THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

JULY, 1896.

No. CCCLXXVII.

ART. I.-1. Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. By EDMUND SHERIDAN PURCELL, Member of the Roman Academy of Letters, in 2 Vols. London : 1896. 2. William George Ward and the Catholic Revival. By WILFRID WARD, author of William George Ward and the 'Oxford Movement.' London : 1893.

THE 'Life of Cardinal Manning' has probably excited more attention than any book of a serious character which has appeared in this country for some time. So much indeed. has been said about it that it seems hardly worth while to discuss its contents at any great length; but it is, perhaps, not undesirable to make its publication an occasion for sketching in outline the Catholic reaction of our times, and of enquiring how far it has succeeded and how far it has failed.

The eighteenth century, which Castelar, looking back through the long vista of years to the Christian era, has called the humanitarian century par excellence,' saw the end of many injustices and of many follies. The amount of human happiness in Christendom, just before the French Revolution broke out, was probably greater than at any previous period, and the amount of virtue, too; for Turgot was quite right when he said: Many who pass for good-fornothing people amongst ourselves would have been thought very Capuchins a hundred years ago.' All this improvement, however, had been followed in the last decade of the century by great catastrophes; and these had been worst in what was, on the whole, the most advanced of European countries. The storm which had burst over France had destroyed a

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great deal that deserved to live, along with not a little that richly deserved to be improved off the face of creation. Great as had been the corruption of the French Church, and pitiable as had been its shortcomings, it ought to have the credit of much of the heroism and most of the resignation, which shone so conspicuously among the victims of the Revolution in all ranks of society. It was natural accordingly, when that tyranny was overpast, that the minds of men and women should turn once again towards the ideas which had done so much for some of the most tried of their contemporaries, and that their thoughts should find ere long literary expression. The literary reaction against the despotism of what Carlyle would have called the arithmetical understanding, which in the first half of our excellent and 'indispensable' eighteenth century measured everything by a foot-rule, began in England. Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry' has sometimes been considered as the first work which turned the current, and carried men's thoughts back to antiquity; but in truth it is difficult to fix on any one name or any one moment for the birth of Romanticism. Suffice it to say that it was already in the air soon after the eighteenth century had passed its meridian. From England it found its way to France and Germany, to lie hidden underground until after the great political cataclysm which was approaching, but none the less destined to play a most important part in the story of the age that was immediately to succeed that world-shaking event.

A German historian, quoted by Mr. Wilfrid Ward in the second volume of the life of his father, dates the commencement of the Catholic reaction in France from the publication in the first year of the century of Chateaubriand's 'Atala.' Perhaps he is right; but some would be inclined rather to fix on the year 1802, when the Génie du Christianisme' appeared. It is difficult to understand how this book should have made the impression which it did. It had, however, the enormous merit of freshness. The subject with which it deals had never been treated quite in the same way before, and it was offered to the eyes of many readers, to whom not a few of its doctrines, which had been stale truisms to their fathers, were new discoveries. There still remained, too, a considerable number of persons who, having been attached by the heart even more than by the head to the old religion before the evil days, had grown doubly attached to it during the terrible years in which they lost its consolations altogether, or could only obtain them amidst

difficulties and dangers which rendered them doubly precious.

The Concordat with Rome, which was almost contemporaneous with the commencement of Chateaubriand's literary career, replaced the Church-not, indeed, in its old preeminence, but at least in a legal and endurable position. Still, in those troubled times, when only the earthquake voice of victory or the dirges of defeat were audible, the philosophic side of religious questions excited but little interest. It was not till four years after Waterloo that the new movement found its statesman in the Savoyard Count Joseph de Maistre, whose book on the Pope produced immense results which are felt to the present day in every corner of the world; for the centralising movement, begun by him, destroyed eventually the old Gallicanism, and brought that added strength to the Papacy which was advertised to all the ends of the earth by the Vatican Council of 1870. If M. de Maistre was the statesman, the Vicomte de Bonald was the philosopher of the new school, the founder of the system known as traditionalism, which, in the words of Mr. Wilfrid Ward, 'seeks the basis of moral 'knowledge in a primitive revelation preserved by the col'lective reason of mankind.' He was the inspirer of that great and irregular genius, the Abbé de Lamennais, who, in the earlier stages of his career, went even beyond his teacher in the fervour, not to say fury, of his Ultramontanism.

