its deficiency of power to penetrate and subdue? Voltaire avowed that he
found the sermons of Massillon to be among "the most agreeable books we
have in our language. I love," he went on, "to have them read to me at
table." There are things in Massillon that Voltaire should not have
delighted to read, or to hear read--things that should have made him
wince and revolt, if they did not make him yield and be converted. Was
there fault in the preacher? Did he preach with professional, rather
than with personal, zeal? Did his hearers feel themselves secretly
acquitted by the man, at the self-same moment at which they were openly
condemned by the preacher? It is impossible to say. But Massillon's
virtue was not lofty and regal; however it may have been free from just
reproach. He was somewhat too capable of compliance. He was made bishop
of Clermont, and his promotion cost him the anguish of having to help
consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray.
Massillon's, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame.
Hierarch as he was, and orthodox Catholic, this most elegant of eloquent
orators had a liberal strain in his blood which allied him politically
with the "philosophers" of the time succeeding. He, with Fenelon, and
perhaps with Racine, makes seem less abrupt the transition in France
from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final revolution.
There is distinct advance in Massillon, and advance more than is
accounted for by his somewhat later time, toward the easier modern
spirit in Church and in State, from the high, unbending austerity of
that antique pontiff and minister, Bossuet.
In dealing with SAURIN we are irresistibly reminded of the train of
historic misfortunes that age after age have visited France. It bears
eloquent, if tragic testimony to the enduring noble qualities of the
French people, that they have survived so splendidly so much national
suicide. What other great nation is there that has continued great and
spilled so often her own best blood? The Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, with its sequel of frightful hemorrhage in the loss to France of
her Huguenots, the guillotine of the Revolution, the decimations of
Napoleon, the madness of the Franco-German war, the Commune!
To such reflections we are forced; for Jacques Saurin preached his great
sermons in French as a compulsory exile from France. He had a year or
two's experience as French preacher in London; but from his
twenty-eighth year till he died at fifty-two he was pastor of the French
church at The Hague in Holland.
Saurin's living renown was great; and his renown has never been less,
though it has been less resounding, since he died. This is as it could
not but be; for the reputation of Saurin as preacher rested from the
first on solid foundations that were not to be shaken. If he had been a
loyal Roman Catholic, he would have been twinned with Bossuet, whom he
somewhat resembles, in the acclamations of general fame. It is far more
in name than in merit that Bossuet surpasses him. Bossuet's
quasi-pontifical relation to the Gallican Church indeed engaged him in
various activities which seemed to display a talent in him
correspondingly more various than that of Saurin, who remained almost
exclusively a preacher. But the difference is probably a difference of
fortune rather than a difference of original gift. The intellect that
expresses itself in Saurin's sermons is certainly a spacious intellect.
Saurin is in mere intellect as distinctly "great" as is Bossuet. In
imagination, however, that attribute of genius as distinguished from
talent, to Bossuet we suppose must be accorded superiority over Saurin.
Clearness, French clearness; order, French order; solidity of matter;
sobriety of thought; soundness of doctrine; breadth of comprehension;
sagacity and instructedness of interpretation; solemnity of inculcation;
progress and cumulation of effect; strength and elevation, rather than
grace and winningness, of style; address to the understanding, rather
than appeal to the emotions; certitude of logic, rather than play of
imagination; a theological, more than a practical, tendency of
interest--such are the distinguishing characteristics of Saurin as
preacher.
Sermons are literary products in which change from fashion to fashion of
thought and of form makes itself felt more than in almost any other kind
of literature. The sermons of one age are generally doomed to be
obsolete in the age next following. But to this general rule Saurin's
sermons come near constituting an exception. They might, many of them,
perhaps most of them, still be preached. This, certain pulpit
plagiarists of a generation or two ago, are said to have learned.
The following extract will give our readers an idea how Saurin, toward
the close of a discourse--having now done, for the occasion, with
dispassionate argument--would follow up and press his hearer with
deliberately vehement, unescapable oratoric harangue and appeal. His
text is: "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world."
Analyzing this, he states thus his second head of discourse: "Motives
to virtue are superior to motives to vice."
