moreover,
for that the rope did not reach to the ground, the fat prelate (cor-
pulentus flamen) came down with a heavy fall, and being nearly
dashed to pieces began to groan most piteously —”

His friends, however, were in waiting with horses to convey
him to the coast, and he escaped. It was some consolation
to the population at large that he had not got off quite scath-
less. —“ If he hurt his arms and scraped the skin off his
hands,” says William of Malmsbury, with a chuckle of
satisfaction, * little does the people care for that.”

Henry meant in his own way to reform the Church. He
was ready to appoint worthy and respectable men to preside
over her government—friends and chaplains of his own,
discreet, able men of business, who had travelled and been
charged with embassies, and learned something of the world,
and who by their princely state and magnificence and public
spirit would keep up the dignity of the Church and their
order. Such were Henry’s favourite bishops. Roger, after-
wards styled the Great, was a poor chantry priest in a
suburb of Caen when he first took Henry’s fancy —then a
needy ill-used younger brother with a small following—by
his expeditious mode of performing divine service; Henry
thought he would make a good soldier’s chaplain, and took
him into his service. Roger proved useful—he kept the
purse-strings discreetly ; and he rose with his patron’s for-
tunes to be Bishop of Salisbury, one of the most trusted and
wealthiest subjects in England. If he was rather more of a
man of the world than became a bishop —if he loved riches,
and was reputed somewhat free in his life, yet he was known
to begin the day with the due religious offices, and his public
works were monuments of his taste and liberality. Such
another was Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln—a contempo-
rary’s recollections of him might almost stand for a sketch of
Wolsey’s fortunes.

o4

200 ' §T, ANSELM AND HENRY 1.

“In my boyhood and youth;” he says, “when I used to see the
glory of our Bishop Robert—his knights so gallant, his pages of
noblest birth, his stud of the greatest value, his gold and gilt
plate, the profusion of his table, the state of his attendants, his
wardrobe of purple and fine linen, I could conceive no greater
happiness. How could I feel otherwise, when every one, even
those who used to lecture in the schools on despising the world,
paid their court to him, and he himself, regarded as the father and
lord of all, most dearly loved and embraced the world. But when
I grew up, I heard tell of foulest reproaches cast in his teeth,
which would have half killed me; beggar as I was, to have endured
before so great an audience; and so I began to hold that ines-
iimable blessing at a cheaper rate.

« And finally I will tell what happened to him before his death,
—he, the justiciary of all England, the terror of every one, was in
the last year of his life twice sued by the king through some petty
justice, and twice cast with every circumstance of indignity. His
distress was such, that while with him as his arehdeacon at dinner,
I have seen him burst into tears; and when asked the reason, ‘ My
attendants,’ he said, ‘once used to be dressed in costly stuffs: now
fines to the king, whose favour I have ever studied, have reduced
them to lamb skins.’ And so completely did he despair of the king’s
friendship, that, when told of the high terms in which the king
had spoken of him, he said, with a sigh, ‘ ‘The king never praises
any of his servants whom he does not mean to ruin utterly.’ For
king Henry, if I may say so, bore a grudge bitterly, and was very
hard to fathom (xdmis inscrutabilis).

“ A few days after he fell down in a fit of apoplexy at Woodstock,
and died,” *

But, further, the king was a man of learning, and he would
not be without learned bishops also; he brought Gilbert the
Universal, “whose equal in science was not to be found
between England and Rome,” from the schools of Nevers to
be Bishop of London. Gilbert justified his patron’s choice,
and moreover left at his death immense wealth, which Henry
seized -— “ the bishop’s boots also, filled with gold and silver,
being carried to the Exchequer.” But at the same -time
Henry could fully appreciate a higher and stricter character,

* Henry of Huntingdon, de Contemptu Mundi, in Wharton, ii. 694.

-
—

gr, ANSELM AND HENRY lL | 201

and it was quite to his taste to have the metropolitan see
filled by such a man as Anselm.

Such was Henry Beauclerk and his policy. On coming to
the throne he at once recalled the archbishop. Anselm found
things changed; from William’s reckless tyranny, England
had passed under the rule of a long-sighted statesman, who
was bent on crushing licence ; a man above the gross vices of
his time— utterly despising the fashionable taste for military
glitter and fame — professedly a man of peace, but not afraid
of war; the avowed patron and friend of the Church, The
prospect seemed hopeful; Anselm’s plans of reform in the
English Church might now be carried into effect; Henry,
from his gentler temper, was more likely to enter into them
than his father. But very few days passed before formidable
difficulties began to show themselves. Anselm, however,
threw himself heart and soul into Henry’s interest ; mediated
between him and his suspicious subjects; received in the name
of the nobility of the realm, and the great body of the people,
the king’s plighted hand, and his promise to govern by “ just
and holy laws;”* accompanied him to the field when Robert
invaded England; kept the changeable and faithless barons
to their duty, and induced Robert to consent to a recon-
ciliation. In the only critical moment of Henry’s reign, he
owed his fortunes mainly to the archbishop.

The difficulties alluded to arose from the question of inves-
titure. Henry, following the analogy of lay fiefs, required
that Anselm should receive his archbishopric afresh from the
hands of his new lord, and do homage for it, according to the
usage of former kings. As we have already said, these feudal
customs had been hitherto exercised without protest in
England; Anselm himself had received investiture from
William Rufus. But the case was now altered; he had
assisted at councils, where the canons against investiture were
confirmed and republished; where those who gave and those
who received it were alike excommunicated. He had now
but one course—to obey the canons, and refuse Henry’s de-
mand, His experience, too, in his last dispute, had taught
him the real importance of the question, and he had made up

* Eadm. Hist. Nov. p. 59., who is the authority for what follows.

202 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

his mind, while supported by the Pope, to hazard every
thing in trying it.

The archbishop’s objection to investiture was a sufficiently
provoking derangement to Henry’s plans. To give up what
his predecessors had possessed was a check at starting; to
resist, was to come into collision with the body he wished of
all things to have on his side; with Anselm, too, an in-
domitable fearless old man, a confessor in the freshness of
triumph: Henry could not yet afford to break with him
openly, but he had not the slightest intention of yielding the
point— ‘it was worth half his realm.” Negociation with the
Pope opened a hopeful prospect of delay ; it was a course to
which the archbishop could not object; if it gained nothing
else, time of itself was well worth gaining. “Hedaeles he
well that this was “mere trifling;” but his position was,
obedience to superior authority, and besides, he did not wish
to bring suspicion on his loyalty. It was settled, therefore,
that matters should remain in abeyance, till an answer could
be received from Rome.

Henry stood on the “usages of the realm;” he was doing
no more than all his predecessors, Saxon and Norman, had
done — requiring no more than Anselm himself had yielded
to William Rufus. He was anxious, he said, to honour the
Roman Church as his father had done—to profit by the
presence and counsel of his archbishop—but, come what
might, his ‘usages,” the honour of his crown, must remain in-
violate; their surrender could not be a question with him;
he did not send to Rome to ask them asa concession from the
Pope, but to see what could be done to enable Anselm with
a good conscience to submit to them. If the Church decrees
could not be dispensed with, he regretted it; he was loth
to depart from the Pope’s obedience; but whatever resolu-
tion Anselm or the Pope might adopt, he must abide by the
“usages.”

Henry had this strong advantage, that he could say that
the Church claim was a new one. He could seem to others
and to himself to be appealing against a theory, to realities
and immemorial practice. ‘ Saw you ever, since you were

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 203

children, ring or staff given away in England, except by the
king? Whom can you conceive doing it but him?” Long
before Norman times— in the days of King Edward—back to
the old time of Charlemagne, kings had used their right, and
bishops never resisted: why should this objection be now for
the first time thought of ? Ifthe usage was wrong now, why
was it ever permitted? Why should Henry, the friend and
protector of the Church, be the first to forfeit his privileges ?
What was this new claim but an open encroachment, a
lowering of temporal honour? and what were Church decrees,
that they should, at this time of day, pretend to meddle with
what all men accounted most sublime and great—the glory
of the king’s majesty ?

Anselm did innovate certainly: loyal, unworldly man as he
was, he was giving a bold and rude shake to Henry’s royalty.
But time had been innovating before him—time and feuda-
lism had been encroaching on the Church—and if she was to
be even with them, she must bring up her way at once, and
therefore,—though principles as old as Christianity were ap-
pealed to,—abruptly. Quietly, silently, for years and years
before his day, society with its feelings and opinions had been
going through its unceasing flux, changing, drifting, settling
anew from day to day; what had at length come of all this
was, that kings and nobles thought that bishoprics were their
own, to do what they pleased with; what seemed likely was,
that soon the rest of the world, lay and clerical, would come
to think so too. These venerable, long endured “customs,”
had been hinting, insinuating, at last plainly telling men so;
leave them alone a little longer, and their evidence would be
irresistible. Since they were fresh and young, every thing
around them was altered. Jor our own part, we are not very
much disposed to quarrel, in its own age and circumstances,
with what it would be a convenient anachronism to call the
Erastianism of Charlemagne.. His was, on the whole, a real,
earnest Christian government, doing, according to its light, a
great religious work. If he meddled, in a high and summary
way, in most Church. matters, it was with the hearty zeal of
one who felt her service to be in truth his business and mis-

204 igre ST. ANSELM AND HENRY 1.

sion, and his highest honour. But Charlemagne, with his
capitularies collected from the canons of councils, and his
*‘missi” travelling all over Europe to execute them, was
among things departed and obsolete, known only to anti-
quarians, or dimly celebrated by minstrels and romancers,
fabling of the majesty and pomp— peyarooyyjpwova xdpyaso-
mpeny T442v—oOf the old Christian emperor. The living ruling
powers of Europe were of a different mould—haughty and
proud lords of the world— soldiers and hunters — “ fathers of
the hare and high deer ;” at best wise and cunning statesmen:
a new dynasty of force, forgetful of the Power more than
human— minister of blessing, teacher of wisdom and myste-
ries — the child of heaven as well as earth, which had in old
time upheld their thrones, and which they were recompensing
now with insults and bonds:

véot yap oiaKxordpot

kparova ‘Odvprou' veoypoic dé 0) vopotc Zeve &DéTwE Kparobvst.
Ta mpl O& wedwpLa VUY GioToT.

It was time for the Church to claim what she could no longer

leave in their hands, if she might yet dream of her old.

functions. Whatever disadvantages she might have entailed
on herself, she had at least a right, had she but courage, to
save her divine commission and powers from being accounted
mere human gifts for human purposes. Usages of England
—the honour of kings—were serious things, and not to
be wantonly tampered with. Henry, practical man that
he was, was right in thinking that they were not to be
sacrificed to atheory. But there were serious and practical
things in the world besides King Henry’s usages; there
were other great works going on, other deep matters filling
men’s thoughts, besides the establishment of his power: the
Church, too, had her ends, her customs, laws, dignities, not
on paper, but in the living world, which to some men were
too precious to be sacrificed even to King Henry’s glory
and policy. She, too, had to preserve, and more than this,
to restore.

But to return to our narrative: Henry’s envoys returned,
probably with all the success he expected. The Pope was

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 205

inflexible, but his long letter against investitures had as little
effect on the king. Henry, without taking the slightest no-
tice of it, turned upon Anselm, coaxing, threatening, bullying,
sending message after message through the bishops, with the
object, if he would not submit, of getting him out of England.
He was loth to repeat in earnest his brother’s rough game ; it
was his way to “worry rather with words than with arms; ”*
—but he tried to intimidate. Anselm, however, was immove-
able ;—“‘ he could not leave his church—-he had work to do
there, and there he must abide till forced from it.” At last a
new embassy was proposed;—men were to go of higher
note, — perhaps the Pope would be moved, when he was told,
that, unless he relented, Anselm must be driven out of
England, and the Roman See lose the obedience of the whole
realm, with the advantage which it yearly derived from it.
Anselm was to send his representatives, if it were but to
testify to the king’s determination—a trusted monk, named
Baldwin, and another. The king’s commissioners were three
bishops; the chief was William Rufus’s old envoy, Gerard,
now Archbishop of York—a man of slippery doubtful ways,
and unhappy end,—shrewd and plausible, and with much
reputation for learning. ‘“ No man in England might be of
more use to the Church,” writes Anselm to the Pope, “ and
I hope in God he has the will, as he has the power.”f But he
was an ambitious and unsteady churchman, as easily tempted
as he was easily frightened. He had a most sensitive jea-
lousy of the primacy of Canterbury, and was not very nice
in displaying it. On one occasion, when the English bishops
met in synod— so went the story among the canons of York
—and a seat of solitary dignity raised above the rest was
prepared for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gerard, in high
dudgeon, kicked it over, with an oath “in the vulgar tongue ”
— Dei odium et qui sie paraverat vulgariter imprecans— and
would not take his seat except as co-ordinate inhonour. The
other two were Robert of Chester and Herbert of Norwich,
men of very questionable respectability.

* Robert of Gloucester. + Ep. iii. 48.

206 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

They returned with fresh letters for the king and the
archbishop: and the nobility and higher clergy; were im-
mediately summoned to meet in London. They found that
the king refused to communicate the contents of his letter,
but again required unqualified submission from Anselm,
under pain of expulsion. To Anselm the Pope wrote, that
he had peremptorily refused to comply with Henry’s demands.

“ Only a few days before,” he said, “it had been again decreed
in council, that churches and church benefices were not to be
received by the clergy from lay hands. This practice was the root
of simony—a temptation to the clergy to pay court to power.
Princes must not come between the Church and her offices, nor
make themselves channels of what is really Christ’s gift, and has
his stamp upon it.” ‘ For,” he continues, “as through Christ
alone the first door is opened by baptism into the Church, and the
last by death into life eternal—so through Christ alone should the
door-keeper of his fold be appointed, by whom not for the hire of
the flock, but for Christ’s sake, the sheep may go in and out till
they are led to everlasting life.”

So wrote Paschal to the archbishop; the letter was handed
about and eagerly read; and in a few days it came out that
he had written to the king to the same effect. Matters
seemed to have come to a crisis, when the three bishops came
forward to make an important communication— they had
received, they said, privately and secretly from the Pope, a
verbal message to Henry, to assure him, “ that so long as he
acted as a good king, and appointed religious prelates, the
Pope would not enforce the decrees against investiture; but
that he was obliged to hold another language in public, and
that he could not give the privilege in writing, lest other
princes should use it to the prejudice of the Church.” This
startling announcement, to which the king’s envoys pledged
their faith and honour as bishops, raised a storm of debate in
the assembly. Anselm’s representatives had heard nothing
of the message, which was inconsistent with everything
which had passed in public between them and the Pope.
Baldwin especially was indignant—the bishops, he said,
were breaking their canonical allegiance, trifling with the

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 207

Pope’s honour. The altercation became hot and fast —
Baldwin insisted that nothing could supersede the authority
of documents sealed with the Pope’s signet—the king’s
party were fierce and insulting in their rejoinder—‘“ The
word of three bishops ought to weigh more than bescribbled
sheep skins with a lump of lead at the bottom, backed by
the testimony of two paltry monks, who, when they re-
nounced the world, lost all weight as evidence in business of
the world.” But this is no secular matter,” said Baldwin.
Sir,” was the answer, “we know you to be discreet and a
man of business, yet still even order requires that we should
set more by the evidence of an archbishop and two bishops
than by yours.” ‘ But what becomes of the evidence of the
letters?” ‘«* When we refuse to receive the evidence of monks
against bishops,” was the sneering reply, “how could we
receive that of sheep skins?” A cry of disgust and indig-
nation burst from the monks who were looking on. ‘“ Woe,
woe!” they exclaimed, “are not the Gospels written on
sheep-skins ?”

Thus things were more embarrassed than ever, and the
archbishop thrown into a most painful state of uncertainty.
What was he to believe, the Pope’s letters or the solemnly
pledged word of the bishops? It was plain that things
could not go on without a fresh embassy, and a fresh em-
bassy accordingly was sent. Anselm wrote, detailing the
transaction, and earnestly begging for some clear and definite
directions how he was to act.

“Tam not afraid,” he wrote, “of banishment, or poverty, or
torments, or death :—for all these, God comforting me, my heart
is ready, in obedience to the Apostolic See, and for the liberty of
my mother the Church—all I ask is certainty, that I may know
without doubt, what course I ought to hold by your authority.” *

It may occur perhaps to some of our readers, did the
bishops after all speak the truth? Was this a trick and
manceuvre of the Pope to keep on good terms with. England

* Bp. iii, 73,

208 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY Tf.

during his struggle with the emperor? The supposition
seems to us to be quite negatived, both by Paschal’s personal
character and by the subsequent events. Paschal certainly
was not a great man: he was diplomatic and wavering, and
dull to the claims of his own cause except when at his very
door; but still he was in earnest, and there is no reason to
suspect him of an act of such incredible folly, which could
not be kept secret, and must prove ruinous to his influence
and cause whenever known. Further, he at once and most
solemnly denied it, and excommunicated the bishops, without
any protest as far as appears on their part; on the contrary,
both Eadmer and William of Malinsbury *, take it for granted
that at the time they were writing, the bishops’ story was a
notorious and confessed falsehood: nor is there any thing in
the character of the envoys to redeem their credit.

During the absence of the new embassy, things were
taking a turn in England, which Henry could scarcely have
expected. He had early in his reign nominated one William
Gifford, who had repeatedly held the office of chancellor
under the preceding kings, to the bishopric of Winchester.
Gifford refused to receive it, as it must come to him from the
hands of the king; but on Anselm’s return to England, the
clergy and people of the see earnestly petitioned the arch-
bishop that they might have Gifford for bishop, and he was
at last prevailed upon to take the office. But he still would
not consent to receive the ring and staff from Henry. How-
ever, for what reason it does not appear, the king connived
at his receiving investiture in the cathedral from the hands
of the archbishop. But his consecration was deferred. Sub-
sequently to this, on the strength of the report brought from
Rome by the bishops, Henry had invested two of his chaplains
with the bishoprics of Salisbury and Hereford, and he now
called on Anselm to consecrate the three bishops elect.
Anselm remonstrated — he was ready to consecrate Gifford,
but as to the other two, it had been agreed between him and
_ the king, that till the Pope’s decision had been finally

* Gest. Rez. § 417,

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY IT. 209

ascertained, he at least should not be expected to sanction
lay investiture. Henry swore that he should consecrate all
or none: he still refused, and the king ordered Gerard of
York to consecrate. This was a gross infringement of the
metropolitan rights of Canterbury: a point keenly felt at
the time; but Gerard was ready. ‘The tide, however, was
turning. To Henry’s surprise and indignation, the bishop
elect of Hereford, a member of his court and the queen’s
chancellor, brought back the ring and crosier to the king,
and resigned them, expressing his sorrow that, as things then
stood, he had ever consented to take them: to go on, and
receive consecration from Gerard, would be receiving a curse
instead of a blessing. He of course was disgraced, and
obliged to leave the court. But he was not alone. On the
day of consecration, at the very last moment, when every
thing was prepared for the ceremony, and the church was
thronged with spectators, Gifford’s conscience misgave him ;
he interrupted the service, and refused Gerard’s benediction.
Confounded and indignant, the officiating bishops retired,
without finishing the ceremony for Roger, who had been
appointed to Salisbury. “ At this a shout burst from the
whole multitude, who had come together to see the issue;
they cried out with one voice, that William was for the right
—that the bishops were no bishops, but perverters of justice.”
With changed countenance, and burning with rage at the
insult, they rushed to the king to make their complaint.
Gifford was summoned to Henry’s presence; menaces on all
sides were showered on him. There he stood,” says Ead-
mer, “but he would not flinch from the right; so he was
despoiled of all he had, and driven from the realm.” Anselm
protested strongly and repeatedly, of. course without effect ;
yet Henry had learnt what he had scarcely looked for. If
the court clergy were becoming infected with Anselm’s views
of Church and State, and were beginning to turn on their
patron, it might be time to think of some rougher and more
summary way of finishing the dispute.

Henry, the most dissembling of men, was visibly showing
his impatience; it was at all events necessary to get Anselm

P

210 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY TI.

out of England—out of sight, and cut off from communication
with the clergy. On some trifling pretext, the king suddenly
made his appearance at Canterbury: his real intention was
by some means or other to drive the archbishop away. A
letter had by this time come from the Pope—the king refused
to see it. Anselm, on the other hand, dared not break the
seal, for its contents might involve an immediate rupture;
and further, to avoid the suspicion of forgery, he wished it to
come sealed into the king’s hands. But Henry had come to
settle matters — he must have his own, he said, whether the
Pope agreed or not: “ let every one who loved him know for
certain, that whoever refused him his paternal customs was
his enemy.” Rumours were becoming rife among those most
in his confidence, of intentions of violence: the quarrel was
waxing hot, and the future looked dismal and full of danger.
«The very nobles,” says Eadmer, “on whose advice Henry
depended, I have seen in tears, at the thought of the mischief
which was at hand.” Special prayers even were offered up
for the crisis. But in the midst of this excitement, Henry
all at once changed his tone: he took up the language of
entreaty — * would the archbishop go to Rome himself, and
try his influence there”? Anselm answered that if his peers
thought it right for him to go, he was ready, “‘as God should
give him strength;” but that “‘even if he should reach the
threshold of the apostles, he could do nothing to the prejudice
of the liberty of the Church, or his own honour — he could
but bear witness to facts.” The reply was that nothing more
was required — the king’s commissioner would be there also,
to plead for his master.

Four days after this had been settled, he was on horseback,
leaving Canterbury to cross again the length of Europe, a
feeble time-worn man on the verge of seventy, but fearless
and cheerful as ever. The intense heat of the season stopped
his progress, and gave him a month of quiet in his old home
at Bec; but he was on his way again before the summer was
over. Henry had now gained his point in having got
Anselm out of England —he had no wish that he should be
seen and heard at Rome; it would be much more to his pur-

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 211

pose if Anselm could be detained in Normandy or France.
We find incidentally from one of Anselm’s letters that the
king had suddenly become anxious about “his archbishop’s”
health, and the fatigues of so long and rough a journey; he
strongly recommended the archbishop to spare himself — to
halt somewhere, and transact his business at Rome by envoys.
Anselm’s answer is dated from the passes of Mont Cenis;
he is thankful for the king’s care for him, and essurances of
his esteem, but he was too far on his way now to think of
turning back—he must go on to his journey’s end.*

At Rome he found his old companion in these transactions,
William Warelwast; and in due course the subject was brought
before the Roman court. Warelwast urged the old ground
of usage; moreover the English kings were distinguished for
their munificence to the Holy See, and he knew for certain,
he said, that if investitures were not allowed, it would be so
much the worse for the Romans, and they would be sorry for
it when too late. He had his friends in the Curia; his words
were received with encouragement—many of the cardinals
thought that the “wishes of so great a man as the king of
England were on no consideration to be overlooked.”
Anselm was silent; Paschal also had not spoken, and Warel-
wast was emboldened. Let what will be said,” he ex-
claimed with vehemence, “ know all present, that if it should
cost him his realm, King Henry will not lose investitures.”
* Sayest thou that King Henry will not give up investitures?”
was the quick rejoinder, “nor, before God, will Pope
Paschal, to save his head, let him have them: ”—*“ the sound
of which words exceedingly dismayed William.” He obtained
however for Henry a personal exemption for a time from
excontmunication. Anselm was ordered to hold communion
with him, but not with any of the other offenders, who were
to remain under excommunication, till the archbishop saw
grounds to take off the sentence,

Warelwast worked hard, after Anselm had left Rome, to
gain some further concessions; but all he could get was a

* Ep. ili. 76 , from the valley of Maurienne.
P 2

212 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

kind of coaxing letter from the Pope to Henry, to smooth
down the sternness of refusal with compliment and con-
gratulation, about his successes, and his ‘distinguished and
glorious consort,” and the son she had just brought him—
“‘whom we have been told you have named William, after
your illustrious father :” — appealing to his devotional feelings,
assuring him that he was parting with nothing really valuable,
and promising him on his compliance to indulge him with any
favour he might ask, besides the apostolic absolution for
himself and his queen, and the protection of the Roman
Church for his son. The Pope scarcely knew King Henry.

Warelwast overtook the archbishop’s company, who were
escorted through the Apennines by the great Countess
Matilda; and travelled with him as far as Lyons. There he
delivered to him a message from Henry — the last expedient,
if the Roman negociations failed. “ The king earnestly de-
sired his return to England, if he was willing to do all that
his predecessors had done to former kings.” “Is that all?”
said Anselm. “I speak to a man of understanding,” was
the reply. It was intelligible enough; and accordingly
Anselm took up his abode a second time with the Arch-
bishop of Lyons, and Warelwast returned to England.

Thus was Anselm, a second time, cast out to eat the bread
of strangers—thrown aside, and forced to sit by, checked,
humbled, and sick at heart, while the great powers in Church
and State exchanged their messages of civility, and carried on
the game for which he was suffering, by the most approved
rules of political manceuvre. Anselm felt most strongly the
necessity of releasing the Church from the feudal yoke; but
his line from the first had been, not his own view of the mat-
ter, but simply obedience to the law of the Church, as soon
as it came before him, and to the Pope. Only let the Pope
speak out, and he was ready, (as he showed afterwards,) to
abide by his decision. ‘* You tell me,” says he in one of his
letters to England, with unwonted sharpness, “ that they say
that I forbid the King to grant investitures. Tell them that
they lie. It is not I who forbid the king; but having heard
the Vicar of the Apostles in a great council excommunicate

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 213

all who give or receive investiture, I have no mind to hold
communion with excommunicates, or to become excommu-
nicate myself.”* But Paschal’s policy was a cruel and em-
barrassing one. With his hands full at home, he was afraid
of the king of England, the son of him who had kept Gregory
VII. at bay; his words were strong, but he shrunk from
acting. He had confirmed and republished, most emphatically
and without exception, the canons against investiture, and
solemnly declared his intention to enforce them. Henry from
the first had held but one language—he wanted no compro-
mise: “nothing in the world should make him give up his
usages.” And yet Paschal had allowed, or rather encouraged,
embassy after embassy in endless succession to come with its
hollow compliments and unvarying message, and to return, as
it was intended, with a letter of expostulation, or, at most,
a distant menace. Nothing could better suit with Henry’s
wishes and policy: and thus Anselm, whom the Roman
court was well content to see the champion of ecclesiastical
liberty, was in reality left to fight his battle, as he best could,
alone—with words indeed of respect and praise, but with
little hearty aid, and with instructions which, he complained,
only embarrassed him.

And in England, friends and foes alike tried his patience,
teazing, mistaking, and criticising him. The king, greatly
relieved by his absence, sent fresh embassies to Rome, and
seized the archbishop’s revenue for his own use, as if he had
been a convicted traitor: “yet,” says Eadmer, “ with con-
sideration and tenderness.” At the same time in his letters
he was as bland and smooth as ever ;—so full of respect and
attachment to Anselm, so grieved that he could not be with
him as Lanfranc had been for many years with his father.
Meanwhile he had no objection that Anselm should be allowed
what was “ convenient” out of the revenues of Canterbury.f
But Anselm’s questions to him as to his intentions for the
future were asked in vain. ‘Then, on the other hand, Queen
Matilda—“ good queen Molde”—amiable, warm-hearted,

* Ep. iii, 100. t Ep. iii. 94.

214 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

religious lady, could not live without her venerable confessor.
She could not understand why he should stand out so
obstinately against her lord and master’s kind wishes. She
argued with the archbishop “to soften what with all respect
she must call his iron heart.” She incessantly importuned
him, with a lady’s impatience of reasons and means, to find
“some way by which neither he might do wrong, nor the
rights of majesty be infringed.”* His poor monks too at
Canterbury were sore beset by the king’s exactions; they
were perplexed in consciencé, jealousies and complaints were
becoming rife, every thing was getting into disorder; they
wanted their head among them, and their very loyalty and
affection made them fretful and peevish, that in spite of the
king he did not return. Letter after letter he had to write
to Prior Ernulf, and to “ his dearest brethren and children,”
quieting their fears, exhorting them to manly endurance,
soothing their pettishness, cheering them with hopes of the
future—remembering especially, in his characteristic way,
the young boys and children, and sending messages to them,
‘not to forget what they had heard from him.” Himself the
greatest sufferer, all looked to him to receive their complaints,
to keep up their spirits, to throw himself into their diffi-
culties, and point out a clear way out of them. Distrust,
irritation, perplexity, all found their way to his ears. The
sufferings and scandals of the day were all laid at his door —
thrown in his teeth by ill-nature, gossip, or impatient zeal.
‘‘ Was he so holy that he could not do as Lanfranc had
done?” ‘ Was he such a coward as to fly from his post at
the word of one William?” ‘“‘ How could he bear the
thoughts of the judgment seat, and the souls which he might
have rescued by his presence in England ?” —Such were the
questions addressed to him by his own party. Critics of
another sort charged him with “ letting wicked clerks invade
and lay waste the Church without rising up against them,”
while—what was only less mischievous and culpable than
his negligence—he was depriving the king of his rights.| The

* Ep.iii.96. + Eadm.p.69. Ep. iii. 90., iv. 44. + Ep. iii. 100.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I- 215

trouble which he endured shows itself in his correspondence,
in the quiet nervous plainness of language which marks
struggling but repressed vexation. His great comfort during
these years of exile was the steady attachment of Gundulf,
Bishop of Rochester. He was not a man to take a lead or
throw much weight into either scale in a contest like the
present; but in him the archbishop had a friend who had
long loved and revered him—in whom he could place most
implicit confidence; a man of plain good sense, whose unpre-
tending yet active service, in matters of routine business, he
could always count on.

At length, after waiting a year and a half at Lyons,
Anselm resolved to act on his own responsibility. The king
of course showed no intention of yielding, or of giving up the
archiepiscopal revenues which he had seized. ‘The utmost
the Pope would do, after all the delay, was to excommunicate
by name the king’s advisers, the chief of whom was the crafty
Earl of Mellent. The king’s sentence was delayed, so he
wrote Anselm, “ because another embassy (the second since
Anselm had left Rome) was expected.” ‘On receiving this
letter,” says Eadmer, “ Anselm saw that it was useless
waiting at Lyons for help from Rome, especially as he had
repeatedly sent agents and letters to the Pope about the
settlement of this business, and up to this time nothing was
vouchsafed to him, save from time to time a promise of some-
thing, held out by way of consolation.” For the third time
he had called upon Henry to restore the lands of Canterbury,
* The cause is not mine, but God’s, entrusted to me, and I
fear to delay long to cry to God. Force me not, I pray you,
to cry sorrowfully and reluctantly, ‘Arise, O God, and judge
thou thy cause.’”* Henry had returned no answer save his
usual smooth evasions—blandientem sibi dilationem: and
Anselm then resolved to approach the borders of Normandy
and fulfil his threat.

This alarmed Henry: an excommunication from Anselm at
this time would have been a serious embarrassment to him.

* Ep. iii. 95.
Pp 4

216 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY TI.

He had enemies enough on all sides looking out for an
opportunity of attacking at advantage a power “ which was
not loved over much,” potestatem non adeo amatam,— which
threatened or had injured them. And he was besides on the
point of attempting the conquest of Normandy. His sister
the Countess of Blois mediated, and a conference was arranged
between him and the archbishop at a castle called L’Aigle.
Henry was all respect and complaisance,—expressed the
ereatest delight at meeting Anselm, and would always go
himself to the archbishop’s ‘quarters, instead of sending for
him, The result was that the revenues of the see were given
up, and Anselm restored to the king’s favour. ,
But things were far from being settled. Henry was not a |
man to yield while a single chance remained to be tried. The
old question was still open; there must be fresh communica-
tions with Rome, which were put off as long as possible. |
Meanwhile Anselm could not return to England. Henry
made the most of the interval. He was just at this time in
pressing need of money for his war in Normandy: and the |
Church of course did not escape, “in the manifold con- |
tributions, which never ceased, before the king went over to |
Normandy, and while he was there, and after he came back |
”* Henry had some skill in inventing, on such emer- |
gencies, new “ foris facta” —matters for fine and forfeiture |
— questions for the “Curia Regis” to settle between him
and his lieges. On this occasion he was seized with a zeal for
Church discipline. Many of the parochial clergy were living
in disobedience to the canons of a late synod at London, which
had forbidden clerical marriage: “ this sin the king could
not endure to see unpunished.” So, to bring the offenders
to their duty, of his own mere motion, he proceeded to
mulct them heavily. ‘The tax, however, proved not so pro-
ductive as he had anticipated; and therefore, changing his —
mind, he imposed the assessment on the whole body of the
parochial clergy, innocent as well as guilty, throughout the
kingdom. Anselm expostulated ; the offending clergy ought

again.

* Saxon Chron.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 217

to be punished, he said, not by the officers of the Iixchequer,
but by their bishops. Henry, in his reply, is much surprised
at the archbishop’s objections ; he thought he was only doing
his work for him, labouring in his cause; but he would see to
it; “however, whatever else had happened, the archbishop’s
people had been left in peace.” —But as to the mass of the
clergy, seizures, imprisonment, and every kind of annoyance,
had enforced the tax-gatherer’s demands. Two hundred
priests went barefooted in procession, in alb and stole, to
Henry’s palace, “with one voice imploring him to have mercy
upon them; ” but they were driven from his presence— “the
king perhaps was busy.” They then, clothed with “confusion
upon confusion,” besought the intercession and good offices
of the queen: she was moved to tears at their story, but she
was afraid to interfere in their behalf. And what isa still
greater proof of Henry’s tyranny, the court party of the
clergy, and, among them, the excommunicated bishops, were
at last beginning to turn their eyes towards Anselm. A
letter was sent to him about this time, signed by several of
the bishops, entreating him to return, as the only means of
remedying the misery of the English Church. ‘“ We have
waited for peace, but it has departed far from us. Laymen
have broken in even to the altar, . . Thy children,” they
continue, “ will fight with thee the battle of the Lord; and if
thou art gathered to thy fathers before us, we will receive of
thy hand the heritage of thy labours. Delay then no longer;
thou hast now no excuse before God; we are ready not only
to follow, but to go before thee, if thou command us.

for now we are seeking in this cause, not what is ours, but
what is the Lord’s.” Among the names attached to this letter
are those of Gerard of York, Herbert of Norwich, and Robert
of Chester.

At length the envoys returned from Rome with Paschal’s
final instructions to Anselm. He was firm in prohibiting in-
vestiture, but yielded the point of homage. “ We must
stoop,” he wrote to Anselm, “ to raise the fallen; but though
in doing so we are bent, and appear to be falling, we do not

. i

218 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I

really lose our uprightness.”* Anselm felt as strongly about
homage as about investiture; but it was his duty to obey,
and he prepared todo so. He was long detained in Normandy
by a desperate illness; for his health, never strong, was now
completely broken by anxiety and hardship. Henry began
to fear that he should after all lose the credit of his recon-
ciliation and reluctant concessions, and should have to bear
the odium of having driven a man, whose character and
prolonged sufferings had been year after year rousing more
and more the sympathy of *England and France, to die in
exile. But Anselm recovered, and in the autumn of 1106
returned to England. A further delay of a year took place
before matters were adjusted. Henry was during part of this
time in Normandy, where the decisive battle of Tinchebrai
placed his brother Robert and his dominions in his power;
and later, the presence of Paschal at the council of Troyes |
gave the king a new pretext for postponement. At length, |
on the first three days of August, 1107, a great council was
held in London, where the subjects in question were debated
between Henry and the bishops, the archbishop not being
present. A party among the bishops still held out for the
old usages, but they were overruled. Henry, in the presence
of Anselm, and in a larger assembly, to which the commons
were admitted, solemnly ‘‘ allowed and ordained that no one
should hereafter for ever receive investiture of bishopric or
abbey by ring and crosier from the king, or any lay hand; ”
and Anselm agreed not to refuse consecration to bishops or
abbots, who had done homage to the king for their benefices.

So ended Anselm’s long battle, just soon enough to give
him a short breathing time, before he was called away. And
now what good came of the result ? Was ita victory? Was
it worth the gaining ?

Dr. Lingard thinks cheaply of it;—‘on the whole, he
says, “the Church gained little by the compromise. It might
check, but it did not abolish the principal abuse. If Henry

* Ep. iii. 90.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 219

surrendered an unnecessary ceremony, he still retained the
substance. The right he assumed of nominating bishops and
abbots remained unimpaired.”

This is an easy view of the subject, and perhaps a con-
venient one, when writing “in the nineteenth century on
behalf of churchmen of the twelfth. It may produce a better
impression of them to underrate their claims, and what they
achieved; to represent Anselm as, “in the true spirit of
conciliation, giving up part of his pretensions,” and treat the
king’s reluctant submission as the mere “surrender of an
unnecessary ceremony.” But the position is scarcely tenable.
The Church of those days did aim at, did gain, did use more
power, than Dr. Lingard would imply. Investiture was
held too pertinaciously, to have been a mere “unnecessary
ceremony,” to have been given up without defeat. What
Anselm did — what all parties then felt to be a triumph—
was, to break the prescription of feudalism: a prescription
which delivered up the Church, bound hand and foot, to the
will of rulers, who could no longer be trusted ; against whose
corruption and usurpation there was no ordinary remedy.
The dangerous tendencies of the day were, not completely
indeed, but in a real and marked manner, checked. It was
settled that the Church was not irrevocably bound up with
the doctrines of the feudal law. When Henry gave up
investiture, he broke in, as he truly felt, on a great system ;
he surrendered what not merely reminded the Church of his
power over her, but what actually, as things were then, gave
him a title to command unqualified obedience from the clergy,
and made resistance to his will treason. Homage indeed re-
mained—a very solemn form of surrender of “ life and limb,
and earthly worship; ” but it remained broken off from the
other ceremony with which it had been so long connected,
without meaning, or forced into a new one—an anomaly, a
mere form of common fealty, a memorial of power lost — an
engagement, which in its old stringent shape, the common
lawyers of succeeding reigns came to see was “ inconvenient,”
in a “man of religion, for that he hath professed himself to be

220 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY T.

only the man of God.”* This, almost more than the question
of nomination, was the vital point to establish. ven if
elections had remained as they had been, it would have been
a victory to carry it. But, in truth, the king’s exclusive right
of nomination was, naturally and of course, very much affected
also. For where the State recognises the Church, the
election of her rulers, even if popular in theory, cannot but
be the result of mixed influences: no practical man in the
eleventh or twelfth century dreamed of excluding altogether
the king’s voice —the questioh was one of checks and coun-
terbalances, however at times it might be strongly and
nakedly stated. Whatever therefore weakened the king’s
hold on the bishops as mere feudal vassals, weakened also his
claim to exclusive nomination, and let in, in varying measure,
the influence of the Church. The claim, indeed, even in
William the Conqueror’s time, seems never to have been more
than a customary act of power, without any such pretext of
legal consistency as the claim of investiture; it was a claim
much like that of a great landholder, or borough-proprietor,
to return his member. But early in Henry’s reign, we hear
of the form of election by the clergy and peoplet; that is, the
acknowledged form, dormant apparently under the despotism
of the preceding kings, revived of itself, when Henry, in his
early and unsettled days, promised liberty to the Church.
His concession of investitures would practically have the same
effect, and in a still greater degree. And it is probably to
this practical effect, not settled by formal stipulation, because
the right was not denied in theory, that Eadmer refers when
he says of Henry}, that when he gave up investiture, he also
left the customs of his predecessors, and no longer elected

* Litt. ii. s. 86. v. Coke, who quotes the lawyers from Glanville (H. II.)
downwards.

t,,Gerard of York (Anselm. Ep. iv. 2., comp. Anselm’s letter, Eadm. p. 80.),
Roger of Salisbury (Rudborne in Wharton, i. 274.), William Gifford (Kadm.
p. 64.).

{ De Vit. S. Anselm, p, 25.; Anselm, Ep. ad Pasch, (iii, 181.) in Eadm, H, N,
p-78. “In personis eligendis nullatenus propria utitur voluntate, sed religi-
osorum se penitus committit consilio.”—So Peter of Blois, in his Continuation
of Ingulph, p. 126., “ Electiones pralatorum omnibus collegiis libere concessit.”

SE Eee

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 221

prelates at his own will (per se elegit), an account which is
confirmed by a letter of Anselm to the Pope: while the in-
fluence which he still retained may account for William of
Malmsbury’s statement that he “retained the privilege of
election.” The election of Archbishop Ralph, Anselm’s suc-
cessor, supplies the best illustration of the change brought
about in this respect. The king’s influence, though visible
and weighty throughout, is no longer the mere nomination
of the Conqueror, or William Rufus: the voice of the
Church, both through the bishops, and through the more
immediate representatives of the common people —the monks
—makes itself distinctly heard, and really affects the elec-
tion. *

But after all, in the great battles of the world, it is not
mere “ carrying points” which constitutes victory, and makes
the combatant’s toil and sufferings worth undergoing. Terms
of accommodation and compromise are very far from showing
always which is the winning, the rising side. To have
enabled a cause to show its strength, or its greatness, to have
palpably called out in its behalf wisdom, courage, faithful-
ness—heroic energy, heroic endurance; to have looked in
the face for its sake what men commonly shrink from; to
have resisted unto blood—this, even under outward disad-
vantage and failure, is really victory, — this is well worth the
‘haying, and in time will bear its fruits. In this contest, with
more than a fair field—with all appliances of force and
subtlety, short of open violence, with the vantage of pre-
scription, with all the honour and power of England, bishops
and barons, the strong hand and ready tongue, to second
them, two kings tried their strength against the Church; for
more than ten years they did their best, to beat down a cause
upheld mainly by the conscience and fortitude of one old man,
They were no triflers—they had laid down their stake and
contested it stoutly ; and, in the face of all England, they
lost it. Was this little to gain? Was it little for the weak

* Eadmer, H. N. p. 86, 87., Will. Malm. de Gest. Pontif. i. p. 230. “In com-

mune arbitrium refudit electionem.” See also the election of William of
Corboil, Sax. Chron, a, 1123,

222 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

and defenceless to have not only resisted, but to have over-
come the soldier’s sword and statesman’s craft?—little for the
Church to have made itself felt against such odds? Were
Norman barons and a Norman king fainéants and mere
devotees, that it was a small matter for a monk to have made
them acknowledge, that there was a power about them,
spiritual only and intangible, which it was not enough for
them to honour with words and forms, in churches and cere-
monies, but to whose control too they must bend in matters
of serious business? Is it suth an every-day occurrence for
a religious party to bring a resolute and able statesman
against his will to a compromise? Was it possible that
Anselm, who had twice sailed from England in disgrace,
leaving behind him the sympathies of few, besides monks and
Saxon churls, should, after ten years of banishment, return
—the same old monk, with his monkish retinue, though
greeted and ministered to by the Queen of England; and
should have his cause allowed in full parliament, by his most
violent opponents, by King Henry himself, — without im-
pressing on his age, in a way not to be at once forgotten,
that the spiritual claims of the Church were a reality of
some consequence; that an archbishop of Canterbury might
be something more than a venerable old man in rich vest-
ments, whose chief business was to place the crown on the
king’s head, at the high tides of the year.

He broke a spell. He showed that, though the days of
martyrdom were gone by,—so he thought*, rather prema-
turely perhaps, —men of consequence and name, guests in
kings’ palaces, accustomed to be treated with tenderness, and
spoken to softly and honourably, might still in sober earnest
have to rough it for a bare principle. A needful lesson
often, when society has got into fixed ways, and takes high
truths for granted; when those truths have become mixed up
with matters of every-day business— things to be seen and
felt, ceremonial and etiquette, made ready by the hands of
men — about which they laugh, or gossip, or yawn, or, still

* Ep. iii. 90. “ At nihil horum super me cadet.”

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 223

worse, cheat and lie. This atmosphere of custom and common-
place has a sad effect in tarnishing the glorious and heroic —
in confounding the great and the littlek—in making it un-
practical and visionary to do anything, “but go on as we
have been going.” So things remain, till they sink into
ruin, or till amid dulness, and wrongheadedness, and quackery,
some man of free and genuine mind discerns what is really
noble and worth exalting, and is willing, at the risk of at
least being called a bigot or an enthusiast, to sacrifice himself
to it. Anselm had got hold of such a principle. He saw in
it the cause of purity and sincerity——the cause also of the
despised and friendless, against the great and lordly. Pro-
vidence, instincts, the voice of the Church, seemed to entrust
it to him, and nothing could scare or lure him away from it.
There might be much to say against his course — the usages
were but forms and trifles—or they were an important right
of the crown, and to assail them was usurpation and disloyalty
— or it was a mere dream to hope to abolish them — or they
were not worth the disturbance they caused —or there were
worse things to be remedied; difficulties there were no doubt:
still, for ali that, he felt that this was the fight of the day,
and he held on unmoved. Through what was romantic and
what was unromantic in his fortunes; whether the contest
showed in its high or low form —as a struggle “in heavenly
places” against evil, before saints and angels, with the un-
fading crown in view—or as a game against cowardly
selfishness and the intrigue of courts;— cheered by the
sympathies of Christendom, by the love and reverence of
crowds which sought his blessing—or brought down from his
height of feeling by commonplace disagreeables, the incon-
veniences of life—dust, heat, and wet, bad roads, and im-
perialist robbers, debts and fevers, low insults and trouble-
some friends : — through it all, his faith failed him not: it was
ever the same precious and ennobling cause — bringing con-
solation in trouble—giving dignity to what was vexatious and
humiliating. |

It was her own fault if the Church gained little by the
compromise, and by so rare a lesson. In one sense, indeed,

224 ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I.

what is gained by any great religious movement? What are
all reforms, remedies, restorations, victories of truth, but
protests of a minority — efforts, clogged, and incomplete, of
the good and brave, just enough in their own day to stop
instant ruin,— the appointed means to save what is to be
saved, but in themselves failures? Good men work and
suffer, and bad men enjoy their labours and spoil them: a

step is made in advance — evil rolled back and kept in check’

for a while only to return, perhaps, the stronger. But thus,
and thus only, is truth passed on, and the world preserved
from utter corruption. Doubtless bad men still continued
powerful in the English Church— Henry tyrannised, evil was
done, and the bishops kept silence —low aims and corruption
may have still polluted the very seats of justice — gold may
have been as powerful with cardinals as with King Henry
and his chancellors—Anselm may have overrated his success.
Yet success and victory it was—a vantage ground for all true
men who would follow him. If his work was undone by
others, he at least had done his task manfully. And he had
left his Church another saintly name, and the memory of his
good confession, enshrining as it were her cause, to await the
day when some other champion should again take up the
quarrel— thus from age to age to be maintained, till He shall
come, for whom alone it is reserved “to still” for ever “the
enemy and avenger,” and to “ root out all wicked doers from
the City of the Lord.”

The struggle ended, Anselm applied himself, during the
short time that was left him, to carry out those great objects,
which had given importance to the contest — the reformation
of the clergy and the protection of the poor: and to do Henry
justice, it must be said that in the latter point, while the
archbishop lived, he seconded him vigorously. But Anselm’s
task was now ended. Soon after his return he buried his
friend Gundulf; and in little more than a year, he followed
him. We shall give the account of his last days in the
words of one who had shared his sufferings, and who watched
by his death-bed, the monk Eadmer.

ST. ANSELM AND HENRY I. 225

“ During these events,” (the final settlement of his dispute with
the king), “he wrote a treatise ‘concerning the agreement of
Foreknowledge, Predestination, and the Grace of God, with Free-
will.” In which, contrary to his wont, he found difficulty in
writing: for after his illness at Bury St. Edmunds, as long as he
was spared to this life, he was weaker in body than before; so
that, when moving from place to place, he was from that time
carried in a litter, instead of riding on horseback. He was tried
also by frequent and sharp sicknesses, so that we scarce dared to
promise him life. He however never left off his old way of living,
but was always engaged in godly meditations, or holy exhortations,
or other good works.

“In the third year after King Henry had recalled him from his
second banishment, every kind of food by which nature is sus-
tained became loathsome to him. He used to eat however, putting
force upon himself, knowing that he could not live without food ;
and in this way he somehow or another dragged on life through
half a year, gradually sinking day by day in body, though in vigour
of mind he was still the same as he used to be. So being strong in
spirit, though but very feeble in the flesh, he could not go to his
oratory on foot—but from his strong desire to attend the con-
secration of our Lord’s Body, which he venerated with a special
feeling of devotion, he caused himself to be carried thither every
day inachair. We who attended on him tried to prevail on him
to desist, because it fatigued him so much: but we succeeded, and
that with difficulty, only four days before he died.

“ From that time he took to his bed; and with gasping breath,
continued to exhort all who had the privilege of drawing near
him, to live to God, each in his own order. Palm Sunday had
dawned, and we, as usual, were sitting round him; one of us said
to him, ‘Lord Father, we are given to understand that you are
going to leave the world for your Lord’s Easter Court. He
answered, ‘If His will be so, I shall gladly obey His will. But if
He will rather that I should yet remain among you, at least till I
have solved a question which I am turning in my mind, about the
origin of the soul, I should receive it thankfully, for I know not
whether any one will finish it when Iam gone. I trust, that if I
could take food, I might yet get well. For I feel no pain any-
where — only a general sinking, from weakness of my stomach,
which cannot take food.’

“On the following Tuesday, towards evening, he was no longer

Q

226 ST. ANSELM. AND HENRY Tf.

able to speak intelligibly. Ralph, Bishop of Rochester, asked him
to bestow his absolution and blessing on us who were present, and
on his other children, and also on the King and Queen with their
children, and the people of the land who had kept themselves
under God in his obedience. He raised his right hand, as if he
was suffering nothing, and made the sign of the Holy Cross; and
then drooped his head and sunk down.

“The congregation of the brethren were already chanting
matins in the great Church, when one of those who watched
about our Father, took the book of the Gospels, and read before
him the history of the Passion, which was to be read that day at
the mass. But when he came to our Lord’s words, ‘ Ye are they
which have continued with me in my temptations, and I appoint
unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me, that
ye may eat and drink at my table ’—he began to draw his breath
more slowly. We saw that he was just going: so he was removed
from his bed, and laid upon sackcloth and ashes. And thus, with
the whole family of his children collected round him, he gave
up his last breath into the hands of his Creator, and slept in peace.

© He passed away, as morning was breaking, on the Wednesday
before the day of our Lord’s Supper, the 21st of April, in the year
of our Lord’s Incarnation 1109; the sixteenth of his pontificate
and seventy-sixth of his life.”

Such was his end: there is nothing remarkable about it —
nothing apparently to distinguish it from the last hours of
many whom we may have known familiarly ourselves;
nothing to fix upon, but a kind of homely quiet; an uncon-
scious readiness, without emotion or effort of any kind, to
meet the future. Death is at the door — yet he seems to be
but continuing his wonted tenor of life, as when he was a
monk at Bec — there is no break; he seems not to feel any-
thing unusual to be coming on—he talks of death as of some
mere ordinary hindrance to his work. The combatant, the
confessor, the veteran of ten tempestuous years, is there, just
finishing his course: but all traces of the storm and battle
have disappeared ; there is no scar to be seen—no heaving of
the waters — no look thrown back to the past, or forward to
the future. For God he has suffered and toiled—to Him he
leaves the Church; his own share in the work done, he has

a

'§T. ANSELM AND HENRY I. i =

fallen back, as of course, into his old ways of living and ae
thinking. He says little; but one thing is evidently filling ,
his thoughts, the contemplation of the mysteries of the faith ;
and at the end he seems to vanish, he “ passes away,” amid
chanting of psalms and gospel lessons, sacraments and bless-
ings, sackcloth and ashes — the accompaniments of his every-
day life. Strange contrast to the thrilling and awful scene ;
which closed with such grandeur the career of the next con- Be
fessor of the Church. ze

228

BRITTANY.*
[ JANUARY, 1846.]

STEAM has done wonders, and promises more, for those who
desire to see with their own eyes what is far off, and who
delight in the contrast of juxtaposition between what is
familiar and what is remote and strange. What it cannot
bring to our door, it takes us most comfortably and without
loss of time to see. It is making a raree-show of the world ;
exhibiting all that the present affords of wonderful, and mag-
nificent, and curious, before those who are never out of the
sound of their mother tongue, and are travellers only in the
multiplicity of their portmanteaus. Before we have time to
forget the express train and the railway-porters in velveteen,
and Southampton Water and Netley Abbey and the Cowes
yachts, we are brought face to face with the bounds of the
old world, the pillars of Hercules, and look upon distant
Atlas; another flight, and we are on the river of Egypt, in
the land of Pharaoh and Cleopatra, of St. Athanasius and St.
Antony; among the pyramids, amid turbans and the lan-
guages of the Kast. We have passed through the wilderness,
and the waves of the Red Sea are breaking on the shore at
our feet; and in a space of time no longer measured by
months and weeks, but by days, and soon by hours and their
fractions, we are in India. The first of the month saw us
riding in an omnibus in Holborn, the last sees us in the land
of elephants and pagodas. Steam will deny us nothing; in

* 1, Voyage dans le Finistére, par CamBry : nouvelle édition, par M. Le Chev.

DE FREMINVILLE. Brest: 1836,

2..A Summer in Brittany: by T.A. Trotrorn, Esq. B.A. 2 Vols.
London: 1840.

3. Les Derniers Bretons : par EMILE SOUVESTRE ; nouvelle édition. Paris:
1843.

4. La Bretagne, Ancienne et Moderne: par Pirre-CHEVALIER. Paris:
1844,

a

BRITTANY. 229

the circle round us, we have but to mark out our goal, and
the genius straight transports us.

It puts us into communication with all the present ; but
not even steam can bring us to the past. In its way, indeed,
it toils; it slaves for the antiquarian and the draughtsman ;
in letter-press, in form, in colour, it strives most assiduously
to bring up the image of the past ; it multiplies and disperses
abroad. But the living past is not in books or engravings, and
cannot be brought to us, nor we to it.

Only here and there, left to itself in some neglected corner
of the world, the living past survives, projecting itself into
the uncongenial and almost unconscious present. A couple
of days off from Paris or Southampton, we may reach a race
of men more difficult to piece on to modern society, than
those who live by the Nile or the Ganges, or sell one another
beneath the Line. Shooting out from the dim middle ages
into the glare and bustle of the civilised “ present day,” in the
midst of English manufactories, and French revolutions, and
wars of the Empire—stretching forth its granite base into a
sea ploughed by steam-ships, and itself planted all over with
tri-coloured flags, dark old Brittany goes on unmoved, un-
sympathising, — believing and working as it and its fellow-
nations did five hundred years ago. Surrounded by excite-
ment and change,—sparkling Frenchmen vapouring about
glory; drudging Englishmen, deep in railways; venomous
Yankee Locofocos, in a white heat about Oregon, —while all
eyes are straining into the future, and all hearts are beating
high with expectation, —the old-fashioned Breton eyes with
the utmost unconcern these “heirs of all the ages, foremost in
the files of time,”—combs his long black hair, and walks
about unashamed in his dragou-bras ;—turns his back on the
future, and looks only on the past — on his dead ancestors and
the cross; and profoundly distrusts all improvement in this
world. A grand, sublime, miraculous Past, is contrasted in
his mind with a poor uninteresting Present, its mere appendix,
and a Future without form or hope till the Last Day ; the past
is to him the great reality of the world—the reality, not of
dilettantism, of forced reverence, of partial or factitious

Q 3

230 BRITTANY.

interest, but of life-long faith. Fixed, undeniable, stands
the solid past, and he reflects and rehearses it as he can; the
work of present men is but vanity, their promised future a
shadow. ‘The progress of the ages, roughly as it has some-
times gone, has left him much as it found him, some con-
siderable time before the Council of Trent.

“« Le pays le plus arriéré de la France!” says the commis-
voyageur from civilised Orleans or Rouen, to his neighbours
in the barbarian diligence: and such is it likely to remain
for some time longer, in spit® of tri-color and steam-engine ;
in spite of the sneers and wares of commis-voyageurs, and
interesting poetical accounts of the country by “ Bretons
Francisés” —-in spite of walking and reading parties from
Oxford — in spite of departemental roads, and improving inns,
and agricultural societies. The onslaught of civilisation is
determined, and full of hope —nay, it is progressive; statistics
measure the encroachments of the French language upon the
Breton, as we measure those of the sea, by leagues; but
civilisation has a tough and intractable pupil, and does not
get on fast with its work. It tells, to be sure, on the en-
lightened bourgeois; but the enlightened bourgeois cannot
print their mark on the country or the population, or force
themselves into notice. The peasantry represent Brittany as
the middle classes represent England; they are the people of
most will and character—-a hard, silent, obstinate, impassive
race, living in their own old world, and, in the lofty feeling
of its antiquity, taking no reflection from that upstart one
which mixes with them — almost ignoring it. Modern France
has been struggling hard to pull them up to a respectable
level in society ; they shake their heads, and resist in silence,
First the guillotine was tried —“ Quel torrent revolutionnaire
que cette Loire!”* wrote Carrier—Carrier of the noyades ;
‘‘ enraptured,” adds the historian, “with the poetry of his
crime : ”— but it would not do: —

— “It was a war between the guillotine and belief; a murderous
war, in which the guillotine used its knife, and was beaten. This

* Michelet, vol. i.

BRITTANY. 231

contest did not, as in La Vendée, degenerate into a civil war; with
some exceptions, Lower Brittany remained immoveable; but re-
mained on her knees, with clasped hands, in spite of all that could
be done to hinder her. Nothing could impair the freshness of her
primitive faith. She yielded neither to anger nor to fear. The
bonnet rouge might be forced on her head, but not on her ideas.
«<¢T will have your church-tower knocked down,’ said Jean Bon-
Saint-André to the Maire of a village, ‘that you may have no
object to recall to you your old superstitions.’ ‘Anyhow you will
have to leave us the stars,’ replied the peasant, ‘and those we can
see farther off than our church-tower.’ ” — Souvestre, pp. 206, 207.

In the quieter times of the Directory, busy, fussy, sen-
timental citizen Cambry, “ commissioned to detail the state,
political, moral, and statistical, of the department of Finis-
tere,” plunged fearlessly into its bogs and thick darkness,
philosophised, pitied, collected stories; found citizen-Maires
in sabots, polite and attentive; had many interviews with
ignorant but promising municipalities, suggested improve-
ments, reported on capabilities,—hopeful, ardent, citizen
Cambry, filled with lofty compassion, devoted to the con-
version of “notre pauvre vieille Bretagne” to civism and
cleanliness: — but, alas, citizen Cambry is dead of apoplexy,
and civil Maires and municipalities have not realised the pro-
mises they gave; they still believe in their priests. The
great imperial mind, which new-modelled France, tried his
hand on Brittany ;—tried to give it a centre; called Pontivy,
after his own name, Napoléonville; began a new broad
straight street among its crooked alleys; but the new street
is unfinished, and Napoléonville has gone back to Pontivy.*
Even the conscription did little: even captains in the imperial
armies, when they got back to Basse Bretagne, resumed their
sabots and baggy breeches, their-dragou-bras. ‘“ We shall
stay as we are,” says a modern Breton writer, “ till the rail-
road drives through our villages of granite ;” +—and, we can-
not help thinking, for some time longer. The railway, and
the navigators, its pioneers, will most assuredly produce some
strange and strong impressions on the Breton peasants, and

* Trollope, vol. i p. 371. { Pitre-Chevyalier.
Q 4

232 BRITTANY.

they will open their eyes and make the sign of the cross; it
will enable, perhaps, navy officers from Brest, and merchants
from St. Malo, to see more of their friends in Paris: but it
will pass by the villages, the foct of Breton character and
feeling. It will be a long time before the influence, which
the railway brings with it, works upon them.

Still, the struggle is going on, and it is a curious spectacle
to see the new intruding into the old, setting itself up by its
side, fastening itself on to it, and slowly and cunningly —
for the old is strong—edging it out. The new has now
become discreet and cautious; the old looks on, dubious,
unintelligent, mistrustful, but by no means in an imitative
humour, doggedly keeping its old fashions. Paris has mapped
out the old province into departments and communes, and
prefetures and souspréfetures ; the system is externally the
same as in the rest of uniform new-fangled France; but the
old ignored divisions are those which are felt. Parishes will
maintain their isolation and singularities; Léon and Cor-
nouaille still keep their ancient names, and continue distinct
and hostile, though clamped together to make up Finistére.
The contrast is grotesque: —for instance, when the modern go-
vernment machinery for improvement is at work amid the old
Breton customs. The feast of the patron saint comes round,
—the people naturally collect, as they have done for centuries,
to a wake,—as they call it, a pardon,—to gain an indulgence,
to worship, tomake merry. They collect from various parishes,
and in various costumes, nowhere else seen in the world,—
men as well as women, long-haired, dark-vested, wild-looking
men, talking gravely their old Celtic dialect, and a little bad
French, and sounding their bagpipes. French civilisation
meets them; M. le Maire and M. le Souspréfet issue their
programmes; there shall be a “ Féte patronale,” a “ Féte
agricole.” (Government and agricultural societies are full of
encouragement; there are horse-races, matches between
ploughs of the country and ploughs “ perfectionées,”— cattle
shows for the improvement ‘des races chevalines, bovines,
ovines, et gallinacées ;” prizes are given, purses of francs, model
ploughs, ‘ Bodin’s Elémens d’Agriculture.” — Fortunati si

il

BRITTANY. 233

bona nérint,—if instead of telling old world stories, they
could seize the opportunity, and study “ Bodin.” Mean-
while, in the midst of enlightened civic authorities with
tight pantaloons and peaked beards, they herd together, a
wild crowd of Celts, thinking a good deal more of the
pardon, and the dancing and wrestling, and the grand op-
portunity of getting drunk, than of improving themselves
in agriculture. The same contrast meets you on the face
of the country. You are tempted to turn aside from the
road to look at an old parish church; there it is, open, and
empty, and silent, except the invariable ticking of the clock ;
there is its charnel house, and shelves of skulls, each with a
name, and in a box by itself; its granite “ Calvaire,” with its
hard Egyptian-looking figures; there is the votive lock of hair,
or the holy spring ; or the picture of a miracle of the last few
years in the neighbourhood; or the rude weather-beaten image
of the village saint, carved from the tree as it grew in the
churchyard, about whom the peasant boys will tell you
stories, if you can understand them. You cross the ridge,
full of the thoughts of old Brittany, and you come upon
modern industry and enterprise at work ;—-smuggling mer-
chants of some unheard-of little port, building unaccountably
extravagant basins and jetties,—the engineer hanging his
light and beautiful suspension bridge, high over the large
blue oily eddies of one of the tide rivers which tear the jagged
coast-line, pushing his communications over the obstacles which
annoyed Cxsar— “ pedestria itinera concisa estuariis.” Or
you come to a chosen stage of innovation and modern fashion,
—the modern race-course,—the “ Hippodrome,” which is the
pride of Landerneau, and the envy of Quimper; here are all
the appliances of the French turf, the course marked out, the
seats for the Préfet, and the seats for the musicians ;— and,
in the midst, a gaunt weather-stained stone cross, to which
the peasant, as he passes it, pulls off his hat.

Nevertheless, whatever lodgement civilisation may have
made, people curious in these matters are yet in time to see a
very fair specimen of a middle-age population,—a peasantry,
that is,—for, as we have said, the towns-people except in the

234 BRITTANY. “

more remote parts, or in the lowest rank, are simply French
of a mongrel sort. The look, indeed, of some of the towns
carries us back some centuries ;—the old burgher houses, for
instance, at Lannion and Morlaix; or Dinan, with its walled
town on the hill, and its suburb straggling up the hill side,
with a street as steep and narrow and feudal-looking, as in
the days of Du Guesclin;—but all this may easily be matched
in other parts of the continent. Old Brittany is outside the
towns.

“Poor rough Brittany,” writes*Michelet, “the element of re-
sistance in France, extends her fields of quartz and schist, from
the slate-quarries of Chateaulin, near Brest, to the slate-quarries
of Angers. This is her extent, geologically speaking. However,
from Angers to Rennes, the country is a debateable land, a border
like that between England and Scotland, which early escaped from
Brittany. The Breton tongue does not even begin at Rennes,
but about Elven, Pontivy, Loudéac, and Chatelaudren. ‘Thence,
as far as the extremity of Finistére, it is true Brittany — Bretagne
bretonnante, a country which has become alien to our own, exactly
because it has remained too faithful to our original condition; so
Gaulish, that it is scarcely French ; —a country which would have |
slipped from us more than once, had we not held it fast, clenched
and griped as in a vice, between four French cities, rough and
stout Nantes and St. Malo, Rennes and Brest.” *

It is to this part of Brittany, where the old language is
still preserved, that our remarks are meant to apply. Even
in this part, there are many differences, between the four
old Bishoprics of Léon, Tréguier, Cornouaille, and Vannes;
—certainly of dialect, it is said, also, of character. Still,
though each parish has its peculiarities and costume, and
Tréguier may be more ribald, and Cornouaille dirtier and
more light-hearted, than sombre Léon, there is a sufficient
uniformity about them to allow of our speaking of them
together.

One feature is common to them all—their religion. In
these times of unbelief, or of a faith which, perhaps, for self-

* Michelet, Hist. de France. (Engl. tr.)

BRITTANY. 235

protection, is sparing of outward show and sign, it is a solemn
and awful sight to see a whole population, visibly, and by
habit, religious; believing in God, and instinctively showing
their belief all day long, and in all possible circumstances.
Their faith may, or may not, restrain and purify them — it
need not necessarily; but in Brittany, there it is, not a
formula, but a spirit penetrating every corner and cranny of
their character and life, free, unaffected, undisguised, not
shrinking from the homeliest contacts and most startling
conclusions, matching itself without stint or fear with every
other reality. The sight, we repeat, is very subduing to
those, who have lived where nothing but the present world is
assumed and referred to, in the forms and language of ordi-
nary intercourse ; where society is ever silent about God,
and nothing that men do or say in their usual business,
implies His existence. To such persons, this perpetual
recognition of His name and power, so uniformly, and often
so unexpectedly, is like an evidence to the senses—a result
and warning of the nearness of His presence.

Brittany is a religious country, if ever the term could be
applied to a country. The Church has set her seal on land
and people. How she gained over these tough, stubborn,
dark-thoughted people, is not the least wonderful question
in her history. Her conquest is best explained by the count-
less legends of self-sacrifice and gospel labour, which the
Breton calendar has of its own. But once gained, they pay
no divided allegiance; and if the outlines of their faith are
coarse, they seem indelible. The feeling that they are
Christians is ever present to them; they delight in the title.
Their most popular songs are religious. Even their tragedies
begin in the Most Holy name. The cross is every where;
the beggar traces it on his morsel before he touches it; on
all things, animate or inanimate, which are turned to the use

of man, its mark is placed; it is set up in granite at the

cross-road, on the moor, on the shifting sands, where, as long

as it is in sight above the waves, the passenger need not fear

the tide-—‘“* pucsque,” says his guide, “ la croix nous voit.”
Even the brute creation is brought within the hallowed

236 BRITTANY.

circle—they have to fast with men on Christmas-eve, and they
receive a blessing of their own from the Church: the very
dogs, when they are sick, have a patron saint. The people
may smile or joke themselves; but they do not the less
believe. The speculator from civilised France, who comes to
improve in Brittany, finds, to his cost, that nothing can shake
this faith. Say, he has to finish a sea-wall before the next
spring-tide—there remains but one day :—

—‘* The evening before, as the workmen were going from their
work, a carter came to tell me that ‘he could not bring his team to-
morrow, because it was the féte of St. Eloi, and he must take his
horses to hear Mass at Landerneau; another came soon after with the
same tidings; then a third, then a fourth, at last all. I was alarmed;
I explained to them the danger of waiting; I entreated; I got into
a rage; I offered to double, to treble the wages of their work: but it
was nouse. ‘They listened attentively, entered into all my reasons,
approved them,—and ended by repeating that they could not come
because their horses would die, if they did not hear the Mass of St.
Eloi. I had to resign myself. Next day the spring-tide rose,
covered the unfinished works, flooded the whole bay, and swept
away the dyke, as it ebbed. This Mass cost me 30,000 francs.” —
Souvestre, p. 433.

They have not yet learnt the powers which God’s wisdom
has, in these last days, placed in the hands of man. In
Brittany still, as in those middle ages which it reflects, men
feel that God only is strong, and that they are weak—help-
less in a world of dangers—among irresistible and unknown
powers, where God only can help them. ‘ My God, succour
me: my bark is so little, and thy sea is so great ;”—so prays
the Breton sailor as he passes the terrible cape, the Bec du
Raz—and he speaks the universal feeling. He sees nothing
between himself and the hand of God. He is still in the
days of the Bible: he realises the invisible world without
effort, he is deeply interested in it, he has his scruples, his
fears, his axioms about it, as his civilised contemporaries have
about the order of their world. They take for granted their
own power, and trouble themselves about no other. He
delivers himself up in his weakness, almost passively, into the

FN

BRITTANY. 237

hands of God. His submission, his intense conviction of the
sorrows of this world, would almost amount to fatalism, were
it not for his faith in the power of prayer.

“Tt is only within a few years,” says M. Souvestre, and we
believe he does not over-colour the case — “ that physicians have
been employed in the country districts; even now confidence in
them is far from being general. Some traditional medicines,
prayers, masses at the parish church, vows to the best known saints,
are the remedies mostly used. Every Sunday at service time, you
may see women with eyes red with weeping, going up to the altar
of the Virgin, with tapers, which they light and place there; they
are sisters or wives who come to beg some dear life, of her in
heaven, who, like themselves, has known the cost of tears shed over
a bier. You can tell by counting these tapers, which burn with a
pale light upon the altar, how many souls there are in the parish
ready to quit the earth.”— Souvestre, pp.9, 10.

The stern resignation to which this faith leads, this steady
acquiescence in suffering as the order of Providence, puts
out the political economist sadly. The Breton peasant or
workman, strange to say, unlike his brethren in England or
France, does not care to mend his condition. He is firmly
persuaded that it is all one where he is, in this world,—a
broad heroic view of things, though a partial and wrong one;
but very maddening to speculators on “ capabilities ” and
‘sresources.” There the peasant sits in his hovel by his fireside,
silent and grave, moaning and dreaming about things invi-
sible and days gone by, chanting his monotonous mournful
poetry, making his coarse cloth, which no one wants to buy
of him. . It is no use telling him that his manufacture is too
rude, that his market is gone—his father made cloth before
him, and, whether it sells or not, he cannot give over making
it. ‘ Dans notre famille nous avons toujours été fabricants de
toiles.’” Arguments are beaten back by the recollection of
past days— “ Dans notre famille nous avons été riches autre-
fois ;? and when he can no longer resist the assertion that
times are changed, he sighs and says—*“ C'est le bon Dieu qui
conduit le pauvre monde.” —** After that, press him no more;
you have reached the end of his arguments, you have driven

238 BRITTANY.

him back on Providence; to any further objections he will
make no answer.”* Yet at this very moment he has not
given up the hope that the old days will come back; he can
see no reason why they should not. He dreams of his new
coat of brown cloth that he will “ purchase, and of the silver
dishes that he will substitute for his wooden spoons —these
silver dishes are the utmost stretch of the Breton workman’s
ambitious visions. ‘This point reached, he goes to sleep in
his rapture; and the next morning, cold and hunger awaken
him as usual at sunrise, and he resumes the toils and bitter
realities of his daily life.”+

But there are times when this heavy, narrow-minded,
melancholy, lethargic drudge, who drones and pines while
others work, rises and fills out into a breadth and grandeur of
character, when all other men are helpless and despicable
with terror. The cholera, when it was in the province, drew
forth to the full the Breton peasant, his nobleness and his
folly ;—his faith and uncomplaining resignation— his obsti-
nate distrust of all that comes through man: and both in
exaggerated proportions. We quote from M. Souvestre:

after speaking of the cry of the Paris mob, that the govern- —

ment had poisoned the provisions, he goes on: —

“In Brittany, where the government, its form and name, are
almost unknown, and parties are political only because they are
religious, it was naturally otherwise. Any one who had told our
peasants that government was poisoning them, would scarcely have
been understood. For them, there are but two powers, God and
the devil, — they looked not to criminal conspiracies for the cause
of the evil which smote them. ‘ The finger of God has touched
us;’ © God has delivered us to the devil;’ —this was their
energetic language. And forthwith the report was spread in the
country, of supernatural apparitions,—red women had been seen
near Brest, breathing the pestilence over the valleys. A beggar
woman maintained before the magistrates, ‘that she had seen them
—had spoken with them.’ Menacing signs gave warning that God
was about to cast his ‘evil air’ over the country,— the churches
were cpened, and the people awaited, without taking any precau-

* Souvestre, p. 368. tT Ibid. p- 369.

ee eee

BRITTANY. 239

tions, the fearful guest, whose approach was announced to them.
I asked the priest of one of the parishes in the Léonais, what precau-
tions he had taken. As we were leaving the church, he silently
pointed with his hand, and showed me twelve pits ready opened.”

The cholera soon came, and came with fury :—

“ But the peasant of Léon, accustomed to hard trials, bowed his
head beneath the scourge. Once only the murmur of grief and
discontent was heard in our country districts; it was when, for
fear of contagion, it was proposed to bury those who died of cholera
in the cemeteries of remote chapels. The relations and friends of
the dead collected round the coffin, and opposed its removal from
the parish churchyard, which already contained the bones of those
whom he loved. Indeed, in some places, it was not without danger
that the new orders were carried into effect: these men who dis-
dain to wrangle about their place in life, disputed with eagerness
for their place in the churchyard. You should have heard their
words in this strange long dispute, to know the depth of those
hearts. ‘The remains of our fathers are here,’ they repeated ;
‘why separate him whois just dead? Banished down there to the
burying-ground of the chapel, he will hear neither the chants of
the service, nor the prayers which ransom the departed. Here is
his place. We can see his grave from our windows; we can send
our smallest children every evening to pray here; this earth is the
property of the dead, no power can take it from them, or exchange
it for another.’ In vain people spoke of the danger of the accu-
mulation of corpses in the parish churchyard, always in the middle
of the village, and surrounded with houses. ‘They shook their large

- heads sadly, and their flowing hair. ‘Corpses do not kill those

who are alive,’ they answered; ‘death does not come except
by the will of God.’ At last it became necessary to apply to the
priests, to overcome their resistance; and all the authority of the
priests themselves was scarcely enough to make them yield to the
change. I shall never forget having heard the rector at Taulé
talking long to them about it, and assuring them, in the name of
God, whom he represented, that the dead had not the feelings of

the living, and did not suffer by this separation from the graves of

their forefathers. These explanations, which would have made
one smile under other circumstances, took so strange a character
of seriousness, from the air of conviction in the priest, and the
intense attention of the crowd, that they left no feeling but that of

240 BRITTANY.

extreme amazement and involuntary awe.” — Souvestre, pp. 14
aa Wy

These views of life are not the views of a soft and tender-
hearted people. The Breton who suffers unmoved, looks un-
moved on suffering in others. He may help or not, as it may
be; he will not waste many words or much compassion. But
the Church, which has not made him feel for suffering as
such, has impressed, like an instinct on his soul, that deep
reverence for earthly humiliation, which since the Sermon on
the Mount she has never for&otten. The roughest and
hardest Breton wrecker never turned away from the beggar
—‘“hédte du bon Dieu,” who visits his hovel, or who sits
praying and begging by the way-side or the church-door.
He sees in him one touched by the “finger of God”—this
moves him, though physical suffering does not. And that
touching faith of early times is still strong among them,
which reverenced the idiot; which believed him to be in
grace, and sought his intercession because he cculd do no sin;
which, because of the extremity of his degradation, felt sure
that the All-merciful was with him, and would visit one who
was so humbled in the eyesof men. The most famous church
in Brittany was raised to consecrate the memory of one of
them. Every one who travels there, hears wherever he goes
of the renown of the Folgéat—the work of the glorious days
of Brittany, now scathed and battered by the Revolution:
where, instead of the princely convent, a few Seurs de la
Providence educate poor children—‘‘ les filles des misérables.”
And though English taste may think it over-rated, it is a
noble church,—with its two towers and spires of pierced
granite, and its line of five altars, along the eastern wall,
carved with the most exquisite beauty, of the sharp dark grey
Kersanton. The legend which led to the building of this
church, shall be given as it was read in the church itself.*
We shall not be surprised at our readers smiling, or, if it is
worth while, condemning; but we think they will be touched,
at least, by the manner in which it is told.

* The legend is hung up on a board, in old French, on one of the piers,

BRITTANY. 241

**Qn the Sunday before All Saints, 1370, deceased the blessed
Salaun, or Solomon, vulgarly called the Fool, because he was taken
for one naturally dull, and wanting reason, having never been able
to learn anything save only these two words, ‘ Ave Maria, which
he would say and repeat without ceasing. This poor innocent had
made for himself a wretched dwelling beneath a great tree, whereof
the branches were very low, and were to him for a roof and walls.
There he lived by himself, lying on the bare ground: and when he
was hungry, going through the town of Lesneven, he asked for
bread, saying, in his Breton language, ‘ Ave Maria, Salaun a de
pre bara, —that is, ‘ Solomon would fain eat bread ;’ and then
he would return to his abode, where he dipped his bread in the
water of a fountain hard by; and no one all his life long could
make him eat or drink any thing else, or sleep elsewhere. And
when in winter time he was cold, he climbed up into his tree, and
hung on to the branches, swinging backwards and forwards, to—
warm himself by the motion of his body, and singing the while
with a loud voice, ‘ O-0-0-0-0-0, Maria. So that, from his
simpleness of life, they called him only ‘the fool.’ At-last, he
having deceased, the neighbours, who were poor country-folk,
simple and ignorant, supposing from his innocence, that as he had
lived without use of reason, or knowledge of God or religion, as
far as it appeared to them, so he had not died like a Christian, not
having been assisted by the Church-folk, nor having asked for any
of the Sacraments ; and thinking also that those frequent words
which he had in his mouth, ‘Ave Maria,’ meant nothing religious,
but rather that they were a custom, without his knowing their

- meaning; and also setting down his great austerity of life to a

brutish disposition by nature, which never could have tasted good
or evil ;—— therefore they thought him not worthy to be buried in
holy ground. And, moreover, his body being disowned of his
friends, and despised by others, the trouble and charges of carrying
it to be buried in the parish burying-ground, which was about one
league distant, were an excuse to each one of them, to flatter
himself in this lack of charity and kindness. So it was, that he
was buried by the peasants, like a beast, at the foot of his tree,
without priests, or the accustomed ceremonies of the Church. But
the good and all-merciful God, to whom only it appertains to judge
of the end, whether blessed or miserable, of all men, caused it to
be seen then, for the consolation of the poor and simple in heart,
that paradise is not only for those whom the world calls wise and
R

242 . BRITTANY.

understanding ; and, above all, that the invocation of the name of
his Holy Mother, is verily a mark of predestination and salvation.
For the night following, there sprung and grew up marvellously,
out of the grave of this innocent, a lily all covered with flowers,
though the season was adverse, and near to winter; and upon these
flowers, and also upon the leaves of the tree, were read these words,
imprinted, ‘O Maria, and ‘Ave Maria, just as if they had
been naturally traced and graven; and they continued, until, the
winter drawing on, the leaves fell off from the flowers, and from
the tree. At the noise and fame of this so admirable an event,
there came together from all parts, an infinite number of folk, as
well of the clergy, as of the nobility aud others, who proposed to
build a church in honour of the glorious Virgin, in this place,
sanctified by so evident a miracle, and where the invocation of her
holy name had appeared so effectual.”

A people who build churches in honour of fools, must be
expected to do many other strange things, grotesque, puz-
zling, revolting, to the shrinking taste and the cautious, un-
venturesome imagination of the civilised traveller, who
suddenly throws himself into this medieval race. Modern
faith shrinks from details, declines the doubtful, cannot tole-
rate juxtaposition of the heterogeneous; it is not imaginative
or wide. Not so the hardy, daring faith that still survives in
Brittany. There the world of faith is the counterpart of the
world of sight; a world which addresses itself not merely to
the devotional or contemplative feelings, but to the whole
man; as full of detail and variety as the visible creation;
with its heights and depths, with its unaccountable phenomena,
its strange conjunctions; which opens up, not by a formless,
featureless expanse of light, but by visions insulated, un-
finished, yet distinct, to the Everlasting Throne — which sinks
down, through all loathsomeness, absurdity, terror, to the
depths of the bottomless pit; and in this middle world presents
a mixture astounding, yet to its own denizens most natural,
of the heavenly, the human, and the infernal.

There is one prominent feature in this, which excites’ very
strange feelings in the serious Englishman. . He has probably
been accustomed to think only with solemn fear, of that evil

BRITTANY. . 243

being, who is to him almost the unnameable: not with ha-
tred, not with contempt, not with anything approaching to
levity. He goes to Brittany, and he finds, as in the middle
ages, that the prevailing feeling is one of heart-felt derision,
implying, but almost too strong to show, real human hatred —
the feeling of redeemed man, triumphing over and laughing to
scorn his outwitted enemy. ‘The Evil one is brought in to
make sport, in the Breton play, or the Breton tale: the Breton
hero must always, to keep up his character, “jouer quelque
mauvais tour au diable.” * Le diable,” says M. Souvestre,
‘est la victime obligée, c’est ’Orgon du fabliau Bas-Breton ;
dans le genre plaisant, comme dans le genre terrible, sa figure
est celle quidomine.” C’est une assez curieuse étude,” adds
our philosophic Breton-francisé, “que celle de cette vieille
haine, qui prend tour a tour la forme de la malédiction,
ou de la raillerie.” *

The popular stories are all of his baffled power and cun-
ning,—not of tremendous conflicts, souls staked and lost, or
hardly saved, but of his ridiculous failures, or precipitate
and foolish bargains with men. ‘There is a grotesque belief,
—sprung, perhaps, from the same feeling which gave birth to
Eastern Dualism,—that the wild animals, and the coarse and
ugly species of the same type, are the result of his abortive
efforts at creation; the ass in his copy of the horse, the fox
_ of the dog. In his contests with man, he is defeated not by
sanctity, but by superior cunning. He tries his sharpness
against the long-headed shrewd peasant, or the light-hearted,
quick-witted Troadec, the great mythic hero of these en-
counters; and he is disgracefully taken in, laughed at, and
duly tortured. Nothing so completely recals the grotesque
side of the middle ages, as these strange tales, so profane to
our ears, which the traveller may still hear in the inn-kitchen,
or in the petite voiture.

Another, and a different feature of medieval times, are the
pilgrimages and “pardons ;”—assemblages, by hundreds and
thousands, to seek the blessing attached to a particular spot.

* Souvestre, p. 83.
R 2

244 BRITTANY.

There is the same undoubting and ardent devotion—there
are also, in many cases, the same excesses. ‘The smaller
meetings, it is said, are free from these scandals: certainly,
nothing can be more striking and solemn than some of them,
from first to last, — unless there happens to be present a rude
Englishman, or, what is still worse, a mocking Frenchman,
But at the larger ones, part of the business of the day is to
get drunk, to the annual vexation of the priests, and the
annual entertainment of the neighbouring bourgeois. M.
Souvestre’s account of one of sthe most famous pilgrimages,
is revolting in the extreme. Mr. Trollope gives a des-
eription of another, which probably is a fairer specimen, —
the pilgrimage to St. Jean du Doigt, near Morlaix.

“We left Morlaix by the picturesque fauxbourg of Troudousten,
which lines the side of the valley with its irregular collection of
buildings ; and then traversed the shady woods of Tréfeunteniou,
and the deep valley of the Dourdu...... Farther on, we crossed
the little stream of the Mesqueau, and soon after arrived at the
object of our pilgrimage.

“All this time we had been journeying amid a crowd of all ages
and sexes, who were bound to the same point, and which became
denser as we approached the village. We made directly for the
church, as the grand centre of interest; and, having reached the
churchyard, found ourselves in the midst of a scene, which it is
almost as difficult adequately to describe, as it is impossible ever
to forget.

“The church is a large building, with a handsome tower,
standing in the midst of an area, which is but little encumbered
with gravestones. This was thickly crowded with a collection of
men, women, and children, more motley in appearance than can
readily be conceived by any one who has not seen the never-ending
variety of Breton costume. The churchyard was bounded on part
of one side by a long straggling building, which had been turned
into a cabaret for the occasion. ‘The door, and front of this house,
were on the side looking away from the church; but a window
opening into the churchyard, had been converted into a temporary
door, for the more ready passage of the pilgrims from one to the
other of the two occupations, drinking and devotion, which, on a
pilgrimage, as for the most part elsewhere, form the principal
amusements of a Breton’s life.

ea ee

BRITTANY. 245

“Tn the parts of the inclosure farthest from the church, were

erected a quantity of booths, beneath which were exposed for sale

innumerable specimens of all the various trumpery which forms
the machinery of Romish devotion. Pictures and figures of saints,
especially of St. John the Baptist, of every possible size, form, and
sort; chaplets of various materials; bottles of water from holy
fountains; crucifixes, crosses, and calvaries, &c., were the princi-
pal articles. Amid these, other stalls were devoted to the more
mundane luxuries of nuts, rolls, figs, sausages, prunes, biscuits,
apples, crépe, &c. By the side of the pathway leading to the prin-
cipal door of the church the dealers in wax and tallow candles had
stationed themselves. ‘The consumption of these, and the supply
provided for it, were enormous.

“The thing that most struck me after the first glance at the
various heterogeneous parts of this strange scene, was an equable
and constant motion of that part of the crowd who were nearest to
the church, around the walls of the building; and, on pressing
forwards, I found an unceasing stream of pilgrims walking round
the church, saying prayers, and telling their beads. Many per-
formed this part of the ceremony on their bare knees.

“Just outside the moving circle thus formed, and constituting a
sort of division between it and the rest of the crowd, were a row
of mendicants, whose united appearance was something far more
horrible than I have any hope os conveying an idea of to the
reader. + * *

“ Each horrible object continued all the day in the position he

’ had taken up, and in many instances, in attitudes which it appeared

scarcely possible to retain so long. One man lay on his back on the
ground, while both his bare legs were raised high in air, and sus-
tained in that position by crutches. Of course each studiously
placed himself so as most to expose that particular affliction which
qualified him to take his place among the sickening crew. All
vociferated their appeals to the charity of the crowd incessantly,
and most of them appeared to receive a great many alms from the
pilgrims. Some gave a small coin to every one of the revolting
circle. In many instances we observed change demanded by the
giver, and produced readily by the miserable object of his charity.
Many gave part of the provisions which they had brought with
them in their wallets from their distant homes. % *
“'The novelty and strangeness of the scene around the church

detained us long from entering it. Fresh pilgrims continued to
R 3

246 BRITTANY.

arrive every instant, and joined themselves to the never-ceasing
procession around the building, who came, as was evident from
their costume, from various distant parts of the country. Grave,
decorous peasants, in black, from the neighbourhood of Morlaix
and St. Thégonec, were mixed with wild-looking-travel-stained
figures from the hills. Here a group might be seen, whose white
flannel jackets and violet-coloured breeches showed them to be
from the neighbourhood of St. Pol de Léon; and there a blue cloak
with its short, falling cape, declared its wearer to have come from
the western extremity of the northern coast. Roscovites were
there, with their close, green jackets, white trousers, and red
sashes; and inhabitants of the distant shores opposite to Brest, dis-
tinguishable by their glaring costume of red coats and breeches, and
white waistcoats, adorned with crimson buttons. $ .

“Each freshly arrived party, as they entered the churchyard,
fell into the ranks, and, muttering as they went, commenced the
tour of the church; and, having performed that, some more, some
fewer times, proceeded next into the interior, and struggled
onwards through the crowd towards the altar. ‘This was no easy
matter to accomplish. We followed into the church a recently
arrived party of very poor-looking pilgrims from the hills, whose
liberal alms-giving we had been observing with surprise and
interest, and endeavoured to make our way towards the altar in
their wake.

“The church was large; but it was crowded to such a degree,
that it was absolutely difficult to find room to stand within the
doors. By degrees, however, and by dint of long perseverance and
much striving, we at length got near the principal altar. A narrow
passage along the front of the rails of this. had been partitioned off,
into one end of which the crowd struggled, and issued from the
other.

“ Within the rails was a priest, carrying the Finger, in its little
case, and applying it to the eyes of the people, one after another as
fast as he possibly could. Running the whole length along the top
of the rails of the altar was a sort of box, about four inches broad,
by six deep. The top consisted of a sort of grating, formed of a
succession of wooden bars, with interstices between them, about a
third of an inch in breadth. Into this each devotee dropped one or
more pieces of money as soon as the miraculous relic had touched
his eyes.

“‘] have been assured that the sum of money received annually

BRITTANY: 247

at St. Jean du Doigt on this day is very considerable indeed. And
I can easily conceive it to be so; for the confluence of people was
immense, and, of course, no one there failed to come to the altar,
nor could I perceive that any one left it without having deposited
an offering in the box.

“The crowding, pushing, struggling, and jostling, at the entrance
to the passage in front of the altar, was tremendous. Here, high
above the heads of the undulating crowd, mounted on a level with
the top of the altar-rails, was a beadle, with a good stout cane in
his hand, with which he was laying about him vigorously; whack-
ing the most violent and impatient of the crowds over their
heads and shoulders; much in the same manner that a Smithfield
drover regulates the motions of an irritated and over-driven herd
of bullocks.

*‘We remained near the altar for some time. But there was
nothing more to see than we had seen. The same thing continued
without the slightest variation. Fresh comers continually thronged
to the door of the passage, and supplied the places of those who
kept streaming from the other end, as fast as the priest could touch
both their eyes with the sacred relic. And this continued nearly
the whole day.

“T could not perceive that any body watched, to see if the people
dropped their money. The priest certainly paid no attention to it,
being fully engaged in performing his own task, now stepping back
a little, and now forward, and now stretching out his arm to some
one behind, whom the throng prevented from getting close to the
altar-rails. It appeared, indeed, that the honesty or fanaticism of
the pilgrims rendered any care on this point unnecessary. For I
observed many, who had had the finger applied to their eyes across
others, and were consequently separated from the box on the rails,
and were being carried away by the motion of the crowd, struggling
hard to reach the box with their hand, to deposit therein their
offering ... . This continued without stopping till about six
o'clock, at which hour the procession was to take place.”

Mr. Trollope proceeds to describe a custom which has
struck all who have seen it—the fires of St. John’s Day.

