It occurred in the beautiful gardens of the Paris exposition during
that summer of 1867 when Glory and France were synonymous expressions.
To the music, cynical and voluptuous, of Offenbach and Strauss the
world enjoyed itself, applauding equally Renan's latest book and
Thérésa's vulgarity; amused by Ponson de Terrail's fatuous indecencies
and speaking of Proudhon in the same breath. Bismarck and his Prussians
seemed far away. Babel or Pompeii? The tower of the Second Empire
reached to the clouds; below, the people danced on the edge of the
crater. A time for prophets and their lamentations. Jeremiah walked in
the gardens. He was a terrible man, with sombre fatidical gaze, eyes
in which were the smothered fires of hatred. His thin hair waved in
the wind. He said to his friends: "I come from the Tuileries Palace;
it is not yet consumed; the Barbarians delay their coming. What is
Attila doing?" He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a companion to Henri
Lasserre. "Not in the least," replied that writer. "He is Ernest
Hello." After reading this episode as related by Hello's friend and
editor, the disquieting figure is evoked of that son of Hanan, who
prowled through the streets of the holy city in the year A.D. 62 crying
aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" The prophecy of Hello was realized
in a few years. Attila came and Attila went, and after his departure
the polemical writer, who could be both a spouting volcano and a subtle
doctor of theology, wrote his masterpiece, L'Homme, a remarkable book,
a seed-bearing book.
Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? He was born 1828, died
1885, and was a voluminous author, who wrote much for the _Univers_ and
other periodicals and passed away as he had lived, fighting in harness
for the truths of his religion. Possibly the less sensitive texture of
Louis Veuillot's mind and character threw the talents of Hello into
shadow; perhaps his avowed hatred of mediocrity, his Old Testament
power of vituperation, and his apocalyptic style militated against his
acceptance by the majority of Roman Catholic readers. Notwithstanding
his gifts as a writer and thinker, Hello was never popular, and it is
only a few years ago that his works began to be republished. Let us
hasten to add that they are rich in suggestion for lovers of apologetic
or hortatory literature.
It was Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont who sent me to the amazing
Hello. In A Rebours Huysmans discusses him with Léon Bloy, Barbey
d'Aurevilly, and Ozanam. "Hello is a cunning engineer of the soul, a
skilful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism
of a passion and to explain the play of a wheel work." United to his
power of analysis there is the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet and the
tortured ingenuity of a master of style. A little John of Patmos, one
who, complex and precious, is a sort of epileptic mystic--vindictive,
proud, a despiser of the commonplace. All these things was Hello
to Huysmans, who did not seem to relish him very much. De Gourmont
described him as one who believed with genius. A believing genius he
was, Ernest Hello, and his genius, his dynamic faith--apart from any
consideration of his qualities as a prose artist or his extraordinary
powers of analysis. Without his faith, which was, one is tempted to
add, his thematic material, he might have been a huge force vainly
flapping his wings in the void, or, as Lasserre puts it, he was
impatient with God because of His infinite patience. He longed to
see Him strike dumb the enemies of His revealed word. He lived in a
continuous thunder-storm of the spirit. He was a mystic, yet a warrior
on the fighting line of the church militant.
Joachim of Flora has written: "The true ascetic counts nothing his
own save his harp." Hello, less subjective than Newman, less lyric
though a "son of thunder," counted but the harp of his faith. All
else he cast away. And this faith was published to the heathen with
the hot rhetoric of a propagandist. The nations must be aroused from
their slumber. He whirls his readers off their feet by the torrential
flow of his argument. He never winds calmly into his subject, but
smites vehemently the opening bars of his hardy discourse. He writes
pure, untroubled prose at times, the line, if agitated, unbroken,
the balance of sound and sense perfect. But too often he employs a
staccato, declamatory, tropical, inflated style which recalls Victor
Hugo at his worst; the short sentence; the single paragraph; the
vicious abuse of antithesis; if it were not for the subject-matter
whole pages might masquerade as the explosive mannerisms of Hugo.
"Christianity is _naturally_ impossible. However, it exists. Therefore
it is supernatural!" This is Hello logic. Or, speaking of St. Joseph
of Cupertino: "If he had not existed, no one could have invented
him," which is a very witty inversion of Voltaire's celebrated _mot_.
God-intoxicated as were St. Francis of Assisi or Père Ratisbonne,
Hello was not; when absent from the tripod of vaticination he was a
meek, loving man; then the walls of his _Turris eburnea_ echoed the
inevitable: _Ora pro nobis!_ Even when the soul seems empty, it may,
like a hollow shell, murmur of eternity. Hello's faith was in the
fourth spiritual dimension. It demanded the affirmation of his virile
intellect and the concurrence of his overarching emotional temperament.
