Part 11

Faithful to his rule of allowing no stain to cling to the shield or sword of the church, he vehemently maintains (contradicting an assertion of Bacon's French translator) that the church has never opposed the progress of natural science. The translator had plainly affirmed that nothing had injured the church more than the clear demonstration of the truth of certain facts which it had long denied, and the proclaimers of which it had actually persecuted; and he had named Galileo as an example. After lauding the church as the patron of science in other cases, and trying as far as possible to explain away the case of Galileo, De Maistre is forced to make an admission. And this is how he does it: "Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, that is to say, by a court liable to err like any other, and which in this case actually was mistaken regarding the main point at issue; but Galileo in numberless ways damaged his own cause, and by his own repeated indiscretions brought upon himself a humiliation which he might easily, and without dishonour, have avoided.... If he had kept his promise not to write, if he had not been determined to find proof in Holy Scripture of the truth of the Copernican theory, if he had even written in Latin instead of unsettling the public mind by employing the vulgar tongue, nothing would have happened to him."

To the end De Maistre was true to his character; he would not yield a foot of the ground that had been lost centuries before.[2]

He is a great and fascinating personality, this successful advocate of a lost cause, which unmistakably gained ground during his lifetime. As the upholder of authority, of monarchy, and of the gloomy view of life, as the disputant, as the knight of Christianity, and as the scorner of science, he has a faint resemblance to Kierkegaard. But his system is an edifice of ideas relating to the outer, Kierkegaard's one of ideas relating to the inner, world.

De Maistre is the thoroughly convinced and vehement, yet cold-hearted champion of the principle of authority. There is heart in his letters, but there is none in his books. In them there is nothing but heated argument, propounded with much subtlety of logic and pungency of wit. In his sarcasm he often reminds us of Voltaire, and his grim delight in horrors at times recalls Swift. It gives him pleasure to astonish and to irritate. He loves paradox, because it makes him feel his superiority, because it perplexes the reader, and because it makes attack difficult, paradox being a redoubt which one can without dishonour evacuate before the assault.

His Christianity is an entirely external thing. He is a Christian as a man is a Protectionist or a Free-trader, on grounds of general theoretical conviction. His Christianity is a Christianity without brotherly love--nay, it is a Christianity without Christ as saviour and reconciler. In it Christ is only the sanguinary sacrifice demanded by the offended Deity--like Iphigenia or Jephthah's daughter. Faguet has aptly said that De Maistre's Christianity is "fear, passive obedience, and state religion." It is a Christianity which does not originate in Jerusalem, but in Rome; and he himself "is something in the nature of an officer of the Pope's bodyguard."

The most ardent assailant of the spirit and philosophy of the eighteenth century, the century in which he was born, has this in common with it, that he is destitute of the proper apprehension of history. He would fain ignore the eighteenth century, just as it was fain to ignore the Middle Ages. He is the counterpart of the woman who represented the goddess of reason--he is the man who represents the principle of authority pure and simple, without any historical qualification. And at heart he is as devoid of religious feeling as the century which he attacks in the name of revealed religion.

Hard and cold, with a sarcastic and at times a cruel expression on his countenance, but noble in character and strong of will, he stands at the threshold of the new century like--if not the good, at least the best spirit of the great, universal reaction. There is no possibility of confusing him with the dwarfish figures who during the course of the century have diluted his ideas, taken the sap and strength out of his thoughts, and torn and twisted his doctrines in order to oppress and dissemble under cover of them. Joseph de Maistre was a mind, these others have only been bodies. He was a man without baseness and without hypocrisy, a colonel of the Papal Zouaves as _litterateur_, the most soldierlike and the most attractive figure which the reactionary camp of the century has to show.

[1] _Du Pape_, pp. 160, 174, 383.

[2] Joseph de Maistre, _Considérations sur la France; Lettres et opuscules_, i., ii; _Correspondance diplomatique_, i., ii.; _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, i., ii; _Du Pape; De l'Église Gallicane; Examen de la philosophie de Bacon,_ i., ii.; Margerée, _Le Comte J. de Maistre_; E. Faguet, _Politiques et moralistes du 19me siècle_.

VI

Bonald

Side by side with Joseph de Maistre stands Bonald, the famous medieval schoolmaster of the European reaction, a man with the same bent of mind and the same practical aims, but as monotonous as De Maistre is versatile, as conventional as De Maistre is wittily fantastic.