“ There are few villages or hamlets in Brittany that have not
their bonfire on the eve of St. John; but of course, in the village
under his peculiar patronage, and in the presence of hundreds of

pilgrims, assembled for his express honour, the rite is solemnized
R 4)

248 . BRITTANY,

with especial pomp and circumstance, and the blaze is a glorious
ace ~ * * * * % »

“ To this spot the solemn train proceeded. A hollow way led
up the side of the hill, and in some degree compelled, by its
narrowness, the immense crowd to keep behind the procession.
We however climbed up tlie steep side of this ravine, and thus, high
above the heads of the crowd, looked down upon the assembled mul-
titude. The coup d’cil was certainly a very striking one. The
processional pomp, examined in detail, was of course mean and
ridiculous. But the general aspect of the prodigious multitude,
assembled from so many distant homes, their deep seriousness, and
evident devotion, as with bare heads, and long locks streaming in
the wind, they raised the burthen of their solemn chant, could not
fail to affect powerfully the imagination.* . 4 wd

“ At length the living mass reached the top of the hill, and ar-
ranged itself in a vast circle around the huge stack of dry broom and
furze, which was destined to the flames. Some fireworks were to
be let off first; and when this had been done, the firing of a cannon
gave the signal that the bonfire was about to be lighted. This,
however, was to be accomplished in no ordinary way, but by fire
from heaven, or by a contrivance intended to resemble it in effect,
as nearly as might be. A long rope was attached to the top of the
church tower, the other end of which communicated with the fuel.
Along this a ‘feu d’artifice, in the form of a dove, was to be
launched, which was to run along the line, and ignite the dry
brushwood.

“Great is the importance attached to this feat of ingenuity, and
long is the sight looked forward to by the admiring peasants.
Down shot the fiery dove at the sound of the cannon, and briskly
she flew along the rope, amid the murmured raptures of the crowd,
till she had travelled about half the distance. But, there, alas! she
stopped dead, nor could any expedient of shaking the rope, &c.,
induce her to advance another inch.

“« The fact was, that the rope was not stretched tightly enough to
produce an uninterrupted line in an inclined plane. Its own weight
caused it to form a considerable curve, and the dove decidedly
refused to advance an inch up hill. Thus foiled in their scenic
effect, the masters of the ceremonies were fain to light their bonfire
in an ordinary and less ambitious away. :

“This was soon done. The dry brushwood blazed up in an
instant, and the already wide circle round the fire was soon enlarged

nae re

BRITTANY. 249

by the heat, which drove back the thick ranks ng its oral in-
creasing power. * . i

* Soon after the pile was lighted, the a ahs with the banners,
the relics, and the principal part of the procession, left the bonfire,
and returned down the hill to the village. This appeared to be the
signal that all semblance of a religious ceremony might now be
dropped. The remainder of the evening was given up to unre-
strained merry-making and carousing. ‘The dance round the fire
which, when formerly it was lighted at the same period of the year,
in honour of the Sun, was intended to typify the motion of the stars,
and has been preserved, though meaningless since the Christian-
ization of the festival, was duly performed. Cattle were brought,
and made to leap over the burning embers, to preserve them from
disease, and from the malice of the fairies. Boys and girls rushed
in, and snatched from the glowing mass a half-consumed morsel,
to be carefully preserved till next St. John’s eve for good-luck —
shouts and cries rose on all sides from the excited multitude; and
the whole scene, over which a solemn and religious spirit had so
recently presided, became one of frolic and confusion.

“ One after another the surrounding hills were lighted up each
with its crowning bonfire, and the reflections of many others still
more distant were seen in the sky, imparting to the heavens in
every direction the ruddy glow of a golden sunset. Then groups of
girls, in their holyday trim, might be seen stealing off and mounting
the various points of the hills, to try if they could see nine fires at
once. For, if they can do this, they are sure of being married in
the course of the year. r * * *

“We did not return by the road we had come, but by Lanmeur.
The whole country through which we passed was illumined by a
succession of fires. And on many of the hills a shadowy circle
of ghost-like figures might be seen, moving around the distant
flames. We found no less than three bonfires blazing in different
places in the very middle of the road, over which two or three
diligences would have to pass in the course of a few hours.”

It is not necessary, we think, to have recourse to a Celtic

rite for the explanation of the fires on St. John’s Eve. But

there are more questionable usages among these wild people.
Paganism has scarcely yet been quite rubbed out from
among them — the religion of the wells, and woods, and
heaths, and shores. The tall ghost-like stone on the moor,

250 BRITTANY,

still fills the peasant with supernatural awe, though the
cross has been set upon it. It is startling to be told by M.
de Fréminville, a writer who professes accuracy, and is not
a free-thinker, that on the western coast, and in the Isle of
Ushant, idolatry was practised as late as the seventeenth
century.“ Idolatry is now gone; but wild fearful ideas
about the invisible world still linger, and belief in the mystic
powers of nature, mixed up with Christian legends. It is on
the western coast that these superstitions, solemn everywhere

in Brittany, are most dreary and terrible; that coast which .

looks out on the desolate ocean — “ la proue de l’ancien monde”
—and shares its gloom and storm. Even on the stillest day
there is a sullen savage look about the scene, about the
gaunt dark rocks, the long low sandy islands in the hazy
distance, the heavy sleepy balancing of the endless waters in
their bed, immensi tremor Oceani. ‘* Who has ever passed
along this funereal coast without exclaiming or feeling,
‘ Tristis usque ad mortem?”’f Every cape and island has
its associations of terror or death; fit place for the Nexvia of
the Odyssey ; —the refuge of the spirits of darkness whom
the Gospel had scared from Greece, and the East, —the
abode of the weird virgins, who ruled the tempests; the
birth-place of Merlin; the haunt of mermaids and _ sea-
monsters, and, in later times, of wreckers.

The local legends are equally gloomy ;—legends of sin and
judgment, of the great city of Ys, and the cry of its wicked-
ness coming up to heaven like Sodom, till its measure was
full. Then King Gradlon’s wicked and beautiful daughter
Dahut stole the golden key, which kept out the sea, and
opened the floodgates, and let in the waters. But S.
Gwenolen was sent to the king to save him: —“ Ah! sire,
sire, let us depart quickly hence, for the wrath of God will
destroy this place! Thou knowest the sin of this people, the
measure is full; let us haste to depart, lest we be overtaken
in the same calamity.” The king mounted his horse, with
his daughter behind him, and fled out of the city; but the

* Trollope, ii. 299. 386. 389. Cambry, p. 64.
+ Michelet.

7.

BRITTANY. 251

raging waves followed him, and were about to devour him.
— ‘King Gradlon,” cried then a terrible voice, “if thou wilt
not perish, separate thyself from that evil one thou carriest
behind thee.” The king knew the voice of Gwenolen, — the
voice of God; he cast off his daughter to the sea, and the sea
was satisfied with its prey, and stood still. But the city was
swallowed up, with all that were in it, and its ruins are still
pointed out under the Bay of Douarnenez.* There, when
the storm is rising, the fishermen hear in the whistling
moaning gale, the crierien, the voices of the shipwrecked,
shrieking for burial; and tell that on Allsouls-day, le jour des
morts, you may see the pale spirits rising on the crests of the
waves, and scudding like the spray before the wind, in the
Baie des Trépassés: it is the annual gathering of those who
once lived on these shores, the drowned and the buried, and
they seek each other among the waves. There also they
believe that the demons which wait for the lost soul, show
themselves in visible form about his door during his agony ;
they tell of fishers’ boats deeply laden with their invisible
freight of spirits, gliding off to the ocean. ‘There, at mys-
terious Carnac, the tombs are opened at midnight, the church
is lighted up, and Death, clad in the. vestments of a priest,
preaches from the pulpit to thousands of kneeling skeletons:
the peasants say that they have seen the lights, and heard the
voice of the preacher. There also, near Auray, is the battle-
field of Pluvigner, where the souls of the unshriven slain are
condemned to wander till the Great Day, each in a straight
line across the plain; and woe to the traveller who crosses .
the path of a spirit !

*“ While I was at Auray,” says Souvestre, “ I was enabled to
judge how deeply the belief is rooted in the minds of the country
people. A young country girl came to the house where I was
_ staying, crying bitterly, and unable to speak. We interrogated her
in alarm, and the poor girl told us, through her sobs, that her father
was dying. He had gone yesterday to the fair of Pluvigner, and
had returned alone and late by the fatal field. He had been met by

* Pitre-Chevalier, p. 88.

252 BRITTANY.

a spirit—(while she said these words, her whole body trembled) ;_
he had been thrown down, and it was only in the morning that he
had been found and brought home; a doctor was no good, it was
a priest that he wanted; his hours were numbered.

“ We went to the dying man. He was already in the agony ;
but he told us his story, in words interrupted by the horrible
hiccough of the deathrattle. He told us, that ‘he had felt himself
struck by the spirit,’ and, in spite of his efforts, he had been hurled
from his horse. — The physician arrived, and declared that he had
been seized with apoplexy.” — Souvestre, pp. 115, 116.

Nowhere do the ideas of death crowd in so thickly and
drearily. But it is on the coast that they are most gloomy
and terrible. In the interior, they are of a more Christian
and fireside character. On the coast, men think of the dead
as exposed to the sea and storm; inland, they still think
of them, but as lingering about their old homes and families.
In Léon especially, as we have already seen in one instance,
they keep up very strongly these household feelings about
the dead. On Allsouls-day, the day on which the fishermen
of the coast see the vexed spirits in the tossing waves of the
Baie des Trépassés, —

“The whole population of the Léonais rises serious and in
mourning. It is the family anniversary, the time of commemo-
rations ; and nearly the whole day is spent in devotion. About
midnight, after a meal taken in common, all retire ; but the dishes
are left on the table; for the Bretons think that, at that hour, those
whom they have lost rise from their graveyards, and come to take
_ their annual repast under the roof where they were born.” —
Souvestre, p. 10.

The Breton shrinks from the thought of laying his bones
out of the consecrated land of Brittany:—*‘ what would
his poor soul feel, if it found itself at night among so many
strange souls ?”—and he shrinks equally from disturbing his
fathers, by burying strangers in their honoured fellowship.*
In the midst of rejoicing, the dead are not forgotten. On
St. John’s night, seats are set for them by the fires, that

* Souvestre, pp. 363. 428.

;
;

BRITTANY. 253

they may come and look on at the dancers. Even at the
wedding, amid its grotesque ceremonies, they are thought of ;
the bazvalan, or village tailor, who conducts the negociations,
after inviting all the living relatives to go with him to
church, excuses himself from inviting the dead, because to
pronounce their names would be too painful ;— ‘but let
every one uncover himself, as I do, and beg for them the
blessing of the Church, and rest for their souls ;”—and he
aloud, and the rest in an under tone, repeat the “ De pro-
fundis.”

These feelings are stamped on the face of the country.
Even in the course of a summer visit, when the long sunny
days, and the bright warm looks of sea and earth and sky,
continuing week after week, make the mind less attentive
and less open to opposite impressions —again and again will
they force themselves upon it. What is elsewhere put out
of sight, is here as much as possible kept before the face of
the living. ‘The way-side cross, with the inscription, “ Jct
trespassa N.,” meets you perpetually. The parish churches
in the country, especially if of any antiquity, have a strange
character of hardness and dreariness, distinct from mere rude-
ness, and quite their own. ‘The well-known forms of church
architecture reappear, but with altered proportions, and a
peculiar grotesque sternness ;—granite without, instead of
the chequered flint, and warm rich freestone of France and
England—within, whitewash, with perhaps a broad border of
black; wide open paved spaces; and the church ending, not
in a chancel, but in a cross transept. Even when empty,
there is generally one sound heard in them—the loud ticking
of aclock. At the east end, are the heavy, brightly painted
images; in other parts of the church, and in the porch, set
up on shelves, each in a small black box, pierced, and sur-
mounted by the cross, the skulls of those who have

worshipped there, taken out of their graves when their flesh
has perished, and placed on high with their names—“ Cy est
le chef de N.,” in the sight of their children when they come

to pray. They are churches of the dead as well as of the
living.

254 BRITTANY.

In keeping with this character of the country, is the
‘sacred city” of old Armorica—the chief see of Brittany,
now decayed and brought low,—S. Pol de Léon. It still
shows the beauty—the grace mingled with sternness—which
the Church impressed upon it. For a couple of hours before
he reaches the city, the traveller looks at its group of spires,
which spring upwards, on a rising ground, from the vague out-
line of trees and houses; they are imprinted on his eye, and
occupy and prepossess his imagination while he is approaching,
and they grow in interest as he comes near. There are the
two cathedral spires, and, like them, but leaving them far
behind, the Creisker; a pierced spire of granite, of strange
and singular beauty, boldly deviating from the most graceful
western types—not springing from its base with a continu-
ously tapering outline, but rising long with solemn evenness
from the ground, and then, after pausing at a deep and
heavy cornice, shooting up amid a crowd of pinnacles, with
inexpressible lightness and freedom into the sky. But the
city beneath these beautiful structures is deserted and deso-
late. There is nothing but dull unbroken streets of granite,
with a few people sitting at their doors, or, it may be,
squatted outside, like savages, round a fire. The general
air of the place,” says Mr. Trollope, “might impress a tra-
veller with the notion that all the inhabitants were asleep.
A deep and slumbering tranquillity seems to be the presiding
genius of the town. ‘The cathedral is small, low, and gleomy.
No service was going on there when we entered. ‘Two or
three silent figures were kneeling motionless in different parts
of the nave, and not a sound but the echo of our own foot-
steps disturbed the death-like stillness of the sombre place.
But the quiet was hardly more profound than that of the
city without; and the deep silence, the dingy walls, and the
undisturbed dust on them, seemed attributes fitting a place
of worship for this scarcely living city.”*

Even the Creisker seems, to some minds, to harmonise
with the melancholy of the city. It was the remark of an

* Trollope, vol. ii. pp. 277, 278.

BRITTANY. 255

intelligent Breton, that it was “ the only Gothic church that
gave him the idea of repose, like the Grecian temples.” And
any one who has wandered from the cold silent streets to the
great cimetiére outside, late on a summer’s evening, when
the full moon was rising, and hanging low and red over the
misty bay behind; and has walked in this uncertain twilight
along its straight avenues, bordered by ossuaries and
‘‘ stations,” till he stood in front of the great “ Calvary,” to
which all the paths converge—in a broad open space paved
with grave-stones, — with dimly-seen groups, as large as life,
of the Passion and the Burial, before and around him, and in
the background the long low shapeless outline of the chapel
of the cemetery—must remember well the solemn dreariness
of the place —

“ Relliquiz mortis hic inhabitant.”

But Breton religion, with its mixture of wildness and
thoughtfulness, its tenderness and sad resignation, has other
sides. Faith, as of old, works in many ways. It is a fearful
thing, yet nothing new, that it can co-exist, strong and all-
pervading, with monstrous evil; it is compatible with vio-
lence, and hatred, and impurity. Faith is no restraint by it-
self,—is no test of the virtue of the multitude. An age of
faith will be fruitful in good: but the evil that grows along
with it may rival in horrible excess the most portentous births
of atheism. The French Pantheist sees God in himself:
“‘méme dans ses passions et ses délires.” The Breton savage
reverses this: firmly believing in the One above him, he sees
his own wild passions on the Throne of Power—he sees
sympathy there with his feuds and hatreds. At no distant
time, we are told, he made pilgrimages to obtain “des bons
naufrages ;”* and stranger things still are reported of him.

* Souvestre asserts that there is a chapel near Tréguier, dedicated to N. D.
de la Haine. “Une chapelle dediée 4 N. D de la Haine existe toujours prés
de Tréguier, et le peuple n’a pas cessé de croire a la puissance des priéres qui
y sont faites. Parfois encore, vers le soir, on voie des ombres honteuses, se
glisser furtivement vers ce triste édifice placé au haut d’un cdteau sans verdure.

Ce sont de jeunes pupilles lassés de la surveillance de leurs tuteurs ; des viellards
jaloux de la prospérité d’un yoisin ; des femmes trop rudement froissées par le

256 BRITTANY.

The fanaticism of this stern faith, when it blazes out,
is of the same terrible character. Take the following
scene, which Souvestre states that he witnessed in 1839.
A pardon is going on—all are dancing under the light clear
sky,

** When suddenly there was a movement in the crowd; the
bagpipe was silent, the dance stopped, and I heard, passing round
me, a name which struck me, Joan de Guiklan. I had heard his
name the day before, and had been told that he had gone out of his
mind after a retreat at S. Pol de Léon, where the sermons, the
solitude, and his naturally excitable temper had worked him up into
a wild fanaticism ; and that he went about everywhere, preaching
repentance, and throwing himself across the joys of life like a mes-

t

despotisme @un mari, qui viennent la prier pour la mort de Vobjet de leur
haine. Trois Ave, dévotement répétés, aménent irrevocablement cette mort
dans l’année.” ‘This statement, on which some remarks were founded in the
pages of the Review in which this paper first appeared, was contradicted by the
Bishop of St. Bricuc, in whose diocese Tréguier is situated, and by the clergy-
man at the head of the “ Petit Séminaire” at Tréguier, PAbbé Uryoy, in
letters, which were printed in the Christian Remembrancer, July, 1846. p. 295.
M. Urvoy, after warmly denying the truth of Souvestre’s statement, offers the
following explanation of the possible origin of the story. ‘ Mais quel objet a
pu lui donner Je théme de sa burlesque histoire? Le voici probablement. I] y
a sur la rive opposée au quai de Tréguier un oratoire, sous ke title de S, Yves
de Vérité. L’amour de la justice dont était pénétré la saint et savant magis-
trat, le zéle et le dévouement avee lesquels il defendait les opprimés, sont
demeurés tellement gravés dans les esprits, que, dans des cas d’injuste op-
pression ou de proces inique, on l’a invoqué spécialement dans ce lieu ponr
obtenir de Dieu par son entremise que la vérité fut connue, et l’injustice con-
damnée. Voila un culte et un oratoire qui sont connus ici. Mais pour la
chapelle de N. D. de la Haine, et sa bizarre superstition, elles sont de la créa.ion
de M. E. Souvestre, et réellement sorties de son imagination fantasque. Car
ici on ne trouve rien du pareil, ni dans le passé, ni dans le présent.” ‘The con-
tradiction is, of course, of the highest authority, as to the existence of such a
chapel as Souvestre speaks of. But the very culée which M, Urvoy admits might
yery easily, in a rude people, pass into something much stronger than his des-
cription of it, and lurk among them in a shape, not so far removed from the
detestable and shameful superstition which Souvestre alleges to exist. We must
add that these letters rather injure the effect of their explanations, by insisting
that “ Brittany is one of the least superstitious parts of France ;” and by the
wholesale way in which they ascribe to Souvestre the intention of discrediting
the clergy, and depreciate his knowledge of the people he describes. He may
be an exaggerated writer; but there is every appearance that he writes, from
continual and familiar intercourse with the peasantry.

BRITTANY. 257

senger of death. It was added, that he had lived for many years
without house, or friends, or family. He taught the word of God
in the country towns, slept at the foot of the stone crosses by the
roadside, or on the thresholds of solitary chapels; he took in alms
only what was necessary to satisfy his hunger, and refused, with
disgust, the offer of money. Never, since his madness, had his
hand been stretched out to ask for, or to clasp, another hand ;
never a word, save of holy counsel or prophetic threatening had
fallen from his lips. In the darkest and coldest winter nights,
when the frost or snow had surprised him in some lonely track,
and prevented him from sleeping on his bed of stone, he remained
all night standing with his rosary in his hand, chanting hymns in
Breton. The people of the neighbourhood said, that a supernatural
foreknowledge had been granted him, and that, at the hour when
death was knocking at the door of a house, the madman always pre-
ceded it, crying Repentance, Repentance! .... We soon perceived
him standing on the blackened walls of a house which had been
burnt some years before. He was a tall man, pale and thin. His
hair fell over his shoulders, and he rolled his haggard eyes over
the crowd which surrounded him, His gestures were frequent,
and in jerks. He often shook his head like a wild beast, and then
his black shaggy hair, half veiling his face, gave a terrible character
to his look. His piercing voice had that marked tone common to
the Breton accent.

“‘ His sermon, which turned upon the dangers of dancing, and the
necessity of flying from the pleasures of the world, was in itself a
very commonplace repetition of what I had heard twenty times in

' country churches ; but, by degrees, the fit came upon him, and then

his language assumed an energy by which I confess to have been
myselfovercome. Vivid images, stirring appeals, sarcasm, pointed,
coarse, and driven home to the heart, and leaving its mark like a
hot iron—this was its character. He pointed out to the crowd of
dancers the rising tide, which would soon wash away the foot-tracks
which they had left on the sand; he compared the sea which
roared round their mirth as if in menaces to eternity, incessantly
murmuring round their life a terrible warning; then, by an abrupt
and familiar transition, he addressed his words to a young man
who stood before him—

*¢Good morrow, Pierre ; good morrow to thee; dance and
laugh, my son; here thou art, where, two years ago, they found the
body of thy brother who was drowned.’

“ He continued in the same strain, calling every one by his

8

258 BRITTANY.

name, stirring each heart by the bitterest recollections, and detailing
them with ferocious exactness. This lasted long, and yet his cutting
bantering was not softened. One felt, by turns, touched and in-
dignant at hearing these sarcasms, sharp as daggers, which searched
about in each man’s history, to find out some old wound to open.
At last Jéan quitted these personal addresses, to speak of the pains
reserved for the sinner, and, attributing to God a horrible irony,
he proclaimed to those who, on earth, had loved the intoxication
of the dance and the revel, an eternal dance in the midst of the
flames of hell. He described this circle of the damned, whirled
about for millions of ages in a perpetual round of sufferings ever
renewed, to the sound of wailing, and sobbing, and gnashing of
teeth. In my life I had never heard anything so agitating as this
grotesque sermon, mingled with bursts of maniac laughter, with
imprecations, and prayers :—the crowd breathed hard.

“ Then he contrasted, with this frightful description, a picture of
the blessedness of the elect; but his expressions were feeble and
tame. He was not carried away, except when he spoke of the
necessity of self-mortification, and of offering our sufferings to
God. Then he gave the history of his life with so majestic a
simplicity, that one might have fancied that one was hearing a
page of Scripture. He told how he had lost his fortune, his children,
his wife; and, at the recital of each loss, he exclaimed,—‘ It is
well, my God: blessed be Thy holy name!’ The women burst
into tears. He added advice and exhortations to repentance; and
finally, warming more and more, he told how his losses had appeared
to him too little to expiate his sins. Jesus Christ had appeared to
him in a dream, and had said to him, ‘ Jéan, give me thy left hand
—to me, who gave my life for thy salvation.’ ‘Lord, it is thine,’
he had answered. —‘ And I have fulfilled my promise,’ he cried,
raising above his head his left arm, which till now we had not
noticed.

“There was a stump, wrapped round with bloody rags. A
murmur of amazement and horror burst out all round.

“ ¢ Who is afraid ?—who is afraid?’ rejoined the maniac, whose
vehemence seemed only to increase. ‘I have restored to God
that which he gave me. Woe be to you, if the deed done at the
command of Christ has made your hearts sick! Behold! behold!
It is Christ who has willed it. See what I have done for the love
of Christ.’

“ And the miserable man tore off, in a frantic transport, the
bandages of his wound, and, shaking his bare stump over the
crowd, made the blood spurt in a half circle on all their heads.

BRITTANY. 259

« A long ery of horror rose; part of the spectators fled terrified ;
some men threw themselves on the wall where he stood, and bore
him to a neighbouring cottage, almost insensible.” — Souwvestre, pp.
25—28.

Yet this Breton peasant —this outlandish medieval being
—with his stoical, unhoping apathy, his low views of life, and
vivid thoughts of death; with his wild dangerous faith, and
dogged attachment to the past; so lofty and awful, and
narrow-minded, and quaint,—is, after all, still a man; the
chances are, a thoughtful, well-judging, honest man, without
pretence or sham,— understanding and trusting himself with
fairness; a man for unromantic self-sacrifices. Home and
family feelings are as strong in Brittany as they are in
England. Not that he is the least romantic in his domestic
affections; home and family, however indispensable, are
simply what tame prose makes them, scenes of work, trials of
temper. Never does the Breton cheat himself by gay
illusions, not even on his wedding-day. Though he is
poetical then, and sings, his poetry comes in, not to dwell
on visions of bliss, but on the troubles of the cottage
nursery ; to chant not an Epithalamium, but a Threnode.
A strange “ Song of the Bride,” is that which Mr. Trollope
has translated from Souvestre; and the Bridegroom’s is
like it :—

** In other days—in the days of my youth—how warm a heart
I had! Adieu, my companions— adieu for ever !

“T had a heart so ardent! Neither for gold, nor for silver,
would I have given my poor heart! Adieu, my companions, adieu
for ever!

“ Alas! [have given it for nothing! Alas! I have placed it
where joys and pleasures are no more. Adieu, my companions,
adieu for ever! |

“Pains and toil await me. Three cradles in the corner of the
fire! A boy and a girl in each of then! Adieu, my companions,
adieu for ever!

“ Three others in the middle of the house! Boys and girls are
there together! Adieu, my companions, adieu for ever!

“ Go, maidens! haste to fairs and to pardons! but for me I must
do so no longer! Adieu, my companions, adieu for ever !

s 2

260 BRITTANY.

“ For me, see you not, that I must remain here! Henceforward
I am but a servant, girls; for I am married. Adieu, my com-

panions, adieu for ever!”

There is little gaiety, or gossip, or comfort in a Breton
cottage , but nothing could make up to its tenant for the loss
of its dull monotony. Just as it is, it exactly suits him; his
surly affectionateness is satisfied with its dingy walls and
silent company. We have drawn the wild side of his cha-

racter ; we will now extract a story from Souvestre, which.

shows him in his family—avcurious picture of simplicity and
reserve, of feeling and composure.

The writer goes to explore a Breton farm, one of the
numberless little “homes” which parcel out the country,
and which, with their surrounding fields, lie out of view of
the great thoroughfares, hidden by their sheltering elms, or
betrayed only by their thin column of smoke.

“ The home of Jean Mauguerou, like all others in Brittany, con-
sisted exclusively of a ground-floor room. The floor was of earth
beaten hard, and the ceiling was formed of hazel bushes, with
their dry leaves still on them, made into bundles, and supported on
cross poles. On two sides of the house were four ‘ lits clos’ (beds
like berths on shipboard), the wood-work blackened by time, and
with the monogram H surmounted by the cross—the usual deco-
ration of Christian altars—carved in open work on their sliding
pannels. Below these beds were seen chests of oak, with their
delicate mouldings and slender shafts, spoils, no doubt, of some
neighbouring manor-house, in the bad days, and carried off from
the bower of some lady of the chateau to the peasant’s cottage. A
high-backed arm chair, coarsely carved, was pushed into a corner
of the huge chimney ; and on the table opposite the casement, was
the loaf of rye-bread wrapped up in a fringed napkin, under a
white wicker cover. . . . . As tothe circumstances of the
inhabitants, the large CE ae which I had observed near the
pond, and the sides of bacon hung over the hearth, showed plainly
that Mauguerou might be reckoned among the rich farmers of
the country.

“ Just at this moment he appeared. He was a man of about

five-and thirty, stern and plain, but stoutly built. While he was.

talking with my friend, his wife was putting out milk, butter, and

BRITTANY. 261

brown bread. She asked us to sit down, which we did, while
Mauguerou lit his pipe at the fire.

“ As I took up the box-wood spoon which had been set for me,
I noticed that it was less rude in its make than the others, and
that the name ‘ Etienne’ was carved along the handle, between
two vine-leaves, rather gracefully cut.

“<< Who is called Etienne in this house!’ I asked. The farmer’s
wife blushed, but answered without hesitation, ‘It is a young man
who is now a soldier.’

«* ¢ Don’t you expect him soon ?’ asked my friend.

* « He wrote that he should be here for August.’

“ ¢ That will be two good arms more to help you.’

« ¢ And a good heart,’ said the woman, almost to herself.

“ The husband, enveloped in his cloud of smoke, listened un-
moved.

“ ¢ Who is this Etienne?’ I said to my friend, in French.

** « He is Yvonne’s lover,’ said he, pointing to the woman.

««¢ And is he coming to stay here?’

*¢ ¢ Yes, in a few days.’

“* ¢ And is her husband satisfied ?’

** *« Her husband knows all.’

* T stared.

«¢ What sort of man is he, then ?’ I asked.

“* He is a worthy man, who has confidence, and with good
reason ; Etienne has been tried, he has nothing to fear from him.’ ”

Etienne and Yvonne had known each other, and been in

_ love with each other from children. In course of time,

Etienne became farm servant to Yvonne’s father; and the
two lovers plighted their troth, and made up their minds that
they were to be man and wife. But Yvonne’s father had
been ill for a long time; the farm had been neglected, and
had got out of order. Things became worse and worse; the
bailiffs began to threaten. Etienne was a mere boy, and
knew nothing of farming ; he could not help. At this pinch,
Mauguerou, another of the farm servants, who had hitherto
been in the back-ground, came forward, and took the com-
mand. Under his management, things improved, and at
length righted. Before dawn, and after night-fall, he was
at work. His cheek sank, and his hair turned, his back

became bowed, his limbs stiffened ; still he toiled on, silently
s 3

262 BRITTANY.

and unostentatiously, with stern calmness, and the family
was saved,

“ But Yvonne's father was dying. He called his children about
his bed, and there, with the prayers for the dying already sounding
in his ears, and with the funeral tapers already lighted at his bed’s
head as at the head of a coffin, he spoke those sacred and solemn
words, which the departing utter when their soul is in view of
heaven. He bade Yvonne come near, and, laying his icy hand on

her brow, he reminded her that she was now the mother of her .

young brothers and sisters. Then calling Mauguerou to her side
—‘ Here is the man who has» raised our house,’ he said to her,
‘and has saved you from wandering about the roads with the
beggar’s wallet on your shoulder. You want him, Yvonne, for a
stay to these children ; he must be your husband, and master.’

“* He saw that the young girl shuddered.

“<T know,’ he added, ‘ that thy heart is elsewhere; but he whom
thou lovest cannot carry on the farm. Submit to what God wills;
Christians receive baptism to suffer; thy duty is better than
thy joy. —

«“¢ And you, Mauguerou, be gentle to your wife, and allow her
to weep sometimes.’

“* Mauguerou, in silence, laid his hand on his heart, and bowed
himself.

“ < Tt is well,’ said the dying man. ‘Now, Yvonne, will you do
what I have asked of you? Will you be this man’s wife, after I am
dead ?’

“The young girl did not answer; she had fallen on her knees
by the bed, sobbing, and in agony, she cried, ‘My father, my
father!’ But her tears prevented her from saying more, and she
shrunk instinctively from the promise.

«“ ¢ Promise to obey your father, who is dying,’ said a voice
behind her, full of lofty despair. Yvonne turned round; her eyes
met Etienne’s; it was a farewell to happiness for both. Yvonne
gave the promise, and her father died.

“ A month afterwards she had married Mauguerou. ‘The day
after the marriage, Etienne, who had been away for a week, came
into the farm house. He went up to Mauguerou, who was sitting
by the fire, took off his hat, and said, with a faint voice, —

“ “Master, I am going away: yesterday, I became the king’s
soldier.’

_ © Mauguerou looked at him with surprise.

BRITTANY. 263

«“ «Why are you leaving us ?’ he asked.

“ ¢ My heart is sick ; I must go elsewhere.’

* ¢ You could have found a cure here among us.’

** The young man shook his head, without answering.

“¢ Listen to me, Etienne,’ said Mauguerou, with simplicity ;
‘remain here; every body wishes you well; you have your stool
by the fire and your porringer in the dish-rack ; your going will
make a void among us.’

“ ¢Tt is better so, master —let me go. There are bad spirits
. round me in this house. I will come back when I have forgotten
what is gone, when—when you have children.’*

“ Mauguerou made a sign of distressed consent ; Etienne twisted
his hat for a moment in embarrassment, and there was a pause.

* ¢Good bye, Mauguerou,’ he said, at last, with a choked
voice.

** The peasant seized his hand with both his own, and pressed it
for some minutes without saying anything ; then he called out—

«© ¢ Yvonne, Etienne is going ; come and speak to him !’ And he
left the house.

** After a long and bitter farewell, the two lovers separated, and
Etienne joined his regiment.” —Souvestre, pp. 442—450.

Jean Mauguerou is a true Breton peasant; a reserved,
silent, not unobservant, not unintelligent man; though
“‘ progress” has no charms for him: if you are a stranger and
an Englishman —a Saxon—he will bear you no particular
love, but he will probably treat you with a kind of just
courtesy, and be a man of his word; his curiosity, or his local
interest, may even make him talkative, and, if you can make
out his French, he may startle you with some naive disclosure
of Chouan feeling, or popular superstition. Nor does he
want for shrewdness, though he lives so much out of the
world; in some districts especially, for every parish almost
has its own character, he is a match for most opponents.
The people of Roscoff, the green-grocers of the province, who
travel riding and singing in their light carts almost to the

* “T’adultére est extrément rare chez les paysans de la basse Bretagne ; le
titre de mére est une sauvegarde pour une femme, et éloigne d’elle to ite idée
de séduction. C'est avant le mariage seulement, que les lois de la chasteté sont
violées.” — Souvestre, p. 449.

8 4

264 BRITTANY.

gates of Paris, are dangerous traders: a purchaser must take
care how he deals with them. Souvestre describes almost
feelingly their skill in handling a customer; their bullying,
or their caressing, according to circumstances; “ how, if he
finds you firm, he will call you son cher pauvre Chrétien, and
lavish on you the most endearing expressions of the Breton
vocabulary, till he has insinuated his merchandise into your
basket, and concluded his bargain before you have offered a
price.” But this is an exception; the grand resource of the
Breton in making a bargain, is resolute ignorance of any
language but his own. .

“ The natural enemies of the Breton farmers are the cunning,
subtile, Norman horse-dealers, who have long ‘worked’ the
province to great advantage. ‘The Bretons know this, and are in
a state of perpetual distrust of the horse-dealers, which increases
their natural taciturnity. They often sham drunkenness, to
make the horse-dealers think that it will be easy to surprise them ;
but generally, they entrench themselves in an apparent stupidity,
of which nothing can express the grotesque truth. On that day
not a single peasant knows French; and the inexperienced pur-
chaser lets fall expressions which guide the seller in his bargaining:
but the older dealers are up to the farce, and retort by affecting an
entire ignorance of the Celtic language. Then it is a scene worth
looking at, this struggle between Breton and Norman trickery ; the
peasant, hstening immovably, with a stupid attention, to the
horse-dealer’s remarks, who, with an air of indifference, looks at the
horse as if he cared not a straw about it, remarks fifty faults, loud
enough for the seller to hear, and ends by proposing half the real
value ;—the result of this ‘fowrberie laborieuse’ naturally being
that, if the bargainers are equally matched, the fair price is hit
upon.” — Souvestre, p. 395.

But bargain-making of any kind is not the line of the
Breton; his defensive position shows that he is not at home
in it. He adheres to the old notion of riches; he makes
money, if he can, but by close parsimony, not by speculation;
he hoards, but does not invest. The mere process of buying
and selling has no attractions for him; his enjoyments are of
a different kind. The nation is still too poetical for the joys
of business.

{
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BRITTANY. 265

As in many other things, so in this, Brittany is a specimen
of the old world: it is still in its poetical phase; it has
scarcely yet reached to prose; all is rhythm, all is traditional,
everything is chanted or sung. ‘‘ When the cholera was in
the province,” says Souvestre, “it was in vain that the pré-
fet and the doctors sent forth proclamations, directions,
warnings; no peasant would look at them, for they were
mere official prose. The only way was to make a chanson
sur le choléra, and set it to a national air; and then the
beggars were soon chanting in all parts of the country,
‘¢‘what Christians were to do to escape the cholera.” Poetry
is there in its earliest state, before it has become a literature,
or a luxury, or the voice of individual feeling or genius; the
natural, free, careless outpouring of feeling in rude and
warm-hearted masses. Poetry is with them not an inspira-
tion, but a habit of mind, a sense or faculty; a natural part
of a character impressible and thoughtful, intent on few
objects, and those absorbing ones. Without any great
events, or great names, their poetry floats and circulates
from village to village, from generation to generation, homely,
and real, and touching; perpetually oozing out, fresh and
exuberant, from the undistinguished crowd — hymns, and
ballads, and elegies, and Theocritean idyls, and love laments,
and satires, and tragedies; quaint combinations, in every
conceivable degree, of clumsiness and delicacy, the genuine
work of the people; of village tailors and schoolmasters,
strolling beggars, and young seminarists. The individual
author may put his name, but it is forgotten; his work is
known only by its subject; it is passed from mouth to mouth,
altered and interpolated at will, to make it a more perfect
expression of the feeling which it embodies. After a time it
may be printed; but its home isin the voices and memories
of the peasants. The blind beggar goes from pardon to
pardon, like the old pawwdos, and stands by the church
reciting his poem on the birth of Jesus Christ, which it takes
him a whole day to get through. And as it is living poetry,

it has its music, and is sung; and poems and airs alike are;
endless.

266 BRITTANY.

The character of these ‘songs of the people”—the genuine
expression of feelings, which elsewhere the sympathy of art
prides itself on copying — is well given in the following, the
“famous complaint of the labourer.” Even diluted through
French prose into English, it calls up some notion of what
the original must be, when it is heard in its own rude force,
and monotonous rhythm, in the smoky cottages, or on the
half-cultivated “landes” of Brittany.

“THE COMPLAINT OF THE LABOURER.
> .

“ My daughter, when the silver ring is put on thy finger
beware who gives it thee:

“« My daughter, when thou makest room for two in thy cottage-
bed, see that thou hast a soft pillow.

“ My daughter, when thou choosest a husband, take not a soldier,
for his life is the King’s: take not a sailor, for his life is the sea’s;
but, before all, take not a labourer, for his life belongs to toil and
misfortune.

“The labourer rises before the little birds are awake in the
woods, and he toils until evening. He fights with the earth
without peace or respite, till his limbs are stiff, and he leaves drops
of sweat on every blade of grass.

“ Rain or snow, hail or sunshine, the little birds are happy, for
the good God gives a leaf to each of them for shelter; but the
labourer, he has no hiding-place: his bare head is his roof-tree;
his flesh is his home.

“« Every year he must pay his rent to the landlord ; and if he is
behind, the master sends his bailiff. Rent!—the labourer shows
his fields parched up, and his mangersempty. Rent! Rent !—the
labourer shows his children’s coffins at the door, covered with the
white cloth. Rent! Rent! Rent!—the labourer bows his head,
and they lead him to prison.

“ Very miserable, too, is it to be the labourer’s wife: all night
long the children cry, and she rocks them ; all day, at her husband’s
side, she is turning the ground: she has no time to comfort herself
—no time to pray, to soothe her heart. Her body is like the wheel
of the parish mill; ever must it be going, to grind for her little
ones. ;

“ And when her sons are grown great, and their arms are grown
strong to relieve their parents, then the king says to the labourer

BRITTANY. 267

and his wife:—‘ You are old, and too weak to train up your
children ; see how strong they are, I will take them from you for
my war.’

«“ And the labourer and his wife begin afresh to sweat and to
suffer, for they are once more alone. ‘The labourer and his wife
are like the swallows which build their nest under the windows
in the town; every day they are swept away, every day they must
begin again.

“© labourers! ye lead a sore life in the world. Ye are poor,
and ye make others rich ;—despised, and ye pay honour ;— per-
secuted, and ye submit yourselves ; ye are cold, and ye are hungry.
O labourers! ye endure much in this life; labourers, ye are,
blessed.

“God hath said, that the great gates of His Paradise shall
be open for those who have wept upon earth. When ye shall
come to heaven, the saints will know you for their brethren by
your wounds.

“The Saints will say—‘brothers, it is not good to live;
brothers, life is sorrowful, and it is a happy thing to be dead ;’
and they will receive you into glory, and into joy.”— Souvestre,
p. 450.

But the Paris newspaper is on its way, and doubtless this
natural poetry is gradually failing, hemmed in by French
prose. The marriage negotiations, which used to be a trial
of extempore poetical talent between the young lady’s friends
and the village tailor who was the mediator, are now
generally carried on in set couplets ;— even the dbazvalan, the
humpbacked, squinting tailor, with his one stocking white,
and the other blue, is become a formula. And other things
in time will follow him. But they are not gone yet. The
story, and song, and tragedy are still the great delight of the
Breton peasantry, which they enjoy with the utmost gravity
and seriousness, as they enjoy their not less solemn dances,
or wrestling matches, and, at fitting times, the pleasure of

getting drunk.

Nothing brings out the mingled clumsiness and feeling of
the Breton character, its originality of idea and want of
resources, so much as their tragedies. The Breton tragedy
is a remarkable thing in its way; a serious and important

268 BRITTANY.

affair, both in the eyes of actors and spectators, by no means
to be confounded with what, at first sight, it most resembles,
the trumpery of an English fair, or the exhibition of strolling
players; nay, not even with the refined and magnificent
opera. ‘There is a rude quaint dignity and self-respect about
it: it is not a money-making show, presented by paid and
professional actors, but an entertainment given to equals by
their equals, who find an ample recompense in the pleasure
of their own acting, and the attention of their audience.
The tragedy itself has lofty pretensions, and professes a
higher mission than merely to dmuse. Supremely despising
all effect, all artificial arrangement, or strokes of passion, it
marshals, with solemn clumsy exactness, the instructive
moralities of some notable life before the audience, “ in
chapters, rather than scenes.” It begins with unaffected
gravity, in the most Holy Name; then comes the Prologue,
giving good advice, and the key of the drama, to the
** Christian and honourable” assembly which has collected to
hear it, while at every four verses the actor who is reciting,
makes the circuit of the theatre, followed by all the company,
during which “march,” say the stage directions, “the
rebecks and bagpipes must sound:” and then, in perfect
keeping with this grotesque beginning, follows the intermin-
able length of the play itself, divided into a number of
‘* journées,” and often actually extending over more than one
day. But however long it may be, it never tires out the
grave patience of a Breton audience.

The external appliances and machinery of the theatre show
the same high-minded contempt for scenic illusion. Tragedy
in Brittany still preserves, in its theatre, its antique simplicity.
While it has elsewhere retired under cover, strutting by gas-
light before the rich in a gorgeous playhouse, or ranting in a
barn before the poor by dim rush-light illumination, it here
comes forward under the open sky, and its stage is still
mounted upon waggons. Mr. Trollope thus describes what
he saw of the Tragedy of St. Helena.

“The ground, though all covered with turf, was considerably
broken and uneven, so as to afford peculiar facilities to a large

a

BRITTANY. 269

concourse of people, all anxious to have a perfect view of the same
object. On the highest point of the ground, with its back against
the gable end of a house adjoining the common, was the stage.
Nine large carts had been arranged in close order, in three rows of
three each, and on these a rude scaffolding of planks was supported.
At the back of this were hung, on a rope sustained by poles, on
either side, several sheets, so as to partition off a portion at the back
of the stage, to serve as a green-room for the performers to retire
to. This white back ground was ornamented with a few boughs of
laurel, and bunches of wild flowers, and, somewhat less appropri-
ately, perhaps, with two or three coloured prints, from the cottages
of the neighbours, of Bonaparte and the Virgin.

“ Of the performers —though it was now past two o’clock, despite
the promised punctuality of our friend, the tailor —there was yet
no appearance. The crowd, however, seemed to be waiting with
great patience, and every body appeared to be in high good
humour. All were busily engaged in securing the most advanta-
geous places. One long row, chiefly composed of women, occupied
the top of the churchyard wall—a most desirable position, inas-
much as, though seated at their ease, they were sufficiently raised
to see over the heads of those who stood at the bottom of the wall.
Some preferred seats on a bank which commanded a perfect view
of the stage, but which must have have been rather too far to hear
well, to a nearer place, were it would have been necessary to stand-
The greater part of the men stood in the immediate front of the
scaffolding, gazing on the unoccupied stage, and waiting with
imperturbable patience the appearance of the performers.

“ At length, the shrill tones of the national instrument —the
bag-pipe—were heard approaching from a lane, which opened upon
the common, and all eyes were immediately turned in that direction.
We were, probably, the only persons on the ground, who were not
aware that this betokened the arrival of the players. But we were
not long left in our ignorance. For presently the bag-piper him-
self, followed by men bearing the banners belonging to the church,
made their appearance upon the common. Behind these, in grave
and solemn procession, and full theatrical costume, came the trage-
dians. The crowd immediately formed a lane for them to pass, and
thus, with great dignity and decorum, they reached the scaffolding,
and, one after another, mounted by a ladder to the stage. When
they were all up, they marched thrice round the boards in the same
order as before, with the bagpipe still playing at their head; then

270 BRITTANY.

gravely bowed to the audience, who lifted their hats in return, and
retired behind the sheets, to their green-room.

“The appearance of the corps dramatique was more prepos-
terously absurd and strange than can well be conceived by those
who have not seen them with the accompanying circumstances of
air, manner, and expression, and all the surrounding objects,
which gave such novelty and striking character to the scene.

“There was the pope with his triple crown, very ingeniously
constructed of coloured paper, a black petticoat for a cassock, a
shirt for a surplice, and a splendid cope, made of paper-hangings,
and with the twofold cross in his hand. There were two kings
with paper crowns, adorned with little waxen figures of saints,
and arrayed in printed cotton robes, carrying in one hand a sword
and in the other a cross. Three or four wore the uniform of the
national guard, and the remainder made any additions they could
to their usual costume, which they thought would most contribute
to the general effect. ‘The female characters were all sustained
by men, dressed as much like the usual costume of ladies as their
knowledge and resources would permit. A very fine young man,
six feet high by two and a half at least broad, was selected to
personate St. Helen, who was dressed entirely in white, with a
large table-cloth for a veil.

“There was one exception only to the general air of deep
gravity and perfect seriousness which prevailed throughout. This
was a buffoon, who was dressed in shreds, with a cap and bells,
and a long pigtail, with a huge horn in his hand, which he blew
from time to time. His part was to fill up the time between the
acts with buffoonery and jests. He was regarded by the crowd as
he walked in the procession, making faces and affecting to
ridicule the tragedians, with a passing smile; but, for the most
part, they were as grave as the performers.

“ The performance commenced by a single actor coming from
behind the curtain of sheets, and making a very long speech. It
was in rhyme, and was delivered in a very distinct manner, with
much, but very unvaried action, and an extremely loud voice, that
strongly marked the rhythm and cadences of the verse. He began
at one corner of the front of the stage, and spoke a certain number
of lines, then moved to the middle and repeated a similar quantity,
did the same at the other corner, and then returned to his original
position, and soon. In this manner, he must have delivered, I
should think, nearly two hundred verses.

‘ ut

- ~%
ph:
ee.

BRITTANY. 271

“ He then retired, and out came the buffoon. His fun con-
sisted, of course, chiefly in absurd attitudes, in blowing his horn,
in ribaldry, and sundry standing jests, which succeeded in pro-
ducing shouts of laughter. The most successful joke of all, which
was repeated every time he came upon the stage, consisted in his
assuming an air of the greatest terror, and effecting his escape
in the most precipitate manner, when the graver actors returned
upon the scene.

“The same remarks will apply to the delivery of all the other
actors as to that of the first. They generally continued walking
up and down the stage while speaking, and marched round it
in procession at the conclusion of every scene.”

And yet this scene, with all its ineffable grotesqueness,
—spiritless, childish, wearisome, — of all coarse and helpless
attempts after the sublime, the most ludicrous,— is not
vulgar; you cannot despise it, while you laugh at it. In
spite of the matchless clumsiness of the whole proceeding,
there is a seriousness about it, a composure, a genuine appre-
ciation of the high and great; and its glaring freedom from
all efforts after effect, the simple undisguised monotony of the
whole scene, raises it out of the class of ordinary stage shows.
It aims in earnest at reviving the past,—the heroic, or the
saintly, the strange changes of character, the visible pro-
vidences, that were then. The popular interest is still set
high, and that, of its own accord; for these tragedies come
- from the people,—their authors are scarcely known. The
exhibition is not that of a low-minded or low-bred people ;
even about the manner of giving it there is a dignity and
mutual self-respect, an édzvéepsdrys, a sort of gentleman-
liness ; actors and spectators meet as equals; the spectators
come, not to pay hirelings to amuse them, but to assist at an
entertainment given by their fellows and friends. All goes
on as between equals, — equals of high breeding, — with so-
lemn etiquette, and all the ceremoniousness of old-fashioned
aristocratic courtesy.

Indeed this self-respect is one of the most striking cha-
racteristics of the Breton peasant. The eldest born of the
races of France, he has a strong feeling of the honours of

272 BRITTANY.

years and ancient blood: he is the old nobdlesse among the
French péasantry. There was no prouder noble in the
French peerage than the Breton Rohan —‘ Roi je ne suis,
prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis,”—but before the proudest of
the Rohans his own tenants would have drawn themselves up,
and said in their solemn manner, * Me zo deuzar Armorig—I
too am a Breton.”* Yet with them the pride of the Celt is
deeply hidden ; it does not show itself in any thing petty, —
in any small peevishness, or uneasy watchfulness after small
slichts. It is dignified, almost unconscious, — it pervades the
man; and, when it appears, it explodes. Their blood is as
good as the gentleman’s, and so is their faith; and while the
gentleman is just, the peasant is content with his lower place
in the world: but the gentleman must not interfere with what
God has appointed, or with what the peasant thinks his due.
No one can, on occasion, hate the gentleman with deeper,
bloodier hatred, than the old-fashioned royalist peasant. He
is at once aristocratic and republican; too proud not to re-
cognise gentle blood and superiority in others; too proud,
also, to do so slavishly. He will not refuse to work for the
messieurs, but it is a traditional point of honour with him
that the “labour of the gentleman” should not display an
excess of zeal. t Nor will he defile himself with the low toil
and base gains of the artizan. His thoughts and his works
are about that where man’s art stops short, and the mys-
terious unseen Hand only works, without labour or stint ;
with the old, sacred, benignant earth, which rewards, but
does not traffic ;— with his own peculiar plot of ground, and
the masterless sea; the pasture and the corn field, and the
sea-weed on the beach. Careless about the works of his
own hands, and rugged in his skill, he rejoices in the gifts
which come perfect and immediate from God, and by which
his life is nourished. He ploughs, he reaps, he threshes the
grain, in the spirit and gladness of patriarchal faith; as it is
his labour, so is it his chief joy in life.

* Michelet. t Souvestre, p. 459.

BRITTANY. 273

The Breton threshing-floor is well described by Souvestre.
The sound of the flail is one of the most familiar summer
sounds in Brittany. Every one who has travelled there will
remember it—borne from a distance on the wind, as his road
passed the opening of some valley —and the lines of dancing,
bounding figures, among the corn.

« When the sheaves were carefully spread out on the floor, the
old peasant who had led the reapers, took his place, and made the
sign of the cross, by striking with his flail several times ; this was,
as it were, the taking possession of the floor. ‘The other labourers
then ranged themselves in a circle. The flails first rose slowly,
and without order, whirling round, and poising themselves like
waltzers ready to start and getting into the step,—then, on a sudden,
at a shout of the leader, they fell all together, and rose again and
descended in cadence. ‘The stroke, at first light and moderate,
soon took a more lively movement: it fell heavier, it grew ani-
mated, then hurried and furious. The reapers, carried away by
a sort of nervous intoxication, danced up and down among the
resounding sheaves, on which their blows fell fast and thick as a
summer hail-storm. The dust of the chaff raised by the flail rose
round them in light eddying clouds, and a line of sweat marked
each muscle beneath their tight-fitting dress. At intervals they
seemed to yield to this toil, and the regular beat became weaker
by degrees, as if it was lost in the distance; but then, the leader
gave a peculiar cry, a mixture of encouragement, rebuke, and
command, and, in a moment, thirty shouts responded and, the
‘sound of the threshing became louder and louder, like an ap-
proaching peal of thunder,—it rallied, it spread, more rapid, more
wild, more furious.” — Souvestre, p. 463.

Out of this wild country, and its stern, poetical-minded
people, French enterprise is trying to make something more
adapted to the standard of Paris and Napoléonesque ideas.
French enterprise is not the most promising engine to produce
great changes in commerce and industry. It talks very
cleverly, but it talks too much; it wants the spirit of plod-
ding, it wants capital. But it is at work. A manufactory
of steam engines was set up at Landerneau*, great trouble

* Souvestre, p. 485.
i

274 BRITTANY.

was taken, great patience shown by the engineer; the Breton
peasants were drilled out of their clumsiness and poetry, and
Jearnt to believe that the steam engine was a machine, and
that they could make one. But capital failed. We have
before alluded to the attempts to introduce a more modern
style of farming,—an up-hill work, in which the disinterest-

edness of the improvers is suspected, and every failure is —

looked upon by the peasantry as a judgment against them.
Interference with the earth, their ancient ally and friend, is
peculiarly repugnant to Breton feeling, and deemed almost
profane. ¥

The following passage will show in what spirit the im-
provements of the French farmer are met. It is a dialogue
between an old Breton peasant, the patriarch of the neigh-
bourhood, and an “improving” French gentleman-farmer,
who had reclaimed a large tract from the sea, by shutting it
out with a dyke. The dyke did not please his old-fashioned
neighbour. A report got about of a compact with evil
spirits, and it was called le Mole du Diable. The farmer, for
his own protection, and to prevent its being injured by them,
had all the new works “ baptized” by the parish priest —
the dyke, and the drained land, and his own new house. To
the surprise of the peasants, the improvements stood the holy
water without moving; but the people were not a bit the
more reconciled to them.

«<¢ You were one of those,’ (he says to the old peasant,) ‘who
maintained that I should never succeed in enclosing the bay.’

“<Tt is true, sir,

“<< Bh bien, pere, you see that you are out. The sea herself has
furnished me with rocks and sand to wage war with her; and
she has produced a child stronger than herself; and now the dyke
laughs at her.’

*«« Men say that it is a sin for children to make a mock at their
parents, answered Carfor.

“* However, you see I have done what I said.’

“The old man shrugged his shoulders, as if to express his

doubts ; he was silent for a moment; then stretching out his hand

to the shoulder of the farmer, with a gesture at once respectful
and familiar,—

te (idles

BRITTANY. 275

“You are strong, Sir, he said; ‘but le bon Dieu is stronger
than you ; le bon Dieu had said to the sea to go as far as there ;’
and he pointed to the hillocks. ‘Some day he will find out that
the sea is no longer obeying him, and then your dyke will have to
give way to the will of God.’

“< And how do you know, father, whether le bon Dieu has not
himself given me this bay?’

“The peasant shook his head.

“©< Monsieur le bon Dieu ne vend pas son bien,’ said he gravely ;
‘this is land stolen from the sea, and stolen goods bring no luck.’”

— The farmer is a little nettled; and talks of the money he
has put into circulation, and the various benefits to the
neighbourhood which would result from his improvements ;
““ mais ces hommes ne comprennent rien.”

“<« We understand,’ answered Carfor, ‘that when the rocks begin
to move, the grains of sand are crushed. Rich men like you are
always awkward neighbours for the small folk. The country was
made for the country-folk, and towns for the gentlefolk; and if
these come into the country, there will soon be no place for us.
Before, when this bay belonged to the sea, the sea lent it to us for
eight hours in the day; we could bring our carts over it, to go to
the beach to pile up our sea-weed. Down in the corner there, was
some coarse grass, on which our sheep browsed; now you have
made a ditch all round it, and said to the sea, and to us, who were
its kinsmen and friends, You shall not come here any more, this

belongs tome. And you wonder that we are not satisfied. We

poor people do not like these changes, because there is never a
change without taking from us a bit of our little place under the
sun, If we used to like better to see the water there than the corn,
it is because the sea was always a better neighbour than the
bourgeois.’ ” — Souvestre, p. 435.

The old quarrel, so hard to adjust, but so certain in its
issue, between the improver, and the poor man of his day: to
whom it is small comfort to be told; what is perfectly true,
that returns will come ¢o some one, and to him, if he can but
wait. ‘The story goes on to relate, that the sea did prove
stronger than Monsieur, and in the course of an equinoctial
night washed away his dyke, and destroyed everything.
When he comes down to view his losses, there is the old

T 2

276 BRITTANY.

Breton standing on the ruined dyke, looking out on the sea,
“comme pour la complimenter de sa victoire.” The cause of
improvement had not much to hope for in the neighbourhood
after this.

But this might happen anywhere; habit, and distrust of
improvements, and suspicion of the disinterestedness of im-
provers, are not confined to Brittany. There is something
deeper at work beneath. Brittany is really not France, any
more than the outlandish names on its map, its Plouha, and
Poullaouen, and Locmariaker, and Guipava, and Lannilis, are
French. It is little more to France than a nursery for
some thousands of good soldiers and sailors, and a causeway
for the road to Brest. Opposite in character to the people,
and uncongenial in feeling, the Frenchman is not at home in
Brittany ; he feels as a stranger, and is felt as such. They
hate England there, it is true. Englishmen, besides being
strangers and enemies, are Saxon heretics ; Souvestre talks of
the little village girls dancing with triumphant glee over the
unconsecrated graves of a shipwrecked “* Saxon ” crew : — but
they have not forgotten that they once had wars with France.
When the Duke de Nemours visited them, two years ago, the
names of Breton victories over the French were not forgotten,
on the triumphal arches under which he passed. Brittany
hangs on to France, because it cannot well do otherwise ; but
like a mass of extraneous matter, which will not assimilate,
dead and heavy and unsympathising. As a part of France,
she is not doing her work. A national character that ought
to tell on the whole country, resolute, steady, serious, and
though slow, apprehensive, —full of quiet deep fortitude,—
seems thrown away. The field of European civilisation is not,
of course, the only or the highest field for these qualities; but
if the advance of human society is to be considered as a pro-
vidential dispensation, it is one field; and they are missed,
they have not found their place, when they are not there.
Brittany is like a nation which has failed in its object, and
been beaten. While her neighbours are in the heyday of suc-
cess, hopeful and busy, she keeps apart, contented with her
own isolation, stagnant, almost in decay; and looks on with

BRITTANY. 277

melancholy listlessness amid the stirring of the world. Her
time may be yet to come. But now, with so much that is
striking in individual character, amid genuine and deeply-felt
influences of the Church, she languishes as a country, aimless,
without any part to play; a study for the summer tourist,—
a curious contrast to that he has left behind. Yet she may
remind him also, if he be wise, of times, when the present, if it
had as much of man’s heart, had less of his feelings and his
reason ; a witness, like those times, of that perplexing truth,
the seeming vanity to each individual man of the wonderful
and magnificent order of things in which he lives—of the
very short and passing interest he appears to have per-
sonally, in that which, for society, and as a system, has
such high-wrought perfection and value.

278 AUDIN’S LEO X.

AUDIN’S LEO X.*

[ OcToBER, 1846. ]

M. D’AusieneE’s History of the Reformation is a_ bold
attempt to revive in all their strength the feelings of that
time, and to represent Luther and Zwingle not merely as
great men and reformers, but as little short of Apostles. M.
D’Aubigné writes with much liveliness and spirit, with much
minuteness of detail, and profusion of citation; every page
overflows with sympathy, with admiration, with triamph—
and as the subjects of his panegyric were equally strong in
their praise and their abuse, he aims at copying them in rough
sweeping expressions of abhorrence and vituperation. He
identifies himself most successfully with their ideas and
measures: nothing comes amiss; nothing, however, appa-
rently awkward, finds him embarrassed -. we can hardly
say for excuses, for that would be to degrade his heroes, but,
—for ingenious laudation. He pushes on without shrinking
or misgiving, with an enthusiasm which nothing can put out
of countenance, with an admiration which no continued
exercise can fatigue, with a confidence which nothing can
shame. Ilis pages are no bad picture of the progress of the
movement; they roll on, crowded with the Reformers’ own
words, boisterous, abrupt, scornful, self-complacent—secure
of convincing, unconscious of fallibility, and incapable of
doubt. One broad maxim governs the whole: that it is im-
possible to say anything too bad against Rome, or too good
about Luther. And by the help of this, with a generous
imagination, and a skilful use of grotesque old quotations,

* Histoire de Léon X. Par M. Auvtn, Chevalier de [ Ordre de Saint-Grégoire
le Grand, Membre de Académie et du Cercle Littéraire de Lyon, Président de
lV’ Institut Catholique de la méme Ville, Membre de l Académie_Tibérine, et l Aca-
démie de la Religion Catholique de Rome. Paris: I, Maison. 1844,

“AUDIN’S LEO X. 279

M. D’Aubigné has eased his heart of much spite against the
Pope, and has accomplished a popular history, very graphic
and dramatic, according to the use of the day.

We have before us, in M. Audin’s Leo X., the appropriate
pendant to M. D’Aubigné’s Reformation. In many respects, of
course, a great contrast, it nevertheless matches it very well,
as opposites often do. Like D’Aubigné’s book, it is a history
of the newest fashion, alive with picturesque incident, strewed
thick with characteristic quotations, for the sake rather of
their words than of their weight as evidence, animated all
through by a resolute spirit of admiration, which expresses
itself, not in the stiff formal reflections which satisfied the
stupid earnestness of old party historians, but in gushes of
warm sympathy, in brilliant strokes of dramatic effect, in
touches and bursts, which mark not only the historian, but
the littérateur, the wit, the poet, the man. But it looks at
the times from an opposite point of view. M. D’Aubigné
writes as the historian of the Reformation; M. Audin, as the
historian of the “‘ Renaissance.” Italy and the Pope, who are
the objects of M. D’Aubigné’s horror, fill M. Audin with
inexpressible enthusiasm; and as M. D’Aubigné makes an
Apostle of Luther, M. Audin makes a Saint of Leo X.

The differences of style and execution which mark these
two remarkable efforts at picturesque apology, only make
each the more suitable companion of the other. M.
D’Aubigné writes as the historian of revolution and strife,
who is in his element amidst confusion and storm. He admires
the eager restlessness, the turbulence, the insurgent and con-
quering energies of the time. He paints with warmth the
struggles and doubts of conscience, the agonised throe of
approaching liberty. He revels in the truculent jest, the
withering rebuke, the triumphant retort, the staggering inter-
rogation; he gloats over the rage of defeated Tetzels and
Ecks, the trepidations of exposed friars, and the mortification
of humbled diplomatists. Fully persuaded of the victory of his
own side, he thoroughly enjoys the conflict. He affects the
free, the impetuous, the uncouth, the wild; his style is harsh,
sententious, broken, without finish or measure. M. Audin

T 4

280 ‘AUDIN’S LEO X.

has all that the other wants of smoothness and repose. He
writes to set forth a time of “unity and faith, of light and
liberty *;” his visions are all of peace and beauty ; a gentle
insinuating softness pervades his volumes; he speaks in the
tones of wronged innocence—wronged, yet not provoked,
only plaintive. For the dark, gusty sky of Germany and
Switzerland, we have the bright gay light of the South,
making all objects look smiling and fair. All that was grim
and forbidding in the history of the Renaissance is smovthed
and softened into a lofty sternness and heroic majesty ; dark
blots and scandals dissolve and vanish in the rosy brillianey
of his poetical pages, and even the fearful name of Borgia,
the bugbear of history, expands into magnificence, and in the
lustre of great purposes and deeds loses all its horrors. But
calm scenes and peaceful souls, such as at the Renaissance he
finds in abundance, are his delight: one after another they
rise up in his smooth, flowing, glossy descriptions, touched off
with delicate fondness, graceful tenderness, or irony, playful,
but not severe. D’Aubigné’s history is tempestuous and
stirring. Audin’s, soothing, sentimental, unctuous. He
allows the intrusion of no foul crimes to shock us — nothing
but the ebullitions of some lofty but undisciplined spirit,
whose very falls give it a romantie interest. War makes its
appearance, indeed; war carried on bya Pope. But it is war
consecrated by high zeal, and without taint of worldly
ambition ; war ennobled alternately by graceful resignation in
disaster, or paternal forbearance in victory: and this is
succeeded by a time of peace and unrivalled splendour. We
see a court at once the wisest and holiest, and the most brilliant
in Europe; where austere self-denial and the keenest wit go
hand in hand—where Pagan art and literature lend all their
grace, and are purified from all their evil—where hearty
affection, sportive gaiety, and tender charity shine forth amid
the marvels of reviving art, and the charms of poetry; a time
of easy and yet guarded innocence, enjoying in thankfulness
and security its rich and magnificent home, till the rebel
monk arose to disturb its peace, with his turbulence and

* Vol. i. p. xviii.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 281

eraft and ingratitude, his vulgar jests and brutal slanders.
Such is M. Audin’s picture of the Rome of Leo X.; a very
fairy-land of Ultra-montanism has he conjured up, in his
ardent enthusiasm, out of the records of the sixteenth
century.

M. Audin is a disciple of De Maistre, and his book is a
bold attempt to recover for his master’s views a field of
history, where hitherto they have found more than ordinary
embarrassment ; to gain back to the interest and sympathy of
his own side a time, when the Roman court and hierarchy
have been supposed very generally to have forgotten, for a
while, their mission. This has of course ever been a chosen
subject for Protestant criticism and vituperation ; Catholics
also, says M. Audin, have been carried away by fatal pre-
judices, and they have left it to the suspicious admiration
of a learned but liberal Protestant to write the most popular
eulogy of a great Pope.

“Leo X. has been unfortunate ; he has not escaped the praises
any more than the calumnies of the Reformation: and praise, in
the form in which it is given, would wrong the memory of the
Pope more than insult itself. Protestantism makes of him an
accomplished man of letters, a brilliant poet, a mere literary cha-
racter of the Renaissance, entirely taken up, on the throne of St.
Peter, with the vanities of this world: what is more sad, it has
imposed upon Catholic opinion, which acquiesces in a judgment
dictated by passion. We fully accept the praises which Protestant
writers have, for their own ends, awarded to Leo X.; but we
claim for him a glory more lasting than that one, which finds here
below its reward in the admiration and applause of men: and
this glory, which God only can give, we shall have to restore to
him, when we see him, in the course of a life so short and so
pregnant, practising all the Gospel precepts, which he had studied,
as a child, at Florence—preserving in exile that purity which,
according to the expression of a contemporary writer, defied sus-
picion itself ; living in the midst of the Roman literati, after the
manner of the primitive Christians, —fasting, praying, rude to
himself—practising abstinence three times a-week—scattering
round him abundant alms—and when God calls him to be head
of the Church, giving to the world the spectacle of the most
eminent Christian virtues.” — Audin, i. xiv. xv.

282 AUDIN’S LEO xX.

No one, of course, can wonder at M. Audin’s taking a new
view of his subject, and a very different one from Roscoe,
Sismondi, or Ranke; he has every right to do so. Every
great principle gives a new grouping and effect, a new light
and shade, to the facts of history. M. Audin is an Ultra-
montane, and the others are not. And considering how
Protestant writers have often treated this period, and the
absurd and incredible picture which they have drawn of it —
their blundering spite, their voracious credulity, their shallow-
ness, and meanness of principle—the marvellous way in which
they have taken for facts, the mythical exaggerations with
which Luther eased his soul, and solemnly believed that they
were describing a true state of things, when they painted the
Church of the day as having absolutely lost all Christianity,
we cannot quarrel with M. Audin for coming forward to
vindicate this age of the Church from the attacks of such
mingled stupidity and ill-nature. It is quite true that
Christianity was not forgotten; that goodness and faith
were not extinct; and that such an extremely improbable
supposition as that the Church was teaching nothing but

falsehood, and doing no good in the world, is by no means.

borne out by the facts of the case.

We are now in the days of fairness and candour. All are
ready to make admissions and give up prejudices. The papacy
of Leo’s age must have had a good side: and a fair statement
of its true position claims, and probably would receive, atten-
tion. Nor could any one complain, if M. Audin took full
advantage of the absurdities of antagonist historians. If he
chose to be witty, or ironical, or indignant, it cannot, we
think, be denied that they are fair game, and that his victory
would not be a hard one. And even that luscious profusion
of sentiment with which he envelopes his subject, his bursts of
feeling, and his peremptory apophthegms, the dramatic turns
and highly imaginative colouring in which he delights, must
be judged of by French and not English rules of criticism,
and much must be allowed to an ardent writer, anxious to
convey vividly his impressions of a great history, and of strik-
ing and varied character.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 283

But after all allowances made, M. Audin’s book is a very
strong case of historical daring—one, we think, which few
but a Frenchman would have thought of, or ventured on.
That the scandals of the Church of Leo’s time were much
exaggerated by the Reformers is credible. ‘That ecclesiastical
feelings and traditions were not extinct among the clergy,
that the ordinary long-used methods of the Church to reform
abuses, and maintain her discipline, were not utterly for-
gotten—that there were in Italy, often high in station, noble
examples of a pure and devoted life, is also highly probable.
In the worst days, God’s providence has been more merciful
to His Church than reformers could admit, or than history
has recorded. But M. Audin wishes us to believe that the
time of the Renaissance was one of the brightest eras of
Church history, till darkened by the rise of the Reformation.
He wishes us to believe that the Papacy was still witnessing
to Europe for the cause of truth and goodness, and guiding
with zeal and deep wisdom the interests of Christendom ; that
besides some exceptional cases of partial scandal, there was
nothing wrong or out of order in the government of the
Church ; that there never was a time of deeper and stronger
faith, never a time when the rulers of the Church were
more alive to their duties, or were more earnest in discharging
them. .

M. Audin forgets that, as we said, we live in days of

~ ceandour—unless across the Channel it is not necessary to

remember it. Here certainly it has been a favourite and
very effective topic of controversy, that attachment to
principles could not change facts. People have been told with
much truth, and with great force, that a bad ease, or a bad
story, will not bear patching. The charge of bolstering up the
Reformation has been a well-chosen subject for keen irony
and triumphant scorn, and more than one waverer has been
decided in his course by the fear of being committed to such
plausibilities. We have been drilled into a state of sensitive
and rigorous candour: it is a nervous thing to attack any
one, except one’s own friends; and we are never so comfort-
able as when making admissions against our own side. The

284 AUDIN’S LEO X.

Roman communion has reaped the full benefit of this feeling.
But they must not claim opposite advantages at once: they
must not shame us into frankness, and enjoy nothing but
theory and sentiment themselves. A Roman Catholic is not
obliged to write history, when it seems to go against him;
but if he chooses to do so, he must remember that if history
will not bend for Protestantism or Anglicanism, neither will
it for Ultra-montanism. M. Audin thinks that he has de-
stroyed the prestige that hung about Luther: he has done
so, as one of his critics expresses it, by prying about with
keen and curious eye behind the scenes —“ particuliérement
dans les coulisses.” When he turned his hand to the work
of ** réhabilitation,” he should have remembered his former
employment. Heshould have remembered that Time, “ that
fearless historian,” as he calls him, is not more afraid of Popes
than of Reformers; and he should have been cautious about
engaging his feelings in a piece of wholesale whitewashing,
which equals most Protestant efforts in that way, both in
daring and in sustained self-complacency, and leaves them far
behind, clumsy productions as most of them are, in its in-
genious adaptation to the ideas of the nineteenth century.

The cause of the Papacy has hitherto been recommended,
and has hitherto found sympathy, because, as has been said,
it has always taken the strict side. M. Audin fans his en-
thusiasm, and seeks to arouse that of his reader in its favour,
by glowing pictures of the Renaissance in Italy, and by
showing how the Papacy, especially under Leo, was allied
with it.

Considering that M. Audin is a Catholic, his ecstatic ad-
miration of the revival of letters, — no other words can con-
vey an idea of his way of speaking — is somewhat startling.
That the Renaissance was a most brilliant and wonderful
period; that it was a time when the highest gifts of mind
were seen on all sides in rich profusion—that a sense of grace
and beauty was strikingly developed and cultivated—that the
Renaissance was a great step in civilisation, is quite true—as
it is true also of the time of Socrates and Aristophanes. But
a Christian and a champion of that Church, whose boast it is,

AUDIN’S LEO X. 285

never to have heeded the charge of bigotry or barbarism
when matters affecting Christian faith or Christian morals
were at stake, might well pause before he expressed such
warm and unreserved sympathy with the spirit and men of
the Renaissance.

M. Audin, however, does not feel himself under any
restrictions; and he throws himself, with the utmost zest,
into a highly-coloured and impassioned description of the
scene of Leo’s birth and education—the gay, and Platonic,
and voluptuous Florence: and we have pages of flowery
declamation about Lorenzo and his literary Greeks, his villas
and his groves, his manuscripts and his statues, his philo-
sophical walks and the Platonic vigils of his friends; about
the change produced by his mild rule on his subjects, the
extinction of family feuds, the refinement of life—no more
noise of daggers and stilettos in the streets — “ tout cela est
remplacé par des discussions philosophiques, des cantiques
aux muses, des douces causeries, des spéculations spiritualistes
a l’ombre des bois.” But we must give one or two of his
paragraphs at length, as specimens; and we will not do them
the injustice of translating them.

“C’est que jamais prince n’aima les lettres d’un amour plus
éclairé que Laurent de Médicis! Il était heureux quand le soir,
loin de Florence, et dans un de ces palais que lui avait laissés en
. Mourant Cosme, son grand-pére, il pouvait montrer & ses protégés
ces beaux manuscrits qu’un Israélite lui avait vendus au poids de
Yor! I disait quelquefois & Nicolas Leoniceno: ‘Je les aime
tant ces livres, que je vendrais jusqu’& ma garderobe de prince
pour m’en procurer.’ A Careggi, Cosme avait fait élever une
maison toute royale, distribuée en petites cellules ot Laurent
logeait ses humanistes chéris. Il y avait deux salles pour les livres,
une pour les ceuvres et les partitions musicales. On lisait sur
lune des portes de cet asile dédié aux muses cette inscription
grecque:
‘Téppa dpdv Brdroto.

Mérpov dipioroy..

“Aprés des causeries toutes philosophiques, imprégnées de poésie
platonique, ot brillait surtout Ficin, on passait dans la salle du

286 Si. | AUDIN’S LEO X.

concert, et Squarcialuppi, son chanteur de prédilection, entonnait
un hymne dont le prince avait composé les paroles, et lon se
séparait pour se réunir le lendemain au coucher du soleil. Laurent
revenait toujours avec quelque nouvelle miniature d’un moine
ignoré, quelque codex antique acheté a Venise, quelque statuette
récemment déterrée &4 Rome. Les poétes, les philosophes, les
lettrés tombaient en extase et se mettaient 4 célébrer la bonne
fortune du prince.”— Vol. i. pp. 4—6.

“Tl tardait & Laurent d’ échapper au tumulte des affaires, et
libre de soucis, et loin des gardes dont il marchait accompagné
dans les rues de Florence, de se réfugier dans le Museion dont
nous a parlé Politien. Quelques-uns de ses amis l’attendaient au
sortir de la ville: tous ensemble ils gravissaient la colline au
sommet de laquelle s’éiéve la ville de Fiesole, discourant en
chemin de lettres, d’art ou de philosophie. Ficin attendait le
prince avec impatience: on échangeait, en se revoyant, de douces
paroles d’affection, et la conversation commencait. C’est dans ces
promenades au crépuscule, que Marsile aimait 4 soulever quelques-
uns des voiles qui cachaient aux yeux profanes les mystéres de sa
doctrine favorite. Laurent prenait souvent la parole, et fuisait
admirer, dans une vive improvisation, sa connaissance du cceur
humain, ses trésors d’érudition, son culte pour le beau. La séance
finie, un repas 4 l’ombre des pins d’Italie terminait délicieusement
la soirée; puis la nuit venue, le poéte, nous parlons du prince,
écrivait ce laude, ot Yon retrouve les idécs philosophiques de
Pépoque.”— Vol. i. pp. 9, 10.

No doubt all this was very enjoyable to live in, and is very
brilliant to look back to. Lovers of art and lovers of letters
may celebrate and envy it. We can well believe that seldom
have wealth, and good taste, and inventive power, and love
of grace, and freedom of manners, and deep sensibility, and
novelty, combined so harmoniously, to supply a greater variety
of pleasures or to give them a keener edge.

But there is another side to this philosophical and literary
Court—one which must qualify the admiration of a Christian
and Churchman. ‘This rapturous admiration of Plato, these
Platonic academies, and Platonic lectures, and Platonic
réveries, were not altogether without effect on the Christian
faith of the distinguished courtiers. Not that there were

AUDIN’S LEO X. 287

any symptoms of open revolt against the doctrines of the
Church. It was not the time to think of such things. The
Court of the Medici was no place for theological controversy,
which Lorenzo’s temper and hatred of the schools would
never invite, and which his tact and good taste would dis-
courage if it appeared. But men of taste and fashion began
to talk in an unwonted and very enlightened manner about
the most serious subjects, and showed much more fear of
offending, in their speculations, against the placita of Plato
than against the Creed of the Church. Mr. Roscoe thus
states the character of the Platonic academy :—‘‘ The prin-
cipal advantages of this institution seem to have been the
collecting together men of talent and erudition, who had
courage to dissent from established modes of belief, and sup-
plying them with new, rational, and important topics of con-
versation.” * No doubt, much that has come down to us of
their sayings and doings is to be set down to the literary foppery
and affectation of these very brilliant, but not very earnest
philosophers. But their very trifling betrayed a most sus-
picious laxity of belief and feeling; and it boded nothing
good, when men, brought up as strict Catholics, and still
professing to be so, began to call one another “ Fratres
dilectissimi in Platone;” and when Lo¥enzo, the Pontiff of
these zealous converts from scholasticism, aped the festivals

of the Church, by keeping the 13th of November in honour
of Plato, after the example of Plotinus and Porphyry, and
celebrated his memory with all but religious pomp, with
*Jauds and canticles,” before his statue. M. Audin mentions
all this in quite a natural way ; he tells us with great naiveté
that Lorenzo’s philosophers made “a veritable pagan” of
him,—that the “lauds and canticles” which they chanted on
Plato’s festival contained “ des offenses fréquentes aux dogmes
Catholiques” —but he seems to find no particular harm in
this—he can pardon much to such poetical people, and to the
father of Leo X.: and though they did teach, as he says, a
“ disguised pantheism,” yet they were in no danger, — “they

* Roscoe, Lorenzo de Medici, ¢, iii.

288 AUDIN’S LEO Xx.

all thought themselves safe from even the suspicion of heresy
—tant leur fot était vive et docile.” *

In the second place, this philosophic Court was, according
to ordinary Christian ideas, a very licentious one. Refine-
ment, genius, sensibility, taste, seem to give a kind of
authority and sanction to vice—to make it more tolerable by
adorning it; and one effect of the Renaissance was, to make
clever and accomplished men feel more at their ease in pur-
suing their pleasures, because they could combine them with
literature and love of art. Lorenzo de’ Medici took the full
benefit of the revival of classical feelings. M. Audin is
aware of this, and feels called upon, “in behalf of Christian
spiritualism, to condemn the sensual instincts of this prince.”+
But the flow and gush of his admiration is surprisingly little
checked by this admission. Considering what he says of
Lorenzo in the following passage, we think that he might
have spared some of his poetical touches, and not made him
quite so interesting. The description would not be amiss in
a feuilleton, but is rather unqualified for an ecclesiastical

history.

“ Dans l’ancienne Rome il etit passé pour un épicurien, tant il
avait peu de souci du lendemain, tant il semblait négliger l’avenir ;
a Florence on disait qu’il avait deux dimes. II resta longtemps
paien, malgré le baptéme qu’il avait recu dans l’église de Santa
Reparata. Les joies turbulentes des jours du carnaval, si beau en
Toscane, le mouvement des masques qui emplissaient & cette époque
les rues de Florence, les cris des ouvriers, les danses des femmes
couronnées de fleurs excitaient sa verve, et lui inspiraient des chants
étincelants de poésie, mais dont Rome moderne a da punir la
licencieuse expression: du reste meilleur pere encore que poéte,
quand il ne s’occupait pas de lettres, son plus doux amusement
était de jouer avec ses enfants, qu'il mettait sur ses genoux, qu'il
couvrait de caresses, qu'il endormait au son de cette petite lyre dont
Squarcialuppi lui avait appris & se servir: heureux si quelqu’une
de ces beautés faciles que Savonarole poursuivait, en chaire, de
ses coléres, ne venait pas frapper & sa porte pour l’arracher a
ses préoccupations de pére, de poéte, ou de philosophe.” — Vol. i.
pp. 14, 15.

* Vol. i. p. 9. tT Vol.i. p.17.

“ic
Ses ee

AUDIN’S LEO X. 289

But M. Audin professes a discriminating and indulgent
criticism. Lorenzo’s virtues were his own; the defects which
sullied that ‘delle vie,” those of his age: and he surmises,
with philosophical good-nature, that “some of his too fre-
quent transgressions of the precepts of the gospel were owing
less aux exigences d'une nature libertine, qua la fastueuse
imitation de Vantiquité.” An opposition more important psy-
chologically than morally ; and if true, not complimentary to
the Renaissance.

The early years of Giovanni de’ Medici are dwelt upon by M.
Audin with the unsuspicious tenderness and amiable loquacity
of a friend of the family. He begins from the beginning —
the dreams which preceded his birth— when he began to
learn to ride—and how Piero de’ Medici taught Virgil to his
little brother; and he imagines that these early lectures may
have given him a taste for Rome — “ Jean se prit aussi d’une
véritable passion pour la belle Rome chantée par Virgile.” It
might be difficult to speak with certainty of these youthful
predilections: but his keen and sharp-sighted father no doubt
turned his thoughts early in that direction, with the prudent
family forethought which marked the Medici. We will give
a scene from M. Audin.

“Lorenzo, like all great men, had an insight into the future.
He had divined the wondrous instincts (/es merveilleux instincts)
of his beloved son. In the evening, after the gates of his palace
had been closed to petitioners, he would call for his favourites —
Politian, Chalcondylas, Marsilius Ficinus, Gentile, Verino the poet,
who has celebrated with more enthusiasm than talent the glory of
Florence; and, taking Giovanni on his knees, he would point out
to them that eye in perpetual movement ; that brow with its lines so
clear and pure ; those locks curling like a young girl’s; that swan-
like neck with its graceful bend; that smile so sweet and full of
mind; and he would ask them to draw the horoscope of the boy.
Politian looked at his countenance, and announced that Giovanni
would one day do honour to ancient literature. Ficinus lifted his
eyes to the horizon, and predicted an era of glory for Platonism,
whose empire the Grand-Duke’s son should extend in Italy.
Chalcondylas, in the boy’s Grecian profile, read of happy days for
his exiled countrymen ; and old Gentile of Urbino repeated, with

U

290 AUDIN’S LEO xX.

Simeon in the Scripture: ‘ Bless the Lord, O my soul.’ John will
be the honour of the sanctuary.”

“Long had it been since the science of divination had seen so
clearly into the future.

“ Lorenzo’s heart expanded with joy at these beautiful dreams,
and his hand, in token of his delight, pressed the hands of his noble
friends. He destined his child to the priesthood.” ——Awudin, vol. i.
pp. 20, 21.

M. Audin seems thoroughly to enter into the father’s
feelings for the advancement of his favourite son. “ At seven
years old, Giovanni de’ Medici received the tonsure, and the
day on which he entered into orders a courier left Florence to
demand from Louis XI. the collation of a benefice ;” a very
natural request, as M. Audin shows, and as Louis thought,
who at once named him Abbot of Font-Douce, in Saintonge,
and a month after, Archbishop of Aix; but the old Arch-
bishop turned out not to be yet dead. But Font-Douce, as
M. Audin says, “was but the first of those favours which
heaven reserved in such rich abundance for the ducal child.”
The Pope, Sixtus IV., on account of a family quarrel, had
been deeply implicated in the conspiracy of the Pazzi — that
conspiracy in which the leading agent was an Archbishop;
its scene, the cathedral of Florence; and the signal for
murder, the elevation of the host ;—he had excommunicated
Lorenzo and his friends for executing the conspirators; and
he had need now, as M. Audin mildly expresses it, “de se
faire pardonner son amitie pour les Pazzi.” The abbey of
Passignano was demanded for the young Abbot of Font-
Douce, and given by the Pope, as the price of reconciliation,
— “ était noblement se répentir,” is the biographer’s reflection.
But this was nothing to the preferment that was heaped on
the boy, when Innocent VIIL, whose illegitimate son had
married one of his sisters, became Pope. “ Every day,” says
the warm-hearted biographer, “ brought a new joy to Lo-
renzo;” and he proceeds to give at full length, as if a mere
natural subject for pride to parent and historian, the long
catalogue of benefices.

“ Every day, so to speak, brought a new joy to Lorenzo. In

AUDIN’S LEO X. 291

the space of some years, his son was successively named Canon of
the Cathedral of Florence, of Fiesole, and of Arezzo; rector of
Carmignano, of Giogoli, of San Casciano, of San Giovanni in Val
d’Arno, of San Pietro di Casale, of San Marcellino di Cacchiano ;
prior of Monte Varchi; precentor of S. Antonio, at Florence ; pro-
vost of Prato; abbot of Monte Cassino, of San Giovanni di Passig-
nano, of Sta. Maria di Morimondo, of St. Martin de Font-Douce, of
S. Salvadore di Vajano, of S. Bartolommeo d’Anghiari, of S. Lorenzo
di Coltibuono, of Sta. Maria di Monte Piano, of St. Julien de
Tours, of S. Giusto and S. Clemente at Volterra, of S. Stefano at
Bologna, of S. Michele at Arezzo, of Chiaravalle near Milan, of Pin
in Poitou, of Chaise-Dieu near Clermont —”— Audin, vol. i. p. 25.
“Jn 1510,” adds Roscoe, “he became Archbishop of Amalfi.
‘ Bone Deus, exclaims the good Fabroni; ‘ guot in uno juvene
cumulata sacerdotia !’” — Roscoe, Leo X. vol. i. note 7.

But even this was not enough to satisfy the fond father ;
one thing was still wanting. His son was now more than
twelve years old, and he was not yet a Cardinal. Innocent
VIII. was infirm, and was getting old. ‘ Lorenzo had no
time to lose; il lui fallait la pourpre, et il la demanda.”
Innocent had, it is true, promised the Conclave, when elected
Pope, that he would never create a Cardinal under thirty
years of age*; but he was of feeble mind, and Lorenzo, as M.
Audin expresses it, “had received from nature an eagle eye,
a will of iron, and a tenacity of purpose, which nothing could

conquer ;” and his letters to his agent —still preserved in the

archives of Florence— show, says Roscoe, ‘‘ such a degree
of policy and assiduity on the part of the great manas could
scarcely fail of success.” To the Pope himself he wrote with
the importunity of a benefactor and a relation, begging the
favour, “with the earnestness with which he would beg of
God the salvation of his own soul.”;+ ‘1 can assure your

* “Sub poena perjurii, et anathematis, a quibus nec me ipsum absolvam,
nec absolutionem alieni committam.”— Burchard, in Raynald. ad ann. 1484,
No. 41. Raynaldi observes that these engagements were “ad cardinalium com-
moda detorta; que cum contra fas conventa essent, in aliquibus infringendis
religione se minime teneri putavit, sicut videbimus.”

t+ “Larichieggo questa volta con I’ efficacia chel’ farei a N.S. Dio la salute
dell’ anima mia,” — Roscoe, Leo X., vol. i. App. i.

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292 AUDIN’S LEO xX.

Holiness,” he continues, as M. Audin paraphrases him, “ that
nothing could be so delightful to my heart as a father, nothing
so happy for Florence, as the hat which I beg of you for my
son; without this distinguished favour, I see not how your
Holiness could recompense my devotedness to your person,
and prove to the world that I am not undeserving of your
favour.” His desires were soon fulfilled.

“ Innocent VITI. could not long resist the prayers of Lorenzo, and
the wishes of the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, and of the Vice-Chan-
cellor of the Church, Roderic Borgia. The 9th of October, 1488,
acourier brought to the ‘Magnificent’ a note from the Cardinal of
Angers” [old Jean Balue, the ex-confident of Louis XI., and hero
of the boar-hunt scene in Quentin Durward, |* “ written in haste,
and running thus: —

“< Magnificent and dear brother, greeting. Good news for your
son, for you, for Florence: John is created Cardinal, by the title
of Sta. Maria in Dominica. I cannot express to you my joy.’

“ Never was father so happy as Lorenzo. The evening after
this good news Florence was illuminated, and the Grand Duke
spent the night in announcing the event to his numerous friends.”
— Audin, i. p. 27.

And M. Audin really expects to carry off this miserable
scandal by seeming not to be aware of it. He affects to
throw himself into the spirit of the times, —of the courts of

* The novelist has probably libelled the equestrian accomplishments of this
worthy personage, as he has certainly libelled Wolsey, by naming him in the
same breath with the most finished, and, in spite of some rough vicissitudes,
luckiest, of the scoundrels of the day. ‘Un bon diable d’évéque pour cette
heure,” said Louis of him, “mais je ne sais ce qu’il sera a l’avenir.”! Jean
Balue long did business with much success for himself and the king, till he
became too venturesome and greedy, and was caught tripping. He was bishop
of several places, gained a cardinal’s hat from Paul IL, was eleven years in a
cage at Loches, for having led the king into the scrape at Peronne, —and yet
escaped alive,—reappeared in France as Pope’s Legate, and died in much
comfort and respectability at Rome, in a good old age. Among many other
things, he was an amateur, for his own amusement, in military matters, as al-o
in old manuscripts, of which he formed a collection for his cathedral.? M. Audin
should not have omitted to tell us the name of Lorenzo’s affectionate corre-
spondent.

? Sismondi, Hist. des Frangais, xiv. 262.
? Gall. Christ, xi. 606. Biog. Univ.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 293

Rome and Florence, who certainly saw nothing wrong in
it.* He treats it as a very natural arrangement, which did
equal honour to the father’s affection, the son’s precocious
excellence, and the Pope’s discrimination. He draws an in-
teresting family picture of Lorenzo’s parental feelings; of
his overflowing gratitude to the Pope; of the never-ceasing
congratulations of the citizens, and the rapturous delight of
the Neo-platonists. He tells us at great length how Politian
wrote an elaborate letter to the Pope, to praise his pupil, and
his pupil’s family, and his pupil’s patron; and how “incon-
solable ” the “ humaniste” was to find that “so enlightened a
judge as Pope Innocent” thought his epistle affected. And
he takes occasion from this to give us an episode about the
“noble exchange of flatteries” which had recently passed
between Lorenzo’s man of letters and the Pope — dedications
of Herodian on one side—ducats and epistles of thanks on
the other; and to correct the estimate of Lorenzo’s ambassador
at Rome, who had “for a moment underrated Innocent’s
talents,” and said that he was a man “di non molto lette-
ratura”—“ Politien pense autrement.” He tells us how
Florence forgot the old quarrel with Sixtus IV., how for a
moment “elle se prend d’un amour tout lyrique pour Rome; ”

* Lorenzo had strong views on the subject of family claims. The sacred
duties incurred by Popes towards their relatives are forcibly stated in the fol-
lowing letter, in which the Grand Duke expresses his anxiety lest Innocent VIII.
should have forgotten them : —

“ Others,” he writes, “ have not so long deferred their endeavour to be popes,
and have troubled themselves little about the decorum and modesty which your
holiness has for so long a time observed. Your holiness is now not only excused
in the sight of God and man, but men may perhaps even censure this reserved
demeanour, and ascribe it to other motives. My zeal and duty render it a matter
of conscience with me to remind your holiness that no man is immortal; that a
pope is of the importance which he chooses to give himself; he cannot make his
dignity hereditary : the honours and the benefits he confers on those belonging tc
him are all that he can call his own.” }

- With respect to his discharge of these duties, Innocent’s conscience must have
been at rest ; his correspondent’s concern for him was more disinterested in ap-
pearance than in reality. Lorenzo had a son, who was brother-in-law to the son
of the pope.

