To those puny
objectors
against cards, as nurturing the bad
passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal.
passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v15 - Kab to Les
' Certain it is that the whole story of the children and
their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon
## p. 8832 (#456) ###########################################
8832
CHARLES LAMB
upon it.
the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the
Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set
up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story
Here Alice put on one of her dear mother's looks, too
tender to be called upbraiding.
Then I went on to say how religious and how good their
great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by
everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great
house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects
she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her
by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fash-
ionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the ad-
joining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had
been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a
sort while she lived, — which afterwards came to decay, and was
nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried
away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and
looked as awkward as if someone were to carry away the old
tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey and stick them up in
Lady C—'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as
much as to say,
That would be foolish indeed. ”
And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was
attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry
too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and
religious woman; so good, indeed, that she knew all the Psaltery
by heart, ay! and a great part of the Testament besides. Here
little Alice spread her hands.
Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-
grandmother Field once was, and how in her youth she
esteemed the best dancer (here Alice's little right foot played
an involuntary movement, till upon my looking grave it desisted)
- the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel
disease called a cancer came, and bowed her down with pain;
but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop,
but they were still upright, because she was so good and reli-
gious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a
lone chamber of the great lone house, and how she believed that
an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight glid-
ing up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but
she said “those innocents would do her no harm ”; and how
was
## p. 8833 (#457) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8833
frightened I used to be,-though in those days I had my maid
to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious
as she,- and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded
all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous.
Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren: hav-
ing us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular
used to spend many hours by myself in gazing upon the old
busts of the twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome,
till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be
turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with
roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms,
with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken
panels with the gilding almost rubbed out; sometimes in the
spacious old-fashioned gardens which I had almost to myself,
unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross
me; and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls
without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were for-
bidden fruit, unless now and then, and because I had more pleas-
ure in strolling about among the old melancholy looking yew-trees
or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir-apples,
which were good for nothing but to look at, or in lying about
upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me,
or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself
ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grate-
ful warmth, or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in
the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state,
as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings. I had more pleas-
ure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of
peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common baits of child-
Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch
of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated
dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them
for the present as irrelevant.
Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though
their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in
an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John
L- , because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a
king to the rest of us, and instead of moping about in solitary
corners like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome
horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves,
XV—553
ren.
## p. 8834 (#458) ###########################################
8834
CHARLES LAMB
and make it carry him half over the country in a morning, and
join the hunters when there were any out,- and yet he loved
the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to
be always pent up within their boundaries; and how their uncle
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the
admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field
most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back
when I was a lame-footed boy,- for he was a good bit older
than me,- many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and
how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not
always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was
impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate
he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he
died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he
had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life
and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well
at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though
I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he
would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long,
and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed
his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be
alive again to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled some-
times) rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy with-
out him as he their poor uncle must have been when the doctor
took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if
their little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John,
and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their
uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead
mother.
Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes,
sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice
W—n; and as much as children could understand, I explained
to them what coyness and difficulty and denial meant in maid-
ens: when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment,
that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or
whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still
receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which without speech strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech:-“We are not of
-
## p. 8835 (#459) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8835
wait upon
Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of
Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing,
and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must
the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before
we have existence and a name. ” And immediately awakening, I
found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side;
but John L-(or James Elia) was gone for ever.
A QUAKERS' MEETING
From the Essays of Elia!
STILL-BORN Silence! thou that art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind !
Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!
Secrecy's confidant, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admiration's speaking'st tongue !
Leave, thy desert shades among,
Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
Where retired Devotion dwells !
With thy enthusiasms come,
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!
Rich. FLECKNOE.
R.
EADER, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean;
wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors
of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and
society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in
stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy
species; — wouldst thou be alone and yet accompanied; solitary,
yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in
countenance; a unit in aggregate, a simple in composite; - come
with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that “before the winds were
made”? Go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the
profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements, nor pour
wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed, self-
mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold his
peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude it is great mas-
tery.
## p. 8836 (#460) ###########################################
8836
CHARLES LAMB
What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place ?
what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? Here the god-
dess reigns and revels. “Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud,”
do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the
brawl, nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed
sounds, than their opposite (Silence, her sacred self) is multiplied
and rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She
too hath her deeps that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a
positive more and less, and closed eyes would seem to obscure
the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal.
By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The
perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but
nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first
hermits did certainly understand this principle when they retired
into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one
another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness.
ular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through
a long winter evening with a friend sitting by, - say a wife,-
he or she too (if that be probable) reading another, without inter-
ruption or oral communication ? Can there be no sympathy with-
out the gabble of words ? Away with this inhuman, shy, single,
shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmer-
mann, a sympathetic solitude.