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, was born in 1754 (the same year as De Maistre) at Monna, in the south of France. He began life as an officer in Louis XV.'s musketeers. During the first stage of the Revolution he favoured liberal ideas, but only for a short time. He married early, and was made chief magistrate of the Department of Aveyron, an appointment which he resigned when Louis XVI. found himself obliged to consent to the subjection of the clergy to the secular laws. In 1791 he emigrated, and joined the army of the Prince of Condé. He wrote his _Théorie du Pouvoir_ at Heidelberg. The police of the Directory destroyed almost the whole first edition of this book, but a copy which had been sent to Bonaparte luckily reached its destination and made such a favourable impression on the great man that he removed its author's name from the list of exiles. Not unprofitably had Bonald taught that every revolution is begun by the subject but ended by the ruler, that it begins because the authorities have been weak and have yielded, and ends because they have recovered strength. He had shown that all disturbance only serves to strengthen authority, and prophesied that the Revolution, which had begun with the declaration of the rights of man, would end with the declaration of the rights of God. These latter being the very rights which Bonaparte, by means of his Concordat, was now proclaiming, Bonald's position was assured. He remained devotedly attached to the Bourbons, but was content to dream of them in an appointment conferred on him by the Emperor. He was made _conseiller tutélaire_ of the University, with a salary of 12,000 francs a year for doing nothing. Chateaubriand reviewed his books with reverent admiration. De Maistre wrote to him after the publication of his _Recherches Philosophiques_; "Is it conceivable that nature has amused herself by tuning two strings until they are in as perfect harmony with each other as your mind and mine? If certain manuscripts of mine are ever printed, you will find in them almost the same expressions you yourself have used, and yet I certainly have altered nothing." In another letter he expresses himself even more strongly: "I have thought nothing which you have not written, and written nothing which you have not thought." Bonald felt himself flattered by these assertions, though he doubted their truth--and this with good reason, for, similar as are the results arrived at by these comrades-in-arms, there is little resemblance between their mental processes.

A proof of the high estimation in which Bonald was held is to be found in the touching letter in which Napoleon's brother, Louis, King of Holland, entreats him to undertake the education of his eldest son. Louis begins by telling what a complete invalid he himself is, how dearly he loves his son, how imperative it is that this son should be educated by a man, in the fullest acceptation of that word, in order that he too may become one. Then he says: "Although I do not know you personally, my investigations have led me to the conclusion that you are one of the men whom I esteem most highly. Therefore you will pardon me that now, when I have to choose the person to whom I must entrust what is more to me than life, I apply to you. If the happiness which you doubtless enjoy in a peaceful home has not made you indifferent to the service you are capable of rendering--I do not say to me, a single individual, but to a whole nation which is even more deserving than it is unfortunate (and that is saying much)--you will consent to become my son's tutor." And he concludes in the same strain, defending himself against slanders which he imagines may have reached Bonald's ears. With such humility did a king appeal to this man--and in vain; he refused the request.

A still more remarkable instance may be adduced of the importance at that time attributed to the influence of a determined upholder of authority of Bonald's calibre. One day Bonald received a note requesting him to call upon Cardinal Maury, an ecclesiastic whose position under the Empire was a very different one from that of the days when he argued in the National Assembly against the civic rights of the Jews. When they were alone, the Cardinal asked Bonald what his answer would be if the Emperor requested him to undertake the education of the King of Rome. For a moment Bonald was silent, astonished by the honour shown him. He then gave, it is said, the discouraging answer: "I confess that, if I ever taught him to rule, it would be in any place but Rome." After the restoration of the monarchy no one did more than Bonald to ensure that Rome and its spirit, the principle of authority, should rule in place of being ruled. All his life long he had opposed the liberty of the press. He attained to the position of its censor.

In 1815 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat on the extreme Right. Under Louis XVIII, he was made a member of the Academy and a peer of France, in which latter capacity he obstinately opposed liberty of religion and liberty of the press. In 1830 he retired from public life because it was against his conscience to swear allegiance to the monarchy of July.

Any one taking up Bonald's works directly after De Maistre's will have difficulty in wading through them. For nearly all of them are deadly dull. There are no human beings in his books, nothing but doctrines, and Bonald's doctrines consist of theologico-political propositions, which we are required to accept without proof. One cannot imagine a mind with a more implicit belief in dogmas, that is to say, a mind which more entirely ignores realities and scientific thought. He seems never to have doubted. Never once during his long career as an author does it appear to have entered his mind to question any one of the few simple fundamental principles on which he bases his theories. These principles are to be found in his works in a petrified form--speaking exactly, in the form of triads. Like the scholastics of the Middle Ages before him, like Hegel after him, Bonald thinks in triads, only he thinks without any perception of the two-sidedness of ideas, without flexibility, without inspiration. All relations are by him reduced to the great triad of cause, means, and effect. In the state we have power as the cause, ministers as the means, and subjects as the effect. In the religious world we have the triad--God, Jesus the Mediator, and man. In another acceptation Jesus is himself power, minister, and subject--power by his thought, minister by his word, subject as sacrifice. In the political sense, too, he is power, minister, and subject--power as King of the Jews, minister as priest, subject as the submissive martyr.