' Quoted from Fabroni, by Ranke, i. 44.
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294 AUDIN’S LEO X.

how she “ felicitated the Papacy in prose and verse; ” “ how
she crowned Innocent VIII., placed him in her museums,
celebrated him in her professors’ chairs, and struck medals,
pour éterniser dans ses annales la glorieuse faveur quwelle en a
recue.”* Then he gives us touching sketches, the product
of his own warm sensibilities, of the young cardinal’s boyhood,
and of the great literati who formed him. He shows him
as the “pride of his masters ’’—affectionately caressing old
Chalcondylas—sportively surprising Ficinus at his lamp, and
discoursing sweet music, or sweeter philosophy, with him—
or else, as the student of Pisa, “bon écolier, excellent cama-
rade,” mixing without pride among “les enfants du peuple,”
and “‘ gaining such reputation for gravity in the university,
that Cardinal Farnese recommended the bishop of Pampe-
luna, who came to study canon law, to his patronage.” +
Finally, he tells us, with what éclat he took his doctor's
degree ; how severe the examination was, and how pleased
were the examiners; and with what pomp he received the
cardinal’s barrette at Fiesole; and how his brother pranced up
on his charger caparisoned with gold, to embrace him; and
how a poet in the frenzy of his joy divined that the noble
child would one day be Pope. ‘ The poet saw into the fu-
ture,” says M. Audin; “ but wherefore did he conceal himself
under the name of Philomus ?”t

Such is M. Anudin’s picture of the early education of
Giovanni de’ Medici. We must now give the reverse, drawn
by no unfavourable hand.

“ But whilst it may be presumed that the subsequent honours
and success of Giovanni de’ Medici are to be attributed in a great
degree to his early education, and to the advantages which he
possessed under his paternal roof, it must be allowed that those
defects in his ecclesiastical character, which were afterwards so ap-

* Vol. i. pp. 27—32.

+ M. Audin, with his love of incident, should not have omitted to say, that
this episcopal student of law, commended to the young Cardinal elect, was no
other than Cesar Borgia.

t Vol. i. p. 78. He might have found his name in Roscoe, Leo X. i. note 212,
(Bohn’s edit.)

AUDIN’S LEO X. 295

parent, were probably derived from the same source. ‘The asso-
ciates of Lorenzo de’ Medici were much better acquainted with the
writings of the poets, and the doctrines of the ancient philosophers,
than with the dogmas of the Christian faith. Of the followers of
Plato, Lorenzo was at this time considered as the chief. He had
himself arranged and methodized a system of theology which
inculeates opinions very different from those of the Romish Church,
and in a forcible manner points out the object of supreme adoration
as one and indivisible. Hence it is not unlikely that the young
Cardinal was induced to regard with less reverence those doctrinal
points of the established creed, the belief of which is considered as
indispensable to the clerical character ; and hence he might have
acquired such ideas of the Supreme Being, and of the duties of
his intelligent creatures, as, in counteracting the spirit of bigotry,
rendered him liable to the imputation of indifference in matters of
religion. A rigid economy in his household was certainly not one
of the first qualifications of Lorenzo, and the example of the father
might perhaps counteract his precept in the estimation of the son ;
whose liberality in future life, too often carried to profusion,
reduced him to the necessity of adopting those measures for the
supplying his exigences which gave rise to consequences of the
utmost importance to the Christian world. From the splendid
exhibitions which were frequently displayed in the city of Florence,
he probably derived that relish for similar entertainments which
he is supposed to have carried, during his pontificate, to an in-
decorous, if not to a culpable excess; whilst the freedom and
indecency of the songs with which the spectacles of Florence were
accompanied, of many of which Lorenzo was himself the author,
could scarcely have failed to banish at intervals that gravity of
carriage which the young Cardinal was directed to support, and to
sow those seeds of dissipation which afterwards met with a more
suitable climate in the fervid atmosphere of Rome.’— Roscoe,
Leo X. pp. 17, 18.

When M. Andin sees so much. to admire and dilate upon
in the young Cardinal’s boyhood, it is not surprising that he

* should give a loose reign to his sensibilities and his fancy when

describing his life at Rome.
His first appearance at Rome excited much sensation: we
have pictures such as the following, in great profusion :—

“ At the consistory, the Cardinals remarked the modest carriage,
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296 AUDIN’S LEO X.

the brief speech, the noble air of the son of Lorenzo: in the streets,
what was most striking was his countenance.

“ At that period, when Form was on the point of being restored
in Italy, we can understand how Giovanni de’ Medici drew all eyes
upon him. He resembled then some of those beautiful statues of
youth in its bloom, which Pomponio Leto used so often to find in
subterranean Rome.

*‘ Painters, sculptors, and artists in general, who saw him pass,
were never tired of contemplating that elastic form, that harmony
of feature, that straight and muscular leg, that hand of snow, that
Greco-Roman countenance, that, azure eye, that strong head re-
posing on its broad shoulders, that slightly filled lip, and all those
beautiful proportions of which the type seemed lost. They
dreamed of some divinity who had crossed the seas to light down
at Rome, to restore there the worship of Matter —(le culte de la
matiere.) We must pardon them, these admirers of the flesh, their
enthusiasm for Form.” * — Audin, i. p. 84.

He tells us of the young Cardinal’s simplicity of life— his
early hours—his frugal table, his exquisite neatness of dress.
The following picture is drawn a good deal from fancy, but
no doubt it is generally correct : —

‘ Enamoured of the old Latin world, he rose in the morning
with the sun, and after having heard mass, he knocked at the door
of his still slumbering secretary, whom he awakened with these
verses of Ausonius :

“ Mane jam clarum reserat fenestras,
Jam strepit nidis vigilax hirundo :
Tu velut primam, mediamque noctem,
Parmeno dormis ;”

“ And then both of them took their way to some of those vine-
yards, where excavations were going on—watchful of all the
lucky chances which the pickaxe was then opening to explorers.
The little statue which reappeared to the light was hailed by a
double cry of joy, and often celebrated in the evening by the Car-
dinal and his secretary. After having paid generously for it,

* This description of the Cardinal’s person is worked up from a funeral
panegyric, by a Roman professor of eloquence.—Doctoris J. A. Ghibbesi, “ Tris-
meyistus Medicus.”

AUDIN’S LEO X. 297

they would wash it carefully from the dirt of centuries, and bear
it like a relic to the prelate’s study, whither, informed of the dis-
covery, soon arrived a crowd of antiquaries, of men of letters, of
sculptors, of savans, who hunted after its name, found it sometimes,
still more often gave one, and sung its resurrection in Greek and
Latin poetry. Soft delights these—which could not disturb
Alexander VI. The Pope had ended by becoming attached to the
Cardinal: and he had good reason, for the young man was a model
of virtues. . . . . Thus Medici had soon his little court at
Rome, composed of the choicest spirits —dmes d élite, living and
discoursing only on ruins, on antiquities, on arts, and letters.” —
Audin, vol. i. 2830—283.

And if this easy, and splendid, and pleasant life of gentle-
manly dilettantism, very graceful as it may be in a high-born
dignitary, seem hardly to amount to what we look for in a
great ecclesiastical character, we are reminded of the great
work of the day—‘ Paffranchissement —la redemption — de
la Pensée,” which was going on in the cabinets and ateliers of
Rome and Florence.

Ts it not a beautiful sight, that great conspiracy of the literati
of the Renaissance against ignorance! Holy league, in which are
enrolled Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Priests, Kings, Dukes, nobles,
peasants, craftsmen—each one using the gifts which he has re-
ceived from above, to fight against the common enemy. In the
van of this crusade, the Popes distribute bulls, gold, mitres, and
hats of cardinals. Here is the work of Pius I., of Nicolas V., of
SixtusIV. of Innocent VIII. Cardinals solicit for those who
cultivate literature the favours of the Holy See; thus do Bes-
sarion, Grimani, Piccolomini, and so many others, whose names we
shall mention. Priests often refuse dignities, in order to live in
peace in a convent, and there to labour in silence for the improye-
ment of morals.” — Audin, i. 141.

“ T’ amélioration des meeurs” —the words rather break the
spell of M. Audin’s eloquence. The Renaissance did much
for art, and much for literature; but it was also a time when
it was to the credit of a Cardinal of the Church that scandal
against him might reasonably be disbelieved.

We will say a word in passing on this subject: for connected

298 AUDIN’S LEO X,

with it is one of the worst faults in M. Audin’s book. If
there is one sin more than another against which the early
Church, and the Middle Age Church also, strove more
zealously than another, it was impurity. Men of the world
complain of the exaggerated importance, and the unnatural
blackness, which they ascribed to it. Everything undoubtedly
bears witness to the seriousness and depth of their feeling —
their ecclesiastical regulations, their institutions of life — their
stern, often tremendous, penitences. ‘There is no mistake
about their sincerity; there really seems nothing in human
life which they are not ready to sacrifice, if thereby they
appear likely to secure greater purity. It is so with the
Fathers; it is so with the leading Churchmen of the Middle
Ages. Rome especially had always claimed to be the
champion of holiness. The cause of the Popes, in the days
of their struggles with the empire, was the cause of strictness,
and on this is now founded one of their most vaunted titles to
the reverence of Christendom. But the severity of the early
times is really, as a moral phenomenon, less astonishing than
the laxity of those of Leo X. The tolerance for licentious-
ness in writings, and in life, is one of the features of this
period which over and over again excites the amazement of a
modern reader. It is not merely its corruption, but its insen-
sibility, which is so strange —the cool, easy, indifferent way
in which all, from high to low, seem to judge and speak of
sins of this kind. Nobody appears to think anything of
them: no one’s character seems to suffer from a taint of this
kind; no one seems to feel that amends or acknowledgment
is at any time due for a profligate life, or profligate books : —
the Church is silent, and does not interfere. There is scarcely
a distinguished man of the period, however amiable, or noble,
or refined, about whom we can feel safe that some disgraceful
fact may not at any moment turn up against him. In art,
in literature, in conduct, it is the same. In each sphere, it
is the leaders and illustrious ornaments — the men who
stamp the age as it is passing, and by whom it is remembered
afterwards, and remembered in many cases with admiration
—who exhibit so recklessly this absence of moral feeling.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 299

That same Roman court which had battled with emperors for
the cause of purity, and had excommunicated kings for their
licentiousness, now regarded such offences, even in its own
members, with the most indulgent facility. The profligacy of
Cardinals could scarcely be said to outrage public opinion, for
it was unrebuked, and had almost established a prescriptive
right. To have led an immoral life was no bar to the purple
—no one seemed to think that it should be: no, nor even to
the throne of St. Peter. When Innocent VIII., or Alexander
VL., are elected Popes, no one seems to be even surprised ; it
passes as an ordinary political change, agreeable to some, dis-
agreeable to others, but a scandal to none; and public opinion
is silent, except in the epigrams of literary men of the
opposite party, who make it their business and pride to imitate
Martial and Juvenal, and to outdo them.

It is one of the worst points, as we have said, in M. Audin’s
book, that he allows himself to treat this deep corruption so
very lightly. He has a right to retort, if he can, its own
charges upon Protestantism; he has a right, also, to extenuate
and explain, to bring out what is great and striking in the
time, and to claim respect for what instances of goodness he
finds in it. But he does much more. It cannot be said that
he absolutely ignores its licentiousness, for there are occasions
when it is forced on his notice; but this must be said, that it
makes no more difference in his admiration and panegyric,
than it would in that of the most indulgent literary liberal.
The recollection of it never seems to restrain or sadden him,
or to suggest some measure to the flow and transports of his
imaginative mind. He is glad, of course, when he can, to
repel the charge; but when he cannot, he proceeds undis-
turbed in the work of laudation, maundering on in his way of
loose, thin, sugary declamation about the “ beautiful spectacle,”
and the “holy confederacy, of the Renaissance ”— making in-
teresting, or tender, or romantic pictures of poets and artists,
with a gentle regret, or an exculpatory rebuke, or a little
mild raillery, or a few grotesque touches of good-natured
malice, where he has to do with a particularly disorderly
spirit. The worship of brilliancy.and splendour, of taste, and

300 AUDIN’S LEO X.

feeling, and genius, of keen and graceful wit, of Ciceronian
latinity, and Catullian elegance ; admiration of the beautiful
figures and long hair of young nobles and painters; of the
profound raptures and joyful tears of poetical antiquarians
over codices, and coins, and statues; of literary suppers, and
philosophical causeries in gardens ;— seem to have superseded
with M. Audin a regard for the common-place rules of moral
judgment. He treats the Renaissance with a kind of affec-
tionate indulgence, like a spoilt child, full of spirit and pro-
mise, though wild, and sometimes wayward ; and, large as is
the licence which it claims, he has not the heart to refuse its
demands. ‘There can scarcely be a more serious offence in
such a writer —a defender of religion and the Church —than
thus to trick out a licentious time, and to be seduced, by its
intellect or its love of beauty, to invite sympathy for what he
dares not openly call good, by help of the shifts and sentiment
of the novel-writer.

When Giovanni de’ Medici came to Rome, his brother-
in-law, Innocent VIII, was Pope. He passed through the
pontificate of Alexander VI. in comparative retirement, and
caine out into public life under Julius II., his own immediate
predecessor.

M. Audin writes to make out that the Papacy had not, at
this time, in any degree, degenerated from its best days; and
that, though its outward conduct was altered, it was still pur-
suing, in the due and natural way, the course suggested by
change of times as most beneficial to the Church universal.
He will not allow that there was any swerving, or wrong
direction —any, even temporary, remissness in the policy of
the Popes; and indignantly stops the mouths of Roman
Catholic critics, who think, with regret, that the Roman
court might have taken a higher, and wiser, and more
becoming line. Each one of these Popes, according to M.
Audin, did exactly what his time required.

Undoubtedly the policy of the Church cannot be immov-
ably stereotyped in one form, and must alter insensibly with
altering, or altered times. Undoubtedly, also, her champions
and heroes have been of every character, as various as the

AUDIN’S LEO X. 30k

character of other men, and the exigences of the time; and
the turn of her fortunes has often pressed into her service men
who could not have been expected to be fit for it. Such men
have often been misunderstood; their perplexed, and perhaps,
turbulent career, has appeared to set the world’s seal upon
them, and to give the world a right to claim them as its own
for judgment. But, if they are her true servants, they will
be sure to bear about them some sign—zeal, or self-forget-
fulness, or humility, or love of purity —which, even in
kings’ palaces and the corruption of courts, or amid the strife
of tongues, or under the coat of mail, marks them to belong
to the cause of goodness. It would be hard to find any such
tokens among the Popes of M. Audin’s history.

The Papacy was no longer, in spirit and object, nor yet in
power, what it had been. The Popes of the Middle Ages,
whether always wisely or not, really watched over religion,
and made their vigilance felt. They often fought, and often
intrigued. But to resist the overshadowing corruptions of
feudalism was a sufficient object to give meaning and dig-
nity even to a merely traditional cause; and often this object
was pursued with the highest and most unselfish earnest-
ness. But the great fight of Julius II. and Leo X. was to
keep a slippery and unsteady footing among the princes of
Italy. Still acknowledged and honoured as the religious
_ chiefs of Christendom, they had sunk down to the temper
and policy of one of those petty, though brilliant, provincial
courts, which crowded and jostled one another so fiercely in
their narrow peninsula. The great idea and venerable cry of
ecclesiastical liberty had disappeared, and was ill supplied by
the watchword of the “ Patrimony of St. Peter.”

The serious object of the Roman court, from being re-
ligious or ecclesiastical, had become a temporal one. It is
impossible to say that the maxims and principles of Innocent
IIT. were those of Julius II. or Leo X. The Papacy had
forgotten at this time its own idea. The charge against it
is not merely that there were great disorders and corruptions,
such as every system on a large scale, at some time or other,
in the long run, is sure to suffer from. Nay, even still, there

302 AUDIN’S LEO X.

was much grandeur in its aspect, and much that was beneficial
to Christendom in its influence. But it had left its true
position, and had failed in doing its proper work; and, with
such perilous prerogatives as it claimed, far more grandeur
and far greater benefits would not have been enough to atone
for such unfaithfulness to its trust. Like every other prince
in Europe, the Popes were establishing their sovereignty by
humbling their barons. Like every other prince in Italy, they
were patronising literature and encouraging art; adding pro-
vince to province, and city to city; forming leagues and
breaking them; building palaces and planting gardens;
raising wonderful monuments to their fame; settling their
families; heaping dignities and honours on their friends — till
the storm rose suddenly on them, to remind them, that the
duties of the first bishop of Christendom had not been ful-
filled by balancing its princes against one another, or even by
consecrating the genius and magnificence of the age to the
honour of the first Apostle. The condemnation of these days
of security was pronounced in a way that cannot be gainsaid
—and, alas! their effects not remedied —by the too Sate re-
forms of Trent, and the order of the Jesuits.

At the death of Innocent VIII. the two Cardinals who
had divided between them the power of the Roman court,
came into direct collision. Julian de la Rovere, the Cardinal
of St. Peter ad vincula, had been great under his uncle Sixtus
IV., and under the feeble Innocent —* S. Pier. in Vincula
si pud dir esser Papa,” wrote the Florentine Envoy to
Lorenzo, at the time of Innocent’s election, ‘‘ e pit potra che
con Papa Sisto, se lo sapra mantenere.”* But though he
was afterwards to become Julius II., he had first to give way
to one yet stronger than himself, and more unscrupulous—
Roderic Borgia.

Cardinal Borgia was vice-chancellor of the holy see. He
held large preferment, and was one of the wealthiest of the
College. And he acknowledged, without rebuke or shame, a
family of illegitimate children, born during his long cardinal-

* In Roscoe, Lor. de’ Med. vol. ii. App. xliv. (8vo. ed.)

AUDIN’S LEO X. 303

ship —several sons and a daughter, whose melancholy celebrity
has engaged the sympathy of Mr. Roscoe. But Mr. Roscoe’s
defence of Lucretia is cold, compared with M. Audin’s en-
thusiasm. 7

M. Audin disclaims attempting a “ réhabilitation” of
Alexander VI. *; but, as his friendly French critic} observes,
this is pretty nearly what he has attempted. The mass of
scandal against him he sweeps away with a stroke of his pen:
— it rests solely on epigrams — on the malignity of Burchard,
his Master of Ceremonies, a man of the North, “a veritable
Teuton, who seeks everywhere to find some fault with the
man of the South,” +t and whose crabbed writing, besides, has
very likely been ill-read, or maliciously copied by some pro-
testant decypherer § :—and, lastly, on the malevolence of his
cotemporaries, and especially the “ Florentine hatred” of
Guicciardini. Drawing a distinction between the man and
the pope — “il y a deux étres en lui,”—he allows that the
man often fell deeply; but, as pope, he considers Alexander
as a sort of hero-king, who performed in his day noble and
admirable works; and dwells on his Italian patriotism, his
wise and beneficial policy in putting down the tyranny of the
ereat families of Romagna, and that fine Christian enthu-
siasm—‘‘ce beau mouvement de xéle évangélique,” which
prompted him to call upon the sacred college to pay a tenth

for the purposes of a crusade against the Turks.

We have not space, nor is it our wish, to go into the intri-
cacies of the secret history of the Borgias—no doubt it is a

* Vol. i. p. 301. t Université Catholique, vol. xx. p. 154.

{ Vol.i. p. 300.

§ “Nous youdrions bien savoir comment on doit s’en rapporter aveuglément au
protestant qui s’est chargé de déchiffrer ce journal,” &¢c. — Vol. i. p.304. This
is rather desperate. M. Audin might easily have convicted the Protestant
copyist : there are nearly a dozen MSS. of the “ Diary” (v. Mém. de l Acad. des
Inscript. t. xvii, p. 597. sqq.; Notices des MSS. du Roi, i. 68. sqq. referred to
by himself, i. p. 302.). M. Audin’s wrath against Burchard is quite misplaced,
Burchard was a simple, absurd, pompous sort of gossiping official, exceedingly
proud of his post at court, very touchy about etiquette, and who put things down
as important, because he saw them. As M. de Bréquigny says (Notices, i.
p. 111.), there is much more naiveté than malice in his stories. It is observable
that he attributes Alexander’s death to natural causes, and not to poison.

304 AUDIN’S LEO X.

very dark and perplexed one ;— but if Alexander VI. has
suffered from slanders, it is equally true that his apologist
exhibits, in a most remarkable degree, a readiness to call evil
good.

Alexander’s election, says Burchard—who was not a mere
epigram writer, but a man, necessarily from his position, in
the secrets of the palace—was brought about by bribery.
Such an event can hardly be said to have been beyond pos-
sibility, considering that Julius IJ., Alexander's successor,
and bitter enemy, thought it, necessary on his death-bed to
issue a constitution against such bribery—one of the most
stringent and threatening enactments ever promulgated.*
M. Audin, without mentioning the charge, indirectly meets
it by pointing out the probability that the Cardinals would
choose a Pope of strong and energetic character; and then
proceeds to set up a witness—as he considers, an overwhelm-
ing one in Borgia’s favour—the complimentary inscriptions
addressed to him by the Roman populace :

* “Concil. Later. V.—Sess. 5. Absente per egritudinem Julio, presedit
Raphael Card. Episc. Ostiensis. Perlecta est Julii constitutio, et a Concilio ap-
probata, non solum districte vetans omnem in creatione Rom. Pont. simoniam, sed
etiam sic factam electionem abrogans et invalidam declarans, nec ullam sic electo
conferre potestatem, ipsosque Cardinales qui sic elegerint esse ipso facto Cardi-
nalatu et aliis quibuscunque dignitatibus et beneficiis absque alia declaratione
privatos: preetereaque excommunicatione reservata irretiri, a quo non nisi
summo Pontifice legitime electo possint extra vite discrimen solvi: paribusque
peenis subjici omnes et singulos hujusce simoniz fautores, consiliarios, et proxe-
netas. — Faxit Deus, ne unquam hujusmodi casus eveniant ; si enim, interveniente
simonia, vigeret ista constitutio, vel iynota esset ac occulta simonia, et tune Ecclesia
credens se alicui in terris capiti subjectam esse, falleretur, essetque Acephala, nul-
lusque valere posset ad Pont. Maz. recursus, quo illa nesciens careret : atque quicunque
vel censura vel alia reservatione supreme Sedis essent irretiti, tametsi recurrerent
ad putatum et existimatum Pontificem, insolubili adhue nexu ligati remanerent :
quia recursus fieret ad eum, cui sua electio nullam potest tribuere potestatem,
qui est excommunicatus, et ab ipso ecclesia corpore divulsus. Si vero illa
simonia innotesceret, dici non potest quanta inde pernicies emergeret, illo per
factiones sibi Pontificatum sibi asserente—et aliis novam alterius Pontificis
electionem efflagitantibus. Quonam, queso, judice nulli partium suspecto, et
cujus sententiz acquieturi omnes essent, controversia ista dirimeretur ?”

Synopsis Conciliorum: auct. R. P. J. Cabassutio, Congreg. Orator. Presbyt.
tom. iii. pp. 138-9: Paris, 1838.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 305

“Tn these difficult times, a man of the character of Alexander
might well be regarded as an instrument of Providence. There is,
therefore, nothing but what is quite natural in his election: the
people sanctioned the choice of the Conclave. In one of the in-
scriptions which they had extemporised (improvisées), they com-
pared the two princes who, with the same name, had borne rule
in the Roman world ; granting to the one, to Caesar, only human
nature; of the other, making a god:

“¢Czsare magna fuit, nunc Roma est maxima: Sextus
Regnat Alexander : ille vir, iste deus.’

“In another transparency they said, ‘Honour and glory to
Alexander’ —‘ Alexandro sapientissimo, Alexandro magnificen-
tissimo, Alexandro in omnibus maximo,

“ These cries of the people at the exaltation of the Pontiff are
also those of history. If the cardinal Roderic had altogether
resembled the Borgia of Burchard, tt seems to us that the people
would have had the modesty to be silent ; at least, they would not
have made a god of a scandalous character ; they would not have
called by the name of the Most Holy, a priest famous for his pro-
fligacy — or else scandals and profligacy were secrets hidden from
all eyes; and, how could Roderic have escaped the eyes of those
who read through stone walls, and who divine that which they
have not seen? ‘Thisis a phenomenon, of which the historian has
a right to demand the explanation.”— Vol. i. p. 157.

Does M. Audin, then, mean that a Cardinal, openly living
in adultery —for there is no dispute about this— was not a
** scandalous character ?”

Certainly a writer who puts such faith in popular compli-
ments, ought not to be so contemptuous about epigrams.
It is to be feared that he gives the Roman populace of that
day more credit for ‘* shamefacedness ” than they deserved.

But M. Audin, without insisting on Alexander’s personal
excellence, maintains that, making allowances for the manners
of the time, he was a great Pope.* A great Pope in former
days was one who, if he diplomatized with kings, was not
afraid to face their enmity in the cause of justice and purity.
If Innocent III. treated King John haughtily, he punished

* Vol. i. p. 288.
x

306 AUDIN’S LEO X.

Philip of France for his adultery, and forced him to take back
his ill-used stranger-wife. In the time of Pope Alexander,
a King of France became tired of his wife, whom he had
married from fear or policy, in less powerful days. She was
deformed and unattractive; and his predecessor’s widow was
young and beautiful, and the heiress, in her own right, of the
great Dukes of Brittany. The Pope also had his wishes.
His second son, Cesar Borgia, had been created an Arch-
bishop and a Cardinal, witnesses swearing that he was the legi-
timate son of a Roman gentleman*; but his elder brother
had perished by assassination, and as he was now the
head of the family, he wished to exchange the crozier and
Cardinal’s red hat for a baton and coronet. The King of
France had these to give; the Pope had bulls and dis-
pensations; and they exchanged their gifts. “ The Cardinal
came one morning into the consistory, and besought his
father, and the other Cardinals, that, considering he had never
had his mind inclined to the sacerdotal profession, they would
grant him power to lay aside the dignity and the habit, and
to follow that exercise to which he was drawn by the Fates.” +
Leave was given; and, having assumed the secular habit, he
carried to France the bulls of dispensation, and the Cardinal’s
hat which he had laid aside for the King’s favourite. The
deformed Queen was put away; Louis XII. married Anne
of Brittany, and Cesar Borgia came back Duke of Valenti-
nois, a baron of Dauphiny, at the head of his hundred lances,
to look out for a rich heiress, and to found a house in
Romagna, on the ruins of the Orsini and Colonna.

But M. Audin still considers that Alexander VI. did a
great work, and one peculiarly befitting a Pope at his day.
‘* He made Romagna quiet,” he says. It was of great im-
portance that the Papal States should not be disturbed by
turbulent and perfidious nobles. Accordingly, this great papal
work turns out to be the eatermination of them, and Cesar
Borgia was the instrument which he made use of to chastise

* Peter Martyr Angler. Ep. 173.
+ Guicciardini, lib, iv. p. 257. Peter Martyr Angler. Ep. 178.

aie

AUDIN’S LEO X. 307

the treason of his vassals.”* M. Audin gives us the portrait
of Borgia, and exclaims—‘La devise de Borgia est magni-
fique: Aut Cesar aut nihil.”

Of these “chastisements,” which M. Audin thinks that
the necessities of the time and the position of the Papacy
almost justified in the Pope, though not in the man, we will
give an instance, which made much noise, even in Italy, and
has been recorded by one who was almost an eye-witness, if
not an abettor.

The following is the title of a short work of Machiavelli :—
Descrizione del modo tenuto dal Duca Valentino nello ammaz-
zare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signor Pagolo et il
Duca di Gravina Orsini. These were certain allies of Cesar’s,
who had lately taken alarm at his increasing greatness, and
had quarrelled with him. We quote from an old English
translation.

“The news of that defeat put the duke upon new counsels,
to try if he could stop that humour by any practice of accord ;
and being excellent at dissembling, he omitted nothing that
might persuade them that they were the aggressors, and had
taken up arms first against him; that what was in his hands
he would willingly surrender: and, if they pleased, the prin-
cipality should be theirs; and he deluded them so far, that
they sent Signor Pagolo to him to treat about a peace, and
in the mean time granted a cessation of arms. Whilst these

_ things were in transaction, a supply of 500 lances arrived to

him from France; and though by their help he found him-
self strong enough to confront his enemy in the field, yet he
judged it more secure and profitable to go on with the cheat,
and not break off the capitulation that then was on foot.
And he acted it so well, that.a peace was concluded: their
old pensions confirmed, 4000 ducats paid down, a solemn en-
gagement given not to disturb the Bentivogli; he made an
alliance with Giovanni, and declared that he could not, and
had no power to constrain any of them to come personally
to him unless they pleased to do it themselyes. They

* Vol. i. pp. 294, 295.
“2.

308 AUDIN’S LEO X.

promised on their part to restore the duchy of Urbino, and
whatever else they had taken from him; to serve him in all
his enterprises; not to make war without his leave; nor hire
themselves to anybody else.

“ But Duke Valentine having finished the agreement, and
disposed his army into quarters all over Romagna, about the
end of November, removed from Imola to Cesena, where he
continued several days in consultation with certain commis-
sioners sent from the Vitelli and Ursini (who were then with
their troops in the duchy of Urbino), about what new enter-
prise they were next to undertake. And because nothing
was concluded, Oliverotto da Fermo was sent to propose to
him, if he thought good, an expedition into Tuscany; if not,
that they might join, and set down before Sinigaglia. The
Duke replied, that the Florentines were his friends, and he
could not with honour carry the war into Tuscany; but their
proposal for Sinigaglia he embraced very willingly. Having
beleaguered the town, it was not long before they had news
it was taken, but the castle held out, for the governor refused
to surrender to anybody but the duke, whereupon they en-
treated him to come. The Duke thought this a fair oppor-
tunity, and the better because he went not of himself, but
upon their invitation; and to make them the more secure, he
dismissed his French, and sent them back into Lombardy
(only he retained a hundred lances under the command of his
kinsman Monsieur de Candale).

“ Departing about the end of December from Cesena he
went to Fano, where, with all the cunning and artifice he
could use, he persuaded the Vitelli and Ursini to stay with
the army till he came: remonstrating to them that such
jealousies and suspicions as those must needs weaken their al-
liance, and render it undurable; and that for his part he was
a man who desired to make use as well of the counsels as the
arms of his friends. And though Vitellozzo opposed it very
much (for by the death of his brother he had been taught
how unwise it was to offend a prince first, and then put him-
self into his hands), nevertheless, persuaded by Paolo Ursino
(who underhand was corrupted by presents and promises,

eS a

‘AUDIN’S LEO X. 309

from the duke), he consented to stay. Hereupon the duke,
upon his departure the 30th of December, 1502, imparted
his design to eight of his principal intimates (amongst whom
Don Michael and Monsignor d’Euna were two), and appointed,
that when Vitellozzo, Pagolo Ursini, the duke de Gravina,
and Oliverotto should come to meet him, two of his favourites
should be sure to order it so as to get one of the Ursini
betwixt them (assigning every couple his man), and entertain
them till they came to Sinigaglia: with express injunction
not to part with them upon any terms till they were brought
to the duke’s lodgings, and taken into custody.

«The Vitelli and Ursini, having concluded to attend the
duke themselves, and to pay their personal respects, to make
room for his men had drawn off their own, and disposed them
into certain castles at the distance of six miles; only they had
left in Sinigaglia, Oliverotto with a party of about 1000 foot,
and 150 horse, which were quartered in the said Bourg.
Things being in this order, Duke Valentine approached, but
when his horse in the van came up to the bridge they did
not pass; but, opening to the right and left, and wheeling
away, they made room for the foot, who marched immediately
into the town. Vitellozzo, Pagolo, and the Duke de Gravina,
advanced upon their mules, to wait upon Duke Valentine;
Vitellozzo was unarmed, in a cape lined with green, very
sad and melancholy, as if he had had some foresight of his
destiny, which, considering his former courage and exploits,
was admired by every body; and it is said, that when he
came from his house, in order to meeting Duke Valentine at
Sinigaglia, he took his last leave very solemnly of every
body. He recommended his family and its fortunes to the
chief of his officers, and admonished his grandchildren, not so
much to commemorate the fortune, as the magnanimity, of
their ancestors.

“These three Princes being arrived in the presence of
Duke Valentine, saluted him with great civility, and were
civilly received; and each of them (as soon as they were
well observed by the persons appointed to secure them) were
singled, and disposed betwixt two of them. But the duke,

x3

310 AUDIN’S LEO xX.

perceiving that Oliverotto was wanting (who was left behind
with his regiment, and had drawn it up in the market-place
for the greater formality), he winked upon Don Michael (to
whom the care of Oliverotto was assigned) that he should be
sure to provide he might not escape. Upon this intimation,
Don Michael clapped spurs to his horse, and rid before, and
being come up to Oliverotto, he told him it was inconvenient
to keep his men to their arms, for unless they were sent
presently to their quarters, their lodgings would be occupied
by the duke’s men; wherefore he persuaded him to dismiss
them, and go with him to the duke. Oliverotto following
his counsel, went along with him to the duke, who no sooner
saw him, but he called him to him, and Oliverotto, having
paid his ceremony, fell in with the rest.

* Being come into the town, and come up to the duke’s
quarters, they all dismounted, and attended him up, where,
being carried by him into a private chamber, they were
instantly arrested and made prisoners. The duke immedi-
ately mounted, and commanded their soldiers should be all
of them disarmed; Oliverotto’s party being so near at hand,
were plundered into the bargain. ....

‘*'The night coming on, and the seecanits appeased, the
duke began to think ag his prisoners, resolved Vitellozzo and
Oliverotto should die, and having caused them to be guarded
into a convenient place, he commanded they should be
strangled. But they said nothing at their deaths that was
answerable to their lives; for Vitellozzo begged only that the
Pope might be supplicated in his behalf, for a plenary indul-
gence. Oliverotto impeached Vitellozzo, and laid all upon
his back. Pagolo and the Duke de Gravina were continued
alive, till the duke had information that his Holiness at Rome
had seized upon the Cardinal Orsini, the archbishop of Flo-
rence, and Messer Jacopo de Santa Croce; upon which news,
on the eighteenth of January, they also were both strangled
in the castle of Pieve, after the same manner.”

“Here finishes,” concludes the imperturbable narrator,
‘the description of the manner which Duke Valentine took
to slay Vitellozzo,” &c.

t

AUDIN’S LEO X. 311

M. Audin, without justifying this, thinks that it was the
way to emancipate the Popedom.

“Tf, like this fatalist historian, we might estimate an action by
its beneficial influence, we ought to express our satisfaction, with-
out a murmur, at these stern blows which Cesar Borgia struck at
some of the Orsini family ; but crime, whether profitable or not to
society, is ever a violation of the divine laws. It is certain that
these vicars of the Holy See, so miserably assassinated, were an
obstacle to that unity, of which Italy stood in such pressing need,
in order that she might drive out the stranger—that they con-
tributed, by their revolt against Alexander, to the conquest of the
country —that they lent aid and protection to the French monarch
—that, shackled by them, the papacy could not fulfil its duties,
either as a spiritual or as a temporal kingdom. . . . Most of
their fiefs they held by the grace of the Sovereign of Rome, and
they used his gifts to sell and betray him. When they pleased,
they could starve the Pope, the Cardinals, and the inhabitants of
Romagna.”— Vol. i. p. 299.

An opposite view was certainly taken at the time, by one
who knew Cesar Borgia well, and entertained a high respect
for his talents and strength of will. These are the reflections
of Machiavelli on the objects and probable results of Borgia’s
proceedings. |

** Pope Alexander the Sixth,” he says, ‘‘ had a desire to
make his son Duke Valentine great, but he saw many blocks
and impediments in the way, both for the present and the
fnture.” The historian enumerates these obstacles, and how
they were partly got over, and then proceeds: —

“The duke, finding himself powerful enough, and secure
against present danger, being himself as strong as he desired,
and his neighbours in a manner reduced to an incapacity of
hurting him, being willing to go on with his conquests, there
remained nothing but a jealousy of France; and not without
cause, for he knew that king had found his error at last, and
would be sure to obstruct him. Hereupon he began to look
abroad for new allies, and to vacillate towards France ; as ap-
peared when the French army advanced into the kingdom of

X 4

312 AUDIN’S LEO X.

Naples against the Spaniards, who had besieged Cajeta. His
great design was to secure himself against the French, and he
had doubtless done it if Alexander had lived. These were
his provisions against the dangers that were imminent, but
those that were remote were more doubtful and uncertain.
The first thing he feared was, lest the next Pope should be his
enemy, and reassume all that Alexander had given him, to pre-
vent which he proposed four several ways. The first was by
destroying the whole line of those lords whom he had dispos-
sessed, that his Holiness might have no occasion to restore

them ; the second was to cajole the nobility in Rome, and draw

them over to his party, that thereby he might put an awe and
restraint upon the Pope ; the third was, if possible, to make the
college his friends ; the fourth was to make himself so strong
before the death of his father, as to be able to stand upon his own
legs, and repel the first violence that should be practised
against him. ‘Three of these four expedients he had tried
before Alexander died, and was in a fair way for the fourth ;
all the disseised lords which came into his clutches he put to
death, and left few of them remaining: he had insinuated
with the nobility of Rome, and got a great party in the
College of Cardinals, and, as to his own corroboration, he
had designed to make himself master of Tuscany, had got
possession of Perugia and Piombino already, and taken Pisa
into his protection. ,

« But his father died five years after his son had taken up
arms, and left him nothing solid and in certainty, but Ro-
magna only, and the rest were in nubibus, infested with two
formidable armies, and himself mortally sick. This duke was
aman of that magnanimity and prudence, understood so well
which way men were to be wheedled, or destroyed, and such
were the foundations that he had laid in a short time, that, had
he not had those two great armies upon his back, and a fierce
distemper upon his body, he had overcome all difficulties, and
brought his designs to perfection.

« He told me himself, about the time that Julius II. was
created, that he had considered well the accidents that might
befal him upon the death of his father, and provided against

.
a

AUDIN’S LEO X. 313

them all, only he did not imagine that, at his death, he should
be so near it himself. Upon serious examination, therefore,
of the whole conduct of Duke Valentine, I see nothing to be
reprehended ; it seems rather proper to me to propose him (as
I have done) as an example for the imitation of all such as,
by the favour of fortune, or the supplies of other princes, have
got into the saddle: for his mind being so large, and his in-
tentions so high, he could not do otherwise, and nothing could
have opposed the greatness and wisdom of his designs, but
his own infirmity, and the death of his father.” *

And for these times M. Audin does not condescend to the
figure, half-admission, half-apology, which he applies, after
Baronius, to the tenth century —that our Lord was asleep
in the bark of Peter. For Alexander VI. and his “truly
royal qualities, ”+ he claims an historical grandeur.

Julius II. is certainly a relief after Alexander VI. At least
he was a great man— undisciplined as the wild sea, and one
who in less evil times would have been thought a scandal to
the smallest cure in Christendom; but if the Roman Pontiff
was to play the king, it was as well to have one who could
play his part with grandeur. He schemed and fought, but
not for the sole object of setting up in the world his own
base-born and abandoned son. He provided one nephew
with a dukedom, and kept up his own Cardinal’s title, S.
Peter ad Vincula, in his own family — giving it to two of his
other nephews successively, both of them men of honourable
character — and then he devoted himself to strengthen the
dominions of the Roman See.

M. Audin feels the effect of the change of scene. Julius is
the ** Moses of Italy,” capable of any thing — “ he might have
been a great general, a great artist, even a Napoleon;” and
following the hint of M. de Maistre}, he enlarges on the
“great idea” of the Pope —the independence of Italy,

“ Not one of these sovereigns, national or foreign, gives a serious

* Machiavelli, “ The Prince,” c. vii. pp. 207. 208. London, 1680.
Tt Vol. i. p. 300. t Du Pape, 1. ii. c. 7.

314 AUDIN’S LEO X.

thought to the interests of the Holy See, the integrity of Romagna,
the deliverance of Italy, the glory of Catholicism, the preservation
of arts and literature. Julius II. towers above all these crowned
heads, as the cupola of St. Peter’s above the spires of other churches.
He has an object, a plan, an idea : —the emancipation of his country,
which is invaded, and which he wishes to save. ‘Talk not to us of
his ambition: is it not sanctified by the end he has before him ?—
We may be told that Julius loved too well the helmet and breast-
plate ;—that he wielded too well the sword; that he remained too
long on horseback ;— this is possible; this is written not only in
history, but on the marble, on the bronze, on the canvass. But
let us confess, that the noblest work that ever monarch can at-
tempt on behalf of a people—the salvation of its nationality —
could not have been accomplished by one of those cold and feeble
natures, without defects as without virtues.” —Awudin, vol. i.
pp. 850 — 852.

The coolness of this is rather provoking. There is
always a satisfaction in seeing a man work his post well,
whatever that post is: it is pleasant to see a general com-
mand his army well, or a captain fight his ship well, or
a jockey ride his horse well. And as an Italian prince,
Julius is a man to be admired for his spirit, and indo-
mitable courage, and magnificent designs. During his
long life, thirty-two years of which he had been Cardinal,
he had seen the Papacy go on as a temporal power; he had
himself commanded armies, defended garrisons, formed and
broken alliances, in the Pope’s name and his own. He had
seen Rome governed by a weak hand and a strong — inter-
posing, with success and without success, in the broils and
fights of the Italian and foreign powers. When he became
Pope he resolved to make the throne, and the state which he
had gained, as great as he could; and under him the political
power of the Roman State was felt with a new and unusual
force. ‘Vol esser il dominus et maistro del jocho del mundo,”
wrote the Venetian envoy in his strange idiom. The French
at Milan—the Baglioni and Bentivogli at Perugia and
Bologna, — were considerable impediments to this; the
French besides were “ barbari;” he hated them with a good
Italian hatred, and Pope Julius was even more than an

AUDIN’S LEO X. 315

ordinary Italian hater. And so he did his best to put down
“the tyrants,” and to drive the barbarians out of Italy.
But when M. Audin talks about “his patriotism taking its
source in religion,” — about his ‘making himself a soldier
only that he might the better adorn his spouse, the Church,
with gold and diamonds” *— and would persuade us that if
his pontificate had not been so turbulent, he would have set
about the reform of the clergy,” t we are reminded that he
was able to be a great man, just because, as spiritual Head
of Christendom, he left his first duties utterly neglected.
Even his political greatness has many blots. M. Audin
is for ever ringing the changes on the “independence of
Italy.” Even Alexander VI., according to him, deserves
credit for haying aimed at the independence of Italy —
and still greater glory is due to Julius. But before he
made so much of Julius’s struggle with the intruding
strangers, he should have remembered that, as he has told
us himself}, it was Cardinal Julian, who, when the Holy
See was in the hands of a personal enemy, fled to the court
of France, and there was the first to tempt and allure the
barbarians into Italy, and to persuade them to attack the
Pope —that it was Pope Julius, too, who leagued with the
Germans, the French, and the Spaniards at Cambray, to par-
tition Italy with them, as the price of the destruction of Venice.
In those days unfaithfulness to promises and treaties was
not much thought of; but Julius was preeminently unscru-
pulous. The man who could take in Cesar Borgia § and cow
him by superior wiliness and audacity, could be no bad pro-
ficient in dissimulation. He forms the league of Cambray
with France against Venice, and excommunicates the Re-
public; when he has secured Romagna he deserts his ally,
and forms the Holy League with Venice against France. ||
After the defeat of Ravenna he is ready to make peace

* Vol. i. pp. 364, 365. { Vol. ii. pp. 10, 11.

t Audin, vol.i. pp. 162, 163.; also Roscoe, Leo X. vol. i, note 88. (Bohn’s
edit.)

§ Roscoe, Leo X. ¢. vii. Sismondi, Rep. Ital. xii. 260.

|| Roscoe, Leo X. e¢. viii.

316 AUDIN’S LEO X.

with Louis; but, while the treaty is waiting his own sig-
nature, he tells the ambassadors of Spain and Venice that he
only meant “ to gain time and impose upon the king;” * and
so the event proved. This would be sharp practice in a
Bentivoglio or a Sforza, or any of the other crafty princes
of Italy; but in the spiritual guide of Christendom, even if
he be a professedly warrior Pope, it is a stain and infamy,
which nothing can atone for.

Julius II. was great among the Italian politicians of his
time; but, instead of being a great Pope, it is far more likely
that his pontificate did more even than the personal wicked-
ness of Alexander VI. to injure the Roman See. He plunged
it, without remorse, into the very thick of the political game.
Kven those days were startled at his unrestrained secularity.
He left nothing undone to make the Church appear as a mere
power of the world. Wielding St. Peter’s keys, he forgot to
use them against the abandoned men — nobles and church-
men— who haunted the Roman court; he only thought of
excommunication as a cheap and ready weapon against a
doomed state or a restive ally. It is no wonder that his
antagonists thought of a Council as a political instrument
against him. A schism was not at that time so strange and
dreaded a thing in the churches of the Roman obedience as
it has become since the Reformation alarmed them; and
abler opponents might have given Julius trouble. He was
unecclesiastical, even in his magnificent use of art at Rome.
The regal mausoleum, the gigantic Basilica, and the proud
and simple inscription on its foundation stone ¢, speak of the
severe and imperial mind of their projector; but speak of

* Roscoe, Leo X. i. 269. From Bembo. Ist. Venet.
z +
DEM PRINCIPIS APOSTOLORUM
IN VATICANO
VETUSTATE ET SITU
SQUALENTEM
A FUNDAMENTIS
RESTITUIT JULIUS LIGUR.

PONT. MAX. AN. MDVI. .
Audin, vol. i. p. 385.

EO

|
4
= 4
4
7

AUDIN’S LEO X. 317

the lofty grandeur of the prince far more than of the religion
of the churchman. When the Cardinals lamented the de-
struction of the old Basilica— the venerated building of
Constantine, hallowed by so many sacred sepulchres, and the
scene of such great events —the Pope ordered its demoli-
tion without emotion.* He had no sighs or thoughts for
the past. “Julius the Ligurian” was the man of his own
time; it was at once the cause of his faults and of his great-
ness, that he so thoroughly represented its spirit. There
was no veil, no pretence, about his character; he never con-
descended to disguise his objects. But his very frankness
and bold openness show, how little it then cost a Pope to be
unreservedly secular. |

M. Audin’s parting eulogy reads like bitter sarcasm.
Speaking of Francis the First’s saying, “that Julius would
have been a better General than Pope,” he says —

“Tt is a judgment that we do not accept. Julius II. was a
still greater Pope than he was warrior. If to know how to protect
the rights of authority menaced by some schismatical cardinals
—to defend in a council the teaching of the Apostles— if to call
none but men of science and piety to his councils —to give to the
world an example of irreproachable chastity of life —if to watch
without ceasing over the administration of justice—to keep his
plighted faith—to pardon his enemies —to trust in God in
adversity, —to give alms— to love the poor—to be careful of the
public treasure, and never to divert a farthing of it to the benefit
of his own friends—and at last, to die as a Christian ought —if
all this is to be a good Pope, Julius II. was worthy of the tiara.”
— Audin, i. 425, 426.

Really, the great and proud old Italian, with all his sins
and faults, deserves something better than this formal and
false panegyric of a sentimental. Frenchman.

It was the glory of Italy and the vision of a great kingdom
which haunted him to the last. ‘My dear brother,” he
wrote to his nephew, “you do not understand why I weary
myself so when my life is spent. I do it to reunite our -
common country under a single master, and he ought to be per-

* Audin, vol. i. p. 384,

318 -AUDIN’S LEO X.

petually the Roman Pontiff. That which harasses me (cid che
mi strazia), is the thought of not being able to compass so
much for the glory of Italy as my heart conceives of. Oh, se
avesst venti anni di meno! But I fear that my pains and
toils have been thrown away.”* He died with dignity among
his Cardinals, almost in public. His words were calm, and
his directions precise. Because, he said, he had been a great
sinner, and had not governed the Churches as he ought, he
wished less expense to be used at his funeral; but there was
no weakness or quailing about the old man — all was spoken
with majesty — ‘* Latino sermone, graviter et pontificaliter, in
plural loquendo,” +

“ Vivant vigeantque juniores,” cried Cardinal Alfonzo
Petrucci, to the Roman people, when he announced to them
the election of Leo X. Three years afterwards, Cardinal
Petrucci found that even under Leo, the juniores could not
have all they wished. Money did not flow in fast enough,
his retinue was not sufficiently great; and he joined with
the oldest of the Cardinals, Riario, the former accomplice of
the Pazzi, and three others of the college, in a plot to destroy
the Pope by one of the most hideous devices that ever man
thought of ;— for which he was strangled in St. Angelo.
But his hearty viva now, expressed without doubt the feeling
of many at Rome. The age of roughness and war was gone
with old Pope Julius, and a new one was to begin under the
affable and accomplished young nobleman of Florence —a
brilliant age of refinement, of easy and splendid enjoyment,
of peace and indulgent mildness, Unspeakable were the
triumphs and rejoicings with which the new Pontificate was
inaugurated. The Reverend Father, Paride de Grassis,
Master of the Ceremonies, the usual reciter of such events,
was too fully occupied to be able to record much; but his
place was supplied by a certain Florentine doctor, Giovan
Giacomo Penni, a ragged but humorous man §, who surveyed

* Letter in a MS. journal of Paris de Grassis. -Audin, vol. i. p. 426.

T Paris de Grassis, in Raynald. ann. 1513. No.8.

} Raynald. vol. xii. ann. 1513. No. 15.

§ “At the end,” he writes, “came my magnificence. I alone cut a sorry

AUDIN’S LEO X. 319

the splendid show on foot, and has left us a full description.
It is given in Mr. Roscoe, and still more fully in M. Audin:
—there were crowds of Italian princes on palfreys, and eccle-
siastics on mules shod with gold, and still greater crowds of
their major-duomos and footmen, —velvet and plumes, jewels
and brocade, streamers and banners and white wands,
triumphal arches, allegories and statues, heathen and Christian,
—the Pope under a silk canopy, riding the white charger he
had mounted on the disastrous day of Ravenna*, — and last
of all, the ragged doctor, and the ragged populace in swarms
innumerable, shouting, “ Palle, Palle.”} No doubt a glorious
and dazzling spectacle, though a warm one, on an August
day in Rome. Mars fuit; est Pallas ; Cypria semper ero,”
said one of the inscriptions; and when the hasty effusions of
the people were over, the poets poured forth their more ela-

borate and prolonged compliments, and sung the returning age

of Astrea : —

“‘ Now comes the happier age, so long foretold,
When the true pastor guards his favoured fold ;
Soon shall the streams with honied sweetness flow,
And truth and justice fix their seats below :
Retiring Mars his dreadful anger cease,

And all the world be hushed in lasting peace.’ §

M. Audin has a singular propensity, while he shows a very
proper distrust of Italian epigrams, to believe in Italian con-
gratulatory inscriptions. The key to his view of Leo X. is
in fact one of these felicitations. A merchant of Florence
had written up on a triumphal arch,

“Leoni X. Restitutori Religionis, Pacts, et Artium.”
On this the author observes with some grandeur : —

“'The merchant had understood and divined Leo X. It was

figure, in the midst of all these notabilities : I resembled the mule of Zachariah.
I had hose on, one of them with holes in it, and the other torn: I was alone,
without lacqueys, without blazonries, and on foot.”— Quoted by Audin, i. 444.

* And on which he is painted in the “ Expulsion of Attila.”

+ The arms and cry of the Medici.

{ L. Parmenius Genesius. Transl. by Roscoe, Leo X. i. 337.

320 AUDIN’S LEO X.

exactly to these three great works that he was intending to devote
himself, when he mounted the throne. Protestantism has mis-
understood this Pontiff: it makes him only a man of art, to whom
it condescends to grant some praise. But it is in this triple life of
Pope, of Sovereign, and of lover of Art, that we mean to study
him. . . . Of the Catholic reader, binded, perhaps, by fatal pre-
judices, drawn from the writings of separatists, we ask but one
thing —to yield their belief to nothing but facts; facts are the
poetry of the historian.”— Audin, i. 461, 462.

The scene had certainly changed. Leo had none of the
old Pope’s fierce temper and love of fighting; he was not a
man to hang up votive cannon-balls in gratitude for his
escape in the batteries, or to ride into a captured town, sword
in hand, through the breach. He was like his wise father, a
man of peace. The contrast was great between the two
Popes:— between the old hard-featured, white-bearded
veteran, who had been tossed about the world for the greatest
part of a century, since, as a boy, he pulled his boat be-
tween Arbizuola and Genoa * — with his burning ambition,
and rude, stammering, hesitating tongue — imperious, in-
flexible, and like a volcano in his rage: — and on the other
hand, the sleek, smooth-faced nobleman of thirty-seven, with
his double chin, and fair white hand, and somewhat portly
person +, mirthful and courtly, with his musical voice, and
Florentine elegance of address — nursed from his childhood
in wealth and ease; whose only exile had been a pleasant
literary tour through Europe, and only hardship, to be for
a short time an honoured prisoner of war; so varied and
easy, and witty in conversation; so indulgent and conde-
scending, so open-handed, so conciliating, so frank and

* Audin, i. 362.

t M. Audin thus describes Raphael’s famous picture ~“ C’est bien la, cette
figure de Médicis, au coloris tout Vénitien ; ces chairs blanches et mates de tous
les hommes de sa race ; cet ceil myope, qui semble échapper de son orbite; ce
front d’une pureté limpide ; cette large téte, reposant sur deux épaules évasées ;
ces mains, un peu trop féminines, aux doigts ornés de camées antiques; et
dans tous les traits cet air d'angélique bonté, qui charmait tous qui avaient le
bonheur de lapprocher, avant méme qu’il edit pu les séduire par le doux son de
voix que les poétes de l’é¢poque comparaient a de la musique.” — Vol. ii. p. 551.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 321

affable, so gentle in temper. ‘ Pour le Pape,” says his
admiring biographer, who now feels himself beyond the
region of apology, and can expatiate in unqualified panegyric _
— pour le Pape, aimer est un besoin ; il dit a tout le monde,
je vous aime.”* All is kindness and reconciliation. Machia-
velli is let out from prison, and is soon to be consulted about
giving a constitution to Florence; the exiled rival of the
Medici, Pier Soderini, is benignantly invited to Rome; the’
kings of Europe, especially the young and clever king of
Englandf, are complimented with blended tenderness, dignity,
and address: even to the hostile King of France, stubborn
and insensible as he is, he sends messages of the most winning
persuasion, and moving affectiont;— the Pope’s letters, to
whomsoever he writes, breathe “in every line a fresh perfume
of charity.Ӥ Even the schismatical Cardinals of the Council
of Pisa, whom Julius, in his wrath, would have crushed to
the earth, are received with a kindness and a lenity, which
surprises themselves, and shocks old men like the Cardinal of
Sion, Matthew Schinner, tough, stern men of war, like their
late master. The offenders have to make an apology, which
is lightened by the “ benignant looks,” and “ gentle raillery,”
and “tender embrace” of the Pope||, and then receive back
their full honours, with only the light penance of a monthly
fast: their secretary also, who was a poet, and had lampooned
Pope Julius, “wept his fault, and besought forgiveness in
prose and verse;” and received from Julius’ placable and
literary successor at once his pardon and his forfeited Doctor-
ship. If Julius’ mission had been one of vengeance, Leo’s
was to restore and heal.

* Vol. i. 467. ft Audin, i. 465.

t Cf. Audin, i. 467, 468., with Roscoe, Leo X. i. 307. (Bohn’s ed.)

§ Vol. i. 467,

|| Vide Audin, ii. 6.—The sentiment of the scene is entirely due to M. Audin.,
His “doux regards,” and “ paroles de douceur,” &c. are not found in Paris de
Grassis, who gives a very business-like turn to the matter, and tells us of the
various shifts of the offenders, to preserve their dignity during their humiliation,
which the vigilant Master of the Ceremonies had some difficulty in disconcerting ;
“ que cum postea intellexisset Papa, risit mirabiliter cum Cardinalibus.”

q Audin, ii. 9.

> 2

322. AUDIN’S LEO xX.

Such was undoubtedly the course which Leo had traced
out for himself, and which gives occasion to such an exuber-
.ant flow of eulogy in his biographer. The restless and fiery
craving for Italian supremacy had gone out in Rome. But
if Leo was a Medici in his love of peace, he was a Medici
also in his love of family. This feeling, which actuated him
so strongly both as Cardinal and as Pope, is put by M. Audin
with some naiveté, and in rather a touching light. Speaking
of his life at Rome, when a Cardinal, he says: —

“ He did not, however, lose sicht of the interests of his family.
He had but one thought—the re-establishment of the Medici.
Lucretia, his sister, laboured with success at Florence at this
entirely filial work. She was a woman of exemplary character, of
a noble courage, whose words were as admirable as her conduct.
More than one [political] conversion was owing to her. . . . It
rested with the Cardinal to choose the moment to overthrow the
Gonfalonier Soderini. Meanwhile his conduct was skilful; no
one could dream that he took any interest in the affairs of Florence.
His friends were almost all painters, sculptors, musicians, artists, —
people who do not usually excite suspicion. Politics were banished
from his saloons ; and they discussed only, as at the court of Urbino,
the pre-eminence of painting or sculpture, the nature of the beau-
tiful, the rules of colouring and design. . . . . If he re-
ceived his partisans with warmth, he had no bitter word even for
his avowed adversaries ; at the farthest, he only allowed himself
in some of those pleasantries in which he was so accomplished a
master,— keen as a needle, but which grazed without tearing.
When he came to speak of Lorenzo, he was eloquent with alla
son’s enthusiasm. ‘Then he called up, as in a magnificent picture,
all those noble antique minds which his father had introduced to the
Italian world, that ‘pack of manuscript-hunters,’ whom he main-
tained at great expense in the East; the little honey-suckle bower,
beneath which Politian wrote his Sylva, &c. &c. When by chance
the conversation turned on his brother Piero the unhappy exile,
tears started in the Cardinal’s eyes, and in a voice broken by sobs,
he described the bitterness which the land of banishment has for
the patriot soul: then he recited some lines of Dante, while
his hearers pressed in emotion around him, and showed by silent
signs how they sympathised with his fraternal grief.”— Audin,
vol. i. 316 — 820.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 323

This is very amiable, and not at all unnatural in a noble-
man. Nor, as things were then, was it at all unnatural that
as Pope, and with increased power, he should pursue the
same object. It was not unnatural that he should act on his
wise father’s maxims, which we have quoted above, and re-
member, as his family foe, Sixtus, and his own patron,
Innocent, had done, that a Pope’s dignity and power is but a
life interest, and that the patronage which it confers is all
that he can secure for himself. It was not unnatural, there-
fore, that his first four cardinals should be his own relations
or adherents*; it was not unnatural, that after the precedent
of Alexander VI., he should have his uncle’s natural son
declared legitimate, in order to promote him to the purple +;
it was not unnatural that he should establish one of his
nephews in a Roman principality, by expelling — at once by
excommunication and cannon — the late Pope’s nephewf, its
previous occupant, who had extended his dominions in much
the same way; it was not unnatural that he should ally him-
self with great houses, and seek among the princesses and
dukedoms of France for wives and titles for his brother and
nephew§; it was not unnatural that he should use his oppor-
tunity to rivet fast the power of his family in Florence, and
to found in his father’s city a great and permanent dynasty.
In all this there was no innovation; if it was in the blood
of a Medici to do it, the fashion had gone on for many
years before him. But it scarcely falls in with theoretical
notions of a great Pope. And certainly these transactions
do not appear in such prominence in M. Audin’s narrative;

* Roscoe, Leo X. i. 325.

t Ib. p.326., and note 229. On evidence, attesting a promise of marriage,
“Leo declared Giulio de Medici ‘legitimum, et ex legitimo matrimonio inter
Julianum Medic. et Florettam Antonii natum fuisse et esse: eumque pro legi-
timo et ex legitimo matrimonio procreatum, in omnibus, et per omnia, pleno
jure, vere et non ficte, haberi et reputari,’ &c.”

{ Francesco-Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Roscoe, ii. 55. seq.

§ Giuliano, his brother, married the aunt of Francis L, and was called Duke
of Nemours; his nephew, Lorenzo, married another relative of the French royal
family, Madeleine de la Tour.

¥:2

324 AUDIN’S LEO X.

they come in only so far as they display Leo’s warmth of
heart. |
But though Leo had given up the grand and systematic
designs of Julius, it was not easy, in the then state of Italy,
to avoid war. Julius had boldly met and faced it: Leo’s
expedient for staving it off was certainly more ecclesiastical
and more useful to Christendom. For many a long year the
popes had been preaching to the kings, to give up their wars
and unite against the Turks. It was a wise and a Christian
part. The ideaand object of the crusade had indeed changed;
it was now a defensive war, to repel invasion ; and the object
was not the sepulchre of our Lord, but the capital of the
Turks in Europe. It was suggested rather by fear than by
religion. Still, it was for the good and for the union of
Christendom. Leo took up the crusade with zeal; and the
perseverance and ardour with which he strove to the last to
unite the princes of Europe against the Turks, form one of
the most prominent and the most creditable features in his
policy. AXgidius of Viterbo preached the Holy War at the
opening of the Council of Lateran, begun under Julius IL,
and continued under Leo. |

“ Aioidius,” says M. Audin, “ weeps, prays, implores the com-
passion of Christendom, and, like those who have gone before
him, prophesies the ruin of man and of humanity, if his voice be,
not heard. Julius II., as Nicholas V., Callixtus III., Pius II.,
Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., promises indulgences
—for he has no other treasures to give—to him who will take the
Cross against the Turk.”— Audin, vol. ii. 430.

M. Audin, as his manner is frequently, contrives to make his
praise read like very ill-natured irony; but this by the way.
With Leo, the Turkish war was undoubtedly a serious object;
and we have no reason for doubting that it was so, for its
own sake, and for the behoof of the Church. But it was
also his favourite expedient, though not a successful one,
for keeping the French and Germans out of Italy. And he
combined with this, when he found it likely to fail, the
less paternal device of setting them on, one against another,

AUDIN’S LEO X. 325

and joining each successively, as he found the balance re-
quired it.

The effect is perfectly astounding, when the reader comes
fresh from M. Audin’s pictures of Leo’s *‘ angelic sweetness ”
and ecclesiastical majesty, to the spectacle, exhibited in the
matter-of-fact pages of Roscoe, or even Raynaldus, of keen
intrigue, of imperturbable falsehood, and, when necessary, of
smiling and finished craft, modelled with the most fearful
accuracy on that of Cesar Borgia. Julius, in the prosecution
of his impossible, though brilliant dream, the independence of
Italy, broke treaties with the most consummate indifference:
but treachery was not his natural weapon. In the game of
profligate selfishness and dissimulation, then played so hotly
and deep among the potentates of Europe, Leo’s diplomacy
was pre-eminent for its daring deceitfulness; and with Leo
the ‘‘independence of Italy ”— the expulsion of the French
from Milan —was but another name for pensions, and prin-
cipalities, and dukedoms for the branches, legitimate or ille-
gitimate, of the house of the Medici.* Let any one turn
only to Roscoe’s account of the intrigues which were going
on just before Leo’s death; and if he wishes to see them in
more shameful detail, he may find them in Raynaldus.+
Through his smooth-tongued, agreeable, elegant envoys in
France, the Pope makes a treaty with France, to seize and
partition Naples; at the same moment, he is concluding a
treaty with Charles V. to drive the French out of Milan.
The following narrative from Roscoe, Leo’s admirer and very
lenient judge, recalls the tragedy of Sinigaglia : —

*“« The city of Perugia was governed by Gian-Paolo Baglioni, who,
if we may believe contemporary historians, was a monster of
iniquity and impiety ; but the cruelty with which he exercised his
usurped authority, rendered him no less an object of dread, than
his other crimes did of horror. Acting on those maxims which
he appears to have adopted on other occasions, and which, how-
ever fallacious, have found apologists, in subsequent times, Leo

* Vide Roscoe, no unfavourable judge, ii. 359. 380., and passim.
7 Raynald. ann. 1521. No. 77. seq.

xy 3

326 AUDIN’S LEO xX.’

_conceived that against such an offender, every species of treachery
was justifiable. Pretending, therefore, that he wished to consult
with Baglioni, on affairs of importance, he invited him to Rome;
but Baglioni, affecting to be indisposed, sent in his stead his son,
Gian-Paolo, for the purpose of discovering the intentions of the
Pope. Leo received the youth with the greatest kindness, and,
after detaining him some time, sent him back to his father, whom
he again requested to take a journey to Rome, and at the same
time transmitted to him a safe-conduct. The violation of such an
assurance was a crime, which even the guilty mind of Baglioni
could not conceive, and he accordingly hastened to Rome, where
he was admitted to the presence of the pontiff, and to the honour
of kissing his feet. On the following day, however, he was taken
into custody by Annibale Rangone, captain of the pontifical guard,
and subjected to the torture, where he is said to have disclosed
enormities, the perpetration of which could not have been expiated
by a thousand deaths. This treacherous and tyrannical act was
closed by the decapitation of Baglioni, in the castle of S. Angelo,
and by the Pope possessing himself of the states of Perugia.” *

On this whole side of Leo’s character, M. Audin maintains
a deep silence. Those last three years of his life, so crowded
with thickening and complicated intrigues, M. Audin passes
over in a chapter entitled “* Mort de Léon X.,” most of which
is taken up with the ceremonial of the emperor’s coronation,
or reflections on the benefit to the world of the “ sword of Pope
Julius,” or episodes about Matthew Schinner, and “ Don
Inigo” Loyola at the siege of Pampeluna. In this reserve
he las at least shown himself an artist, and judges rightly
of discordant effects. These “facts” of political history have
little “* poetry” in them, and do not suit that reverend and
guileless character in which Leo X. appears in his pages;
—like a “ pius Aineas,” or a French Télémaque,—in all the
amiability of insipid blamelessness.

His great object is, as he says, to show the religious side + -
of Leo’s character; and he appeals with great triumph to the
acts of the Council of Lateran to show how Leo anticipated
and remedied beforehand the complaints of the Reformers.

* Vol. i. Pref. p. xviii. t Roscoe, vol. ii, 355, 356.

2)

ay

AUDIN’S LEO X. 327

« There it is,” he says, ‘ that Leo shows himself in all his
Christian grandeur—at the Lateran, when he listens to the
groans of Catholic hearts, and, under his inspiration, the
Council promulgates those rules of wisdom, which have not
yet received their full appreciation, . ... We willanalyze its
acts, and then let us hear whether Leo was wanting to his
apostolical mission. Open the books of those who have
written the life of this Pope: they pass with their eyes shut
before these truly evangelical labours.”* And we have three
chapters, headed the *‘ Lateran Council,” but devoted not so
much to the analysis of its acts, as to very digressive re-
flections and anecdotes about Italian society at the time.

The Council of Lateran — whether under the “supreme
inspiration ” of the Pope, or of others — passed many excel-
lent and necessary regulations. It is a proof, if any were
wanted, that there was a strict party in the Church, whose
opinion in a religious assembly must be respected. The
** Reformatio a capite ad pedes” had been a demand made
even at the scandalous election of Innocent VIII.: it was
made again now, and the Pope, in the words of the minute
Paride de Grassis, “ subridens dizit, se velle aliquantulum co-
gitare.”+ But less could not be done, in order to keep up, as
was politically necessary, the character of the Council, than to
notice and condemn flagrant scandals. And when this was
done, and the rival conciliabulum of Pisa humbled, the Pope,
in spite of the wish of the majority{, dismissed the Council
and took matters into his own hands. And how were the
regulations of the Council enforced? The Pope, according
to M. Audin, had been very “ exigeant” towards the Cardi-
nals — very precise and peremptory, in banishing from their
tables and houses all luxury and display, in abridging plu-
ralities, and enforcing the performance of duties. Was any
Cardinal less wealthy or less profuse for the re-enactment of

these unheeded Church laws? Nor can it be said, that the

Pope could not enforce what he wished: he could excommu-
nicate the Duke of Urbino for keeping a city; he could threaten

* Vol. i. p. xvi. 7 In Raynald. ann. 1513. No. 57. .
} Raynald. ann. 1513. No. 16.

328 AUDIN’S LEO X.

to excommunicate the bookseller who should pirate Ariosto’s
works; could he not excommunicate a scandalous or dis-
obedient Cardinal ?

Raynaldi’s opinion of the benefits of the Council of Lateran
is, we think, worth more than M, Audin’s:— “ The attend-
ance of so small a number of Bishops,” he says, “ out of all
the great kingdoms which then were obedient to the Roman
Church, and in spite of the repeated summons of the Aposto-
lical See, is a proof of the laxity of those times, in which many
Bishops, casting aside the care of their Churches, plunged
into frivolous engagements, ensnared by the love of the
world. And so it was that the ungodly rage of even one
false monk was too much for them to master. The decrees
of this Council were finally, in great measure, without their
desired result.” *

And yet never was Pope more jealous of his prerogatives
than Leo at this time, when the Roman See appeared, not as
the representative and leader of the Church against the world,
but as an Italian principality, pushing for power. But the
manner in which he maintained this is characteristic. For
the acknowledgment of his authority in form, he was quite
willing to sell all that in former times Popes had fought
for. Kings might do what they pleased with the Church,
so that they did it as his delegates. Every one knows
of the fierce quarrel in the middle ages between Church and
State concerning the appointment to ecclesiastical offices: it
had not yet ceased. In France, under the Pragmatic Sanc-
tion, founded on the canons of the Council of Basle, the form
prevailed of election by Chapters, subject to the king’s re-
commendation and approval. The Popes had for a long time
protested and acted against this system, which ignored their
authority, and which, as they alleged, produced a very scan-

* “'Tam paucos numero presules, et tot amplissimis regnis, que tune Rom.
. Ecclesie parebant, toties ad concilium apostolico imperio vocatos venisse, indicat
eorum temporum socordiam, quibus plures Episcopi, abjecté Ecclesiarum cura,
terrenarumque rerum amore irretiti, inanibus curis se implicabant : quamobrem
nec unius Pseudomonachi impios furores coercuerunt. Hujus concilii decreta
optato fructu magna ex parte demum caruerunt.”— Raynald. ad An. 1517.
No. 1.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 329

dalous Clergy. The arrangement of this dispute was one of
the first achievements of Leo; and M. Audin considers it ‘‘a
work of wisdom on which the Papacy has good right to pride
itself.” But the days of contest for an ecclesiastical principle
were gone by. The Pope could fight only for cities and
provinces: in spiritual claims he displayed his wisdom by
bargaining and compromise. The victory of Marignan was
followed by the most courteous interchange of compliments
between Francis I. and Leo, which M. Audin details with
much satisfaction. The French King was full of devotion
for the Holy See. Nor was this mere show,” M. Audin
assures us; “ for Francis loved, as much as he admired, the
character of Leo” — and Leo, on his part, was not wanting
in one of those exquisite letters, which his, biographer extols
so much: —

“The Pope thought proper to thank Francis I. for these expres-
sions of devotion to the Holy See, in a letter, in which he brings
out, with infinite felicity of language, those fine qualities which
Heaven had bestowed on the young prince. Call it address if you
will, but it is address with which one cannot find fault. If he
alludes indirectly to the victory of Marignan, it is to ascribe the
glory of it to God, and to conjure him to use his triumph for the
welfare of Christendom. The letter finishes with most cordial
wishes —‘Adieu! aimez-nous. Long had it been since the Kings
of France had been accustomed to a language so full of affection:
Francis I. was quite the man to appreciate it.” — Audin, ii. 144, 145.

Francis proposed to treat in person; Leo “consented
with joy; for Rome had been demanding for more than a
century the abrogation of that Pragmatic Sanction, which
surrendered the election of Bishops to capricious and fatal in-
fluences.” — ‘Leo, in his work of reformation, could not
leave in force a form of election which left the sanctuary a
prey to such gross disorders.” *

The two potentates met at Bologna. That most fidgetty
and important of men, the Master of the Ceremonies, who
under different names attends the reigns of all the Popes of

* Vol. ii. pp. 145, 146.

‘330 AUDIN’S LEO X.

this period, —ever minute and vigilant, — has accurately
recorded the pomp and courtesy of the occasion. Paris de
Grassis — “* une belle ame,” says M. Audin, “ who did not,
like malignant Burchard, listen behind screens,” * is more than
usually diffuse in his account of what passed: —of the tri-
umphal procession at Florence, and the difficult question
of etiquette which arose; how the Pope’s umbrella was left
behind at Rome, and how the Pope solved the difficulty ; how
the city magistrates would not yield precedence to the
Cardinals, and how he, Paris, paid them off, by ‘appointing
that the Cardinals should not look up as they passed the
magistrates’ balcony ;”+ and how in his thoughtfulness, he had
ordered that no guns should be fired during the procession,
“on account of our horses, and the multitude of timid
mules: ” { how at Bologna, on the contrary, everything was
mismanaged, and the French Nobles were so ill-mannered,
that they would not listen to his directions; how he and
King Francis, whom he was introducing, were wedged in
the dense crowd which filled the Pope’s reception-chamber ;
and how at last, “ Rex et ego ascendimus ad osculum pacis ;”
with what care and felicity, at last, he marshalled the
ceremony, and what trouble and alarm he was in, lest the
Pope should forget himself, and take off his cap in the King’s
presence, as Alexander VI. did in the presence of Charles
VIII.: —a mistake, which Paris whispered to the Pope to
guard against; “and the Pope,” he adds, * observed the
caution faithfully, at least in my presence.” §

With two such men as Leo and Francis, there could be
nothing jarring or disagreeable. Leo was full of grace and

* Though on one occasion he informs us how he peeped through a key-hole,
to. see what the Pope and the Cardinals were doing. — Audin, ii. 205.

t “ Ego, subridens vanitatem hujusmodi, jussi ut remanerent in Palatio suo” —
then seeing that they did not rise up when the Cardinals went by their gallery,
“statui quod nullus Cardinalis transiens elevaret oculos ad palcum, sive taxillum
illud, ne contingeret eos videri, aut audire; et sic Vewillifer et Priores reman-
serunt in sua vanitate.” — Roscoe, vol, ii. App. 11.

{ —“ In nocte bombardis sine fine crepitantibus, quia ego in die sic ordinavi
propter equos nostros, et multitudinem mularum timidarum, ne propter siliceas
stratas in viis aliqui caderent,” — J bid,

§ Audin, ii. 155, 158.

AUDIN’S LEO X. $31

benignity; Francis profuse in his homage and devotion.
M. Audin can for once give full scope both to his national
and to his religious feelings.

“The Chancellor’s harangue is a manifesto in honour of the
Holy See, whose claims the orator sets forth to the love, not less
than to the gratitude, of the kingdom of France. It is at the
same time a profession of faith on the part of the Most Christian
king in the authority of the Head of the Church. It is noble to
hear the conqueror of Marignan exclaim, by his accredited
spokesman, ‘Most Holy Father,—the army of the Most Christian
king is yours —dispose of it at your pleasure—the forces of
France are yours — her standards are yours — Leo, behold before
you your obedient son —¢tuus e religione, tuus jure, tuus more
majorum, tuus consuetudine, tuus fide, tuus voluntate. French
words can but feebly give the force of the Latin phrase. ‘ This
devoted child,’ he adds, ‘is ready to defend on all occasions your
sacred rights, by his word or by his sword.’ ‘L’ombre de Jules II
(continues M. Audin,) gui sans doute assistait a cette entrevue,
dut tressaillir de joie.’ ””»—Audin, ii. 156, 157.

The shade of old Papa Giulio was more likely to have
smiled a very grim smile.—Leo, on his side, was not behind, in
his rivalry of amenity and compliment. He granted Francis
various spiritual and temporal favours, — the nomination to
some, and the suppression of other bishoprics, — the recall of
ecclesiastical censures on the French bishops, and a tithe to be
levied on the Church property in France * ; he distributed rich
jewels to the King, and to the “ beautiful and accomplished ”
ladies of the Court +,— and both parties broke up from the
conference with expressions of the warmest esteem.

The results of the negociations, concerning the Pragmatic
Sanction, are thus stated by Roscoe : —

“Tn agitating this important question, the object of Francis was
not only to obtain a formal concession of the jurisdiction exercised
-by the monarchs of France in the ecclesiastical affairs of the king-
dom, but to transfer to the crown some of those privileges which
had been claimed and exercised by the French clergy, and to vest
in the king a right to those presentations to ecclesiastical benefices,

* Audin, ii. 168. 1 Roscoe, ii. 39. -

332 AUDIN’S LEO x.

which had heretofore been claimed by the Roman see. On the
other hand, Leo was not less desirous to accomplish an object
which had frustrated the efforts of his predecessors, and to abolish
a code of laws which had been so long regarded as the opprobrium
of the Church; and although the pretensions of the king went
beyond the claims of the Pragmatic Sanction, yet, as the destruc-
tion of that system would overturn the independence of the French
clergy, and as the rights of the sovereign were to be exercised
under the express sanction of the holy see, and not in direct oppo-
sition to its authority, as had theretofore been done, the pontiff
willingly listened to the representations made to him by the king
on this head, and the discussion was soon terminated to their
mutual satisfaction. It was in consequence agreed that the Prag-
matic Sanction should be abolished in express terms, both by the
pope and the king, but that its chief provisions and immunities
should be revived and extended by a contemporary act, which
should invest the king with greater power in the ecclesiastical
concerns of the kingdom, than he had before enjoyed. Hence
arose the celebrated Concordat, by which the nomination to all
ecclesiastical benefices within the French dominions was expressly
granted to the king, with a reservation of the annates to the
Roman see; besides which, the right of deciding all controversies
respecting the affairs of the Church, excepting in some particular
instances, was conceded to the judicature of the sovereign without
appeal.” *

There may have been necessity in this; or Francis I. was
perhaps a safe person to trust with the appointment of
Bishops: but was there any great difference, in point of
dignity, or in substantial results, between Leo surrendering
to Francis, and Cranmer surrendering to Henry, what used
to be called the liberties of the Church ? f

In all that concerns the real interest of the Church, Leo’s
pontificate, as far as it depended on himself, was the complete
reign of * laissez-faire.” For himself, he kept up appearances
and was respectable; so say the fairest and most probable
accounts. He was frugal in his ordinary table, and attended

* Roscoe, Leo X. vol. ii. 41, 42.
+ The Pope reserved a veto; he thus saved his claims, but the king might
without any risk yield them in this point.

ee oe S.C

AUDIN’S LEO X. 333

to the distinction of fasting days. He gave no cause for
slander against his life. And he performed religious services
with dignity and impressiveness. ‘“ E’ bona persona:”—says
one of those sharp men, whom the Venetian Senate sent to
watch things at Rome, —‘“é ben religioso: —ma_ vuol
vivere.”* He liked to enjoy life himself, and was very good-
natured and indulgent to his friends. He had his brilliant
court, his artists and musicians, his circle of wit and talent,
his grand public works going on. He had his elegant country
villa, and his sumptuous town entertainments. He could
equally enjoy deep and intellectual conversation, or a contest
of banter and raillery. And he could enter with spirit into
even lighter diversions.} He hunted, hawked, and fished
with the zest and keenness of a country gentleman — it was
said, for the benefit of his health. In due moderation, he
played cards and chess ; — and he threw off in private, with
graceful ease, the reserve and ceremony which he knew so
well how to maintain in its proper place. At the risk of
shocking the correct Paris de Grassis, he did not mind going
into the country ¢, without his rochet, and, still worse, cum
stivalibus, sive ocreis —booted like a layman. Never was
there a Pope with less stiffness. Even the more vulgar kinds
of amusement were not without their interest for him. The
most temperate of men himself, he rivalled the luxury of the
Roman emperors in his banquets, that he might laugh at the
gluttony of his guests §, who voraciously devoured his “ pea-
cock sausages ;” he had his improvisatori, who drank and sang
alternately, and were sconced if their verses were bad; he had
his jester, — “‘ a mendicant friar, named Father Martinus, or
Marianus, who had the reputation of being able to swallow a
young pigeon whole, and despatched four hundred eggs, or
twenty capons, at a sitting.” |} And on one occasion Rome

* Quoted in Ranke, i. 71. T Roscoe, ii. 390,

¢ “ Et fuit cum stola, sed pejus, sine rochetto, et quod pessimum, cum stivalibus,
sive ocreis, in pedibus munitus,” — Roscoe, ii. 510.

§ Roscoe, ii. 180. 392. || Roscoe, ii. note 330.

334 AUDIN’S LEO X.

was astonished by a ponderous jest, which was deemed worthy
of a lasting record in the Vatican itself.

“But the most remarkable instance of folly and of absurdity is
preserved to us in the account given of Baraballo, abate of Gaeta,

one of that unfortunate but numerous class, who, without the

talent, possess the inclination for poetry, and who, like the rest of
his brethren, was perfectly insensible of his own defects. The
commendations ironically bestowed on his absurd productions had,
however, raised him to such importance in his own opinion, that
he thought himself another Petragca, and, like him, aspired to the
honour of being crowned in the Capitol. This afforded too favour-
able an opportunity for amusement to be neglected by the pontiff
and his attendants; and the festival of SS. Cosma and Damiano
was fixed upon as the day for gratifying the wishes of the poet.
In order to add to the ridicule, it was resolved, that the elephant,
which had lately been presented to the pontiff by the king of
Portugal, should be brought out and splendidly decorated, and
that Baraballo, arrayed in the triumphal habit of a Roman con-
queror, should mount it, and be conveyed in triumph to the Capitol.
The preparations on this occasion were highly splendid and ex-
pensive; but before they were completed, a deputation arrived

from Gaeta, where the relations of Baraballo held a respectable

rank, for the purpose of dissuading him from rendering himself an
object of laughter to the whole city. Baraballo, however, construed
their kindness into an illiberal jealousy of his good fortune, in
having obtained the favour of the pontiff, and dismissed them with
reproaches and anger. Having then recited several of his poems,
replete with the most ridiculous absurdities, until his hearers were
no longer able to maintain their gravity, he was brought to the
area of the Vatican, where he mounted the elephant, and proeeeded
in great state through the streets, amidst the confused noise of
drums and trumpets, and the acclamations of the populace. ‘I
should scarcely have believed,’ says Jovius, ‘unless I had myself
been present at the sight, that a man not less than sixty years of
age, of an honourable family, and venerable by his stature and his
grey hairs, should have suffered himself to be decorated with the
toga palmata and the latum clavum of the ancient Romans, and
bedecked with gold and purple, to be led in a triumphal procession
before the public, with the sound of trumpets.’ His triumph was
not, however, of long continuance. On arriving at the bridge

-

i ak

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AUDIN’S LEO X. 335

of S. Angelo, the sagacious quadruped refused to contribute any
longer to the ungenerous mirth of the crowd, and the hero of the
day was glad to descend in safety from his exalted station. ‘The
remembrance of this important incident was, by the orders of the
pope, perpetuated by a piece of sculpture in wood; which yet remains
upon the door of one of the inner.chambers in the Vatican.” *

Leo’s taste for these strange amusements is ascribed by
Mr. Roscoe to that ‘diversity and range of intellect which
distinguished him and many of his family.” No doubt they
were the amusements of the noblemen of the day: but
the nobleman in this case was a Pope. And Leo carried the
good nature and princely freedom, not, perhaps, ungraceful
in a nobleman, into the government of the Church. M.
Audin, with singular coolness, exhibits his generosity and
goodness when still Cardinal, by telling us how when Ariosto
begged for a dispensation of the “tria incompatibilia” —that is,
the power of “ keeping ecclesiastical benefices, without at once
taking orders,” — the Cardinal interested himself in the poet’s
cause, and gained him the favour.+ M. Audin seems to see
nothing but what is natural in this. He has a strong feeling
about the efforts of “beaux vers.” When Julius II.
threatened to throw Ariosto into the sea for his impertinence,
M. Audin remarks, “il est facheux que l’Arioste n’ait pas
addressé une supplique 4 Jules II.: le pape aimait les beaux
vers.” { And so he sees no difficulty in the principle on
which Leo went, in distributing the offices and preferments
of the Church. Leo scattered bishoprics and abbeys round
him, as if they were purses of ducats, on the poets and literati
who flocked to his court. His patronage of literature and the

* Roscoe, ii. 180, 181.

+ “ Mieux qu’un autre, le légat connaissait les péchés contre le Saint-Siége,
ou le poéte était tombé, et pourtant l’Arioste obtint ce qu'il demandait.”—
Vol. i. 329.

f= Audin, i. 361. M. Audin delights to record instances of doing penance in
elegies. “Postumo obtint son pardon au prix d’une élégie. Il est vrai que
Pélégie était écrite en beau Latin.” (ii. 331.) The schismatical secretary of the
Conciliabulum of Pisa no longer languishes when he hears of Leo’s election :—
“Car il est impossible que le souverain pontife ne pardonne pas au proscrit,
quand le proscrit se repent en vers Latins.” —(ii. 329.)

336 AUDIN’S LEO X;

arts means, among other things, that he filled the benefices of
the Church with men whose recommendation to him was
their wit, or their skill, or their classical learning. ‘ Andrea
Marone,” says Roscoe, “ having been desired, at a solemn
entertainment given by the Pontiff to several of the am-
bassadors of foreign powers, to deliver extempore verses on
the league which was then forming against the Turks; he
acquitted himself in such a manner as to obtain the applause
of the whole assembly, and the Pope immediately afterwards
presented him with a benefice in the diocese of Capua.”*
“ Colocci,” says M. Audin, “ used to read verses in the Roman
Academy, which were of a grace quite Catullian. Now the
poet had had the honour of addressing a copy of verses to his
Holiness. The reward was not long in coming — 4000 seudi,
which the author at once employed in buying new statues
and new marbles. It was money well bestowed. But Leo
X. did not consider himself quit towards Colocci: he gave
him the survivorship of the bishopric of Nocera.”+ ‘The
Cardinalship itself, the place of highest influence in the
Church, was disposed of in the same way, —to satisfy
private friendship — relationship — political claims ; given to
a handsome and courtly young man, ‘fou de gaieté,” ** who
would have been the first comic writer of his day, if Leo X.
had not thrown over the poet’s shoulders the Cardinal’s red
robe ” { — or to a royal child of seven years old ; — placed at
the disposal of a French captain as the price of a prisoner’s
life §;— promised, if Vasari is to be believed, to a great
painter, to liquidate an inconvenient debt. |

It was no remedy to the evil, thus produced, and is no
answer to the charges against Leo, that he had good sense
enough not to confine himself to such promotions — that he
picked out good and religious men like Sadolet, AXgidius of

* Roscoe, ii. 178. ¢ Audin, ii. 333.

} Bibbiena. Audin, i. 272. § Audin, ii, 545.

| “ Perché, avendo tanti anni servito la corte, ed essendo creditore di Leone di
buona somma, gli era stato dato indizio che alla fine della sala (di Costantino),
il Papa gli avrebbe dato un capello rosso.” Vasari (of Raphael, quoted by
Rumohr, iii, 126.)

AUDIN’S LEO X. 337

‘Viterbo, and Cajetan, for high offices, or for the honours of

the purple. He had good need, after the conspiracy of the
five Cardinals, three of whom had enjoyed a high reputation
for prudence and respectability *, to swamp the old conclave,
the leaven of the Roveres and Borgias, with a numerous
addition of men whom he could trust either from friendship,
interest, or worth. M. Audin strangely thinks it a high
merit in Leo, that, in a creation of thirty-one Cardinals in
one day, several of them should have been men who entirely
deserved the trust committed to them.

But M. Audin is a singular person. With the contem-
porary historians before him—the writers of Roman Catholic
Italy — he persists in telling us that we must believe that Leo
lived like “ the primitive Christians—that he prayed, fasted,
and was rude to himself” like them; and treats any other
belief as a prejudice arising from ‘des écrivains dissidents.”
In the same way he dwells with fond admiration and pleasure
on Leo’s intimates—on his artists and poets—on the high
and refined tone of society at Rome. Leo’s character, he
says, is reflected by his three friends, Sadolet, Bembo, and
Bibbiena. Tous trois sont des hommes de paix et de charité.”
He praises Sadolet, and justly:—he tells us indeed that
Bembo was a “ pagan, in literary feeling,” but he does not
tell us that Bembo, at the very time that he was Leo’s
secretary — writing the beautiful letters which M. Audin
dwells upon with such delight, and enjoying the money of
benefices+ without being in orders — was openly living with
a beautiful mistress }:—he does not bring Cardinal Bibbiena
before us as the glozing and plausible envoy, hunting for
still more preferment at the French Court, and never out of
debt. He does not tell us that Sadolet’s high character
could not prevent even a friend from coupling his name in
some bacchanalian verses, as a boon companion, with the

* Audin, ii, 202, 203.
t It is said, to his credit, that till he beeame Cardinal, under Paul IIL, he
declined benefices with cure of souls.
f Roscoe, ii. 114. Greswell’s Memoirs of Bembo, &c. p. 420.
§ Roscoe, ii. 192.
Z

338 AUDIN’S LEO X.

names of a jester, and of the Aspasia of the day.* He tells
us how literary Rome was— how it was the haven and haunt
of all that was elegant and intellectual. He does not tell us
that among these pensioners of Leo’s munificence was one
Pietro Aretino. +

We have only space to set side by side two passages from
M. Audin and Mr. Roscoe on this subject.

“Thanks to the daily intercourse of minds,” says M. Audin,
“humanity insensibly changes its nature, and ceases to wrangle.
Satire disappears from bookx . . . irony lives indeed, but
it is delicate, playful, and no longer merciless, as of old at
Naples and Florence. Berni and his numerous disciples amuse
themselves at the expense of humanity, never at the expense
of the man. . . The life of the man of letters—it is a remark
which has not escaped Roscoe—is a fair and decent one: his
writings are not disgraced by insolence or impurity. Should
you ever desire to make acquaintance with the poets whom
Leo used to receive at the Vatican, you would be astonished at
the chastity of style which reigns in their writings. 'To please
their illustrious master, they sing all that he loves with passion —
peace in the city, peace at the hearth, peace in the fields. There
is not one of them—and their number is very great—who has not
in his collection some beautiful hymn to God or the Virgin. When
men take for their subject our Lord at Golgotha, or Mary at
Bethlehem, it is that the age is religious. It is beyond dispute that
a revolution was brought about in the manners of Roman society
after Leo mounted the papal throne.” f

No doubt Politian’s ferocious style of lampooning had gone
out of fashion in the much more civilised days of Leo.§ But
impurity need not be that of the pot-house. And as M.
Audin has specified *‘ Berni and his numerous disciples,” as
favourites of Leo||, and men who did honour to his patron-
age, we will quote, first what he says of them himself, and
then Mr. Roscoe’s account.