What [under the first head] I affirmed of all known truth, that its
force is irresistible, I affirm, on the same principle, of all motives
to virtue: the most hardened sinners cannot resist them if they attend
to them; there is no other way of becoming insensible to them than to
turn the eyes away from them....
And where is the man so blinded as to digest the falsehoods which the
motives to vice imply? Where is the wretch desperate enough to reason
in this manner:
"I love to be esteemed; I will, therefore, devote myself exclusively
to acquiring the esteem of those men who, like me, will in a few days
be devoured by worms, and whose ashes will in a few days, like my own,
be mixed with the dust of the earth; but I will not take the least
pains to obtain the approbation of those noble intelligences, of those
sublime spirits, of those angels, of those seraphims, who are without
ceasing around the throne of God; I will not take the least pains to
have a share in those praises with which the great God will one day,
in the sight of heaven and of earth, crown those who have been
faithful to him.
"I love glory; I will therefore apply myself exclusively to make the
world say of me: That man has a taste quite exceptional in dress, his
table is delicately served, there has never been either base blood or
plebeian marriage in his family, nobody offends him with impunity, he
permits none but a respectful approach; but I will never take the
least pains to make envy itself say of me: That man fears God, he
prefers his duty above all other things, he thinks there is more
magnanimity in forgiving an affront than in revenging it, in being
holy than in being noble in the world's esteem, and so on.
"I am very fond of pleasure; I will therefore give myself wholly up to
gratify my senses, to lead a voluptuous life, to have the spectacle
follow the feast, debauchery the spectacle, and so on; but I will
never take the least pains to secure that _fullness of joy_ which is
at _God's right hand_, that _river of pleasure_ whereof he gives to
drink to those _who put their trust under the shadow of his wings_.
"I hate constraint and trouble; I will apply myself therefore
exclusively to escape the idea of emotions of penitence, above all,
the idea of prison cells, of exile, of the rack, of the stake; but I
will brave the chains of darkness with their weight, the demons with
their fury, hell with its torments, eternity with its horrors. I have
made my decision; I consent to curse eternally the day of my birth, to
look eternally upon annihilation as a blessing beyond price, to seek
eternally for death without being able to find it, to vomit eternally
blasphemies against my Creator, to hear eternally the howlings of the
damned, to howl eternally with them, and to be eternally, like them,
the object of that sentence, Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Once more,
Where is the wretch desperate enough to digest these propositions? Yet
these are the motives to vice.
To illustrate the point-blank directness, the almost excessive fidelity,
amounting to something very like truculence, with which Saurin would
train his guns and fire his broadsides into the faces and eyes of his
hearers, let the following, our final citation, serve; we quote from the
conclusion to a powerful sermon on infidelity:
Let us here put a period to this discourse. We turn to you, my
brethren.... You congratulate yourselves for the most part,... on
detesting infidelity, and on respecting religion. But shall we tell
you, my brethren, how odious soever the men are whom we have just been
describing, we know of others more odious still. There is a
restriction in the judgment which the prophet pronounces on the first,
when he calls them, in the words of my text, the most foolish and the
most brutish among the people; and there are men who surpass them in
brutality and in extravagance.
Do not think we exceed the truth of the matter, or that we are
endeavoring to obtain your attention by paradoxes. In all good faith,
I speak as I think, I find more refinement, and even, if I may venture
to say so, a less fund of corruption in men who, having resolved to
abandon themselves to the torrent of their passions, strive to
persuade themselves, either that there is no God in heaven, or that he
pays no attention to what men do on earth; than in those who,
believing in a God who sees them and heeds them, live as if they
believed nothing of the sort. Infidels were not able to support, in
their excesses, the idea of a benefactor outraged, of a Supreme Judge
provoked to anger, of an eternal salvation neglected, of a hell
braved, _a lake burning with fire and brimstone_, and _smoke ascending
up for ever and ever_. It was necessary, in order to give free course
to their passions it was necessary for them to put far away from their
eyes these terrifying objects, and to efface from their minds these
overwhelming truths.