In the family, in society, in the state, in the universe, the same tri-unity is demonstrated; and all this is done with the aim of proving the necessity and the truth of monarchy. Monarchy is a true thing because it is founded on the principle by which the world is ordered. The universe is monarchic. Hence revolutionists and republicans, who have dared for the moment to abolish monarchy, have actually been making the bold attempt to overturn the order of the universe. It is not a constitution which they have abolished, but _the_ constitution, for there is only one.

Bonald jeers at the witness of experience, scorns that of history--the lessons of experience are without significance to him who is in possession of the eternal, fundamental principles. Even natural history he will have nothing to do with, because in it he perceives the idea of evolution, which is of the evil one.

There is no such thing as historical evolution; there is historical tradition, and it is to this we must cling. For by means of tradition we reach God. In the chain of blind men which we call humanity only the first blind man requires a staff, and this staff is the commandment of God, which is transmitted by tradition.

The eighteenth century had placed more faith than any of its precursors in man's conscious capacity of invention and production. Rousseau maintained that it was man who invented and founded society. Bonald contests this theory. Man, he says, has invented nothing; he no more invented the family or society than he invented speech or writing. He was in the beginning the blank page, the _tabula rasa_, of which Condillac and the Sensationalists romanced--this blank page has not been filled with the impressions of the senses, but with the direct instructions of God.

For God was not merely the creator "in the beginning"; he continues to create to this very day. He founded society, and founded it that it might preserve his words and his thoughts. But this it can only do by preserving tradition unbroken.

The intention, the mission of tradition, then, is to keep God in the world. Hence every attempt to break with tradition is an attempt at spiritual suicide. And the endeavour to preserve tradition is simply aspiration after the full pulsation of life. A tenacious clinging to the purest spiritual inheritance produces the purest, fullest life. Therefore Bonald clings to the dogmas and to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic church.

In order to vindicate the doctrine of creation and continued creative acts in every domain of nature, he is obliged to prove the same immutability in the universe of which he is the advocate in politics; hence from the year 1800 onwards he is perpetually attacking what was a comparatively new thing in those days, the doctrine of evolution. Like Voltaire before him and Disraeli after him, he makes merry over the idea of man being descended from a fish.

With love and understanding, but with a persistently flattering pen, Bonald describes the government of France under kings like Henry IV. and regents like Richelieu. In his turn attacking the revolutionary assailants of the old monarchy and its nobles, he skilfully argues that the monarchy was not the despotism nor the aristocracy the exclusive caste which their detractors made them out to have been. He shrewdly points out the defects of the succeeding system, with its much boasted liberty for every one, which meant no more than that every one had a right to vote, and warmly defends the advantages of the old order of things, which permitted the rich man to become a nobleman, but set limits to plutocracy by prohibiting the nobleman's working to become rich. He wilfully overlooks the fact that the original advantages of the old monarchy existed at last only on paper, and that under its auspices the most shameful injustice and the basest cupidity grew up and prospered.

In his aversion to the independence of parliaments and courts of justice, to liberty of conscience and liberty of the press, Bonald is doubtless sincere enough, but in his eulogies of the old form of government there is a want of common honesty. As a historian he is ignorant, but not so ignorant as not to know what that government really was.

His writings are now not only antiquated but decayed. Open his long treatises where we will, a faint odour of dust and musty leaves and corruption meets us. The most important chapters in the once famous _Recherches Philosophiques_ (such as those on the origin of speech and writing) read like fragments of some old theological text-book.

As a general rule the shorter treatises and occasional articles of philosophers of Bonald's type retain most freshness. But one can read through the two thick volumes which Bonald published under the title of _Mélanges littéraires et politiques_ without coming upon a single page to which the word "fresh" can be applied. Even such essays as those on the writings of Voltaire, on the Jews, and on tolerance, topics which might have been expected to tempt him to say something strong or bitter--at any rate something which would imprint itself on the memory--are terribly monotonous and colourless. Whether he is disapproving of Voltaire's morality, or maintaining that the Jews ought to be deprived of civic rights, or proving that tolerance is a vice and an impossibility, we have always the same solemn and empty ceremonial, the same application of the formula of cause, means, and effect, the same grave, monotonous tempo--one, two, three; one, two, three. Bonald is unreadable because of the very passionlessness on which he prided himself.

The only one among his books which still attracts readers, and that simply because of its occasional flashes of passionate enthusiasm, is the famous _Du Divorce_, undoubtedly the most entertaining of them all.