“Berni,” says M. Audin, “taught the man of letters to put
himself into a passion, without offending against the catechism, or

* Roscoe, ii. 486. t Roscoe, ii. 273. ¢ Audin, ii. pp. 333, 334.
§ Roscoe, ii. 173. || Audin, ii. 573.

AUDIN’S: LEO X. 339

against civility. . . . He formed a school at Rome. Gio. della
Casa, Angelo Firenzuola, Fr. Molza, Piero Nelli, have trodden in
his steps, but they have not eclipsed his memory. Like all imi-
tators, they have exaggerated the defects of their model. The
master is very free; the disciple has become libertine. Berni
himself gave in later days, in his Capitoli, sad specimens of an
unbridled.mind: he was old then.”*

We now give Roscoe’s account of Berni himself, and
Berni’s writings ; —

“ Having now taken the ecclesiastical habit, Berni was oc-
casionally employed by Ghiberti in missions to his more distant
benefices, and frequently accompanied the Bishop on his journeys
through Italy; but the fatigues of business, and the habits of regu-
larity were irksome to him, and he sought for relief in the society
of the Muses, who generally brought both Bacchus and Venus in
their train. Being at length preferred to the affluent and easy
station of a canon of Florence, he retired to that city, where he
was much more distinguished by the eccentricity of his conduct
and the pungency of his satire, than by the regularity of his life.
Such was his aversion to a state of servitude, if we may credit the
humorous passages in which he has professedly drawn his own
character, that he no sooner received a command from his patron,
than he felt an invincible reluctance to comply with it. He
delighted not in music, dancing, gaming, or hunting; his sole
pleasure consisting in having nothing to do, and stretching himself
at full length in his bed. His chief exercise was to eat a little
and then compose himself to sleep, and after sleep to eat again.
He observed neither days nor almanacks; and his servants were
ordered to bring him no news, whether good or bad. These ex-
aggerations, among many others yet more extravagant, may at
least be admitted as a proof that Berni was fond of his ease, and
that his writings were rather the amusement of his leisure than a
serious occupation.

* * * * * %* *

_ “Perhaps the most characteristic idea of the writings of Berni
and his associates, may be obtained by considering them to be, in
lively and unaffected verse, what the works of Rabelais, of Cer-
vantes, and of Sterne, are in prose. It is, however, much to be

* Audin, ii, 303, 304.

zZ 2

340 AUDIN’S LEO X.

regretted that a great part of these compositions are remarkable
for a degree of indecency and profaneness, which requires all the
wit and elegance of the original, and perhaps more sympathy with
such subjects than an untainted mind should feel, to prevent their
being read without disapprobation or disgust. It ean, therefore,
occasion no surprise, that these pieces, many of which have been
written by men of high ecclesiastical rank, should have brought
some degree of disgrace upon the Roman Church.” *

And in the midst of this whirl of pleasure, and play of wit,
and splendour of art, and profusion of riches, and heady ex-
citement of intellectual achievement, and dizzy intrigues of
state, the Reformation broke out in the rude and prea
north, lands which the brilliant and refined Italians thought
of with disgust, as the abode of coarseness and barbarism —

** Quaque non notos populos et urbes
Damnat eternis Helice pruinis ”—

and despised the intelligence of their inhabitants, as much as
they dreaded their fierceness.

Leo never thoroughly understood and realised the serious-
ness of the crisis — he had more pressing cares, and he did not
live long enough. He had begun by reforming the Church
with a Council of Lateran. And he met Luther with diplo-
macy, and a Bull drawn up in classical Latin—*a picture,”
adds M. Audin, “like one of Michael Angelo’s.”

Leo’s had been a successful and fortunate life, above that
of most men. Born to nobility and wealth, and, before he
could speak or remember, a dignitary of the Church, his
course had been a rapid and a splendid one to the highest
place in Christendom. Little had ever crossed him; and with
a cheerful and even temper, and ample talent to enjoy to the
full his prosperous lot, he viewed himself as a chosen child of
fortune. ‘It seems to have been his intention,” says one of
his biographers, ‘‘ to pass his time cheerfully, and to secure
himself against trouble and anxiety by all the means in his
power.” The almost uninterrupted good fortune of his

* Vol. ii. 129, 130.

AUDIN’S LEO X. 341

career, throws into melancholy relief its dark and abrupt and
mysterious close. At the moment when he thought that his
triumph over the French was beginning, without any warning
or serious sickness, he suddenly sunk and died. All is strange
and unaccountable about his death: nothing was certainly
known of his last days of illness; but his attendant, Paris de
Grassis, believed that he was poisoned.

And now we take leave of M. Audin’s very ambitious, and,
we must callit, very impudent book. The Reformation may
be very vulnerable — the system which it assailed has no doubt
those claims for equitable judgment which all great systems
may justly urge: it has further its good side, however such
insincerity as M. Audin’s may tempt us to forget or doubt it.
Luther disbelieved the dormant life of the Roman Church,
and events showed that he was wrong. But if ever despon-
dency or hostility could justify themselves by broad and
palpable appearances — if ever great and leading signs
might influence and guide abstract thought — if ever
abhorrence of what is specious and hollow, and _ instinc-
tive presages of its doom, might turn the balance in theo-
logical difficulties—if ever an assailant might indignantly
override all defence and palliation as the mere plausibilities
of selfishness, by pointing to the significant events of the time
—this advantage of position and argument belonged to
Luther. If it be enough to warrant despair, that a system
seems to be breaking up under the weight of scandals
—that the powers, which alone could restore and reform,
are in hands which will not use them—that the whole
machine is so entangled and clogged, so inextricably linked
to the worldliness and selfishness of great classes of men,
that to disengage it, is to endanger society,—if to find that
attempts at improvement are checked and fail, that energy
slackens, and self-devotion relapses, and all strength and hope
sink in an apparently final exhaustion,—if to see in the
highest and holiest places not merely dull laziness, or easy
respectability, but the foulest and most unblushing vice, —
if to see Church offices turned into mere prizes of this world,
Church interests put aside for the convenience of kings, the

Z3

342 AUDIN’S LEO X.

dignity of the Church lost in her low-minded and worldly
servants, — if to see primitive ideas of strictness forgotten
in bustle and refinement and pleasure, the revival of them
suspected, perhaps tried unwisely, and miscarrying, —if to
see a system so deranged, that a man like Savonarola, who
might have been a saint, is driven to be a fanatic and a dema-
gogue,—-if all this is enough to excuse alienation of minds
from such a system, disbelief in its divinity, indifference to
the good that is in it, separation from its communion—this
justification for his revolt Luther could certainly claim.

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FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.*

[Juxy, 1848.]

WE are now half through this year of revolutions, and their
novelty is wearing off. We are becoming familiar with a
state of things which, compared with all that we have hitherto
known, is a reversed order of the world. The game, indeed,
is far from being played out. We seldom look in vain in
the morning for those headings in large capitals, characteristic
of the newspaper files of 1848, which imply another throne
shaken, or another perilous encounter between rival elements
of society. But now, every new event of this kind, however
exciting in itself, is perfectly natural, and belongs to the
established course of things. Chaos is, for the present, the
recognised condition of Europe. Conflict, convulsion, and
overthrow belong to that condition. ‘They affect us only
like any other phenomena with which life has made us ac-
quainted. Not so those astounding and incredible tidings,
which used to come in the gloomy mornings of February and
March, more trying to our faith even than to our fears or
hopes, like the shocks of an earthquake to persons who have
never felt one. We, the children of tranquil monotony and
unbroken peace, gravely doubting whether war was hence-
forth a possibility, found ourselves ina moment the contempo-
raries of a revolution, in very deed accepting the traditions of
1793, and not hesitating before any of its consequences. We
found ourselves at once a historical generation. But the
bewilderment attending this novel transformation has worn
off. We have recovered our breath, and can look back and
about us.

But, though the shock of surprise is over, the scene is still

* Narrative of the French Revolution of 1848. By W.K. Kerry. London:
Chapman and Hall. 1848.
Z4

344 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

too confused, and the drama not sufficiently gone forward, to
admit of any very satisfactory or comprehensive criticism.
All seems broken up, floating apparently at random, the
sport of a day’s accidents, wanting informing principle within
to shape and guide it, or energy and power without to control
it. What order of things will arise from this wreck? Which
are the really powerful and prevailing tendencies among the
many which have shown themselves? Is this the beginning
of a state of society new to Europe ?—or one ina chain of
steps and series of conflicts? Or is it a dream or hour's
madness? Is the spell of old opinions and old associations
finally broken? Have the old ideas of rank and privilege, of
property and hereditary right, received their death-wound ?
The immemorial unquestioned data of social arrangements —
are they going to make way for a new political economy, a
new public opinion and social creed, —-or will they return to
their strength again as they have ever done before? Are we
really driven down to first principles,—or do we only seem
to beso? Is it possible that this time next year may find
old Europe again settled as of old, — somewhat shaken by the
rude hand of democracy, but fast subsiding to-its old tran-
quillity ; or will it be in the thick of that pitiless and inter-
necine “ war of principles,” which a great statesman is said to
have foreboded? Are the great problems of industry about
to be solved? Is the condition of the labouring classes likely
to receive a fundamental change, — or is all that is propounded
and promised them a fatal and hopeless rebellion against the
strong laws of Providence? Is there really in modern Re-
publicanism the self-devotion, the self-denial, the justice, the
kindness, the hatred of unfairness and.corruption, the insight,
and the energy, which it has so largely promised? Does
society stand on the edge of the abyss?—on the border of the
promised land ?— or is it entering the wilderness? or have we
exaggerated at once the forces, the talent, the perils, and the
prospects of the revolution? Is it, after all, but “the
situation ? ” ;

The great revolution, and its foreign progeny, are still too
young for their history to be written. They have not yet

FRENCH REVOLUTION oF 1848. $45.

taken shape; they are simply monstrous, though, no doubt,
they will grow into something —some new type, or, possibly,
some very old one. Nor would any wise man, who cared
about his character, stake much of it on any but the most
general prophecies about the future. We, who cannot wait
for the issues of things, but must speak when our turn comes
round, must not encroach on the business of the historian,
much less have we any inclination to try our chance in
forecasting. The obvious and palpable characteristics of this
last strange birth of time are all that come within our sphere
to notice: but they are worth noticing.

The French revolution is the centre of the system of
European revolution, and we shall confine ourselves to it.
Paris is the heart and brain of Europe, which moves when
Paris moves, and thinks what Paris thinks—so cry all
Parisians and Frenchmen, journalists, poets, tragedy-writers
and comedy-writers, philosophers, historians and preachers,
novelists and fabricants, deputies and the great family of
commis-voyageurs —Guizot and Thiers, Michelet and De
Maistre, Lamennais and Lacordaire, and stern little M.
Alexis Pupin, the crop-haired, bullet-headed, black-bearded,
full-waisted, short man, who travels with ddjouterte for the
Maison Flamm of Marseilles, and who lays down the law
peremptorily on cookery questions, politics, and taste, at every
table @héte from Frankfort to the Fair of Sinigaglia, They
make so much noise that we are inclined to disbelieve: never-
theless there is some truth in what they say. France popu-
larizes, and communicates; easily, elegantly. Her writers seem
to think that this is the whole of the civilising process; but,
though this is one of their many simplicities, a people who
have this gift cannot be without vast influence. Again, they
are eloquent in descanting on the sacrifices which France has
made to redeem the nations ; — but though this, too, is a hyper-
bole, such as none but Frenchmen would venture on, it is
undeniable that they have shown those who are so disposed the
way to overturn governments. Glib, excitable, frowning M.
Alexis Pupin, the oracle of tables d’héte, is unquestionably a
ridiculous little man; yet, to use the French formula, Pupin

346 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

represents a principle. The solemn German burghers vilipend
him, and his subtle Italian friends secretly mock him; they
have their own way of thinking and acting, quite independent
of Pupin and his country ; but (besides that they find the
bijouterie Flamm to their taste) Pupin, in conversation, is at
a loss on no subject; he discourses with fluency, spirit, and
assurance, with breadth of view, yet with apparent precision ;
bold and rapid in inference, and, where ignorant, inventive.
Further, however his local criticisms may be accepted, he is
an authority worth listening,to in Frankfort about Siniga-
glia, and at Sinigaglia about Frankfort; and at both, about
the mysteries of St. Petersburgh, and the monster system of
the English aristocracy: he is sure to be ingenious, and plau-
sible, and amusing, even where his lying becomes too bold.
Pupin, too, is a hater of despotisms: his opinions are strong,
and his sentiments generous, whenever the question of
oppressed nationalities turns up: and when foreign patriots
despair, he cheers their fainting spirits by the example of
France, and the assurance of its warm sympathy. So that
M. Pupin, besides the dzjouterie business, also keeps up liberal
enthusiasm, and dispenses information pleasantly: and what
M. Pupin does in his small measure, is done in a large way
by the French nation in general, and specially by the writers
and speakers of the city of Paris.

The doings and fortunes of the French revolution, though
with one exception—the doings and fortunes of the Roman
see—-the most absorbing spectacle in Europe, are far from
being the only one worthy of attention and study. Its history
does not virtually comprehend that of the German or Italian
movements, nor are these mere copies of the 24th February.
But the French revolution is far the most advanced of all the
others, the most systematic, the most uncompromising and
venturesome; the type of revolution, though not the actual
model. While the Italians are aiming at national independ-
ence, and the Germans at national unity, the idea of the
French revolution is an entire recasting of society, not in
France only, but throughout the civilised world. This is the
idea, at least, which its leaders profess, and which will hence-

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 347

forth become the keynote and highest mark of revolutionary
action throughout Europe. We shall therefore devote what
space we have to it, and review briefly the state of things
which preceded it, and its past and present aspects.

A strong government and a long one, a fortunate and a
rich one, had not been able, even with the aid of peace and
increasing prosperity, to bring about and secure the harmony
of French society. It had its own way more than any
government not avowedly despotic. There was no want of
ability among its statesmen, no want of choice among those
who might be its instruments, no want of devotion in those
who were chosen, no want of purpose and will in its chief.
Its influence extended wide and deep through the mass of
French society, knitting and tying it together by a tissue
and network of mutually connected interests, joined to, and
directly dependent on, its central power, as the nerves are on
the brain. It gave opportunity and encouragement for what
was disturbed to settle, and for what was dislocated and frac-
tured to unite; it gave time, it appeared to give a solid basis,
and confidence for the future. It used to be said that every
hour of peace gained to France, was a further pledge of
future tranquillity. This government secured seventeen
years of peace. It had no overwhelming difficulties to
struggle with, no want of money, no discontented army, no
universal famine; nothing more than the ordinary trials of
statesmen. And there was a minister in power who appeared
equal to far greater emergencies than any that threatened ;
. the very personification of good sense and of moderate and
conciliating policy, never shrinking from the call of duty,
yet as cool and philosophical as if he had been tess bold and
firm ; of the simplest and austerest manners, which yet in
public life did not make him inopportunely nice, and allowed
him a large range in the use of political instruments; bent
with passionate devotion, and unscrupulous only in this cause,
on building up on deep and stable foundations, and at what-
ever cost, the fabric of French society; patient of a cor-
ruption which he scorned, and of a stigma on himself, so

348 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.-

that he might not lose that last chance for his countrymen,

repose —
“Si Pergama dextra

Defendi possent, etiam hic defensa fuissent.”

But two deadly symptoms, which make revolution a’

continual possibility, had never disappeared from French
society since the first revolution; a feverish, uncontrollable,
‘sudden excitability, and a cynical énsouciance for their existing
political institutions of whatever sort. Whether from their
own fault or that of the institutions, they never have become
attached to them. ‘The instincts and customs of loyal subordi-
nation have perished among them. They have never known
what it is to value and respect while they find fault. A
sneering or dogged obedience, or the acquiescence of perfect
indifference, ee marked the general temper of the French
people, towards the various political arrangements, under
which they have found themselves for the last half century.
Enthusiasm they have shown in abundance, but never,
except in the field of battle, trust. We are not going into
the causes of this; but it is obvious that it has gone along
with great social disorder. The dark pictures that we have
lately seen of French society, drawn by Frenchmen, and
Frenchmen of very opposite parties, and which taken by
themselves appear exaggerations, receive confirmation from
recent events, of which they offer a key. Exaggerations
probably they are, for the writers we allude to are given to
exaggeration; but they cannot be wholly false, and they
point exactly to those evils which we should expect to precede
a great convulsion, for which no very sufficient cause appears
on the surface. They speak of the way in which French
society has separated itself from the past; of the traditions,
and recollections, and sentiments of old days which have been
violently broken off; of the absence of any instincts or habits
powerful enough to replace them; of the alarming way in
which authority has lost its prestige, and law all that is
sacrosanct and inviolable; of the disunion, isolation, mutual
jealousy of classes; of the failing hearts of the peasantry,
the viciousness of the artisans, the feebleness, decay, stag-

ee.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 349

nation and incapacity of the easy inhabitants of the towns;
of the weakening of the family tie; of the loss of influence
among the clergy; of the savage spirit which any attempt to
regain it calls up; of the light and reckless scepticism, or the
selfish and sulky indifference, which is shown, not only in
respect of religion, but morality. Their authors complain of
dissatisfaction and misunderstanding, a fretful restlessness,
vexing and wearying men, they scarcely know why ;— and
finish their description with the worst feature of the whole, —
a corruption which is not satisfied with its own excesses, but
morbidly seeks to parade itself, and uses the brilliant style
and cosmopolite press of France to publish its abominations
and its miseries to the whole of Europe.

These social evils are not confined to France; but in France
their poison is inflamed, in proportion to the fiery vehemence
of French temper, incapable of balancing and enduring —
in proportion to its exaggeration of sentiment, its want of
reserve and patience. Making allowances for this, may we
not say that such views as the following have been amply con-
firmed ; or, at least, that they explain with painful probability
the strange events we have seen. ‘The bitterness with which
evils are published and commented on may help forward their
effects, but can hardly of itself produce those effects.

We will take some statements of a French clergyman
writing in 1845.* The revival of religion in France, of which
a good deal has been said, and the change of tone towards it,
from mockery to respect, he treats as a mere superficial
symptom, marking, indeed, a partial reaction from past
madness, and suggesting hope, but in itself worth little.

After saying that there never was a time when religion
seemed so much to interest the world, and to claim the homage
even of its enemies, he proceeds : —

“You who speak of religion, who seem to humble yourselves at
its feet and devote to it your heart, your soul, your deceitful lips,
show us your religious acts, Acts, alas! you have none to show.

* De l’Etat et des Besoins Religieux et Moraux des Populations en France :
par M. PAbbé J. Bonnetat. Paris, 1845,

350 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

What, then, do you mean by religion? I know not; probably you
know not yourselves. . .... Who can venture to deny that, in
the present day, every one has two characters? There is the
outward and the inward man; each has his show side, and his
concealed side: each is at once the man of the drawing-room, with
his honeyed words, his correct and guarded conversation, and also
the man of the saloons, with his deeds of shame and ignominy,
often of infamy. ‘Their lips and their hearts have each a set of
doctrines of their own. Hence the change of our society into a
vast theatre where each plays his part as best he may; hence this
understanding, each to. be decgived; hence the necessity of this
accomplished and faultless hypocrisy ; hence this woeful scepticism
which extends through every thing, so that men no longer believe
anything, not even virtue ; hence this false position, this universal
uneasiness, these vague and sad forebodings of suffering humanity,
balancing between the fear of impending dissolution, and the
yearning after speedy regeneration ; hence this language of etiquette
and conventionality, which all mock at in their hearts, and which
offers such a contrast to their actions.” —Pp. 3, 4.

Yet in this arrest of open and rampant infidelity, he sees
some hope; a hesitation in the path of destruction. But this
is only in the higher classes. If there seems a chance of
improvement in them, he sees nothing but increasing de-
cradation in the lower, a degradation getting deeper in a far
more rapid proportion than the utmost improvement in the
higher. For example, in the matter of religion: —

“The people—as it is the way to designate the laborious
classes —have preserved nought of their fathers’ faith and virtues
but the remembrance of them. .... Except a small number of
families, on whom the fatal cause which produces all these evils has
not yet acted, or acted but slightly, the remainder presents only
the fearful aspect of a revolting degradation, — a degradation the
more amazing, as in no age to which we can carry back our
thoughts, has the ease and material prosperity of the people been so
great. * * * * * * *

“T am not exaggerating. There is, at this day, in general, in
any given district, on an average, almost a tenth of the men, who
do not believe in God, and who glory in this tremendous unbelief.
About half of the remaining nine-tenths, and a great number of
the women, do not believe in the immortality of the soul, and make

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 351

no concealment of it. Let me give an idea of their language ; one
set of them say,—‘For my part, I only know him who gives us
light—God means the sun: there is no other. Is it not the sun
who causes rain and fair weather; who makes the fruit of the
ground to spring? If there be a God, as people say, why does he
not show himself, and let us see him?’ The others say, — ‘ People
tell us that after death there is a soul: what is a soul? once dead,
we are dead for good and all.’ And all these misbelievers, these
small professors of free-thinking, are usually grossly ignorant and
stupid, and without exception, the most abandoned and vicious
people of the place. A proof of their ignorance and stupidity is
that, believing nothing, they are yet most superstitious. .. . The
other four-tenths have faith, but, for the most part, a dead faith,
or a faith simply negative: they believe, in the sense of denying
nothing: they want, as compared with the others, the science of
misbelief; they deny nothing, and affirm nothing. Their ignorance
is extreme; they know nothing of their own hearts, of the faith,
of religion. They are preeminently indifferentists ; such is the
least bad we have to show in a religious point of view. . . . Their
breaches of the rules of discipline, of the commandments of God
and the Church, are numerous, almost of daily occurrence. Those
even who are considered religious for the most part pay no at-
tention to them; the sacraments are neglected, the churches
deserted, and the streets of Sion mourn because her children come
not to her solemnities. They have their children baptized, they
make them receive their first communion, here they stop; after
this no more talk of religious acts, of attendance on the sacraments,
except when they marry, and, in this case, it is more a matter of
custom than of religion.

“ As to the divine and salutary institution of the Sunday, it no
longer attains its end. In the towns the working and trading
classes scarcely ever put foot in the churches. In the country,
about a tenth of the people never come, viz. those who do not
believe in God, the worshippers of the sun; half the other nine-
tenths come four or five times a year, or the more solemn festivals ;
the rest more frequently, but very irregularly. One Sunday they
attend the parish services, the next they work in the fields or at
home, or do nothing, but any how do not come to church. The
young people, especially after twelve or fourteen, when they
usually receive their first communion, leave off coming in a great
many districts, except it may be three or four times a-year.

352 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

“Tt is fair to say there are exceptions. We have still in France
a number of parishes in the country which have preserved the faith
and simplicity of their fathers; to whatever cause this be owing,
the fact is certain. But the number of these localities is small
compared with those which have been swept away by the torrent,
and even ¢hey begin to feel the first touch of the contagion of the
age. In those where irreligion and carelessness reign supreme,
some good and sensible persons have had the happiness to preserve
a spark of piety. . . . . But what happens? They are unceasingly
the objects of a regular persecution: let them but attend church
with tolerable regularity, let them but fulfil some of the practical
duties of religion,—this is enough: the rest get up a cry against
them, make them the subject of their coarse jests, their insolent
sneers, and contemptuous slights. . . .”—Pp. 7—14.

The parish church, he says, is empty; the only chance
which the clergy have of bringing them back to religious
ways, the pulpit, is taken from them by the desecration of
Sunday, with respect to which all feelings of sacredness are
extinguished.

He further complains of the great social and domestic
disorder among the poorer classes of the towns and villages ;— t=
“ Aujourd hui il ny a plus de famille.”

“In the greater number of married people, the profoundest
indifference takes the place of the sacred friendship which ought
to unite them. . . . From indifference to hatred is but a step—a
step which is often passed. . . . When they speak to one another,
even in their moments of good humour, it is with that tone of
carelessness which would wound the least susceptible heart; but
their usual tone is one of discontent, dislike, contempt. When
they hear good people speaking the language of the heart, they call
it sentiment and humbug, and would blush to imitate them. ... -
When the labourer returns home at night, worn out with fatigue,
and his brow loaded with sadness and anxiety, not a word, not a
look, much less a smile, to welcome him to the threshold of his
silent hovel. . . . . Speak to them of the bad conduct which they
allow in their children, they will answer, ‘Oh, nowadays, children
are masters, they must be left to themselves; if they tried to force
them, they would lose their help.’ . Nothing do they fear so
much as hearing their children aalicd stupid. . . . Their sons
might be very fiends, so that they were caosuee fellows’ —

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 353.

degourdis ; this is the term of their ambition— the manners learnt
in the pot-house. . . . Their daughters are brought up like
their boys, free as they, going where they will, coming home at
night when they will, with a language of their own. ‘Amuse
yourselves,’ they say, ‘while you are young; you will have other
things to think of when you are married :’ never a word to them
of religion or duty. When their boys have gone to their first
communion, they never set foot again in church; their girls often
spend the time of service, of vespers specially, in houses where the
boys meet together. And the parents never ask their children,
‘Were you at mass? where were you at vespers? why were you not
at church?’ . . . . By their own mockery of religion, its duties,
ceremonies, and doctrines, their own gross language and gross
actions, and their daily general bad example, they are the first
corrupters of their children.” *

But what, after all, is perhaps the most alarming symptom, is
the way in which religion itself cannot act without breaking
up households, chilling affection, estranging hearts. The
fact is witnessed by its friends and foes. The priest and the
priest-hater speak almost in the same language :—it is “ la
question la plus brilante de Pépoque.”

“* We may speak,” says the latter, “to our mothers, wives,
and daughters on any of the subjects which form the topics
of our conversation with indifferent persons, such as business,
or the news of the day; but never on subjects that affect
_ the heart and moral life, such as eternity, religion, the soul,
and God.

‘Choose, for instance, the moment when we naturally
feel disposed to meditate with our family in common thought,
some quiet evening at the family table; venture even there,
in your own house, at your own fire-side, to say one word
about these things ; your mother sadly shakes her head, your
wife contradicts you, your daughter, by her very silence,
shows her disapprobation. They are on one side of the
table, and you on the other —and alone. One would think
that in the midst of them, and opposite you, was seated an
invisible personage to contradict whatever you may say. T

* Pp. 43. 46, 47, 22—28,

_ t Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families, pref. p. xxix.
AA

354 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

“Oh, shame of our times,” says the clergyman, “in which
it is possible to say what follows: — that at the family hearth
Faith is still seated in the person of a wife, but at her side
is Unbelief, sitting there in the person of the husband, and
there is disunion in the household: that, in order to put a
stop to this permanent state of warfare and intestine troubles,
to gain that peace and union which is to be prized before all
things, it is necessary to withdraw the wife from the influ-
ence of that religion which makes her what she is, which
gives her feelings and belief different from her husband’s,
and thus to expel faith, and consequently virtue, from her
home.” *

Side by side with this view of French society from the
pen of a priest, a common one among religious people in
France, set the statements of their extreme opponents, such
as Lamennais or Michelet. Whether exaggerated or not,
they bear testimony to the same disorganisation, so to speak,
of society —the dull uneasy discontent and jealousy, which
work in secret under the dazzling veil of the most refined
civilisation: the bitter sense of wrong, the isolation and
fear, the absence of loyalty from the citizen to the law, of
trust from the subordinate to the superior. Take, for
example, Michelet’s book, ‘‘ Du Peuple,” published in 1846.
He begins by protesting formally against the unfair and
exaggerated pictures of French social disorders, which
Frenchmen have held up to the scorn of the world: ‘* We
are not so bad as the world thinks us,” he says; “ in the
excess of our frankness, we have accused ourselves, but
our self-condemnation has been extreme.” And yet he
writes his book on purpose to shame his countrymen into
union and patriotism, by a detail of the misery which they
inflict on and suffer from one another. ‘ Du Servage, et
de la Haine” —this is the title of his chapters. This is the
condition, and this the feeling, which he finds in all classes
alike; he describes it in each, often with affectation and
extravagance, but often too with touches of nature, which

* Bonnetat, p. 83,

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 355

it is hard not to believe. He is enthusiastic in his admiration
of the people,— meaning by the word, not, as Louis Blanc,
the workmen of great towns, but the labourers of the field,
where, neglected by statesmen and economists, he finds the
virtue, the self-denial, the hope of France. Yet, in this
country-population of twenty-four millions of agricultural
labourers, ‘ not only the most numerous, but the strongest,
the healthiest, and, on the whole, taking in together phy-
sical and moral considerations, the best part of France,” he
too finds religion extinct ; and, by way of substitute for the
faith which has been lost, nothing but the military ideas
and remembrances of the empire. ‘ Unsupported by the
faith which formerly sustained him, left to himself, halting
betwixt that religion which is no longer his and the lights of
modern philosophy which are withheld from him, he is yet
the depositary of the national sentiment, the grand military
tradition of his race, he still preserves something of the
honour of the soldier. He is selfish and hard to deal with,
no doubt; but who can rail at this who knows all that he
has to go through?” He describes the peasant as engaged
in a hopeless war with the usurer : —

“ And thus,” he continues, “the peasant is more and more isolated
and embittered. His heart is too frozen up for him to open it, to
any sentiment of goodwill. He hates the rich; he hates his neigh-
bour and the world. Alone on this miserable plot of ground of his,
as much alone as if on a desert island, he becomes a savage. His
unsociableness, arising from the very sense of his misery, renders it
irremediable, and prevents him from coming to an understanding
with those who ought to be his natural aids and friends, his
brother peasants; he would die sooner than advance one step to
meet them. On the other hand, the denizen of the town has no
mind to draw near to this fierce man, and almost fears him. ‘The
peasant is mischievous, malignant, capable of any thing. ... You
cannot live among them with any safety.’ So, people in easy cir-
cumstances become more estranged from them ; they make short
visits to the country, but do not fix permanently there; their
dwelling is the town. They leave the field open to the village
aa to the lawyer, — the secret confessor of all, who gains by
all,

2-2

356 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

Yet of all the pictures which he draws, that of the labourer,
both as to his condition and his character, is the most hopeful.

Is this exaggeration? Possibly: but not therefore total
falsehood. General descriptions are apt to overstate; French
writers are apt to overstate; M. Bonnetat and M. Michelet
are apt to overstate;— and they say, which is a probability
the other way, that they do zot overstate. But are they
simply false witnesses? If so, they have a large body of
compurgators. Two parties are disputing a battle ground: and
both assume the same facts to begin with. Both parties,
religious and irreligious, assume that French society presents
certain phenomena: these phenomena each lays to the other’s
door; and each professes to give the only remedy. M. Bonnetat
confesses that the influence of the Church has dwindled
down to nearly total extinction. M. Michelet, who hates it,
yet abstains from triumphing—what the Church has lost,
“la patrie” has not yet gained. Each has to charge his
opponent for the failure of his own cause; but each cause
meantime appears as a failure. And between them, French
society, even if its actual misery be painted too darkly,
appears at least in a state of apathetic indifference, on the
look-out for good which it would receive from any hand —
neither opponent charging it with those prejudices which
imply principles or at least fixed habits and sentiments, or
even with the parties which result from these, and which, if
they separate also bind together; both looking on it as a field
where nothing is so settled, as that it may not legitimately be
disturbed, and where, in default of steady attachment and
steady purposes, bold enthusiasm might most hopefully make
its ventures.

Further, to whatever extent social evils exist in France,
whether different, or in a greater or less degree, from those
of other countries, those who are affected by them are, at all
events, more sensitive, and more precipitate, than Englishmen
or Germans. An Englishman broods long over an abuse, and
ponders long on an improvement: first, whether it és an
abuse or improvement; and next, whether he can mend by
altering: it may be, he is not sensitive enough. But with a

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 357

Frenchman, impressions magnify, and inference hurries on ;
and before this “infinitely sensitive public,” or before the
infinitely susceptible part of it which reads, such pictures as
we have quoted cannot be paraded, without irritating mis-
fortune, poisoning wounds, infusing bitterness, goading on
discontent. And such pictures have been daily presented
to it for years past, in the pages of the brilliant and exciting
journalism of Paris—a series of papers, not so rich or so
practical as much of our English press, but combining
singularly a scientific and luminous method of exposition, with
equal pungency, and far more direct and significant calls for
an immediate response from the public. Add to these the
novelists, as representing phases of society in France, or at
least what the most popular literary men have not hesitated to
present as such—have not been ashamed to make interesting,
nor the public, to admire and applaud. Michelet—here, at
least, an authority who may be trusted—thus records and
comments on this fact in French literature : —

“ Immortal and classic romances, revealing the domestic tragedies
of the higher and wealthier classes, have made it an established
article of European belief, that domestic life is not to be found in
France.

“ Other works, of incontestable talent, but dealing in terrible
phantasmagoria, have given as examples of ordinary life in our
towns, retaken criminals and returned convicts.

“A painter of manners, of wonderful genius for details, amuses
himself with painting a loathsome village ale-house, a low tavern
for the reception of thieves and blackguards; and to this hideous
sketch he has the effrontery to affix a word which is the name of
the majority of the inhabitants of France.

*« Europe reads greedily, admires, and recognizes such or such
a touch from life; and from some minute incident which startles
her with its truth, jumps to the conclusion that all the rest is true.

“No people upon earth can stand such a test. This singular
mania for blackening ourselves, for parading our sores, and, as it
were, for courting disgrace, will be fatal to us in the end. Many,
I know, belie the present, that they may hasten a more brilliant
future, and exaggerate our evils to hurry us on to the fruition of
the felicity which their theories are to secure us. Have a care,

AA 3

358 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

nevertheless, lave a care ; it is a dangerous game to play. Europe
takes no account of all these clever tricks; if we call ourselves
despicable, she is very ready to believe us.”

“ Just the opposite to the English,” he says, this French
people * takes a delight and a pride in parading itself as worse
than it really is” — it is one of their ways of “ showing their
independence”; bad government and bad customs have cut
them off from most others. Such is his apology. In French
character and French scenes, there is no place, it seems, for
freshness of heart and force of imagination, but where the
existing order of things is reversed: truth is not to be found
except in wild or monstrous forms: where there is repose
there is falsehood, and with obedience goes along weakness
and stagnation.

“ Our novelists have supposed that art lies in the revolting, and
believed that its most infallible effects were to be found in moral
deformity. To them, a vagabond love has seemed more poetical
than the domestic affections; robbery than industry; the galleys
than the workshop. Had they but tasted for themselves, by per-
sonal sufferings, of the profound realities of the life of this epoch,
they would then have seen that the family circle, the hard work,
the lives of the humblest and the meanest of the people, have a
holy poetry of theirown. ‘To feel this, and to describe it, is not the
business of the machinist — is no proper subject for stage effect ;
only it requires to bring to the study the ‘single eye’ adapted to
the subdued light of these humble scenes, fitted to penetrate into
the obscure, the small, and the humble, aided by the heart which
shrinks not from the recesses of the fireside, thrown into Rem-
brandt shades.

“ Whenever our great writers have taken this view, they have
been worthy of all admiration ; but, too generally, they have turned
aside their eyes to the fantastic, the violent, the strange, the rare ;
nor have they even deigned to warn us that they have been
painting the exception.”

—

French literature of late, whether in the shape of novel, or
history, or journal, or drama, has come more and miore to
represent society in this contradictory and disorganised state ;
and ever and anon events have happened which gave mean-

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 359

ing to the strong words and wild pictures of the popular
writers. Whether or not their exceptional heroism was
realised, their exceptional crimes were. The tribunals of
Europe have furnished, of late, no parallel, we do not say in
ferocity or baseness, but in strange extravagance of combina-
tion, to the mysteries of French wickedness. ‘The great crimi-
nals who in France have from time to time figured before all
Europe, have thrown all others into the shade by their daring,
inventiveness, and originality ; and they have ranged in all
classes of men. The accumulated horrors and abominations of
last year are not forgotten: and many who read of them, must
have felt at the time forebodings for a state of things, over
which they threw such an ominous shadow.

We have said that a variety of symptoms indicated certain
great evils in French society ; indicated that it wanted sta-
bility and union; indicated uneasiness, dissatisfaction, the
want of new ties and new principles to replace those which
had vanished ; showed talent and energy spending themselves
on the work of destruction, love of peace without loyalty, re-
pose. nursing itself in indifference. In the midst of this state
of things, an idea, long stifled by the effects of the empire,
began to push forward, to take shape, and gather strength —
the idea of the Republic. It was too new a revival in 1830 to
have much chance of prevailing then; and its partizans were
not ready for their opportunity. But they had gained an
immense step: the sacred right of insurrection, dormant since
the “ whiff of grape-shot ” in Vendémiaire, had been again
asserted, and with success. They took courage. The Re-
public, so long given up as utopian, again began to appear
feasible. The tide had begun to turn, with the recall of the
Tricolor. Men once more ventured to scrutinise that terrible
revolution from which they had so long averted their eyes,
In spite of its terrors, it wore attractions; with long years,
the alarm had worn off; from being defended, it came to be
glorified; horror and hatred had grown common-place,
and it was generous and original to praise. The Revolution
became more and more interesting —more and more identified
with the glory of France-—nay, marvellous to relate, with

AA 4

360 “FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

the glory of Christianity, and the strengthening of the Church.
Mignet and Thiers broke in the public mind to admire the
Revolution, minus the * Terror,’ and to excuse that: but
they were tame panegyrists compared with two fervent and,
we are told, self-denying Catholics, who in 1833 commenced
the most laborious and minute history of the Revolution, on
the theory that “it was at bottom an attempt to realise
Christianity, and fairly put it in action in our world.”* One
of this pair of Catholic historians has since become himself
historical, and is M. Buchez, the late president of the National
Assembly. He is not ashamed of the “Terror;” he and his
companion shock M. Michelet, “by their apologies for the
2nd September, and the 8. Bartholomew, their testimonial of
good Catholics given to the Jacobins, their satire on Charlotte
Corday, and praise of Marat:” t M. Michelet is forced to
protest against them, that the Convention saved France, not
by, but tn spite of, the “ Terror,” hopes that in the next edition
these sad “ paradoxes ” will disappear, and laments the activity
which in 1845 was “ distributing these strange absurdities, by
means of cheap papers, among the people and labourers who
have not time to examine.” The last and most brilliant
apology was furnished by an illustrious convert from the ranks
of legitimacy. Men in France do not write in vain, if they
write well: the republican party drew into itself a large
proportion, perhaps the largest, of the ablest writers of the
day ; it was served too by many more keen pens and brilliant
imaginations than it could claim as its own. But it
did not confine itself to writing—it worked, organised,
paraded itself. It tried its hand; bafiled, it recommenced ;
defeated, it never lost confidence; it changed its shape, its
name, its tactics, as necessary ; it showed daring, and threw
away lives, though without being uselessly prodigal, to
deepen an impression, and gain the consecration which is
given by death; and when it found itself premature, the
lesson. was not lost, and it learnt resolution to bide its

* Roux et Buchez, “ Histoire Parlementaire.” Vide Carlyle, Miseell. vol. v.
p. 228.
+ Michelet, “ Du Peuple,” p. 263. note.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 361

opportunity. It tried, and not without success, to unite
the dazzling praise of chivalrous daring, with the lustre of
high intellect and noble thought, and with the severer
merits of indefatigable industry, simplicity of manners, and
self-sacrifice, warmed and softened by all tender and gene-
rous emotions —it presented itself as the cause of the young,
as well as the cause of the poor. There was no want of
bombast and buckram in it; but amid the damaged reputa-
tions, the tried and but too well-known expedients, the feeble
attachments, the inconsistencies and selfishness by which it
was surrounded, itself unproved, it bore itself bravely, and
made a figure. It conciliated, it promised, it seduced; and no
one need recognise the children of the grim and _ grisly
Jacobins, in the long-haired handsome youths, redolent of
poetry and flowers, with melancholy tender eye, but firmly
set lip and manly mouth, who gloried in the “ traditions of
93.” Their old heroic sires had been compelled to do rough
work; their sons would be heroic, but not rough. Republi-
canism had laid aside its terrors, its knife and sabre, and red
cap, and was become mild as the age —

“ Positis novus exuviis, nitidusque juventa
Volvitur ”—

graceful and gentle, and gay, yet not without aggression on
its crest, and menace in its restless glittering tongue —

* Arduus ad solem, et linguis micat ore trisulcis.”

“The party,” says Louis Blanc, “had distinguished and even
illustrious representatives in the parliament, the Institute, the
press, the army, in the sciences, in the arts, and in trade. But it
is particularly as a@ militant party that it deserves to be considered
in this period of French history.’

“A great and serious thought possessed the leaders of the
republican militia, and was about to form the business of their
lives. They wished to reconstruct the chain of modern ideas
which the empire had so rudely broken. They wished to lead
back into the course of history that marvellous epoch of the first
Revolution, over which had passed the coups d'état of General
Bonaparte. It was their glory, as we shall see, to accomplish this

362 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

vast design at the cost of absolute self-sacrifice—an incalculable
service, enough for ever to mark out their place in the narrative of
the most pregnant vicissitudes of French society.

“They were for the most part men of brilliant intellect, of
chivalric valour, and who answered more exactly than the legiti-
matist party itself to the ancient national type. Amongst them
had taken refuge, when banished from a society overspread with
mercantilism, that tone of sarcastic levity and intelligent turbulence,
that love of adventure, that impetuosity in self-abandonment, that
gaiety in danger, that appetite for action, those lively ways of
treating serious things, that formerly constituted the salient cha-
racteristics of the nation, Thus, with a curious contrast, an earnest
care for the things of the future was found precisely amongst those
whose personal qualities best recalled the most brilliant features of
the past.” *

For seventeen years —it is a thing worth noting, for it is
not so common—this republican party have worked as no
other body of men of their time have served a cause; with
clear ability, and singular pertinacity and daring, and an
enthusiasm which never cooled down from the hottest point.
They started into life, warriors — the sights and sounds of their
birthdays in July 1530, had entered deep into their soul:
warriors in all sorts of ways— wielding the journalist’s pen,
and the musket of the barricades, and the duellist’s pistol.
They were not vain seekers after present improvement ; that
they left to a prudish, pettish, blind government, and an in-
consistent, illogical, selfish opposition. Their line was a
clear one, attack— perpetual, manifold, varied attack. When
everything existing was destroyed, it would be time to begin
to build. “ Every institution,” Robespierre had said, * which
does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corrupt-
ible, is vicious;” and such were the institutions of 1830. “La
liberté vit de défiances,” had been laid down by M. Armand
Marrast, editor of the Z'rzbune, and on it he had founded the
* theory of personal attacks,”"— “la théorie des attaques per-
sonelles,”— made a reality with a faith and determination
such as few theories inspire. “The theory of personal at-

“ Louis Blane, Dix Ans, vol. i, p. 429. Eng. Tr.
+ Louis Blanc, Dix Ans, ¢. xxi. vol. i. 477. Eng. Tr.

- FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 363

tacks” was not confined to the journalist in his higher sphere
— exercising in the bureaux of his paper “a magistracy, say
rather a priesthood.” The maxim, that “his life belongs to
the cause of truth,” meant, that he might have to end it not
merely in hard work, but, if needs be, in the Bois de Boulogne
by a bullet. He was bound to do battle against all men, like
the knight errant of old, for the honour of his lady, “ Notre
_ dame, a nous, c'est la liberté,”* cried the chivalric M.
Ferdinand Flocon, of the Tribune, to the whole legitimatist
party, when he solemnly forbade them, under pain of mortal
encounter, “to speak concerning her either good or evil.”
Twelve republican champions chose each his man, from among
twelve legitimatists, in the quarrel of Liberty against the
Duchess de Berri; and Armand Carrel led the band,—
Armand Carrel, who was to shed his blood again, and for the
last time, in defending the sacred purity of the press against
the intrigues of a “ speculator :” —

“The Corsaire, a satirical journal belonging to the republican
party, having one day alluded to the suspicions indulged in by
public malice, the editor, M. Eugene Brifault, was called out by a
royalist and wounded. Another attack was followed by another
challenge upon the part of the writers in the Revenant, to which
the Corsaire on this occasion replied by an energetic appeal to the
respect due to the liberty of the press. Now to have recourse to
measures of intimidation against the republican party was a proof
~ how little that party was understood. Composed of men full of
courage, impetuosity, and daring, the strength of that party con-
sisted precisely in its ardour in braving death. No sooner did it
find itself threatened than its indignation burst forth with tre-
mendous vehemence. The National and the Tribune, which
until then had spoken only with chivalrous generosity of the
unfortunate and captive Duchess de Berri, now hurled a formal
and haughty defiance at the legitimatists. With that lofty disdain
which characterised him, Armand Carrel wrote, ‘It seems that
the moment is come for testing the famous Carlo-republican
alliance ; be it so. Let messieurs cavalieri serventi say how many
they are ; let us see each other once face to face, and then let there
be an end of the matter. We will not call in the juste-miliew men

* Louis Blanc, ¢. xxxii, yol. ii, 134. Eng. Tr,

364 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

to help us.’ A declaration of the same kind appeared in the
Tribune. Instantly the popular societies, the schools, and all were
in motion. ‘The offices of the two republican newspapers were
filled with impassioned crowds. Every one demanded permission
to enrol his name; every one claimed for himself the honour of the
first fight. A list of twelve names had been deposited by the
legitimatists at the offices of the National and the Tribune, and
from that list Armand Carrel had selected the name of Roux
Laborie; but in matters of single combat the republicans admitted
no representative, and they all insisted that the engagement should
have a character more in conformity with the intensity of their anger.
Accordingly they deposited at fhe offices both of the National and the
Tribune twelve names in opposition to the twelve that had been fur-
nished to them, and declared that they determined to have, not a col-
lective engagement, not a listed field, which would have been im-
practicable, but a combat divided into twelve rencontres, at different
hours, and at different places. After several negotiations and a
long correspondence, the legitimatists refused to subscribe to these
conditions. The following letter addressed to the Revenant, by
MM. Godefroi Cavaignac, Marrast, and Garderin, will give an idea
of this singular conflict, in which the spirit of the middle ages
seemed to be revived.

««¢ We send you a first list of twelve persons. We demand, not
twelve simultaneous duels, but twelve successive duels, at times
and places on which we shall easily agree. No excuses, no
pretexts; which would not save you from the disgrace of cowardice,
nor, above all, from the consequences which ensue from it. Hence-
forth there is war, man to man, between your party and ours; no
truce till one of the two shall have given way to the other.’

“From the acrimony of this language, it may be conceived what
must have been the surprise of the republican party when its
opponents dared to threaten it. The men of intelligence among
the royalists felt that a great blunder had been committed, and
they exerted all their energies to stifle this deplorable quarrel. In
pursuance of a decision come to at a meeting of their leading men,
the legitimatists declared that they could not consent to generalise
the dispute. Tardy prudence, and insufficient to the end proposed!
On the 2d of February, MM. Armand Carrel and Roux Laborie
met upon the ground. The fight took place with swords, and
lasted three minutes. Carrel had already twice wounded his
adversary in the arm; but in making a lunge, he met the point of
the sword, and received a deep wound in the abdomen. ‘The news

o

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 365

spread like lightning, and immediately became the subject of every
conversation. Nothing was talked of in the schools, the journals,
at the Bourse, in the theatres, but the courage of Armand Carrel,
his devotedness, and the danger impending over his life.” *

They carried on the war with the advantages which all
extreme opinions possess as long as they are extreme; the
cheap cost at which they can get credit for two important

" virtues—candour and consistency. They looked down on the
struggles between cabinets and chambers with contemptuous
fairness—on the false position of the July monarchy as
against that of Charles X., of the liberal opponents of the
peerage as against its supporters, on the dynastic opposition
as against the ministry, on the curtailers of prerogative as
against its extenders—each the impotent and self-contra-
dictory result of that masterpiece of human madness, “ chef
d ceuvre de folie humaine” —a constitutional régime. The nearer
to truth, the more false; the more liberal, the more absurd.
They laughed with the legitimatist Gazette de France, they
admired its talent, they celebrated, at least for a time, the
uprightness and honour of its party, they were moved to tears
by M. Berryer’s eloquence, and could afford to sympathise
with the touching adventures of Marie Caroline. If, again,
the system of the ministry was bad, that of the opposition
was worse. One appeared at least a “politique d'affaires,”

the other but a “ politique de sentiment.” When the liberals
talked of liberty, they were answered that their liberty was a
*‘ cowardly despotism: ” when they murmured against autho-
rity, they were told that what society wanted was just a
stronger authority —la réhabilitation du principe d’autorité,”
—not fresh “ guarantees for existing liberties.” Themselves
far beyond the reach of religion to trammel or alarm, the
republicans could be tolerant against a bigoted infidelity, and
defend even middle-age usages against prosaic reformers.
They sneered at the officious attempt of “a priest named

* Louis Blanc, vol. ii. pp. 132, 133.
{ Louis Blane, c. xxxiii. vol. ii. 187.

366 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

Chatel, who had taken upon him to introduce the French
language into the Liturgy —a schism without meaning, with-
out sense, because it deprived of all mystery, that is of all
poetry, the prayer which rises from the depths of simple
souls.”* They made game of the narrow-minded, sour,
fretful, petty Voltairianism which took alarm at the idea of
admitting priests to the Chamber; they protested sternly
against the liberals for “their famous principle of Atheism in
the law—the equality of religions—the liberty of instruc
tion,” “ the consecration of, the erossest of quackeries;” and
reminded them that if the “state declares itself indifferent in
religion, it abdicates; and that what in the state is taken
away from the sovereignty of God, is added to the sovereignty
of the executioner.”}+ And this exposition of self-contra-
diction and want of consequence, so peculiarly powerful on
a Frenchman’s mind, was not confined to institutions or par-
ties, or measures. With their “theory of personal attacks,”
the republicans were not likely to neglect such a powerful
weapon as personal inconsistency. Their memory was good.
When the “ Society of the Rights of Man” was attacked in
the chamber, its champions turned on the ministers : —

“The famous debate on this law, which was to end in a civil
war, was opened on the llth of March. ‘There was not a heart
but was filled with trouble, not a face but what wore the marks of
the liveliest anxiety. It was well known that if such a law passed,
it could only be met by the Société des Droits de l Homme with
open resistance ; and therefore greater sensation than astonishment
was excited in the Chamber when M. de Ludre launched from the
tribune these bold and terrible words —‘The Société des Droits
de l Homme will begin no tumults ; but were it not resolved to wait
until the French people shall declare their sentiments, the number
and courage of its members might perchance impel it at once to
arms.’ Such was the declaration with which the debate opened,
and personal attacks were the order of the day. Allusions were made
to three individuals sitting on the ministerial bench, of whom one
(M. de Broglie) had opened his house, during the Restoration, to

* Louis Blanc, ¢c. xviii. vol. i. 387.
+ Louis Blanc, c. xviii. “ Liberté d’enseignement, la gestation d’anarchie,”
vol. ii. p. 49.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 367.

the Société des Amis de la Presse ; another (M. Guizot) had been
the prime mover in the Société Aide-toi le ciel faidera; and the
third (M. Barthe) had been an associate of the Carbonari. The
allusion was understood by all present, and M. Pagés (de l’Arriége)
overwhelmed ministers, especially M. Guizot, with his sarcasms on
that point. The only answer the latter could make, was by
explaining away the views and intentions of the Société Aide-toi,
when he belonged to it—a pitiable begging of the question un-
worthy of him, and of which he was, doubtless, conscious, since
his humbled pride sought refuge in passion. Pale, with head erect,
body trembling with emotion, and extended arm, he hurled at the
republican party insults for their defiance. Quick at making up
for the weakness of his defence by the haughtiness of his attacks,
he was great in his bravado and contempt. ‘Man vexes himself,
God leads him,’ he exclaimed, quoting Bossuet; and, according to
him, the paths of ministers are God’s ways in France.” *

It is not necessary to say that the Republican party justified.
this war of the pen and the tongue by its deeds. The 29th
of Robespierre’s 38 Articles of the “ Rights of Man ” declares
that, “when government violates the rights of the people,
insurrection is the most sacred of rights, and most indispens-
able of duties.”t The duty was not allowed to be forgotten.
From time to time, it was the “ theory of personal attacks,”
in the shape of an infernal machine, or a pistol bullet—from
time to time, the barricades were raised again in Paris. The
Provinces helped occasionally, or were turned to account. If
the Lyons weavers rose in 1831 in a quarrel with their
masters, yet, any how, they rose; and next time, care was taken,
that they should rise against the government also. And so,
though the insurgents were beaten, it was always good
practice. The tradition was not broken; and, on each oc-
casion, the party gained a new talismanic name or motto, for
future watchwords. The “ Cloitre 8. Méry,” and the « Fau-
bourg de Vaise,” became as stirring words as Austerlitz and
Lodi; and the stern war-cry of the vanquished workmen of
Lyons, “‘ Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant,” has
survived to lead others to victory.

* Lonis Blanc, ii. pp. 231, 232. t+ Ibid. ii, p. 182,

368 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

But it was when an insurrection had failed, and its leaders
were in prison or before their judges, that the spirit of uncon-
querable pugnacity rose highest. The tribunals—the Cham-
ber of Peers especially — were the chosen fields of republican
warfare. <A trial had the interest of a fight for life. At the
' sight of the organs of law, the blood of the republicans boiled
over, and they rose against them with all the hatred and scorn
which they felt for the system which those tribunals guarded.
They felt too, and turned to account, the advantages of the
weaker party; they felt that,they had sympathy on their side,
admiration for their gallant audacity, an impressible audience.
They made it an opportunity for inculcating republicanism :
they did not defend themselves, but discussed first principles,
and the judges answered them. It was as they wished.
Whether from the inevitable condition of things, or from the
peculiarities of French Courts, the trials were mere scenes
of party collision of the bitterest kind. The historian of
the rise of modern republicanism dwells with delight on such
scenes, of which his pages are full.

‘‘ After a brief address from the President M. Hardoin, who
thought it right to recommend a calm demeanour to the actors in
the judicial drama about to commence, the examination of the
prisoners began. But it was easy to judge, from the deportment
of the accused, how much they reckoned on the ascendancy of their
patriotism and their intrepidity. Far from thinking of defending
themselves, they attacked; and were, by turns, sarcastic and
vehement, ironical and impassioned. The trial lasted two days,
and the excitement of the people increased continually. .... -

“ The trial gave rise to highly interesting scenes. In the sittings
of the 7th of April, the President having reproached M. Pécheux
@’Herbinville, one of the accused, with having had arms by him,
and with having distributed them, ‘ Yes,’ replied the prisoner, ‘I
have had arms, a great many arms, and I will tell you how I came
by them.’ Then, relating the part he had taken in the three days,
he told how, followed by his comrades, he had disarmed posts, and
sustained glorious conflicts; and how, though not wealthy, he had
equipped national guards at his own cost. There still burned in
the hearts of the people some of the fire kindled by the revolution
of July; such recitals as this fanned the embers. The young man

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 369

himself, as he concluded his brief defence, wore a face radiant with
enthusiasm, and his eyes were filled with tears........

“ M. Cavaignac next rose. Though endowed with the organi-
sation of an artist, which revealed itself in the original grace of
his manners, the freshness of his writings, and a most sparkling
conversation, Cavaignac took pleasure in studies of deep research,
and had adopted an especially serious course of life. As son of the
conventionalist of the same name, he watched jealously over the
honour of memories so cruelly calumniated during the Restoration
and the Empire.

“<« My father, he began, ‘was one of those who, in the Con-
vention, proclaimed the republic in the face of then victorious
Europe. . . Study has confirmed this bent naturally given to my
political ideas; and now that the opportunity at last presents it-
self to me this day to pronounce a word which so many others pro-
scribe, I declare, without affectation and without fear, I am, in
my heart and by conviction, a republican.’

* After this noble exordium, Cavaignac repudiated, with singular
elevation of thought, all the reproaches addressed to the republican
party. It was accused of conspiracy. An idle accusation. Ever
since revolutions had been in vogue, conspiracies had counted for
very little. The republican party was too sure of the future to
lose patience; too sure, not to rely on the fortune of the popular
cause. It was much better pleased to let monarchy conspire for it
by a host of incurable blunders and iniquities. Why should the
republican party be over-hasty? Could it fail to know that a
solvent was at work so potently on all the means of govern-

‘ment, that the latter would require to be wholly reconstructed ?

Did it not know that, tormented as the world was by new, im-
mense wants, even a god would find it more difficult to govern
than to reconstructit? . . He argued against monarchy considered
in its action, not on France, but on the secondary powers.
Thank heaven! France carried within her what enabled her to
surmount the most fearful trials; but what was to become of the
nations placed under her egis, and which it was one of the

necessary conditions of the monarchy to abandon? ‘The re-

volution,’ said M. Cavaignac, in concluding his address, ‘is the

whole nation, with the exception of those who fatten upon the

nation; it is our country fulfilling that mission of emancipation

confided to it by the providence which watches over nations; it is

all France which has done her duty towards them. As for us,
BB

370 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.-

gentlemen, we have done our duty towards her, and she will find
us ready at her call, whenever she shall have need of us; whatever
she demands of us, she shall obtain.’ A burst of applause followed
these last words. Nor was the impression less strong after the
speech of M. Guinard, one of those young men of lofty stature and
noble features, who combined the energetic virtues of the repub-
lican with the elegant manners of the high-born gentleman.” *

Or take the following scene from the trial of the Lyons and
Paris insurgents of 1834: —

“This fermentation of men’s minds made it obvious that a
vigorous resistance would be entered upon; and accordingly, the
very next day, at the sitting of the 6th of May, it burst forth with
a vehemence and unanimity, a concentration of purpose, which
absolutely overwhelmed the judges. M. Godefroi Cavaignae
having demanded to be heard against the decision of the previous
evening, and his demand being refused, the whole body of the
defendants arose with a spontaneous, simultaneous movement, and,
with arms upraised, and eyes darting fire, exclaimed, ‘ Speak,
Cavaignac, speak!’ The municipal guards were ordered to check
the tumult, but overwhelmed with sudden stupor, they advanced
not a step. The cries redoubled. The President, who seemed
quite confounded, sought alternately to conciliate and to bully the
clamourers, but equally in vain. He then, after consulting with
the Keeper of the Seals, and with the Vice-President, M. de
Bastard, intimated to the Court that it was desirable to retire for
the purpose of deliberation. The words had scarcely quitted his
lips, when the Peers rushed towards the Council Chamber, mani-
festly labouring under the strongest agitation. As the doors
closed upon them, the recent uproar was succeeded by the most
profound silence. Outside the troops were under arms. After
four hours of solemn expectation, the spectators beheld the judges
resume their seats. A decision against M. Cavaignac was read,
and the municipal guard led away the defendants.

“ Next day the tempest raged again, and with increased violence.
An advocate, M. Crivelli, had begun a speech, having for its
purpose the challenging of such Peers as had taken part in the in-
dictments, when he was interrupted by the defendants themselves.
His claim was perfectly valid, it being alike contrary to the formal

* Vol. i. pp. 431 — 438.

a... a, a.
tm, 2 “-: z-

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 371

rules of the code of criminal prosecution, and to the elementary prin-
ciples of justice, that men who have preferred the charge, who have
issued the indictment against a person, shall afterwards sit in judg-
ment upon him. But it was in the highest degree important to the

- accused that the trial should not proceed as the matter then stood.

They therefore sought by their outcries to stifle the nascent discus-
sions, and it became necessary, in consequence, to remove them to
the waiting-rooms below, while the Court drew up the decision by
which M. Crivelli’s demand was rejected. ‘The defendants were
then brought back, and the decision just formed having been read
to them, M. Cauchy, the Clerk of the Records, began to recite the
indictments. No language can describe the various aspects ex-
hibited at this moment by that assembly. As on the previous
evening, all the defendants rose er masse, and with one voice, ex-
claimed, ‘Our advocates! our advocates!’ the colonel of the mu-
nicipal guard, M. Feisthamel, issued orders of a menacing character.
The President essayed in vain to conceal the emotion which agitated
him. The Crown officers, from their seats beneath, addressed to him
words of exhortation, but all were lost in the tumult of the Peers
—some standing up in a state of great excitement, were adding by
their vociferations to the general clamour ; others had thrown them-
selves back in their arm-chairs, as if panic-struck. The short-
hand writers had laid down their pencils in despair, while from the
galleries, the spectators, their bodies bent as much forward as pos-
sible, watched with eager and disquiet gaze the progress of this
strange drama. All at once the Attorney-general rose to read a
requisition ; but at the same moment, M. Baune, on his part, rose

‘ in the name of the accused to read a protest. The two voices

made themselves heard above the tumult, that of M. Martin (du
Nord), sharp and piercing, though somewhat faltering from weari-
ness; that of M. Baune, grave, deep, solemn, reverberating. We
can only give an idea of this scene by placing in parallel columns.
the requisition of the Attorney-general, and the protest of M.
Baune, as they concurrently proceeded from the lips of the respec-
tive gentlemen :—

“M. BAaune. “'M. Martin (pu Norp).
“<The undersigned defendants, in- The King’s Attorney- General in the
habitants of Lyons, Paris, St. Btienne, Chamber of Peers. _
Arbois, Lunéville, Marseilles, Epinal, “Tn pursuance of the decree dated
Grenoble, the sixth of the present month, which

“*¢ After the events of grave import orders that all necessary steps for as- -
which have taken place at the two first suring to justice its free course shall be

BB 2

372
sittings in the case wherein they are
concerned, hold it due to their own
honour, and to the public welfare, to
address to the Chamber of Peers, the
following declaration :—

“<The Court has, by its decision of
yesterday, violated the undoubted right
of the subject to a free defence. (Loud
cries of Hear, hear, hear, from the de-
fendants’ bench. )

««¢ A supreme court armed with exor-
bitant powers, judging without control,
proceeding without law, it deprives of
the most sacred of securities men whom,
as its political opponents, it has kept
in prison fourteen months, and whom
it now calls upon to come before it to
defend their honour and their lives.

“Yesterday it went still further
than ever, and, contrary to the practice
in all criminal courts, where speech is
never forbidden until after the final ter-
mination of a case, it has pronounced a
decision against the defendant Cavaig-
nac, without allowing him, or any one
for him, to say a word in his defence.

«Finally, M. le Président has actually
sought to begin the reading of the in-
dictments before the identity of the de-
fendants had been established, and ere
they had a single counsel in court.

“¢ All these acts constitute judicial
outrages, which are the natural antece-
dents to those administrative outrages
at which they regard the Chamber of
Peers to be aiming.

“ ¢ Under these circumstances the un-
dersigned declare that, in the absence
of counsel to plead their cause, the
forms even of justice are wanting, that
the acts of the Chamber of Peers are
no longer in their eyes any other than
measures of brute force, whose only
sanction is in the bayonets by which it
has surrounded itself.

*« «Tn consequence, they refuse hence-
forth to take any share, by their pre-
sence, in this so-called trial (Hear, hear,

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

taken in the event of any further dis-
orders being committed by the defend-
ants ;—(Loud outcries from the de-
fendants’ bench, which grew more and
more vociferous as the reading of the
requisition proceeded. At times the
voices of particular defendants predo-
minated, and we shall give the more
striking of their interpolations.)

«* And whereas, in point of fact, in-
stead of attending to our caution, certain
of the defendants by violent manifesta-
tions, by a series of tumultuous clamour,
evidently the result of a pre-arranged
system, seek to render the regular pro-
gress of the trial impossible, so that it
appears clear that the proceedings can-
not go on in the presence of such de-
fendants ;’ (‘Cut off all our heads at
once !”)

«“«* And whereas, if defendants were
permitted with impunity, by any means
they might adopt, to impede the pro-
gress of a case, the whole power of go-
vernment would become vested in their
hands, anarchy would usurp the place
of justice; and tolerance accorded to
such rebellion against the law, would
constitute a denial of justice towards
society at large, and towards those de-
fendants who, in the exercise of their
rights, demand their trial. (‘ No, no,
we protest against it !—all of us! all,
all !”)

“* And whereas it is the manifest
duty of the Court to prevent the recur-
rence of such scandalous proceedings,
and to assure the full course of justice
to the public, and to such of the de-
fendants as demand a trial.’ (‘We
none of us demand it !”)

“* May it therefore please the Court,
in pursuance of the discretionary power
vested in it as indispensable to the car-
rying out its proceedings, to authorise
M. le Président to expel from the Cham-
ber and have reconducted to prison, all
such defendants as shall seek to create a

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 373

hear), where speech is forbidden both
to the defendants and to their chosen
advocates. Convinced that the only
resource for freemen is unalterable
firmness, they declare that they will
not again present themselves before the
Chamber of Peers, and that they make
the Chamber personally responsible for
any ill results that may attend this their
determination.’ (‘ Hear, hear, hear, that
is the determination of us all !”)

disturbance,’ — (‘ We'll all go back to
prison !’) ‘so that, the clerk having it
in charge to make a note of the proceed-
ings, and communicate the same to such
expelled defendants at the close of each
sitting, the trial may proceed as well
with reference to those defendants whose
conduct has necessitated their expulsion,
as with regard to those who are actually
present,’ (‘You may be our butchers
— our judges you shall never be!’”’)

' They began by acting by themselves.

In spite of the complaints made by Louis Blanc, of their
want of discipline, and headstrong intractable temper, in their
first efforts, there was forethought and generalship combined
with this fiery enthusiasm. They organised their agitation
from the first, and improved as time went on. There were
secret societies and open societies, passing one into another and
changing their form as a defeat or discovery, or the circum-
stances of the time, required. “ Rebellion,” says the historian
of it, “had in the bosom of the State its own Government,
its body of functionaries, its geographical divisions, its army.
A great disorder, doubtless,” he adds, “but there, at least,
an element of life was to be found. The Society of the
Rights of Man was necessary, as a reaction against the ener-
vating action of an oligarchy of tradespeople. Selfishness and
fear were gaining ground: anarchy was the counterpoise.” *
In a few years they
were strong enough and clever enough to propose and effect
a union of forces with the “ constitutional opposition.” The
move was an important one; they divided the liberals, part
of whom, with QOdillon Barrot, shrunk from the alliance,
while they themselves joined the coalition with an open pro-
fession of hostility to the existing state of things, With them
all was gain; for the liberals there was but a doubtful al-
liance, purchased by a schism. Louis Blane recounts the
proceeding with a justifiable self-complacency : —

“Relying on these grounds, MM. Dupont, avocat, and Louis

* Louis Blane, c. xxxilii.
BB 3

374 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

Blanc, took the first steps for forming an electoral committee in the
very centre of the democratic party. Dupont de ’Eure promised
his co-operation ; Arago’s was obtained, and through him that of
Laffitte; and, this being done, the members of the dynastic oppo-
sition were invited to join the committee, the first nucleus of which
had just been formed by the democratic party.

** One of two results was foreseen ; either the dynastic opposition
would accept the proposals, and then the democrats would fight by
its side—difference of opinion apart; or else it would refuse, and
in that case the democrats were prepared to do without it, since
they had on their side Arago, Laffitte, and Dupont de PEure; that
is to say, three men the want of whom would be fatal to any oppo-
sition committee.

“The plan was well conceived, as the sequel proved. A meeting
having been appointed in the offices of the Nouvelle Minerve, in
the Marché des Jacobins, the two oppositions met there. The
republic was represented there in the persons of some of its
staunchest champions, among whom were MM. Dupont, Dornéz,
Thomas, principal editor of the National, and Frédéric Degeorges,
principal editor of the Propagateur du Pas de Calais. The dis-
cussion began under the presidency of M. Laffitte.

“The question was put to the meeting in the midst of extreme
excitement ; a strong majority declared in favour of the radicals ;
the most energetic members of the dynastic opposition joined the
democratic party, the dissentients withdrew, and the following note
appeared next day in the papers :—

«¢ A CENTRAL CoMMITTEE has been established in Paris for the
purpose of attending to the elections. Its aim is to unite in one
undivided system of action all shades of the national opposition,
and to obtain an independent Chamber by their combined efforts.

«<The Committee consists at present of MM. Dupont de Eure,
Arago, Mauguin, Mathieu, Larabit, Laffitte, Ernest Girardin,
Marshal Clauzel, Garnier Pagés, Cormenin, Salverte, and Thiers,
members of the late Chamber ; Chatelain, principal editor of the
Courrier Francais; Cauchois Lemaire, principal editor of the
Minerve ; Bert, principal editor of the Commerce; E. D. Durand,
of the Minerve; Louis Blanc, principal editor of the Bon Sens;
Frédéric Lacroix, principal editor of the Monde ; Thomas, prin-
cipal editor of the National; Dubose, principal editor of the
Journal du Peuple; Goudchaux, banker; Viardot, Homme de
Lettres ; Dornéz, Avocat ; Nepomucéne Lemercier, of the Académie

FRENCIL REVOLUTION OF 1848. 375

Francaise ; |Rostand, Professor in the Ecole de Médicine; Félix
Desportes, Propriétaire; Marie, Avocat; Ledru Rollin, Avocat ;
Dupont, Avocat ; Sarrans, Homme de Lettres ; A. Guilbert ; David
(@ Angers), seulpteur. .

“¢ Secretaries —MM. Garnier Pagés, Cauchois Lemaire, and
Mauguin.’

“The composition of this committee was almost wholly demo-
eratic, and beside it no other opposition committee could possibly
exist. MM. Chambolle, principal editor of the Svécle, detailed to
the public, in a very discreet and temperate article, the reasons
that had induced him to keep aloof. M. Odillon Barrot, chief of
the dynastic opposition, published on his own part a note, in which
he expressed his deep sorrow at the schism which had taken place
in the constitutional party, but declared that he could not serve on
a committee into which the republican party had entered with
colours flying.

“Thus the control of the electioneering movement remained
concentrated in the hands of the radicals. It was the first time
they made their way into the heart of public affairs resolutely and
in one compact body; it was the first time, they seemed to say,
‘We have no need of stirring up the tempest around us, in order
to seize the helm.’ ”—Vol. ii. pp. 536—539.

The republican party, when it first started, was but the
party of extreme opposition. It took up in the main, excusing
or protesting against their disastrous consequences, the tra-
ditions of the former Revolution, viewed as a whole, and
‘maintained them against a monarchical constitution. But it
was a purely traditionary party, the “logicians of liberalism ;”*
it was distinguished by maxims and sentiments rather than
by an idea; its originality was shown mainly in the details of
its attack on all things established. Its type was Armand
Carrel, the famous editor of the National, who ‘on the 2nd
January, 1832,, pronounced for the republic.” Louis Blanc
thus draws his picture : —

“There was about the whole person and manner of Armand
Carrel a decidedly chivalrous air. His free, bold step, his brief
emphatic action, his deportment, full of manly elegance, his taste

* Vide Louis Blanc, vol. i. 387., and vol. ii. 56. Eng. Tr.
BB 4

<

376 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

for bodily exercises, and, furthermore, a certain ruggedness of
temperament, made manifest in the strongly projecting lines of his
face, and the energetic determination of his look, all this had much
more of the soldier about it than of the writer. An officer under
the Restoration, a conspirator at Béfort, in arms in Spain against
the white flag, dragged at a later period before three councils of
war, 1830 found him a journalist. But the soldier still lived in
him. How many times have we seen him entering the court-yard
of the Hotel Colbert, on horseback, whip in hand, wearing as stern
and martial a mien as ever did belted knight of old. Full of gentle
kindliness and winning ease when among his private friends, he ap-
peared in public life domineering, despotic. As a writer, his style
had less brilliancy than keenness, less animation than nerve; but
he handled with inimitable effect the weapon of scorn; he did not
criticise his adversaries, he chastised them; and as he was always
ready to risk the sacrifice of his life in affording satisfaction to any
person who might take offence at what he wrote, he reigned
supreme over the domain of polemics, disdainful, formidable, and
respected. He was born to be the chief of a party; chief of a
school he could never be. He was utterly deficient in that cool,
immoveable fanaticism, which springs from stubborn undeviating
devotion to one particular class of studies, and creates innovators.
Above all things a Voltairian, he seemed never to have conceived
the notion of marking his place in history by originality of
thought... . All violent systems were repugnant to him; the
American principles greatly pleased him, in the homage they paid
to individual liberty, and the dignity of human nature. He had
long been a Girondin from sentiment; and most reluctantly had he
bowed before the majesty of the revolutionary dictatorship, the
terror, the glory, the despair, and the salvation of France. ‘Though
the empire had tempted his fancy with its surpassing glories, his
mind revolted against the insolence of its organised force; and
he experienced a sort of haughty enjoyment in throwing scorn
upon the rudeness of the soldiers of the court, whom in his
energetic way he called ‘swash-bucklers.’ Unfortunately he
had too profound a faith in the prodigies of discipline, though
he himself had been much more conspirator than soldier. Can
* an insurgent people get the better of a regiment faithful to its
standard? ‘This is what Armand Carrel, even after the revolution
of July, always refused to believe. On the other hand, the craving
after action was ever at work within him, urging him on and on;

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 377

he would eagerly have overturned every thing that was an ob-
stacle to the exaltation of the destinies of his country, with which
his own were closely interwoven by high and honourable ambition.
The war of the pen which he had declared against power, not-
withstanding the real dangers which it involved, only served to
console without satisfying his daring spirit, to beguile the uneasy
yearnings of his heart. Often compelled to extinguish in his
friends the fire that was consuming himself, he was by turns
exalted and depressed in this internal struggle; checking the
impulses of passion by the dictates of prudence, and then indignant
at the very wisdom which imposed that restraint. While strug-
gling between bright hopes and bitter fears, it was sometimes his
fate, under the influence of the latter, to declare against movements
which, perhaps, sanctioned and supported by him, would have
succeeded. Yet when the battle against which he had raised his
voice had been fought and lost, he embraced the cause of the van-
quished, unreservedly, without limitation. Heroic inconsistency,
the inevitable weakness of lofty souls!”—Vol. i. pp. 573—575.

But, in the midst of the republican party —a party compri-
sing, of course, infinite shades of opinion—and to which, in one
sense, the whole population of France, as recent events have
shown, may be said to have implicitly belonged, there soon
appeared a nucleus of men who fad an idea and a philosophy,
whose object was definite and precise as well as novel—novel,
that is, in the distinct way in which it was laid down and
systematised. They, too, went back to the old revolution,

but not to every part and phase of it, not to the constitutional

period of 89, but to the wild scenes of ’93. It was Robes-
pierre who, according to them, accepted, with heroic self-
devotion, the anathema of the world so that he might realise
ideas which were to become its salvation.

“There were two individuals in Robespierre—the philosopher
and the tribune. As a philosopher he certainly had not been
as bold as Jéan Jacques Rousseau, Mably, or Fénélon. But as
tribune, he had laid up for himself stores of vengeance; su-
perior in his devotedness to those warriors of ancient Rome, who
dedicated themselves to the infernal deities, he had, with heroic
aim and wild magnanimity, immolated his name to the execration
of future ages; he had been of those who said, ‘Perish our

378 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

memories, rather than the ideas which will be the salvation of the
world ;’ and he had rendered himself responsible for chaos, until
the day when, wishing to hold back the revolution which was
drowning itself in blood, he was himself dragged in, and sank. A
conquered man, whose history was written by his conquerors,
Robespierre had left behind him a memory which was accursed.” *

These ideas it was their business to elaborate and unfold
with the light of modern science; and in the comparative
calm of modern days to develope the oracles of Robespierre
and §. Just into a theory, a social system, a creed. <A po-
litical revolution they wanted, of course; but as a step to
something deeper. Their great quarrel was not with go-
vernment, but with society. The injustice and oppression of
kings and ministers were crying, but still more crying those
‘two great immoralities, riches and poverty,” and that “ in-
visible tyranny of things, of recognised arrangements and
opinions, and usages, and divisions of men,” which was never
surpassed in cruelty by any sensible, palpable “tyranny of
human force.” + Philosophers, who had hitherto studied
society, had erred, first, by accepting its phenomena as they
stood, as ultimate facts and unchangeable laws; and, secondly
by beginning at the wrong end, with the rich and the refined
instead of the poor. Accustomed to think seriously only of
the wants and welfare of those who could help themselves,
they had never understood, never fairly considered, the con-
dition and the claims of those who could not. It was time
for this to cease. It was not the rich who wanted to be
made richer, or the comfortable more comfortable, but the
poor who wanted, not merely to be fed, but to command food,
and command comfort. The true and primary object, both
of political science and of government, was to see not so
much to the production, but to the distribution, of wealth; a
principle which all the current doctrines, and all the ac-
knowledged rights of society, deny. It had been asserted
once only, in 1793; the only hope of society was to assert
it again. Political economy had provoked its reaction. -

* Louis Blanc, Dix Ans, ¢. xxxiii,
+ Louis Blanc, Organisation du Travail, Preface.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 379

«The early republicans,” says Louis Blanc, “had only
touched, in their declaration of principles, on purely political
and national questions: they had not as yet opened any of
those which are indicated by that deep and formidable word,
le prolétariat.” The various men and sects who soon after
began to examine and decide upon these questions, became,
in spite of their differences, their absurdities, and their
failures, the most weighty element of the republican party.
For they had the advantage of knowing what they were
working for. Whether Charles Fourrier, meditating in soli-
tude, or Enfantin founding a religion, or Louis Blanc and
Considérant journalising in the Bon Sens and the Démo-
cratie Pacifique, they were men with a view — with a positive
object, to attain which, and not merely from logic, or love of
political forms, or hatred of abuses, they required a revolution.
They touched the sorest evils; they mooted the deepest
questions; they committed themselves with great apparent
conviction and earnestness, at once to very broad principles
and very detailed applications of them; they forced the social
question on their own party, and with it the honour of its
audacity, and the danger of its solution. And as they were
the boldest, they were the most active in their speculations.
They collected their materials, whether or not accurately,
at least widely. English travellers, in a remote part of

_ France, have been surprised to find a French socialist,—not

a student, but an engineer, it might be, or a bagman, or an
enseigne de vaisseau, deep in the history of colliery strikes
and Manchester associations.

Another feature in the language, at least, of this’ party
was its religious cast. It is a feature which suggests
very unpleasant thoughts, though it wore a Christian guise,
sometimes more and sometimes less marked; and it would
be the height of simplicity to mistake it for anything that
has been hitherto known as Christianity. Heathenism had
its faith, the natural man has his religious thoughts and
aspirations. But, contrasted with the heartless and flip-
pant scepticism of the day, this religious tone appeared to
advantage. It, too, in this day of reactions, was a revolt

380 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

against the traditionary supremacy of Voltaire. It was a
new thing to hear French revolutionists, like Louis Blane,
sneering at the liberals for their scepticism, rebuking the law
for its Atheism, and proclaiming religion as the necessary
basis of a Constitution, “the religious sentiment,” we should
rather say, “the source of all poetry, of all force and
grandeur.”* Still more novel was it when, in the mocking
city of Paris, the Pére Enfantin had the hardihood to invent,
and divers of the ablest men of France the hardihood to exer-
cise, with all seriousness, a new worship, the very counterpart
of ancient Gnosticism. Further, these new preachers of
democracy rejected, with startling earnestness, the cant of
the liberal schools about individual rights, and checks upon
government. Careless of the seeming paradox, they main-
tained that the bane of the age was anarchy; its want was
not constitutions, but government; their own mission, to
re-establish an authority powerful enough to curb, and, if
necessary, annihilate, individual rights and influences. Who
shall protect and help the weak, except the state? And how
shall it protect them, unless every thwarting power is over-
thrown before it? ‘It is, therefore, in the name of Liberty,
and in her behalf, that we demand the restoration of the
principle of authority. We want a strong government,
because, with the system of inequality under which we still
vegetate, there are helpless classes who need a social force to
protect them.... In a word, we invoke the idea of power,
because the liberty of this day is a lie, and the liberty of the
future must be a reality.” +

It was these men who, we conceive, were the life end
strength of the republican party. They gained for them-
selves, and for their party, the credit of grappling with the
great question of the day,— more real and interesting than
abstract questions of government, broader and more elevated
than questions of administrative abuses. ‘“‘ L’organisation du
travail,” said its apostle, in 1845, ‘‘ these words four or five

* Louis Blanc, Dix Ans, ¢. xxxiii.
+ Louis Blanc, Organisation du Travail, p. 31.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 381

years ago, were uttered to the winds; now they resound from
one end of France to the other.” The boldness with which
a principle asks for power, is one test of its substance ; and
there seemed reality and the consciousness of capacity, in the
unguarded and peremptory way, in which the extremest
champions of liberty maintained, regardless of the charge of
inconsistency, the necessity of a government not less strong
than a despotism. And in full faith of the revolution close at
hand, they called on their party to master the “ social ques-
tion” which would then present itself for solution. The time
was short enough for preparation, and there was none to be
lost: the chance was not far off, and would be missed if they
were not ready. ‘ Onse trompe étrangement,” wrote Louis
Blanc in 1845, “si lon croit que les révolutions s’improvi-
sent. Les révolutions qui n’avortent pas, sont celles dont le but
est précis, et a été définé @avance.”

Thus, with France as a whole, apathetic and indifferent,
there was a body of men, considerable in point of number, and
still more so in point of ability, whose set and declared purpose
it was, when their time came, to overthrow the existing state
of things: who day by day were working most powerfully
on public opinion, and meanwhile, were watching the right
moment to raise and slip the populace of Paris against the
Government. It was not a conspiracy in the ordinary sense
of the word. A revolution to come was an understood thing ;
it was to be of course, whenever it could be—as a check-
mate at chess, as soon as it is possible. If the world was
sceptical about it, it was because it is sceptical about most
things which it does not yet see: but, in spite of defeats and
prosecutions —“ Cloitre S. Méry,” Barbés and Blanqui in
prison, and Laws of September—the National was not
sceptical. |

« Laws of September” indeed, laws making prosecutions
easier, and “ deportation” heavier, which set up the censure-
ship, and which forbad to speak evil of the king or the mo-
narchy, or to take the name of republican,— were a weak
spell by themselves to conjure down the storm. Republicans,
indeed, of the Louis Blanc sort, advocates of strong govern-

382 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

ment, are inconsiderate in taxing these laws with monstrous
inconsistency, and raising their brows in admiration of the
impudence which let a man call himself an atheist, but not a
republican.* In one shape or another, whether as acknow-

ledged laws, or as exceptional stretches of power, they will be.

wanted and will be in force for some time to come, in France,
under all governments. All governments there will think,
and think rightly, that they are instruments not to he despised,
and which very few men really do despise. But instruments
which cut will not heal; and cutting, by itself, is bad
surgery. Louis Philippe and his ministers shot down insur-
rection, imprisoned conspirators, prosecuted unflinchingly
men of strong language — Lamennais both as a priest
and as an unbeliever—Enfantin for his §S. Simonian
religion and morality—newspaper editors without end. They
even seized Louis Blanc’s pamphlet on the organisation of
labour. But though in the more showy parts of administra-
tion, in public workst, and the encouragement of art and
literature, they spent much money and have left behind
no inconsiderable results, it is hard to find traces of much
attention to those domestic questions which the republicans
were turning to such account—hard to find even a poor law
ora factory law. At court and in the Chambers, we used to
see an unceasing personal struggle between clever men, who
represented little beyond themselves. The absorbing ques-
tions were questions of foreign politics, in which the national
pride had remained hurt and unsatisfied,—the American
question, the Right of Search question, the Syrian ques-
tion, the Pritchard indemnity question. And at last, with
charges of corruption waxing louder and louder against them,
the king and the ministers found time and inclination to
dabble together in a snug family intrigue, and adequate
occupation for their ambition in manceuvres, like those of a
scheming dowager, or the cunning doings of a not very scru-
pulous broker.

* “ Discuter Dieu restait un droit: discuter le roi devenait un crime.”
+ Lacave-Laplagne’s answer to Garnier Pagés; extract in Times, June 5.
1848,

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.” 383

' The storm came without preparation. It was improbable
—not like the course of history —too poetically just — that
there should be a second “three days.” Those who most
suspected the back-stroke of 1830, looked for it in another
shape—and certainly not now. There was nothing pressing
to excite alarm. Louis Philippe was hated, but so he had
been for a long time. There had been sixty-two Reform
Banquets in the provinces; but the “ Toast au Roi,” had
descended into them as an opportune spirit of discord between
Opposition dynastique and Opposition pure, and bickerings,
hard names, and resignations of chairmen had followed.
There had been some unpleasant exposures, some revolting
crimes in the course of the year, some grumblings, and some
declamation about national honour; but were not these either
accidental, or perpetual? Sharp distress there was none.
Money crisis there was none. ‘The ministry had lasted seven
years, but it had a strong majority in the Chambers. The
opposition deputies came to Paris: the king met and branded
them as the slaves of “blind and hostile passions.” They
would hold a ‘monster banquet” in Paris: M. Duchatel,
believing very naturally in 100,000 men and his cannons,
told them finally that they should not. They protested, and
submitted. To the last, all seemed firm as a rock: the sen-
sitive race of stock-jobbers bought and sold in security— nay,
_in increasing security. The opposition threatened impeach-
ment. M. Guizot met them in the Chamber, with his pale
scornful look. The President handed him a paper containing
this or some other of their proposals. He perused it, and
“laughed immoderately,” a memorable laugh, likely to become
proverbial. Another hot anxious day—vacillation and troub-
ling of spirit in the palace, confusion in the streets, Guizot
again in the Tribune, commanding and haughty, with de-
fiance and scorn telling the Chamber that he would “ do his
duty :”—and then the end. In the night, some uncertain
_ Republican—perhaps one Lagrange, a hero of the Lyons in-
surrection—thinking that the mob had been behaving itself
too lightly, shot the officer, or the officer’s horse, at Guizot’s
hotel — “ Cosa fatta capo ha.” The volley was elicited, the

384 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

victims made, the mob ceased their ill-timed jocose levity, and
began to yell out vengeance and the Girondins’ chorus.
Next day, sudden and swift, in the course of a morning, the
kingdom of the French passed away: in the evening it was
the Republic. |

Few Englishmen, we believe, can do justice to the pheno-
menon of thirty-five millions of men, living, the most part of
them, peaceably, and pursuing their various callings without
serious interruption, for seventeen years and a half, under one
form of government — and then, in the course of a’week, as
fast as telegraphs could beckon and mail-coaches gallop — and
mainly because telegraphs beckoned and mails arrived—quietly
resolving that they would be, and in fact were, under a totally
different one. When the letters were delivered, they consi-
dered themselves citizens of a monarchy ; when they had read
them, they shrugged their shoulders, and were republicans.
There was no objection made; no pause of surprise or sus-
pense; far less any resistance. ‘The transition was imper-
ceptible and soft as from sleeping to waking, or from one
dream to another. “ On ne se détache jamais sans douleur,”
said Pascal: the customary and familiar, with all its faults,
is apt to levy a natural regret when finally parted with. But
France had none for its July monarchy. It saw the esta-
blished disappear with philosophic calmness, and gracefully
and frankly, as it would to a new fashion, “ adhered” to the
provisional.

No doubt, the terror of the triumphant bonnet-rouge, and
sympathy with success, and absence of anything more hope-
ful, were powerful agents in proselytizing. No doubt, too, the
Republic was the most genuine and most logical develop-
ment of the political principles in vogue; for “ the Revolu-.
tion” was accepted by all politicians as a starting point, and
M. Guizot, as well as M. Thiers or M. Lamartine, claimed
to represent and carry on its ideas. And as to that old-
fashioned and rapidly-vanishing virtue of loyalty—the belief
in a mission and an authority in governors in some sense
divine, which associates their names and place in society more
or less distinctly with a religious reverence—it certainly would

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 385

be vain, in matter of fact, to look for it; and it seems to us

unfair to expect what, after the events of the last half-century,
would simply be unnatural. But was it a genuine love of a
republic, a love long latent, deep, unacknowledged, but
springing up spontaneous and strong at the sight of its object,
which turned the thirty-five millions of France as in one
day to the side of the Provisional Government? We cannot
think so.

Republicanism has gained a victory, but its conquests are
still to come. The explanation of its acceptance is to be
found much more in political scepticism than in political faith.
It came, as a successful theory, with the lustre of instant and
unexpected triumph, before a society long familiar with it —
accustomed to canvass without embarrassment many theories,
and contemplate in turn the possible truth of all. Since the
Revolution, everything had been cut loose from prejudices and
prescriptions—law, polity, religion, morality, rights, interests,
ties; -— each to stand on its own basis, and make out its case
independently. And they had done so——each stating its claims,
erecting its theories, pushing its consequences, without fear or
reserve, before a keen, dialectical, pitiless intelligence, which
spied all their weak places, but was candid withal, and did not
refuse to acknowledge, and even abandon itself to, their at-
tractions. Republicanism appeared with double charms when
it issued forth into the world of action, and displayed itself as

areality. But it will doa great work indeed, if it can implant

a creed — if it can permanently fascinate, as it has captivated;
if, as in America, beyond a sentiment and an enthusiasm, it
can create a loyalty. It will be strong and great if it does
this. There is in every human statement of truth a flaw
which makes it issue in falsehood, as in every human in-
stitution a plague-spot from which its corruption spreads: will
Republicanism be able to turn away from itself or charm that
unrespecting audacious eye, which no sacredness has ever yet
abashed, which has«pried into the secret and fault of every
human belief, and every human passion, which has not feared
to look on any nakedness? The republican leaders rejoiced at
the rapidity and hardihood of intelligence, which followed them
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386 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

to the depths and bottom of rights and duties, which compre-
hended and responded to their exposures of constitutional fic-
tions, solemn farces of law, conventionalities of opinion, tram-
mels of usage, impositions of selfishness. Are they not human
also? Are their “ formulas” the vehicles of pure truth — in-
vulnerable — dipped, even over the fatal spot, in the charmed
waters ? —never to fail, never to tire, never to wear out? Is
this French cleverness at length to be satisfied and set at rest,
—or will the world yet have to speak of it, as a gift and
dower as fatal to France, as her beauty has been to Italy ?
As to the Revolution itself of the 24th February there is
not very much to say, and nothing new. The insurrection
singularly resembles in its details and course that of July,
except that what was premature then, was ripe for accomplish-
ment now, and Lamartine did easily and naturally what
Lafayette dared not. And the republic, which has grown
out of it, strikes us as belonging as yet to the class of pheno-
mena, which have been remarked upon as characteristic of the
time, namely, revivals. Revival has been the rage; there
have been good revivals and bad ones, wise ones and unwise;
but though very fashionable, the world has not treated them,
even in their most respectable form, with much reverence.
They are, of course, a symptom of weakness and want of
what is at once genuine and satisfying; and without careful
watching they easily run off into forms which it is painful,
and not edifying, to contemplate. Our liberal friends have
made merry with medieval revivals — not always in the best
taste, nor always, it must be confessed, without reason ; —
they may now contemplate a Jacobin revival. The course of
the Revolution suggests—-it is certainly comparing great
things to small—one of our cotemporary ‘ Punch’s ” imita-
tions of designs of the ancient masters. We are speaking
rigorously of the present. It is a more serious matter to play
at Jacobins than to hold Eglintoun tournaments. But have
we not had as yet—it is very satisfactory in some respects that
it should be so—a Revolution “‘in rose-water?” There has
been a rigorous and accurate adherence to the rules and pre-
cedents of the elder artists, as far as consistent with modern

al
al
se

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 387

feelings. Read a history of the old Revolution, with its de-
monstrations and ceremonial; its chafings and unquiet days;
its leaders passing rapidly from point to point of their historic
city, with a few fiery words calming the multitudes or rousing
them ; with its journals and editors unnumbered; its clamo-
rous hawkers, and flights of bill-stickers; its vast swarming
assemblages; its feasts of fraternity ; its endless processions
passing along from morning till evening; its theatrical sym-
bolism; its plaster statues and cars of liberty, and fairy
illuminations; its phrases and formulas; its costume and its
antics; its trees of liberty; its zealous rubbing out of arms
from coach pannels, and royal names from streets and monu-
ments; its patriot deputations and patriot offerings; its
clubs, and conventions and constitution-making ;—read all
this, and you might fancy you were reading the “ Times”
Correspondent, till you come to September massacres and the
guillotine. There the modern change begins. Humanity,
gentleness, respectability, colour the reproduction. The enor-
mous oath-takings are abolished; the political guillotine is
abolished; the ‘‘adored” of 1848 is neither Necker, nor
Mirabeau, nor Robespierre, but the most chivalrous of the
modern gentlemen, and the most imaginative and most re-
ligious of the modern poets, of France —a man who heard
his double destiny as poet and statesman from the lips of the
mysterious Princess and Prophetess of Lebanon—the all-

accomplished Lamartine. For a “ sniffing” Abbé Sieyes to

make the constitution, there is a solemn Lamennais; for a
mocking Bishop Talleyrand, the most eloquent of modern
preachers. Insurrection itself, National Guards and S. An-
tome, meet and part, more noisily, it is true, but as harmlessly,
as chartists and police at Kennington Common; a mob could
thrust out the National Assembly, and be thrust out itself
without loss of life or limb; and fiery Barbés allows himself
to be arrested in the very room which saw the fall of
Robespierre, without finding it necessary to share Robes-
pierre’s fate.