To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathedral
time-stricken,
(Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains,
In sec.
is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who
come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted sol-
itude. This is the loneliness “to be felt. ” The Abbey Church
of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as
the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are
no tombs, no inscriptions -
«sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; »
but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the
foreground: SILENCE, eldest of things — language of old Night -
## p. 8837 (#461) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8837
primitive Discourser -- to which the insolent decays of molder-
ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and as we may say
unnatural progression.
« How reverend is the view of these hushed heads
Looking tranquillity!
»
Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod! con-
vocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a
lesson dost thou read to council and to consistory! If my pen
treat of you lightly, -as haply it will wander, - yet my spirit
hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when, sitting among
you in deepest peace, which some outwelling tears would rather
confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your begin.
nings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I
have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic
tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of
the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you,-
for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and
offscouring of Church and Presbytery. I have seen the reeling
sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the
avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit
of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently
sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn
before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted
up in spirit, as he tells us, and “the judge and the jury became
as dead men under his feet. ”
Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend
to you above all church narratives to read Sewel's History of
the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals
of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and
affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his col-
leagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you
mistrust; no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly
or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that
much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a byword in
your mouth), James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what
patience he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue
with red-hot irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of
mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigma-
tized as blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifulest humility, yet
>>
## p. 8838 (#462) ###########################################
8838
CHARLES LAMB
keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still! — so different from
the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who,
when they apostatize, a postatise all, and think they can never
get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to
the renunciation of some saving truths with which they had been
mingled, not implicated.
Get the writings of John Woolman by heart, and love the
early Quakers.
How far the followers of these good men in our days have
kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have sub-
stituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine.
I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove
sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my
thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could pos-
sibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all,
and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce
controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Qua-
kers have abated, at least they make few pretenses. Hypocrites
they certainly are not in their preaching. It is seldom indeed
that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only
now and then a trembling female, generally ancient, voice is
heard,- you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it pro-
ceeds,— with a low buzzing musical sound laying out a few words
which she thought might suit the condition of some present,"
with a quaking diffidence which leaves no possibility of suppos-
ing that anything of female vanity was mixed up where the tones
were so full of tenderness and a restraining modesty. The men,
for what I have observed, speak seldomer,
Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample
of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who,
as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced from head to foot
equipt in iron mail. His frame was of iron too. But he was
malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-- I dare not
say of delusion.
The strivings of the outer man were unutter-
able: he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw
I
the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail; his joints all
seemed loosening: it was a figure to set off against Paul preach-
ing. The words he uttered were few and sound: he was evi-
dently resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom
with more mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs.
“He had been a wit in his youth,” he told us with expressions
((
(C
## p. 8839 (#463) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8839
of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impres-
sion had begun to wear away that I was enabled, with something
like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession
- understanding the term in its worldly acceptation -- with the
frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow
would have scared away the Levities — the Jocos Risus-que-
faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. By wit, ,
even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far
within the limits of an allowable liberty.
More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word
having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away
with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the
milder caverns of Trophonius, or as in some den where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that un-
ruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have
bathed with stillness. . Oh, when the spirit is sore fretted, even
tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the
world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself for
a quiet half-hour upon some undisputed corner of a bench among
the gentle Quakers!
Their garb and stillness conjoined present a uniformity tran-
quil and herd-like, as in the pasture,- forty feeding like one. ”
The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving
a soil, and cleanliness in them to be something more than the
absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when
they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening
the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United
Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.
MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST
From the Essays of Elia)
“A
CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game. ” This
was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with
God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of
whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-
and-half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you
want one to make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no
pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose
another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a
card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will
## p. 8840 (#464) ###########################################
8840
CHARLES LAMB
desire an adversary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up
and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a
table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may
be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing
at them.
Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them as
I do, from her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a strik-
ing emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with
them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy.
She took and gave no concessions. She hated favors. She never
made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without
exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight, cut
and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) "like a
dancer. ” She sate bolt upright, and neither showed you her cards
nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind side -
their superstitions; and I have heard her declare under the rose
that hearts was her favorite suit.
I never in my life and I knew Sarah Battle many of the
best years of it — saw her take out her snuff-box when it was
her turn to play, or snuff a candle in the middle of a game, or
ring for a servant till it was fairly over. She never introduced
or connived at miscellaneous conversation during its process. As
she emphatically observed, cards were cards; and if I ever saw
unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was
at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had
been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand, and who in his
excess of candor declared that he thought there was
no harm
in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in
recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble
occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in
that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came
into the world to do,- and she did it. She unbent her mind
afterwards over a book.