It begins with a long jeremiad on the sad condition of the world since authority was overthrown. Modern philosophy, which originated in Greece, among that people who remained children to the end, and who ever sought wisdom by other paths than those of reason (_sic!_), began by atheistically or deistically (!) denying God. Now, Hume and Condillac, with their doctrine that all our knowledge is derived from the impressions of the senses, have turned man, who is "a reasonable being, served by his organs," into an animal pure and simple, an ordinary product of nature. The universal dissolving tendency has penetrated into family life, and instead of the old relation between parents and children--authority and submission--we have the spirit of revolt in the young hearts and ideas of equality in the young brains; the children regard themselves as the equals of their parents, actually permitting themselves to address them as "thou"; the parents, conscious of their own weakness, no longer dare to assert their authority, but try to become their children's "friends" or "confidants"--only too frequently their accomplices.

The enervated conception of life is imaged in an equally enervated conception of death. It has been proposed to preserve the ashes of the departed in glass or porcelain urns, and, horrible to relate! a mother has actually been permitted by the authorities to burn the corpse of her daughter in heathen fashion. There has been universal agitation for the abolition of capital punishment, that precious institution, _ce premier moyen de conservation de la société_, and in some countries it is already abolished. Governments have had attacks of "the sudden madness which goes by the name of philanthropy." The so-called natural sciences ("so-called" is amusing), which ought really to be styled the material sciences, because they treat of the material world alone, have ousted the higher, the intellectual sciences, beginning with that of metaphysics, so renowned in days of old. In poetry noble tragedy has had to make way for the light and humorous style. In fiction, which so clearly mirrors the spirit of an age, love used always to be sacrificed to duty. Now the reverse is the case; and it is Rousseau who has written the novel "which more than any other has misled the imagination and corrupted the hearts of women," namely, _La nouvelle Héloïse_. The principle of authority has been overthrown even in the art of gardening: "The rural uncultivatedness of the English garden has taken the place of the symmetrical splendour of the art of Le Nôtre."

In view of all this endeavour to dissolve society, Bonald makes his attempt to save it. It is a special institution which he aims at rescuing. Society is founded upon marriage, stands or falls with that. The Revolution has made divorce lawful. But where divorce is possible, marriage no longer exists. Therefore every possible effort must be made to procure the repeal of the law of divorce. The effort was made, and was only too successful.

Let us hear what Bonald's theory is.

He maintains (as usual) that a properly developed reasoning faculty reduces all relations to the triad of ideas--cause, means, and effect--the most universally applicable which reason can evolve. These ideas lie at the foundation of every judgment, and form the basis of all social order. Every society consists of three distinct personages, who may be termed the social personages. Reason perceives in God, who wills, the first _cause_; in the man who executes God's will, the _means_, or minister, or mediator; and in the order of things which goes by the name of society, the _effect_ which is produced by the will of God and the action of man. But the reason which argues thus exists, in Bonald's opinion, only in conjunction with the Catholic religion. He says: "Religion, which places God at the head of society, gives man an exalted idea of his own dignity and a strong feeling of independence, whilst philosophy, which assigns the highest place to man himself, is always grovelling at the feet of some idol or other--in Asia at Mahomet's, in Europe at Luther's, Rousseau's, or Voltaire's." (_Du Divorce_, 42.)

We observe that Bonald calmly classes Luther with anti-Christians like Mahomet and Voltaire. All the Catholic authors of the period do this, and also insist on the affinity between Protestantism and immorality. When De Maistre is discoursing on the Reformation he asserts with the utmost gravity that one half of Europe changed its religion in order that a dissolute monk might be enabled to marry a nun. In his _Théorie du Pouvoir_ (ii. 305) Bonald writes: "A choleric, sensual monk reformed religion in Germany; a voluptuous, cruel king reformed it in England.... It is significant that the Reformation was supported in Germany by the Landgrave of Hesse, who was desirous to marry Margarethe von Saale whilst his first wife still lived; in England by Henry VIII, who wished to divorce Katharine of Arragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn; and in France by Margaret of Navarre, a princess of more than doubtful morals. Divorce was the ruin of the West as polygamy had been of the East." In his Essay on English Literature (_Œuvres_, vi. 75) Chateaubriand, touching on Luther's marriage, writes: "He married for two reasons--to show a good example, and to deliver himself from temptation. The man who has transgressed laws always tries to draw his weak brethren after him, that he may shield himself behind numbers; he flatters himself that the acquiescence of many will lead men to believe in the propriety and rectitude of acts which were often only the result of accident or passion. Sacred vows were doubly violated--Luther married a nun."