Of course, this ought to be so. We live in the middle of the
nineteenth century. The warnings of the end of the eigh-

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388 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

teenth ought to be,.and doubtless are, present to men’s minds.
They walk in fear. Besides, there are not the same exaspe-
rations; no burning recollections of Corvées and haute justice ;
no emigrant aristocrats at Coblentz; no impotent, but vin-
dictive court; no rebellious Clergy; no disappearance of
money and corn; no banded leagues of kings; no minister
Pitt. The Republic of 1848 is born amid the applause and
congratulations of sympathising Germany and complacent
England. Never did a fallen throne and an exiled king
attract less sympathy. Money is scarce, but in spite of
bankruptcy prophesied every week, is still to be had. Aris-
tocracy prudently holds its tongue. The Clergy, the highest
and strictest, no longer ban the Republic; but press into the
National Assembly, and bless trees of liberty. The army is
obedient, and ready for work. The provinces adhere. The
government finds none to dispute its commands. It ought to
succeed: never had the Republic a fairer chance.

It is time for the Republic and its government “to march.”
For it, the old policy of “ Laisser passer” is exploded for
good. It promised—and this is its characteristic vaunt in
contrast to all other governments, to be a moving, originating,
interfering government; a government not afraid of respon-
sibility, not pe Tet of the initiative, not afraid of realities, not
afraid of ideas, afraid only of going to sleep. Custom and
the etiquette of the bureau should not trammel it: and doubt-
less it has broken through them. But now comes the tug.
Can it do that high work which it has set itself? Will it
shame the sluggishness and incapacity of other governments,
by refusing no social question, by seeking out the difficulties
which others ignore, by showing that a strong and central
government, in the hands of true and brave men, may do as
great and visible things, may change, cure, harmonise, with as
signal and palpable success, as a great general, by spontaneous
and forward action, not by mere control, organises an army
and wins victories, or as a great adventurer arranges a sree:
lation, and opens a new line of commerce ?

The Revolution will, on all hands, have utterly failed,
unless this is its result; and it can hardly fail with impunity.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 389

The Republic is still young—too young, perhaps, to judge of—
and it is still confident. But there are signs and symptoms
which damp self-gratulation, and vex hope—signs and symp-
toms which do not diminish as the months wear on. We
in England may think, though it may not so strike a French-
man, that the whole movement has a preternatural rapidity
about it which is not ominous of strength, and bears too
prominently the mark of its birth-place, the newspaper offices.
Conversions were too sudden. Sweeping decrees spoke with
brief apophthegmatic point, like leading articles. Alterations
were so hurried, and soshowy. Genuine and deep the change
may be, but it is unlike what usually isso. But there are
still more unpleasant features. Government is clogged. In
spite of efforts hitherto not unsuccessful, there is the difficulty
about money ; the finance minister puts on a cheerful face,
but the weight does not grow lighter. And now—now that
the days of work are come, and success is old, and fervour is
cooling, disunion—disunion among Frenchmen, which was to
have taken flight in February last, is come back, and is making
itself more and more an understood condition of the state.
It was seemingly quelled in its first displays: querulous and
impertinent in the compagnies élite of the National Guard,
rebellious and ill-mannered in the violators of the National
Assembly, treasonable and audacious in Blanqui and Barbés,

- it was then shamed down, expelled, or arrested. But now it has

taken its seat, obstreperous, ill-tempered, and full of suspicion,
in the National Assembly ; it growls, and mocks, and jostles,
with cursing and frowns, in the streets of Paris. Shop-
keepers and workmen, alas! are not so soon made friends,
though they have sung the Marseillaise together, and, perhaps,
embraced. Cunning M. Thiers, frank republican as he has
become, is not so easily persuaded of the generous doctrine of
Lamartine. The great Dominican preacher finds that the
Assembly is no place for him. Proposition follows on propo-
sition, report on report, interpellation on interpellation; but
something stops the free and onward flow of business. Per-
plexities and complications and perpetual changes interrupt
it. A minister of justice quarrels with his attorney-general,
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390 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848, |

and the attorney-general resigns; the lie is exchanged, then
the minister resigns, and the officer returns. Members dis-
trust the executive, and hold conventicles apart in the old
Chamber of Deputies.* Intrigues, and the rumours of in-
trigues; uncertainties, ignorances, jealousies, plots and coun-
terplots, reactions and conspiracies, agitate and sway, from
day to day, the sensitive and ever-changing mind of Paris, in
all streets, squares, and cafés. The bureaux of the Assembly,
and the clubs, do some work; but whether they work to-
gether remains to be seen.

Paris, too, is not all France. What is really passing in the
provinces? It is hard to say; for rarely do they find place
in that daily portion of the history of France which the
morning newspapers unroll for us. Nothing reaches us but
incomplete notices, indicative of restlessness and discontent.
We have heard of Limoges, with its provisional government 3
Lyons, with its anarchy not yet stopped; Brittany reverting
to its old provincial ideas, and talking of a federate state};
the ery for young Napoleon spreading—heard in northern Ar-
dennes, and southern Gascony. It is true that a prolonged
state of disturbance inevitably follows a great convulsion,
It was no doubt foreseen; it was allowed for. But are there
the able men, to face, master, and bring round to order and
peace, the elements of confusion which are so threatening ?

They have been as yet simply kept down by main force.
And to do this, the men in power have had to deny rights
which they claimed themselves with the sword’s point, and
to listen to their own fierce words directed against them-
selves by their old companions—companions in February,
prisoners in May. The hard but common necessity of re-
volutions. Barbés must have arrested Lamartine, if Lamar-
tine had not arrested Barbés: it is no question of consistency,
but of strength. But, meanwhile, the Republic has to do as
Louis Philippe did, and be called a persecutor; to turn against
her benefactors, to imprison even her ex-minister Albert —
and that soon. It, too, has to make “ Draconian” } laws.

* Times, June 13. Tt Times, June 13. t Times, June 10.

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 391

A law against ‘“atroupements,” gatherings of citizens, even
without arms, is absolutely necessary ; the Republic, too, must
have the streets cleared; the Republic must make 2000 pri-
soners in one night, a razzia of the Boulevards; the Republic
must call in the soldiers; the Republic must gag the clubs, if
they go faster than itself; the Republic has to acknowledge
that there is such a crime as sedition, and must punish, how we
know not, its most generous-minded citizens, only for pure
republicanism. Of course it must: who can blame it? for it,
too, is made up of the strong and the weak; it, too, is afraid
of opinion—it must seem to contradict its own first principles. -
It has to proscribe the innocent, because they may be dan-
gerous; the unborn children of the Orleans race, and the name
of the most glorious of Frenchmen; condemned by the malice
of fate to give an example of what it had most severely cen-
sured, and to repeat to the letter those acts of the dynasty,
which its own writers had most delighted in as subjects for
their irony —the bootless expedient of a jealousy which could
only make itself odious. But, as M. Armand Marrast said,
“la liberté vit de défiances.” This meant, once, that the
guillotine must be always at work; now, it only means that
the national guard must be always on duty. But this isa
painful life, and she has many times before now got tired of it.
There is one feature, however, which does give a new im-
portance to the Revolution — without which, indeed, the re-

-publicans would be merely beginning work afresh, in a feeble

and unpromising fashion, with every thing to do over again,
after fifty years wasted. This feature is the prominence it
has given to the socialist doctrines.

We do not overrate their importance. We do not mean
that socialism is the only, or the strongest cause of the Revo-
lution, or that all the republican leaders are socialists — far
from it. Indeed, there are symptoms that socialism is be-
coming unfashionable. But the question has been raised for
the first time in a public and formal manner; and the go-
vernment of the 24th February not only pledged itself to
meet it, but by its first steps committed itself to the socialist

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392 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

line —nor has the National Assembly, whatever may be its
predominant feeling, recalled their measures.

Socialism, which in England we associate with the unfor-
tunate Mr. Robert Owen, has in France made itself heard.
It is there no longer cramped and entangled in repulsive un-
couthness or unintelligible jargon. It has risen for some time
into the region of letters, and been developed by some of the
most forcible writers of France, in language measured, exact,
and refined, as well as impassioned ; and it has now risen, fur-
ther, into the region of politics, and changed the extreme field of
liberal battle from forms of government to the fundamental
ideas of society. The evils which liberals have long descanted
upon as arising from the tyranny of kings and bigotry of cler-
gies, come, it seems, from a deeper source, from a social order
which necessitates tyranny and bigotry — which sanctions a
claim, baseless in reason, and terrible in its consequences—that
a man may draw to himself exclusively, and subject to his
single will, any amount of this world’s good, far beyond what
his personal strength could keep, his personal labour gain, his
personal needs require: which, while it allows some of its
members to do this, and erects it into a right—a right
which depends on nothing but its own pleasure — has no help,
and creates no rights, for those who have not enough, who
may even be starving; artificial in the most extreme degree
at one end, and leaving all to nature at the other; which has
raised the most complex apparatus of law, to guard for the
rich man’s son the accumulations for which he had never
laboured; while it has left the day labour of the workman,
kept up from hour to hour, and prolonged from year to year,
with its real toil, and real productions, to its minimum of
reward, and uninsured even of this.

It is an old story, that ‘‘ it never was merry since gentle-
men came up.” ‘The peculiarity of socialism is, that it takes
the shape of a philosophy, competing not among the poor and
untaught, but among the educated, with the two most popu-
lar social doctrines of the day — the commercial philosophy
of the economists, and the political philosophy of Locke and

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 393

Montesquieu. It is a philosophy full grown and of due pro-
portions ; duly generalised, and duly illustrated ; reposing on
statistics, and animating novels; old enough, and discussed
sufficiently, to have room and range for separate schools and
doctors, each with distinct “ definitions,” “problems,” * solu-
tions,” * formule;” all clearly divided, and hotly at war—
disciples of S. Simon combating those of Fourier, and both of
them criticising and criticised by Louis Blanc. And outside
of these sects is a crowd of writers, who, without adopting
any formal doctrines, yet take for their first principle, the
necessity of an entire reconstitution of social orders.

The contrast is singular between the two philosophies.
Both are systematic and comprehensive, and deal in universals.
Each disposes of the will and actions and fortunes of men, as
if all were referrible to a “ human nature” as unvaried and
inflexible as the nature of electricity, or the peremptory
formule of algebra. Neither take account of exceptions.
But then comes the difference. Political economy, in philoso-
phising on society, left out morality. Socialism calls it in to
the solution of every question of trade and wealth. While
both profess to be practical and real in the highest sense, the
one talks of man as of a natural agent, the other will admit
in the discussion nothing short of the highest laws of con-
science. One takes self-interest as a primitive fact, working
like gravitation or attraction, the basis of all that goes on
between man and man: the other aims at its extinction, and
contemplates the great world at large going on upon pure
principles of love. One ignores in its sphere the idea of duty
or self-denial: the other looks upon all that does not repre-
sent that idea as simply accidental and vicious. One speaks
of questions of wages and production in mere terms of the
market, which make us forget that they relate to creatures
with will and conscience, and to whom they bring suffering
or pleasure: the other invades with the idea of duty the limits
within which self-interest thought itself privileged and secure,
and gravely queries whether property is lawful, and how far
the gains of mere capital are compatible with morality. One
subordinates the real, living, feeling man who works, to the

394 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.

great results of speculations in which he performs such a frac-
tional part : —‘* Who,” asks the other, “in a social question,
can put the impersonal services of the capitalist on the same
footing with the personal services of the workman?”* Com-
petition is to one a natural law, therefore it is right: it
involves greediness and selfishness, according to the other,
therefore it is wrong. Its evils are a mere bating of the sum
of its good, aceondiba to one; a conclusive argument, ac-
cording to the other, that there can be no good init. One
views with resignation, as a natural result of power, the rich
capitalist ruining the poor one: to the other it is an intoler-
able abuse, that what has no basis in right should exist in
fact. It cannot be helped, says the one, that the weaker
should go to the wall: it must be helped, replies the other,
therefore whatever is in the way must be overthrown. The
greater the ability, the greater the claim for reward, is the
rule of distributive justice in the one. No, says the other,
only the greater debt of service ;—the weak have claims, the
able, dutiest; and the sensitive feelings of the awakened
conscience are made the universally applicable law and
formula of society.

In a word, socialism adopts the great commandment of
charity as the scientific and practicable basis of civilised legis-

* Louis Blanc, “ Organisation du Travail,” p. 160.

¢ Louis Blanc considers the fundamental error of S. Simonism to be, that it
made capacity a measure of rights and rewards, instead simply of duties :—“ Il
y a deux choses dans ’homme: des besoins, et des facultés. Par les besoins,
homme est passif, par les facultés, il est actif. Par les besoins, il appelle ses
semblables 4 son secours ; par les facultés, il se met au service de ses semblables.
Les besoins sont Pindication que Dieu donne a la société de ce qu'elle doit a Pindi-
vidu. Les facultés sont Pindication que Dieu donne & lindividu de ce qvil doit a
la société. Done, il est di davantage a celui qui a plus de besoin, et il est
permis dexiger davantage de celui qui a plus de facultés, Done, d’aprés la loi
divine écrite dans l’organisation de chaque homme, wae intelligence plus grande
suppose une action plus utile, mais non pas une rétribution plus considérable ; et
linégalité des aptitudes ne saurait légitimement aboutir gu’d 'inégalité des devoirs.
Phiérarchie par capacités est nécessaire et féconde: la rétribution par capacités
est plus que funeste, elle est impie.”— Dix Ans,c.25. And in his Organisation
du Travail, p.133. “Beaucoup d’idées fausses sont 4 détruire .... Ce n’est pas
4 l'inégalité des droits que Vinégalité des aptitudes doit dboutis; cest a Piné-
galité des devoirs.”

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 395

lation. This is its boast. It does not reject religion, like the
old infidels; it but professes to complete Christianity. It takes
up, not with less faith, but with more philosophy, what
Christianity failed in. Christianity, it says, started from
the right point, the poor ; it took them, and not the rich, as
the true essence of society, not, with modern economists, as
an inconvenient accident; and it laid down the true law of
society to be, not individual interest, but mutual self-devo-
tion. Socialism accordingly echoes its highest principles.
S. Simon repeated the apostolic canon, that if a man would
not work, neither should he eat. Louis Blanc shot beyond
him, and built his system on the principle, that the strong
were to work, that the weak might eat; that nothing that a
man has is his own, but all a trust for others. And so history,
in their hands, proclaims self-sacrifice to be the only measure
of greatness: fiction, but too questionable in its end, yet not
less powerful in its art, paints touchingly, and not falsely,
the contrast between Christian mercy and man’s hardness,
between the world’s mockery at once of innocence and of
penitence, and that Divine Love which blessed the little
children and forgave the Magdalen. But though Chris-
tianity — so runs the Socialist doctrine — has done so much,
it has not done all. We cannot be satisfied with any thing
which does not directly tell on the masses. Christianity makes
. good men, but leaves society unjust and cruel ; its individual
charity heals single wounds, but cannot stop the fount of
evil. It has failed —so say these apostles of a new Christi-
anity—because its doctrines were not hopeful enough; because
it wanted faith, because it dared not trust man. And it has
cloaked its failure by two fatal doctrines; it has thrown the
cause of it upon a supposed incapability of perfection, a doc-
trine of original sin; and it has smoothed over the effect of it
by preaching resignation, a doctrine of meritorious suffering,
— by bringing in a supplement of future life to make up for
the defects of the present; by comforting Lazarus in the
next world, when it could not comfort him here.

Such were the ideas with which the Republic was in-
augurated. ‘The Republic was to succeed the Church — to

396 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848.”

realise that the Church had only attempted — by education,
and by a state all-powerful and all-wise, to do those impos-
sibilities which the Church had failed in, or only done in
the way of specimen and exception; not, indeed, to deprive
men of hope in another life, but to make them able to afford
to dispense with the necessity of it.

Frenchmen easily believe in perfection — that what has
taken shape so easily and completely, with such keen outline
and neat finish, in their own ideas, will as easily be re-
produced in the world. ‘Thewge of gold has ever been one
of their weaknesses. Frenchmen —and who but Frenchmen
could have done so?—wrote “Numa Pompilius,” and
‘‘ Télémaque.” So Socialism has been believed in. And now
comes the trial of these long-meditated plans, the application
of these mighty formule. ‘They are simple, society very
complicated. They ask for new conditions to start with. The
hard, vast, impenetrable world remains as it is. It is hard to
move; its reformers are more likely to break against it, than
it is to yield. The Republic began with Socialism, but has
grown cold, and does not seem disposed to go on with it.
Bourgeois national guards love their shops too well, obstinate
country farmers are too fond of their land, and object to sub-
ordinating it to associations of artizans— very selfishly, it is
said, and foolishly too; but probably they think that the
gentlemen who so peremptorily, and with such clear logic,
require of them the sacrifice of all interests, and the surrender
of all power to themselves, ought to show clearer credentials
for a mission scarcely less than Divine: if they can see
through the others, possibly the others can see through them.
Socialism as yet has not prospered: it has found it easier
to overturn a throne, than to set an atelier social fairly at
work. The hearts of the sanguine masses are beginning to
fail. Poor toil-worn multitudes, whose days had passed in
heaviness and hard work, multitudes not knowing their right
hand from their left, had heard from eloquent lips, and, we
are ready to believe, in some cases, from earnest and feeling
hearts, the big words of hope — had heard and rejoiced that
their hour was come. Many, no doubt, trusted that they

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848, 397

should now spoil their enemies — but many too, that a fair
place in the world should be secured to them. But neither are
likely to gain their hope, least of the two the latter. Hard,
it seems to some, such brief triumph and blank disappoint-
ment ; harder will it be, if,in their blind following, they meet
with the eternal laws across their path, and refusing this life as
one of probation, they find it at least not one of refreshment.

Foiled, however, as they may be for the present, the So-
cialist chiefs, of whatever shade of opinion, and there are
many, have not lost confidence. They know well that their
antagonists are strong. Besides the established political parties,
with various “ pretenders,” and the redoubtable and abhorred
Thiers to boot, there are the great interests of money and
agriculture against them, a powerful literary opposition, and,
still more formidable, a powerful shopkeeper opposition. The
hour of their triumph is not yet close at hand, as they know:
but they are hopeful. It is singular to read the enthusiastic
articles of their journals, written in the thick of the diffi-
culties in which France is plunged. They revolt, as from a
blasphemy, from the idea of comparing their “ France of ’48,”
— bourgeois and all—with England, “ degraded by an
aristocracy, and swarming with famished workmen and
prostitutes.” rightful as is the failing of counsel, barren
and meagre as seem the measures proposed to arrest imme-
diate ruin, still they triumph; at least, the “system of
expedients” is giving way to the reign of ideas and of
thought. They are not men to be turned from their hopes
and purposes by anything but the absorbing enthusiasm of a
great war.

And whatever becomes of Socialist theories in the shocks
of war, or in the reaction which their arrogance and extra-
vagance is sure to provoke, the prominence which they have
assumed, and the partial adoption of their ideas by the Re-
public, are facts which cannot be dismissed as unimportant.
This public recognition of them forms a distinct and a new
step in the direction towards which all changes have long
steadily looked — a step as real and as pregnant with conse-
quences, as any political change of the last century in the

398 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. .

rights and position of classes—consequences very various and
very mixed, perhaps a long way off, but wide and lasting; a
step in that “ progress” which it is the fashion, especially in
France, to take for granted is towards perfection, but which
at any rate, as a fact, is scarcely to be denied. Whether it
means forfeiture of useful powers by those who have not used
them well, or the gaining of them by their rightful claimants;
whether it is the advance of justice and fellow-feeling, or of
self-will and disobedience; whether it is the breaking up of
baseless opinions, or the breaking away from traditions which
connect us with truth — exchanging the venerable for the
true, or the steady ways of wisdom for the lights of tempt-
ing theory; whether it is disturbing good which we did
not, and could not, create for ourselves, or winning, in the
due order of providence, the good which is given only to those
who dare to seize it; whether the tendency of it is to
combine, or to resolye — towards wise self-government or
towards anarchy ; whether we look on with hope or fear, —
we can scarcely doubt which way the current is flowing —
faster now, and now slower — but ever one way, from high to
low. New claims, which from time to time are made, are made
for the many : new theories push ever further the dominion
of the many. In the actual world changes are slower, but
there too the new rights which are at last acknowledged, are
rights which are shared by many, not by few. Socialism,
in respect of the rights of property and the rights of labour,
has contrasted strongly and broadly the interest of the few
and of the many, as constitutionalism did in respect of the
rights of prerogative and the rights of citizenship. It is easy
to take exceptions — easy to apologise with grave and real
reason — easier still, when theorists are tempted to indulge
in construction, to expose presumption, and overthrow ideal
fabrics. Experience will distrust the contrast drawn, power
can long afford to despise it. Still, in one case as in the other,
the general effect remains — an impression which legislatures
must henceforth reckon with, and which society cannot help
acknowledging. ‘There is a difference, it is true, between
the two cases. Constitutionalism could always point to a real

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 399

existing government, the model, on the whole, by which it
illustrated its lessons. Socialism cannot boast of much in
the world of realities. But, on the other hand, Socialism
appeals to higher feelings, and more real necessities, and
deals in more home truths: if its remedies are too impracti-

cable and unnatural for success, its complaints are too weighty

to be soon forgotten. It is true that its arrogant and
meagre speculations offend self-interest deeply, and good
sense still more deeply ; but it must not be overlooked, that,
visionary as are its hopes, and anti-Christian its design, its
warnings coincide with those of the Bible.

They coincide, but not for the same ends. We cannot
help thinking, when Socialism comes before us, of those
ancient heresies, which loom so mysterious in the distance
of years, hanging around, rather than appearing to belong to
the Church—revolts, certainly, against her, but much more
against God’s government of the world —which found their
subjects, not so much in theology, as in the disorders and
perplexities of our present life, and served themselves at their
good pleasure of Christian principles, as they happened to fall
in withatheory. Socialism is not unlike the living analogue,
in our days, and with our questions, of Manicheeism. Of
this upturning of all old ideas, this bursting up, not merely
of force, but of thought, against the old orders of society,
who can tell what is to come? ‘The idea of a ludicrous and
impotent conclusion to it does sometimes cross the mind. But
the elements of storm are too numerous and potent. Daring
intellect and zeal, allied with the wild power, Titan-like and
blind, of the strong inexorable masses, and tempted by per-
plexity and distress, promise no such easy issues. This is the
time of suspense. At home and abroad, there is holding
back, and waiting. Yet who but feels, that at any moment
the holding back may cease—that at any moment, to conjure
down domestic war, France, which claims the nations for her
inheritance, which claims the right of shedding her blood to
convert them to liberty, may dash down her armies into the
fields of Europe, and challenge her primacy, “the Pontificate
of the age of light.” And how will the Church shape her

400 FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848,

course ? What is she to do with the multitudes who throng
round her, accepting her poetry, but despising her creed; or
with those not rare cases of noble-minded and serious men,
who, in the confusion of the times, have grown up by them-
selves, out of the fold of her children? If she dares not be
exclusive, is not the reality and positiveness of her faith
open to the subtle gradual sap of vague sentiment? And,
benign as has been the greeting of the Republic, and ready
the congratulations of many of the Clergy, and great the
marks of mutual respect and good will, which gave a new
character to the Revolution of February, — the men of the
barricades saluting the sacred symbol, and protecting the
Clergy, the Clergy substituting the People for the King, in
the Church offices, the Archbishop offering his silver spoons
as a patriotic gift, —is it so clear that old jealousies are dis-
armed, that the old instincts of mistrust and fear are
weakened? And when the Socialists talk of unity, religious
as well as social and political, what sort of unity do they
look to?

She and we are in our Master’s hand. This is not
the first time in history that the appalling cry has been
heard, that unless justice be seen fere, it never will be.
Others before our time have been perplexed, and have
desponded too hastily. As it is certain that God’s pro-
vidence does not sleep, it may be that under this tempest
of the wrath of man, the gradual and slow growth of good
is going on, which, in spite of ever-new evils, we seem to
discern even here. But—whether this heralds the last storm,
or whether, just as amid those overflowings of ungodliness
which made our fathers afraid, much was working which God
has turned to good for us, so now things may be growing up
wherewith the indulgence of an over-ruling Providence shall
bless our children — we, at any rate, may take refuge in the
thought, not new to us, or resorted to for the first time in
perplexity, that ‘* God’s government is a scheme imperfectly
comprehended.” In the faith involved in these solemn words
we may keep ourselves collected in the dizzy and terrible
scene of wreck and madness; we may be content to depart

FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1848. 401

hence without seeing the end, without seeing destruction
repaired, or good completed —

“ And rejoice to think God’s greatness flows around our incom-
pleteness :
Round our restlessness, His rest.”*

We had written so far, when the news arrived of the ter-
rible events which began on the 24th.t The change has
come at last over the Revolution. Bourgeois and workmen,
who fought by one another’s side in February, — who met in
anger, yet parted without bloodshed, in May,—have met once
more, for defeat and carnage only to part them. It has been
the relentless and unflinching battle of class against class,
rich against poor. Bloodier days have seldom fallen on that
doomed city of Paris. The scene will now change. Power
will now pass from one who, whatever else he may have been,
was noble-minded and a lover of peace, into probably stronger
hands. But who will appease the spirit of unforgiving
vengeance which must haunt every neighbourhood? Recol-
lections of mortal strife,—spots where men have been
slaughtered, will be familiar in the crowded thoroughfares,
and close to each man’s door. Who is there to stand between
the dead and the living, and charm down, on that reeking
ground and in those polluted homes, the cry of blood?

* Elizabeth Barrett’s Poems. Tt June, 1848.

402

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,*
[Ocrosprr, 1851.]

THE result of the events which, some three years ago, drew
the eyes of all Europe, even in the midst of unwonted do-
mestic anxiety, upon Italy and the Papacy, has left an
impression on the minds of most Englishmen, very unfayour-
able to all the parties concerned. A mixture of disgust and
contempt, despair of amendment anywhere, incredulity about
the statements of all sides alike, distrust equally of principle
and capacity in the leaders, have succeeded to the interest and
wonderment, joined in some with hope, in many more with
unconvinced misgivings, with which movements so strange in
their origin, and so triumphant in their first success, were
looked upon here. Italian reform has been a failure, and a
failure as complete as it has been miserable. Only in the
representatives of the two extremes, —in the foreign sup-
porters of despotism, and the native supporters of democracy,
was there energy, determination, and steadiness. Radetsky
and Mazzini stand out like men, amid the bewildered and
bafiled crowd, and extort, the one in his victory, the other in
his defeat, the admiration which it is hard to withhold from
vigour and a clear purpose.

But everywhere else appears that ludicrous disproportion
between excitement and principle, between sentiment and ca-
pacity, between powers of language and of business, between
anticipations indulged in and realised, between promises made
and fulfilled, which is so fatal to sympathy not less than to

* The Roman State from 1815 to 1850. By Luiet Carto Fart. Trans-
lated from the Italian by the Right Hon. W. E. Guiapstonn, M.P. for the
University of Oxford, London: John Murray. 1851.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. AQ3

approval. The new Revolution was to be quite different, we
were led to expect, from the old, conducted on different prin-
ciples, guided by men who had learnt sense, moderation, and
unselfishness, from past mistakes; a revolution from above,
not from below ; from the pope and the sovereigns, not from
the mob, — conciliatory, patient, gradual; sober in its hopes
as well as its aims; averse to violence; not merely respectful,
but loyal, to religion. Such it was meant and wished to be,
by the accomplished and eloquent men whose writings pre-
pared the way for it; thus, in appearance at least, it began.
But now that it has run its course, and for the present is all
over, it seems to differ from any other vulgar revolution only
in the feebleness and hollowness of all its proceedings, except
its fierce death-struggle under the Roman triumvirate.

There is therefore, now, less interest than ever felt here,
for Italian politicians, and their attempts. We were always
accustomed to look with doubtful eye on their ideas of im-
provement ; and now when, for once, they had raised some
serious expectations, they have disappointed them as com-
pletely as the most distrustful could have augured. They
appear to have not only failed, but failed discreditably, by
their own quarrels and vacillations, their pettiness of spirit,
and want of seriousness, as much as by their military infe-
riority to the armies of Austria and France. And thus, after
three years of noise and vainglory, of illuminations and con-
stitution-making, the civic guard has ignominiously doffed its
Roman helmet and sword, and slunk out of sight behind
desks and counters; and the old order of things, faithless,
lawless, cowardly, and corrupt, wherever “Reasons of State”
influence it, isonce more restored. That such a drama should
awaken no great interest, no great curiosity about its details
and actors, is not very astonishing. With Italian art, Italian
music, and Italian scenery, we are content; and leave the
men, the abuses of their social condition, and the way in
which these abuses are either maintained or assaulted, without
inquiry or notice.

Undeterred, however, by this indifference, Mr. Gladstone
has, in the present publication, invited attention to the his-

DD 2

404 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

tory and results of these movements, in a very emphatic way.
For a man like Mr. Gladstone does not translate two large
volumes simply to amuse himself, or gratify a fancy. He
has felt that something more is due to the objects, at least;
which have been aimed at by the various parties in Italy
for the last few years, than a careless and contemptuous
ignorance. And, in truth, they are worth understanding
—not merely from the position which Italy holds still,
as it always has held in Europe,—a position varying in
importance, but never unimportant — and from the character
of Italian civilisation, historical traditions, intellectual cul-
ture, and political institutions, always peculiar; not only
from the strange fatality which has doomed the Italian
people, with all the promise of their rare gifts, and, what
is more, of those gifts rarely balanced and tempered, to be
as a nation invariably unprosperous and unfortunate, to be
the country where abuses linger longest, and most shamelessly
—not only for this, but also because Italy is, and has been
for centuries, the territorial basis on which the ecclesiastical
monarchy of the West reposes. To this great power, in a
degree scarcely to be exaggerated, Italy has communicated its
national spirit, and temper, and talent, and ways of thought
and action ; the direction of is has been kept in the hands of
Italians, with ever-increasing jealousy and exclusiveness,
since the issue of the great schism practically confined the
chair of S. Peter to their race; it is the national boast of
Italians, identifying itself with their interests and prejudices,
and reflecting through the remotest of its vast ramifications
the characteristics of its local centre.

In Italy the governing body of the Roman Catholic Church
has for ten centuries been a temporal power, and has had
liberty to direct as it pleased, with the independence of
sovereignty, the civil order and social welfare of a remarkable
people, whose enthusiastic faith in its religious pretensions
has never faltered. Beyond its own territorial borders, it has
acted on its Italian neighbours with whatever political force
belongs to a separate state; while there also, as much as in
its own dominions, the spiritual training and government of

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 405

the whole population has been, with the free choice of princes
and subjects, exclusively in its hands. Italy and the Roman
Catholic Church are, indeed, bound up together. It is
difficult to follow the development of the Roman Catholic
Church, without keeping in mind the peculiarities of the
nation of its choice; and still more difficult to trace the for-
tunes of that nation, without reverting continually to that
ecclesiastical autocracy which has had so much influence in
making Italians what they are. On no conceivable principle
can a Church of such claims, and also of such undoubted power
over the hearts, the habits, and the actions of men, be left out
of sight, when studying, whether to account for, or to learn
from, the state of that country which is its principal seat.
To those, to whom that Church, in any of its aspects, is
an object of interest, Italy must always be an object of
interest also.

The last strange and eventful chapter in the history of the
Papal State is given in the work before us, by one who was
an eye-witness, an actor, and, it must be borne in mind, for
fairness’ sake, a sufferer also. It begins with that point of
departure for all recent history, the settlement of 1815, when
all the governments of Europe, after the tremendous chas-
tisements and warnings of the French invasion, were again
allowed a fresh and fair start. How the pontifical govern-
ment used that new chance — how, after a singular display
of dignity under adversity, restoration brought with it, not
pride, or vindictiveness, but a feeble slackness, and insensi-
bility to the claims and opportunities of the time — how the
ecclesiastical government, as if nothing had intervened, and
nothing had been changed, took up the threads of its old
habitudes and maxims just where they had been so rudely
broken, is set forth in its opening chapters. It shows us, of
how little avail were the noble and majestic gentleness of
Pius VII., when coupled with want of capacity and of real
inclination for the hard tough work of improving government,
to meet a bitter and implacable discontent, which had its
continual food in undeniable and untouched abuses. It
relates, how far, in combating this subversive spirit, and in

DD 3

406 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

default of the serious will to face its real cause, matters were
mended by the expedients substituted,—by enlisting a virulent
sectarianism, the old curse of Italian society, on the side of
government, and opposing to the liberal conspiracies a fana-
ticism as savage, as unscrupulous, as turbulent as themselves,
—by the bold return of Leo XII. to the high-handed and
uncompromising system of the older Papacy,—by the exchange
of his predecessor’s independence for Austrian countenance,
by Pius VIII.,— by the secret police, jealous and vindictive,
and the military commissions which alternated with outbreaks
of civil war, through the long and sullen reign of Gregory
XVI. It shows, in what state the end of this first thirty years of
the restored Popedom, a time of profound external peace, found
the system, the experience, the temper, the administrative
habits, the law, the finances of the government, and the well-
being, the social discipline, the loyalty of its subjects — how
the result of this fresh trial of government was, that all these
had sunk down so low, that men had lost all reliance on one
another and on themselves, and the extremity of social disor-
ganisation seemed at hand. It goes on to tell, how, at this crisis,
when no one seemed to have any expedients but the rudest,
and now the most desperate, Gregory died, and Pius IX. began
to reign — with how much of sincerity, with how clear an
estimate of the work before him, with what aids, with what
hindrances, he entered on his difficult office: — to describe
the brilliant beginnings and prospects of the reformed
Popedom, and the amount of intelligence and spirit with
which it met the obstacles which necessarily arose as
it came seriously into action; finally, to relate its abrupt
and ignominious catastrophe, almost premature, in spite of
the signs of confused and uncertain purposes which had
portended it the complete bursting of the bubble, the
utter downfal of vaunts and hopes—and how, after all,
Pius IX. had to go back, without a struggle, without dis-
guise, and on a scale as yet unprecedented, to those old-
fashioned and odious props of power, which seemed the last
evils threatened by the misrule of Gregory— foreign armies
of occupation, and a police without limitation by law. All

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 407

this is related in the volumes before us, in order and at
length.

It is related, too, with an apparent seriousness, candour, and
truthfulness, which have plainly been the great recommenda-
tions of the book to its distinguished translator, and which
are said to have gained for the work great authority in the
_ writer’s own country. He has to tell a story of bitter disap-
pointment —a story which seems to pass judgment on the
calculations and ideas, as well as on the hopes of himself and
his friends; that is, of those who, in late years in Italy, have
endeavoured to ally a zeal for social and political improvement,
with sincere loyalty towards their Church and its head. He
has to tell how he and his party, with fair chances in their
favour, endeavoured to give body and practical effect to their
principles; and how, on the first trial, after an ominous
gleam of delusive success, they failed utterly—how they
were unable to realise one of their conceptions—how they
were driven from the field discomfited and hopeless, as theorists
whom facts had confounded. And this, a trying story for a
man to tell of himself and his party, he does tell with frank-
ness, dignity, and temper. Claiming full credit still for the
substantive truth of his principles, both as a Catholic and a
citizen, and for sincerity and zeal in applying them, he does
not disguise that, so far, they have proved inapplicable. The
experiment being for the time at an end, he has set to work
to note its turns and phases, not as an apologist, nor to
complain, or shift the blame on others, but to ascertain and
record for future instruction, the mistakes and faults of all,
and the degree in which inherited difficulties, or the influence
of collateral disturbing circumstances, affected the result.

Farini, we learn from his translator, is a native of the
Roman States. He was born in 1812, near Ravenna, and
brought up to the medical profession, apparently at Bologna,
a city of which he always speaks with strong attachment, as
the centre of intelligence, and of free and manly, yet temperate
opinion, in Romagna; and where he appears to have possessed
personal influence. He speaks as a sincere and zealous Roman
Catholic, and appears to have been admitted to a considerable

DD 4

408 FARINI’'S ROMAN STATE.

share of the confidence of Pius IX., by whom he was em-
ployed in one of the trying crises of his pontificate as a
special envoy and commissioner in the camp of Charles
Albert. Like most, however, who have had the reputation
of being Liberals in Italy, he has been a political exile or
refugee, which seems to be as much a matter of course under
the circumstances, as being some part of his life in opposition
is to an English M. P.

“ He was twice in exile,” we are told, “under Gregory XVL,
and returned to his country under the amnesty of Pius IX.,
July, 1846. In March, 1848, he became Secretary of State for the
Interior, sat in the Council of Deputies, and retired from political
office when Mamiani was minister. In October, he was appointed
Director of the Board of Health, but was ejected by the Triumvirs
of the Republic. He resumed his post on the entry of the French,
but was dismissed by the Triumvirate of Cardinals. He has taken
refuge in Turin, and holds an appointment there.”— P. x.

Thus he has felt the hostility of both the extreme parties—
the Republicans and the Absolutists; and it is hard to say,
to which of them, in the course of his narrative, he shows
himself most strongly opposed. The leader in whom he
placed most confidence, and from whom he expected most,
was the victim of the Republicans, Pellegrino Rossi. He
belongs to a party, or probably we ought to say now, a
school, of Italian liberal politicians, only lately discrimi-
nated in England from the hot-headed enthusiasts, or
the desperate plotters and levellers, who have been, hitherto,
the most prominent representatives of the class. In truth,
we fear in many parts of Italy it cannot require any very
extraordinary restlessness and independence of mind to
make a man what is there called a Liberal,—to place and
keep his reason in habitual discord with the authority and
institutions under which he lives. Of Liberalism, theoretical
and active, there are many shades in Italy; and many who
are rightly ranked among its leaders are very far indeed from
being either destructives or unbelievers. Theorists they may
be—unpractical, fruitless disturbersof what exists, for the sake

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 409

of what is impossible—dreamers over a glorious but irrecover-
able past; but such men as Balbo, d’Azeglio, and Rosmini, are
at least not enemies of government and order, and, as far as men
can know, are as good Catholics as their opponents. But, good
Catholics as they are, and because they are such, their moral
sense has been deeply shocked by that absence of morality,
both in what is neglected, and in what is done or allowed to
be done, by authorities which claim most loudly the sanction
of religion. In the home and centre of Roman Catholicism,
in that Italy whose faith has never been shaken in the tradi-
tions of antiquity, and under the eye of the guardian of that
faith, the methods of governing are the by-word of Chris-
tendom. And this is no mere question of political philosophy
or party ; it is something much more elementary than a com-
parison of different theories or models of government. It
means, that such is the system which has grown up and
taken root in many parts of that country, in the employment
of political power, that neither truth, nor fairness, nor mercy,
nor honour, nor justice, nor integrity, are reckoned among
its essential and indispensable laws and conditions. It means,
that no one expects these, as a matter of course, at the hands
of those in authority ; and that rulers never show any hesita-
tion, or scruple, when it is convenient, in departing from
them. It means, that where religion is alleged to be purest
and most influential, falsehood, and corruption, and loathsome
villany, vex and pollute the civil and social relations of men,
more widely, more systematically, and more hopelessly, than
in any other Christian people; and that those who have the
welfare of their fellows in their hands, cannot, after many
attempts, be divested of the idea that these disgraceful ex-
pedients are justifiable. It means further, that those who,
in times of difficulty, meet resistance with vindictive cruelty,
cannot be got to take the trouble, in times of peace, to consult
seriously for the happiness and improvement of their subjects.
This is what is meant by the political degradation of Italy.
In a race of so much intelligence and such high culti-
vation, authority is without dignity and without principle.
The very ideas of truth and justice between the governors

a
410 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

and the governed, have been obliterated, on either sidé, by
the immemorial and incurable contempt of them. This, and
not the mere admiration of constitutions and representatives
— this it is, which makes men Liberals in Italy ; not only the
violent and impetuous, but the religious, the temperate, and
the well-judging; those who know, how the Bible speaks of
cruelty and oppression, of treachery and denial of justice ;
and that these are not the less sins against religion, because
contrary to a civilisation itself not always religious. And
it is this which has roused the sympathy of one like Mr.
Gladstone for Italian Liberals.

The school to whom Farini belongs have as yet been more
distinguished as writers than as statesmen. They are, in
politics, what would be generally termed Constitutionalists,
though their line is more moral than political, more directed
to elevate and refine the public mind, to excite a sense of
the debasement encouraged or allowed by those who ought
to prevent it, than to discuss the indirect advantages or evils
of this or that political institution. They have tried to im-
press on their countrymen in all ranks, on all who can think
and exert influence, that the first great want is a real and
pervading sense of justice and respect for law; and next, they
have sought to chasten the extravagance and childishness which
so often mar the great natural powers of the Italians, and to
point their thoughts and wishes to greater manliness and
greater sobriety. These aims are on the surface of all that
has been written by Balbo, by d’Azeglio, by Gioberti, and
those who have worked with them; and it is to the force and
eloquence with which they have urged these points, to the
earnestness and breadth with which they have worked out
the moral above the political side of their cause, rather than
to any theory of state, or party watchword, or plan of prac-
tical reform, that they are indebted for the remarkable
attention which their works have commanded. Possibly
enough, they may have overrated what they could do by mere
writing. But they have written with great effect and great
honour to themselves; in form, far too diffusively and enthu-
siastically for a country like England, where political writing

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 411

has enjoyed the training of two centuries; yet with great
acuteness, with great moderation, with great comprehen-
siveness, often with very nervous and weighty language, and
-with a very grave and sorrowful reality of tone.

What these men have hitherto succeeded in accomplishing
for their country is but too clearly shown in the book before
us. We believe them to be men above the common stamp
in spirit and devotedness to their cause, men of high principle
and noble feeling; but they are not the men to save a state,
much less to re-create and restore one. Subtle, eloquent, and
refined, they have shown themselves as men of ideas and
wishes, not of means. Still, if they can keep to that for which
they are fitted, they may yet do good service to their coun-
trymen. So far as they can in any measure correct and brace
up public feeling in Italy, on political matters—so far as
they can leayen public opinion with that manliness, that
patience, that soberness, on which they place such a high
value —can wean the thinkers from their extravagance,
and the practical men from their slipperimess,—so far they
will be effectual, though only indirect, workers in that cause
of real improvement, the immediate steps towards which will
only then become clear and possible, when a healthier and
wiser tone prevails in society than exists at present.

Having said thus much of the writer, we turn to his book.
_ The object of it is, as we have said, to trace the political his-
tory of the Roman States from the peace of 1815 to the
present time, and to show what have been the social evils and
wants of those states, and how far the Papal government has
shown itself able to deal with them.

After the peace of Vienna, the old forms of government,
guarded and maintained with the jealousy of a restoration,
came in contact with a population unsettled by French ideas
and occupation, and become acquainted to a certain degree
with the vigour and method of French administration. It
was a trying state of things; and it required great for-
bearance, great forethought, and great firmness, to reconcile
and harmonise the anomalies of a clerical government restored
to all its ancient privileges and exclusiveness, and disposed to

412 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.
enforce them stiffly, with the spirit of independence or of
lawlessness left behind after the great war. eal zeal, care,
and pains, visibly displayed by the government in its civil
duties, might have done this, especially with a population in
general so warmly attached to their religion as that of the
Roman States. But it was not done. It was barely at-
tempted. In all that concerned the civil order of its subjects,
and their present and prospective peace and welfare, the
Roman court, so keen about its old prerogatives, was dog-
gedly indifferent and slack, Asking once more for the res-
ponsibilities of temporal government at the hands of the
European powers, it took no pains—none of that earnest and
persevering trouble which it never spares in its diplomacy —
to fulfil them. The result was a natural one. Those who
reviled ecclesiastical government had every day better reasons
given them for reviling it. What the government would
not try to provide against, it had in time to encounter by
violence; and thus to lay the foundation of fresh hatred and
fresh misery. Finesse and adroitness, or else bold and
thorough-going rigour, were the only qualities that ever
seemed to take the place of feeble mismanagement. Thus
severity, without the effort to improve, was met by conspi-
racy, with the sole aim of revenge; and, even under the mild
Pius VII., before five years were over, the Roman Provinces
were festering with faction and ill-blood, and abuses had ac-
quired their terrible defence, that it was become too hazardous
to touch them.

The beginning of this state of things, which has led on to
the results which we have witnessed of late, is thus de-
scribed : —

“On the restoration of the Pope, the clerical party came back
to power with the ideas it had when it fell, and with passions not
tempered, but inflamed, by calamity. Consalvi was at a distance ;
in spite of the Pope, the most hot-headed and fanatical persons
prevailed at court; and these persons who counted the very
moments until they could get full power to reverse all that had
been effected, did and said the strangest and maddest things in the
world” 2... |

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 413

*“ When Consalvi had returned to Rome, he endeavoured, in the
discharge of his duty as Secretary of State, to stem that current,
but with incomplete success; in fact, they neither gave any uni-
formity of frame to the entire state, nor did they simply reinstate
the ancient order of things: nor did they so adjust what they
newly introduced, as to make it harmonise with the peculiar
circumstances of the States of the Church, or with the fresh wants
and altered conditions of society. They ought to have acted with
forethought, both in cancelling the old and introducing the new,
instead of which they put new upon old, without cement, and
without dovetailing ; and whether of new or of old, they main-
tained or restored rather the bad than the good, or, at any rate,
rather what was hateful, than what was agreeable, to the people.
There were unbounded promises of civil and criminal codes, but
there came of them only some proclamations of Cardinals and
Papal bulls, with a few new and yet jarring laws. ‘There were
taxes and duties in the French fashion, general administration in
the Roman; no rules for a military conscription, troops picked up
at random on the highways; while commerce and industry were
discouraged by that legal meddling which some economists call
protection and favour. Instruction was impoverished, the censor-
ship peddling; all the men who had been distinguished in the time
of Napoleon were suspected and in disesteem. .... In the lay
principalities, the administrative and civil institutions had already
been in part reformed before the French Revolution ; in Lombardy,
at Naples, and in Tuscany, the excess of encroachment by the Church
upon the State had at that period been retrenched; nor did the
sovereigns, when restored, think of destroying all that which they
themselves or their fathers had effected. At Rome, on the con-
trary, although Consalvi tried to cheek it, the retrograde move-
ment tended towards those methods of administration, of legisla-
tion, and of policy, which reflected the likeness of the middle ages ;
a matter which was the cause of serious discontent, especially
in those provinces that for many years had formed part of the
kingdom of Italy. In the lay states the public functionaries were
changed, and perhaps, too, according to the custom of revolu-
tions and of restorations, without any restraint of justice or
kindness; but in the pontifical State the havoc was much greater,
inasmuch as the ecclesiastics returned to the exercise of those
civil offices, which in former times, when society was in infancy,
they had filled not without distinction to themselves and advantage

414 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. .

to the public, but which now they resumed by mere privilege of caste.
It is manifest how much evil this must have caused to the laity,
how much jealousy towards the clergy.”— Vol. i. pp. 6—8.

Pius was succeeded by a much abler man, Leo XII. Leo
boldly faced the danger; and, with no hesitating or incon-
sistent purpose, tried what could be done by a uniform return
to the old methods of government.

“Being resolved to change the policy of the state, and bring it
back, as far as possible, to the,ancient rules and customs, which he
thought admirable, he set about carrying these plans into’ effect
with a persevering anxiety. Owing to him, the authority of the con-
eregations of Cardinals was restored, and many ancient practices
and methods of the Roman Court were re-established. He gave coun-
tenance and protection to every kind of religious congregation
and pious confraternity ; by the Bull Quod divina sapientia he
appointed that education should be brought entirely under the
ecclesiastical hierarchy ; he determined to have all institutions
of charity and beneficence administered and governed by the
clergy ; he confirmed and enlarged the clerical exemptions, pri-
vileges, and jurisdictions. He took away from the Jews the right
to hold real property, binding them to sell what they possessed
within a fixed period; he recalled into vigour, to their detriment,
many offensive practices and barbarous customs of the middle age;
he caused them to be shut up in Ghetti with walls and gates, and
he put them in charge of the Holy Office. The result was, that
many wealthy and honourable merchants emigrated to Lombardy,
to Venice, to Trieste, and to Tuscany. He dissolved the board
which superintended vaccination, and quashed its rules; he gave
unlimited power to appoint majorats and entails; he abolished the
collegiate courts which administered justice, and instead of them
instituted pretorships, or courts of a single judge ; he reduced the
municipalities to dependence on the government, changed the
denominations of magisterial offices, made stringent game and
fishery laws, enjoined the use, or, to speak more truly, the torture,
of the Latin language in forensic speaking and writing, and in
the universities.”—Vol. i. pp. 20, 21.

Leo’s vigour and courage, which excite the respect of the
liberal historian, were by no means without their benefits;

7

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 415

but their very success, commensurate only with Leo’s life-
time, but showed more clearly the weakness of the system.

“ Truth requires me to relate, that, in the reign of Leo XII,
and under Bernetti’s administration, some good and useful acts
were done. There were abuses removed, and persons guilty of
them punished ; endeavours were made to set in order the hospitals
and charitable institutions of Rome ; streets, bridges, and other
public works, were completed or commenced; general security
was re-established in those districts that had been plundered by |
brigands; method was introduced into the expenditure, and the
land-tax was diminished by a third; a sinking fund for extin-
guishing the public debt was established on an adequate basis.
These were benefits which might have gained for the papal au-
thority the strength both of gratitude and of love, if, when the
people were presented with them, they had been gratified simul-
taneously with those institutions and those civilising laws which
others, even though subjects of absolute monarchies, enjoyed ; and
if they had not been accompanied with superfluous severities and
acts of political injustice. ..... And those extravagant assaults
upon the liberals, that practice of clothing inquisitors with the
long robe and judges with the cowl, that mixing up religion with
politics, and ecclesiastics with police officers, that placing the
throne upon the altar, rendered the government and the clerical
party odious to persons of refinement, to the youth hopeful of the
future, to the cultivated laity, which revolted in heart against the
domination of the clergy. And because that public opinion, by
which governments acquire stability or fall, forms itself out of
the sentiments, the likes and the dislikes, of that very description
of people, and not according to the sympathies and the notions of
the stupid and indifferent multitude; hence it happened that
everything abusive was stated and believed, about Rome, and
the cardinals, and the government of priests. These circumstances
kept alive the disposition to conspire, and paved the way for
the excesses both of friendly and. of hostile factions.”— Vol. i.
pp. 28—30.

_ Of the methods employed by Leo to stop the evils of the
time, the following is given as a specimen : —

“Cardinal Rivarola surrounded himself with gendarmes and
spies, encouraged informers, set on foot secret inquisitions, pub-
lished a proclamation which prohibited going about at night with-

oe
~
— *

"Sa
Ss

416 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

out a lantern in the hand, under pain of such sentence as the
authorities might please, and imprisoned persons of every age, class,
and condition. Then, on the 31st of August, in the year 1825, he
sentenced five hundred and eight individuals. Of these, seven were
to suffer death ; thirteen, hard labour for life ; sixteen, for twenty
years; four, for fifteen years; sixteen, for ten years; three, for seven
years; one, for five; one, for three; six were to have imprisonment
for life in a fortress ; thirteen, for twenty years; twelve, for fifteen
years ; twenty-one, for ten; one, for seven; four, for five; two,
for a single year; two were banished for life. Two hundred and
twenty-nine were punished by,surveillance and the precetto politico
of the first order; one hundred and fifty-seven by that of the
second order. The first of these bound the party not to quit
his native town and province; to return home within an hour
after sun-set, and not to go out before sun-rise ; to appear before
the inspector of police every fifteen days ; to confess once a month,
and ¢o prove it to the police by the declaration of an ap-
proved confessor ; and, lastly, to perform every year the spiritual
exercises for at least three days, in a convent to be chosen by the
bishop. ‘The penalty for disobedience was three years of labour
on the public works. The precetto of the second order was a
little less severe, and the penalty for deviation more lenient. The
sentences of death were afterwards commuted for perpetual im-
prisonment. Of the five hundred and eight condemned by
Rivarola, thirty were nobles, one hundred and fifty-six landed pro-
prietors or traders, two priests, seventy-four public functionaries,
thirty-eight military men; seventy-two were doctors, advocates,
engineers, or men of letters: the rest artisans. The sentence was
grounded upon simple presumptions of belonging to the liberal
sects, and it was pronounced by the cardinal a latere without any
sort of guarantee, whether of defence or of publicity, and without
any other rule than the mere will of a cardinal sitting as judge.
There followed a proclamation, in which a free pardon was
declared for all those members of the sects who were not included
in the sentence; but if they attached themselves to those bodies
afresh, they were to be punished even for the offence which had
once received pardon. And, lastly, it was provided that, from
that time forwards, the heads and propagators of sects should
be punished with death upon simple ex parte evidence; those who
kept arms, emblems, or money, with twenty years of labour on
public works ; those simply associated, with ten ; and, lastly, those

a

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 417

who, knowing or suspecting the existence of a sect, or the con-
nexion of an individual with one, should not give information,
were to be punished with seven years of the galleys.

“ After this burst was over, Rivarola appeared to grow gentle,
recalled here and there an exile, did another act or two of grace,
declared he had it at heart to reconcile political factions, and in
proof of that intention, had a strange plan, that in Faenza, a city
afflicted more than any with party quarrels, there should be
celebrated, by way of example to the public, various marriages,
for which he paid the dowry and the charges.”— Vol. i. pp. 21—24.

But this merciless abuse of the judicial office is really a light
evil, compared with that savage spirit of faction which the
government scrupled not to elicit and employ. Vigorous,
and what to bystanders seems cruel repression, may be car-
ried on upon some sort of principle, even though in its exercise
the laws, not only of humanity, but of truth, are broken
without much scruple. But the deliberate sanctioning of the
spirit of civil feud is such a deadly blow to the existence of
society, that on no principle, that a government could dare to
avow, can it be justified. That fierce sects existed in the
Roman states was, indeed, a terrible evil ; that the opposition
to government took the shape of conspiracy, aiding itself by
secret societies, was a serious danger. But the Roman
government did their best to legitimate and perpetuate this
fatal temper, when it used the like instruments on its own
side, and allowed them to dignify themselves with sacred
names. Against the liberal Carbonari were arrayed the San-
fedisti; the crimes of the one were imitated closely by the
other: the dagger of the one was to achieve liberty; of the
other, to maintain the Catholic faith. |

The beginning of the Sanfedisti, under Pius VIL., is thus
related, and commented on: —

“The Pope formally condemned, and smote with an anathema,
_ the sect of the Carbonari, which was spreading in the States of
the Church, and the court of Rome allowed the formation of the
hostile sect of the Sanfedists.
“There had existed anciently a politico-religious association
called the Pacifici, or the Santa Unione, which took for its motto
EE

418 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

the text of the Gospel, ‘ Beati pacifici quia filii Dei vocabuntur,
and was sworn to maintain the public peace at the risk of life.
Perhaps in its origin Sanfedism was the development and amplifica-
tion of a scheme of this kind: its professed object was, to defend
the Catholic religion and the privileges and jurisdictions of the Court
of Rome, with the temporal dominion and the prerogatives of the
Papacy, as well from the plots of innovators as from the aggres-
sions of the Empire...... It was, or seemed to be, national, by
opposing the influence of the Empire. Those who held high office
in the Church or in the State,—those who were in esteem for
property, for high birth, or for wisdom,—those who were con-
spicuous for well-ordered life and firm belief, should have been the
natural governors and moderators of the society ; but since all
human designs deteriorate as they go into operation, so it easily
happened that rank and dignity were held sufficient without merit
and learning, fortune without the habit of employing it properly,
nobility of origin without nobility of mind; and that hypocrisy
assumed the garb of religion, covetousness of loyalty. Hence
there were many knaves, many impostors, and many scoundrels,
who made use of the influence of the society for their personal
advantage. Time brought about modifications, and Sanfedism
grew worse while it grew older, as will presently be seen. In the
meantime it is well to fix the mind on this association, which held
absolute and extreme principles together with retrograde political
aims, and to place it in comparison with the sect of the Carbonari;
we may then well conceive how many feuds, and what standing con-
flict, must needs have been the result. ..... It is but too true,
that sects in opposition are indispensable, more than elsewhere, in
Lower Italy, where conspiracy must remain a second nature, as
long as governments discountenance publicity and parliaments,
which are its only genuine remedies; too true, that such sects
work ill in our times, and can never work really well: but sects
in aid of the executive power are always and everywhere unnatural
and anti-rational; they lead governments into a course of excess,
and so to destruction.”— Vol. i. pp. 1O—13.

In the time of Gregory XIV. things had advanced; and
an armed and secret association was set on foot by cardinals
and ecclesiastics, which was allowed to take law into its own
hands throughout the cities of Romagna : —

“ The pontifical government was in danger from the Liberals ;

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 419

in the French it had at best but doubtful friends ; Austrian aid
was doubtful and perilous, the heterodox Powers suspected. San-
fedism, orthodox in politics as in religion, thought itself equal
to sustaining and defending the fabric of government by aug-
menting and training in military discipline the actual force of
the sect, and all who on religious or political grounds sympathised
with it.

“ Hence came the idea of a soldiery to be called Centurions,
a most ancient institution of the States of the Church, men-
tioned by the chroniclers who condemn its working, and eulogise
Sixtus V., among other things, for having destroyed it......
So at this juncture, in defence of the Government, when Cardinal
Bernetti was Secretary of State, these Centurions were repro-
duced. Not indeed that I think the minister had any merely
factious aim, or proposed to employ them except in the way
of legitimate defence: but I well know and affirm that they were
principally used and abused for the annoyance of the Liberals, it
being in the nature of the spirit of party so to blind men, that
they think governments can only be defended by injuring their
enemies. Cardinal Brignole, who had come to Bologna as Com-
missioner Extraordinary instead of Albani, showed great zeal
in the foundation of this secret militia, which remained in the
condition of a clandestine society in the Marches, in Umbria, and
in the other Lower Provinces ; but in the four Legations they
assumed the name and uniform of Pontifical Volunteers. These
Centurions and Volunteers obtained their recruits amidst the
meanest and most criminal of the people. ‘They had the privilege
of carrying arms; were exempt from certain municipal taxes ;
and were influenced by fanaticism, not only political, but likewise
religious, because certain Bishops and Priests enrolled and in-
structed them. In some towns and castles they domineered with
brutal ferocity; at Faenza particularly, where Sanfedism had
of old struck deep root, they scoured the place, in arms to the
teeth, like a horde of savages in a conquered country ; the police
was in their hands, so that they practised insolence and excess with
impunity ; the country people and servants resisted the authority
of their masters; nor was there any mode of remedy, for those
in power were either of the same fry, or else were afraid of the
excesses of this dominant faction. It avenged the wrongs of
the Government, those of religion, those of the sect and of every
member of it, and it lighted up in Romagna a very hell of frantic

EE 2

420 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

passions; I have only to add, that the Centurions were also political
assassins. I have already told, and I sorrowfully repeat it, how
the Liberal sects of Romagna had begun at an early date to
imbrue their hands in the blood of their party opponents. The
example was fatal: blood brought forth blood. ‘The Carbonari,
execrable deed! had treacherously shed it under the pretext of
freedom and of patriotism; the Centurions were greedy of it
for the honour of Mary and of the Vicar of Christ; a twofold
and a threefold abomination. Oh! may it please the mercy of
God, that all parties may imbibe the persuasion, that no enormity
is necessary or advantageous to,the cause of nations, of the masses,
or of Governments.”— Vol. i. pp. 71—73.

The turbulence which was made the excuse of such vile
expedients was, as it could not fail to be, perpetuated and
inflamed by them. ‘This excessive severity of persecution,
brutal as it was, and not now the same powerful instrument
that it once may have been, because civilisation now “ will
not permit effectual extermination,” might yet in vigorous
hands have enforced temporary tranquillity; not so, when the
lawless sects of revolutionists found the government willing
to play the same game as themselves. At the beginning of
Gregory’s reign, the writer tells us, that the times were
too degenerate for even factions to be violent and boisterous;
yet still, there had ‘*been no peace for fifteen years in
the Pontifical State; Prince and people lived in continual
suspicion the one of the other, and contending sects were
engaged in alternate efforts at mutual destruction.” *
Thus it was when Gregory began; under him there was
violence enough, at least, to wipe away from the time the
charge of degenerating from the ancient bitterness of Italian
factions. With the same or worse obstinacy, on the part of
the court, in evading the real duties of civil government, there
grew daily, and with daily aggravation, the reasons and the
pretexts of mutual hostility between itself and the discon-
tented part of its subjects. Daily each side found itself with
fresh and greater wrongs,— more unable to forgive, and
more resolved not to spare.

* Voli. p.39,

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 421

In his account of this pontificate, Farini seems to do justice,
both to what was wise and beneficial, and to what was
tolerable and excusable, in the organisation of the court and
government,—of which he gives a curious and detailed
account*, and also, to the private virtues both of Gregory and
his minister Lambruschini. He bears witness to the learning
and the simplicity of the Pope, to his zeal, his prudence, and
conciliatory spirit, in managing the affairs of the Jesuits in
France, and especially, to the dignity and courage with which
he confronted the Emperor of Russia. And to Lambru-
schini, though he charges him with the full responsibility of
the policy of that unprosperous reign, and with an imperious
and haughty temper which could endure no rival, he gives
full credit for his devotion to the Church, and speaks of him
invariably as of one who had always commanded the respect
of honourable antagonists. But his administration, like that
of his predecessor, Bernetti—a vigorous and perhaps able one,
if there had been nothing to amend, and amendment had
not been the most sacred duty — was powerless for anything
but harsh repression. There was a famous document pre-
sented to the Papal government in 1831, which bears the
most fatal testimony against its fitness and its willingness to
govern well. In that year, alarmed for its very existence, the
ministers of the great powers earnestly and solemnly urged on
it the necessity of placing its power on a “solid basis, by means
of timely ameliorations.” They spoke of these ameliorations
as changes, which would realise Cardinal Bernetti’s promise
of a “‘ new era” to the Pope’s subjects, and of the necessity
of securing them by internal guarantees against the vicis-
situdes of an elective monarchy. These ameliorations touched
the great springs of society. ‘The ministers recommended,
first and foremost, a reformed administration of justice, ac-
cording to the as yet unfulfilled promises of 1816,—a wise
system of partial self-covernment for the towns and the
provinces, —in the finance, an order and responsibility which
had never yet existed,—and, further, the admission of laymen

* Book L. c. xi,

EE $

429 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

to judicial and administrative functions. These were not the
demands of Liberal conspirators. They were not the device
of the constitutional powers of Europe. This was the remon-
strance and advice, not only of France and England, but of
Prussia, of Austria, and of Russia, and “was urged on the
Pope for adoption by the Austrian ambassador, Count
Lutzow.”* How it was attended to, the narrative of these
volumes shows. ‘The changes reluctantly made were soon
withdrawn. A pretext was found in outbreaks, which the
Government punished with indiscriminate severity : —

“The pontifical Government seemed to bind bad and good
in the same bundle. Punishments for political causes ought as
a general rule to be lenient for the greater part of offenders, and
not to touch too many nor to be too much prolonged, otherwise
they carry an appearance of excess, vindictiveness, and cruelty,
and they sustain and quicken that spirit of rebellion which
they are meant to exhaust and to extinguish, . . . . Al-
ready numerous were the exiles of the Papal States, not few
the prisoners for plots old and new, for revolts and for disturb-
ances. Were not these enough? ‘The Government had on its
side French, Austrian, native troops, two Swiss regiments, the
Volunteers and the Centurions; and, further, it wasset at ease
both with respect to the pacific tendency of the policy of France,
and because the spirit of its enemies was cowed by recent defeats
and by egregious disappointments. It had, then, nothing to fear ;
yet it resolved to punish to excess, and to punish, perhaps, yet
more, the mere aspiration of youth, than acts really seditious.
It determined to close the universities, and it gave licence to
private persons, in the small towns and provincial cities, to teach
the sciences; it inhibited youths, although minors, who in 18381
had borne arms, from completing their course of studies and taking
degrees ; it repelled many from the courts of law; against many
more it closed every career of honour; and thus it cast the whole
of a new generation into the Sects and their conspiracies. It
dissolved the Municipal Councils nominated towards the end of
1831; it imprisoned and condemned those who had made efforts
to resist their dissolution, and it turned the representative . bodies
into servile assemblages of needy, ignorant, and factious indi-

* Parl. Papers, Italy, 1846-7, part i. p. 126.

FARINI'S ROMAN STATE, 423

viduals. No person, who was in bad odour as a Liberal (and in
the estimation of the Sanfedists little was needed for the purpose),
could keep an office, whether under Government or Municipal,
or could obtain one if he asked for it, or could represent either
municipality or province. Thus they sweiled excessively the
numbers of those that were called the excluded, and that might
well have been called, in a political phrase of the Florentine
Republic, ‘the warned.’ Besides this, no more was thought of
the reforms and institutions indicated in the Memorandum of 1831.”
—Vol. i. pp. 75—77.

The goading unfairness of the judicial administration still
continued; and the finances were left to the conscience of
their officers : —

*“ The Judicial department was not rectified according to promise;
codes were not published; an ill-patched penal statute was enacted;
in which there were merciless punishments for the crimes which
were called treasonable, or which might be so construed. There
exists a confidential circular of Cardinal Bernetti, in which he
orders the judges, in the case of Liberals charged with ordinary
offences or crimes, invariably to inflict the highest degree of
punishment. ‘The judges seconded all this from passion, if they
were of the colour of the sect, or else from fear, or from venality.
The police was all faction in some places, and an agent of police
caused more alarm among the inhabitants than a highwayman ;
those bullies, uniting with the Centurions, would pluck out the very
beard or moustache of the citizens; they would not let the Liberals
indulge in shooting or any amusement; they refused them
passports, pried into their families, and used force against their
domiciles and persons with incessant and minute searches. Mean-
while, the administration of the public revenue remained as
of old, without method and without audit; ruinous loans were
contracted ; ruinous leases of public revenues were given ; trade,
instruction, and industry, suffered not only neglect, but discourage-
ment and deterioration.”— Vol. i. pp. 77, 78.

_ Miserable,” says the historian, ‘“ were those first years of
the reign of -Gregory, and not only infested by revolts,
intestine feuds, and the bitterness of faction, but likewise by
the casualties of nature.” In the summer of 1832, storms and
hail such as had not been seen within the memory of man

EE 4

424 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

destroyed the crops, tore down the trees, and wasted the fields
of Romagna. Earthquakes were frequent in those years.
Men’s minds were filled with terror. In 1833, and again in
1837, cholera raged destructively at Ancona and Rome, and
for a moment awed into stillness the ferocity of the sects.
The years 1839 and 1840 were marked by extraordinary and
devastating inundations: visitations, all these, which were
not confined to Romagna; but the historian only reflects the
feeling of the time, when he interweaves them with the story
of social unhappiness, which always makes men mark such
scourges, when they coincide with it, as direct and solemn
chastisements.

And such was the state of things which continued through
the reign of Gregory. Meanwhile, among the Liberals, that
is, those who more or less boldly set themselves against the
government, there was going on a gradual clearing up of their
aims, and a growing definiteness of plan and intention. The
Liberals of 1830 in the Pontifical State were

“for the most part, either the followers of Voltaire or indifferentists
in the matter of religion, materialists in philosophy; almost all
of them Constitutionalists in politics, some in the French fashion,
others in the Spanish. But whether unitarians or federalists, few
of them had any well-defined conception, either philosophical or
political, or any true and conprehensive idea of nationality. The
greater part of them thought chiefly of what they had to pull down;
about building up, they meant to think afterwards ; only anxious, to
speak plainly, that in the mean time the priests and the Sanfedists
should be well beaten, and their odious government done away
with.”— Vol. i. p. 33.

Not so the body formed and directed by one who was, perhaps,
never exceeded by any founder of an order, in his self-
devotion, perseverance, and patience — Mazzini: —

“But these, and other like considerations, did not restrain
Giuseppe Mazzini from founding a new clandestine Association,
which was intended, not only to absorb and to recast the sects
formerly existing, but to extend them, bind them to one another
at home, and to himself as their head abroad. To this new

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE, 425

sect he gave the name of Giovine Italia, as if in token of a new
creed and new objects; and he designedly shut out of it every
man that was more than forty years old, to show that he based
his calculations on the buoyant enthusiasm of youth, and not
on judgment and experience. He enjoined obedience, and sur-
render of will and of strength, on the part of every member, to the
orders of their chiefs ; he arranged that all should have arms, am-
munition, and military training. This Giovine Italia was a
mixture of Germanism and of Christianity, of Romanism and
Mysticism, through which the old and purely political Sects were
transmuted into an association, in part political, in part social,
and in part religious. The Carbonari, it is true, were for the
most part either indifferentists or followers of Voltaire, but that
old sect bore more enmity to the priests than to the religion
of our fathers; the new one had a positive religious faith, not
avowed, it is true, or determined, but in substance heretical with
reference to the Roman Catholic creed. And as in philosophy
and in religion, so likewise it was positive in politics, whether
with respect to an organisation for the nation, or to the form
of government, or to its social institutions; choosing as its idol
Unity for the first, a Republic for the second, and pure Democracy
for the third......

“War then was to be waged upon all the Governments and
upon all the princes of Italy; war upon the very idea of a Prince
or of a Monarch ; war upon the Austrians ; war upon Europe, the
guardian and avenger of treaties. Giovine Italia begged the
obolus out of the lean purses of the refugees—such were its
revenues ; it enlisted on foreign soil, with an oath of life and
death, Italian exiles and young Poles, fearless for their lives,
and forward to expose themselves to conflict—such were its
armies ; it conspired with the republicans of France —such were
its allies ; it despatched conspirators and agitators into Italy—
such were its ambassadors and diplomatists. And, as if its move-
ments to and fro, its levies of money, its purchases of arms and
its other numerous indications, any single one of which is more
than enough in the eyes of a modern police, did not suffice to
give an inkling of its machinations, this Giovine Italia printed a
Journal, in which the principles and aims of the association were
frankly declared.”— Vol. i. pp. 81—83.

But Mazzini’s first attempts were failures; and the enthu-
silastic and visionary ideas of his sect, its democratic elements

426 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

and purpose, and its unscrupulousness, had further dis-
credited him with the more educated, more refined, and more
moderate classes, who equally wished for great changes.
About 1844 Balbo and Gioberti began to write : —

“The leading idea of the book of Balbo was that of inde-
pendence; while Gioberti chiefly affected and recommended all
practicable’ modes of conciliation and thorough concord of the
people with their Princes. He taught, that Sects and partial
insurrections would not forward, but retard and obstruct, the
recovery of Italy; that the Catholic Religion was not opposed
to any honourable plans for freedom, but blessed and sanctified
them ; that the Italians should revere and jealously preserve it as
their chief, their sole, their inexhaustible treasure, amidst the
great miseries of their country; that her fortunes ought to be
restored, but by honourable and virtuous means ; that the sanctity
of the end does not justify measures in themselves unrighteous ;
that the concord of the various classes with one another was
indispensable, and also the concord of the Princes with their
subjects. All this would be gained, if the Liberals would give
up their fruitless plots, their irreverence towards the Church,
their assaults upon Royalty; and if the Princes would reform
their civil and political systems and laws, as the times and
the judgments of the wise required. . .... . What was
wanting, was, if I may so express myself, a political conscience —
a faith on which enlightened minds and well-disposed hearts
might rely,—a system that would define what was _ possible,
and declared what was probable, in respect both to means and
ends, and would form a training both for the understanding
and the feelings. The books of which I am speaking had this
effect upon all the men of a certain grade in age, judgment, know-
ledge and character, being in the main those by whose influence
public opinion is shaped. It appeared a great gain, and a great
comfort, to have it proved that men might be liberal without
being irreligious; might love their country, and labour for its
good, without offending the eternal principles of justice, and
without being surrounded by continual dangers; that they might
believe in good without producing evil, believe in the resurrection
of Italy without renouncing their reason, and might take this for
their guide instead of chance. But the Giovine Italia began to
bristle up, and censured these famous works, with their no less
famous authors. The sects, too, remained. But the sectarian

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 427

temper was everywhere softened; the reformers soon became
more numerous than the revolutionists: an attainable end had
been pointed out, and all eyes that could see regarded it with
eagerness: their means, their advances, their order of proceeding,
were elucidated ; and thus materials and aim were supplied for
the diligence of the well-disposed.”— Vol. i. pp. 103-106.

In June, 1846, Gregory died. The Pontifical government
had been restored for more than thirty years. During that
time it had enjoyed, not indeed quiet, but under the guarantees
of treaties, and the support of all Europe, perfect safety. At
this time what was the condition of the population specially
entrusted to the care, temporal as well as spiritual, of the
Roman Court?

Without dwelling on matters of political economy and
wealth, we have before us the following summary, drawn up
apparently with all due fairness and discrimination, of matters
necessarily affecting the moral habits and character of the
people,

In the country the people did not complain. ‘ The country
people,” says Farini, “ were everywhere peaceful, devoted to
the head of their religion, reverent to the priesthood, only
discontented at paying too much. The minor clergy, whether
of the capital or of the provinces, were single-minded, little
instructed, given to complain of the abuses of Rome and of
the badness of the government, and, with few exceptions,
neither turbulent nor immoral.” But the hangers-on of the
court, “more foreign than Roman,” were “false, hypocritical,
sectarian, and factious.” The lower class in Rome, “ perhaps
attached to the Pontiff, but little to the Prince, and not at
all to the government,” were rude and turbulent: in the
provinces, they were sectaries and “daring partisans.” The
middle class was small, and discontented. The nobility at
Rome were reverent to the Papacy, but jealous of the ex-
clusive power of the clergy ; and in the provinces, “ disinclined
or positively hostile to the government, or else indifferent.”
In general, the government “was far from strong in the
attachment of its subjects or in public opinion.” But the
following circumstance calls for special attention: of itself, it

428. FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

tells a whole story. Not individuals, but whole bodies of
men, were under punishment : — “ Thousands upon thousands
of citizens were what is called under warning: these were in-
terdicted from all offices of honour and emolument, whether
under government or in the municipalities. The number of
families, who, after 1831, were persecuted for political causes,
by the government or the Sanfedists, was very great. The
exiles, with those proscribed and under sentence, amounted
perhaps to two thousand. The military commissions were
permanent.” In the promised reforms of justice and finance
nothing had been done. It is scarcely surprising that such a
government should be “ the object, abroad, of sharp reproach
and sarcasm, and that the diplomatic body stood in dread of
insurrection and revolution.”

Such a state of things was indeed both scandalous and for-
midable. At the very time when the Church of Rome was
drawing deep and earnest attention throughout Europe to
her religious claims—at the very time when, after the indif-
ference or hostility of the last century, a strong reaction in
her favour was setting in,—at the very time when it was
becoming the fashion, even with liberal writers, to be not
only dispassionate, but indulgent,—at the very time when
she was rising more and more to the height of her ancient
spirit, and her advocates were eagerly maintaining that not
only all truth and high morality, but all civilization, all en-
lightenment, all art, all social order had flowed from her, and
were dependent on her,—at the very time that they were
arguing for the necessity of her temporal power, and even
suggesting her claim to the guardianship of law and justice
between nations and kings, —coincidently with this remark-
able change in opinion and language on her religious aspect,
and this progress of her own spiritual pretensions, and in-
versely with it, her temporal government was becoming
more intolerable and infamous. There was nothing to save
her responsibility. She was independent; her ministers
had exclusive and absolute possession of power; her popula-
tion was devoted to the religion which she taught, and had
ever been so; her presence was in itself their highest boast.

a

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 429

And yet the Roman government was, not only in matters
of material prosperity, but in those of truth, and justice,
and mercy, the worst in Europe.

Yet, even in this respect, it seemed as if at length the
Roman Church was going to show its power, and make good
the boast of its modern champions. Undoubtedly the ac-
cession of Pius IX. was a time of the most singular and
exciting interest. His attempts, and their result, first, to
remove the plain abuses of the old system, next, to give an
essentially new organisation to his government, are the sub-
ject of the remainder of the volumes.

The narrative is given in great detail, and has every ap-
pearance of truthfulness. ach step in the history is noted,
from the conclave to the amnesty, from the amnesty to the plot,
from the plot to the constitution, from the constitution to the
Austrian war, from the Austrian war to the Triumvirate.
Each turn inthe popular mind is watched and put down;
each procession and féte, with their peculiar symptoms—what
they arose from, and what they portended. Each personage
is scrutinised and weighed, as he appears on the scene; his
merits and his motives adjusted with care, not with any great
breadth of effect, yet as if they had been actually seen and
thoughtfully observed. Towns, parties, cliques, journals, are
discriminated with equal care, and the degree marked, in
which the opposite elements, mixed up in this singular passage
of history, were a drag or a stimulus to one another — how in
the same person, the Cardinal jarred or coincided with the
Minister, the Italian with the Roman, the Liberal with the
Catholic, the Prince with the Pope. It is on this minute
exhibition of character, and of the various shades of the
movement, that much of the interest of the book depends;
for, as a narrative, partly it may be from the nature of the
events themselves, it is deficient in concentration and force.

The first measure of Pius IX. was, without doubt, as wise
as it was popular. With “thousands upon thousands under
punishment,” for political offences, there was no beginning
anew without a fresh and clear start. The amnesty was the
act of a considerate and merciful ruler, and might well have

430 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

been that of a far-sighted one. Nor is there much to criticise
in the rapturous enthusiasm with which it was received by the
Italians. At such an omen, and such an act of grace, cheering
so many hearts, the most serious and thoughtful might allow
himself to be carried away by the unaffected gladness and
pride of the hour. The amnesty and the rejoicings which
greeted it are the only point on which it is possible to dwell
with satisfaction, in this melancholy, yet most grotesque
history.

But the clouds began to gather immediately. That ex-
aggeration of sentiment, in its external acts leading, perhaps,
only to childish folly, but the too sure symptom, in grown-up
men, of hollowness and want of truth, soon made its ap-
pearance. Many of the exiles made professions of extra-
vagant gratitude; like Galletti, the future republican minister,
‘‘ who swore at the feet of the Pontiff, by the heart’s blood of
himself and his children, that he would be grateful and faith-
ful; and made himself conspicuous by declaring, through the
press, the strongest sentiments of the same kind.” The
Jesuits, though more backward than the other orders, cele-
brated the amnesty by ‘‘ appointing to be held in the Church
of S. Ignazio, a grand literary assembly, under the title of
the Triumph of Mercy:” not without exciting the murmurs
of the city, “both at the lateness of the demonstration, and
at some of the compositions which were read at it.” ‘ There
was a kind of plot in which all were implicated, to make soft
speeches and keep holiday.” Exorbitant adulation seemed
the only means of relieving the public mind from its burden
of delight. ‘ Every little act of good was magnified and
exalted to the skies. Every one took pleasure in blinding
himself and others, and public opinion learned the accents of
acourt. If the Pope revived the Academy of the Lincei*,
the Members of the Arcadia chanted, Marvellous! even as
if he were opening a parliament of civilisation for the whole
world. If he permitted industrial associations, evening schools,
infant asylums, reading rooms, it seemed a miracle. If he

* 'The earliest scientific society of Italy, founded by Galileo.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 431

gave it to be understood that he did not object to scientific
meetings, the crowd of the half learned, to whom this puffing
age distributes chaplets, blew the trumpet of Fame forthwith.”
‘* All the journals sang a chorus of his praises: any man that
did not do the like, and join in the general rejoicing, was
pointed at with the finger.” ‘‘ Interminable odes of poetasters,
and discourses of puny scribblers—in whose hands all popes
and heroes grew dwarfish when compared with Pius [X.—”
every form into which pedantry and folly could twist flattery,
every prank which “merry and addle-headed politicians”
could imagine, abounded. If the Pope visited a church, if
an anniversary came round, or if the weather was fine and
men in high spirits, demonstrations were got up, processions
went to the Quirinal to cry Viva, and fire-works were let off.
In the towns, parties of “ Gregorians” and “ Pians” were
formed. ‘‘ The name of Gregory became a by-word of abuse,
but that of Pius, with his likeness and his shield, became the
fashion. Besides these, there were a thousand of those little
follies through which men lose their senses, and, in jest and
unawares, fan the accursed flame of civil discord.”

The amiable Pope looked on complacently, with smiles and
blessings. ‘‘ Perhaps,” says the cautious, and not unfriendly
historian, “ he too was self-deceived, and exulted in the uni-
versal exultation, with the reverent homage which was paid
him by his subjects, by all Italy, and by strangers.” The
actual business of the Government, meanwhile, was going
very wrong. In its control it was slack and feeble. Very
soon “there were noticed certain signs of an ill-disposition,
and certain greater signs of remissness in the Government,
and of an unruly temper in the people.” ‘ Malcontents,
aware of the gentle temper of the Prince, and the laxity of
the Government, ventured more than they would probably
had dared under Gregory.” Much was said and promised
about Reforms— much praise given, by anticipation, for them;
and extremely little clearly seen, as to what was necessary
and how it was to be done, either by the Pope, or his Liberal
flatterers. On the one hand,—

432. FARINI'S ROMAN STATE,

“Pius IX. and Cardinal Gizzi, aware of these difficulties and
dangers, and by nature given to hesitate, would not proceed in
haste, for fear of furnishing matter rather for quarrel than for
union, and, accordingly, they conducted themselves rather with a
view to inspiring the innovators with a persuasion of their disposi-
tion to effect reforms, than so as to exasperate, by real and prompt
acts of reformation, those who were averse to them. For this
purpose it was, that they nominated commissions to deliberate and
advise upon many and various subjects; and that Cardinal Gizzi
wrote letters of the 24th of August, to the Presidents of the Pro-
vinces, directing them to invite the municipal magistracies, the
ecclesiastics, and all respectable citizens, to consider and suggest
the most suitable schemes for popular education, and especially for
the moral, religious, and industrial instruction of the children of
the poor. But this practice of talking much and doing little, of
showing a disposition to innovate, and letting all plans of change
be strained through a series of discussions and of congregations,
was not good for the Pontifical State. Whether because this
country was too far behind others in the path of civilisation, or
because the people had too little patience and too sanguine anti-
cipations, such a method of proceeding begot an excess of hopes
on the one side, and of apprehensions on the other, and left open
that boundless field of conjecture, over ,;which the mind of man,
when eager in expectation, wanders without a guide. Already the
Liberals had conceived boundless desires, and the Retrogradists
were haunted with unreasonable fear. The Government had, to-
day, to moderate on the left; to-morrow, to re-assure on the
right; then with fresh circular despatches, well nigh to scold men
for hoping too much, and, in seeming at least, to contradict and
stultify itself, and to lose its presence of mind.” — Vol. i. pp. 186,
187.

On the other,

“Liberal opinion seemed more inclined to skim lightly the fields
of fancy, and to cull delicate exotic flowers of freedom, than to
work out, with steady will, measures of practical reform ; and the
Court, tenacious of the privileges and the temporal possessions of
the clergy, looked complacently upon this levity of liberalism, and
upon the intoxication of the public from joy. ‘This intoxication
grew in such a way, that it had become the habitual mood of the
spirits and the understandings of the generality; and it seemed
as if altering the constitution of a State was a game of capering

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 433

children, or a carnival freak, and not a task of men in earnest.
But that incessant summoning of the people into the streets, and
their assembling, was such a sign of rankness in their vitality,
and such a stimulus to their southern temperaments, as made it
easy to conclude that, at a more advanced stage, there would be a
change of humour for the worse! and that easy indifference of the
Government was of no good omen in regard to the future, either
for its own authority or the public security. And who could have
checked this utter ebriety? .... At that time all restraining
councils, all serious warnings, were held cheap, as bugbears from
the minds of alarmists, and auguries of ill-willed prophets. Former
Governments had used to give encouragement to the triumphs of
singers and dancing girls, to pastimes, harliquinades, the loungers,
and lounging processions, of one kind ; hence it was an easy matter
to fall in with the habit, and to bring into fashion triumphs and
mountebanks, lounges and shows of another kind. In Rome es-
pecially, where idling is a habit with many, where spectacles are
highly popular, where the people are going in processions all the
year round, it was more easy than elsewhere to turn bacchanalian
spirits to a political end, and to change religious into political
processions. And in Rome especially, popular agitation was of
moment; because from thence went forth impulses and examples
to the Provinces. The pious Pontiff, who, since the amnesty, had
probably remarked not only a greater respect to sacred persons and
things, but likewise an unusual, or at least an increased, resort to
the observances of public worship, rejoicing in the reconcili-
ation of souls to God, gratified, too, with that of subjects to their
’ Sovereign, was readily tolerant of their superlative manifestations
of gratitude and merriment. And it is no more than the truth
that the accents of pardon, descending from the chair of Saint
Peter upon the souls of men, had reunited many to their God;
the humanity and the compassion, of which the Vicar of Christ set
a bright example, had revived the religious sentiment ; and nume-
reus were the consciences encouraged and tranquillised by the
benediction of a Pope friendly to the advancement of Christian
civilisation. ”— Vol. i. pp. 207 — 209.

And so after a year had passed, little had been done except
to enfeeble and disorganise the Executive Government, and
to encourage men in thinking it the necessity of the times,
to play unnatural and incongruous parts: —

FE

434 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

“The Government had acquired a character for boldness in
innovation, although, in reality, it had done little to renew either
institutions, systems, or men. The Finances, Justice, Public In-
struction, the Military Service, Commerce, all these principal de-
partments of the State, were still administered and directed as
in former times. The commissions indefinitely prolonged their
labours. The practical anomalies of the former system still con-
tinued. Questions of form absorbed the minds of men, while little
was thought of the substance. The appetite of the Liberals was
sharpened from day to day by the stimulants of the press and of
the popular assemblages. ‘The old Government, virtually con-
demned by the new, had fallen without the new one’s founding
itself firmly on any ground of its own; it lived upon the mere
credit which was lent it by the opinion of the Liberals. It was,
therefore, in the discharge of its functions, hesitating and remiss,
while the popular action was lively. The country had always had
a Government incapable of training it, because itself ill-trained ;
still, up to that time, there had been material force adequate to the
business of repression. Now, that system had come to an end,
and unruliness bore sway; both the governors and the governed
were in the hand of chance. The official servants of the Gregorian
administration, who all, or nearly all, were still in office, laboured
under great uncertainty as to their own destiny and that of the
State. Accustomed to hunt down the Liberals, and to be hated
by them, they now studied to win their indulgence and favour by
throwing the reins upon their necks. They apologised for having
served Gregory; some of them disclosed the ill deeds of the
police in which they had themselves had a hand. Even the Pre-
lates felt the itch for popularity. Yet the merry-makings never
ceased. The agitators loved them, as stimulants to the people,
which they are; the masses loved them, as the masses always love
spectacles; the Government began to mislike, but did not dare
to discountenance them.” — Vol. i. pp. 223, 224.

The sort of men who came to be of importance were an evil
omen. The Prince of Canino traversed Italy, as the preacher
of the new era. “ Forgetting his ancient alliance with the
Gregorian Cardinals, he came to Genoa, run wild in praise of
Pius [X., and gave it to be understood, that he was com-
missioned to invite the men of science to hold a meeting in
the Papal States.” A more important man was the notorious
Ciceruacchio.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 435

“ Angelo Brunetti, known under the name of Ciceruacchio,
signalised himself in getting up and managing this popular cele~
bration, which was more imposing than any former one. Already
in the earliest public demonstrations, having many bound to him
by affection and by favours conferred, he had made himself con-
spicuous among the leaders of the people. He was a person
of single mind, rustic in manners, proud, and at the same time ~
generous, as is common with Romans of the lower class. Indus-
trious and persevering, he had amassed something like a fortune;
by his generosity and charities, he had gained a species of primacy
among the men of his own class, who let out carriages, kept
pot-houses, and such like small dealers; he now put these men on
their mettle, and fired them with his own enthusiasm for Pius
IX.”—Vol. i. p. 192. .