Lamennais, after a youth in which periods of rather careless living alternated with their opposite, threw himself, as he approached middle life, with all the impetuosity of his Celtic nature, into the Ultramontanism of Fénelon, reinforced by that of De Maistre. The first of his works which produced a great sensation was the Essay on Indifference,' published in 1817. Its success was immediate, and for a time the French clergy thought they had found a spokesman such as they had not had for several generations. Ere long, however, doubts and questionings arose. The Court, at once very clerical and very Gallican, looked coldly upon a priest who was all too devoted to the Vatican, and thought all too little of the eldest son of the Church. Its attitude tended to make him more inclined to Liberal politics, to fix his aspirations upon bringing the Church into harmony, not with the king, but with the people. Those aspirations were destined to lead him far, to take him outside the pale of Catholicism and into the very centre of the democratic movement. The impulse which he had given,

however, to Ultramontanism lived on in the French Church long after he had ceased to have anything to do with it, and, in its present condition of complete and willing subservience to papal authority we must recognise, as almost more powerful than any other influence, that of Lamennais as he was in the first period of his public life. The breach between him and Rome was brought about by the affair of the 'Avenir,' a newspaper founded, in the beginning of the reign of Louis Philippe, by him and two men of whom we shall have to speak presently-the Abbé Lacordaire and the Count de Montalembert. These three, whose views were much disapproved by the clerical authorities of their own country, went to Rome, in 1832, to appeal to the Pope, but failed to obtain any support. Lacordaire and Montalembert submitted, but Lameunais, after doing so for a moment, broke away. Submission was never much in his line. As his friend Sainte-Beuve remarked, 'He was an eagle who 'sadly required his St. John to guide and look after him.'

The new movement had not been helped but hindered by the Restoration, and it was not until after the fall of the elder branch that it produced a great preacher. This was the Abbé Lacordaire, who, having begun life as an advocate with Voltairian opinions, was converted in 1824, and entered Saint-Sulpice, on leaving which he became connected with Lamennais and Montalembert, went as we have seen with them to Rome, submitted to the condemnation, and found, ere long, the true outlet for his splendid abilities in 1834 in the pulpit of the Collège Stanislas, and in 1835 in that of Notre-Dame. From that time to his death he remained the first pulpit orator of France, or, if surpassed by anyone, then by the Jesuit Père de Ravignan alone. In genius he was undoubtedly superior to that very remarkable man, of whom Lord Coleridge, an admirable judge of eloquence, said that he had opened to him a new chapter in the human mind; but he was inferior, perhaps, in persuasive power. This he thought himself, for Ravignan having said to him one day, 'I hear that at your last sermon people climbed up and sat on the confessionals,' 'Yes,' was the reply, but it is you who can make them enter the confessionals.' It was natural that one who had such oratorical gifts as Lacordaire should have wished to resuscitate in France the order called into existence by Saint Dominic for the purpose of preaching. This he did, and he would have considered it no doubt his principal work; but, in spite of his love of solitude, he touched life on a variety of sides. Many

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will remember Matthew Arnold's account of his great educational establishment at Sorèze, published in 1864 under the name of 'A French Eton.' He was elected, too, to the Assembly in 1848, and, although he soon found that he had little in common with the politicians of the Left, amongst whom he took his seat, he remained constant to his political principles. I die,' he said, when his end was near at hand, a penitent Catholic, but an impenitent Liberal.'

The political orator of the movement, the chief link between it and the stirring, active world, was the brilliant Count Charles de Montalembert, whose outlook on things in general was widened by his belonging to two countries, for his mother was one of the Forbeses of Corsindae in Aberdeenshire, and he was brought up in early life by his excellent grandfather, the author of the Oriental Memoirs.' He threw himself into the Catholic reaction, dreamt dreams of reconciling it with all the liberal tendencies of the age, and took for his motto God and Liberty.' Not unfrequently he fell into grave mistakes, as when he made a man, with whom he, after all, had so little in common as Daniel O'Connell, the idol of his youth, and gave his sanctionhappily only for a time-to the usurpation of Louis Napoleon. In the main, however, he was, alike in public and in private, one of the most interesting and sympathetic figures which France has produced in our times. His admiration for the English constitution and for liberty, as we understand it, stood him in good stead in dealing both with political and religious questions. Perhaps he never rose higher than he did at the Catholic Congress which was held in 1863 at Mechlin, the Rome of Flanders,' where, amidst the applause of a great multitude who hailed him as the son of the Crusaders,' he made an appeal in favour of religious freedom.

The Catholic reaction in France never possessed a poet who continued throughout life so devoted to it as was the preacher Lacordaire, or Montalembert, the Parliamentary orator; but it may fairly claim the earlier and perhaps the best work of Lamartine, who, born in 1790, had been much influenced by Chateaubriand, and sprang into fame on the publication, in 1820, of his Méditations.'

In the high places of the hierarchy the most characteristic representative of the movement was perhaps Dupanloup, who, having come into great prominence when Talleyrand was reconciled to the Church, became the head of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, and brought up there a great