Pope was her favorite author; his Rape of the Lock' her
favorite work. She once did me the favor to play over with
me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem,
and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points
it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations
were apposite and poignant, and I had the pleasure of sending
the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they came
too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that
author.
## p. 8841 (#465) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8841
Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist
had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was
showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The
uncertainty and quick shifting of partners - a thing which the
-
constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal in-
vestiture of spadille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure
aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter gave him no
proper power above his brother nobility of the aces; the giddy
vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone; above
all, the overpowering attractions of a sans prendre vole, to the
triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approach-
ing in the contingencies of whist;— all these, she would say, make
quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic.
But whist was the solider game; that was her word. It was a
long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two
rubbers might coextend in duration with an evening. They gave
time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She
despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alli-
ances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say,
reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little
Italian States depicted by Machiavel: perpetually changing pos-
tures and connections; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-
morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;- but the wars of
whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational
antipathies of the great French and English nations.
A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favor-
ite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage
— nothing superfluous. No flushes, - that most irrational of all
pleas that a reasonable being can set up: that any one should
claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and
color, without reference to the playing of the game, or the indi-
vidual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held
this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as allitera-
tion is in authorship. She despised superficiality; pegging teased
her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-pound stake)
because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which
would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the
disgraceful tenure of declaring «Two for his heels. There is
something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah
Battle was a gentlewoman born.
Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons,
though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms,- such as
## p. 8842 (#466) ###########################################
8842
CHARLES LAMB
on
pique, repique, the capot: they savored (she thought) of affecta-
tion. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared
for. She loved the quadrate or square.
She would argue thus:
Cards are warfare: the ends are gain, with glory. But cards
are war in disguise of a sport: when single adversaries encounter,
the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves it is too
close a fight; with spectators it is not much bettered. No looker-
can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere
affair of money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or
for your play. Three are still worse: a mere naked war of
every
man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alli-
ance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succes-
sion of heartless leagues and not much more hearty infractions
of them, as in tradrille. But in square games (she meant whist)
all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished.
There are the incentives of profit with honor, common to every
species; though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in
those other games where the spectator is only feebly a partici.
pator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals
too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not
wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence.
Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You
glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a
cold or even an interested — bystander witnesses it, but because
your partner sympathizes in the contingency. You win for two.
You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are morti-
fied; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by
taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are
better reconciled than one to one in that close butchery. The
hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War
becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady
was accustomed to defend her favorite pastime.
No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any
game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing.
Chance, she would argue - and here again admire the subtlety
of her conclusion — chance is nothing, but where something else
depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot be glory. What
rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size
ace a hundred times together by himself, or before spectators,
where no stake was depending? Make a lottery of a hundred
thousand tickets with but one fortunate number, and what possi-
ble principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it
## p. 8843 (#467) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8843
gratify to gain that number as many times successively without
a prize ? Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in back-
gammon, where it was not played for money. She called it
foolish, and those people idiots who were taken with a lucky hit
under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little
to her fancy Played for a stake, they were a mere system of
overreaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one
man's wit -- his memory or combination-faculty, rather -- against
another's; like a mock engagement at a review, bloodless and
profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the spritely
infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two
people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was
stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror
and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of castles and knights, the
imagery of the board, she would argue (and I think in this case
justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head
contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject
form and color. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were
the proper arena for such combatants.
To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad
passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal. He
must be always trying to get the better in something or other;
that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon
a game at cards; that cards are a temporary illusion,- in truth,
a mere drama — for we do but play at being mightily concerned
where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet during the illusion
we are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and
kingdoms. They are a sort of dream fighting: much ado, great
battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means for disproportioned
ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than
many of those more serious games of life which men play with-
out esteeming them to be such.
With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these mat-
ters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life when
playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I
am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for
the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin
Bridget — Bridget Elia.
I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a tooth-
ache or a sprained ankle,-- when you are subdued and humble, -
you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action.
## p. 8844 (#468) ###########################################
8844
CHARLES LAMB
There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick
whist.
I grant it is not the highest style of man; I deprecate the
manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas! to whom I should
apologize.
At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to
come in as something admissible. I love to get a tierce or a
quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an infe-
rior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me.
That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)
— (dare I tell thee how foolish I am ? )— I wished it might have
lasted for ever, though we gained nothing and lost nothing, though
it was a mere shade of play; I would be content to go on in
that idle folly forever. The pipkin should be ever boiling that
was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget
was doomed to apply after the game was over; and as I do not
much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and
I should be ever playing.