Prelates and Governors of Rome “ courted his countenance,
and gained a hold on his attachment by all sorts of compli-
mentary attentions.” Now, also, journalism, practically set
free from all restraints, began to give power and conse-
quence to more than one of the prominent actors in the re-
volutionary times that were approaching; while the ecclesias-
tics, whom the Pope called into employment, were, for the
most part, either men who had no business, from their pre-
vious conduct, to be acting in concert with the Liberals; or
they were men, who were unequal, from want of sympathy
or of talent, to the very difficult work required of them, and
- who felt themselves to be so. Of this latter class were the
Cardinals, who succeeded one another reluctantly in the
office of Prime Minister, rather on their obedience as eccle-
siastics than with the plans or feelings of statesmen. On
the other hand, such a person as Monsignor Savelli might
have been in his place under the old Government, but ap-
pears awkwardly in the new : —

“There were stories of his having adopted a determination,
at the time when he was vicar to Cardinal Giustiniani, the
Bishop of Imola, that persons guilty of blaspheming should
have their tongues bored. It was also said that, when he
afterwards became Delegate, he took bribes from the farmers
of the state revenues; and furthermore, that once when a criminal
condemned to death would not settle the concerns of his soul,

FF 2

436 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. ;

Savelli, as Delegate, induced him to perceive the consolations of
religion by presenting fifty crowns to his wife, which, when the
sentence had been executed, he took away from her in her be-
reavement; and that the Pope was so indignant at this proceeding,
that he both fined the Monsignore in twice that amount for the
benefit of the poor woman, and deprived him of his office.”—Vol.
i, p. 170.

Yet this gentleman appears afterwards under Pius IX. as
Minister of Police, in which office he is charged with en-
couraging or at least allowing the formation of an ultra-liberal
and democratic club, which came to be the nucleus of the
revolution.

“When, in that month of November, Monsignor Savelli was
summoned from Forli, where he was prolegate to the department
of police, he shortly gave permission for the establishment of
a club called the Circolo popolare. It was then said, and it
was believed, that the Monsignore had thoughts of pitting this
new association (which he hoped to control and lead by means
of his own agents) against the meeting at the [liberal] Circolo
Romano ; which gave him annoyance, possibly because it exerted
itself in maintaining goodwill and in restraining passion. It is a
fact, at any rate, that the Club of the People sprang up in Rome
under the auspices of Monsignore Savelli, or, if this cannot
be believed, it was, at any rate, during his administration of the
police.”— Vol. i. pp. 314, 315.

It is at this time that we find the rise and advancement of
a personage, whose name has eclipsed most others of late,
Cardinal Antonelli. He was made Cardinal by Pius IX. on
the 11th June, 1847.

“ Antonelli had left a bad name at Viterbo for political in-
quisitions and sentences: but in the offices which he had filled
in the Secretary of State’s department, he had merited praise
for acuteness and diligence; and in the capacity of Treasurer
he had succeeded, if not in setting his office and the funds of
the States to rights, which was impracticable, at least in checking
the disorder in which Tosti had left them... .. Antonelli
continued in the office of Treasurer. He, clearsighted as he was
in the highest degree, caught the will of the Pope and the tendency

| oe =

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 437

of the times, and backed the one and the other, in the hope of
realising for himself popularity and weight, for the Court éclaé, and
for the temporal dominion of the Church security.”— Vol. i. pp.
229, 223.

He was the president of the new Council of State the fol-
lowing October; president of the still more liberal ministry
which succeeded the French Revolution, of which Farini was
a member, and which resigned because the Pope would not
openly join in the Italian war—a subject on which Cardinal
Antonelli showed no disagreement with his colleagues; and
all through, a member of the most important commissions for
reform, moderating, but far from opposing, the proposed
changes.

There is indeed a want of reality about all the proceedings,
of clearness of head and wish, which explains, if explanation
were wanted, why the men of good intentions became the
victims of the revolution. Men did not know their own
minds: they were partly flattered, partly puzzled, partly
frightened by the apparent opportunity of doing some great
things, they did not exactly know what, and of doing them so
easily. No one knew his own mind less than the amiable
Pontiff; and as the enormous difficulties of his undertaking
rose to view, enormous even if they had not been aggravated
by events without, he lost all self-reliance, and surrendered
himself to the events or the men in whose power he found
himself. There is truth and reason in the following sketch
of his character : —

* Pius IX. had applied himself to political reform, not so much
for the reason that his conscience as an honourable man and a most
pious Sovereign enjoined it, as because his high view of the Papal
office prompted him to employ the temporal power for the benefit
of his spiritual authority. A meek man and a benevolent Prince,
Pius [X. was as a Pontiff, lofty even to sternness. With a soul
not only devout, but mystical, he referred everything to God,
and respect and venerated his own person as standing in God’s
place. He thought it his duty to guard with jealousy the temporal
sovereignty of the Church, because he thought it essential to
the safe keeping and the apostleship of the Faith. Aware of

FF 3

438 FARINI’'S ROMAN STATE.

the numerous vices of that temporal Government, and hostile
to all vice and all its agents, he had sought, on mounting the
throne, to effect those reforms which justice, public opinion, and
the times required. He hoped to give lustre to the Papacy by
their means, and so to extend and to consolidate the Faith. He
hoped to acquire for the clergy that credit, which is a great
part of the decorum of religion, and an efficient cause of reverence
and devotion in the people. His first efforts were successful
in such a degree, that no Pontiff ever got greater praise. By
this he was greatly stimulated and encouraged, and perhaps he
gave into the seduction of applause and the temptations of popu-
larity more than is fitting for a man of decision, or for a prudent
Prince. But when, after a little, Europe was shaken by universal
revolution, the work he had commenced was in his view marred;
he then retired within himself, and took alarm. In his heart,
the Pontiff always came before the Prince, the Priest before
the citizen; in the secret struggles of his mind, the Pontifical
and priestly conscience always outweighed the conscience of
the Prince and citizen. And as his conscience was a very timid
one, it followed that his inward conflicts were frequent, that
hesitation was a matter of course, and that he often took resolutions
even about temporal affairs more from religious intuition or
impulse, than from his judgment as a man. Add that his health
was weak and susceptible of nervous excitement, the dregs of
his old complaint. From this he suffered most, when his mind
was most troubled and uneasy; another cause of wavering and
changefulness. When the frenzy of the revolution of Paris, in
the days of February, bowed the knee before the sacred image
of Christ, and amidst its triumph respected the altars and their
ministers, Pius IX. anticipated more favour to the Church from
the new political order, than it had had from the indevout
monarchy of Orleans. Then he took pleasure in the religious
language of M. Forbin Janson, Envoy of the infant Republic,
and in his fervent reverence for the Papal person; and he rejoiced
to learn, and to tell others, that he was the nephew of a pious
French Bishop. At the news of the violence suffered by the
Jesuits in Naples, and threatened in his own States, he was
troubled, and his heart conceived resentment against the inno-
vators. Afterwards he was cheered, by learning that. one of
the rulers of the new Republic of Venice was Tommaseo, whom he
valued as a zealous Catholic. He had a tenderness towards the
dynasty of Savoy, illustrious for its Saints, and towards Charles

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 439

Albert, who was himself most devout. He learnt with exultation,
that Venice and Milan had emancipated their Bishops from the
censorship and scrutiny of the Government in their correspondence
with Rome. It seemed as if God were using the Revolution
to free the Church from the vexations entailed by the laws of
Joseph IL., which Pius IX. ever remembered with horror, and con-
sidered to be a curse weighing down the Empire. Where he did
not foresee or suspect injury to Religion, he was in accordance
with the friends of change. But everything disturbed his mind
and soul, which impugned or gave any token of impugning it, or
imported disparagement to spiritual discipline or persons. And
if, from his vacillating nature, and his inborn mildness, he did
not adopt strong resolutions, which would have given proof of
his uneasy thoughts and feelings, yet they wrought on him in
secret, and he had no peace till he could find some way to set
his conscience at ease. He had fondled the idea of making
the people happy with guarded freedom, in harmony with their
Sovereigns ; of bringing both into harmony with the Papal See ;
of a Popedom presiding over the League of Italian States; of
internal repose and agreement; of civilising prosperity, and of
splendour for Religion. But events, as they proceeded from day
to day, shattered this design. When in the name of freedom
and of Italy, and by the acts of the innovators, priests were in-
sulted, excesses perpetrated, the Popedom or the ecclesiastical
hierarchy assailed, Pius IX. ceased to trust them: then he
began to regret and repent of his own work; then he doubted,
whether by his mildness and liberality he had not encouraged
& spirit irreverent to the Church, rebellious to the Popedom;
then he complained of the ingratitude of mankind, faltered in

his political designs, and bi rg calamity.”— Vol. ii. pp.
68—7],

Among the difficulties which beset the attempt to make
changes in the Roman system of Government, besides those
very serious ones arising from the temper of the people, and
the chances of external disturbance, two apparently insuper-
able ones show themselves on the surface.

The first was, the presence of Austria in Italy. It was a
piece of diplomatic flippancy as insolent as it is untrue,
which pronounced Italy to be a mere “ geographical ex-

pression.” However parcelled out Italy may be, — differently
FF 4

440 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

governed, and with strong local peculiarities and jealousies,
yet history, language, and character bind all the Italian races
together in a natural cohesion and sympathy, which centuries
of conquest and occupation have been unable, we do not say,
to sever, but even to disturb. The national tie is real and
ineffaceable. To judge, at least, from the past, Austria, if she
keeps Lombardy for five centuries more, will never make the
Lombard care about what goes on in Germany, or prevent
him from caring about what goes on in Rome or Naples. To
every Italian, however his life and associations may be pent
up within the walls of an obscure municipality, all Italy is a
country. In every part of it he is at home as he is nowhere
else, even though at a distance of ten miles from his native
town he may be an exile.

It is therefore quite impossible that any great series of
changes can go on in one part of the peninsula, without
putting every other part on the gui vive. And thus a foreign.
power cannot acquire territory in Italy, without becoming
deeply, and, in its own view, fairly interested in the domestic
policy of all the other states; and no one state can be very
different in its measures and principles, without affecting, and,
it may be, endangering and undermining, the stability of the
rest. England or France might be as reforming and liberal
as they please, without Italians caring about it, except at
critical moments. But Piedmont cannot be constitutional,
without making it more troublesome for Austria to be abso-
lute in Lombardy. And much less could Rome relax from
her immemorial rigour, and deviate from her traditions of
policy, without quickening in north and south the ideas of
change, and being held responsible, by those opposed to these
ideas, for shaking the foundations of their power, and of the
public inc aillity:

Austria, therefore, can never look with favour on any neds
of government in Italy, different from her own in Lombardy;
and her government there is a government of conquest. She
has never taken root there. She holds by the sword, and by
the sword only. Whether by her own fault or that of her
subjects, she is compelled to be arbitrary. She has not won

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 44]

them over; she cannot assimilate them: she can but daunt ©
and keep them down. It is neither profit nor pride to them
to be Austrians; allow them any liberty, and they would say
so. Europe owes much to Austria, as the guardian both of
independence and of authority, and as one of the greatest
examples, perhaps, in modern times, of tenacity and resolution
under adversity. Nor, under her rule, have the rich plains
of Lombardy languished, or the thriving population which tills
them become inndvetiched. Betwéen! man and man she is,
we believe, just and considerate, and is trusted. Yet it can-
not be denied that, politically, she is there as a harsh and
suspicious mistress, with jealous eye and heavy hand. She
can be cruel. What is almost worse, she teases. But this is
not all. She cannot afford to leave the other states of Italy
to themselves. That contagion of national feeling which her
ministers so contemptuously ignored, is the necessity which
makes Austria keep her eye on the state of parties in every
city of Italy : and not only her eye, but herhand. She says,
* You cannot reform, you cannot allow more freedom of
speech and action, without doing me mischief, without en-
couraging my subjects to wish and scheme for the same;
and to me you shall not do mischief.” “The emperor,”
said Prince Metternich, “has determined not to lose his
Italian possessions.” And, in consequence, he claims the
right of the strong, to check or stop whatever endangers
them.

All changes, therefore, in Italy, which involve greater
freedom, whether made on good principles or bad, are a real
and inevitable peril to the Austrian dominion there. To all
she must be hostile ; and as the states of Italy are on a small
scale, her tone has generally been, as if it were scarcely less
impertinence, than folly and mischief, for such insignificant
powers to act for themselves. And she has, more than once,
been able to taunt them with the experiment ending in their
having recourse to her, to help them out of it. In self-de-
fence — not necessarily to extend her territory, but to keep
what she has— she must meddle. And her influence and
strength have been always lent, without scruple, to all who

442 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

- opposed change, whether it were revolution or improvement,
and whose lawlessness and oppression were frequently far
worse than her own stern rule. Not hostile herself to im-
provements which do not involve political freedom, it was yet
all the same to her, whether what she supported politically
was fair authority or the vilest tyranny.

The presence, therefore, of Austria in Italy was one great -
bar to the changes attempted in the government of the Roman
State. The fact of their going on made Lombardy unsafe,
and that Lombardy should be unsafe was a reason with
Austria why, whoever wished for them, they should not go
on. For a moment, indeed, it seemed as if she was going to
lose Lombardy. But she regained it; and once more there,
the reason returned, and with the reason the power to enforce
it. It is necessary to bear this fairly in mind, to do justice to
the Italian cry for independence, which all the reforming par-_
ties, from Rosmini to the Republicans, have uttered alike, and
for which, as Mr. Gladstone remarks, little sympathy, indeed
little patience, is felt in England. The words of the Roman
council of Deputies to the Pope, after the rout of Custoza,
are, as a fact, we conceive, undeniable: ‘ The independence
of no Italian state can be secure, if all Italy be not inde-
pendent.” * It is the influence of Austria out of her Italian
dominions, on states which claim to be their own masters, as
much as her holding Italian ground by conquest, which is
the cause of it. Both sides feel the fact to be, that Austria
cannot be there, in any part, without virtually controlling the
policy of the -whole: and if her safety is a reason with her
against their reform, it is, at least, not unnatural that they
should feel that their reforms are a reason why she should
not be there at all. This feeling, according to Farini, was
the dominant one, in the movement in Pio’s reign. ‘“ The
foreign publicists,” he says, “did not appear sufficiently to
understand the case.”..... “Ido not wish to deal in con-
jecture; but this I strongly affirm, that the sentiment of in-
dependence warmed the public mind more than any other;

* August, 1848,— Vol. ii. p. 304.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 443

and that those politicians were at fault who thought that in
1846 and 1847 Italy could have been tranquillised for any
length of time, by meeting our desires for reform, and sup-
plying us with codes, with railroads, nay even with some
modicum of civilised and free institutions. If they have no
other specific, they did, and ever will deceive themselves.
As often as Italy ‘shall have a little life and freedom, she
will always be planning and struggling to use it for the
purpose of national independence.” The difficulty was not
long in presenting itself in Pio’s path; he could not make
up his mind how to meet it; and, as much as anything else,
it overthrew him.

The other difficulty was yet more serious. It was one,
too, which a change in external circumstances would not
remove: » Nothing eduld remove it, but that change in the
opinions and feelings of men which is the slow and secret
effect of time—one which it is vain to hurry, or hope to
bring about by the same power which can remodel or subvert
institutions. ~ If not an Austrian sentinel were to be seen to
the south of the Alps, this difficulty would exist in its full
force.

It lay in the very nature of the Roman government; in
the principle on which it was based, and the effects which
this principle had produced. This principle was, as all know,
that none but the clergy could be entrusted with political
and administrative power; that the laity were disqualified
for it, except in a very subordinate degree, by their being
the laity. The Roman state, by being a state, has all the
temporal incidents and responsibilities of a state; so far, it
must be administered in the same way as the other European
states, with whom it is incorporated, and maintains political
relations. It must have secular laws, over and above its
religious ones; it must have civil and criminal justice, main-
tain a police, raise taxes, have a commercial policy, be on its
guard against its neighbours, and use the same precautions
as they,;—soldiers, fortresses, and diplomatists. The three
millions of Roman subjects will quarrel like other men about
lands and houses, and need a law-suit to bring them to

444 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

reason. Some of them will steal or cheat or murder, and
must be sent to the galleys or hung. Others will employ
themselves in trade, or manufactures, or agriculture; and
these sources of national and private wealth must be dealt
with and regulated, one way or another, by government. In
all these matters, the Roman government, whoever carries it
on, and for whatever purpose, must have to do with the
same kind of affairsas any other government. Yet the men
who thus deal with police and justice, diplomacy, war, and
trade, are clergymen: and none but clerg gymen may deal
with them, except as mere officials. What is emphatically
the business of the laity, all over the world, what is else-
where emphatically not business for the clergy, is here
equally emphatically, their business only. The finances,”
we read, “ were administered by a Prelateas Treasurer, who
was entitled on quitting his office to be appointed Cardinal.
His acts were liable to review only by the Pope, his accounts
were not audited, and probably were not susceptible of audit,
by reason of the badness of the system, and the privileged
quality of the person.” This clergyman settled the taxes,
managed the public debt, farmed out the monopolies of salt
and. tobacco, negotiated loans with foreign capitalists. ‘ Com-
merce and industry were governed by the Cardinal of the
Exchequer of Holy Church, under a system of prohibitory
and protective regulations, by tariffs, premiums, monopolies,
and privileges.” ‘‘ The Secretaryship of State for Foreign
Affairs, both ecclesiastical and lay, is held by a Cardinal.”
«The department of State for Home Affairs is likewise
under a Cardinal, in each case, with a Prelate for deputy,
and clerical and lay subordinates.” The Legations are
governed by Cardinals, the other provinces by Prelates.
The Cardinal Legates “direct the police of the province,
command the armed force, superintend the provincial, and
are guardians of the municipal, administration; sentence to
imprisonment summarily, release from punishment, and ad-
minister mercy within fixed limits.” The assistant councillors
only, and inferior governors, are laymen. ‘The supreme
administration of the police lies with a Prelate, who is also

wy Mes -
=

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 445

Governor of Rome. The office is held by a Cardinal, from
whom authority passes downwards to the Cardinal Legates ;
and in another branch it likewise passes through the suc-
cessive grades of the Carabineers, a police force commanded
by the same Governor-Prelate.” ‘‘The Department, else-
where called of War, is governed by a Prelate, with the title
of President of Arms. This is likewise a Cardinal's post.”
All the higher courts of law are, in like manner, composed of
Cardinals and Prelates, with a thin sprinkling of lawyers
who are not clergymen, but who “are bound to wear the
clerical dress” —the “ Rota,” and the ‘‘ Segnatura,” courts
of civil appeal; and the “ Sagra Consulta,” a court of review
for capital cases, and for the trial of political offences, which
also “ decides causes of the Woods and Forests, and of Public
Health and Quarantine, and directs in chief the Department
of Public Health and Prisons.” ‘The Cardinal Vicar at
Rome, with the aid of deputies and assessors, and each
Bishop in his own diocese, with his Vicar and some assessors,
try causes both criminal and civil. Their jurisdiction extends
to all the controversies which affect properties, either ecclesi-
astical, or administered by ecclesiastics, and to the persons of
all clerks. Besides this, they have the whole police over
morals, and try all the causes belonging toit..... The
Bishops imprison, fine and otherwise punish for blasphemy,
and for disobeying the precepts of holiday and fasting. In
criminal cases, the clerk has always the advantage of going
into the Church court; in civil, he may choose at his will
either the temporal or the Church court:” the appeal is to

courts composed of ecclesiastics. ‘This was the ordinary

course of things. In times of trouble, Cardinals directed the
movements of the public force, and presided over the extra-
ordinary commissions of tribunals appointed to punish revolt.

However logical, however necessary, however under given
conditions, reasonable, this state of things may be, it has
the disadvantage and misfortune of summoning up against
itself ideas and feelings which have become well-nigh in-
stinctive in nearly the whole of civilised Europe, — ideas
which condemn, and feelings which shrink from, the confusion

446 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

of functions which it involves. Among the disciples just as
much as among the opponents of the Roman Church, these
are the recognised and practical principles of most thinking
men — of those who are most deeply interested for religion,
as well as of those who are jealous of it. The charge of wish-
ing to blend temporal with spiritual power, is certainly not
more strongly imputed on one side, than disclaimed on the
other. And the disclaimer is genuine and truthful. The
ambition of classes, if not of individuals, is regulated by the
habits of thought which preyail at the time ; and the employ-
ment and absorption, in the business of diplomacy or govern-
ment, of time and zeal, consecrated once for all to that of
religion, is as repugnant to our modern habits of thought, —
both in men who reverence, and men who hate, religion,—as
the dedication of them to any other professed secular pursuits.
Fair men will see much to admire —- at any rate, will excuse
much,— in the Episcopal Chancellors and Cardinal Prime
Ministers, who played their parts in the confused politics of
the middle ages of Europe: but not many would wish to
recall them in our days,

Thus, the Roman government, however the anomaly
which it presented might, on special grounds, and from parti-
cular points of view, be defended or palliated, was in very
violent contradiction to the general sense, and the most un-
disputed maxims of all parties of serious and reflecting men.
But its theoretical anomaly was its least defect. It might
have been in theory, absurd and inconsistent, and yet have
produced much good. But it is abundantly clear, that those,
whose real and proper business was about something very
different from taxes, and tariffs, and courts of law, did, as
was very natural, mismanage them grossly. ‘Their adminis-
tration has not been more contrary to modern political ideas,
than productive of vast practical mischief. Untrained and
unqualified for their work, the Roman hierarchy have, as
a class, done it without understanding it,— without trying
to understand it. They have spared themselves — we
may almost say, they have on principle declined the
trouble and concentrated attention, which administrative

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 447

functions, connected with secular affairs, receive in other
states. The clergy thus employed may in many cases have
been, though too often they certainly were not, men who
meant to do their duty seriously and well; but, unfortunately,
governing is not a duty which can be done well by wishing
to do it well. The best had little to rely on, but their good
sense and good feeling. ‘The average ones-had to go by tra-
ditionary expedients and customs, which countenanced every
remissness, and sanctioned harshness as its remedy, or insin-
cerity and bad faith as its escape; and, like the average of men
elsewhere, they saved themselves pains, which they were not
forced to take. Then, when their routine betrayed them, and
their mismanagement caused mischief, with the perplexity and
vexation of men who know that they do not understand what
they are about, they took the shortest and roughest method
to bring the crisis to an end, and thought that they could save
their credit, as they did perhaps their consciences, by laying
all the blame on the evil disposition of their subjects. The
last expedient ever thought of, was, to investigate and try
to remove the causes of evil. Possibly enough, they did not
know how.

Whatever other privileges the Roman Court may claim, no
set of men can have the privilege, of not taking the trouble to
do decently, what they will not let any one else do. If they
_ must govern, and govern exclusively, their connexion with
the Church abates nothing from their duties as civil governors;
nor does this connexion make it less a grievous crime in
them, that they should choose the very worst and most
debased systems of government to copy, and should in
practice be worse than their models. It makes very little
difference that the state which has the misfortune to be en-
trusted to their care should be buta small one: three millions
of men are quite a large enough number, to have a claim for
provident and just government on those who insist upon
governing them. We may criticise and blame, as we will,
the advocates of lay rights. We may think that “the desire
of civil equality that the subjects of other states enjoyed —
the impatience of the privileges, exemptions, and exceptional

448 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE;

jurisdictions of the clergy —the detriment, the jealousy, the
contempt, the humiliation of the laity under the absolute
government of priests;”— which, as we are told, were the
peculiar causes of the agitation in the Papal States, and “on
which we must fix our thoughts, if we seek to know the
cause of the occurrences in them,”—were not enough to
palliate liberalism, or justify revolution. But bad govern-
ment is bad government still, however faulty the temper and
measures of its opponents. Nor can the Roman government
expect, that it should be an_ indifferent matter to the rest of
the world, what it chooses to do in its own dominions. They
who govern ill, and think it enough to say, that they, like all
other governments, are irresponsible, and may govern as they
see best, have to recollect what else, besides a human govern-
ment, they profess to be and to represent, before the eyes of
Christendom and the whole world.

Here, then, was the great difficulty for a reforming Pope.
He had to improve the worst government in Europe, and, at
the same time, to guard, even against risk, the temporal
power of the Papacy. But to guard the temporal power,
clerical government seemed essential; and clerical govern-
ment seemed incapable of improvement; so at least thought
most, both of its advocates and opponents. Both appeared to
agree that, to touch it, would be to destroy it.

And, further, he had to proceed in the face of a deep and
obstinate distrust. How any lasting and salutary changes are
to be brought about, without some degree of mutual confidence
between the various classes of Italian society, and how, as
things are now, there is ever to be any, we really cannot see.
Weakness, and the insincerity which attends on weakness, and
the knowledge of this insincerity, and the supposed necessity of
meeting it by equal insincerity,—and the consciousness on
all sides that ¢his is the way in which the game is being
carried on, that it is a struggle in which neither party can
either overpower, or can depend upon the other, — this, which
marks the political movement all over the Peninsula, was to
be found in its worst forms in the Roman states. The clergy
did not trust the laity; the laity did not trust the clergy.

a

FARINI'S ROMAN STATE. 449

Both sides knew their own want of strength; and neither
one nor the other, those who resisted, or those who wished
for change, had a clear conscience, or even knew exactly
their own minds. Both were ready to push forward, or to
retract concessions, as might seem feasible; and each party
was perfectly aware of this in the other. Dissimulation and
distrust ruled the game, and are visible at every step.

Pius IX. began with simple attempts at functional im-
provement. The course of events soon forced him on to
organic changes. He tried to abate the anomaly of the
Papal government, and adapt it, if possible, to its place in
Europe, by conciliatory temperaments; but the two classes
whom he had to reconcile and harmonise, would not be re-
conciled. arly in the day, as the historian complains, the
moderate party found that they could persuade few to join,
seriously and in good faith, in a policy which should main-
tain, and yet enlarge, the basis of the temporal power : —

“The party that desired to strengthen the government, to obtain
freedom through its agency, and by its means to prepare the way
to independence, had to encounter far greater obstacles in the Papal
States than in the rest; whether because it was thought that the
good faith of the clergy could not be relied on, or because the tem-
poral dominion of the Pope was, in the view of many, not only ill
adapted to harmonise with genuine liberty, but also an obstacle to

- realising the unity of the nation. It was, therefore, an arduous

task to keep the public mind trustful and at rest; and an easy one
to disturb it with misgiving, which is most potent of all things in
ripening those humours that engender and feed revolution. ... .
. . The Moderate party had no share, had no hand or voice in the
government; rather, indeed, it was ever viewed by those in power
with suspicion, or in the light of a troublesome and self-appointed
counsellor: nor was it at liberty to form secret societies, in order
to constitute, or, as is said, to organise itself, or to oppose them by
intrigue and dishonourable means. A party favourable to govern-
ment cannot be strong, unless it governs. The Court of Rome,
thanks to the will of the Pontiff, yielded to reform; but it could
not yield to the admission of laymen into the government ; or, if it
made up its mind to call them into council, it did not call them to
GG

450 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE,

resolye, administer, and execute, in which governing really con-
sists.” — Vol. i. pp. 216—218.

After laymen had been admitted to share in the govern-
ment, the difficulty was not yet got over: —

“....... The lay Ministers, strange to the business of
governing, and most strange to the Court, were beset with grave
and peculiar difficulties. In order better to apprehend them, it is
fitting to reflect, how all the ordinary criteria of reason, experience,
public opinion, and utility, lose their power, whenever the Sove-
reign, being also Pope, conceives that some temporal affair of his
State has to do with the spiritual power. When the Sovereign,
Guardian of the Faith and Guide of consciences, gives such a judg-
ment, then any such affair is through him drawn within the
sphere of that infallible will, which does not admit of influence or
advice in a contrary sense. In questions of such a nature, laymen
are always and throughout impotent in dealing with ecclesiastics ;
because these last are always prone to contemn human wisdom,
and readily find means to oust and proscribe it with the meta-
physics of theology, and with the doctrines of the canons and the
bulls. And the priestly class has invariably such a mistrust of
the laity as perverts their logic; so that discussion assumes the
character, if not the form, of bitter contest. ‘There was no evi-
dence, since the new measures were adopted, that the Sacred Col-
lege had continued its interference in the administration of the
State. .... Yet the Sacred College was still, in virtue of the
Statute, the political Senate of the Sovereign: and hence it cannot
be presumed to have laid aside all concern, every wish, or every
habit, related to government ; rather we may with reason surmise,
that it was no friend to lay administration ; for, in truth, the
Liberal party both acted and spoke in a manner ill suited to con-
ciliate the Cardinals to the new political system. Nothing could
be more sottish and imprudent, than to cry a crusade all day
against the College of Cardinals — which, after all, was a consti-
tutional organ, and which, moreover, was by law the perpetual
and sole Electoral Assembly of the Sovereignty, as well as by
custom the list of persons exclusively capable of being elected —
and then to think of consolidating the new system in Rome. The
Prelates, except a few, who certainly were the best, such as Corboli
Morichini, and Pentini, had no influence in the City, and little at
Court; but the Prelature in general, envious of the recent advance-

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 451

ment of the laity, combated them with that sort of finesse in
which the clerical courtier vies with women, nay beats them. Nor
should we forget, that there still subsisted the relics of Sanfedism,
and of the cligues devoted to the Gregorian system, which was
deeply rooted in the Court, and, by its abundant offshoots, through
ways shrouded in intricacy, figment, and insinuation, was always
mining under the new order of things. The lay functionaries,
and especially those of the old department of the Secretary of
State, who all remained in office, could ill adapt themselves to a
system of audit, accountability, and publicity, or to those prompt,
vigorous, and determined modes of governing, which the times
demanded. A race brought up, fed, and trained in an Ecclesi-
astical Court, they were masters of trick, most accomplished in
winking, smirking, twisting phrases, above all, in wasting away
time, or,rather in wasting away other men by means of time ;
sheer buttresses of inertia, on which broke in vain every effort of
volition.” — Vol. ii. pp. 72—74.

And thus, with clergy and laity, only brought by their
novel juxtaposition into collision, not into agreement, com-
pelled, or thinking themselves compelled, to a continual war
of manceuvre and intrigue, the step was not far from the wish
on either side to get rid completely of the other; and as the
laity were for the time in the ascendant, and the assailing
party, their purposes distinctly took that direction. Even
among those, in whom the spirit of change was least violent

_and impatient, this feeling, we are told, prevailed; and the

reason assigned for it is of very serious significance : —

“ But it must not be overlooked, that the old aversion to priestly
government was ever in vigour among them; and they keenly
desired the cessation of the privileges and preferences which that
class still enjoyed. The germs of misgiving and mistrust were
always there; and it might easily be seen, that a small matter
would bring them to flower and fruit. Herein lies the wretched-
ness of States governed by a caste, that when its name has become
a byeword for bad faith, unless it be entirely ousted, the moral
weight of Government hardly admits of being restored. Now the
Constitution had been essentially altered; the civil equality of
citizens established; the avenues to public employment laid open
for all; yet still the privileges of the clergy subsisted: we had

GG 2

452 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

clergy in the political departments, clergy in the supreme courts,
clergy in the governments of Provinces. And doubtless the Pro-
vinces wished the temporal Sovereignty of the Pontiff to be re-
spected and entire; but wished the Statute to be entire too, in its
spirit ; and public offices to be entrusted to citizens, according, not
to their class, but to their competency. The priest, as a civil
governor, had so utterly fallen in the affection and estimation of
the governed, that the miracles of Pius LX. availed little to lift him
up again. I do not say this was always and absolutely rational
and just; but it was the effect of a reaction according to nature,
whence wrong was done even to worthy men that belonged to the
misliked caste.” — Vol. ii. pp. 80, 81.

And to complete the picture, the laity are accused of shrink-
ing, in critical moments, from the very employments far which
they had been so clamorous. When the Pope wanted to send
a lay envoy to Vienna, to offer his mediation between Austria
and the Italians, though the liberal Mamiani was his minister,
and was loud in praise of the design, “the Pope was not
seconded as he should have been.” .... “ For the laity,
who complained so much of having no share or voice in the
diplomatic service, and mistrusted the clergy, now hung back
from accepting that honourable charge.” *

We have not space to follow, with the historian, the slippery
and shifting revolution; the inversion and transformation of
all that Rome used to hold most inviolable and fixed. Now
that things are once more returned to their old courses, and
Pope, Cardinals, and Prelates are again what they used to be,
the liberties which the story seems to take with them, and the
probabilities which it seems to violate, task our powers of be-
lief. Changes and substitutions, and interchange of functions,
are as many, as rapid, as audacious, as coolly told, as in the
Eastern tales, where giants rise out of bottles, black stones
are men, and princes and tailors act the most unusual parts,
with the most easy and natural air. It is hard to conceive
that the same men who now rule in Rome, no better and no
worse than their predecessors ruled, and seem as if they never

* Vol. ii. p. 158.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 453

had heard of any other way of ruling, should be the very per-
sons who did and who saw all these strange things. It is so,
however: it is but three years ago, since old-fashioned Rome
beheld these wonders, and most of the witnesses are alive.
Chekib Effendi, likening himself to the Queen of Sheba
coming to salute King Solomon, arrives from Constantinople,
to compliment the Pope in the name of the Sultan. He extols
the “ wonderful and lofty acts of his Holiness, which have filled
the whole world with the sound of his praises ; tenders to him
the Sultan’s most gracious congratulations on his elevation to
the throne of the Prince of the Apostles, with whose succes-
sors his master hopes still to live in cordial friendship, and for
whose sake he undertakes the protection of the Christians of
Turkey.” The West emulates the East: from Chili comes
Don Raimond Jrarazzeval, as Minister Plenipotentiary ; from
the United States, comes a “ warm and respectful address.” An
honourable Roman Embassy returns the courtesy of the Sultan,
The praises of the English press are given and appreciated.
Protestants are enthusiastic about a Pope, and their enthu-
siasm is not distasteful. Padre Ventura, the famous preacher
of Rome, preaches about civil progress, and publishes a pro-
ject of a Constitution. The crowds sing national hymns under
the Pope’s balcony, before they receive his blessing. News-
papers, both “responsible” and clandestine, start up in all
- directions, and say what they please; the once inexorable
censorship is too indulgent even for some of the Liberal
leaders. Under its mild sway, says the historian, “ our infant
journalism had its infant passions and caprices; instead of
meditating, it gambolled, and every day it smashed its toys of
the day before, as children do.” Priests blessed the new ban-
ners. To the Papal colours were-added pennons of the new
Italian tricolor. In the popular processions, together with the
civic guard and the mob, marched bodies of ecclesiastics,
** flanked by tricolor flags,” and “all wearing tricolor tassels.”
The funeral masses for the “ Victims of Milan,” “ ostenta-
tiously offered by the youth of Rome,” were attended also by
the Pope’s “ consulta.” As the Pope’s coach moved through
the shouting crowds and waving banners, ‘‘ Ciceruacchio,

GG 3

454 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

mounting on the hinder part of the carriage, lifts a flag with
the inscription, ‘ Holy Father, rely on the people;’ and Pius
IX., with emotion, signifies that he will.” Cardinal Altieri
makes popular harangues from the windows of his palace.
Cardinal Savelli patronises a popular club. Cardinal Ferretti
argues with Prince Metternich in favour of the Pope’s “ gi-
gantic design,” and appeals to “all acquainted with the history
of great reforms,” to bear witness to the comparative peace-
fulness of this. Cardinal Antonelli frames, and, with liberals
for his colleagues, administers, a constitution ; and resigns with
them, because the Pope will not go to war with Austria.*
The Pope creates lay ministers, and sends away the Jesuits
out of Rome; hints once more at the employment of spiritual
weapons, but against Catholic Austria; turns himself, by his
own act, into a constitutional sovereign, and ‘purposes to em-
body the statute in a Bull, according to the ancient form,
in perpetual memory.” That dream of reform, and mad fit of
liberalism, was indeed a strange interlude to disturb and put
out of countenance the solemn decorum and antique fashions
of the Roman Court. And now that it is over, the subjects
and patients seem scarcely conscious of what they have gone
through.

They may, however, derive some excuse, from the way in
which the Reformed government was carried on by its repre-
sentatives. The proceedings of the ministries and parliaments
of Rome, which are given in ample detail, were not of a kind
to inspire respect. The deep and subtle heads which saw
through the emptiness and impertinences of the day, as much
as they feared their consequences, must have looked on with
mingled amusement and disgust at the scenes described in
these pages, as the first efforts of infant constitutionalism at
Rome. Of business really done or attempted, there is the
least possible trace. All is words. Words are the great
subject of debate between the Pope and his ministers.
Words are all the recorded contributions of the leaders of
parties and opinion. Words are what they fight about, and

* Vol. ii, pp. 100—105.

4s 4

FARINI'S ROMAN STATE. 455

what they fight with. Words, and a voice to boot, are all
that appears to explain the influence of a popular chief, in
the street or in parliament. Everything is drowned by
words — words take the precedence, if some one, more sensi-
ble or more tongue-tied, claims a little time for business. The
Council of Deputies * was immediately taken possession of
by glib tongues and stentorian voices, and turned into some-
thing more uproarious than a parish vestry, with a grotesque
mountebank, the Prince de Canino, for its loudest speaker.
Of the High Council little is recorded except its addresses to
the Pope, and the Pope’s replies to its addresses. If any one
really understood how business was to be carried on, under
the new liberties, he failed in making others understand. No
one appears with sufficient character, purpose, and clearness
of head, to form a party or control others: for Rossi, the man
of most promise, had not time. The Pope, apparently, did
not at all comprehend that he had assigned away any rights,
by proclaiming himself a constitutional monarch, and calling
into play a constitutional machinery. Between him and his
ministers, there seems to have been little more than a conti-
nual, but rather feeble and sluggish game, as to which should
pull the other over, a little bit more, to absolutism or to libe-
ralism. The ministers wanted independence, and war with
Austria: the Pope liked independence, but not war. The

_ ministers went as far as they dared, in their line; joined the

tricolor with the Papal cockade, and put the troops where
they were pretty sure to fight. The Pope went as far as
he dared, in making an allocution against the war, which
embarrassed the ministers; though he left the ministers’ acts as
they were, and themselves still ministers. They resign, and
are restored, and resign again, *‘ greatly disheartened by the
street disorders, and by the reserve of the court, as well as by
the singular nature of a government, where a constitution had
actually been given before the ministers knew what it was;
and where, just now, the question of peace and war had been
settled by the sovereign, without and against the advice of

* Cf. ii. 328., where a more favourable account is given; but it is not borne
out by the history itself.

GG 4

456. FARINI'S ROMAN STATE,

his ministers, and that sovereign had issued proclamations
accordingly, to the people, of his own motion.” But they
resign, Only to be succeeded by the great liberal leader,
Mamiani, who accepts office “ on condition that he should be
allowed to adhere to the policy of his predecessors in what
concerned the cause of Italy ” — that is, to dabble, at least, in
the war against Austria — and “ have a lay foreign secretary
for temporal affairs; ” — which conditions were accepted or
*‘ acquiesced in (for in such arrangements it is no easy matter
to distinguish acquiescence from acceptance) by the Pope.”
But this “ ministry of the 4th of May had hardly been
formed, when an article, printed on the 5th of May, in the go-
vernment gazette, with the title of “ Ministerial Programme,”
was censured by the Pope, because it indicated an intention
to support the war: hence zt was necessary,” what ? — not to
resign, but —‘‘ to declare, in the number of the nezt day,
that that writing was not in any way a programme of policy.”
Mamiani was a liberal, according to Farini, who wished to
separate the Pope from the prince, keeping his authority intact,
as Pope, but committing all temporal affairs to lay hands * ;
he was the favourite, for the time, with those who looked
for further changes, and was distrusted by the Pope. Yet
he governed “ in the name of Pius LX., who either let him
have his own way, or, first resigning himself and approving,
afterwards murmured.” <A series of small quarrels marked
the reign of the Mamiani ministry. The Pope first corrected,
and then rejected, their draft of the speech from the throne,
proposing one of his own; and, without consulting them, he
ordered the official censor, a Dominican Friar, to prepare a
law on the press. The ministers refused to have anything
to do either with his speech or his law.

“On the morning of the 5th, the City was in holiday garb,
because the Municipality, and the ordinary political masters of the
ceremonies, had chosen to turn the opening of Parliament into a
popular spectacle. .... The long and ostentatious train was
already on the way, when the Ministers went to the Pope, to

* Vol. ii pp. 162. 311.

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 457

announce that they did not mean to consent to the delivery of that
Speech, which he had remodelled at his own pleasure: and they
proposed, that he should cause his Delegate to read a few words of
no political significancy, and that the Minister should afterwards
read a speech on the first regular day of setting. The Pope
received both the Ministers and what they said to him resentfully ;
he suspected that they were using the actual pressure in point of
time for the purposes of moral coercion: he broke into strong
language, spoke something about treachery, and dismissed them.
Accordingly, it became necessary to interpose good offices, that
the Ministers might not, there and then, quit their posts, and that
the Pope might acquiesce in allowing a certain interval to elapse
before he should execute his resolution to appoint new ones; a re-
solution to which it was impossible to give instant effect, without
public scandal and risk. ....

“The Pope had now been persuaded, that a new Ministry could
hardly be constituted forthwith, and had resolved to wait until the
inclinations of Parliament should appear. When his Ministers
requested their discharge, he bid them continue provisionally in
office; he allowed them to set about framing the Speech they
intended to deliver to Parliament, which they were to put on
paper, and submit to him for approval. On the 7th, the pro-
gramme of the Government, which Mamiani had been commissioned
by his colleagues to prepare, was discussed and approved by the
Council of Ministers. I was charged to carry it to the Holy
Father for his approbation, and I must now enlarge somewhat
on this topic.”—Vol. ii. pp. 191—194,

A new battle about words and phrases followed, very
minutely described by the historian, who was concerned in
it. In the midst of events big with peril, the Pope was
making a fight, whether by changing a word or two, his
liberal ministers’ speech might not have one or two liberalisms
fewer. So things continued ; the ministers remaining ministers,
for want of any one else, and doing much what they liked —
which was nothing considerable: the Pope, if he wished to
do anything, which was equally little, doing it without them,
and censuring them in the same breath in which he was
recommending agreement with them.*

* Vol. ii, pp. 258, 260,

458 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

How, indeed, it may be asked, should it be otherwise?
How should the Pope trust Mamiani, an avowed Liberal, who
wanted to take the temporal government entirely out of the
hands of the clergy ? True; but, avowed Liberal as he was, it
was the Pope who, knowing his opinions, hadasked him to take
the government, and had the benefit for the time of his in-
fluence with the Liberals. And in Mamiani, at least, he
appears to have had no reason to complain of insincerity.
Farini, who was not of his party, and criticises his statesman-
ship severely, gives him the, character of an honourable and
upright man, who “had studied every mode of acquiring the
Pope’s love and esteem, short of truckling in his will and
debasing his understanding.” The Mamiani ministry was a
fair consequence of the Pope's experiment, and threw much
light on its wisdom.

It is not wonderful, perhaps, that of this ministry, which
lasted one month before, and two months after, it had quar-
relled with the Pope, ‘the acts should not have been nume-
rous.” “It promulgated,” we are informed, “ one law only,
which conferred the right of citizenship on the Swiss troops ;
and Galetti put forth an ordinance, which bound all servants
and journeymen to keep a book for the police, a measure
which was held invalid, because the councils had not passed
it.”

These are illustrations of the inherent difficulties which
lay in the way of changes, of which all, from the highest to
the lowest, were at least most willing to have the credit.
These difficulties were, it must be admitted, out of immediate
control. So was a further and unlooked-for, but most for-
midable one; the turn which things took abroad, —the
revolutions in Paris, in Palermo, in Naples, in Vienna. On
the King of Naples this historian lays the chief blame of
having been the first to give extravagant and delusive liber-
ties. After a tumult at Naples, he conceded a constitution
— “he showed his wish to surpass the rest of the Italian
sovereigns, as in the amplitude of the institutions conceded,
so also in the abundance of his ingratiating acts. He
was all to all. He laid open the gates of his palace, con-

FARINIS ROMAN STATE. 459

versed familiarly with men who yesterday were in fetters,
and bid for votes and acclamation, and for the character of a
liberal king. And in this manner, first by excess of re-
sistance and of obstinacy, then by a new excess of weakness
and haste, he wholly shifted the Italian movement off the
line of measured progress, and as it were jerked the states to
a point, which no one expected to see them reach within
any short period. ..... Thus the chapter of reforms was
closed in Italy. Next began that of Constitutions, which
were invented or copied ; every one vied with his neighbour
to do most work and quickest.” ‘T'o this supposed necessity
of following his neighbours in granting a constitution, the
Pope makes reference in the preamble to his own hasty and
crude “ Fundamental Statute,” as his reason for issuing it.
Of the sincerity of the Neapolitan King’s co-operation in what
the Pope’s minister, Cardinal Ferretti, called his “ gigantic
design,” there can be, we suppose, little doubt. But all these
difficulties gained tenfold force, from the Pope’s utter ina-
bility to meet them, not merely with intelligence and vigour,
but with a straightforward purpose.

The whole of the second volume of Farini’s work is but an
exemplification of this remark. We do not at all underrate
the very trying circumstances of the Pope’s position. Doubt-
less he was betrayed; and we are certainly very far indeed
from sympathising with the men who, by their cowardice
or their treachery, betrayed him. The best of the men
whom he took into his service, as his coadjutors in his
* gigantic design,” were, on the historian’s own showing, with
one exception, most inefficient allies. They, too, were
below their work; or they did not know their own minds ;
or they had secret purposes and. reservations of their own,
while professing loyalty to him; and the party into whose
hands these men played, were unscrupulously bent on the
destruction of his power. But amidst these dangers, amid
this feebleness, and treachery, and formidable hatred, there
was always room for a manly and consistent course. Pio
IX. had received in advance and in profusion the reformer’s
glory. He bid high, and a place little short of the highest

460 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

among his contemporaries was not refused him; he has no
right to claim exemption from the criticism of those whose
admiration was so loudly challenged for him, and challenged
upon trust. That he failed, was not perhaps his fault; but
hemight at least have failed like a man. For this at least,
the history of the Papacy might have furnished him with
more than one precedent.

But we look in vain, through the course of the rapid down-
fal, which followed the promulgation of that boastful « Funda-
mental Statute,” by which,the Papacy was changed into a
Constitutional government, for one single act of courageous
resistance, or conscientious denial, on the part of the Pope.
Scruples, reluctance, impatience, disapprobation, obstinacy,
—there are in abundance. It is quite certain that he did
not like the turn that things were taking, or the use which
the new responsible ministers were making of the authority
which he had given them. But his distrust and dislike
exhaled in complaints to his courtiers, bickerings with his
ministers about the wording of a speech, and querulous pro-
clamations to the “Romans.” He thought it strange and
ungrateful that Liberal ministers should follow the stream of
Liberal policy and sympathies ; but to obstruct and perplex
was the utmost he ventured on. It was clear enough when
he consented to shut up the Jesuit houses in Rome, and send
away the Fathers, that he did it sorely against his will, and to
men whom he approved and honoured. He had condescended,
in the beginning of the month, to expostulate, to intercede,
with the senseless mob and their blackguard leaders — finally,
even to intimate a threat. But as the mob and their leaders
were proof against flattery and paternal exhortation, and had
no cause to be alarmed about threats, at the end of the
month the Jesuits had to go.*

It was in the matter of the Austrian war, that this vacil-
lation displayed itself most unworthily, and most fatally.
Whether it was right or wrong for the Pope to go to war
with Austria, in order to drive her out of Italy, it was clearly
right that in such a matter, he should be above trifling. He

* Vol. ii. pp. 4. 17—21.

—

FARINI'S ROMAN STATE. 461

should either have joined in the war, or he should have
refused to join. Another course might be convenient; right
and honourable it could not be. Austria, it may be, has
forgiven him, as having acted under the terror of the Li-
berals, and received a memorable lesson to boot: but this
does not affect the example set by one with such claims as
the Pope, and a Pope like Pio IX.

Both the Pope and his subjects, such at least as shouted
his praises, wished the Austrians out of Italy: and when in
the troubles that succeeded the French revolution, the oppor-
tunity seemed come for getting them out, both in different,
but equally significant ways, showed their satisfaction. But,
as it was not likely that the Austrians would go without
fighting, the Pope’s subjects, and his ministers, were for try-
ing to fight them.

Here the Pope paused. Conscientiously, no one can
doubt, he shrunk from aggressive war. But he shrunk
equally from encountering the feeling which in his subjects
was all for that war. They went on arming avowedly for it,
and he said nothing. They entered into the war. He went
on, as if in perfect ignorance or perfect indifference about
their proceeding ; certainly as if he had no voice, either as
priest or as sovereign, to command, to warn, even to remon-
strate. At last he thought proper to declare to the world

that he did not mean to go to war. But though his ministers

resigned, his subjects went on going to war; his next
ministers came in with the same avowed purpose; and he
himself placed his troops “beyond the Po,” under the com-
mand of the King of Sardinia.

A few extracts from Farini’s narrative will illustrate this.

In March, 1848, Milan rose, and drove out the Austrian
troops. ‘The Pope expressed his feelings on the occasion in
the following proclamation : —

“From time to time he thrilled with the inspiration of ideas
that exalted the Papacy to a new and astonishing elevation, and
uttered sentences such that from his lips we seemed to hear the
voice of God. Godlike words were these :

462 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

“ «Pius Papa IX., to the people of the States of Italy,
Health and Apostolic benediction.

«<The events which the last two months have witnessed, fol-
lowing and thronging one another in such rapid succession, are no
work of man. Woe to him that does not discern the Lord’s Voice
in this blast that agitates, uproots, and rends the cedar and the
oak! Woe to the pride of man, if he shall refer these marvellous
changes to any human merit or any human fault, instead of adoring
the hidden designs of Providence, whether manifested in the paths
of His justice, or of His mercy: of that providence in whose hands
are all the ends of the earth. And We, who are endowed with
speech in order to interpret the dumb eloquence of the works of
God, We cannot be mute, amidst the longings, the fears and the
hopes, which agitate the minds of our children.

“¢ And first, it is our duty to make known to you, that if our
heart has been moved at hearing how, in a part of Italy, the con-
solations of Religion have preceded the perils of battle, and noble-
ness of mind has been displayed in works of charity, We never-
theless could not and cannot but deeply grieve over the injuries
which, in other places, have been done to the Ministers of that
same Religion,—injuries which, even if, contrary to our duty,
We were silent concerning them, our silence could not hinder from
impairing the efficacy of our Benedictions.

“‘¢ Neither can we refrain from telling you, that to use victory
well is a greater and more difficult achievement than to be vic-
torious. If the present day recalls to you any other period of your
history, let the children profit by the errors of their forefathers.
Remember that all stability and all prosperity has its main earthly
ground in concord: that it is God alone Who maketh of one mind
them that dwell in an house: that He grants this reward only to
the humble and the meek, to those that respect His laws, in the
liberty of His Church, in the order of society, in charity towards
all mankind. Remember that righteousness alone can build, that
passion destroys, and He that adopts the name of King of Kings
entitles himself likewise the Ruler of Nations.

““¢ May our prayers have strength to ascend into the presence
of the Lord, and to bring down upon you that spirit of counsel,
of strength, and of wisdom, of which the fear of God is the be-
ginning; that so our eyes may behold peace over all this land of
Italy, which if our love towards the whole Catholic world does
not allow us to call the most beloved, yet God has willed to be to
Ourselves, the most dear.

i

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 463

“ ¢ Given in Rome, at Santa Maria Maggiore, on the 30th of
March, 1848, in the second year of Our Pontificate.’

“ This language more and more increased the fervent love of
Pius IX., of liberty, and of Italy ; so that every one as he repaired
to arms felt himself a champion of Religion, of Liberty, and of
Italy.” —Vol. ii. pp. 21, 22.

To say the least, these words show strong sympathy with
the “ victory” of the Italians, in this first step in the war of
independence. ‘The second step was the entry of Charles
Albert into Lombardy. The greatest enthusiasm for war
was created by it in the Roman States—and in this en-
thusiasm the Pope was not backward : —

“The Pope and the religious Congregations made rich con-
tributions; the Princes of Rome vied in liberality with the
citizens ; every one joyfully and spontaneously paid the tribute of
free bounty to their country ; the people emulated them, if not in the
magnificence yet in the multitude of their gifts and in the fervour
of their feelings; the very mendicant, stretching out his hand
to passengers, begged of them for Italy .... Cardinals and
Princes presented horses for the artillery; and Princes, Dukes,
nobles, citizens, commons, set out for the camp, all as brethren:
among them were two nephews of the Pope; within a few days
there were at least twelve thousand volunteers from the Papal
States. The Pope gave his benediction, letting it be understood

_ that it descended upon warriors, who were on their way to defend

the confines of the States of the Church; the cities were all
in jubilee; even the country folks greeted merrily the Papal
legions. ‘The Pontifical ensigns were blended with the colours
of the nation ; the Cross surmounted the Italian flag.”—Vol. ii. p. 25.

The reservation noticed in this extract must not be for-
gotten. It was for the defence of his own states, that the
Pope authorised all these warlike preparations. But the
Pope knew very well that no one in that army which he had
blessed, no one in the ministry which directed that army,
had any such limitations in their warlike purposes. They
went, to favour, and, if necessary, help, in that Piedmontese
invasion, which had been greeted in Rome with such en-

464 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

thusiasm ; and they went under orders from their superiors
in Rome : —

“But when the Roman government had heard of the entry
of the Piedmontese into Lombardy, Cardinal Antonelli wrote on
the 27th of March to the Cardinal Legate of Bologna, that he was
to apprise the General [Durando] of Charles Albert’s desire that
our force should remain at the confines, and should there assemble
the largest numbers practicable, in order to overawe the Austrians;
giving him to understand that he, as President of the Council
of Ministers, conceived it necessary to convey to Durando, as
Commander of the Pontifical’ corps of operation, this information
‘both for his guidance, and also in consideration that a different
attitude’ (such are the words of the despatch) ‘might hamper the
operations of the King of Piedmont.’ Aldobrandini, the Minister
of War, wrote on the 28th to the selfsame General Durando,
“enjoining him at once to place himself in communication with
the Head-quarters of his Majesty, and to act in concert with him.’

ee et Let it then stand for a fact, that, after the war had broken
out in Lombardy, the Pope sent a person to represent him [ Mon-
signor Corboli Bussi] in the Italian camp; that this person was
an ecclesiastic, the most distinguished man of the Prelacy of
Rome, the dearest, too, and most devoted to Pius IX. ; that same
person who a few months before had gone as Commissioner for
the conclusion of the Custom’s League: and, further, let this stand,
that the Roman Government ordered the Commander of the Papal
troops ‘at once to place himself in communication with the Head-
quarters of His Majesty, and to act in concert with him.’

.... “But the Ministry would not determine upon ordering
Durando to act on the offensive without the Pope’s explicit order.
Accordingly they pointed out to his Holiness into what peril the
peace of the country would be brought, if that uncertainty should
continue longer; and gave him to understand, that they must
resign office, rather than undertake to abstain from giving coun-
tenance to the war. ‘To this the Pope replied, that he had not as
yet taken any final resolution; that he was waiting for intelli-
gence from Piedmont about the proposal of a League, and that
the Ministers therefore should not resign, but should act ‘ac-
cording to circumstances.’ One of the Ministers remarked, that
the question was not simply about sending our troops across the
Po, but about sharing in a war which would necessarily involve

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 465

the shedding of human blood, a responsibility which the con-
science of a Christian statesman could not assume without the
consent of his Sovereign. Upon this the Pope guaranteed him
against every scruple, by saying that there would always be time
to recall the troops, in case he should decide upon taking no part
in the war. Aldobrandini, the Minister of War, a frank and
high-minded gentleman, who sought in any case to set his own
conscience at ease, heard such language more than once, so that he
was encouraged to give orders to Durando to encamp beyond the
Po, and, under date of the 18th of April, wrote to him as follows :
“<«T have to acknowledge the receipt of your acceptabie letter
of the 14th current, which I have forthwith submitted to the Holy
Father: and he has deigned to answer me, that you are authorised
to do all that you may judge requisite for the tranquillity and
the advantage of the Pontifical States. Accordingly, I hasten to
send to you this intelligence by express.’”—Vol. ii. pp. 61—68.

It is no matter of surprise, however irregular it may
have been, that the Roman general, Durando, should on the
banks of the Po tell his soldiers that the “ Holy Pontiff
had blessed their swords, which, when united to those of
Charles Albert, were to work concurrently, for the exter-
mination of the enemies of God and of Italy,” and bid them
wear a tricolor cross on their heart, as crusaders. But this
proclamation disturbed the Pope; not so much from its un-
warrantable presumption, as from the sentiments it expressed.
He said, that he must now allay the scruples of the Catholic
world; that he must speak. And in spite of the Ministers,
among whom was Cardinal Antonelli, he did speak. On the
25th of April, they laid a paper before him, in which they
present

“<their most earnest prayers to your. Holiness, that you would
deign to make a precise declaration of your sentiments concerning
the war, and to determine the rules of policy which were to be
followed. Such a declaration becomes every day more necessary 3
whether considered in respect to the tranquillity of the country,
the dignity of the Government, or the actual condition of the
Ministry and the army. Upon this cardinal act depends, in great

part, the future of the State, and of Italy at large.’”—Vol. ii. p-
102.

H H

466 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

And, leaving the ecclesiastical point of view to him, as Pope,
they put the question before him as his temporal ministers
thus : —

«<The question may be resolved in three modes :
“¢ Your Holiness will either allow your subjects to make war;
“<¢QOr declare your will absolutely against them making war ;
“¢QOr finally, announce that, though desirous of peace, you
cannot prevent their making war.’”—Vol. ii. p. 102.

They recommended the first: they strongly dissuaded from
the second; and still more strongly from the third, with
very unanswerable arguments.* It will be said, they ob-
served,—

«“¢That a deception lies in these words; because, if the Go-
vernment cannot prevent this anarchical movement, it should
at least show its good faith by putting into operation all such
means as it possesses for that purpose; but since, on the con-
trary, it furnishes arms and stores to the Volunteers, and more-
over finds Generals to command them, these are proofs of its
secretly wishing well to the war which it ostensibly repudiates.
The Papal authority will be no less assailed by the perfidious, than
it would be in the case of an open declaration of war. Lastly,
both the regular troops, and the Volunteers, who after such a mani-~
festo, might continue beyond the Po, would find themselves wholly
stripped of those rights which the law of nations grants even
in the hottest wars, provided they have been declared in the first
instance. ‘They would, on the contrary, be treated as outlaws,
assassins, and brigands; and yet they are Pontifical subjects,
serving under Generals chosen by Your Holiness, wearing the
Papal uniform, carrying your flags and the cross. ‘These con-
siderations the Undersigned lay at the feet of Your Holiness, and

* «“ Now, any one who reads this paper of the Ministers of the 10th of March,
will be perhaps in no small marvel if he happen to have read and heard it re-
peated, in more languages than one, that they sought to take advantage of the
general excitement to drive the Pope into a declaration of war. Still more will
he wonder that this should be said and repeated, and allowed to be said and
repeated, while Pius IX. is alive, and while that same Cardinal Antonelli, whe
subscribed the remonstrance, is anew in power.” — Vol. ii. p. 105.

i ==”
ea
'
a

=

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 467

bowing profoundly before Your Blessedness they kiss your sacred

foot.
“<« Your most humble and devoted subjects,

«“¢ ANTONELLI. SIMONETTI.
RECCHI. PASOLINI.
MINGHETTI. STURBINETTI,

ALDOBRANDINI. GALLETTIL
“*Rome 25th April, 1848.”—Vol. ii. p. 104.

The Pope said nothing at the time — but on the 29th ap-
peared the famous ‘“‘ Allocution ” to the Cardinals, which was
one of the turning points of the history; the Pope’s first
step backward, the palinode of his previous reign.

“The Allocution had already been printed, but either no one
knew, or no one would tell what it contained. Cardinal Antonelli
was not privy to it, and he stated that those about the Court did
not breathe on it: even the nephew of the Pope, who had much
of his affection, knew nothing of it, and asked others for informa-
tion; circumstances, these, that are well worthy to be known
and reflected on. The meeting of the Consistory was hardly over,
when Cardinal Antonelli looked for me with the paper containing
the Allocution in his hand: and as I was wild with eagerness
to know the contents, and asked him for it, he told me that he had
not been able to form an adequate idea of them from the single
reading aloud, which he had scarcely heard; so we set ourselves

to peruse it together.”—Vol. ii. p. 106,

The Allocution contained the following, among other apo-
logetic passages : —

“<Besides which, the above-mentioned people of Germany

-could not be incensed with Us, if it has been absolutely impos-

sible for Us to restrain the ardour of those persons, within our
temporal sway, who have thought fit to applaud the acts done
against them in Upper Italy, and who, caught by the same ardour
as others for the cause of their own Nation, have, together with
the subjects of other Italian States, exerted themselves on behalf
of that cause.

“* For several other European Potentates, greatly excelling Us
in the number of their troops, have been unable at this particular
epoch to resist the impetus of their people.

HH 2

468 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

- “Moreover, in this condition of affairs, We have declined
to allow the imposition of any other obligation on our soldiers,
despatched to the confines of the Pontifical State, except that of
maintaining its integrity and security.

“< But, seeing that some at present desire that We too, along
with the other Princes of Italy and their subjects, should engage
in war against the Austrians, We have thought it convenient to
proclaim clearly and openly, in this our solemn Assembly, that such
a measure is altogether alien from our counsels, inasmuch as We,
albeit unworthy, are upon earth the vicegerent of Him that is the
Author of Peace, and the Lover of hasten, and, conformably to
the function of our supreme “Apostolate, We reach to and embrace
all kindreds, people, and nations, with equal solicitude of paternal
affection. But if, notwithstanding, there are not wanting among
our subjects those who allow themselves to be carried away by the
example of the rest of the Italians, in what manner could We
possibly curb their ardour? ’”—Vol. ii. pp. 109, 110.

This was from the Pope, who on the 30th of the preceding
March, had blessed, and if he warned, warned with the voice
of full sympathy, the victorious insurgents of Milan; and
had joined in the military enthusiasm which he knew well
had no other mark but the war against Austria.

But this was not all. If the war was wrong, the Pope
had not said so to his subjects. He had now said so, not
indeed, to them, who were engaged in it, but to Europe
generally. Some step might now be looked for, from one
who was not insensible, at least to his spiritual power.
“How,” he says, a day or two after, when disaster threatened
at Rome, “how in such contingencies, could the spiritual
power, which God has given us, remain idle in our hands?
Let all know, once for all, that we are conscious of the
greatness of our office, and the efficacy of our power.” But
the word of recall was not yet given. The new Ministry
was allowed to come in, roe the same warlike inten-
tions as the old one. More than this: the Allocution pro-
duced, as might have been foreseen, great excitement, to the
astonishment of the Pope. Then came various means to
take off its edge. The Pope was to mediate a peace. This,

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 469

it seemed, was what he had meant. He had meant only to
protest against war, not to discredit the sacred cause of Italian
nationality. By way of preliminary, he sent to confer on
Charles Albert, then before Verona, the command of all the
Pontifical troops beyond the Po.

* Meanwhile, the Pope decided upon sending to Charles Albert
a Legate of his own commissioned to conclude a treaty for con-
ferring on the King the command of all the Pontifical troops
beyond the Po: to give such explanations as might mitigate any
sinister impressions made by the allocution, and to continue at the
camp of the King, in the stead of Monsignor Corboli, who was
recalled to Rome. ‘This mission was entrusted by the Pope to
the Author; and I likewise received from him, and from the
Ministers, authority to take measures in regard to any disorders
which might chance to have occurred in the portion of the country
which I should have to traverse in order to get to Lombardy.”—
Vol. ii. p. 121.

Bologna was quieted with this assurance:

“But, according to my duty and commission, I gave the
Bolognese the assurance that his Holiness would not abandon the
Italian cause; that I was on my way to the camp of Charles
Albert, to offer him, in the Pope’s name, the command of our
forces; and that the Allocution would not involve a change in
policy. Upon this calm returned; yet, to speak truly, rather the
calm of expectation than of assurance.”—Vol. ii. p. 130.

And Cardinal Antonelli thus writes to Farini, at Somma-
Campagna : —

**< Most esteemed Signor Farini,

“<The Holy Father gives me the honourable commission to
reply to the letter which you addressed to him under date of the
7th current, from the camp of H. M. King Charles Albert. I do
not disguise from you, that his Holiness is unable to comprehend
how an interpretation different from that which the true sense of
his Allocution carries can be given to it. In that Allocution, the
Holy Father has not shown himself hostile in the slightest degree
to Italian nationality, and has only said, that as he is the Prince of
Peace, and the common Father of the Faithful, his mind recoiled

HH 38

470 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

from sharing in the war, but yet that he did not perceive in what
manner it was in his power to restrain the ardour of his subjects.
He _ then testified the satisfaction he would have experienced, if
he could instead have undertaken to mediate a peace. From this
idea, which is well unfolded in the Allocution, you think that the
Holy Father might now opportunely interpose his mediation as
a pacific Sovereign, always in the sense of establishing the
nationality of Italy. You know how I, especially before your
departure from Rome, dwelt upon this idea; you may therefore
well believe how I should be gratified if I could see it properly
carried into execution, with prosperous result.’”—Vol. ii. p. 135.

Is it surprising that the following letter —“ this very noble
letter,” as our admiring historian calls it— to the Emperor of
Austria, of which a copy was sent to Charles Albert, pro-
duced little effect ?

“< Your Majesty,

“<¢Tt has ever been customary, that a word of peace should go
forth from this Holy See amidst the wars which have bathed
Christian lands with blood: and, in the Allocution of the 29th
of April, while We have said that our paternal heart shrinks from
declaring war, We have expressly stated our ardent desire to
contribute towards a peace. Let it not then be distasteful to
Your Majesty, that We should appeal to your piety and devotion,
and with paternal sentiments should exhort You to withdraw your
arms from the contest, which, without any possibility of again
subduing to your empire the spirit of the Lombards and the Vene-
tians, draws with it the fatal series of calamities that are wont to
attend on war, and that without doubt are by You detested and
abhorred.

“<¢ Tet not, then, the generous German nation take it in ill part,
if We invite them to lay resentment aside, and to convert into the
beneficial relations of friendly neighbourhood a domination, which
could never be prosperous or noble while it depended solely on the
sword.

“< Thus then We trust that the said Nation, honourably proud
of its own nationality, will not think its honour to consist in bloody
efforts against the Italian Nation, but rather in generously ac-
knowledging her for a sister, even as both are daughters to Us,
and most dear to our heart; that so each may confine itself to

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 471

reside within its natural limits, upon honourable terms, and with
the blessing of the Lord. In the meantime we entreat the Giver
of every light, and Author of every good, toinspire Your Majesty
with holy counsel; while from the inmost of our heart we impart
to You, to H. M. the Empress, and to the Imperial family, the
Apostolic Benediction.

“Given in Rome, at Santa Maria Maggiore, on the 3d of
May, 1848, in the second year of our Pontificate.” ’— Vol. ii. pp.
136, 137.

The Pope’s troops, however, continued to fight the Austrians,
with the full sanction of the Ministry, and murmurs indeed,
but no remonstrance, from the Pope. ‘Then when Charles
Albert was beaten, and Marshal Walden and his Austrians,
with the same disclaimer of hostile purposes as that in the
Pope’s Allocution, enter the Papal territory, the Pope is
indignant and “ greatly surprised” that his “prudence and
mildness have failed in preventing the entrance into the
States of an Austrian army.” *

Such were the conditions under which it was attempted to
reconstruct the Government of the States of the Church, to
form ministries and make laws. First, things to all appear-
ance contradictory had to be reconciled —the ideas of the
College of Cardinals, with those of the Liberals, from
Rosmini and Mamiani to Mazzini and the Republican Clubs.
‘Next, this had to be done, in the midst of a rapid and as-
tonishing collapse, in Rome as in Europe generally, of tradi-
tional authority and respect, of the moral power and the
material force of the Governments, of the influence of great
names, great offices, great popularity. And lastly, the men
who were responsible for the attempt, and its fulfilment,
brought to their task little besides an enthusiasm, which
jealousy, scruples, ignorance, and insincerity first rendered
ridiculous, and then converted into despair.

Rossi, an Italian pupil of Guizot, a politician who began
life as a university Professor at Bologna, and after being

* Vol. ii. p. 317,
HH 4

472 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

long a proscribed fugitive, finished by being an Ambassador of
France, was the last minister to whom the Pope had recourse,
and the only one who showed any appearance of energy and
self-reliance. But it was now too late. He was, indeed,
scarcely less liberal than his predecessors. He too was in
favour of an Italian war against Austria. He had early said
‘‘ that the national feeling for war was so strong, that Pius IX.
must either take it resolutely in hand, or the factions hostile
to him would seize it, and turn it against him and the
Popedom,”* And now the latter alternative of the prophecy
was to be verified. The Pope’s miserable vacillation had
not prevented the war; but it had made a wreck of his
authority: and the first minister who dared to act vigorously
on that authority, showed by his fall, so fearful, yet un-
avenged, that it too had fallen. Rossi did act vigorously.
This was enough to gain for him the epithet of tyrant, and
that epithet was the warrant for his murder. He knew his
danger ; he was warned of it also. But Rossi was at least
a brave and resolute man; the one man, among these
scrupulous or boasting personages, who, when he thought he
saw his duty, was not afraid to attempt it.

‘* It appertained, as is usual in Constitutional States, to the Pre-
sident of the Council of Deputies, to regulate its police; nor had
Rossi, who was a scrupulous observer of constitutional method
and custom, any idea of having a hand or voice in it. ‘To any
person who, under an apprehension of violence, advised him to
look to the matter, he replied, that he would call for armed assist-
ance, if it were desired by the President ; but not otherwise. He
had repeatedly received anonymous letters, in which his life was
threatened, and he had scorned them, as every brave and wise
man should. On the very morning of the 15th, he got one, which
differed from the rest in this, that it brought him an intimation,
rather than a mere threat, of his death. A distinguished lady,
likewise, wrote to him, that her mind stood in doubt and fear of
some untoward occurrence: a veteran Polish General came to
him, and signified his misgivings, lest the threats should be put
into execution: and a pious priest warned him of the dangers that

* Vol. ii. p. 100.

FARINI’'S ROMAN STATE. 473

were hanging over him. To all this he answered, that he had
taken the measures he thought suitable for keeping the seditious in
order: that he could not, because of risks he might personally
run, forego repairing to the Council according to his duty: that,
perhaps, these were idle menaces; that, moreover, if any one
thirsted for his blood, he would have the means of shedding it
elsewhere on some other day, even if on that day he should lose
his opportunity: he would therefore go: and he repeated again
and again, that the Government was in readiness to put down any
faction that might seek to lift up its head.....

* When the ordinary hour of the parliamentary sitting, which
was about noon, had arrived, the people began to gather in the
Square of the Cancelleria and by degrees in the courtyard, and
then in the public galleries of the hall. Shortly all were full. A
battalion of the Civic Guard was drawn up in the Square: in the
court and hall there was no guard greater than ordinary. ‘There
were, however, not a few individuals, armed with their daggers,
in the dress of the volunteers, returned from Vicenza, and wearing
the medals with which the Municipality of Rome had decorated
them. They stood close together, and formed a line from the
gate up to the staircase of the palace. Sullen visages were to be
seen, and ferocious imprecations heard, among them. During the
time when the Deputies were slowly assembling, and business
could not commence, because there was not yet a guorum present,
a cry for help suddenly proceeded from the éxtremity of the public
gallery, on which every one turned thither a curious eye, but
nothing more was heard or seen, and those who went to get some
explanation of the circumstance, returned without success.

“In the meantime Rossi’s carriage entered the court of the
palace. He sat on the right, and Righetti, Deputy-Minister of
Finance, on the left. A howl was raised in the court and yard,
which echoed even into the hall of the Council. Rossi got out
first, and moved briskly, as was his habit in walking, across the
short space which leads from the centre of the court to the stair-
case on the left hand. Righetti, who descended after him, re-
mained behind, because the persons were in his way who raised

the outcry, and who, brandishing their cutlasses, had surrounded

Rossi, and were loading him with opprobrium. At this moment
might be seen amidst the throng the flash of a poniard, and then
Rossi losing his feet, and sinking to the ground. Alas! he was
spouting blood from a broad gash in the neck. He was raised by

474 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

Righetti, but could hardly hold himself up, and did not articulate
a syllable ; his eyes grew clouded, and his blood spirted in a copious
jet. Some of those, whom I named as clad in military uniform,
were above upon the stairs; they came down, and formed a ring
about the unhappy man: and when they saw him shedding blood
and half lifeless, they all turned, and rejoined their companions.
He was borne, amidst his death-struggle, into the apartments of
Cardinal Gazzoli, at the head of the stairs on the left side; and
there, after a few moments, he breathed his last.”—Vol. ii. pp.
405—407.

Horrible as this was, it was not half so horrible as the
indifference about it among those who were held to be
respectable men. Whether they felt this unconcern, or were
cowed into it, it is equally a mark far more damning on re-
ligious and Catholic Rome than the murder itself. It
disclosed in a moment the incredible corruption of feeling, and
decay of all seriousness and all strength, to which public
men and the public mind had come, amid these antics of a
sham reform. ‘The President of the chamber sat quiet, as
if nothing had happened, while the intelligence was passing
from mouth to mouth; and no one in the chamber ventured
to take public notice of it.

“ Some of those present rose to demand an account of what had
happened, and a reason for the stir; to which a Deputy replied,
they could not tell; then, after a while, the President Sturbinetti
takes the chair, and, though scarcely twenty-five Deputies were
present, orders the minutes of the last sitting to be read. A low
buzz may now be heard: the Secretary begins to read: the Depu-
ties stand unheeding and absorbed, or go forth: the galleries grow
thin, and soon the hall is void and mute. Not one voice was
raised to protest before God and man against the enormous crime.
Was this from fear? Some have thought to term it prudence: by
foreign nations it is named disgrace.

“JT was no longer a Deputy at the time, but, as an eye-witness
to the facts, I can now speak the truth with a mind free from
prejudice of whatever kind. Possibly it was terror, disguised as
prudence, and whitewashed with imperturbability, in him who
desired the record of the last sitting to be read. There was no

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 475

legal meeting: no motion could be made: the few Deputies, taken
by surprise and incensed, almost all went out on the instant,
prompted by sympathy with Rossi, whom they thought wounded,
but not dead. One worthless voice alone was heard to cry, ‘ Why
all this fuss? one would think he was King of Rome.’ Truly
some other voice might have cried, ‘Out upon such infamy!’ and
shame it was, that no such voice was heard!”—Vol. ii. pp. 407,
408.

It was natural for the bad to exult; but where were the
good, even to protest? ‘ Such was the poltroonery, or such
the depravity, of consciences, that no journal would or dared
to denounce the murder. Pantaleoni wanted to print in the
Epoca, a paper of his, condemning and abominating it, but
the managers of the journal would not consent. But why
do I speak of execration? The murder was honoured with
illuminations and festivities in numerous cities, and not in
these states exclusively, but beyond them, especially at Leg-
horn.” One yet more foul trait is recorded by the historian.
He tells us of one Monsignor Muzzarelli, a Roman Prelate,
whom his bewildered and powerless master had named minister
in the room of the murdered man. This person, “ who was
in favour with the insurgents, had intimated even to the
Pope, that he held the death of Rossi to be a blessing.”

With this consummation of the reformed Papal Govern-
ment, the history stops for the present:—the account of its
overthrow and restoration is yet to come. ‘The moral of the
whole is thus stated by Mr. Gladstone : —

“ A great problem, of deep and lasting interest to the whole of
Europe and of Christendom, has for some time been in process of
solution in the Roman or Papal States.

“This process has been, during the reign of the present Pope,
greatly, and beyond all expectation, accelerated; and it may now
be said to be virtually complete, although the interposition of
material force obstructs for the present its manifestation to the
world. |

‘Its three principal stages, since the peace of 1815, have been
as follows: — .

476. FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

“First, until the death of Gregory XVI. the question was,
whether the temporal power of the Popes could be perpetuated upon
the basis of its old and very defective traditional system, further
deteriorated by some of the worse characteristics of that system
of government which owes its paternity to the first French Revo-
lution.

“From the accession of Pius IX. in June, 1846, a second era
commenced, and the question now became this: whether it was
possible to remove the crying oppressions and abuses of the old
system, and to establish constitutional freedom, retaining at the
same time any effective sovereignty in the Papal Chair.

“This period is, indeed, divisible into two; for there is no
evidence to show that Pius IX. desired or intended, of his own
free will, to establish anything like what we understand by Con-
stitutional freedom. Still, he bent his neck to the necessity, which
the French Revolution of 1848 brought upon him; and, for the
present purpose, it is enough to mark November, 1848, as the
term of the second stage of the process under view.

“ The third stage is, from the entry of the French, and the
restoration of the Papal Government, in the summer of 1849,
down to the present time. Though it is not yet formally at an
end, it may be considered morally complete. During this period,
a third form of the question has been put. It has been this:
whether the temporal power of the Popedom had life enough in
itself to reconstruct and improve its external forms, and during
the interval of forced but entire repose afforded by the presence
of the overwhelming military power of three or four nations—the
smallest of them outnumbering, three times over, the population of
the Roman States—to strike such roots into the soil as might
again give it a substantive existence, might enable it to endure
the removal of those screens which cover it from east, west, north,
and south, and might embolden it to expose itself once more to
the free current of the air of Heaven?

“Every one of these three questions has, I believe, received
an answer from the facts of the time; an answer, in substance,
already complete and final.”—Vol. i. pp. vii. viii.

Three things appear in this history and its upshot :—

1. The coincidence of very great disorder, corruption, and
inisery, social and political, with the Ecclesiastical govern-
ment of the centre of the Roman Church; and then worst,

—
fe
Ca ie

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 477

when that Ecclesiastical government was most strong; and
the mischief and danger thence ensuing.

2. The utter failure of the attempt to infuse new life into
it; the absence of anything in the old system which the new
could take hold of, with which it could be knit together, and
could harmonise.

3. The consequent necessity of falling back, without altera-
tion or compromise, on the old system ; and as that system
had none of the ordinary elements of political strength, the
further necessity of absolute and helpless dependence on
foreign influence and foreign arms; the acknowledged neces-
sity of garrisons, French or Austrian, to protect the Roman
government against its own subjects: the alliance, once more
mutually cultivated, and daily coming closer, between the
Roman court and the harshest of despotic governments, those
of Austria and Naples.

Persons must be very insensible who can look on a spec-
tacle like this, a problem so precisely and clearly defined, and
so distinctly solved, without being moved by it; those
especially who, in a spirit of chivalrous paradox, in opposition
to common opinion, have vaunted of the elasticity and power
of the Papacy, of the necessity to the Church of its temporal
dominion ; of its independence of the powers of the world.
What sort of independence is that, which is indebted for
existence to one foreign army, which it wishes away, in order
that it may be indebted for it, to another which it likes better?
What sort of dominion is that, where neither love, nor fear,
nor habit, nor interest, nor national sentiment, nor even re-
ligion, can ensure for a week the safety of the state? What
sort of power is that, which has been for centuries influencing
its subjects, and finds them at the end no more to be either
trusted or controlled, than if they were Malays or Caffres,
instead of one of the most cultivated and intelligent races of
Christian Europe? What sort of elasticity is that, which,
after two years of factitious and unsuccessful liberalism
relapses blindly and desperately into the most antiquated
despotism ?

The political is not necessarily the theological point of

478 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

view ; but a great deal has been said, of late, in theological
discussions on two points:—J. on the brilliant part which
the Papacy has played in civilisation— of arts, science, poli-
tical institutions, all indebted to its fostering encouragement :
and, 2. in another aspect of things, on the compatibility of
good and successful political institutions with a very low
standard of morality and religion; of public truth and justice
flourishing, it may be, more in heretical than in Catholic
countries, more among people devoted to wealth and self-in-
dulgence, than in those marked by faith and devotion, yet
flourishing simply on principles of the world, and a well-
understood selfishness.

We are far from denying that there is truth in both these
considerations. ‘The Papacy has done much for civilisation.
Good political institutions may be very imperfect tests of
Christian character. But there is another side to these con-
siderations, and if one side is of weight, so is the other.

We believe that there is a great debt, for good as well as
for evil, which Europe owes to the Papacy; but whatever
the Papacy may have been, or have done in times past, is not
to be put in the place of what it is and does now. If, for-
merly, it grappled with the times, and directed their energies
— if it enlightened, and humanised, and guarded justice be-
tween the strong and the weak, it does not now. Let its
most ardent champion in France or England imagine the
political spirit of the Papacy, its customs and methods of
governing, extended to the whole of Europe, and ask himself
if even he could congratulate Christendom on the change. A
Pope has acknowledged, as clearly as he could, that civilisa-
tion has outstripped the Papacy, and he tried to overtake it
in vain. We do not know what can be a scandal, if it is not
one of the worst kind, that the professed centre and judgment
seat of the Christian Church should be a_ political evil of
the first magnitude, and as incurable as it is great; that the
fountain and guardian of Christian principles for the whole
world, cannot keep its own people, the people whom it trains
as it thinks best, from a chronic state of bloody faction;

FARINI’S ROMAN STATE. 479

that a Pope has tried to govern well, to govern mercifully and
justly, by law and not by terror, and could not.

And, on the other hand, if the excellence of a political sys-
tem, the general rule of law in a nation, a real pervading
regard paid to truth, justice, and equity, in matters social and
political, a temper of considerateness and mercy, an attention,
incomplete it may be, but systematic and effectual, to the
welfare of the poorer classes, a wide sympathy for enterprises
of benevolence, a strong sense of security and mutual confi-
dence; and resulting from all this, order, tranquillity, and the
successful exercise of industry, be but imperfect guarantees of
the Christianity of a nation and its government, if they may
be but the exquisitely adjusted contrivance of a worldly-wise
selfishness, at least the absence of these things are actual po-
sitive proof against the soundness of professed religious
principles. Christianity may be, doubtless, far short of its
purity and due influence, in a nation which is well governed,
and in order; but it is ludicrous to speak of its being more
influential, where power is plainly abused, and government
corrupt ; where justice cannot be trusted, where mercy is
esteemed dangerous, where falsehood and violence are found
by experience to be more successful than straightforwardness
and reason; and all this under a government unrestricted
in its power, safe from external violence, possessing the high-
est religious influence, the spiritual guides as well as the
temporal rulers of its subjects.

* La tyrannie est,” says Pascal, “ de vouloir avoir par une
voie, ce qu’on ne peut avoir que par une autre.” Order, con-
fidence, and peace can only come to a government which will
think and work for them. They are not meant to be the re-
ward of one which has been, if not harsh, yet selfishly remiss
and inattentive to the wants and welfare of its subjects. But
as all governments must have subordination, such a one has
to compel, what it ought to have brought about; the sword
and the illegal tribunal must supply the place of past obliga-
tions evaded, duties unfulfilled, and influence wasted. Pro-
vidence allows, for the time, in this as in other cases, an

480 FARINI’S ROMAN STATE.

inversion of its appointed order, allows of these illegitimate
expedients and short rough roads to peace; but even in its
visible course, it usually exacts compensation, and that not
sparingly. And those who tell us how cheaply it holds, and
how severely it judges, in its secret visitations, man’s industry,
man’s justice, and man’s mercy, may not doubt, how it will
judge man’s cruelty, to which he has been driven by his in-
dolent neglect,

481

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.*
[ Jury, 1852.]

THis is a curious book. Pascal’s famous Letters elicited, at
the time of their publication, a vigorous defence on the part
of the great order whom they had attacked so unceremoni-
ously ; but of that fierce and eventful controversy they are
now almost the sole memorials. It may be supposed that
the able and shrewd men against whom they were directed,
had something to say tothem. As a company, the Jesuits
possessed more available talent, more concentrated resources,
more discipline, than any public body in Europe. They sifted
and contradicted the ‘* Provincial Letters;” they explained
with ingenuity, and even with wit; they made out, with
much plausibility, that they had said nothing but what other
people had said. Butit is very hard now to get a sight of their
books. We may look in vain in some of our most famous
libraries: all seem to have disappeared — the Jesuit books
which Pascal attacked, and the Jesuit books which attacked
Pascal ; the Péres Bauny, and Binet, and Garasse, and Le
- Moyne, his victims, and their defenders, Péres Annat and
Nouet, and Pirot and Pinthereau, and even the polite
P. Daniel. This want, however, has been supplied by the
work before us, an edition of the “ Provincial Letters,” with
their refutation, by the Abbé Maynard, a French ecclesiastic
of some literary pretensions, who may stand very well for the
Baunys and Daniels, now so seldom met with.

In noticing this book, we wish one thing distinctly to be
understood. It is not that we are opening afresh these by-
gone scandals. It is M. Maynard who has brought them

* Les Provinciales ; et leur Réfutation. Par M. TAbbé Maynarp, Chanoine
Honoraire de Poitiers. Ouvrage dédié a Mons. de Vesins, Evéque d’ Agen.
Paris: 1851. 2 vols, 8vo,

> |

482 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

before us, to show us how he could dispose of them, by an
elaborate and ostentatious refutation. And what we propose
to consider is not so much Pascal and his charges, as the way
in which M. Maynard deals with them, and the light which
his statements, whether in attack or defence, throw on the
practical system and feelings of those in whose behalf he
speaks. We notice the book the more, because it is a cha-
racteristic specimen of the style and spirit which mark the
school of Joseph de Maistre — of the line of argument which
they adopt — of the self-complacent contempt of facts, the
extravagance of misrepresentation and even calumny, which
seem to sit so lightly on the consciences, and are expressed so
glibly by the pens, of the disciples of that master of brilliant
and insolent theory, who bids fair to become the acknow-
ledged exponent of the principles of modern Romanism.

The book is what we might call in England a “ Family
Pascal.” Pascal’s “ Provincial Letters,” says the Abbé
Maynard, have done more harm to the cause of religion and
the Church in France, than perhaps any other book in the
French language. They are the most hypocritical and lying
production of the most hypocritical sect of heretics, that ever
assailed Christianity. Yet they are so clever, that it is hope-
less to expect that Frenchmen will ever cease to read them ;
and equally hopeless, that they will read the solid refutations
which the Jesuits wrote of them. ‘The effect of answers, he
says, has only been like that of Pére Daniel’s book on James
the Second’s courtiers at St. Germain, who were so delighted
with the extracts that he gave from Pascal, in order to refute
them, that they sent off at once to Paris for a copy of the
Provinciales, and thought no more of Pére Daniel. What is
to be done in this case? says M. Maynard. Doubtless, the
best would be, that the Provinciales should be forgotten, at
any sacrifice to literature. But as this is past praying for,
M. Maynard has taken the next best course. He has pub-
lished, “on the favourable opinion of the highest ecclesiastical
authority existing in France,” a new edition of the Provinciales,
with all the attractions of Firmin Didot’s elegant typography,
and a collated text, accompanied with a running and popular

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 483

refutation in the introductions and notes. The method is
convenient, but it has its disadvantages. There is something
ungracious in editing a great writer, avowedly to pick him to
pieces. But in Pascal’s case, it is also rather a perilous method ;
for we are apt to compare the note-maker with his victim; and
a hostile editor of Pascal had need be a considerable person, to -
venture to place his remarks in proximity with their text,
without running the risk of looking very like a lacquey, soli-
citing our attention to the faults of his master.

The Abbé Maynard, however, fully sensible, as he pro-
fesses to be, of Pascal’s genius, cannot be said to have any
fear of this contrast. We might have expected that M.
Maynard would have confined himself to careful rectifications
of quotations or facts, and to comprehensive expositions of
principles or systems. But the lively Abbé is not satisfied
with the resources of theology and history. He adds to them
the perilous ones of pleasantry. Over and above his heavier
artillery, a running fire of sharp little sayings at the bottom
of the page, makes answer to the rapid and deadly hits which
succeed one another in the text. Besides carefully recording
his opinion of the probability of everything that the Jesuits
said or insinuated against Pascal and his friends, as that
Jansenius swindled for the benefit of his friend’s nephew*, M.
Maynard has enriched his edition, and thought to damage

_ Pascal, by a vast quantity of brief notes, such as impatient

readers scribble with pencil on the margin of irritating books
—such, as we are sorry to find, have considerably damaged our
own copy of his elegantly printed volumes. They are very
commonly in the second person — direct addresses to the of-
fending writer, or his Jesuit interlocutor. Now it is a brisk
dialogue in which he pushes Pascal to the wall; now indig-
nant interpellations, such as we used to see reported in the
French Chamber; now ironical answers to Pascal’s ironical
questions ; now apostrophes by single words, brief and
emphatic : — “ Mensonge!” “ Calomnie !” — Pourquoi falsi-
Jier toujours 2?” —* Non, non! c'est pas vrai!” — “ Courage,
bon pére (to the Jesuit speaker), “vous avez droit dans le

* Vol. ii. p. 238.
Ixi3

484 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

fonds, quoique Pascal vous donne tort dans la forme.” —“ Voila
ce qui est plaisant!” —“ Mon Dieu! quel entétement !” —
** C'est le comble de limpudence!” “C'est une infamie!” —
“ Eh, misérables Gallicans, soyez done conséquents avec vous-
mémes.” * Allons ! voila Gros-Jean qui en remontre & son curé,
quelques docteurs pédants qui font la legonaux Papes!” Pascal
observes that the Jesuits called him “ zmpie, bouffon, ignorant,
farceur, imposteur, calomniateur, fourbe, hérétique, Calviniste
dégquisé, disciple de Du Moulin, possédé dune légion de diables,
et tout ce qui vous plait:” the measured annotation says,
* Ily avait bien un peu de tout cela dans Vauteur des Lettres,
moins peut-étre la légion de diables.” These sarcastic interjec-
tions are varied by others of candour or compassion. Atthe
end of some merciless paragraph of Pascal’s, we find his
editor only laughing at the joke, “ Nous rions de tout notre
ceur ;” or we have little bursts of ‘* Charmant !” — “ Char-
mante satire du pédantisme de Vécole!” showing that he
can appreciate the beauty which he deems so fatal. At the
end of the ninth Provinciale, about the devotional novelties
of Péres Bauny and Binet, Pascal adds a postscript to tell
his correspondent that since he had written the letter, he
had himself seen the books — “ce sont des pieces dignes
@étre vues.” We used to think that this was part of the joke.
But we were, it seems, mistaken. M. Maynard is both indig-
nant and grieved :— Quoi / vous avez écrit une lettre sur des
ouvrages que vous ne connaissiez pas, et que vous navez lus
quensuite! L’aveu est naif, et se congoit difficilement dun
homme ordinairement si habile ; ‘ mentita est iniquitas sibi.’ —
Preuve nouvelle,” he adds, with a sympathetic allowance for
genius, “ que le pauvre Pascal était victime de ses amis, acceptait
aveuglement leurs mémoires, et se faisait [écho docile de leurs
erreurs et de leurs passions.” *

These little explosive protests, in which he bandies irony
with Pascal, are a curious method of turning the edge of the
« Provincial Letters.” His way of meeting their direct charges
is equally remarkable. .