But you, you who believe that there is a God in heaven, you who
believe yourselves under his eye, and who insult him without remorse
and without repentance, you who believe that this God holds the
thunderbolt in his hand to crush sinners, and who live in sin, you who
believe that there are devouring flames and chains of darkness, and
who brave their horrors, you who believe the soul immortal, and who
concern yourselves only with time; what forehead, what forehead of
brass, is the one you wear!
One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his
pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of
apostrophe, as he frequently does, personifying inanimate objects and
addressing them in the way of oratoric appeal, he is very apt to produce
a frigid effect, the absolute opposite of genuine eloquence. Nothing but
imagination white-hot with passion justifies, in the use of the orator,
the expedient of such apostrophe as this which Saurin affects. With
Saurin, both the necessary imagination and the necessary passion seem
somehow to fail; and he possessed neither the perfect judgment nor the
perfect taste, nor yet the fine feeling, that might have chastised the
audacities to which his ambition incited him. His rhetorically bold
things he did in a certain cold-blooded way; so that, with him, what
should have been the climax of oratoric effectiveness, or else not been
at all, produces sometimes instead a reaction and recoil of
disappointment. We thus indicate a shortcoming in Saurin which deposes
this great preacher, one is compelled to admit, despite his remarkable
merits, from the first into the second rank of orators.
Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant lines of French pulpit
eloquence are continued down to our own day. Lacordaire, Pere Felix,
Pere Hyacinthe, of the Catholics, Frederic Monod, Adolph Monod,
Coquerel, of the Protestants, are names worthy to be here set down; and
it may be added that Eugene Bersier, deceased in 1889, challenges on the
whole not unequal comparison with the men treated in this chapter for
pulpit power. He may be described as a kind of nineteenth-century
Bossuet, tempered to Massillon, among French Protestant preachers.
But there is no Louis XIV. now to cast over any great preachers, even of
the Roman Catholics, the illusive, factitious, reflected glory of the
person and court, the sentence and seal, of the "most illustrious
sovereign of the world."
The seventeenth-century sacred eloquence of France, the sacred
eloquence, that is to say, of the "great" French age, will always remain
a unique tradition in the history of the pulpit.
XIII.
FENELON.
1651-1715.
If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is
Fenelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one
might say, "the sublime Bossuet," "the saintly Fenelon," somewhat as one
says, "the learned Selden," "the judicious Hooker." It is as much a
French delight to idealize Fenelon an archangel Raphael, affable and
mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.
But saintliness of character was in Fenelon commended to the world by
equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve
might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fenelon, both
the exterior and the interior man:
Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.
The consent is general among those who saw Fenelon, and have left behind
them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius,
he was such as we thus describe him.
Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of
vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the
intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his
half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and
friendship to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become
famous. Young Fenelon's friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a
bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.
Until he was forty-two years old, Francois Fenelon lived in comparative
retirement, nourishing his genius with study, with contemplation, with
choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his
mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new
species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine,
and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be
verse, did not cease to be poetry.
The great world will presently involve Fenelon in the currents of
history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of
personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of
personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in
the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes,
which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to
dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church.
The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had
to be silenced. Fenelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and
win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of
coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success
was remarkable. But not even Fenelon quite escaped the infection of
violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise
wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.
The luster of Fenelon's name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission
among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man,
a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as
was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The
Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the
charge of Fenelon to be trained for future kingship. Never, probably, in
the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory
of a teacher could be more illustrious than actually was the victory of
Fenelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be
giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated
memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of the portrait in
words, drawn by him from life, of Fenelon's princely pupil, we transfer
here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:
In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of
Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was
passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks when
they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like, and of
flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it interfered with
what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into paroxysms of fury. I
speak of what I have often witnessed in his early youth. Moreover, an
ungovernable impulse drove him into whatever indulgence, bodily or
mental, was forbidden him. His sarcasm was so much the more cruel, as
it was witty and piquant, and as it seized with precision upon every
point open to ridicule. All this was sharpened by a vivacity of body
and of mind that proceeded to the degree of impetuosity, and that
during his early days never permitted him to learn any thing except by
doing two things at once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a
violent avidity, and all this with a pride and a haughtiness
impossible to describe; dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men
and things, and to detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and
to reason himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers.