## p. 8845 (#469) ###########################################
8845
LAMENNAIS
(1782-1854)
BY GRACE KING
UGUES FÉLICITÉ ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS was born at St. Malo
in 1782. His family, the Roberts, belonged to the old bour-
geoisie of Brittany. The seigneurial termination of De La
Mennais came from his father, a wealthy ship-owner, who was en-
nobled by Louis XVI. for services during the American war. His
mother, of Irish extraction, was noted for her brilliant accomplish-
ments and fervid piety. The mother dying when Félicité was but five
years old, the child was left by his busy, preoccupied father entirely
in the care of an elder brother, Jean, and
of an eccentric free-thinking uncle, who
lived in the country in his château of La
Chenaie. From Jean, Felicité received the
rudiments of his education; and almost at
the same time, such was his precocity, he
acquired in the great library of La Chenaie
the erudition of constant and indiscriminate
reading. Hence his first misunderstanding
by, rather than with, his Church. In the
instruction for his first communion, certain
points aroused his spirit of discussion, and
into the argument with the priest he poured
the mass of his ill-digested philosophical
LAMENNAIS
reading: the result was that he was refused
the communion. It was not until his twenty-second year upon the
occasion of his brother Jean's ordination, that he rectified his posi-
tion and became an active member of his church. Shortly afterward,
the two brothers, having inherited jointly La Chenaie from their uncle,
retired there. From this retreat, two years later, 1807, appeared
Lamennais's first literary essay: a (Guide Spirituel,' the translation
of Louis de Blois's tract the "Speculum Monacharum. The transla-
tion, perfect in itself, is accompanied by a preface which in pure
spirituality of thought and expression equals, if it does not surpass,
the original tract. Lamennais himself never afterwards surpassed it.
It was his next publication a year later, however, that sounds the
## p. 8846 (#470) ###########################################
8846
LAMENNAIS
true note, the war-cry of his genius, - his (Reflections upon the State
of the Church during the Eighteenth Century and the Actual Situa-
tion,' -- a fierce arraignment of the despotism which held the Church
in a cringing position before the government. The book, published
anonymously, was promptly suppressed by Napoleon's police. Jean,
now Vicar of St. Malo and director of the ecclesiastical seminary
there, withdrew his brother from La Chenaie, and gave him the posi-
tion of professor of mathematics in the seminary, persuading him
about the same time to receive the tonsure. In collaboration the
two brothers wrote “The Tradition of the Church on the Institution of
Bishops. The downfall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bour-
bons opportunely opening the way to Paris, Félicité went thither
with the manuscript. The book came out, but it did not sell.
Polemical by nature, the project of an ecclesiastical journal, a
Catholic organ, came to him as a necessity of the hour; but, help-
lessly dependent upon his brother, he urged him to come to Paris
and make the venture a possible one. Jean refused to be diverted
from his vocation as parish priest. The return of Napoleon put an
end to situation and projects. Lamennais went into exile in London.
Friendless and without resources, he was wandering around the streets
in search of employment, when he met the Abbé Caron, the dispenser
of royal charity to French exiles in London. The Abbé befriended
Lamennais, and in the end gained over him an influence similar to
that of his brother Jean. As a result of their intimacy, and before
the Hundred Days were over, Lamennais was persuaded to take the
last step in his profession and become a priest. It is in elucidating
this period of Lamennais's life that the publication of his private
letters has been of most service to his memory. When he returned
to Paris he was ordained priest. Two years later the first volume of
his “Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion appeared. Its suc-
cess was instantaneous and immense.
To quote Sainte-Beuve: “Its
effect upon the world was that of a sudden explosion; the author
was bombarded into celebrity by it. ” Lamennais was soon surrounded
by a party of the most brilliant men among the clergy and laity.
The essay, falling into the hands of the law-student Lacordaire,
converted him into a student of theology. It must suffice here to
state that Lamennais's creed at this time was that of the strictest
Ultramontane. Upon the appearance of the second volume, the debate
which the first volume caused waxed into a violent tempest of dis-
cussion. To satisfy the orthodox an appeal was made to Rome.
Lamennais himself went there for a personal interview with the
Pope. He was welcomed by Leo XII. as the foremost living cham-
pion of the Church; and returned to Paris, encouraged to continue
his warfare. He now entered the period of his highest ecclesiastical
»
## p. 8847 (#471) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8847
over-
.
devotion and his greatest literary activity. He wrote for Château-
briand's paper the Conservateur, for the Drapeau Blanc, and for the
Mémorial Catholique; he published his Religion Considered in its
Relations to Civil and Political Order,' and his Progress of the
Revolution and of the War against the Church,' for both of which
he was prosecuted and fined; his famous open letters to the Arch-
bishop of Paris appeared.