Pascal’s book, it appears, must be dealt with in a sweeping

* Vol. i. p. 441,

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 485

manner. The safe, and we should imagine, the old answer
would be, that the Jesuits were not the Church; and that the
relaxed and extravagant opinions which he attacked, were
those of individuals, or, at worst, of an order, for which the
Church was not responsible. It might be further observed,
that lists of propositions, many of them the very ones which
Pascal had quoted, were formally condemned shortly after by
the Popes; and finally that the Church at length disclaimed
the general policy of the Jesuits, showed that even their zeal
and services could not excuse their errors, and publicly sepa-
rated her cause from theirs, by formally dissolving the order.
This is one line of defence. ‘There are others also: as that
Pascal hit a weak point, but exaggerated it ; that he and his
friends went as dangerously in one direction as the Jesuits did
in the other; that it was really a dispute about speculative
and open points, in which both parties lost their temper and
their way. But these answers are too tame, have not enough
of “principle” in them, for the dashing philosophy of the
disciple of De Maistre.

The Abbé Maynard is one of those eager combatants who
disdain to do things by halves. The battle seems to him not
worth gaining, unless he can gain one of those heroic ones in
which every man of the enemy is killed on the spot, and not
one of his own. He accepts the whole weight of the Jesuit
case. One side was right without any wrong, and that was
the Jesuits; the other wrong without any right, and that was
the Jansenists. This is the simple issue, according to M.
Maynard, of the quarrel which distracted the great Church of
France, in its palmiest days, for a century and a half.

_ At the same time, M. Maynard is far from giving up the
charge against Pascal of gross falsehood and wilful misrepre-
sentation in nearly every text that he cites. But the sub-
stance of the refutation is that in all the points which Pascal
singled out for attack, whether doctrine, or morality, or dis-
cipline, he attacked in the Jesuits what is now universally
accepted by the Church. The Abbé’s ambition aims at a
triumph short of nothing less than the brilliant one of putting
‘Pascal out of court for ever, as being, after every allowance

Ir 3

486 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

made for genius and bad company, a convicted and notorious
liar, hypocrite, impostor, slanderer, and heretic.

After M. Maynard’s book, it is to be supposed that no one
ean any longer entertain a doubt on the subject. He, and—
if it will take his advice —the rest of the world, will leave
Pascal in peace, and his Letters also. The following perora-
tion shows how M. Maynard considers that he has accom-
plished his task, and is suggestive of the spirit in which he
has worked : —

“We are at the end of this long controversy 5 what is there
wanting to complete what we “have said in the course of the dis-
cussion? For the first time for two centuries, all the documents
relating to the cause have been submitted at once to the exami-
nation of the public. Well: without any presumption, it seems
to us, that no man of fairness will hesitate to pronounce, that the
Provincial Letters are the most notoriously calumnious charge
ever framed by passion and hatred. As to Pascal himself, divided
between our profound sympathy for his person, and our still
greater love of Catholic truth, we feel, when we wish to judge
him, that our thoughts become confused, and that our words die
away on our lips. At the risk of scandalising many men of our >
days, we will say, nevertheless, that we would gladly tear a page
out of his life, even if the Provincial Letters must go withit. But,
—severe for a doctrine, and for a work which have been so fatal
to religion in France, we have nothing but indulgence and com-
passion for the unhappy writer whose genius was made a tool of.
Contrary to the majority of our contemporaries, we condemn the
work and absolve the man; the reason is, that the work has been
judged by the highest authority which exists in this world, and
that no one has the right to disturb the ashes of the man,
and to cite before his own tribunal his intentions and his memory.

“¢Son cercueil est fermé; Dieu l’a jugé; silence.’”*

“De vrai malheur des Jesuites au dizx-septicme siecle,” he
says, “ a été de n’avoir pas eu un Pascal.”

But from M. Maynard himself we must go on to his state-
ments. We propose to notice the ground which he takes
against Pascal, first, historically ; next, as disclosing the prin-
ciples which he represents as established in his own commu-

* Vol. ii. pp. 440, 441,

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 487

nion. It is mainly for this latter purpose that we have given
so much space to the subject. It may be as well, however,
at starting, though we are not dealing with the controversy
in itself, to say a few words on the alleged unfairness of
Pascal.

We certainly dothink that his charges, on the whole, are
very serious, both in their matter and evidence ; and also
that they reach beyond the Jesuits. But we certainly cannot
defend Pascal as M. Maynard does the Jesuits. few persons
read him without more or less of misgiving as to his perfect
fairness. Indeed, it is not unnatural that after such a sweep-
ing victory of human wit, there should come a reaction; the
mind feels disposed to be sceptical, whether in reality the
triumph could have been as complete as it appears. It seems
to violate likelihood — to be more than Providence, which is
jealous of human pride, is wont to allot to man. And this
natural suspicion is not without grounds. Pascal was by
no means always fair, especially in the detail of his proof.

Pascal’s Letters have the exaggeration, inseparable from
an able, earnest, passionate attack,—the exaggeration of a
clear statement and lucid arrangement of the case on one
side ; the exaggeration of ridicule and irony; the exaggera-
tion of strong and indignant feeling. Further, they leave
unsaid how the system which they attacked grew up; how
long custom, and a general use, not confined to the Jesuits,
if it had made this system dangerous, had also in all proba-
bility, in a measure, corrected it, as it certainly in a degree
excused it: and they leave the impression, that that was a
distinct intention, which was mainly a result, not very coyly
accepted and followed up. Further, he leaves unsaid, for he
did not on principle acknowledge them, the practical ne-
cessities of a popular, and much more, of a fashionable religion
——much the same under all circumstances, whether resisted
as temptations, or accepted as facts.

As to his quotations, the Letters, we think, will bear
favourable comparison with any work that deals as largely in
controversial citations. He solemnly declares that he had
looked into text and context of every passage that he used ;

rm 4

488 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

and we can see no reason to doubt his belief that he was
dealing fairly. Still it is undeniable, we think, that he is at
times really, and still oftener, apparently, unfair in his use of
passages. We say, apparently, where in quoting, he omits
restrictions and conditions which in the context accompany
some startling decision, because he feels them to be mere
surplusage. Where the point of a passage really remains
unaltered by qualifications, which seem put in simply for
verbal show, Pascal makes little ceremony in sacrificing limi-
tations which he thinks unmeaning or trifling, to the con-
venience of his own statement. And besides, it must be
confessed, that it was an unlucky chance for his victims,
clumsy writers, singularly confident in their formal methods
and their own authority —coarse and technical about refine-
ments which almost defy words, and not dreaming of any
opposition but that logical one which was the delight and
business of their lives,—to fall into the hands of Pascal.
The skilfully chosen, and skilfully exhibited passage, which
looks so monstrous in his pages, not seldom subsides in their
own into mere grotesque absurdity ; often too, what really
illustrates the mischief of the whole system, seems to bear
hard in each separate instance when pointed against indi-
viduals. But there are cases where he is substantially un-
fair; we will give an instance or two.

The following is a case which has been more than once
quoted against Pascal. He is speaking of the jolies questions
which Escobar and others have framed on the subject of
fasting: it may be remembered how, as they proceed, they
become more and more delicate and thoughtful for the
penitent, who wishes to have a good conscience and not to
fast. These questions and answers are not disputed by M.
Maynard. He only sneers at Escobar, or else backs him
with S. Thomas. As to the man coming of age an hour
after midnight, and thus having a right to be let off, he dis-
misses it with ‘‘c’est subtil, ridicule, si on le veut, mais c'est
vrai. Puis, en quoi cela va-t-il a la corruption de la morale ?”
-—there being no harm apparently in a director of conscience,

—_—”

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 489

or his penitent, being shufflers. At length, Pascal comes to
the following climax : —

“¢Q que cela est divertissant!’ lui dis-je. ‘On ne s’en peut
tirer,’ me repondit-il; ‘je passe les jours et les nuits & le lire; je
ne fais autre chose.’ Le bon pére, voyant que j’y prenais plaisir,
en fut ravi; et continuant: ‘ Voyez,’ dit-il, ‘encore ce trait de
Filiutius, qui est un de ces vingt-quatre Jésuites ;—Celui qui s’est
fatigué & quelque chose, comme & poursuivre une fille, ad inse-
quendam amicam, est-il obligé de jeiner? Nullement. Mais s'il
s’est fatigué exprés, pour étre par 1& dispensé du jetine, y sera-t-il
tenu? Encore qu’il etit ce dessein formé, il n’y sera point obligé.’”
— Vol. i. p. 233.

On this M. Maynard begins his note with a triumphant
chuckle : —

“Oh! pour le coup, voila Pascal pris en flagrant délit de fal-
sification. D/abord, Filiuci n'est point linventeur du probléme.
La question avait été traitée bien avant lui par S. Antonin, Syl-
vestre, Médina, Sancius, et beaucoup d’autres auteurs étrangers a
la Compagnie. De plus, la question n’était pas oiseuse. ‘Si vous
vous souvenez,’ dit & ce propos M. Sainte Beuve (Port Royal, tom.
iii. p. 59.), ‘qu il se présentait souvent au tribunal de la confession
des pénitents bien étranges, comme Louis XI. par exemple, ou
Philippe Il., ou Henri III. (je parle des plus connus), pour qui
c’était une affaire sérieuse de jefiner le lendemain @zi meurtre ou
dune course libertine, vous trouverez moins étranges les pré-
cautions et distinctions que Filiutius préscrivait 4 la date de 1626,
et quon rétrouverait plus ou moins chez les autres Casuistes de ce
temps.’ Et maintenant abordons le texte de Filiuci, et traduisons-
le littéralement. Ce sera moins joli que chez Pascal; mais dans
toute cette longue discussion, ayons le courage de prendre pour
adage le vers de Boileau:

“*QRien n’est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable.’

‘Vous demanderez en second lieu,’ dit-il, ‘si celui qui se fatigue-
rait & mauvaise fin, comme & tuer un homme ou & poursuivre une
fille, ou & quelque chose de semblable, serait tenu au jefine. Je
réponds, qwil pécherait, il est vrai, par la mauvaise fin qu’il se
propose; mais que la fatigue en étant resultée, il serait exempté
du jetne: @ moins, disent quelques-uns, qu'il n’eit agi en fraude
de la loi; mais les autres répondent mieux, que la faute con-

490 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

sisterait & apporter une cause de rupture du jetine, mais que, la
cause posée, il n’y serait pas tenu.’? Qu’a fait Pascal? II a ar-
raché au texte de Filiuci le milieu et la fin, pour faire croire que le
Jésuite exemptait de toute faute dans les singuliéres circonstances
qu'il décrit. Mais non, le Jésuite, comme tout le monde, enverrait
bien un pareil homme en enfer ; seulement ce ne serait pas pour
n’avoir pas jetiné, ne le pouvant faire, mais pour sa crime, et pour
s’étre mis dans l’impossibilité de jefiner. L£¢ il a raison, le bon
Filiuci; car Pascal nous dira-t-il qu’un homme qui se serait fait
Saigner aux quatres membres pour ne pas jetiner, y serait obligé
encore, malgré son épuisement complet? Allons done, ce serait
absurde! et il faut avoir ufi front Janséniste pour chercher 4
excuser Pascal comme a voulu le faire Nicole en répondant aux
accusations du P. Nouet.”— Vol. i. pp. 233, 234.*

We will not excuse Pascal. He has left out what “le bon
Filiuct” could ill afford to spare; the worthy man certainly
does admit that this “strange penitent” would sin, though
not about fasting, and Pascal takes no notice of the admission.

* We give another specimen of the very subtle distinction between what leads
to a necessity, and what follows from a necessity, or quasi-necessity. Lessius
says, “adulter se debito moderamine defendens, maritum interficit ; non est reus
homicidti, sed occisio illa censetur fortuita.” For he says, “the original crime is
only the remote cause and occasion; and every man when he is hard pressed,
is not bound to let himself be killed, but may defend himself.” Then after
maintaining his view, he proceeds in the following, in which we cannot help
thinking of the bonté and douceur of Pére Bauny’s brileur des granges :—“ Ad-
verte tamen, si suspicabatur adulter, talia incommoda [i7. e. that he should kill
the husband,] ex adulterio secutura, tenebatur ex charitate abstinere. Unde
volendo adulterium committere, peccat non solum peccato adulterii, sed etiam
contra charitatem proximi, quatenus per adulterium constituit se in necessitate
damni proximo inferendi; . . . quando tamen constitutus est in tali periculo, non
peccat, etiamsi se defendendo, occidat alterum; quia jus habet se defendendi.
Idem dicendum, si imminente marito poterat fugere ; tenebatur enim ex charitate,
si videbat inde marito periculum: unde non fugiendo peccat contra charitatem
proximi. Non tamen peccat, si postquam non potest amplius fugere, se de-
fendendo, occidat invasorem: occisio enim illa, non est peccatum, sed effectus
per accidens secutus ex peccato.” — Lessius, de Just. 1, ii. c. 9. dub, 15. pp. 106,
107.

The sin lasting on till a certain moment, and then metaphysically vanishing, is
singular enough. Still it may be taken as a philosophical analysis, whether
right or wrong, yet purely speculative, of the action. But on the other hand, we
are told that these were not “ questions oiseuses,” that they were practically neces-
sary for delicate cases, for “ strange penitents ” like Louis XL and Philip II.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 491

But the considerateness, which remembered that to such
very “strange penitents as Louis XI, Philip II. and Henry
ITI.” it was “a serious affair” to fast after a murder, or a
day of debauchery, and the “precaution” which anxiously
guarded against laying on their conscience under such cir-
cumstances one sin more, and was so careful to clear the
murderer from the guilt of fast breaking, are really curious
enough phenomena, to deserve a little more notice than M.
Maynard thinks necessary.

We will give another instance. In the Seventh Letter,
Pascal quotes Lessius (de Just. |. uc. 9. dub. 12,19.) as
saying that a man may resent a blow with the sword, not
from vengeance, but to clear his own honour. He makes
Lessius responsible for this doctrine. He does not say that
Lessius qualifies it, doubts about it, puts it as a matter of
any question whatever, or does anything but lay it down
simply as a safe and practical rule of action, as Escobar may
be fairly said to do. But in fact it turns out that the real
state of the case is this: —1. Lessius quotes it from some
one else. 2. He gives arguments, by which it, and some
other maxims of the same sort, may be supported. 3. He
ends by saying, in the scholastic formula, that though “ it is
speculatively probable, it does not seem to be easily allowed
in practice.” That is, whether mildly or not, he does dis-
tinctly condemn the maxim; first, from the danger of hatred
- or vengeance in the agent: second, because likely to lead to
other bloodshed.

Certainly, no one reading Pascal’s account would imagine
that Lessius had said anything of the kind. Accordingly the
Jesuits made the most of it against Pascal’s good faith, and
Pascal answers them in his thirteenth Letter. They said
that Lessius quoted it from some one else, and quoted it to
“combat” it; Pascal, that he quoted it to “follow” it.
Lessius’s style of “‘combating” is of a very mild order: but
Pascal is unfair nevertheless. His reply to the Jesuits, who
quote certain words of condemnation, is that these word refer
not to this case, but to another; which is true. But Pascal
himself persists in shutting his eyes to the fact that Lessius

492 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

had spoken against it, in some words, and in refusing him the
benefit of what he did say : —“ Il ne se trouve pas,” he main-
tains, “* une seule parole de condamnation en ce lieu-la; mais
il parle ainsi: ‘Il semble, qu'on men doit pas facilement
permettre la pratique: in praxt non videtur FACILE PERMIT-
TENDA. ” This he will not admit to be any sort of real con-
demnation.

He further suppresses the fact, that he himself had origi-
nally taken no notice, except in a general way, of this limita-
tion. And he tries very unfairly to weaken the force of the
words themselves, a techni¢al form of disapproval. ‘Thus he
begins with charging Lessius with inventing and maintaining
a maxim, and he ends by really proving against him only
that he discountenanced it in too mild language.

This is unfair. But in this, as in most other instances, if
we criticise the accuser’s fairness, the case of the accused is
not much mended. An inspection of the text only conveys
more vividly the cool way in which Lessius entertains and
has difficulties about the doubt, whether we may kill a man
for a blow. M. Maynard is still better, and gives us the
reason for Lessius’ hesitating and faint rejection, — videtur
non facile permittenda. “If,” says he, ‘ Lessius does not
speak more expressly, it zs out of respect for Victoria (from
whom he quotes); when he treats of murdering for calumny,
he absolutely condemns the practice, n’étant géné-la par
aucune autorité.” (Vol. ii. p. 135.)

We will add a third case, where unfairness seems to arise
from the two parties being at cross purposes. The Roman
system is a great system of external legislation, yet bearing
intimately on conscience. On the one hand, it must wear

the technical form of ordinary law. The crimes it denounces ©

have to be defined; the rules which apply to all penal enact-
ments must govern and abridge its severity. But, on the
other hand, it appeals to more than outward obedience; it
claims the submission of the Christian in his conscience, as it
is meant to provide for the good direction of his religious
life; its penalties are assumed to touch his soul, even though

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 493

applied by the rules of human punishment.* This was the
long-established system in the Church to which Pascal, as
well as the Jesuits, belonged. But in several of the questions
between him and his answerers, each drops one side of this
double system. He assumes solely its moral object; that
Pope’s Bulls, for instance, when they denounce, and enact
punishment against, some particular crime, are to be taken in
a broad and common-sense view, as intending as hard a blow
as can be given against the crime in all its forms; and so he
quotes, as specimens of explaining away authorities, in order
to favour crime, cases where terms are defined, or penalties
restricted. The Jesuits and their friends bring for answer,
the necessary method and practice of such a system as the
Canon law. Thus Pascal shows from Escobar, that a man
who murders, not for money, but to oblige his friend, is not
to be called an assassin : —

“Le Pape Grég. XIV. a déclaré que les assassins sont indignes
de jouir de l’asile des églises, et. qu’on doit lesen arracher. Cepen-
dant nos vingtquatre vieillards disent, que ‘tous ceux qui tuent en
trahison ne doivent pas encourir la peine de cette bulle.’ Cela
vous parait €tre contraire; mais on laccorde, en interprétant le
mot d’assassin, comme ils le font par ces paroles. ‘Les assassins
ne sont-ils pas indignes de jouir du privilége des églises ? Oui, par la
bulle de Grég. XIV. Mais nous entendons par le mot d’assassins
ceux qui ont recu de l’argent pour tuer quelqu’un en trahison. D’ot
il arrive que ceux qui tuent sans en recevoir aucun prix, mais seule-
ment pour obliger leurs amis, ne sont pas appelés assassins.’ ”—
Lett. VI. vol. i. p. 254.

Now the result of this interpretation certainly is, either
that real assassins get off, or that people may with truth think
that he who is not canonically an assassin, is not a real as-
sassin. Yet it is fair to remember, as M. Maynard reminds us,
that it is primarily a question of legal definition. ‘ The pri-

* “Tdem pontifex refert, quod Innoc. X. et Innoc. XII. excommunicationem
inflixerunt, in eos qui in Ecclesid Vaticana tabacum sumerent; et eandem impo-
suit Urban VIII. pro ecclesiis Hispanicis ; sed Bened. XIII. omnes istas prohi-
bitiones abstulit.” — Liguori, Hom. Ap. Tr. xy. p. iii. No. 38.

494 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

vilege of sanctuary,” he says, “has always been regarded in
Italy as very important.”* Abuses occurred, and were re-
strained by bulls and censures; and the extent of these
restraints gave further occasion to disputes between Churches
and magistrates. This had to be settled, like the interpretation
of other legal terms — who were assassins in the view of the
bull? And in penal matters, the maxim is, “ odiosa sunt
restringenda et rigorose applicanda.” The effect of the mix-
ture of civil and spiritual perils — of excommunication and
hanging — in this system, is a fair question. But it is not
the question that Pascal is here dealing with.

We might add other instances of summary and unfair ways
of dealing with what he attacked. Pascal was often as un-
ceremonious or unscrupulous as powerful and earnest minds
are apt to be, in dealing with what they not only detest, but
thoroughly despise. When he had made up his mind that he
must be unsparing, he did not stop to think whether he made
his victim too absurd. But the main question still remains.
Pascal may have been guilty of more or less unfairness ;
under the disguise of a man of the world, he may have had
in him a good deal of the partizan, and something of the
Puritan. Still it is a question, whether the state of things
he alleges to have existed was substantially true; and if so,
we may be excused for being curious to see, how a modern
French ecclesiastic volunteers to deal with it, especially when
he presents his labours with considerable pomp, in all the
luxury of typographical elegance, and introduces it to the
world with the “favourable opinion of the highest ecclesias-
tical authority in France.” We take it up not to go over
the quarrels of the past, but to learn the principles and views
of the present.

We shall find, that, first, as we have intimated, he denies
the existence, as a fact, of this corrupt moral teaching among
the Jesuits, or indeed in the Church; and next, that he supports
his assertion by absolutely identifying the teaching of the
Jesuits at that day with the teaching of the Church at this.

* Vol. i. pp. 254, 255.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 495

The question then remains, as to the view which he presents,
of the nature of this teaching. These three points we shall
attempt to illustrate as we proceed, and in this order.

First, as to the fact on which Pascal’s attack rests, the
existence and influence of a system of easy Casuistry. M.
Maynard, as we have said, broadly denies it. ‘There was
nothing, he maintains, in the morals or the teaching of the
period to warrant it; far less in those of the Jesuits. “It is
absurd,” he says, “‘to suppose of the Society of Jesus that
they taught bad ‘doctrine.’” ... “Never was there a
society, perhaps, which takes more precautions to maintain
the purity of its doctrine and morality, and which, with this
view, has recourse to rules more severe, and, it may be said,
more exactly observed.” Nor will he allow of the distinction
between the earlier and later Jesuits. They strike him, on
the contrary, by their unity of purpose and character. He
quotes instances of their boldness and severity in the court of
France: —“* En un mot, les Jésuites transigérent-ils une seule
fois avec Timmoralité dans la voluptueuse cour de Versailles ?”
They harassed Louis XI V.,—P. Annat, especially, it is said
in Bayle*, “le chagrinait tous les jours ”»—* lui permirent-tls
jamais de conserver le dehors de la religion et de s’approcher
des sacrements, tant qwil était livré a ses scandaleuses
amours?” . .. “ Courage autant plus digne d’éloge, que
_ chacun était pris @admiration, ou du moins se taisait devant
ces brillants désordres.” . . . “ Toutes les courtisanes eurent
les Jésuites pour persécuteurs.”t * All the efforts,” he ob-
serves, “ which they made at the time of the Provinciales to
refute the slanders of Pascal, prove clearly that the doctrines
ascribed to them were not those which they applied to the di-
rection of souls. One only among them, Pére Pirot, wanted
to defend them, and he was disavowed by his brethren.”{ And
what inducement had they to do otherwise? “ Eh! mon
Dieu,” exclaims their defender ; “ quel intérét auraient donc

* “Tl est dit dans Bayle.” M. Maynard weighs his words; in Bayle, not by
Bayle, but by the writer of a “ fabulous and satirical” work, from which Bayle
quotes the passage referred to, for the purpose of showing up its anachronisms.

+ Vol.i. pp. 178—180. ft Vol. i. p. 209.

496 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM,

eu les Jésuites a fuvoriser de tels crimes, eux si purs, qwils
pourraient presque dire a leurs ennemis, avec Tauteur de toute
innocence: Quis ex vobis arguat me de peccato?”* There
was, in reality, “as has been so well observed by Comte de
Maistre, no parti de la morale reléchée in the Church.” f
Now, the report of history and the common belief is, that
there was,—and that it was found among the Jesuits. Not,
as Voltaire puts it, and the Abbé after him, a party with the
deliberate plan to corrupt morals,—which, as Voltaire observes,
and might have recollected before he fathered absurdities on
Pascal, “no society ever had, or can have,”—but a party
formed for the purpose of directing morals, and which, in
directing them, allowed them great liberties; a party which
urged virtue where they could, but compromised, on principle,
with disobedience, where they could not. Pascal has made
no improbable charge, and has taken care to state it in terms
which keep clear of the desirable exaggeration. He has but
described, in the most exquisitely organised specimen of a
party, the natural malady of all parties, and its effects, when

exhibited on so large a scale.

“ Sachez donc que leur objet n’est pas de corrompre les meeurs ;
ce n’est pas leur dessein. Mais ils n’ont pas aussi pour unique but
celui de les reformer; ce serait une mauvaise politique. Voici
quelle est leur pensée. Ils ont assez bonne opinion d’eux-mémes
pour croire qwil est utile et comme nécessaire au bien de la religion
que leur crédit s’étende partout, et qwils gouvernent toutes les con-
sciences. Et parceque les maximes évangéliques et séveres sont
propres pour gouverner quelques sortes de personnes, ils s’en ser-
vent dans ces occasions ow elles leur sont favorables. Mais comme
ces mémes maximes ne s’accordent pas au dessein de la plupart des
gens, ils les laissent & ’égard de ceux-la, afin d’avoir de quoi satis-
faire tout le monde. C’est pour cette raison qu’ayant affaire 4 des
personnes de toutes sortes de conditions et de nations si différentes,
il est nécessaire qu’ils aient de Casuistes assortis & toute diversité.
. . . Cest par cette conduite obligéante et accommedante, comme
l’appelle le Pére Pétau, qu’ils tendent les bras a tout le monde,” —
Lett. V. vol. i. pp. 218, 219.

* Vol. i. p.264. + Vol. i. p. 185.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM, 497

Pascal may be elsewhere carried beyond this, in his disgust
or indignation; and here he speaks as a partizan, when he
implies that their “‘ severe directors” were but few—merely
enough for a bait. M. Maynard has a right to remind us of
the bright side of the Jesuits—of what they did for literature
and piety—how, when Péres Annat, and Pinthereau, and
Bauny were speculating or calling names in Paris, their bre-
thren were dying at the stake of the Hurons, or under the
sword of the Chinese —how the very Pére Garasse, the
buffoon of the Provinciales, asked, as a special favour, to wait
on the plague-stricken people at Orleans, and died among them
and one of them. But Pascal is not unfair, if his facts are
true, in making the society, whose boasted excellence was its
perfection of government, and absolute control over the very
thoughts and will of its members, responsible for all that it
sanctioned. The world heard a good deal, from itself, of its
singular merit in this matter. It was only taking it at its

word, if Pascal fixes on it what its superiors allowed their

subjects to print, and obtrude with no little ostentation on
the church; if he assumes that ‘‘ un st grand corps ne subsis-
terait pas dans une conduite téméraire, et sans une dme
qui le gouverne, et qui régle tous ses mouvements.”* Once
for all it must be said, that even in his hands the charge was
not, that the Jesuit institute had not great virtues, but that
it had also great vices: “neque virtute propria tantum pro-
Suerunt, quantum in hoe nocuerunt, quod aliorum virtutem
corruperint et perdiderint.” t

* “Outre,” he proceeds, “ qu’ils ont un ordre particulier de ne rien imprimer
sans l’aveu de leurs supérieurs.” “ Pascal,” answers M. Maynard, “ donne 4
approbation 4 laquelle sont soumis, en vertu des constitutions de S. Ignace,
tous les ouvrages de ses membres, un valeur et une signification chimérique.
D’abord, cette approbation est imposée communement 4 tous les ouvrages ré-
ligieux. Quant aux Jésuites, ce n’est pas le général qui lit les ouvrages ...,
mais le provincial, aidé de deux ou trois examinateurs, gui se conforment dans
leur jugement aux doctrines des divers pays oi ils se trouvent. Ce jugement en
conséquence n’est pas plus l’impression des idées de la Société, qu’il n’est irré-
fragable.”— Vol. i. p.210. It hardly does for M. Maynard to call this, giving
“une valeur et signification chimérique” to the licensing of books, when in the
next page he argues from the rigour and practical success of the precautions
taken, the absurdity of supposing that bad doctrine could haye found its way
into the Order.

t Noy. Org. Pref.

KK

498 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM:

As to the evidence, we will only say that others of great
name and authority, besides Pascal, spoke, at the time, as
strongly as he did, both of the existence and dangers of this
accommodating morality, as a feature of the time; and further
we will venture to engage that no one at this day, except
be felt his position already compromised by it, would any
more dream of saying a word in its justification, than he
would of committing himself to the physics of the schoolmen
or the political maxims of Machiavelli. It was not Pascal
who said,—* Certes, je ne vois rien dans le monde qui soit plus
a charge a lEglise, que ces esprits vainement subtils, qui
réduisent tout [TEvangile en problémes, qui forment des in-
cidents sur UVexécution de ses préceptes, qui fatiguent les
casuistes par des consultations infinies, qui ne travaillent, en
vérité, qua nous envelopper la régle des meurs. Plus mal-
heureux encore les docteurs indignes de ce nom, qui adherent a
leurs sentiments, et donnent du poids a leurs folies. Ces sont
des astres errants ... tls confondent le ciel et la terre, et
mélent Jésus-Christ avec Belial ; mélange indigne de la piété
Chrétienne; union monstrueuse qui déshonore la vérité, la
simplicité, la pureté incorruptible du Christianisme.” Pascal
never said anything stronger: yet it was no Jansenist who
wrote these words, but Bossuet, who goes on in the next
paragraph to condemn with equal severity the rigour of the
Jansenists: Bossuet, the man of strong good sense and im-
partial justice — Bossuet, in his panegyric on the very theo-
logian, who first extracted and denounced the Five Propositions
of Jansenius, the Grand Master of the College of Navarre,
Nicolas Cornet— Bossuet, himself a director, and not an
extravagantly severe one, celebrating the praises of another
director, “ whom all France knew, for he was consulted by
all France,”—a theologian of the “ancient mark,” as hostile
to impracticable and “ affected” rigour, as to laxity and “ af-
fected ignorance.” It was Nicolas Cornet, the enemy of
Jansenism, who, according to Bossuet, showed himself
equally implacable to those maxims, “‘ moztié profanes et moitié
saintes, mottié Chrétiennes et mottié mondaines; ou plutét
toutes mondaines et toutes profanes, parce qu elles ne sont
qua demi-Chrétiennes et & demi-saintes.”

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 499

“Nicolas Cornet,” he goes on to say, “n’a jamais trouvé belles
aucunes des couleurs de la Simonie. . . . Il a condamné lPusure
sous tous ses noms, et sous tous ses titres. Sa pudeur a toujours
rougi de tous les prétextes honnétes des engagements déshonnétes,
ou il n’a épargné le fer et le feu pour éviter les périls des occasions
prochaines. Les inventeurs trop subtils des vaines contentions et
questions de néant, qui ne servent qua faire perdre, parmi des
détours infinis, la trace toute droite de la vérité, lui ont paru, aussi
bien qu’a S. Augustin, des hommes inconsidérés et volages —
‘sufflantes pulverem et excitantes terram in oculos suos. Ces
chicanes raffinées, ces subtilités en vaines distinctions, sont véri-
tablement de la poussiére souffiée, de la terre dans les yeux, qui ne
font que troubler la vue. Enfin il n’a écouté aucun expédient pour
accorder l’esprit et la chair, entre lesquels nous avons appris que
la guerre doit étre immortelle.” *

So wrote Bossuet in 1663. After an interval of many
years, we find him still in the same mind. In the General
Assembly of 1700 we find him urging, with all the earnestness
and force of his character, the condemnation by the authority
of the whole French Church of those “monstrous opinions,
which had so long caused scandal to the Church and to
Europe, and which offended the sanctity of Christian mo-
rality in its purest and most certain maxims;” and he adds
that, ‘ Si, contre toute vraisemblance, et par des considé-
rations quil ne voulait ni supposer ni admettre, [Assemblée
se refusait aprononcer un jugement digne de [ Eglise Gallicane,
SEUL, i éléverait la voix dans un si pressant danger ; SEUL, il
révelerait & toute la terre une si honteuse prévarication ; SEUL, tl
publierait la censure de tant @erreurs monstrueuses.”t Could
Pascal have said more ?

Bossuet saw a “ parti dela morale reléchée” in the Church.
He talked, as M. Maynard tells us, of “two dangerous
maladies which had afflicted in his days the body of the
Church—one an extreme severity; the other, une malheu-
reuse et inhumaine complaisance, qui a pris quelques docteurs,
une pitté meurtriére, qui leur a fait porter des coussins sous les

* Bossuet, “ Oraison Funebre de Nicolas Cornet,” 1663, vol. xi. pp. 201. 203.
+ Bausset, “ Hist. de Bossuet,” L. xi. No. 7. »

K K 2

500 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

coudes de pécheurs, chercher des couvertures d leurs passions,
pour condescendre a leur vanité, et flatter leur ignorance
affectée.” And where did he find these doctors, whom, at the
close of his career, he thought it his duty to impeach before
the assembled Clergy of France? M. Maynard shall inter-
pret Bossuet’s words, for he named no one.* It was among
the Jesuits—the Jesuits, whom as an order he honoured, and
among whom he had many friends.

But was it fair to lay all this on the Jesuits? It is true
that Pascal attacked as,peculiar to the Jesuits a system of
casuistry run to seed, which was pursued by theologians of
other orders, and which was at least highly respected by the
authorities of the Church. But it is true also, that no order
did so much with it as the Jesuits. No order pursued it so
systematically, with so much zest, and such unintermitting
purpose.+ It was one of their instruments in gaining that
reputation of which no order ever made such parade,—the
reputation for’skill in directing consciences. They had no
right to complain that the “ Praxis secundum Societatis Jesu,”
should be presented in as prominent and strong a light by
others, as the boasts of the ‘‘ Imago primi seculi” had been
by themselves. ‘They had no right to decline the odium of
representing casuistry, who had claimed its first honours.

M. Maynard starts, as we see, with denying zn toto the

* “ These ideas prevailed in the Assembly of 1700—a great number of pro-
positions were there denounced as being the doctrine of a party dangerous to
Catholic morality. This was, on the part of the Jansenists of the Assembly, a
lie; a mistake, and blind acquiescence, on the part of the rest, and even of
Bossuet. How could Bossuet have said, that, if people spoke against Jansenism,
without at the same time repressing the errors of the other party, the manifest
iniquity of so visible a partiality would make men despise such a judgment, and
think that there was the wish to spare half the evil? . . . What was this other
party? Bossuet talked, indeed, of priests and religions, of all orders and all habits,
but he used the words as a blind ; and, in spite of this prudent generalisation, no
one could be understood but the Jesuits, who alone had been the subjects of dis- .
cussion for half a century, and whose authors had furnished nearly all the pro-
positions submitted to the censure. It is true that Louis XIV. forbad the
mention by name of the Jesuits in the censure, but all the world understood
perfectly well who was meant.” — Vol. i. pp. 185, 186.

t Ste. Beuve, vol. iii. p. 67.

i

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 501

historical fact of the corruption either of doctrine or morals.
But we shall understand him better when we know the
principles which guide his judgment. What Pascal thought
once of putting into the mouth of his ‘bon pére,”—“ Accordez-
mot ce principe, que la Société et ( Eglise courent méme fortune,
et je vous prouverai tout,” *—expresses without irony M.
Maynard’s view. That the Jesuits could not have been
wrong, he maintains, follows from the broad fact, that their
doctrines were simply those of the Church. He states it as
indisputable that what the Jesuits held, and their opponents
attacked,— making allowance for open questions and indi-
vidual mistakes, corrected as soon as noticed,— was but what
every good Catholic now takes for granted. He lays down
in strong terms, that in reality the “ Jesuits have no doctrine
of their own. They attach themselves immovably to the deci-
sions of the Church; for the rest, either they follow the
doctrines which are most commonly authorised, or, in case of a
divergence of opinions, they embrace the sentiment which
pleases each, in all the liberty of thought.” +

Thus with the famous doctrine of Probability. As Pascal
represents it, it is a curious perversion of the principle of
authority —the application of it to legitimatise doubt and
licence. M. Maynard states, as its characteristic rule, that
you may follow the less probable, as well as the less safe side,
provided it is really probable. Such a rule is obviously
vague enough to admit any application, from the baldest
truism to the most barefaced quibble. As expounded by
Liguori, the S. Thomas of the modern school, it seems to be
simply a theory to provide for and justify the natural and
legitimate liberty of individual acts. It does not seem to
come to more than that when a daw is uncertain, a man is not
bound to its most rigid sense, but is left freely to other
guidance. It isa poor and clumsy theory, based on the ap-
plication to human life in general, of the maxims of equitable
interpretation of Jaw between man and man, or subject and
ruler. But it does not present the singular features of

* Faugére, Fragments, vol. i. p. 297, t Vol. i, p. 211.
KK 3

502 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

Pascal’s representation. It is otherwise, however, when we
turn to the Casuists from whom he drew. There we re-
cognise what he describes; there, what is prominent is, not
the scope and purport of the theory, but the practical idea
and test of what is probable, and its value in settling questions
of conscience. There, the common sense rule of following a
wiser or better man than ourselves when we can do nothing
better, is turned into a universal and exclusive basis for
conscience, and expanded into logical consequences. There
we find it argued, that since it is prudent to trust those who
are in arte sua periti, and to submit to the judgment of the
wise and good, therefore it is prudent to follow Sanchez, and
seventeen wise and good authors, whom he quotes, to prove
the general maxim, that it is lawful in conscience to leave the
more and follow the less probable opinion, even if it’ is less
safe; that an opinion is probable which rests on a reason of
some weight; that therefore the opinion of one good and
learned doctor is probable, because such authority is not
light but weighty; that one learned man may make his
opinion, even to the unlearned who trusts him, more probable
than the common opinion ;—that the general opinion of the
more recent authors cuts off, in general, appeal to older ones,
as their vigilance is a sufficient guarantee that no error would
be allowed to creep in;—that the same person may judge
two opposite opinions equally probable.* Many common
sense ways of acting might indeed come under these rules;
but it 1s equally plain, that thus broadly stated, as exclusive
or leading rules of any man’s mind, they will lead him a long
way, at least from common sense. ‘They may mean anything ;
and their writers take no trouble to show that they do not
mean the “leaden rule ” which they seem.

What does M. Maynard? He tells us that it was not a
Jesuit but a Dominican invention, in 1598, which imme-
diately was adopted universally in the Catholic schools, where
all theologians were “ tenants passionés du Probabilisme.” + He

* Filliuc, Tr. xxi. c. 4. nn, 128—137. (“ Pénitencier du Pape a S. Pierre, et
Casuiste en Chef du Saint-Office,” Mayn. ii. 456.)
+ Pascal might have seen a new illustration of its principles in the fact, that,

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM, 503

gives his own exposition of ‘ Probabilism,” guarding it by
cautions as vague asits rules. He admits Pascal’s quotations.
He makes no attempt to disprove his inferences, or allow us
to judge by extracts whether the tone and spirit of the
originals seem against them. But he charges him generally
with misrepresentation, and tells us that his own, the Jesuits’,
and Liguori’s view are all one with that of the Church. It
is rather hard upon Pascal, considering that the very “ abuses”
which the Church had to condemn were those which some
Jesuits had allowed to pass current, and he had attacked.

“True Probabilism, which Pascal has so strangely misrepre-
sented, confined within these limits, the Church has not con-
demned, nor will ever condemn; and recently she has yet further
placed it out of the reach of any censure, by placing on her altars
S. Liguori, who has, nevertheless, carried out its consequences to
the very utmost.* In fact, apart from certain propositions con-
demned in some Jesuit writers, who had themselves borrowed them
JSrom older authors, there is the greatest analogy between the the-
ology of S. Liguori and that with which Pascal reproaches the
Society; since both one and the other are based on Probabilism,
regard the diversity of opinions as allowed, useful, and even
necessary; and since, moreover, the holy bishop draws from these
common principles, in the way of inference, a great number of the
propositions condemned in the ‘ Petites Lettres’ as subversive of
all morality. ‘The Church has confined itself to restraining the
abuses of Probabilism, by condemning those propositions which
reduced to nothing the conditions of true probability, or extended
the application of the system to matters to which it is inapplicable,
or drew from it forced consequences. .... But the Church has

according to M. Maynard, “there was no religious order from whence issued
such solid dissertations against it,” as from the Jesuits; yét when Gonzalez
wanted to publish his, so warmly was the company in general attached to the
opinion, that they would not permit him; and Innocent XI. interposed his
supreme authority in vain, pour vaincre les opinidtretés; and even when Gon-
zalez became General of the Order, he had to publish not as General, but as an
individual doctor.

* “Jt is well known that in the process of canonisation all the writings of the
person are examined with the most minute and most severe attention; and if
there be found in them one single proposition contrary to the faith or sound

morality, the cause proceeds no further, and is stopped for ever.” — (Maynard’s
note.)

EE 4

504 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

never touched Probabilism itself; and if the Assembly of 1700
has disapproved of it, it did not pass any censure on it.”— Vol. i.
pp. 197 —199.

The Jesuits, M. Maynard maintains, never were,— never
would be mistaken, except in the very best company in the
Church. If they are wrong, he always takes care to say
that they had borrowed. There is something quite amusing
in the eagerness with which he transfers to the Church or
her great doctors the responsibility of what Pascal attributes
to the Jesuits. You cannot point out a reproach against the
Jesuits,—seems to be constantly his language,— but I will
find its match elsewhere, and that in the highest quarters.
If the Jesuits are reproached for extravagant self-laudation
in their book, * Lmago Primi Seculi,” M. Maynard tells us
that Franciscans and Dominicans were not only equally
absurd, but impious, inthe same way. After apologising for
the legitimate enthusiasm and poetic feelings of the young
Jesuits who composed it—a family trophy of the Order —
and reprobating the “ cruelty” “ qwil y avait a se moquer de
cette tendresse filiale des enfants pour leur mére, a fiétrir ce
bonheur de famille, a étouffer cette ardeur juvenile qui s’élangait
avec tant de confiance vers le bel avenir,” &c., M. Maynard
observes that Franciscans and Dominicans did worse without
exciting remark : —

“Comment les Jansenistes ne voulurent-ils pas se souvenir des
‘Conformités de la Vie de S. Frangois a la Vie de Jésus- Christ,
par F. Barthélemy de Pise, owvrage extravagant et méme impie ;
de l ‘ Origo Seraphica Familie Franciscane, du Capucin Gon-
zague; des ‘ Entrailles de la Ste. Vierge pour Ordre des Fréres
Précheurs, du Dominician Chouques? Mais sous ce rapport,
comme sous tous les autres, ce qui était excusable, méme légitime,
chez les enfants de S. Francois ou de 8. Dominique, était un crime
chez les fils de Loyola.” — Vol. i. p. 217.

There were Casuists, too, in the Church, he says, besides
the Jesuits, and Casuists who said as strange things, though
Pascal keeps it out of sight;— which, however, he scarcely
did ;—and the Jesuits did but follow out and perfect what

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 505

had high and abundant sanction elsewhere. The Pére Daniel,
says M. Maynard, was able, doubtless not without some zest,
to substitute for the Jesuzé quotations in the Fifth Provinciale
names and extracts of Dominicans, their keen rivals. ‘‘ Rap-
pelons-nous,” he says, after Voltaire (and—if the question
of degree, and of the organisation and power of the Jesuits,
is set aside —with some truth), “que les opinions reprochées aux
Jésuites ne leur étaient point particuliéres, et quen leur
substituant toutes les Universités de Europe, tous les ordres
religieux qui existaient au dix-septicme siecle, on aurait pu dire
aussi bien des docteurs de Sorbonne, de Louvain, de Sala-
manque, des religieux de S. Dominique et de S. Francois, tout
ce que dit Pascal des Jésuites dans les Provinciales.”* ‘Thus,
for instance, when Pascal quotes from Escobar, how you
may hear mass in a very short time, namely, “by hearing
different portions of four masses simultaneously,” M. May-
nard, in reply, points out to us that we must not smile: the
opinion of which this is a consequence was considerable
enough to have a history and growth, and at last the honour
of a special limitation. Diégnus vindice nodus. Viewing it
as he does, we shall see in it and the kindred questions, a
logical following out of certain truth —mistaken, indeed, as
it has turned out, but which seemed so undeniable to all the
great theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
that no one ventured to oppose it except with the utmost
hesitation. Thus Azor “embraced with repugnance” that
“two successive halves made one mass,” — “ entrainé, dit-il,
par le nombre et le poids des autorités ;” and those who, like
the Jesuits Suarez and Lugo, resisted the torrent, looked
with alarm at the array of great names against them. If it
is not so now, it is because Innocent XI. proscribed it;
since which time, no theologian has defended it. We may
admire, in passing, the singular mode of thought which affects
not to be able to see the right and wrong of such a question,
except by going to the Pope’s decision; and excuses the wrong
opinion as quite defensible, till condemned by him.

* Vol. i. p. 212,

KR
506 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

“Ces diverses décisions ne sont pas également absurdes. Jl a
été longtemps regu, parmi les théologiens, qu’on satisfaisait au
précepte par l’audition successive de deux moitiés de messe; et ce
sentiment, quoique faux, n’a jamais été condamné. Puis on a pré-
tendu que cela serait vrai quand méme Vordre des parties serait
interverti. Enfin, par une mauvaise conséquence d’une doctrine
certaine, qu’on peut satisfaire simultanément au précepte de
laudition de la messe et au précepte de la récitation de office
divin, et dune doctrine probable qu’on satisfait par audition dune
seule messe & une triple obligation, provenant, par exemple, du
précepte ecclésiastique, d’un yoeu, de la pénitence sacramentelle,
on en est venu & soutenir qu’on pouvait simultanément entendre
deux ou plusieurs parties de messe, ce qui détruit entierement
Vintégrité du sacrifice. Cette doctrine a été proscrite par In-
nocent XI. (59™° Prop.), [Satisfacit precepto Ecclesie de
audiendo sacro qui duas ejus partes, imo quatuor, simul a diversis
celebrantibus audit ;|—et depuis aucun théologien ne l’a défendu.
Mais elle était auparavant fort commune, car on la trouve ainsi
formulée dans presque tous les auteurs du seizieme et du com-
mencement du dix-septieme siecle, Soto, Navarre, Medina [Domi-
nicans] et ceux méme qui embrassent un sentiment contraire,
comme les Jésuites Suarez et De Lugo, se montrent effrayés de
Vautorité et du nombre de ses défenseurs. Remarquons pourtant
qu’on n’en faisait application qu’au précepte de lEglise; et que
ses partisans eux-mémes généralement en condamnaient la pra-
tique.”— Vol. i. p, 489.

“ O mon pére!” cries Pascal, also tout effrayé, as he says,
—and asa Frenchman well might be, — at the list of dis-
tinguished Casuists with extraordinary names cited by his
bon pere* —*“ O mon pére! tous ces gens-la, étaient-ils
Chrétiens ?” Comment, Chrétiens!” is the tart reply ; “ ne
vous disais-je que ce sont les seuls par lesquels nous gouver-
nons aujourd hui toute la Chrétienté?” M. Maynard is not
pleased with the joke. “ Ces noms barroques,” he says,
** que cite ici Pascal, et qwil livre a la risée publique, sont
ceux des docteurs encore estimés par tous les théologiens, de
saints évéques, et méme dhommes de génie, comme Suarez.”
There is truth and pertinence in the remark. It is Pascal

* Lett. V,

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 507

against the great names of the Roman Church: he must be
wrong, because he attacked them.

But it is convenient, in a conflict of diversified aspect, to
haye friends of different sorts, both too great to be attacked,
and also not too great to be sacrificed ; the one, to bear down
charges in the general, the other, to carry them off when they
become pressing, in the particular. Vasquez and Suarez may
confound Pascal by their imposing authority; still there are
quotations for which the other sort are useful. M. Maynard
always thinks of Escobar and Bauny being obscure writers
when he comes to some inconvenient quotation. “ Bauny is
not a savant Casuiste,” he says testily, when Pascal’s Jesuit,
ce stupide interlocuteur de Pascal, describes him as “ pénétrant
dans le pour et le contre @une méme question, et trouvant raison
partout.”* Escobar is a bonhomme, qui a trop, beaucoup trop
écrit. He gets quite impatient with suchauthorities. ‘ En-
core Bauny! Que cest ennuyeux.” —“ Escobar, toujours
Escobar, et rien qu’ Escobar.” What is Escobar, flanked by
Bauny, to represent the society ? In Escobar and Bauny, he
finds all that it is necessary to give up. Not that this, after
all, is very much; for the reason is always at hand, that their
words are quoted by Pascal in an “ abstraction scandalisante ;”
that the point of them was blunted by restrictions and condi-
tions: that confessors knew what was meant; that they
expressed themselves ill. But when Escobar decides that “a
man may satisfy the Church precept by going to mass, with
the intention also of indulging bad thoughts; ” t ora “judge
receive bribes to pay particular attention to a cause;” t or
** that a man may evade the law of fasting in certain cases,
for the reason that no one is bound to alter the order of his
meals ;Ӥ and when Bauny blunders into awkward vagueness
about * occasions prochaines,” || or says that if a man begs a
soldier to beat his neighbour or burn his barn, he is not bound
_ to compensation, because it is not his act —he not having
forced the soldier to do it, whom nothing obliged but his own
bonté, douceur, facilité,—M. Maynard gives up such decisions,

* Voli. p. 284, -f Voli. p.487. 0 © t Voli. pp. 353. 351.
§ VoLi. p. 231. || Voli. p. 236,

508 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

and laughs with Pascal* at the bonté and douceur of the
burner of barns,— “for there is nothing else to be done.” But
he insists, that from such insignificant authorities no harm
could ever come. The obvious answer is, that, whether absurd
or not, they were popular. P. Bauny’s Somme des Péchés, a
large book of a thousand pages t, was in a sixthedition. “A
qui la faute, si ce nest & vous, qui lui avez donné sa célébrité?”
says M. Maynard, when Pascal talks of the many reprints of
Escobar; there might possibly be some colour in the rejoinder,
if we were not informed, on other authority, that, of the forty-
two editions of Escobar, forty-one appeared before, and one
after, the date of the Provinciales.t

But even Escobar and Bauny M. Maynard is loth to resign
to the cruelties of Pascal. ‘ Mon Dieu!” he cries, “ la doc-
trine de Bauny fut-elle si relachée,” § that Pascal should risk
the honour of the priesthood by revealing his eccentric deci-
sions to the world? ‘“ Nous avions pitié de ce pauvre pére
Bauny, st maltraité par Pascal, et qwa notre grand regret nous
serons obligé de condamner nous-mémes en d'autres circon-
stances.” So of Escobar, he draws a touching, and possibly
a true picture, as ofa man of boundless and not very accurate
labour, undertaken with the kindest intentions; who, like many
other good men, was perfectly unconscious that, with so much
learning, he could say anything ridiculous or mischievous. It
is at least a not improbable representation. Doubtless Escobar
would never have written as he did, but for greater men than
Escobar, who set the fashion and showed him the way.
Escobar was obviously a man who would never have dreamed
of going beyond the spirit or ideas of the atmosphere in which
he worked, or the authorities who were his daily and nightly
study, and in whom his profound admiration saw a counter-
part to the Apocalyptic Vision. If he improved upon them,

* Vol.i. p. 367. tT Vol. i. p. 293,

{ “La cherté ou du moins la curiosité s’y mit en effet. Escobar avait été
imprimé quarante-et-une fois avant 1656; il le fut une quarante-deuxiéme fois
en 1656, grace aux Provinciales.” — Ste. Beuve, vol. iii. p. 52. Hallam, vol. ii.
p. 500., speaks of forty editions, and gives the date 1646,

§ Vol. i. pp. 284, 285.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 509

he had learned from those whom he surpassed the taste for
improving on them. He could not understand what harm or
what excess there could be in decisions which, in full accord-
ance with a received system, he made in pure charity.* He
was astonished, we are told, at his triste célébrité. But he is
none the worse a representative of what the system of specu-
lating on morality, and that for the practical purposes of the
confessional, had been allowed to come to. He showed the
use that could be made of the Casuists, as Pascal’s con-
versations show the use that could be made of himself,
(for the Pére Jésuite of the Letters is a dramatized Escobar),
a use, which, as the historical facts of the period show, was
made of them. And after all, even Escobar is an authority.
“ Enfin Saint Liguori cite avec respect la plupart des Casuistes
de Pascal, et méme Escobar, Vhomme aux vingt-quatre vieillards,
et aux quatre animaux.” +

In truth, it is ludicrous to suppose, that Escobar would
have been allowed to go on writing, and booksellers to
go on reprinting, these curious questions and answers, if
he had said anything that was so very repugnant to the
current notions of those in power, in the Order, or in the
Church itself. Quite another account would haye been
given of him, if his licences and eccentricities had taken
another turn, if he had spoken of the authority and sanc-
tions of ecclesiastical precepts, as he did of the way of satis-
Sying them; if he had taken the explanatory liberties with the
Pope’s divine right, which he did with modes of fasting and
hearing mass, or had been as vague in his doctrine about
transubstantiation as about “ occasions prochaines.” Writers
did not escape the censure, because they were small people.
P. Bauny was, in fact, put-in the Index. As for him, ce
pauvre Pere Bauny, “ce bon pére, si commode, dont on disait,
en le voyant, Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi!” it must be said
_ that he snapped his fingers at the Index: “Qu’a de commun,”
he said, “ /a censure de Rome avec celle de France?” a remark
which, as M. Maynard informs us, “ tient & un principe Gal-
lican, que nous n’aimons pas, mais toléré par Rome elle-méme,

* Vol. ii. p. 454, + Vol.i. p. 208.

510 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM,

que l’'Index noblige pas en France.” But, according to M.
Maynard’s view, it was mainly his Erastianism, not his laxity,
that led to P. Bauny’s condemnation at Rome : —

* Ici on doit remarquer qu’un livre est quelquefois mis & I’ Index
pour une simple formalité omise dans impression, ou bien pour
quelque principe peu conforme & certaines maximes des Casuistes
@Itahie, par exemple, celui du P. Bauny touchant la juridiction
des officiers civils sur les cleres; et il parait qu’on apporta ce
motif pour presser la censure de la Somme des Péchés; ce qui
n’empéche pas cependant que cet ouvrage ne soit condamnable &
d’autres égards, et ne renferme quelques propositions relachées qui
lui valurent la réprobation des évéques de France.”—Vol. i. p. 148.

_ Thus, according to M. Maynard, the Jesuits held nothing

but what the Church holds, and therefore have a right
to throw their responsibility on her. But the most im-
portant point yet remains. What does he tell us of the
standard itself, to which he brings these doctrines? In
the Letters, an easy theory of religion is contrasted with a
strict one. Does M. Maynard mean that the Jesuit theory
could not have been the easy one, because it was that of
the Church; or that, though it was an easy one, it must be
right, because it is of that of the Church? We must think
that M. Maynard has been more resolute in ascribing the
Jesuit doctrines to the Church, than successful in disproving
that these doctrines were what are usually accounted easy
ones.

It is suspicious at starting to find M. Maynard sympa-
thising so strongly with the devotional works criticised by
Pascal. He reminds us indeed, that-the Jesuits had produced
something better. But what appeared to Pascal sentimental
trifling, or a substitution of childish superstition to S. Mary
for real religion, appears to M. Maynard as the very counter-
part of modern piety. If he had retorted on Pascal, in
return for the cruel immortalising of the “ Dévotion Aisée”
and the poet of “ Delphine,” that, after all, his wit had
been spent on a poor ordinary theological fop of an age
of bad taste, a harmless and smirking hanger-on at tea-
tables, to find them in divinity and wit, it would have been

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 511

intelligible, if not fair. Not so, however, M. Maynard. On
taste and theology both, he is at issue with Pascal. P. Le
Moyne, he thinks, with a little less exuberance of imagination
and language, “ might have become a great poet.” He cannot
see, what he so happily terms, the “ton musqué et galant” of
Pascal’s quotations. The “ Dévotion Aisée” is aimable,
charmant, délicieux ; its language ravissant; its histories like
the doux babil Cun enfant.* When P. Le Moyne said, that,
by the rules of true devotion, virtue had been made “ plus
facile que le vice, et plus aisée que la volupté,” and “ le simple
vivre incomparablement plus malaisé que le bien vivre,” he
spoke of the joys of a good conscience, and the pains of vice
and ambition. When he sneered at melancholy devotees, who
thought of nothing but a dreary asceticism, he meant Port-
Royal. We can only say, that it shows that P. Le Moyne
and M. Maynard are kindred spirits.

P. Barry’s book, “ Le Paradis ouvert a Philagie par cent
Dévotions ala Mere de Dieu,” he gives up, in a literary point
of view; but, on the other hand, its spirit, its theology, the

* “Te livre de la Dévotion Aisée, du Pére Le Moine, est un aimable et
charmant petit livre; aprés les ouvrages de Saint Francois de Sales, nous n’en
connaissons pas de plus délicieux, ni de plus encourageant pour la faiblesse
humaine. Aussi ce livre fit-il parfaitement accueilli; et dés son apparition, le
gout public lui fit une célébrité. Le Pére Le Moine n’était pas seulement un
saint religieux, mais un homme d’esprit, et un homme du monde. II parlait 4
ceux qu'il voulait amener a la pratique de la dévotion, le seul langage qu’il convint
de leur tenir. Ce langage fut entendu, le petit livre fut devoré sans que personne
se sentit du poison qu’il contenait ; le Jansénisme fut jaloux de ce succés. La
facilité de cette dévotion ne consiste pas 4 lui allier des choses coupables ou
dangereuses, mais 4 montrer qu’elle peut s'unir a toutes les conditions honnétes
de la vie, et qu’elle n’est pas incompatible avec les joies et-ies plaisirs qu’avoue
lavertu . . . gue lareligion n’est pas essentiellement cette Thébaide, ces terreurs, ces
desespoirs que révait le Jansénisme, mais que si quelques-uns sont appelés A cette
sombre perfection, les autres peuvent se sanctifier dans des conditions communes.
Pouvait-on dire autre chose aux gens de monde! et ce langage, n’est-il pas plus
propre a faire des Chrétiens que la morale alambiquée dans St. Cyran? . . . Pour

nous, nous aimons ce petit livre, et parcequ’il peut faire du bien a beaucoup d’Ames,

et parcequ’il est un yéritable curiosité littéraire ; nous aimons ces histoires naives
qui ressemblent au doux babil d’un enfant s’entretenant avec son pére, et nous
ne songeons pas a jeter une pédante critique au-devant de notre admiration. . .
Nous plaignions les esprits revéches et farouches de Port-Royal, de n’avoir pu
gouter ce qui nous parait si charmant et si gracieux.” — Vol. i. pp. 395—404.

512 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

devotional practices which it recommends, —some of them,
says M. Maynard, of such simplicity, that they make us smile,
esprits forts that we are, but all authorised by the example of
some great saint,— are most edifying. The following shows
the principle on which he answers Pascal : —

** Pascal voudrait-il dire que le Pere Barry, dans son aveugle
confiance, a présenté des pratiques toutes matérielles comme des
moyens infaillibles de sanctification, sans qu’il fut nécessaire d’y
joindre le plus petit mouvement de cceur, le moindre effort de la
volonté? Il Vinsinue méchamment; mais ¢c’est une calomnie.
‘ Donnez tout le ceur a la Mére d'amour, dit Barry, avec protes-
tation quaucune créature ne le possédera. Et que fait-il autre
chose en tout son livre, sinon inviter Philagie & consacrer 4 Marie
toutes ses puissances intérieures? Et dans lendroit méme ot
Pascal est allé chercher ce petit esclave si attaché aux créatures,
Barry s’écrie: ‘Donnez-lui votre cceur sans partage, tel qu’il est,
et dites-lui ce peu de paroles :’— (suit une consécration 4 la Ste
Vierge, ot le coeur est donné sans réserve et avec une effusion
charmante.)”— Vol, i. p. 391.

Undoubtedly Pére Barry recommends us to consecrate our
whole heart to S. Mary,—in words, it may be observed, than
which no higher can be imagined to express devotion of our-
selves to God ; but this is no disproof of Pascal’s charge, that,
in default of this consecration, something as short of it, as sa-
luting her image, or pronouncing her name, will avail. So
Pére Binet’s little book is, it seems, quite an anticipation of
modern ideas and feelings : —

«¢ At the moment when the arduous and overwhelming questions
of predestination were agitated in the theological world, the Pére
Binet thought, with reason, that he would do better to leave on
one side all these disputes, in which we may lose faith without
ever deriving from them a virtue, in order to point out the prac-
tical means of arriving at eternal salvation; and he composed his
book, entitled Marque de Prédestination, which he dedicated to
Cardinal Bellarmine. Among all the means of salvation he chose
the devotion to the Holy Virgin. This book seems to have been
written for our age, and to contain a sort of prophecy of the
wonders which we have seen accomplished in our days by the

“—_

j

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. §13

devotion to Mary. ‘ When all the world was lost,’ says Binet,
in his first page, ‘God sent Mary on the earth, and by her He
gave us Jesus Christ, the author of all our good. Now that all
the world seems rushing to its ruin, nothing can assure us so
much as that the devotion of this worthy Mother of God should
begin to flourish again in the Church, and that by her intercession
God should be favourable to us, and inflame our hearts again,
All this, it appears, did not please Port-Royal, which preferred
plunging into the abysses of grace and predestination rather than
simply committing itself to the hands of Mary. Port-Royal did
not openly condemn the devotion to the Holy Virgin, but as this
has something affectionate and tender, which suited not with its
doctrines, it preferred a terror, a trembling before God. Con-
sequently, with reference to certain books which spoke of the
worship of the Holy Virgin, as we all speak of it, we Christians
in 1851, Port-Royal set itself to ridicule certain simple practices,
not seeing that impiety would gather up its sarcasms, to turn
them against all devotion. Port-Royal it is which has torn from
us that simple confidence, that childhood of faith, those sweet
tears of prayer, which are to our critical minds and dried-up
hearts, but a charming recollection, when they are not an object
of ridicule. We have read Pére Binet’s little book, and without
blushing we confess that it has interested us. To prove his thesis
that devotion to the Holy Virgin is a great mark of predesti
nation, he goes through all the figures of the Bible, all the passages
of sacred literature and of the Fathers, where there is allusion to
the greatness, powers, and the mercies of Mary. He develops
especially that thought, familiar to S. Bernard, that God has given
us everything by her, and that this order is henceforth unchange
able; that she is our advocate and our patroness, and that her
true servants cannot perish.” — Vol. i. pp. 391—393.

Whether there are not differences between what is childlike
and what is childish in religion; whether it matters or not,
how and on what object, the religious affections are exercised,
so that they are exercised; whether it be right or not to en-
courage religious practices and belief by what is apocryphal,
must still remain questions while the divisions of Christendom
remain. But it can be no question whether what Pascal, as
a Roman Catholic, repudiates as a degrading self-deceit, M.
Maynard, as a Roman Catholic, accepts both as beautiful in

LL

514 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

spirit, and as the acknowledged devotional idea of his own
time.

From worship and devotion let us go to practice. The
following is an incidental sketch, by one who had good
means of observing, of the religion of the day in the time of
Louis XIV. It seems to be the echo of Pascal’s interpret-
ation of the ‘ Dévotion Aisée,” and the “ Paradis Ouvert,”
as opening to the world, “des moyens d’assurer son salut,
assez faciles, assez stirs, et en assez grand nombre.”

“J’ai appris avec beaucoup de plaisir que M. le Comte de
Gramont a recouvré sa premiére santé, et acquis une dévotion
nouvelle. Jusquici, je me suis contenté grossierement d’étre
homme de bien; il faut faire quelque chose de plus; et je n’attends
que votre exemple pour étre dévot. Vous vivez dans un pays ot
Pon a de merveilleux avantages pour se sauver. Le vice n'y est
guére moins opposé a la mode qua la vertu. Pécher, c'est ne
savoir pas vivre, et choquer la bienséance autant que la religion.
Ceux qui n’ont pas assez de considération pour l’autre vie sont
conduits au salut par les égards et les devoirs de celle-ci. C’en
est assez sur une matiére ot la conversion de M. de Gramont m’a
engagé: je la crois sincere et honnéte. I] sied bien & un homme
qui n’est pas jeune d’oublier qu'il l’'a été.”

The passage is from a letter to the notorious Ninon de
V’Enclos, from Saint-Evremond, the old favourite of Ninon and
of Marion Delorme, the master of gay and easy philosophy
in the Court of Charles II., and of whom, in proof, we must
observe, of his religion, his biographer* writes, that ‘ though
very worldly in his morality, he had always held it asa prin-
ciple to respect religion, and made outward profession of the
Catholic faith. He would never allow it to be turned into
a matter of pleasantry.” +

* Biog. Univ.—“ Saint-Evremond.”

+ “La seule spain ol he said, “ et le respect qu’on doit 4 ses concitoyens,
ne le permettait pas.” The writer quotes the passage we have given, as a proof
of his religion, and proceeds to add, that if we could have any doubts “on the
subject of his religion, his will would dispel them, in which hey implores the
mercy of God,’ and leaves a pious legacy for poor Catholics ;” and then cites
the following verses of S. Evremond on himself ;: — -

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 515

Whatever doubt there may be as to the meaning of making
« la dévotion plus facile que le vice, et plus aisée que la volupté,”
in the mouth of a priest, there can be little — whether it be
irony or earnest — about its meaning in the mouth of a wit.
Yet when M. Maynard wants to convey what he considers a
just and true view of religious strictness, in contrast to the
rigour and Puritanism of Port-Royal, he goes to seek it in a
dialogue between Saint-Evremond and one of his friends : —

“ Elles font,’—says D’Aubigny to Saint-Evremond, in the con-
versation between them in Saint-Evremond’s works, speaking of
the doctrines of Port-Royal, —“ Elles font une violence éternelle
- Bla nature; elles 6tent de la religion ce qui nous console; elles
y mettent la crainte, la douleur, le désespoir. Les Jansénistes, _
voulant faire des saints de tous les hommes, n’en trouvent pas dix
dans un royaume, pour faire des Chrétiens tels qu’ils les veulent.
Le Christianisme est divin, mais ce sont des hommes qui le re-
coivent; et quoi qu’on fasse, il faut s’accommoder 4 ’humanité,
Une philosophie trop austére fait peu de sages; une politique trop
rigoureuse peu de bons sujets; une religion trop dure, peu d’ames
religieuses qui le soient long temps. Rien n’est durable, qui ne
saccommode a la nature. La grace dont nous parlons tant, s’y
accommode elle-méme; Dieu se sert de la docilité de notre esprit,
et de la tendresse de notre cceur, pour se faire recevoir et se faire
aimer. Il est certain que les docteurs trop rigides donnent plus
daversion pour eux que pour les péchés. La pénitence qu’ils
préchent fait préférer la facilité qu’il y a de demeurer dans le vice,
aux difficultés qu’il y a d’en sortir.”—Vol. i. p. 202.

Here is a man of the world’s view of religion, and the wis-
dom of this world speaks in it. It was, no doubt, the view of
the Court of Louis XIV. M. Maynard offers it as the view
of the Church. It is a strange way of expressing the indul-

** De justice et de charité,

Beaucoup plus que de pénitence,
Il compose sa piété.
Mettant en Dieu sa confiance,
Espérant tout de sa bonté,
Dans le sein de la Providence

Il trouve son repos et sa félicité,”

LL 2

516 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

gence and condescension of religion. This, says M. Maynard,
the Jansenists ignored; and we believe that it is partly true.
But if the Jansenists, in reviving the old ideas about peni-
tence, forgot that the Gospel had an indulgent side, those
whom they opposed seem to have forgotten that it has a stern
one; and, what is more, M. Maynard, at this day, in his de-
fence of them, forgets it too. If the Jansenists spoke to all the
world the same language, and bound weak as well as strong
to counsels of perfection, most assuredly the Casuists spoke as
if the mass of Christians were dispensed from all but the
veriest shadows of religion, and as if it were necessary to the
success of religion that the “ gate” should be declared to be
not “strait,” and the “way” not “narrow.” And the
theologian of the nineteenth century tells us that they were
right.

Let us take first M. Maynard’s view of perhaps the most
prominent feature of the Roman practical system — their
system of penitence.

The great point with the Port-Royalist directors was, that
penitence to be effectual must be real and searching; and that
the sacraments without this effectual penitence availed nothing.
Here M. Maynard sees the root of their error. In opposition
to it he thus states the Jesuit principle : —

“ Understanding a little better the redemption of love, the ad-
mirable economy of the Sacraments, those sacred channels which
place us in communication with the source of divine graces, the
Jesuits urged men to the participation of the divine mysteries, with
the same ardour as the Jansenists displayed in turning them away.
They were convinced, with the Church, that nowhere else was
there succour for the weakness, or medicine for the wounds, of the
soul. Jansenism abandoned man to his own resources, while it
looked on his faculties as annihilated by sin. The Jesuits, more
consistent, bade him walk with God, and borrow continually from
the treasures prepared by God’s mercy, the supply needed by his
own powers, weakened indeed, but not destroyed. Men, gifted
at once with a practical sense of life, and with a boundless charity,
on the one hand they dreamed not of a chimerical perfection, and
thought not of transforming the world into a Thebaid, and driving
all Christians into the desert: and on the other, they repelled no

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 517

one, offering themselves to heal the deepest wounds of the soul, as
well as its ailings and its weaknesses, making themselves ‘all
things to all men,’ like S. Paul, and feeling themselves obliged to
continue the ministry of the Master, who came not to call the
righteous, but sinners.’

“ Persuaded that the sinner, if no one holds out a hand, will
plunge deeper and deeper into vice, and fall soon into an irre-
vocable impenitence, they were eager to snatch him from evil,
to interrupt, at least, his sinful habits, to give him, by some act of
virtue, a taste of the virtue which he knows not. They did not
demand, for admission to reconciliation, those interior dispositions,
which even the most perfect do not always attain, and which con-
sequently are to him well-nigh impossible, in his state of sin and
disfavour with God ; bué only that he should actually place no
obstacle in the way of the effect of the Sacrament, whatever might
be his future miserable falls, (‘ quelles que dussent étre ses miséres
futures’); and they left to grace the care of fortifying his weakness,
of rendering his backslidings, at first less frequent, then rare, till
he should arrive in due time at a perfect conversion, and the sinner
become a saint.

* It was possible to abuse this charitable tolerance; who doubts
it? Men might sometimes find in the facility of pardon an en-
couragement to vice; who denies it? But the evil was the ex-
ception in this system of direction, while it was the good which
was the exception in that of the Jansenists. For one sinner who
changed the divine remedy into poison, a thousand found in it
recovery and life; for one sinner who would consent to follow the
long and painful way opened by Jansenism to reconciliation, a
thousand refused to take the first step, and excusing themselves on
the ground of the impossibility of virtue, fixed their permanent
abode in vice, or fell into despair.

“Tt is not necessary to be a theologian, nor even a Christian, to
understand that: it is enough to be aman, and therefore, we
leave with confidence to men of thé world who may read us, the
business of pronouncing between Jansenius and Loyola.”

_ The appeal to men of the world on a question of strictness
of direction is curious. But we would not have M. Maynard
too sure of their verdict. They admire strictness, in theory,
at least; and they might, moreover, be apt to think that, if
confession and penance cannot be worked on a large scale

LL 3

518 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM,

strictly and really, without driving the masses from the altar,
or “to hang themselves,” * they may be dispensed with on a
large scale altogether. And what, in fact, was the case in that
seventeenth century, when the “ Jesuits had the monopoly of
direction, which they held exclusively of the public confi-
dence?” f M. Maynard asks indeed, “ Does any one believe
that morals were more relaxed at the time when Probabilism
was the doctrine of nearly all the schools, than in our own,
when we hypocritically protest against it?”t and observes,—
“Quant aux hommes de been, quimporte un systeme spéculatif ?
. - » Nous concluons done hardiment que ces systemes de morale,
dont on peut éternellement disputer, n’ont aucune influence
sérieuse sur la conduite de la vie.” But it is he who tells us,
that this was such an epoch of licentiousness and impiety, that
it is a fair argument against the reality of the feeling raised by
Pascal on the subject of the bad maxims, “ that there was
not sufficient moral sense left to be really revolted by them.” §
If the fact were not notorious, we should learn even from
him of the steady progress of irreligion throughout the seven-
teenth century—of Pére Mersenne’s|| calculation of the
number of atheists in 1623,—60,000 in France, 50,000 in
Paris, 12 in a single house; of the “ hypocritical reserves
which the severe and morose piety ” of the great pupil of the
Jesuits, “ Louis XIV., as he grew old, imposed on pro-
fligacy ;” and how to these “ hypocritical reserves,” and this
* severe and morose piety,” succeeded the days of the Regent
Orleans and Louis X V.— days of blasphemy and abomination,
probably never equalled since the world was made. We
must add, however, that he lays this to the account of the
Provincial Letters !

Such is the broad principle on which the Jesuit system of

direction is defended. To make penitence a work which may
alarm the half-hearted, is not only sneered at as “ trans-
forming the world into a Thebaid,’ but plainly stated to be an
intentional blow at religion; and to urge on men in general
the moral discipline of religion, is to deny the grace, and

* As P. Caussin said ; vide Provine. x™*. See below, p. 556, note.
; Voli.p.34. t Voli.p.200. § Vol.i. p. 203.- |] Vol. i. p. 61.

—

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 619

abolish the use of the Sacraments—to ‘‘ abandon man to his
own resources.” Indeed, as to what was, in fact, the Jesuit
principle, there is little difference between Pascal and M.
Maynard.*

Accordingly the Jesuits’ great boast was that they had
made confession popular by their system. They had won
back to the Roman Church that prestige of popular religion
which for a time the Reformation had claimed. “ We are
overwhelmed,” they say in the Imago Primi Seculi,—
obruimur,— by the number of penitents.” With a con-
fidence only equalled by Luther’s Pecca fortiter, and at least
equally likely to be misunderstood, they protest that —singular
change in this sinful world of ours! —men had become more
eager to confess than to commit sin, “‘ Alacrius multo atque
ardentius scelera jam expiantur quam ante solebant committi.”
Nothing was more common, “ nil magis moribus receptum,”
than monthly or weekly confession. Many “no sooner con-
tract a stain than they wash it out.” Here is an account,
indeed, of a popular religion, which M. Maynard does not
except to—“ les jeunes Jésuites vantent avec raison,” he says —
though he charges Pascal, as usual, with “ falsifying ” it, not
because he misquotes it, but because he gives a reason for it.t

But how was this brought about? What was that “ pie-

* “Take away,” he says, “from the following statement, the exaggeration,
the tone of irony, the spiteful insinuations, and you will have in fact the prin-
ciple of the Jesuits in the conduct of souls,’—the principle which he tells us is
the principle of the Church. ‘“ Alas!” says the bon pére, in the Sixth Provin-
ciale, —“ alas! it would have been our first object to establish no maxims but
those of the Gospel in all their strictness : and it may be seen sufficiently by the
regularity of our own morals, that if we suffer some laxity in others, it is rather
by condescension than by design. We are forced to it. Men are now so corrupt,
that since we cannot make them come to us, we must go to them; otherwise
they would leave us: they would do worse, they would give themselves up
altogether. And it is to keep hold on them, that our Casuists have taken into
consideration the vices to which men are most inclined, in all conditions of
life, in order to establish maxims so mild, without at the same time doing violence
to truth, that persons must be hard to please if they are not satisfied with them ;
for the leading design, which our Society has in view for the good of religion, is
not to repel any one, whoever he may be, in order not to drive the world to
despair.”—Vol. i. 272.

- F Provine. x™. vol. ii. p. 10.
LL 4

520 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. |

tatis sollertia,” that * religiosa calliditas,” of which the Jesuits
boasted? ‘* Pieuses et saintes finesses,” “ artifices de dévotion,”
“‘adoucissements de confession ;” —these are Pascal’s inter-
pretations. ‘ Admirables paroles!” on the contrary, says
M. Maynard, “qui nexpriment pas dautres subtilités, ou
d'autres finesses que celles de Jésus-Christ mémes.”* What
Pascal denounces as irreligious, M. Maynard accepts as
necessary and Catholic.

Thus, the Jesuit authorities cited by Pascal seem only
intent on removing every obstacle to the facility of absolu-
tion. Filiucci tells the confessor, among other things, that if
his penitent does not show sufficient signs of sorrow for his
sins, he has only to ask him, whether he does not detest sin
from his heart ; and if he answers yes, the confessor may set
his mind at rest about absolving him. This sounds loose,
without some further proof of the penitent’s sincerity. But
M. Maynard, though he quarrels with Pascal’s use of the pas-
sages, and tells us, what is true, that Filiucci and his brethren
say something besides this still allows that they do say this,
and justifies it. “ Nothing proves that the penitent has any af-
fection for sin. You have believed his confession, why not believe
his promises?” ‘Disons enfin, que dans la pratique on est souvent
obligé den agir ainsi. Pascal pouvait Vignorer; mais les
prétres d’expérience, les missionnaires surtout, le savent bien.” ¢
So, again, Suarez and Filiuci are quoted as saying : —

“That, ‘the priest is obliged to believe his penitent on his
word,’ and, ‘that it is not necessary that the confessor should
persuade himself that the resolution of his penitent will be ful-
filled, nor that he himself judge that it probably will; but it is
enough that he think that he has at the moment the intention in
general, though he may relapse in a very short time.’ And it is
thus that all our authors teach: Jta docent omnes autores.” —
(Prov. x™.)

On which the comment is :—

“Tt is, alas! but too certain that the confessor must often act
thus, under the alternative of reconciling sinners but rarely, and
leaving them to wallow in their vicious habits. But, by the grace
of absolution (which is supposed to be always given, in cases of

* Vol. ii. p. 10. tT Vol. ii. p. 19.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 521

sufficient disposition), relapses will soon become less frequent,
and the conversion finish by being complete.” *

Even the startling sentiment, that “absolution may be
given to him who ayows that the hope of being absolved had
led him to sin with more ease than if he had not had the hope,”
is thus explained : —

“ Encore Bauny! que cest ennuyeux! These quotations are
made up of passages taken right and left, at the interval of several
folio columns. W’%importe, cest a peu prés cela. Only Bauny
adds: So that the penitent, affected with necessary sorrow, brings
to confession the plan of living better: ‘ce gui ne veut pas dire
pourtant, nous Tavouons, quil ne soit un peu relaché” But it
is not less true, that absolution frequently repeated will often be
the only mode of rescuing a sinner from vicious habits. The
friends of God are much stronger than his foes against their pas-
sions. The return to grace is itself a first victory, which will soon
lead to a decisive triumph. There may be exceptions to this rule ;
this is unquestionable; but all must be left to the prudence of the
confessor.”—Vol. il. pp. 22, 23.

A curious light, this, thrown incidentally on the actual
working of one of the seemingly strictest parts of the
Roman system. We shall understand this better, when we
examine M. Maynard’s way of dealing with the subject of
contrition and the love of God. Pascal quotes from P. Pin-
thereau the sentiment that “all the Jesuit fathers teach,
with one consent, that it is an error, and almost a heresy, to
say that contrition is necessary, and that attrition alone, even
conceived by the mere dread of the pains of hell, but ex-
cluding the will to sin, is not sufficient with the sacrament ”
of absolution. The pithy comment on this is “ Cest vrai.”
«What, almost an article of faith!” cries Pascal; « every
one else has required at least some love of God to be mixed
with this ‘attrition.”” P. Pinthereau,” says the comment,
‘does not deny it ; but still this will be short of contrition.” +

What is contrition, then, that a Christian may do without
it and be justified? What degree of sanctity is it that
makes it more than necessary for men in general? It is’
sorrow for sin, which is distinguished from the lower form

* ¥ol..i. pr 22: T Vol. ii. pp. 27, 28.

522 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

of attrition, by proceeding from, and being joined with, a

true and hearty love of God. This true and hearty love of

God may vary in degree; but where it exists in any real
sense, there is contrition.* Attrition is the sorrow which
springs from the fear of punishment, a disgust at sin, and,
though mixed with an “inchoate love,” it is distinctly said
to want real charity, or love of God. And the approved
Roman doctrine is, we are informed, that a man whose sole
motive for being sorry for his sins is the fear of their punish-
ment, and who has nothing but the motion to love God, but
no true love of Him, requires no other frame of mind to fit
him for pardon, but is,—and knows certainly that he is,—
when he receives the sacrament of Absolution, actually and
truly forgiven and justified. The doctrine is, not that he is
in the way, or may hope to be forgiven—but, that he zs for-
given; justification is given him, not in promise or foretaste,
but in actual possession.

“Tt is certain that attrition suffices with the Sacrament for the
justification of the sinner. Theologians were still disputing on
this point at the end of the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent
not having decided anything. But the Jansenist doctrine on the
necessity of contrition justifying by itself, drew afresh the atten-
tion of theologians to this important question; and at this day,
it would be almost a heresy, as P.2Pinthereau said, to maintain
the insufficiency of attrition, even arising from the sole motive
of the pains of hell, provided that it be accompanied by a be-
ginning of love of God, considered as the source of all justice.”—
Vol. 11. p. 29.

The reason assigned for this doctrine is a remarkable one.

* Contrition is defined by the Council of Trent, as “ Animi dolor ac detestatio
de peccato commisso, cum proposito non peccandi de cetero,” and stated to be a
necessary part of the sacrament of Penance. But the later Theologians — e. g.
Liguori—hold that the word is a generic one, and comprehends, 1. Perfect con-
trition, which arises “ex motivo charitatis.” 2. Imperfect contrition, which is
called attrition, “ which is conceived either from a view of the foulness of sin, or
the fear of hell, excluding the will to sin, and including the hope of pardon ;”
but having only “ amor inchoatus,” which is different in kind, not only in degree,
from the true love of God, “ charitas predominans,” which, whether more or less
intensely, loves God above the creature. “Nos non negamus requiri in attri-
tione initium amoris, sed dicimus tantum non requiri charitatem predomi-
nantem.” — Liguori, Hom, Apost, Tr. xvi. c. 2. No. 8, 14.

—/
|
:
”

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 523

It is, according to Liguori, that contrition, loving sorrow,
justifies of itself, without and before the sacrament of Abso-
lution *; and that, therefore, as the sacrament does also of
itself justify, it must require, as a previous disposition, some-
thing less than is sufficient to justify independently of it. If
contrition, which implies charity, were necessary, the sacra-
ment would never cause grace, or justify; for the simple
reason, that those who came fitly to it, would come already
justified. Contrition, he says, is a ‘formal act of charity,”
which loves God above all things, and which, therefore,
according to innumerable passages of Scripture, cannot be
joined with sin; “since, therefore, it is certain that the love
which loves God above all things, whatever it be in degree,
(charitatem predominantem quamvis remissam ), cannot be joined
with sin, it is certain that any sort of contrition, being formally
an act of charity, takes away sins.” There would, therefore,
be no room left for the proper and real office of the sacrament
in justifying, if we suppose that it required a disposition of
such intrinsic efficacy as contrition. And M. Maynard does
not shrink from the Jesuit’s startling conclusion, quoted by
Pascal as the ne plus ultra of nonsense and laxity joined, “ Que
la contrition n'est point du tout nécessaire pour obtenir Ueffet

* “Sacramenta actualiter operantur quod significant ; unde verificari debet
(ex se loquendo) quod cum sacerdos dat absolutionem, eo momento peccata
remittuntur.. . Si ergo in dolore necessario requiritur charitas preedominans,
sacramentum nunquam causaret gratiam, quia omnes accederent jam justificati ;
nam quilibet dolor qui ex charitate praedominante procedit est vera contritio, ut
docet §. Thomas; et hoc accidit quoties homini displicet potius gratizx quam
alterius boni amissio; et cum illa sit vera contritio, quamvis exiguus sit dolor,
delet peccata.” . . . “ Omnem culpam delet,” says S. Thomas; and again, “ Per
solam contritionem dimittitur peccatum, . . . si antequam absolvitur habeat hoc
sacramentum in voto, jam virtus clavium.operatur in ipso.” 'The love of God
spoken of in Scripture cannot, in its lowest degree, be joined with sin; and in
its lowest degree is different from that “‘ beginning of it’ which may be with
attrition.” “Si autem in attritione desideraretur amor inchoatus, qui sit prin-
cipium, amoris . . . hoc non negatur, et dicimus hoc initium jam in qualibet
attritione reperiri, tum metu poenarum a Deo infligendarum (“ Timor Dei initium
delectionis’), tum spe remissionis et beatitudinis.” But a “ verus charitatis
predominantis actus” is not necessary. Of course, even with contrition, the
** will to fulfil all righteousness,” involves the desire of the sacrament. — Liguori,
Hom. Ap. Tr. xvi. c. 2. No. 16,

524 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

principal du Sacrement (7.e. justification), mais au contraire,
elle y est plutit un obstacle: ‘imo obstat potius quominus
effectus sequatur.’” *

The doctrine, too, is a curious case of a doctrine developing
from a vagueness which gave an advantage to the stricter in-
terpretation, to a clearness which took it away. The process,
as given in Liguori, may be compared with Pascal’s account
of the growth of probable opinions.+ A General Council
left things in doubt. A Pope, while forbidding either side to
censure or insult the other, dropped the admission that the
opinion of one was the common opinion of the schools. A
moral theologian, whom the Church has canonized, drew the
inference, that since the Pope had attested that this was the
common opinion of the schools, it had become the morally
certain one, and therefore the opposite the improbable one,
which no doctor may embrace. ‘The Pope’s decree,” he
remarks, “does not forbid the opposite opinion to be called
improbable ; for improbability is not a note of censure or con-
tumely forbidden by the decree.” And, at last, the public
is informed by dignified ecclesiastics, as a matter of notoriety,
that it has become “ presque une hérésie” to hold it.t

* No doubt, this was a technical way of saying, not that it hinders justification,
but that it hinders justification from being the effect of a particular cause, i. e. the
Sacrament : i. e. even supposing that the separate effect of these two causes could
be exactly discriminated, the most startling and monstrously paradoxical way of
expressing the distinction, and the one which dealt with these awful mysteries as
if they were mechanical forces, the one which tempted and solicited misunder-
standing in the most deeply practically matters, was coolly preferred and set
down, without remark. M. Maynard’s comment is, “ C’est trés vrai, puisqu’alors
le pécheur est déja justifié, que le Sacrement n’a plus rien a faire sous ce rapport
principal, et qwil ne peut en augmenter la grace sanctifiante.” Accordingly, he

charges the Jansenists with “destroying the use” of the Sacrament, for saying, that
the absolution of the priest is real, only when it follows the sentence of the invisible
Judge, and that it requires in consequence great preparation ; “ Nous y voild,”
says he, when Pascal charges the Jesuits with giving absolution indifferently to
all who ask for it, without first considering whether Jesus Christ unlooses in
heaven those whom they unloose on earth ; “Vous y voila ; Jésus- Christ doit dabord
délier dans le ciel avant que le prétre ne délie sur la terre.” Here is the secret
let out of the Jansenist plan. “In such a case the priest’s office was useless,
for the sinner was already purified before God.” — Vol. ii. pp. 3—17.

} In the Sixth Provinciale. “ D’abord, le docteur grave qui l’a inventée l’expose
au monde,” &c. ,

{ “Sed sententia satis communis, quam nos sequimur, tenet sufficere attri-

ar! 5

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 625

Nor is this a mere question of the schools. So practical a
question is it, that M. Maynard, with Pére Pinthereau, can
see no mercy or advantage in the Gospel, if contrition is
made identical with saving penitence, and sinners are to be
told that justification cannot be had without it :—

“C’est le couronnement de cette doctrine,” says the bon pére.

“Vous y verrez donc que cette dispense de Vobligation facheuse
d’aimer Dieu est le privilége de la loi évangélique par-dessus la
judaique. ‘Ila été raisonnable, dit-il, [P. Pinthereau] que, dans la
loi de grace du N. T., Dieu levat obligation facheuse et difficile, qui
était dans la loi de rigueur, d’exercer un acte de parfaite contrition
pour étre justifié: et qu’il instituat des sacrements qui pussent sup~
pléer son défaut, 4 l'aide d’une disposition plus facile. Autrement,
certés, les enfants (les Chrétiens) n’auraient pas maintenant plus de
facilité de se remettre aux bonnes graces de leur Pére, qu’avaient
jadis ces esclaves (les Juifs), d’obtenir miséricorde de leur Seig-
neur.’”—Lett. X.

M. Maynard corrects Pascal, and corrects him as follows :—

“Tt is not the obligation of loving God that Father Pinthereau
treats as ‘ painful’ (facheuse), but the necessity of a perfect con-

tionem sine charitate praedominante, que oritur ex timore inferni, aut glorie
amissione, aut ex horrore erga peccati turpitudinem, lumine fidei cognitam : ita
tenent Gonet, Canus, Petroc., Tourn., Cabass., Wigandt, Abelly, Navarr.,
Suar., Tolet., Lugo, Laym., Salmer. et alii multi, cum Bened. XIV. qui asserit
quod post Trid. cum plausu hance sententiam omnes schole sibi adoptarunt ;
unde recte dicunt Suar. Less., Castr., Filliuc., Carden., Rainaud., Lugo, Prado,
Tanner., Viva et Croix, hance sententiam hodie post concil. esse moraliter certam,
et oppositam non esse amplius probabilem. Et quod scholz, saltem communius,
tanquam moraliter certam habeant, constat ex decr, Alex. VII. (5 Maii, 1667),
ubi sub excommunicatione prohibuit, ‘ne quis audeat alicujus theologicse censurse
alteriusque injuris aut contumeliz nota taxare alterutram sententiam, sive ne-
gantem necessitatem aliqualis dilectionis Dei in attritione ex metu gehenne concepté,
que hodie inter scholasticos communis videtur, sive asserentem dictz dilectionis
necessitatem.’ Attestando ergo Pontifex sententiam negantem esse commu-
niorem inter scholasticos, consequenter testatur in scholis haberi communitcr
certam; dum quisque scit, quod circa sacramentorum valorem alias sententias
quam moraliter certas, non posse doctores amplecti. Nec prefato decr. vetuit
Pontifex, sententiam oppositam posse nuncupari improbabilem; nam improba-
bilitas non est nota censure aut contumeliz per decretum vetita ;” especially as
we do not deny the necessity of an “ initium amoris.”— Liguori, Hom. Ap.
Tr. xvi. c. 2. No. 14.

526 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

trition in order to be justified. And it is certain that this act”
[we have seen how Liguori defines it] “is so sublime, so difficult
to degraded man, plunged in sensuality, that the sinner would
have reason to tremble if he had no other means of reconciliation.
Yes, the divine economy of the Sacraments is one of the most ad-
mirable parts of the New Law, one of its great excellences, com-
pared with the law of severity and fear. The sinner, who could
never assure himself on the worth of his personal acts, raises
himself in perfect security, at this word of the priest, ‘Go in
peace, thy sins are forgiven thee.’”—Vol. ii. p. 41.