But at the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed
her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes with
such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively, alert,
penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling literally
in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time piety and
grace made of him a different being, and transformed faults so
numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.
St. Simon attributes to Fenelon "every virtue under heaven"; but his way
was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable
change which, during Fenelon's charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over
the character of the prince.
The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern
proof of historical experiment whether Fenelon had indeed turned out one
Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or later,
of that royal line.
Before, however, the Duke of Burgundy was thus snatched away from the
perilous prospect of a throne, his beloved teacher was parted from him,
not indeed by death, but by what, to the archbishop's susceptible and
suffering spirit, was worse than death, by "disgrace." The disgrace was
such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the
sympathy, and the admiration of mankind. Fenelon lost the royal favor.
That was all--for the present; but that was much. He was banished from
court, and he ceased to be preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. The king,
in signal severity, used his own hand to strike Fenelon's name from the
list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop--for
Fenelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray--returned into
his diocese as into an exile. But his cup of humiliation was by no means
full. Bossuet will stain his own glory by following his exiled former
pupil and friend, with hostile pontifical rage, to crush him in his
retreat.
The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius and of
exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic--it was Madame
Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love God for himself
alone, purely and disinterestedly. Fenelon received the doctrine, and
Madame Guyon was patronized by Madame de Maintenon. Bossuet scented
heresy. He was too much a "natural man" to understand Madame Guyon. The
king was like the prelate, his minister, in spirit, and in consequent
incapacity. It was resolved that Fenelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But
Fenelon would not. He was very gentle, very conciliatory, but in fine he
would not. Controversy ensued, haughty, magisterial, domineering, on the
part of Bossuet; on the part of Fenelon, meek, docile, suasive. The
world wondered, and watched the duel. Fenelon finally did what king
James's translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had
done--he wrote a book, "The Maxims of the Saints." In this book, he
sought to show that the accepted and even canonized teachers of the
Church had taught the doctrine for which, in his own case and in the
case of Madame Guyon, condemnation was now invoked. Bossuet was pope at
Paris: and he, in full presence, denounced to the monarch the heresy of
Fenelon. At this moment of crisis for Fenelon, it happened that news was
brought him of the burning of his mansion at Cambray with all his books
and manuscripts. It will always be remembered that Fenelon only said:
"It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor
laboring-man."
Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfect frigid facility
separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was
carried to Rome, where at length Fenelon's book was condemned--condemned
mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have made the remark that
Fenelon erred by loving God too much, and Fenelon's antagonists by
loving their fellow-man too little. Fenelon bowed to the authority of
the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his error. It was
a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a
beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on
his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which
was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at
all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much
sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful
height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fenelon seems
to have been reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate.
"I have wept and prayed," he wrote to a friend, "for this old instructor
of my youth; but it is not true that I celebrated his obsequies in my
cathedral, and preached his funeral sermon. Such affectation, you know,
is foreign to my nature." The iron must have gone deep, to wring from
that gentle bosom even so much cry as this of wounded feeling.
It is hard to tell what might now have befallen Fenelon, in the way of
good fortune--he might even have been recalled to court, and
re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince--had not a sinister
incident, not to have been looked for, at an inopportune moment
occurred. The "Telemachus" appeared in print, and kindled a sudden flame
of popular feeling, which instantly spread in universal conflagration
over the face of Europe. This composition of Fenelon's the author had
written to convey, under a form of quasi-poetical fiction, lessons of
wisdom in government to the mind of his royal pupil. The existence of
the manuscript book would seem to have been intended to be a secret from
the king--indeed, from almost every one, except the pupil himself for
whose use it was made. But a copyist proved false to his trust, and
furnished a copy of "Telemachus" to a printer in Holland, who lost no
time in publishing a book so likely to sell. But the sale of the book
surpassed all expectation. Holland not only, but Belgium, Germany,
France, and England multiplied copies as fast as they could; still
Europe could not get copies as fast as she wanted them.