Lamennais came revolutionized out of the Revolution of July (1839),
and joined the Liberals in politics. It was the beginning of the strug-
gle which now took place in his mind between his Ultramontane ideal
and his ideal of political liberty. With Montalembert and Lacordaire
for associates, he founded the Avenir, which bore for its motto and
had for its platform “God and Liberty”; and he organized an agence
générale, a secular arm to carry its principles into practice. The
government, the Gallicans, and the Jesuits combined into an
whelming opposition against the Avenir; and Lamennais was de-
nounced to the Pope, Gregory XVI. , as a modern Savonarola. The
Avenir was ordered to suspend; the editors obeyed, starting imme-
diately for Rome. Lamennais published the account of this journey
years afterwards; the book furnishes to the religious and political
history of the nineteenth century a page that can never lose its value
or interest. It is a masterpiece.
After long days of waiting in Rome, an interview was obtained
from the Pope upon condition that no allusion should be made to the
object of the interview; after another wearisome period of waiting
for definite action or response from the Vatican, the pilgrims decided
to return to Paris. At Munich the Pope's encyclical overtook them;
it condemned political freedom in some of its most essential forms.
Lamennais wrote an act of submission to the Pope; but it was not
an unqualificd pledge of adherence to the encyclical, and of absolute
obedience to the Pope in temporal as well as spiritual matters. The
Pope in a brief, demanded this. Lamennais hesitated, struggled;
the pressure of his most intimate affections was brought to bear upon
him; «The arts adopted against him," writes Mazzini, “constituted a
positive system of moral torture. ” He signed the act of submission
demanded, and retired to his old refuge, La Chenaie. Here a small
group of devoted scholars gathered around him; among them was
Maurice de Guérin, who has described the place and the master in
his letters. Before the year was over, the Words of a Believer)
appeared in print. Its effect also was that of an explosion. Sainte-
Beuve, who superintended the publication of it, found the printers
abandoning their work at it, awe-struck by reading the pages. A
council of ministers was called. “It is a red cap stuck on a cross,”
said one; “That book could wake the dead," said the Archbishop of
>
## p. 8848 (#472) ###########################################
8848
LAMENNAIS
»
Paris. Guizot demanded the prosecution of the author; the insane
asylum was suggested. A hundred thousand copies were sold imme-
diately; it was translated into all European languages. Gregory XVI.
condemned its contents as “falsas, calumniosas, temerarias,
impias, scandalosas, erroneas. ” In Mazzini's words: “The priest of
the Romish Church became the priest of the church universal. ”
Modern Slavery,' the Book of the People, Politics for the Peo-
ple,' followed. A paper on (The Country and the Government) cost
Lamennais three months' imprisonment. For eighteen years he now
fought with incessant activity in the ranks of the Radicals, and con-
tributed to the most pronounced Radical papers.
He served in the
Constituent Assembly, and as member of the Committee on Constitu-
tion drew up a draught that was rejected as too radical. He changed
the aristocratic form of his name into the familiar Lamennais. The
Coup d'Etat of Napoleon, by destroying all hopes of political liberty,
freed him from politics; as the encyclical of the Pope, by destroying
all hopes of religious liberty, freed him from the Church. Estranged
friends, resentful pride, straitened resources, and ill health, are the
private chronicle of his life of retirement; during which he employed
his indefatigable mind upon a (Sketch of Philosophy) in four vol-
umeş, and a translation of Dante.
In January 1854, seized with his last illness, he expired, surrounded
by a few devoted friends, who enforced his orders against priestly
visits. According to his instructions, no religious services were held
over his body; he was conveyed to the cemetery in the hearse of the
city poor, and was buried in the common trench, no cross or name
marking the spot. Twenty thousand people, headed by Lamartine,
,
Béranger, and Cousin, followed the funeral.
Grau tuua
A SPIRITUAL ALLEGORY
1
T was a dark night; a starless sky hung heavily above the earth
like the lid of black marble over a tomb.
And nothing troubled the silence of the night; unless that
it were a strange sound, like the light flapping of wings now and
again, was audible over city and country.
## p. 8849 (#473) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8849
seven
And then the darkness deepened, and every one felt his heart
oppressed, while a shiver ran through his veins.
And in a hall hung with black and lighted by a ruddy lamp,
men clad in purple, and with heads bound with crowns,
were seated on seven iron chairs.
And in the midst of the hall rose a throne built out of bones;
and at the foot of the throne, in the form of a footstool, was an
overthrown crucifix; and before the throne an ebony table; and
on the table a vase full of red and foaming blood, and a human
skull.
And the seven crowned men seemed sad and thoughtful; and
from the depths of sunken orbits their eyes from time to time
emitted sparks of livid fire.
And one of them having risen, approached the throne, totter-
ing as he went, and set his foot upon the crucifix.
At that moment his limbs trembled, and he seemed about
to faint. The others looked on silently; they did not make the
slightest movement, but an indescribable something crept over
their brows, and a smile which is not of man contracted their
eyes.
