I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's _Port Royal_, a book I have often
thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that
period, always held me aloof. Happily, chance and mood came together,
and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth acquiring. It is the
kind of book which, one may reasonably say, tends to edification. One is
better for having lived a while with "Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best
of them were, surely, not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.
Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are among
theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the
early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which
seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint
of mortality.
A gallery of impressive and touching portraits. The great-souled M. de
Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre, who, at
the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to meditation and
penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs, his conflicts of
soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good Lancelot, ideal
schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical books; the vigorous
Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-suffering for the faith
that was in him; and all the smaller names--Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole,
Hamon--spirits of exquisite humility and sweetness--a perfume rises from
the page as one reads about them. But best of all I like M. de
Tillemont; I could have wished for myself even such a life as his;
wrapped in silence and calm, a life of gentle devotion and zealous study.
From the age of fourteen, he said, his intellect had occupied itself with
but one subject, that of ecclesiastical history. Rising at four o'clock,
he read and wrote until half-past nine in the evening, interrupting his
work only to say the Offices of the Church, and for a couple of hours'
breathing at mid-day. Few were his absences. When he had to make a
journey, he set forth on foot, staff in hand, and lightened the way by
singing to himself a psalm or canticle. This man of profound erudition
had as pure and simple a heart as ever dwelt in mortal. He loved to stop
by the road and talk with children, and knew how to hold their attention
whilst teaching them a lesson. Seeing boy or girl in charge of a cow, he
would ask: "How is it that you, a little child, are able to control that
animal, so much bigger and stronger?" And he would show the reason,
speaking of the human soul. All this about Tillemont is new to me; well
as I knew his name (from the pages of Gibbon), I thought of him merely as
the laborious and accurate compiler of historical materials. Admirable
as was his work, the spirit in which he performed it is the thing to
dwell upon; he studied for study's sake, and with no aim but truth; to
him it was a matter of indifference whether his learning ever became
known among men, and at any moment he would have given the fruits of his
labour to any one capable of making use of them.
Think of the world in which the Jansenists were living; the world of the
Fronde, of Richelieu and Mazarin, of his refulgent Majesty Louis XIV.
Contrast Port-Royal with Versailles, and--whatever one's judgment of
their religious and ecclesiastical aims--one must needs say that these
men lived with dignity. The Great Monarch is, in comparison, a poor,
sordid creature. One thinks of Moliere refused burial--the king's
contemptuous indifference for one who could do no more to amuse him being
a true measure of the royal greatness. Face to face with even the least
of these grave and pious men, how paltry and unclean are all those
courtly figures; not _there_ was dignity, in the palace chambers and the
stately gardens, but in the poor rooms where the solitaries of Port-Royal
prayed and studied and taught. Whether or not the ideal for mankind,
their life was worthy of man. And what is rarer than a life to which
that praise can be given?