The last part of the Tenth Provinciale, on the love of God,
reads as if it were a caricature. It seems as if, to show the
radically false principle of the popular casuistry, Pascal said,—
Apply this plan of weighing and measuring moral obligation,
of fixing the minimum which is safe for conscience, and with
which absolution may be granted, of construing rules relating
to conscience by the maxim of law, that penal enactments
must be interpreted strictly —“ odiosa sunt restringenda et
rigorose applicanda” — of finding out what is the least amount
of morality and religion which is compatible with a state of
grace and assurance of justification — apply this to the “ great
commandment,” the obligation to love God “ with all our
heart, and soul, and mind, and strength.” If you are con-
sistent, you are bound to find a minimum here; you are
bound to answer the question,— What is enough to satisfy
the obligation which the Gospel makes indispensable? On
your system, men will come to you, as directors of conscience,
as those who translate into practical and feasible reality the
general principles of duty, as confessors who can refuse
absolution if the measure of duty has not been fulfilled, and
ask you, What are we bound to? not in a vague indefinite
way, but in detail and fact; and you must be able to tell
them with certainty or probability, so as to assure their con-
science: and the weak will come as well as the strong. On
your pretension, of undertaking to entertain and satisfy all
questions definitely, as to how much of obedience is necessary
and safe, you must be prepared for questions, as to how often,
and when, God is to be loved by Christians who wish for

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 527

justification and salvation. You must not be content, as
preachers, with general exhortations to love to the uttermost ;
you must, as practical moralists, gravely weigh, discuss, limit,
and define —define, too, with practical certainty, for it is a
matter for practice, and the love of God is one which concerns
consciences very seriously,—what is the least that a man
may be allowed to love God. And then Pascal might be
imagined going on, with the exaggeration of a reductio ad
absurdum, to represent the great lights of casuistry, meeting
and determining exactly, what God intended, when He bade
men love Him with all their heart—some opining for more,
some for less, but all fixing the measure, and all, whether
they fixed it at once in three or once in five years, allowing
to their colleagues’ opinion the benefit of probability, however
confident they might be of their own; all forced by a sup-
posed consistency to treat the most transcendent law of reli-
gious affection in the fashion of bidders at a Dutch auction.
But it is no caricature. The authorities and decisions
which he quotes are real ones. The Casuists have found it
necessary to settle, whether God must be loved once, or three
times, or eight times in a Christian’s life; Escobar gravely
pronounces in favour of the moderate Henriquez, who strikes
the mean between the excess of Azor, who is for etght times,
and the defect of Sanchez, who is for one, and prescribes,
himself, three — the age of discretion, the hour of death, and
once every five years. It is necessary to distinguish between
cases where the obligation to love God is essential, and where
accidental. Vasquez and Suarez have really pondered seri-
ously over the problem of how often; Castro Palao had as
really “combated them, and with reason, merito;” and it is
not Pascal, but a real Jesuit, who represents the most dis-
tinguished theologians so puzzled by this question, of how
often is the love of God obligatory ; and so discordant is their

solution when, that he despairingly takes refuge in the answer,
— Never.*

* See the passage from Antoine Sirmond, lett. x., vol. ii. p.36. M. Maynard
says, “ Dans cette grande question de l’amour de Dieu, le P. A. Sirmond -est le

seul de tous les auteurs Jesuites qu’on pourrait abandonner & la justice passionée
de Pascal.” Yet even he is excused.

528 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

But if not a caricature, it must, then, of course, we might
suppose, be wrong—say, an exploded extravagance, chargeable
on the age, or on a perverse love of system, but which it
would be unjust,to impute to modern theologians. We might
the more be led to think this, from finding very similar pro-
positions condemned by Alexander VII. and Innocent XI.
And from finding them thus censured, we might have inferred
that the Popes meant to discountenance this fashion, whether
scientific or practical, of beating down, under the show of
fixing, the obligation of the love of God, as “at least scanda-
lous.” But we should only have shown our haste, and our
ignorance of the effect of a censure. M. Maynard, who ad-
dresses his refutation of Pascal to the intelligence of the day,
is not a whit behind Escobar or Bauny, or the bon pére him-
self, in maintaining the good sense and necessity and practical
ends of limiting the obligation to love God. It is a natural
problem in theological science, and necessary information for
confessors and their penitents. The Popes have, indeed, con-
demned some ways of limiting it; but it is a mistake to sup-
pose that has anything to do with other ways. The effect of
the censure is not to condemn the method of inquiry, but
definite wrong answers. From it, results the measure up to
which, according to the Church, we are bound to exercise
love to God. But this measure is a vague one; and though
the more definite answers condemned are wrong, other equally
definite ones may be right. To the honour of the Jesuits
be it said, that since the censure, at least, they have never
maintained any of these propositions. But the command-
ment to love God must be treated like any other precept
or obligation —as we treat a civil law, enjoining or for-
bidding ; it must be construed strictly and against itself;
whatever it does not specify, we are not bound to. And here,
except within the very wide limits fixed by the Church, we
are not bound to any time. Obligatory it is, we know;
but when, and how often, is an open question among theo-
logians ; and it is easier to say when it is not, than when
it is. :

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 529

“Tn the ‘great commandment’ there is the negative and general
precept, which obliges us, under all circumstances, to do nothing
against the love of God, and to observe His law; but there is
besides, the affirmative and special one, which obliges us to formal
acts of charity. The affirmative precept obliges, first accidentally,
when there is no other way of returning to favour with God,
and of itself also, not always, but from time to time in the course
of life.

“Tt is on the precept of the love of God in this latter view of
it, that theologians dispute,

“ Now, there are but few points decided about it by the Church.
It results, on the one hand, from tie censure of certain propo-
sitions, that there is obligation to a formal act of love of God,
when we have attained the age of reason (taking this instant in
a certain moral latitude), at the point of death, and several times
during life, so that there should not be between each act an inter-
val of five years, nor a culpable delay ; and, on the other hand
that this obligation does not exist, as Baius and Jansenius hold,
in all the moments and circumstances of life, The Church therefore
has condemned only those, who reduced to nothing or next to
nothing, the precept of the love of God, and those who extended it
to all the actions of life, and regarded as vicious all that proceeded
not from pure charity. All the rest is controverted, and will ever
be, among theologians. It is especially impossible to assign, besides
the two extreme limits of life, the precise and certain moment
when the precept obliges.”—Vol. ii. pp. 6, 7.*

And therefore all these Jesuits attacked by Pascal are so
far from being wrong or even extravagant, that they say
nothing but what is perfectly conformable to Catholic truth
and wisdom. “ One only,” Pére Antoine Sirmond, whois
so puzzled to find when it is ever necessary to love God,
“may be abandoned to the passionate justice of Pascal ; ” and
even he, well-meaning man, is more sinned against than
sinning. Escobar, too, the ‘‘ good old Escobar,” who never
dreamt of falling into the hands of a Pascal, and was therefore
incautious, vexes M. Maynard with his occasional careless
slips ; but the rest are blameless,

* He goes on to quote a passage, from Bossuet against Fénélon —“ Qui peut
“ déterminer heure précise a la quelle il faille satisfaire au précepte intérieur
“ de croire, d’espérer, et d’aimer ?” Why then try ?
MM

530 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

“Suarez is admirable for his wisdom on this point. After
having said that the precept of the love of God obliges ‘ acci-
dentally, when a man cannot recur to the sacrament, and has no
other means of justification, and, further, at the point of death, he
adds, ‘that it also obliges sometimes, of itself, like every precept,
and besides, the love of God is necessary to salvation, only it is
difficult to determine the time of the obligation. But the love of
God may not be delayed long after the first use of reason ; further,
it ought to be reiterated sometimes (quelquefois) during life; for
it is evident that it is not enough for a man to love once or twice
in the course of his existertee the God for whom he was created,
and who is the last end of his actions. But what ought to be this
time? It is for prudence to determine it. Vasquez says nothing
more than Escobar attributes to him; but he is speaking only of -
the precept of contrition. Now the two precepts of love of God
and contrition being certainly connected together only at the hour
of death, Vasquez could not determine any other time. Castro
Palao does indeed combat all these opinions; but we must under-
stand him. He also distinguishes the obligation per se and per
accidens. By violating this last, we sin, not against charity, but
some other virtue. ‘ Pure question de mots qui ne change rien &
la pratique.’ As for the obligation per se, it presses from time to
time during life, and it is not right to delay long the accomplish-
ment of it; and, always submitting himself to the judgment of the
prudent, he would regard as grave an omission of three years.
He thus ends:—‘J¢ is rare that a Christian, except he be of
depraved morals, makes himself guilty of this crime; for often he
endeavours to dispose himself by contrition for the sacrament of
Penitence ; often he meditates on the benefit of God and his
sovereign bounty, the consideration of which incites in him senti-
ments of charity. Remarkable words, which show well how all
these disputes were purely speculative.” —V ol. ii. pp. 35, 36.

The question, then, is worthy of pious Christians, solemn
and laborious theologians, anxious penitents, and practical
men. Up to a certain point, the illumination of the Church
clears up our doubts as to how often in our lives we must
love God; but even with the light of these decisions much
remains vague. Of course it is a good thing to do so as often
as we can. M. Maynard bids us remark that all the Jesuits
say so, and that they wrote excellent practical books on the

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 531

subject ; but theologians and confessors require to know not
only when we ought, but when we must. And within the
limits fixed for the obligation by the Church, it is a charitable
and profitable work to thin out as much as possible the obliga-
tion of specific occasion, because an obligation of the Church
involves a definite mortal sin, if neglected. “The Jesuits,”
as M. Maynard remarks, though they, as a general rule,
teach all the points decided by the Church, “ refute very well
those authors, who, on vain reasons, pretend that the precept
of charity obliges of itself on all festival days—when an adult
receives baptism—on going to martyrdom—at the beginning
of some difficult and excellent work—on occasion of some
signal benefit of God — in temptations to hate him — at the
reception of the Eucharist— after a mortal sin, in case that a
man cannot or will not have recourse to the sacrament of
penitence.” * On these occasions it is purely a question of
probability, whether we are bound to love God ; some Jesuits,
he observes, say we are, on some of them; but as the Church
has decided nothing on the subject, we cannot get certainty ;
and yet we want guidance. Therefore to sift these pros and
cons is an employment worthy to occupy their thoughts, their
ingenuity, and their time; and they have come for the most
part to admirable conclusions. :

Such is M. Maynard’s mentiris impudentissime to Pascal ;
and having upset his theology, he answers him as an orator
and aman. Pascal is a ‘ calumniator,” a “ sophist,” a dealer
in “ false eloquence,” for contrasting this system with the lan-
guage of Scripture. “ The theologians,” says his refuter,
“have never dispensed with the love of God, and have spoken
only of the time when the rigorous obligation of the precept
pressed:” * voila la calomnie.” Thesophistry” consists in sup-
posing, that the love of God isa thing which may be decreed,
and which depends on the theories, more or less subtle, of the
schools. ‘* Mais qu’y font ces théories 2?” Will men love God
more or less, according as this or that decision is found in the
folio pages of theologians? “ L’amour de Dieu,” he continues,

* Vol. ii p. 7.

MM 2

532 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

“* inspire, et ne se decréte pas.” Doubtless, “ decrees” about
affections are strange things. Who would think of “decreeing”
how many times a-year a son was to love his father, or in-
quiring how often the obligation of loving her husband was
not binding on his wife. But, then, for what purpose were
these decisions? Who did make decrees about the great
commandment? Or does M. Maynard think that Pascal
complains because theologians had decided on once in five
years instead of once a-week ? * Theories of the Schools” —
** pages in folio of theologians,” —is it M. Maynard who
speaks so slightingly of labours which he has just presented
as so practically necessary and so admirably executed? Is it
he who compares the natural instincts of good sense and good
feeling, with the weighty maxims of Suarez and Vasquez, and
takes refuge from books in the heart? ‘ L’amour de Dieu ne
se decréte pas.” We cannot set it up in men’s hearts by the-
ories and decisions. True, M. Maynard, but may it not be
explained away by them ?

Now, these belong to a class of subjects in respect to which
the Roman Church has been set before us of late in an im-
posing aspect ; subjects in themselves of permanent interest —
the principles and tone of clerical teaching, the depth and
seriousness and practical reach of theological doctrines trans-
lated into systems at work among men —the discipline of
Christian life, amid the passions, the confusions, or the oppor-
tunities of the world. In all these matters, great, as we very
well know, is the boast of the Roman Catholic Church. She,
we have been told, has the most refined and severe principles.
She has had living examples of them. She, we are told
continually, is uncompromising, consistent, uniform; and she
only. This is her boast, and, so far as it is true, her strength.
By it her defenders override, with no measured triumph, the
theological or historical difficulties of her case. All other
bodies, they say, are loose, have no principles, or are afraid of
them; are tame in their moral spirit, compromisers with evil,
shrinking from the realities of faith, systematic smoothers of
the rough ascent, and wideners of the narrow way. Rome
only, besides a clear and unhesitating theology, has a great

ae

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 533

system of spiritual discipline of souls and consciences, and a
moral character which results from it and corresponds with it;
she only has the secret of a searching and elevating ministry
— she only dares to realise that she professes. Protestants,
on the other hand, proceed the Roman doctors, will have an
easy religion. They want a speedy remedy for conscience.
They want to be forgiven at once, every time they sin, and to
feel assured that they are so; and for this they invented jus-
tification by faith. They want to get rid of the reality of re-
pentance. They want to choose their own way of fulfilling
their duty. What they rebel against in the Roman Church, is,
such real aids and obligations to strictness of life as confession
and sacramental absolution. Their self-indulgence shrinks
from direction, because the two are incompatible. Rome, only,
brings the sinner before his God. Rome, only, will not tem-
porise and parley with the self-deceit of the will. Rome, only,
secures penitence by acts. She, only, inherits the spirit
of the ancient Church—its inexorable hatred of sin. Con-
science cannot escape from her strong grasp, and personal
questioning. She leaves it without excuse; and shrinks, as
from a profanation, from offering it any relief, except what
is real. Rome will give a religion of mercy and consolation,
but not an easy religion, not a religion of the world.

This is one popular way of presenting the claims of the
Roman Church. If Protestants, then, had objected to Port-
’ Royal, an exaggerated notion of the sacerdotal office, and of
the claims and responsibility of the director—if they had
charged it with giving too real a sanctity to ordinances, and
making religion too strict for man— Roman Catholics it
~ might have been supposed, could have seen nothing but a
consistent carrying out of the principles of the Church.
When Port-Royal complained so-bitterly of playing with the
discipline of the confessional, or the ineffable sanctity of the
Kucharist, the complaint, to Roman Catholics, we should have
thought, would have had at least meaning. Injudiciously,
perhaps, but surely not groundlessly, the Port-Royalists only
wanted to take their Church at her word, and to turn the
edge of that primitive and Catholic discipline, which cut so

MM 3 |

534 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM..

deep in controversy with heretics without, against worldliness,
and connivance with worldliness, inside the Church. They
seem only to be holding up to the careless multitudes within
her pale the standard of the religious depth and reality,
which her divines have ever presented to Protestant opponents,
as incapable of accommodating itself to what the world asks
for in religion.

But, it seems, the Portroyalists were mistaken. Bossuet
thought them in extremes, though he had many points of sym-
pathy with them. But if we are to take such representations
as have just been given, and with the air of authority, of the
spirit and demands of the Church, their view was radically false.
The system which looked so uncompromising and stern in deal-
ing with the individual conscience, when turned towards those
without, must wear quite a different aspect when turned to
those within;— with whom it is no longer a question about
what will best silence them, but about what they can best be
got to submit to. In presenting that discipline before them,
theologians are, it seems, to remember before what sort of
persons it is held up; they are masses of variable character,
who look with an evil eye on restraints and inconveniences—
a multitude of believers, indeed, but a very mixed one; whose
general good will may be trusted, but not to the extent of
submitting to any very sharp pressure. Unstable, wayward,
halting between right and wrong, it takes but a little to scare
or offend them; their worldliness, unruliness, suspiciousness,
obstinacy, feebleness, are to be lamented, but, if the Church
is to control them, must be allowed for. When speaking of
discipline within the Church, the standard is to be set, for

the weak, the capricious, the self-willed, who form the bulk -

of actual living mankind. Hold up before them the rule of
the strong and the perfect, and it is simply driving them
from the altar and the confessional.* Have, by all means, a

* “ Si l’absolution,” says P. Caussin, “ doit étre refusée 4 ceux que l’espérance
d’étre absous a portés 4 pécher avec plus de facilité, Pusage de la confession
devra-t-il pas étre interdit d la plupart du monde? et il n’y aurait plus dautre
remede aux pécheurs qu'une branche darbre et une corde.” —“ Le P. Caussin a
raison en somme; et sila doctrine de Bauny peut pousser quelquefois au relache-
ment par l’espérance d’un facile pardon, la doctrine janséniste sur la pénitence
conduisait certainement au désespoir, et, par suite, A ’immoralité habituelle,”
observes M. Maynard, vol. ii. p. 24.

a

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 535

high standard besides; have it for the strictly disposed, and
keep it for them; but with the multitudes you must be easy,
or they will break from you altogether.

We will venture to say that, were he in controversy with
an Anglican or a Lutheran, no divine in France would insist
more strongly and more feelingly on the austere sanctity of
Roman Catholic discipline than M. Maynard. Not Port-
Royal itself would be more absolute in statement or inex-
orable in logic. But he is dealing with domestic difficulties
and with discipline as a system to be realised. In the former
case he might have claimed for his communion the maxims of
S$. Augustin and §. Bernard. Jn the present, he puts the
Jansenist rigorists to confusion by appealing to the indulgent
good sense of men of the world, the mts sapientia of the court
of Charles II. This may be very sensible; only, what is
now the recommendation and boast of the Roman system,
when dealing with the necessities of the faint-hearted and
petulant multitude within, is, after all, its old taunt against
Protestantism —that it is an easy religion.

Here, then, we observe another aspect of the Roman
Church; we do not say that it is not a practical and natural
one, but it is another. Indeed, the truth is, that in this discus-
sion, our feeling varies, according as we view things broadly
or in detail. Look at the discipline of the Church in the
_ gross, and the Jesuits seem to have a good deal to say. They
professed to be indulgent, yet watchful and persevering. Look
at the special and necessary parts of its machinery, and the
way in which it affects theological questions, and Port-Royal
seems irresistible. We cannot help allowing the practical
common sense of the Jesuit view of mankind, and the way to
get hold of them; but it is equally obvious, that it led its holders
into a most singular maze of theological entanglement, and
that the intermediate steps which linked their most unbending
dogmatism with the infinite wants and changes of living cha-
racter, were a series of slippery and prevaricating inventions,
without even the poor merit of real subtlety. Keep out of
sight what absolution is held to be by the Roman Church,
and we think only of the charitable condescension which

uM 4

536. PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

brings home to the individual penitent the prospect of mercy,
and faints not, nor despairs, though ever so often disappointed.
But view absolution, not as a subsidiary portion of a great
practical machinery for dealing with the waywardness of
man, but in itself—as it is defined and jealously exalted in
decrees of councils and commentaries of divines,—as the certain
channel of justification; and the condescension seems a
strange one, which cheapens such a gift into a mere auxiliary
and complement to the most inchoate and tentative act of
improvement. Yet it may be said, what were the Jesuits to
do? The Roman Church had strictly defined what absolu-
tion was, and to maintain, in its integrity, the Roman dog-
matism, was the end and the pride of their institute. On the
other hand, absolution in popular practice was inseparably
connected with confession, and compensated for its burden ;
the two things went together, and could not be separated.
Their theological duty to Rome led them to extend and en-
force to the uttermost the unrestricted and literal interpreta-
tion of her lancuage; their practical duty, to keep up the
attachment of the masses to her discipline. They were
debarred by the one from restricting the effect of the sacra-
ment; by the other, from making difficulties in the way of
its reception. In their theology, it was all, and even more
than all, that any Catholic doctors had made it: in their
practice, it must sink to be a solace and encouragement, not
to be easily denied even to the lowest and most doubtful
class of penitents. To those who objected, they had the prac-
tical argument, that nothing less than this encouragement
would bring men to confess. Absolution, whatever it was,
was indispensable. Yet Port-Royal had logic on its side, and
right reason and feeling too, when it urged, that this was a
tremendous price to pay for keeping up a popular system of
confession; that it was sacrificing absolution to confession—
a divine sacrament and supernatural gift, to moral control and
moral training for the lowest of Christians. They only urged
indisputable truth, when they said that, doctrinally, absolu-
tion had never been held to be the preliminary, but the end
and crown of Christian repentance and amendment. As dis-

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. . Bad

putants, they tore to pieces the flimsy refinements with which
the Jesuits reconciled their theology with their practical
system: as Christian divines, they raised their voice in behalf
of the reality and the seriousness of Christian penitence, and
denounced the fearfully short-sighted wisdom, which, for any
seeming advantages, could undermine the sincerity of cha-
racter, by attempting to fight self-deceit with weapons of its
own.

But, however accounted for, here is another aspect of the
Roman Church. And it is hard to see how, if it is true, the
former one is not, we will not say untrue, but greatly exag-
gerated. We repeat, we are not undertaking to pass judg-
ment on the internal quarrels of the Roman Church, or to
say which is the true interpretation of the Council of Trent
about contrition and attrition. But we observe this: that in
fixing, for practical discipline, among themselves, the minimum
of moral disposition sufficient for justification and salvation,
modern Roman doctors, claiming very loudly to speak for
their Church, pronounce, and pronounce for certain, on a very
low one: the minimum, be it observed, not for ecclesiastical
pardon, for long-suffering, or encouragement, or hope, but
for present justification, for giving the sinner the assurance,
on the highest earthly warrant, that God has actually blotted
out his sins, and restored to him His favour. And they do
it on the express ground that nothing else will work; that
the mass of men must have this assurance or revolt from
religion.

If this is so, however it be explained, it is not too much to
say, that no Evangelical doctrine short of avowed Antino-
mianism, which connects instant and actual justification, over
and over again, with the act of faith, can require, in the way of
moral disposition, Jess. A religion which allows the sinner
to set his conscience at rest, and feel complete assurance of
pardon and justification, with no moral qualification but
sorrow and fear— except in promise,-—which allows its
teachers to say, that contrition is so far beyond the reach of
ordinary Christians, that to insist on it to them is to narrow,
and almost evacuate the mercy of the Gospel, — which allows

538 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

its discipline to be controlled by theories and practical rules,
which, if true, turn nine-tenths of all the sermons on repent-
ance into mere declamation,—we do not say, must be, but
certainly may be, in the hands of those who choose, logically
and consistently, an easy religion: and has extremely little
reason to taunt other systems with theories, which make too
free with the terms of the Gospel, and yield too speedy a cure
to the smarts and impatience of conscience.

From theological let us proceed to moral explanations.
How does M. Maynard deal with the broad fact of Pascal’s
mass of startling extracts from the popular Casuists? We
will state generally the grounds to which he appeals, before
we illustrate them by instances. First, he has recourse to the
counter-charge of false quotation and misconstruction —a
very good answer, so far as it is true, but a dangerous one to
quibble about; and no other name can be given to a very
large proportion of M. Maynard’s criticism. He will scarcely
ever trust us with a passage quoted in full. He prefers to
give what he calls analyses or exposés of so and so’s doctrine,
smooth, guarded, and pointless, which present a far more curi-
ous contrast when compared with the downright original, than
any of Pascal’s unfairnesses. ‘Then, as we have already said,
he complains of Pascal’s always quoting Escobar and Bauny,
which, if Escobar and Bauny spoke only for themselves,
might be reasonable ; but as they carefully inform us, and the
fact is plain on the face of it, that they are servile repeaters of
a method which they thought every one accepted, and simply
represent the latest results of the labours of others, whose wis-
dom all admire, the complaint is not so much in place.* Then

* The following is Escobar’s account of his compilation :—“ At ego solum-
modo memoro reserationem factam ab Agno suis auctoribus Jesuitis....
Qualibet igitur in materia, in primis auctorum Societatis exhaurio, Medullam
Confessariorum in Examen exponendam, indicatis generatim auctoribus. Mox
circa materias singulas, speciales Doctorum meorum resolutiones ad principiorum
generalium praxim attexo, jam specialiter auctorum nomina et scripta citans,
jam sola nomina recensens. Hoc ingenue profiteor, me nihil toto in hoe libello
scripsisse, quod Societatis Jesu non acceperim ex Doctore. Quas epim proprias
passim resolutiones innuo, ex scholad Societatis aperte deductas existimarim. Licet

autem. profiteor totum meum opus ex Societatis Doctoribus texuisse, non ideo as-
sero omnes sententias omnium esse (ut non bene Caramuel intellexit), sed singulas

\ ‘
EO

.
|

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 539

we are told that casuistry and moral theology are not popular
sciences ; that they are a system which cannot be understood,
: except as a whole; that questions necessarily are very different
& in the abstract and in practice; that when people have to deal
4 with the infinity of human characters, and sins, and circum-
4 stances, the questions which must arise are necessarily intri-
| cate and strange; and that we have only to try and state in
general terms any set of ordinary practical difficulties, and the
ways by which we should ordinarily, in daily life, get through
them, to see both how puzzling such subjects are, and how
easy to make any practical general rules seem grossly lax.
Then, it is suggested that we look differently on a crime
before and after it has been committed; that we may forbid
most severely, in the abstract, what, when it comes to be
realised in a particular person, we do and must judge ina
very different way ; and that those very decisions which shock
us so much as they stand, in naked formality, would be applied
by ourselves unconsciously, in the case of an actual penitent,
whom we saw before us.

singulis tribuendas, ut aperte ostendo, dum fere nunquam pro una sententia, duos
Doctores recenseo. Dum autem eorum refero dictorum varietatem, non ideo me
idem sentire affirmo. Problematum moralium volumina que edidi, que digero,
post unam et alteram contradictoriam relatam sententiam, quid sentiam aperiunt.
Porro licet Societati Jesu summula hee omnem attribuit sententiam, non ideo
indico, propriam esse Societatis, nullam enim propositionem exprimo, que non possit
gravissimis extra Societatem Doctoribus confirmari. Quod si sepe videar me
laxioribus opinionibus adherescere, id certe non est definire quid sentio, sed
exponere, quid sine conscientia lesione Docti poterunt cum eis visum fuerit expedire
ad sedandos penitentium animos, ad praxim adducere.”

This edition, Lyons, 1659, after the date of the Provinciales, has the licence
of the Provincial to print the book (which had been recognitus by two fathers of
the Society), for nine years, dated 1644; the approbation of two doctors of
theology of the University of Paris, a Carmelite and a Minor, certifying that
they had found nothing in it dissonant from the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman
faith, and judged it worthy of publication, dated 1644; the licence of the
ordinary in consequence of this approbation, and the consent and permission of
the civil power.

He goes through, in the way of short questions and answers, the subject of
Moral Theology, under seven heads, to which he applies in allegory the seven
seals of the book of the Apocalypse. These are— Laws, Sins, Justice, Censures,
Virtues, States of Life, Sacraments: each division, or examen, after discussing
general principles, ends with a chapter of practical solutions, entitled “ Praxis ex
Societatis Jesu Schola,” on the previous subjects.

540 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

On these principles we are told that we may understand
the purpose and meaning of these much vilified books. They
were meant, not for lay Christians before the act, but for con-
fessors after it; to teach the priest how to measure and deal
with what could no longer be helped; —-the utmost that he
- had a right to exact, and the least that he might accept ; —
not to teach the penitent the means of eluding duty, and still
escaping sin. They represent not what men are to be taught
to do, but only how far they may be allowed not to do as they
are taught. ‘ They are not receipts given to penitents, to
sweeten for them the remedy*of confession, but rules of con-
duct and judgment for priests.” ‘ This simple reflection,”
adds M. Maynard, “causes to fall to the ground all the accu-
sations of Pascal.” And they are to be considered as coming
first to the knowledge of the penitent, and the mass of people,
when applied to their case by the confessor. They were not
intended for the public; they were written in Latin, and the
world has no business to know these rules, nor Pascal to di-
vulge them. Thus M. Maynard, after asking whether there
is no danger in so many “ subtle questions” on morality, and
in such speculatively bold decisions, which must necessarily
“ briser bientét les liens de labstraction, pour entrer dans le
domaine des faits,” thus answers: —

“ Peut étre. Mais songeons bien que les Casuistes n’écrivaient que
pour les confesseurs, et non pour le monde, encore moins pour les
plaisants; que leur maximes, dont il peut tre facile d’abuser, ne
sadressuient pas ala foule ignorante ou corrompue, mais a des
hommes graves, instruits, vertueux, $c... . Leurs livres étaient
écrits en Latin, qui west pas la langue de la multitude; étaient
des énormes en folio, inabordables & la foule légére, des ceuvres &
formes techniques et barbares, peu attrayantes pour la frivolité.
Aussi étaient-ils renfermés dans les écoles et les bibliothéques,
sans que jamais une main profane etit songé a les ouvrir pour en
répandre le secret et le prétendu venin sur le monde... . Tout
cela devait rester un mystére entre le confesseur et la conscience
coupable. Le poison, si tant est que les Casuistes en renfermassent,
devait étre exclusivement confié aux mains habiles et prudentes
des médecins des Ames, qui V’auraient toujours transformés en
rémede salutaire. Aussi Escobar, fut-il tout étonné du rétentisse-

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 541

ment que son ceuvre avait en France. Cet humble religieux ne
pouvait comprendre sa triste célébrité: cet homme, & l’dme et aux
intentions si pures, concevait encore moins qu’on détournat de leur
sens et de leur but les conseils qwil avait adressés exclusivement aux
confesseurs, pour les aider 4 diriger leurs fréres dans la voie du
bien.” — Vol. i. pp. 206, 207.

No doubt. The books might be written in Latin and in
folio ; the confessor as careful as he could be, to keep Escobar
out of “ profane hands.” But, besides that among people like
the French, what was to be read in Latin could not long be
kept secret from those whom it concerned — not to say that
an indiscreet Pére Bauny might publish French “ Sums of
Theology,” —it does not seem to have occurred to M. May-
nard, that, supposing a sufficient degree of intelligence and
memory in the penitent, he might come to comprehend these
rules by their application to his own case; and supposing him
to be weak and self-deceiving, he might abuse this know-
ledge, as much as if he had learnt it straight from Escobar or
Pascal. And where every Christian was supposed to come to
the confessional, and the mass of thei to require the benefit
of these indulgent decisions, it is not easy to suppose, with
M. Maynard, that it is to Pascal and the Jansenists, that the
world in general is indebted for its knowledge that such deci-
sions exist ; or to imagine, that it must have waited till it learned
them from such informants, before it could have taken practi-
caladvantage of them. And with respect to M. Maynard’s dis-
tinction, we must add, that a simple inspection of these books
is sufficient to show, that they were meant to tell the priest, not
only how to judge of the past, but to advise about the future.

Thus, however, the inculpated system is defended — on the
ground of its being a highly practical one. Its startling
results are but the anomalies which attend all working systems.
Arguments may prove them wrong, but they turn out right
in practice. But besides this, M. Maynard has two more de-
fences in reserve. Side by side, or alternately, with the plea
that it is highly practical, is the plea that it is only speculative.
Having proved that it is intended only for the confessional,
and that the confessional cannot do without it, M. Maynard

542 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

offers us another point of view. It is, he says, the inevitable
development of logical consequences ; the mere course of ab-
stract thought—subtle intellect, in the greater men ; analysing
metaphysically, or playing with possibilities, simple “ logo-
machies” in the lesser. ‘ Systems of morality,” says M.
Maynard, “ about which we may dispute for ever, have no seri-
ous influence on life ;” and this casuistry was a “ veritable
science, more metaphysical than moral, which, on pain of ap-
pearing incomplete, was bound to embrace all questions that
were possible and even chimerical.” * Its startling conclusions
were simply the result of ** studies purely speculative.” f
Even those about duelling, tyrannicide, and killing false wit-
nesses, which were condemned for their practical danger by
the Pope, “ were certainly,” we are informed, “admissible in
principle and in theory.” {

Finally, when, in some particular case, the general sugges-
tions of its being practically useful, or merely speculative, or
both, have been gone through, and we have been further re-
minded of that ‘ candid and charitable simplicity, which would
not impose on the weak shoulders of men anything more than
the least heavy burden possible, and sometimes placed itself
outside the Gospel in seeking to reconcile our duties and our
miserable doings,” he treats the whole matter as a trifle not
worth talking about —as something on the face of it, absurd
and impossible, except as a little flourish of sportive subtlety ;
and turns round on us and laughs in our face, for being such
simpletons as to suppose, that the inculpated casuist ever
meant his words to be taken in earnest.

We are rather at a loss to describe the general effect upon
our mind of M. Maynard’s way of arguing. It is, more than
‘anything we can bring to mind, like the equestrian per-
former, who is carried round the ring, jumping from one
horse’s back to the other. The Abbé employs two main
‘principles, the necessities of a practical, and the liberty of a
speculative system; and his argument has the appearance of

invoking, as soon as he is embarrassed in the use of one, the —

* Voli. t Voli. p. 200, $ Vol. i. pp. 200, 205, 309..

=
EE ——

PE ———————— ———

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 543

assistance of its apparently discordant opposite. Thus it pro-
ceeds, through a series of alternations, to its triumphant close.
And at length, when it ends, we are left to reflect, whether
what has so much engaged our attention is any thing more
than elaborate nonsense.

M. Maynard’s mode of defence will be best understood by
an instance or two.

It may be remembered, for instance, that Pascal quotes a
number of remarkable dicta about duelling, and homicide in
general. M. Maynard deals with them at considerable length.
He notices that they arose in a state of society when there
was little public law.* He reminds us that these decisions
are of a local kind: —

“La doctrine, qu’on peut tuer pour l’honneur n’est guére admise
que par les théologiens étrangers, en Espagne surtout, ot. Vhonneur
n’est pas une passion seulement, mais une sorte de religion. Les
Jésuites inculpés sous ce rapport ne se sont pas écartés de Ven-
seignement recu dans leur pays. Ce peut étre un tort, mais on ne
saurait leur en faire, sans injustice, un crime propre et personnel.
Ces théologiens se fondaient sur ce que l’infamie est pour un homme
de coeur pire que lamort: . . . Il doit donc étre permis de
défendre ’honneur comme la vie elle-méme, et 4 plus juste titre
que les biens matériels, pour la conservation desquels cependant, la
plupart des théologiens permettaient l"homicide.”— Vol. i. p. 308.

Critical persons might think it equally strange, that so
large a proportion of Roman doctors as the theologians of
Spain and Italy, should be called anywhere, even in France,
** étrangers ;” and that local feelings about honour and blood-
shed should be a reason for their playing fast and loose with
the Sixth Commandment. However, M. Maynard, after
discussing the limits of what is allowable on the subject,
thus sums up what he considers to be their real drift and
purport : —

“Nous achevons cette discussion, sans craindre d’avoir mis le
poignard aux mains des assassins, quoique nous ayons exposé, sans
la frapper en général d’anathéme, la doctrine des Jésuites. Nous

* “Tes maximes des Casuistes sur ’homicide et le duel se sentaient néces-

sairement du régime féodal et barbare, dans lequel elles étaient toutes natu-
relles.” Vol, i. p. 307. ;

544 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.,

ne croyons pas que jamais un glaive se soit aiguisé 4 ces théories
purement spéculatives, ou quon ne proposait pas pour régles de
conduite, mais dappréciation @un fait accompli. En les offrant
aux confesseurs, les théologiens ne leur disaient pas: ‘ Voila ce
que vous pouvez permettre, encore moins conseiller:’ mais, ‘ Voila
ou il y a crime, voilé un fait moins coupable, voil& une défense
enticrement légitime. Néanmoins, sans vous arroger la mission
de vouer &Venfer un meutrier qui n’a fait qu’user de son droit
rigoureux, ayez bien garde de le féiciter de sa conduite, comme
s'il avait accompli un acte de vertu, et engagez-le & préférer dé-
sormiis & tout la divine douceur de Pévangile.’

*'Telle était la seule doctrihe qu’on préchat au peuple. Les
décisions de l’école, choquantes au premier aspect, moins choquantes
cependant dans les principes que dans les applications que des
théologiens se croyaient obligés de donner toutes, ne devaient pas
étre communiquées au public. Si elles présentent quelque danger,
Yimprudence n’est pas dans les théologiens, mais dans ceux qui les
ont divulguées.”— Vol. i. p. 313.

This is the general view of the matter. The theologians
wished to secure a liberal and long-suffering considerateness
in the confessors whom they instructed. They were not to
be hasty and sour, even with homicides. On the other hand,
they were to “take care not to felicitate them on their conduct.”
The theologians had foreseen even this contingency, and pro-
vided against it.

But when we come to the decisions one by one, they are
defended, not for their practical good, but for their impossi-
bility. These nice rules, so minutely analysed, these delicate
balancings, so wisely adjusted by prudence and charity, finally
turn, it appears, into nonsense when taken literally. The
decision complained of is merely one of the speculative “ ap-
plications, of which the theologians thought themselves bound
to give all.” The question is a minutely practical one; but
the answer, though equally minute, is only speculative. The
ereatest subtlety and care are shown, for instance, in marking
out when a duel may be fought ; circumstances carefully dis-
tinguished, as whether “a gentleman is known ‘ pour n’étre
pas dévét,’” so that he will be thought to act from fear of
man and not of God, and so that men will call him, gallina

a ee a

EE as

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 545

et non vir; he is directed not to intend to fight a duel, but
only to walk about in a field: —and the end of it all is, that
we are informed, “that this, though probable in speculation,.
is extremely difficult in practice,” and that the careful Casuist
himself is related to have prescribed the contrary in his book
** De Charitate.” *

Again, Molina names about the sum—four or five ducats —
for less than which we may not kill a thief who is stealing, but
he will not “dare to condemn” a man who kills for a crown
or less; Escobar draws from Molina’s estimate, that ‘“‘ we
may ‘regularly’ (regulariter) kill the thief for the value of a
gold crown; ” and Pascal represents Molina as estimating at
six or seven ducats the value for which we may kill the thief.
* Voila,” says M. Maynard}, “ce qui s’appelle une bonne
calomnie.” However, he gives up Escobar. Why is Escobar
wrong ?—for wrong he is, his proposition having found its way
into the condemned list of Innocent XJ. All that M. Maynard
sees in it is excess of precision, whether over-speculative or
ever-practical, he does not say. It is morally impossible to
fix the sum; and, he adds, “l’Eglise n’ayant rien décidé sur
ce point,” (how much the thief might be killed for), ‘ e¢
nayant condamné quune proposition, (31° du Décret dIn-

* Vol. i. p. 322. “* None of our duels,” he says, “ would find in these purely me-
taphysical decisions, any principle of justification.” (Vol.i. p.325.) If Layman
says, “ Je n’ose pas condamner ”—(not “je ne vois pas qu’on puisse condamner,”

’ —here is one of Pascal’s “ falsifications”), “a courtier, or soldier who accepts

a duel, for fear of losing place or favour, through suspicion of cowardice,” it
is, says M. Maynard, “a question not about a vain point of honour, but only
about the right of self-defence when threatened with considerable loss, — which
explains the illusion of the Casuists :” and besides, this “is only in rare cases, almost
chimerical ones.” (Vol. i. p. 325.) If Jesuits are quoted, saying that “ we may kill
false-witnesses,” we are told that it was not they only, for “ that this doctrine was
then common in the schools ;” but the Jesuits regard it as lawful only “ en ce qui
touche la conscience, c’est a dire, suivant le droit naturel, rigoureux, en dehors des
prohibitions positives, et des inconvénients qui en sont inséparable dans la pra-
tique.” (Vol i.p.327.) “ The Casuists, evidently, reason almost always for men
in a state of nature, obliged to do justice for themselves ; this is what they call
speculation ; but in practice, that is, in the state of society, they forbid it absolutely,
in conscience and before God, and not for fear of the judges and executioner.”
—Vol.i. p. 334.
{ Vol. i. pp. 337, 338.

546 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

nocent XI.) qui autorisait & tuer pour un écu d'or, somme—
réguliérement parlant insuffisante, on doit étre trés-réservé &

cet égard.” *

To take another subject, Pascal accuses the Casuists of ex-
plaining away the duty of attention in the acts of worship.
The Church tells men to go to mass; it is hard to imagine
for what purpose but to pray, and to pray rightly; and
equally hard to imagine, how any other way of going could
be prescribed, or thought of. But it was not so simple a
matter, and gave rise to great questions, about how, and when,
and with what intention the precept was to be satisfied.
There were pros and cons on the subject; there was a severe
school which exacted attention; another which maintained
that the Church cannot command internal acts. As an
extreme specimen of what could be put out to the world on
this point, we will quote the following passage from Cara-
muel, whose name will be remembered by readers of Pascal
—nota Jesuit, though a warm admirer of the order, and an
enthusiastic votary of the “‘ generous and clement” way of philo-
sophising about moral questions. The Casuist Diana was said
by envious rivals, “ esse agnum Det, qui tollit peceata mundi.”
Caramuel is explaining the phrase in Diana’s honour f:—

“Let Navarrus,” he says, “and the old Casuists have their own
glory; let them be lions and get praise for their severity; be you
the lamb, praised for benignity. Let those who please follow
the lions—those who distrust with me their own frailty will more
wisely follow you. iz sunt,” he proceeds, “qui cum mulieribus
non sunt coinquinati; virgines enim sunt, et sequuntur agnum
gquocunque ierit.”

* Voli. p. 310.

+ It occurs in a letter to the Sicilian Casuist Diana, also not a Jesuit, in
which Caramuel sets forth his friend Diana’s European reputation and well-
grounded claims to promotion at the hands of the Holy See. Diana was the
Casuist whose “ industry had made many opinions probable which were not so
before.” “ ‘Tota emulorum oblocutio pervenit ad columnas Herculis cum dicunt,
Dianam esse Agnum Dei qui tollit peccata mundi. Idem ego frequenter inculco
ut te commendem, . . . cujus industria multas opiniones evasisse probabiles
que antea non erant. Si jam sint probabiles que antea non erant, jam non
peccant qui eas sequuntur, licet antea peccaverint : ergo si ejusmodi peccata ab
orbe literario Diana sustulit, merito dicetur esse Agnum,” &c. ‘ae

es ———s

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 547

Of this he gives the following allegorical exposition : —

“ These are the disciples and admirers of Diana. The opinions
of Doctors at this day ‘differunt genere.” Some are masculine,
others feminine, not to speak of neuters. In the last century there
were many moral opinions, defenceless, inconsistent, difficult, la-
bouring under all the imperfection of women—they have been
succeeded by others, well guarded, consistent, and very easy; and
they who look with favour on these later opinions are not only
warriors, but virgins. But why? I will shortly explain. Na-
varrus, and all who require internal attention in the Divine Office,
for instance, considering the liveliness of the human mind, con-
clude that a man can scarcely, or not at all, satisfy the duty without
some venial distraction; and so with equal solidity they philoso-
phise about the other precepts. But we, who on the other hand
take a generous view, and confirm our opinion by armed reasoning,
are not only warriors but virgins: for we can so satisfy ‘the Hours,’
and also the other precepts of the Church, so as not to fall into even
a light fault. For continued exercise (prolatio), and every exter-
nal act, is most easy; and human laws of superiors, ecclesiastical
or secular, do not enjoin internal ones. Then the conscience which
has wrought without venial sin is a virgin, and most brave cham-
pion, which fears not to be conquered, for she cannot be, against
her will. So we hold, and because hither we have been led by this
‘Regular’ Lamb*, philosophising generously and with clemency,
we follow the Lamb (that is, Diana) whithersoever he goeth. For
we are sure that his doctrines are confirmed by so large a number
of theologians, that it is enough, when any one asks whether this
or that is lawful, to answer, AYTOS E®A, i. e. Diana dixit.”—
Caram. Theol. Fundam. pp. 23,24. Francof. 1652.

An extravagance of the seventeenth century, it may be
said. We should say so, for ourselves. This Caramuel von
Lobeowitz we should have looked upon simply as the buffoon
and jack-pudding of casuistry. . But we are checked by M.
Maynard, who, while disclaiming all obligation to defend one
who was not a Jesuit, informs us that he was a “ Bishop, and
a very virtuous one, though a man of ardent imagination
rather than of solid judgment;” and, though allowing that
Caramuel made many mistakes in his book, exerts himself

* Diana was a Canon-Regular.
NN 2

548 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

with ludicrous gravity to put a creditable construction on his
famous ‘ conclusto conclusionum” and its corollary, why
Jesuits may not kill Jansenists.* And we find, further, that,
whatever we may think of him, he had a brilliant and suc-
cessful career.t ‘* His moral doctrines in theology, indeed,
were so decried, that those who are furthest from rigorism
would not like to be suspected of the smallest leaning towards
his opinions;” t but they cannot be said to have hindered

his honours or promotions.

But now, let us see how, not Caramuel, but M. Maynard,
speaks of the kindred decision of certain theologians, that * it
was sufficient to be present at mass in body, though absent in
mind, pourvu quwon demeure dans une contenance respectueuse
extérieurement.” On this, M. Maynard observes as follows:
the diffidence of himself and his client are remarkable, in the
presence of the “ great theologians,” whom they venture to
differ from, or to follow with reluctance : —

“This decision, like the following ones, appears at least singular,
in its abstract form. But it depends on a question long debated
among theologians; whether the Church can command an internal
act, either directly, or at least indirectly, so far as it is necessary
for giving to the external act a real virtue. After a great number
of authors whom he cites, Coninch maintains the negative, out of
respect, he says, for S. Thomas,” (because there can be no com-
mand, but so far as there is power to punish, and, therefore, power
to judge: and the Church, except in confession, cannot judge
and punish internal acts.) ‘ According to this opinion, which we
do not hold, but which has been defended by great theologians,
Coninch advances, 1. That the ecclesiastical precept is satisfied by

* Letter 7th, vol. i. p. 341.
+ He wrote seventy-seven large volumes. He converted 2,500 heretics. He

fought against the Swedes at Prague, at the head of his troop of drilled ecclesi-
astics. He was the Envoy of the King of Spain to the Emperor. He shone at
Salamanca, Alcala, and Louvain. He was successively Titular Abbot of Melrose,
and Vicar-General of the Cistercians in England, Abbot of Dissenburg, Bishop
of Niessy, and Suffragan to the Archbishop of Mayence, Vicar-General to the
Archbishop of Prague, Bishop of Konisgratz. ‘The year after Pascai had been
quoting him in Paris, Alexander VII. gave him the bishopric of Campagna, and
to supply his printing expenses, the King of Spain that of Vigevano, in which
he died in 1682.

t Biog. Univ.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 549

hearing mass without bringing to it any interior affection, provided
that one be present with external respect, so as to exercise truly
an external act of religion, and be in external communion of prayer
with the priest. But, 2. he adds, what Pascal has taken good care
not to say,—that so a man violates the precept of natural right,
bidding us to attend mass with devotion, and sins against the
respect due to God and the holy mysteries. ‘Thus understood, the
sentiment may be false, and we believe it such; but it does not
in any way facilitate the use of holy things, and does not lead either
to contempt of the sacrifice, or impiety, or even to negligence in
the accomplishment of religious duties. Besides, it was not
common fo all the Jesuits, and.several of their theologians, as
Suarez, Azor, Reginaldus, have supported the necessity of interior
attention.”— Vol. i. pp. 435, 436.

Unless the restrictions reduce the rule simply to no sense
at all, it certainly seems considerably “ to facilitate the use of
holy things.” A precept of the Church—to violate which is
mortal sin—restrained exclusively to the external act, though
about a religious duty, which, to be worth doing at all, must be
an inward act,—satisfied as a precept, yet involving sin in the
mode of satisfying;—the doctrine maintained stoutly by great
and wise doctors, and yet, though intelligible only as a practi-
cal matter, condemned by its maintainers, except in specula-
tion ; — all this presents a curious union of conditions. The
practical Escobar, however, goes a step further. He lays
down, that mass may be heard “ comme il faut,” by a person
not only absent in mind, but intent on bad thoughts, and pre-
sent for the purpose of indulging them: ‘‘ qu’une méchante
intention, . . . « jointe a celle douir la messe comme il faut,
nempéche pas quon n'y satisfasse.” Very shocking, indeed,
says M. Maynard; but what can you do? you may be out
of temper with Escobar, but Escobar will answer you that
he is simply arguing from a doctrine maintained by great
authorities, about the “comme il faut” of hearing mass:
no one can help “ logical consequences :” —

“Cette vilaine proposition est inexcusable, bien qu’elle suive
assez logiquement du sentiment que l’Eglise ne commande pas les
actes intérieurs.” — Vol. i. p. 487.

NWN

550 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. -

Besides, he supposes, ali the time, that the outward attention
to the service is kept up simultaneously : ‘71 suppose toujours,
que attention extérieure subsiste.” Then M. Maynard bids us
observe that i] ne justifie pas ces mauvais regards dans la
circonstance ; encore moins en eux-mémes, et il y verrait vo-
lontiers un infame sacrilége.” But having done what was
candid in admitting, in Escobar’s name as well as his own,
that this would be “an inféme sacrilége,” and for himself,
that Escobar’s conclusion was a “ vilaine proposition,” he pro-
ceeds to express his inability to see what can be the harm of
it, or what people can mean by quibbling about such a trifle:
** Puis pour la pratique, il nous est impossible de comprendre
en quot tout cela peut nuire a la picté Catholique: ce sont de
subtilités desprit misérables, scabreuses méme, si Ton veut,”
(candid man!) “et rien de plus.” Why then put these
miserable subtleties in practical books? Oh! he says, they
have their use; practical questions for confessors may arise,
which they may be wanted to answer. On pourrait, ce-
pendant, ajouter, que toutes ces questions n’étaient pas absolu-
ment otseuses, et quwelles tendatent a décider si, quelque pit
étre la péché commis par le pénitent pendant la messe, il était
obligé dentendre une autre.” So that, rather than trust the
confessor’s common sense, to settle whether, to comply with
the command of the Church, a man who had abominably pro-
faned one mass was bound to hear another, Escobar might
* tend to decide it” by putting in his book that the Church’s
precept could be satisfied by an “ infaéme sacrilége,” without
erring, apparently, in more than judgment. Is there much
difference between Caramuel and M. Maynard ?

We will take one more case ; — that of what M. Maynard
terms the ‘‘ theory of equivocations and mental restrictions :”*
a theory, which, he says, “ had been known in the schools for
“two centuries; ” and so far from the Jesuits having been
its inventors, “at the date of the Provinciales, it would not

have been easy to find more than three or four theologians -

of an opposite sentiment.” ‘ A doctrine so universally
adopted must have solid foundations ;” and, as it has con-
* Vide Lettre IX., voi. i. p. 420.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 551

tinued to be taught in the Church by strict theologians, even
after the condemnation of certain propositions by the Pope,
we must conclude that only its abuses were condemned.

How, he says, can you do without some theory to reconcile
veracity with other often conflicting duties? and what harm
can there be in this one, when its maintainers tell you, never
to apply or use equivocation, when it is not right, or in a
wrong way? The following exposé of its principles is stated
to be but an analysis of the learned Jesuit Sanchez: —

“Tt is necessary,” he begins, “first, to shelter from all ac-
cusation of falsehood divers holy personages of the Bible, who
appear in word and deed to have departed from the way of simple
and straightforward truth, e. g. Abraham and Isaac, Jacob calling
himself the eldest son to his father, the angel of Tobias taking the
name of some high person in Israel. Several saints of the New
Testament appear to have had recourse to equivocation; and cer-
tain expressions of our Lord are hard to explain in their obvious
and natural sense.”

Then, after noticing that a man is often placed between con-
tradictory obligations, he states as follows the distinctions by
which the Casuists saved equivocation from the guilt of lying,
and guarded its right use: —

“The objections to the ‘system of equivocations’ are obvious;
but any other system is just as open to difficulty, especially as
applied to the facts of the Bible. Nevertheless, the holders of
the system of equivocation could not rest under the charge of
excusing lies and deceit. So they establish two sorts of re-
strictions, one allowed, the other forbidden; the ‘purely mental,’
where it is absolutely impossible to discover the truth, and the
‘sensible,’ of which the sense might be discovered by certain signs
or circumstances, though more often it must remain hidden. Again,
they distinguished between the equivocation sensible, and the equi-
vocation at pleasure (forgée & plaisir), of which the meaning is
purely arbitrary.

“In this manner, say they, not only is a person without the
‘intention of deceiving, but he does not necessarily deceive at all,
because it is possible to discover the truth; and there is no injustice,
for it is assumed that one party has no right to know, nor the other
to reveal the truth. So there is no wish to ‘faire aceroire une

NR 4

552 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

chose fausse, as Pascal says; such an intention would be con-
demned by all theologians. Moreover, there is no mischief done
to human society, for equivocations are not recurred to under every
circumstance, but in exceptional cases, where there are grave in-
conveniences in discovering the truth, and a real necessity and
duty to keep it silent.”— Vol. i. pp. 421, 422.

So far for general statement. If a theory were true
because it is wanted, it is clear that it is often inconvenient,
hard, undesirable — sometimes wrong, to state truth. But,
as M. Maynard truly remarks, “the real difficulty is in its
application.” Does it help us out of our perplexities? The
difficulties of astronomy remained after the invention of cycles
and epicycles. M. Maynard admits, indeed, that in their ap-
plication of the “solid” and safe principles, the theologians
were occasionally mistaken ; but, ‘‘ why should that be made
a crime in them? ”

Pascal, for instance, quotes from Sanchez, “ that we may
swear that we have not done something which we have done, by
understanding mentally, that we did not do it on such a day, or
before we were born, or with some such circumstances.” Here
is certainly a very definite way of using equivocation, and
escaping, we are told, lying or perjury. M, Maynard appears
to think that it only wants the rules, conditions, and restric-
tions, omitted by Pascal, to make it a practical solution of
possible perplexities. But it seems, that all the conditions
necessary are contained in the passage which we have quoted
above—an analysis of this same Sanchez.* M. Maynard is
easily satisfied. Pascal goes on to another particular case, yet
stronger. Filliucci is more definite even than Sanchez; and M.
Maynard appears—we cannot say for certain more—to accept
this also, as a satisfactory way of escaping from the difficulties
of veracity. At any rate he will not give up Filliucci. Pascal
observes, that he says that Sanchez’s method of equivocation
is neither lie nor perjury : — |

*“Parceque c’est ‘Vintention qui régle la qualité de Vaction.’
Et il y donne encore une autre moyen plus stir d’éviter le mensonge.
C’est qu’aprés avoir dit tout haut, Je gure que je n'ai point fait

* Voli. p, 424.

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 553

celd, on ajoute tout bas, aujourd’hui; ou qu’aprés avoir dit tout
haut, Je jure, on dise tout bas, que je dis; et que lon continue
ensuite tout haut, que je n'ai point fait cela. Vous voyez bien que
c'est dire la vérité. Je l’avoue, lui dis-je ; mais nous trouverions,
peut-étre, que c’est dire la vérité tout bas, et un mensonge tout
haut: outre, que je craindrais que bien de gens n’eussent pas assez
de présence d’esprit pour se servir de ces méthodes. Nos péres,
dit-il, ont enseigné au méme lieu, en faveur de ceux qui ne sau-
raient pas user de ces restrictions, qu'il leur suffit, pour ne point
mentir, de dire simplement, quwils n’ont point fait ce quils ont fait,
pourvu quwils aient en général l’intention de donner a leur dis-
cours le sens qu’un habile homme y donnerait.”

We will here quote the curiously stated decisions of the
Penitentiary on “ Amphibologia,” and then our readers may
judge for themselves of M. Maynard’s comments on him and
on Pascal. Filliucci,— after stating, on the question,
‘whether, if the amphibologia be solely mental, it is lawful
to swear ?’ that it 7s a probable opinion that it is not lawful,
but a more probable one that it is; ‘for that, out of the word
spoken and the mental restriction is made one compound
speech in which is no falsehood, and that it is free for a man
to compound his speech of terms spoken and mental;’ and
after proving this by S. Gregory, who says that ‘ the Prophet
sometimes joined the word which one sounded by the mouth,
to the word of the mind, which is reason,’—confirms his
position thus: ‘It is confirmed by the example of Christ’s
words, “ of that day no man knows,” and “ I go not up to this
feast,” in which one thing is said in the outward words, and
another understood in the internal ones.’ He then says that
the mental restriction ought not to be arbitrary, but propor-
tionate to the words and matter, so that, with explanation,
the words might be understood in the intended sense; and
he gives the following rules, ‘ ad utendum amphibologid.’

“Fourthly, I inquire, with what caution must amphibologia be
used? I answer, and say, first, besides what has just been ob-
served, two modes may be assigned for persons endued with judg-
ment; the first is, to have the intention of expressing the outward
words materially, and for greater security ; when the person begins,
for instance, by saying, I swear that—to interpose in a low voice

554 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

the mental restriction, to-day—and then to add in a loud voice,
‘I did not eat this or that;’ or, ‘I swear that’—then interpose,
‘I say that’—then finish in a loud voice, ‘I did not do this
or that:” for so the whole speech is most true. The second way
is, to have the intention of not completing the speech merely by
external words, but, at the same time, with a mental restriction ;
for a man is at liberty to express his mind wholly or partially.
But for the untaught, who cannot understand ambiguous ex-
pression in the particular (pro rudibus qui nesciunt in particulari
concipere amphibologiam,) it is sufficient if they have the intention
of affirming or denying in the sense which in reality contains
truth; for which it is necessarysthat they should know, at least in
the universal, that they can deny in some true sense, otherwise
they could not speak in a true sense.”

He then says that this mode of expression by ambiguous
words, especially where the restriction is mental, is not to be
used without a “just cause ;” otherwise a fault is committed;
and if with an oath, a grave fault; and proceeds to inquire
what sort of fault. Is it a lie? and, if sworn to, perjury ?
He answers, that it is probable that it is, and gives reasons
why ; but more probable that it is not: —

“I say, in the second place, that it seems more probable that
in strictness it is not a lie or perjury. The principal reason,
is, that he who so speaks and swears has not the intention of
saying what is false, or swearing to it, as is presupposed; and
what is expressed, in strictness has some true sense, which the person
intends ; therefore he does not lie (from Navarr. cap. Humane
Aures, 22,9, 5). For the intention characterises (discernit) the
action. It is confirmed from S. Thomas, 2, 2, 9, 55, Art. 3, where
cunning (astutia) is said to be the vice contrary to prudence;
but he who uses ‘amphibologia’ is, at the utmost, astute ; there-
fore, &c... But it is not repugnant to human truth and good
faith, because it is not opposed to it by a defect of truth, but
by an excessive occultation of truth. Hence it is that to confirm
this by an oath is not strictly perjury, but a certain want of
religiousness (irreligiositas quedam), and if there be scandal,
from the outward semblance of perjury, it will be reduced to
the evil of that; which [evil] has most place in ambiguous ex-
pression with mental restriction, as Suarez rightly teaches.” — Fell.
Moral. Quest. Tr. xxv. cap. xi. nn. 325—331.

See eee

4
4
q
q

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 555

- Such is Filliucci’s statement, little more than copied, as is
the wont of these writers, even to the illustrations, from a
predecessor — in this case, one of the greatest of the Casuists,
Suarez. M. Maynard thus excepts to Pascal’s use of it: —

“We have nearly the same thing to say of Filliucci as of
Sanchez. ‘This principle, that ‘the intention regulates the quality
of the action, has been quoted by Pascal in a very dishonest way.
It means merely that we must never, even in the case of mental
restriction, have the intention to deceive, but only to hide a truth
which our neighbour has no right to know. Such is also the
sense of the general rule, ‘to have the intention to give to our
words the sense which a clever man (un habile homme) would give
them.’ This rule is for the ignorant who may use ambiguous
terms (cette régle est pour les ignorants qui useraient damphi-
bologie). As it is never allowed to speak contrary to our thought,
then, if they do not understand the expedient which they use (s’ils
ne comprennent pas le tour dont ils se servent), they ought to have
the intention in general of giving to it the sense which a clever
man would give it.”—-Vol. i. p. 425.

There is something delightful in the simplicity with which
M. Maynard disposes of the matter, by merely tacitly trans-
lating the restriction which Filliucci thinks sufficient. We
must add, as we have so often had the distinction between
speculation and practice, that Suarez, the original authority,
assures us that this doctrine, so stated, is “ practice securis-
sima.” *

These are the sort of subjects on which, according to M.
Maynard, men cannot be expected to be of one mind — the
subjects to which the doctrine of Probabilism applies. «If
there are in morals some points which are certain, there are
others which are not, which come into the domain of the
probable, and of opinion. Do what we will, take up what
system we please, there will always be controverted prin-
ciples, embarrassing cases, through which we cannot guide
ourselves by a certainty and evidence which do not exist,
but only by the glimmering twilight of reasons or autho-

* Suarez de Rel. tom. ii. tr. 4. lib. iii, c. 10. n. 4.

556 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

tities more or less plausible.”* The men whom Pascal
accuses of such diversity of sentiment are, he says, agreed,
“ first on all the principles which are certain or defined by

Scripture, tradition, and the Church; then on all the doc-

trines commonly received in the Catholic schools. As for
controverted opinions, whatever system of morals we embrace,
we shall never be agreed.” +

But he treats with scorn the idea that these open ques-

tions, and, as he allows very often, singular solutions of them,
could have the smallest effect on feeling, opinion, or practice.
He coolly parallels them to the books of medical and legal
science,—an analogy which might perhaps do for the questions,
if they had not the answers to them. We must oppose to
M. Maynard’s opinion, one which on this point is at least as
“ probable.” Ona matter of fact, at least, the authority of
the famous Caramuel may be of weight. An injudicious
director may yet be a fair witness, especially against himself;
and so great was his confidence in his favourite science, that
he could afford the admission that M. Maynard shrinks from.
Caramuel attests the fact, that “inconvenience” did result
from many of the most probable opinions of the schools ; only
he thinks it a very paltry argument to infer, that therefore
they are not probable : —

“You will say that from this doctrine” [he is speaking, we
may observe, of the famous conclusio conclusionum of Pascal’s
seventh Letter] “ many inconveniences [ or, awkward consequences |
arise, and therefore it is to be rejected. And I answer, that to say,
‘From such and such an assertion great dangers and mischiefs arise,
therefore it is false,’ is not a good consequence.” [ He then instances,
e.g. an assertion which might throw a whole kingdom into a revo-
lution, yet would not be the less true, and proceeds—it will be
observed that we are quoting him only as a witness to fact, |
«‘ Hence it is that I judge that the highest inconveniences (summa in-
convenientia) follow from many opinions which are at this day in
vogue in the schools, yet that these opinions are not therefore im-
probable. For many inconveniences arise from mental restrictions ;
many from secret compensations ; many from the permission to hill

* Voli. p.199. _ + Vol. i. p. 241.

ee

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 557

an unjust judge or witness, which some grant; many also from
the opinion, which teaches, that of secret things the Church
judges not; many from others; notwithstanding which incon-
veniences, these opinions, in the terms in which they are at this day
delivered in the schools, are at the very least most probable, and
may not be condemned by any (sunt ad minimum probabilissime,
et a nemine damnari possunt).”— Theolog. Fundam. No. 1150.
Ed. France. 1652.

Now to all this we are quite aware that there is a sum-
mary and specious answer. It is, that the Popes, in spite of
Caramuel, have condemned these discreditable opinions, and
banished them for ever from the teaching of the Church.
Whatever might be said inconsiderately in 1650, yet when
Alexander VII. and Innocent XI. spoke, a few years later,
Jesuits andall submitted with absolute reverence to the decision
of Rome, and no theologian can be cited who has since then
said these things.

To this a rejoinder might be supposed, that it was but a
make-believe condemnation, or one brought about accidentally
by the policy or revenge of the moment; that when Rome
meant to condemn in earnest, as in the case of the Jansenists,
there was no mistake in her way of doing it; that here,
though she happened to fix on most of the propositions quoted
by Pascal, she simply condemned them in their bare literal
sense, and said nothing as to why and how she condemned
them; that Casuists might still treat the censures as sullen
lawyers do an Act of Parliament,—maintain that their method
was unrebuked, and that the propositions were condemned,
not as morally shocking, but merely verbally inexact, and that
they might still hold others next door to them with impunity.
It might be urged, that, apparently, they had only become
wrong, since and because the Popes condemned them, and
that the Pope’s previous tolerance indicates, that it was little
more than a formal stigma.

On the other hand, it might be said, that it is unfair thus
to explain away the obvious purport of the Popes’ act; that
we ought to take it for what it looks like—the condem-
nation of a dangerous mode of thought or expression in

558 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

certain palpable samples of it, as Jansenism was condemned
in the Five Propositions, or in the 101 of the Bull Unigenitus ;
that the propositions are nearly the same as those which
Bossuet got condemned by the Assembly of 1700, and we
know that he condemned in them the spirit and system which
had produced them.

Now how does M. Maynard deal with this? For it is
obvious that for him, in proportion as it removes one difficulty,
it brings in another. Apparently, at least, if it clears the
Popes, it compromises the Casuists; and in proportion as we
give weight and significance to the condemnation, it seems to
fix on them the load of a mischievous and at length intoler-
able teaching,—intolerable, even to that very authority, of
which they were the champions. The fact, of course, he
more than admits. “ Long before 1679,” he says, ‘the
Jesuits had been able to cite more than thirty of their theo-
logians, anterior even to the Provinciales, on the necessity of
the love of God in penitence. With much stronger reason,
then, did they abstain, after the pontifical sentence, to teach
any of the propositions condemned by Innocent XI.” *
Whether the mistake was practical, “these men, who were
led astray by benevolent and pure intentions, to impose on
weak men the least burden possible,—renounced their error
as soon as it was pointed out to them by their superiors, and
especially by the Holy See; and thus the evil was dried up at
its source; ”t or whether it was but mere speculation, “ they
_ renounced even their abstractions, as soon as any point of

doctrine had been prescribed by the Holy See. Thus it
would be impossible to cite a single theologian who has per-
mitted the murder of the unjust judge, or of the false witnesses,
since the censure of the 18th proposition of the decree of
Alexander VII.; and the most celebrated authors,” it is
added, with some boldness of assertion, ‘* had not waited till
then to condemn it in their works.”{ We do not for a
moment doubt their submission; yet M. Maynard seems to
make more of a merit of it than is quite intelligible. ~The

* Vol. i, p. 183. + Vol. i. p. 210. t Voli. p. 304.

j
—_r

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 559

sacrifice of submitting to be debarred from such propositions
as that “ the love of God is not necessary for penitence,” or
that “ we may seek occasions of sin for our own good or that
of our neighbour,” does not seem so very hard, any more
than the glory very singular of not having maintained them.

But we should, it appears, be grossly mistaken, if we saw
in these censures any such condemnation, or even discoun-
tenancing, of principles, or methods of arguing or stating, as
the Bull Unigenitus is of Jansenismasawhole. The decrees
of Alexander and Innocent are, we are told to observe, cen-
sures, not of doctrines, but of propositions. The propositions
are given up, of course; and there is an end of the matter.
But the authors are not named, and are therefore untouched.
What the Church has decided upon, is nothing but certain
extreme and lax applications of a recognised way of treating
moral questions. The propositions are to be taken one by
one, as separate, isolated, for the most part trifling, or
accidental mistakes, each to be set down to the account of
him who made it: and who does not make mistakes? And
as we are not to gather from the censure, that the Church
meant to notice them as an aggregate and significant pheno-
menon, such as Pascal sees in them; so, on each subject
touched by the propositions, beyond the strict letter of the
proposition censured, the condemnation does not reach.

It was, for instance, as M. Maynard tells us, a common doc-
trine at the time in the schools*—by no means confined to
the Jesuits, and, indeed, not accepted by several of them —
that it is lawful to kill beforehand-false witnesses against us.
“ Speculatively, indeed,” says M. Maynard f, “it will be
legitimate, for it flows logically from natural right, general
principles, and analogy with permitted cases;” and it is
difficult to see, in what this “horrible consequence ” “ differs
from the case of unjust aggression and lawful self-defence.”
And the theologians “added almost always,” that, speeula-
tively only, was it lawful. Turned into practice, “it would
involve an almost inevitable sin.” Therefore, and so far only,
it was condemned. Practical dangers, (which for once

* Vol. i. p. $27. ¢ Vol.i. pp. 303, 304,

560 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

M. Maynard admits, ) “ caused to be absolutely condemned by
the Popes a certain number of propositions on this subject
certainly admissible in principle and in theory. But the theo-
logians who confined themselves within the limits of pure abstrac-
tion and metaphysical precision are not touched by these censures.”
The general doctrine on homicide, which Pascal imputes to
the Jesuits, is not merely unjustly made peculiar to them, but
“*has never been condemned by the Church.” *

So with the “systéme des équivoques,” which we have already
alluded to:—

“The adversaries of this system,” says M. Maynard, “ point
to the propositions condemned by Innocent XI. and the clergy
of France in 1700. It would be singular enough,” he proceeds,
“that if the system of equivocations was absolutely condemned,
it should continue to be taught by a great number of theologians
with the full cognizance of the Church, and by theologians, too,
very little suspected of relaxed moral opinions. . . . We must sup-
pose, therefore, that it is only the abuses and excesses of the system
which are touched by the censure. That this answer is founded in
reason may be seen by the examination of the condemned proposi-
tions. The 26th of those censured by Innocent XI. permits,
without distinction, every restriction, even purely mental, under
every circumstance, with or without reason ; the 27th measures the
use of it only by the private advantage of him who uses it, with-
out regard to the public interest, often opposed to private, or
to the exceptions laid down by theologians; the 28th authorizes
reservations in cases where the public good, law, and morality
require a plain and straightforward oath, by a culpable abuse
of the principle, that a man is not obliged to avow a secret crime ;
and in other ways it tends to favour intrigue and bad means of
‘arriving at employments.”—Vol. i. pp. 423, 424.

Again, P. Bauny asks, “ Les valets qui se plaignent de leurs
gages peuvent ils @eux-mémes les croitre en se garnissant les
mains dautant de bien appartenant a leur maitres, comme ils
s’ imaginent en étre nécessaire pour égaler les dits gages a leur
peine?” and answers, “ Ils le peuvent, en quelques rencontres,
comme lors-quils sont si pauvres en cherchant condition, qwils
ont été obliger d’accepter Voffre qu’on leur a faite, ou que les
autres valets de leur sorte gagnent d'avantage ailleurs.” ** Voila,”

* Voli. p. 810,

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 561

says M. Maynard, “ encore une matiére fort délicate. Inno-
cent XI. and the Assembly of 1700 have condemned the
proposition, that ‘ men-servants and maid-servants may take in
secret from their masters, wherewith to compensate their labour,
which they judge to be greater than the salary which they
receive.” This condemnation seems absolute and clear; and
M. Maynard says the doctrine is a blameable one, inasmuch
as it leaves the estimation of the value to the interested
party, and opens the gate to an infinity of domestic thefts.
But, he adds, not even P. Bauny taught this proposition. For,
he proceeds to ask, —‘“ Follows it from this condemnation
that in certain circumstances, infinitely rare if we please,
servants may not use secret compensation?” Not at all.
He observes that, as between creditor and debtor in ge-
neral, it is “‘ certainly permitted” to the creditor, under certain
conditions, to use “ secret compensation: ” such conditions as
that the debt is unquestionable, strictly due, irrecoverable by
course of law, and that this “secret compensation” do no harm
toa third party, or expose the debtor to the chance of a second
payment. ‘The principle is proved by the example of Jacob
and Laban, and the Israelites in Egypt. The concourse of
conditions is rare, and therefore it is a question rather specu-
lative than practical; but where they do concur, all theolo-
gians allow it. Now, what are servants but creditors, and
why should they be debarred the general rights of creditors?
By all means, he says, make more severe conditions for them,
as they are more liable to make mistakes —“ a la bonne heure
—mais doit-on les priver absolument du droit de compenser
eux-mémes les injustices de maitres durs et impitoyables? Les
théologiens, Jésuites ou non, n'ont pas eu ce triste courage.”
Now all that P. Bauny means, says M. Maynard, is this, to
put servants on the footing of other creditors ; “secret compen-
sation,” he thinks, is allowable to servants: —1. when agree-
ment for increase of wages in proportion to increased usefulness
is not kept; 2. when servants have been forced into a service
for fear of starving. But even so, Bauny will not allow it
them, when they have been taken out of pure compas-
sion, or at their own request, or are not under worse
00

562 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

condition than others. “ Avec ces limitations, la décision de
Bauny west pas dangereuse, surtout si le confesseur est laissé
juge, et bien rarement trouvera-t-il son application.” * Thus
Bauny is proved not to have taught the condemned proposition.
The condemnation and Bauny are both right. And so the
honour of both Pope and Casuist is judiciously reconciled.
But it brings forcibly before us how difficult a thing it must
be to ** condemn” a proposition.

So much for the effect of the condemnation. It is a fait
accompli, to be treated with all respect. But M. Maynard
suggests that nevertheless its importance is diminished, if we
consider its history. ‘The condemnation by Innocent XI.
was a sort of accident; when the propositions were forced on
the attention of the Pope, he could not but condemn them ;
but that they were so forced on him, was owing to the un-
lucky failure of Louis XIV.’s judicious attempt to catch the
Jansenist agents on the road to Rome, and stop them from
getting to the Pope.

“Madame de Sevigné is too amusing,” he observes, “‘ when she
affects so much pity for her ‘pauvres fréres,’ whom she makes
into victims when they were really persecutors. ... ‘ Louis
XIV. was therefore wise in placing his agents on the great
roads to prevent any such communications between the Pope
and the Jansenists. But he did not succeed in barring that
passage to them, and the denunciation reached Innocent XI.
The Pope then pronounced on the question of fact, not on that
of right, and condemned, in 1679, the sixty-five propositions,
as he was bound to condemn them, wherever found, to show that
the Church does not approve laxities in morality. But he did
not attribute them to the Jesuits, nor condemn the Jesuits as
corrupters of morality.” —Vol. i. pp. 182, 183.

Though it was an inopportune question, the Pope’s decision,
when forced, could be but one way, and wasright. A modest
foot-note, however, ventures further to insinuate the intrusion
of a cause, which takes off still more from the weight and
significance, though not the formal effect, of the act. The

7

* Vol. i. pp. 294—296..

ee ee le

; F
:

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 563

Jesuits knew the Pope’s duty better than himself sometimes;
but a price must be paid for helping a man in spite of him-
self : — =

“ We must observe, that Innocent XI. did not love the Jesuits,
and wished to change their Institute. He was a great and
holy Pontiff, but inflexible even to harshness, jealous of his
rights even to obstinacy, and impracticable when his authority
was in question. In the affair of the Regale, the Jesuits had
shown themselves more French than Roman. He had sent them
his briefs, which the Parliament suppressed, with orders to publish
them and certify their authenticity. The Jesuits remained neuter,
et ne voulurent pas se rendre impossibles en France en sopposant
aux lois duroyaume. He had even entrusted to P. Dez a brief of
excommunication against Lou's XIV., but the Jesuit took care not
to publish it. He kept it secret, to leave the Pope time for
reflection; and in fact Innocent XI. withdrew it himself, ac-
knowledging in the end how wise had been the conduct of the
Jesuits. This, however, did not prevent him from entertaining a
grudge against them ; and the condemnation of the sixty-five pro-
positions, though just in itself, was without doubt an act of
revenge.’ —Vol. i. p. 183.

From a writer who, as against Jansenism, treats the con-
demnation of propositions as a solemn judgment of Infallibility,
not on the bare letter of isolated sentences, but on the spirit
and meaning of a coherent system of doctrine, this is re-
markable. Which is the true interpretation of the censures,
must be settled in the Roman Church, between those who
think most, like Bossuet, about the meaning of the propo-
sitions, and those who feel most, like M. Maynard, about the
honour of the Jesuits. But it seems at least ambiguous,
whether it is public feeling or the censures of Rome, which

prevents Escobars and Caramuels from appearing now.

Such is M. Maynard’s way of vindicating a system, whose
speculations and practical decisions ranged with equal bold-
ness and equal solemnity, and with equal arbitrariness in
relaxing or tightening, from the obligation of the first and
great commandment, to the problem whether chocolate were

oo 2

564 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

meat or drink*, or whether, and in what shape, using
tobacco violated the eucharistic fast. + Weare familiar with
the gross exaggerations of its meaning and design, made for
party purposes —for a Maynooth bill, for instance —on one
side. Here we have equally gross shuffling and effrontery,
to get rid of obvious facts, on the other. We are not going
here to reduce and adjust these rival extravagances; but it
seems as if, to fair examination, that the truth does not lie
very deep.

If we look into the history of this casuistry, its first cause
is to be sought in the inherited habits of thought, which had
been formed in the middle-age schools. The extravagant
licence of speculating and deciding had passed from doctrine

* “ Quid de potione in Hispania, aut Occidentali India, dicta vulgo ‘ choco-
late?’ Aliquando dixi pro potu haberi, sed parum meriti jejunio relinquere ob
vires, quas jejunanti adjicit, omnino inedia sublata, aut impedita; nec absolute
cuperem usum hujusce potionis, uti mortificationi jejunii ab Ecclesiz intents
apprime adversantem ; at magis authoritati adherens quam rationi, potum esse
assero, sed non uti condit abusus, sed quemamodum potio ab Indis ad Hispaniam
pervenit. Unde ‘chocolate’ ovis aut lacte conditum potus non est, sed cibus
substantialissimus. Item hujusmodi potio admodum crassa in notabili quantitate
jejunium violat. Verum ‘chocolate’ liquidum adeo, ut unicz potioni uncia una
adhibeatur saccharo necessario potus est, et absque scrupulo absumi potest.
Unicam potionem appello quod capit commune vas, quod vicara vulgo assolet
appellari. Quod si assignata proportione ea potionis quantitas condiatur, licet
vas non semel evacuetur, jejunium non solvitur, temperantia fortasse violata,
quia potus est, quemadmodum de vino asserimus.” — Escobar, Tr. i. Exam. xiii.
cap. 3. Praxis sec. S. J. de Jejunio. ;

+ “ I regula est: ad frangendum jejunium requiritur ut accipiatur aliquid
per modum comestionis aut potationis: quare communiter dicunt Suar. Lugo,
Conc. Holzm. Rone. Escob. Croix, Elb., quicquid dicant aliqui pauci, non ledere
jejun. tabacum per nares sumtum, licet aliquid illius descenderet in stomachum,
ratione allata ... saltem ait Bened. XIV. hoc est permissum propter usum
universalem inter fideles receptum.

“ Pariter, tabaci fumus ore haustus non frangit jejun., ut etiam communiter
cocent Suar. Vill. Trullenc., &c. cum eodem Bened. XIV. qui similiter testatur
hance esse hodiernam consuetudinem, confirmatam communi DD. consensu. Li-
initant tamen Salmant., et dicunt frangere jejun. qui ex proposito transmitteret
fumum in stomachum, dicendo quod hee esset vera comestio, dum talis fumus
etiam aliquo modo nutriret ; sed hac limitatio communius et probabilius negatur
ab Escob. Prep. March. Viva, Spor. Renzi. Tamb. Diana, &c. Et ratio est,
quia fumus non sumitur per modum cibi, nec est cibus in se comestibilis au,
manducabilis, quem voluerit Ecclesia prohibere, juxta communem DD. sensum.’
Liguori, Hom, Ap. Tract. xv. p. 3. n, 38. 39.

. See
3 r
'

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 565

to questions of morality and conscience ; it was the fashion

and mania of the day; serious men competed in the hardi-
hood and strangeness of their solutions, and good men seemed
to take a pride in finding out how much they could allow—
in speculation at any rate—to be lawful. Conditions, re-
strictions, distinctions multiplied of course; but so did the
authorities and decisions, inventing doubts, extending liberty,
and taking away scruples. It is all done in these countless
folios of Moral Theology, just as if casuistical questions had
no more to do with real human action than with the moye-
ments of the stars—all for the mere pleasure of speculating,
with the zest of a race in avoiding a corner, and the inven-
tiveness of a legal debate, in pressing or giving the slip to
the letter of an Act of Parliament.

Its next cause was the practical needs of a system of dis-

‘cipline —the endeavour to fix what cannot be fixed, the

limits, in every possible case, of mortal sin. Casuistry may
be a natural growth of the wants of conscience, and its place
in a system like that of Rome is obvious. Whether it can
supply those wants or not, the attempt to do so may doubtless
be made with fairness and soberness; and it is impossible to
doubt the ability or religious mind of many, whose meditations
it has engaged. Such, in spite of Pascal, were Suarez and
Vasquez. But its extent and its utility are limited; and the
mischief of which it may be the occasion is obvious, if it
becomes formal, or attempts to supersede or overshadow the
individual conscience. And its tendency to do so was plainly
visible even in the best writers of the class. Doubtless moral
questions are very important and often very hard ones. But
there are endless questions on which no answer can be given
except a bad one,— which cannot be answered, in the shape
proposed, at all. We may think it very desirable to be able to
state in the abstract, yet for practical use, the extreme cases,
which excuse killing, or taking what is not our own; but if
we cannot get beyond decisions, which leave the door open
for unquestionable murders or thefts, or shut it only by vague
verbal restrictions, unexplained and inexplicable, about “ pru-
dence,” and ‘‘ moderation,” and “necessity,” and “ gravity of cir-

oo 3

566 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

cumstances,” it is a practical illustration of the difficulty of this |
extreme casuistry, which seems to point out, that unless we can
do better, we had best leave it alone. Butts professors were
hard to daunt. They could not indeed trust the consciences
of mankind with principles of duty, but they could trust
without a misgiving their own dialectic forms, as a calculus
which nothing could resist. Nothing in the feelings or actions
of men was too fleeting, too complicated, too subtle to be
grasped, analysed, expressed and laid up for use, by means of
the verbal technicalities of their method. No question would
they dismiss as insoluble om absurd. The consequence was
twofold. Their method often did fail, and in the attempt
to give exact formule of right and wrong action, they proved
unable to express the right without comprehending the wrong
with it. Then, as it was not their way to re-open and re-
examine their received principles, they were driven on that
strange maxim for a practical philosophy—that much might be
lawful in speculation which was unlawful in practice. They
did not shrink from consequences: but they, or at least their
defenders, took refuge in the alleged unfairness of taking
them at their word. But it is scarcely possible to believe that
this scientific impotence was the only consequence of their
misdirected labour. From all evil designs the leaders, at any
rate, may be safely absolved; though whether they did not
lose their sense of the reality of human action, in the formal
terms in which they contemplated it, may be a question.
But though the design of corrupting morality is one of the
most improbable charges against any men, the effect may more
easily follow, even where not intended. When great autho-
rities lay down conclusions which seem to relax the strength
of obligation, man must cease to be the creature of affected
self-deceit and mixed character, which we know him to be, if
any verbal guarding can save them from misleading him —
misleading under the pretence of obedience. These Casuists
would not trust the individual conscience ; and it had its re-
venge. They were driven onwards till they had no choice
left between talking nonsense, or what was worse. They
would ticket, and control, and provide for the most evanescent

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 567

and mixed forms of will and feeling. They would set con-
science to rights in minutest detail; and so they had to take
the responsibility of whatever could not be set to rights.
They claimed to lay down exactly the measure and shape of
every form of stealing; so whenever the letter of their rules
did not hold, there was no stealing. Nature outwitted them ;
it gave up its liberty in the gross, and then forced them to
surrender it again in detail. Nay, it made them avowedly
allow for its waywardness, in the rules they laid down, as the
price of its submission to control at all. And thus, at length,
under the treatment of compilers and abridgers, and under the
influence of that idea of authority, which deferred to opinions *
on the same rule as it deferred to testimony, — exhibited in
the coarsest brevity, and with the affectation of outbidding the
boldest precedents, —grew up that form of casuistry which is
exhibited in the Escobars and Baunys; which professing to
be the indispensable aid to common sense, envelopes it in a
very Charybdis of discordant opinions; amid whose grotesque
suppositions, and whimsical distinctions, and vague yet per-
emptory rules, bandied about between metaphysics and real
life, the mind sinks into a hopeless confusion of moral ideas,
and loses every clue to simple and straightforward action.

A modern reader is more disposed to see in it stupid
pedantry, than mischief. Able and serious men of the time,
on the other hand, were revolted in seeing stupid pedantry
pretending to be the guide of human conduct, and showing it-
self off as the latest invention of modern wisdom. Doubtless
both views may be exaggerated. The system may have done
good in its earlier and healthier state; possibly it may also
have been too antiquated and worn out to do as much evil as
would seem likely, in its subsequent formal overgrowth. If
it is said to have been too absurd to be important, we can

* “Une opinion probable est celle qui a un fondement considérable. Or
Yautorité d’un homme savant et pieux n’est pas de petite considération, mais
plutot de grande considération. Car si le témoignage d’un tel homme est de grand
poids pour nous assurer qu’une chose se soit passée, par exemple & Rome, pourquot
ne le sera-t-il pas de méme dans un doute de morale.” —Sanchez, quoted in Prov. V.,
vol. i. p. 240.

568 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

understand if we do not accept the view. But it is asking a
hard thing to beg us to believe, as M. Maynard does, both
that these decisions were harmless, and that, with a few ex-
ceptions, they were very wise; both that they had a practical
use and effect, and yet were not mischievous. If it can be
made out that they are only matter for laughing, we are quite
as much inclined to laugh as to be indignant: but if we are to
be serious about them, there is only one way of being so.

One point more remains to be noticed. ‘“ Cecitatis due
species facile concurrunt,” says an old writer, “ ut gui non vident
que sunt, videre videantur qute non sunt.” The remark is
singularly borne out here. So convinced is M. Maynard of
the evil of the Jansenist doctrine and system of direction, in
exacting so much and such strict preparation for absolution
and communion, and insisting so strongly on their uselessness
and danger without a real change of life, that in one way only
can he account for it.* It isimpossible, it appears to him, that
men could state the claims of religion so rigorously, except
for one object, to drive men to refuse them altogether. Accord-
ingly, he comes to the serious conclusion, that Jansenius, S.
Cyran, and Arnauld were disguised infidels ; and labours to
show, from a story of the time, coupled with their otherwise
inexplicable severity, that Port Royal was a deistical plot, as a
Jesuit of the day expressed it, “ to ruin the mystery of the In-
carnation, to make the Gospel pass for an apocryphal story, to
exterminate the Christian religion, and to raise up Deism on the
ruins of Christianity.”

Such is the only way in which M. Maynard can explain
the appearance in the seventeenth century, in his own com-
munion, of the austere language of the Fathers of the Church,

* For instance, he quotes from S, Cyran, —“ Pour recevoir le sacrement de
l’Eucharistie, il faut étre en état de grace, avoir fait pénitence de ces péchés, et
n’étre pas attaché, ni par volonté ni par négligence, a aucune chose qui! puisse

“éplaire & Dieu.” “Ceux qui demeurent yolontairement dans les moindres
fautes et imperfections sont indignes du sacrement de l’Eucharistie ;” with
passages recommending the newly converted, or those guilty of some special sin,
to abstain for a time from communion. On this M. Maynard can only put the
construction, “ Traduction libre mais exacte de tous ces passages ; ‘ne communiez
jamais, car vous en étes et en serez toujours indignes.’” — Vol. ii. pp. 219, 220. —

Ee

oe Te ee

PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM. 569.

And this is not a passing insinuation. As P. Brisacier as-
sured the Jansenists that he called them * gates of hell and
pontiffs of the devil,” not ‘* par forme @injure, mais par la
force de la vérité;” so M. Maynard maintains, in a special
essay * of sixteen closely printed pages, the high historical
probability of the Jansenist plot of Bourg-Fontaine, for the
annihilation of Christianity. “ Si Taxiome de logique,” he
says, “ ‘ ab actu ad posse valet illatio,’ peut trouver ici son appli-
cation, on doit conclure qwil est au moins FORT POSSIBLE que le
dessein de détruire le Christianisme ait été pris a Bourg-Fontaine,
car les différents points qui l'auraient composé ont été essayés
par S. Cyran et ses disciples; voila qui est incontestable.” ...
*< Pour conclure en un mot; des preuves indirectes et retroac-
tives semblent établir la réalité du projet de Bourg-Fontaine ;
des preuves péremptoires démontrent que la fot de Port Royal
sur les Sacrements, sur [ Eucharistie, sur [ Eglise, et sur
[essence méme du Christianisme, étaient au moins suspectes.
Quand méme ils se seraient trompés sur quelques points, les
Jésuites étaient ni téméraires ni calomniateurs dans leurs
accusations.” +—** Le croyez-vous vous-mémes, misérables que
vous étes ?” was Pascal’s indignant challenge to his opponents
then, and it is the only one worth giving at any time.

This reminds us that we have spent more time than enough
on M. Maynard. Some of that famous order of which he has
made himself the champion, might afford him precedents in
deliberately arguing for moral paradoxes. P. Hardouin com-
prised Pascal in his list of Atheists. P. Raynauld proved a
heresy in every article of the Apostles’ Creed. But, one of
them, at least, probably both, did it in joke. M. Maynard has
forgotten Scaliger’s wise saying, Ars est etiam maledicendi.
The most determined enemy of §. Cyran or Arnauld, who at
this day should affect to doubt their Tridentine faith about
Penance and the Eucharist, would peril his character for
candour; but the man who gravely pretends to maintain, and
asks us to believe, that they were deliberate infidels, is far
past criticism. It would be as fair to talk ofa league between

* Introd. a la 16me Provine, vol. ii. pp. 215—231.
{ Vol. ii. pp. 218, 231.

570 PASCAL AND ULTRAMONTANISM.

Xavier and the Bonzes of Japan, and as rational to speculate
on the secret Christianity of the devotees of Juggernaut.

Here we take our leave of him. Yet he has laid us under
an obligation. He has realised to us the Jesuit father of the
Provincial Letters,—no longer, indeed, in an unsuspicious
and communicative, but in an irritated mood— a well-mean-
ing man, and as far as possible from purposing any harm, but
dulled into a positive incapacity for perceiving that there is
any harm in what is wrong, if his friends say it.

But, after all, this man is but a blind and injudicious re-
peater, —seduced into print by that cheap gift which French-
men have, a plausible and flimsy rhetoric,— of the views and
assertions of De Maistre.* He but represents that way of
theorizing, now, it seems, fashionable in the Roman Church,
which itself does, what is its heaviest and justest charge
against many opponents of that Church—which prefers to
call good evil, rather than submit to be checked and controlled
by facts. He but follows the stream, and talks, as he can,
the fearless sophistry which he hears admired. The French
Church has still, we know, among her bishops and working

clergy, and instructors of youth, names not unworthy of the

Church of Bossuet and 8. Vincent de Paul. But we can-
not congratulate her, if Mr. Maynard is an average specimen
of the men who are promoted to her titular dignities, set over
the education of her dioceses}, and encouraged to publish by
the “favourable opinion of the highest ecclesiastical au-
thority existing in France.”

* V.De Maistre, de l’Eglise Gallicane; the parallel between Hobbes and

Jansenius.
+ “Appelé 4 travailler auprés de vous & la grande ceuvre de l’éducation.”—

Dedication to the Bishop of Agen.

THE END.

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