And he who had seemed ready to faint stretched out his hand,
seized the vase full of blood, poured some into the skull, and
drank it.
And this drink seemed to fortify him.
And he lifted up his head, and this cry burst from his breast
like a hollow rattle:
"Accursed be Christ who has brought back liberty to earth!
And the six other crowned men all rose together, and all
together uttered the same cry:-
"Accursed be Christ who has brought back liberty to earth! ”
After which, when they had resumed their iron seats, the first
said:
“My brothers, what can we do to stifle liberty ? For our reign
is at an end, if his begins. We have a common cause. Let each
suggest what seems good to him. Here is my advice: Before
Christ came, did any stand before us? His religion has destroyed
us. Let us abolish the religion of Christ. ”
And all answered, “That is true.
«
Let us abolish the religion
of Christ! »
And a second advanced toward the throne, took the human
skull, poured in the blood, drank it, and then said: -
>>
c
XV-554
## p. 8850 (#474) ###########################################
8850
LAMENNAIS
»
"We must abolish not only religion, but also science and
thought: for science wishes to know what it is not good for us
that man should know; and thought is always ready to struggle
against force. ”
And all answered, "It is true.
<<
Let us abolish science and
thought. ”
And when he had followed the example of the first two, a
third said:-
"When we shall have plunged man back into brutishness by
taking away religion, science, and thought, we shall have done
much; but something will still remain to do. The brute has
dangerous instincts and dangerous sympathies. One people should
never hear the voice of another people, lest it should be tempted
to follow an example of complaint and agitation. Let no sound
from without penetrate to us. ”
And all answered, "It is true. Let no sound from without
penetrate to us. ”
And a fourth said:-
“We have our interests, and the nations too have theirs which
are opposed to ours. If they were to unite in self-defense, how
could we resist them ? Let us divide to reign. In every hamlet,
every city, every province, let us establish an interest opposed to
that of other hamlets, other cities, other provinces. Then all
will hate each other, and will not think to unite against us.
And all answered, "It is true. Let us divide to reign!
Concord would destroy us. ”
And a fifth, when he had twice filled with blood and twice
emptied the human skull, said:
"I approve all these means; they are good, but inadequate.
To create brutes is well; but intimidate these brutes — strike
them with terror by an inexorable justice and frightful penalties
- if you would not sooner or later be devoured by them. The
executioner is the prime minister of a good prince. ”
And all answered, “It is true. The executioner is the prime
minister of a good prince. ”
And a sixth said:-
"I acknowledge the advantage of prompt, terrible, inevitable
penalties. Yet there are brave spirits and despairing spirits who
.
brave penalties. If you would govern men easily, soften them
by pleasure. Virtue is naught to us; it nourishes force: let us
exhaust it by means of corruption. ”
C
»
## p. 8851 (#475) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8851
And all answered, "It is true. Let us exhaust strength and
energy and courage by means of corruption. ”
Then the seventh, having like the others drunk from the
human skull, with feet on the crucifix, spoke thus:-
« Down with Christ ! - there is war to the death, eternal war
between him and us. But how can we tear the nations from
him ? It is a vain attempt. What then shall we do? Listen to
me. We must win the priests of God with goods, honors, and
power. And they will command the people in the name of
Christ to submit to us in all things, whatever we may do, what-
ever we may order. And the people will believe them; and will
obey from conscience, and our power will be stronger than ever
before. "
And all answered, "It is true. We must win over the priests
of Christ ! »
And suddenly the lamp which lighted the hall went out, and
the seven men separated in the darkness.
And to a just man, who at that moment was watching and
praying before the Cross, it was said: “My day is drawing near.
Adore and fear nothing. ”
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature) by Jane G. Cooke.
CHAPTERS FROM (WORDS OF A BELIEVER)
INTRODUCTORY, TO THE PEOPLE
T"
his book was made principally for you; it is to you that I
offer it. May it, amid so many ills that are your portion,
so many sorrows that bear you down almost without any
rest, reanimate and console you a little.
You who carry the burden of the day, I would that it might
be to your poor tired souls what, at midday in the corner of a
field, the shade of a tree no matter how stunted it may be —
is to one who has worked all the morning under the hot rays
of the sun.
You are living in evil times, but these times will pass away.
After the rigors of winter, Providence sends a season less rude;
and the little bird blesses in his morning songs the beneficent
hand which has returned to him warmth and abundance, his com-
panion and soft nest.