In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he resembles both Remenyi,
the Hungarian violin virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist.
The brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth belligerent,
disputatious, and the chin slightly receding. One would say a man of
violent passions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, a good
hater--did he not once propose a History of Hatred? Yet how submissive
he was to papal decrees; many of his books contain instead of a preface
his act of submission to Catholic dogma. More so than Huysmans was
he a mediæval man. For him modern science did not exist. The Angelic
Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and the powers and principalities
of darkness are as active in these days as in the age when the saints
of the desert warred with the demons of doubt and concupiscence. "To
wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's
greatest power," was a sentiment of Père Ravignan to which Hello would
have heartily subscribed. He detested Renan--_Renan, voilà l'ennemi!_
Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an abode crowded with a million dead
dogs would not be too severe a punishment for that silken sophist,
whose writings are the veriest flotsam and jetsam of a disordered
spiritual life. Hello has written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose
poetry he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon was a genius, but
a foe of God.
Shakespeare for him vacillated between obscenity and melancholy; Hamlet
was a character hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psychological
impossibility to one of his faith. He was convinced that the John of
the Apocalyptic books was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the
five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the Apostle. He has often
the colour of Bossuet's moral indignation. A master of theological
odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, Anathema, Anathème,
Amen!" His favourite symbol of confusion is Babel--Paris. He loved,
among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he extolled the study of St.
Thomas Aquinas. To the unhappy Abbé de Lamenais's Paroles d'un Croyant
(1834), he opposed his own Paroles de Dieu. He could have, phrase for
phrase, book for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietzsche's
vilification of Christianity. Society will again become a theocracy,
else pay the penalty in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he
cries aloud: "_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ Our Lord is at hand!" The next
we find him with the icy contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from
the Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century mystic whom he had
translated, whose writings influenced Huysmans, and at one period of
his development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave words: "Needs must
I rejoice beyond the age, though the world has horror of my joy, and
its grossness cannot understand what I say." Notwithstanding this
aloofness, there are some who after reading Ernest Hello's Man may
agree with Havelock Ellis: "Hello is the real psychologist of the
century, not Stendhal."
It is indeed a work of penetrating criticism and clairvoyance, this
study of man, of life. Read his analysis of the Miser and you will
recall Plautus or Molière. He has something of Saint-Simon's power in
presenting a finished portrait and La Bruyère's cameo concision. He
is reactionary in all that concerns modern æsthetics or the natural
sciences. There is but one science, the knowledge of God. Avoiding the
devious webs of metaphysics, he sets before us his ideas with a crystal
clarity. Despite its religious bias, L'Homme may be recommended as a
book for mundane minds. Nor is Le Siècle to be missed. Those views
of the world, of men and women, are written by a shrewd observer and
a profound thinker. Philosophie et Athéisme is just what its title
foretells--a battering-ram of dialectic. The scholastic learning of
Hello is enormous. He had at his back the Bible, the patristic writers,
the schoolmen, and all the moderns from De Maistre to Father Faber.
He execrated Modernism. Physionomies de Saintes, Angelo de Foligno,
and half a dozen other volumes prove how versed he was in Holy Writ.
"The Scriptures are an abysm," he declared. He wrote short stories,
Contes extraordinaires, which display excellent workmanship, no little
fantasy, yet are rather slow reading. In literature Hello was a belated
romantic, a Don Quixote of the ideal who charged ferociously the
windmills of indifference.
In 1881 he was a collaborator with an American religious publication
called _Propagateur Catholique_ (I give the French title because
I do not know whether it was published here or in Canada). His
contributions were incorporated later in his Words of God. I confess
to knowing little of Hello but his works, the Life by Lasserre being
out of print. Impressive as is his genius, it is often repellent,
because love of his fellow-man is not a dominant part of it. The
central flame burns brightly, fiercely; the tiny taper of charity is
often missing. With his beloved Ruysbroeck (Rusbrock, he names him)
he seems to be muttering too often a disdainful adieu to his gross
and ignorant brethren as if abandoning them to their lies and ruin.
However, his translation of this same Ruysbroeck is a genuine accession
to contemplative literature. And perhaps, if one too hastily criticises
the almost elemental faith of Hello and its rude assaults of the
portals of pride, luxury, and worldliness, perhaps the old wisdom may
cruelly rebound upon his detractors: "Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non
est Deus."