## p. 8852 (#476) ###########################################
8852
LAMENNAIS
:
Hope and love. Hope softens all things; and love renders all
things easy. There are at this moment men who are suffering
much because they have loved you much. I their brother, I
have written the account of what they have done for you, and
what has been done against them on account of it; and when
violence shall have worn itself out I shall publish it, and you
will read then with tears less bitter, and you also will love these
men who have so loved you. At present, if I should speak to
you of their love and of their sufferings, I should be thrown into
the dungeon with them. I would descend into it with great joy
if your misery could thereby be lightened a little; but you would
not recover any ease from it, and that is why it is better to wait
and pray God that he shorten the trial. Now it is men who
judge and strike; soon it will be He who will judge. Happy
those who see his justice!
I am old: listen to the words of an old man. The earth is
sad and dried up, but it will turn green again. The breath of
the wicked will not eternally pass over it, like a wind that blasts.
What is being done, Providence wishes should be done for
your instruction, so that you may learn to be good and just
when your hour comes. When those who make an abuse of
power shall have passed before you, like the mud of the running
gutters in a day of storms, then you will understand that good
alone is durable, and you will fear to soil the air which the
breath of heaven has purified.
Prepare your souls against that time, for it is not far off, - it
nears.
Christ, laid upon the cross, has promised to deliver you.
Believe in his promise: and to hasten its fulfillment, reform that
which needs reformation within you; exercise yourselves in all
virtues, and love one another, as the Savior of the human race
loved you till his death.
IN The name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit, Amen.
Glory to God in the highest of heaven, and peace on earth to
men of good-will.
The Father begot the Son, his Word, his Verb: and the Verb
became flesh, and dwelt amongst us; and it came into the world,
and the world knew it not
## p. 8853 (#477) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8853
The Son promised to send the consoling Spirit, which proceeds
from the Father and himself, and which is their mutual love:
will come and renew the face of the earth, and it will be like
a second creation.
Eighteen centuries ago the Verb scattered the divine seed, and
the Holy Spirit fertilized it. Men saw it flourish; they tasted the
fruit, the fruit of the Tree of Life, replanted in their poor hab-
itations. I tell you there was a great joy among them when
they saw the light appear, and felt themselves all penetrated by
a celestial fire.
their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon
## p. 8832 (#456) ###########################################
8832
CHARLES LAMB
upon it.
the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the
Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set
up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story
Here Alice put on one of her dear mother's looks, too
tender to be called upbraiding.
Then I went on to say how religious and how good their
great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by
everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great
house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects
she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her
by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fash-
ionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the ad-
joining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had
been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a
sort while she lived, — which afterwards came to decay, and was
nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried
away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and
looked as awkward as if someone were to carry away the old
tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey and stick them up in
Lady C—'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as
much as to say,
That would be foolish indeed. ”
And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was
attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry
too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and
religious woman; so good, indeed, that she knew all the Psaltery
by heart, ay! and a great part of the Testament besides. Here
little Alice spread her hands.
Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-
grandmother Field once was, and how in her youth she
esteemed the best dancer (here Alice's little right foot played
an involuntary movement, till upon my looking grave it desisted)
- the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel
disease called a cancer came, and bowed her down with pain;
but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop,
but they were still upright, because she was so good and reli-
gious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a
lone chamber of the great lone house, and how she believed that
an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight glid-
ing up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but
she said “those innocents would do her no harm ”; and how
was
## p. 8833 (#457) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8833
frightened I used to be,-though in those days I had my maid
to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious
as she,- and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded
all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous.
Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren: hav-
ing us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular
used to spend many hours by myself in gazing upon the old
busts of the twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome,
till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be
turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with
roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms,
with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken
panels with the gilding almost rubbed out; sometimes in the
spacious old-fashioned gardens which I had almost to myself,
unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross
me; and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls
without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were for-
bidden fruit, unless now and then, and because I had more pleas-
ure in strolling about among the old melancholy looking yew-trees
or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir-apples,
which were good for nothing but to look at, or in lying about
upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me,
or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself
ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grate-
ful warmth, or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in
the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state,
as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings. I had more pleas-
ure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of
peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common baits of child-
Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch
of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated
dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them
for the present as irrelevant.
Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though
their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in
an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John
L- , because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a
king to the rest of us, and instead of moping about in solitary
corners like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome
horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves,
XV—553
ren.
## p. 8834 (#458) ###########################################
8834
CHARLES LAMB
and make it carry him half over the country in a morning, and
join the hunters when there were any out,- and yet he loved
the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to
be always pent up within their boundaries; and how their uncle
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the
admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field
most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back
when I was a lame-footed boy,- for he was a good bit older
than me,- many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and
how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not
always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was
impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate
he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he
died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he
had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life
and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well
at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though
I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he
would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long,
and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed
his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be
alive again to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled some-
times) rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy with-
out him as he their poor uncle must have been when the doctor
took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if
their little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John,
and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their
uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead
mother.
Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes,
sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice
W—n; and as much as children could understand, I explained
to them what coyness and difficulty and denial meant in maid-
ens: when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment,
that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or
whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still
receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which without speech strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech:-“We are not of
-
## p. 8835 (#459) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8835
wait upon
Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of
Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing,
and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must
the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before
we have existence and a name. ” And immediately awakening, I
found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side;
but John L-(or James Elia) was gone for ever.
A QUAKERS' MEETING
From the Essays of Elia!
STILL-BORN Silence! thou that art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind !
Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!
Secrecy's confidant, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admiration's speaking'st tongue !
Leave, thy desert shades among,
Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
Where retired Devotion dwells !
With thy enthusiasms come,
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!
Rich. FLECKNOE.
R.
EADER, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean;
wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors
of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and
society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in
stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy
species; — wouldst thou be alone and yet accompanied; solitary,
yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in
countenance; a unit in aggregate, a simple in composite; - come
with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that “before the winds were
made”? Go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the
profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements, nor pour
wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed, self-
mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold his
peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude it is great mas-
tery.
## p. 8836 (#460) ###########################################
8836
CHARLES LAMB
What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place ?
what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? Here the god-
dess reigns and revels. “Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud,”
do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the
brawl, nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed
sounds, than their opposite (Silence, her sacred self) is multiplied
and rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She
too hath her deeps that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a
positive more and less, and closed eyes would seem to obscure
the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal.
By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The
perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but
nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first
hermits did certainly understand this principle when they retired
into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one
another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness.
ular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through
a long winter evening with a friend sitting by, - say a wife,-
he or she too (if that be probable) reading another, without inter-
ruption or oral communication ? Can there be no sympathy with-
out the gabble of words ? Away with this inhuman, shy, single,
shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmer-
mann, a sympathetic solitude.
To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathedral
time-stricken,
(Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains,
In sec.
is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who
come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted sol-
itude. This is the loneliness “to be felt. ” The Abbey Church
of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as
the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are
no tombs, no inscriptions -
«sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; »
but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the
foreground: SILENCE, eldest of things — language of old Night -
## p. 8837 (#461) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8837
primitive Discourser -- to which the insolent decays of molder-
ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and as we may say
unnatural progression.
« How reverend is the view of these hushed heads
Looking tranquillity!
»
Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod! con-
vocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a
lesson dost thou read to council and to consistory! If my pen
treat of you lightly, -as haply it will wander, - yet my spirit
hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when, sitting among
you in deepest peace, which some outwelling tears would rather
confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your begin.
nings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I
have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic
tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of
the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you,-
for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and
offscouring of Church and Presbytery. I have seen the reeling
sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the
avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit
of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently
sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn
before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted
up in spirit, as he tells us, and “the judge and the jury became
as dead men under his feet. ”
Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend
to you above all church narratives to read Sewel's History of
the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals
of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and
affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his col-
leagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you
mistrust; no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly
or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that
much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a byword in
your mouth), James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what
patience he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue
with red-hot irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of
mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigma-
tized as blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifulest humility, yet
>>
## p. 8838 (#462) ###########################################
8838
CHARLES LAMB
keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still! — so different from
the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who,
when they apostatize, a postatise all, and think they can never
get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to
the renunciation of some saving truths with which they had been
mingled, not implicated.
Get the writings of John Woolman by heart, and love the
early Quakers.
How far the followers of these good men in our days have
kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have sub-
stituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine.
I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove
sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my
thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could pos-
sibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all,
and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce
controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Qua-
kers have abated, at least they make few pretenses. Hypocrites
they certainly are not in their preaching. It is seldom indeed
that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only
now and then a trembling female, generally ancient, voice is
heard,- you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it pro-
ceeds,— with a low buzzing musical sound laying out a few words
which she thought might suit the condition of some present,"
with a quaking diffidence which leaves no possibility of suppos-
ing that anything of female vanity was mixed up where the tones
were so full of tenderness and a restraining modesty. The men,
for what I have observed, speak seldomer,
Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample
of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who,
as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced from head to foot
equipt in iron mail. His frame was of iron too. But he was
malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-- I dare not
say of delusion.
The strivings of the outer man were unutter-
able: he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw
I
the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail; his joints all
seemed loosening: it was a figure to set off against Paul preach-
ing. The words he uttered were few and sound: he was evi-
dently resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom
with more mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs.
“He had been a wit in his youth,” he told us with expressions
((
(C
## p. 8839 (#463) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8839
of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impres-
sion had begun to wear away that I was enabled, with something
like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession
- understanding the term in its worldly acceptation -- with the
frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow
would have scared away the Levities — the Jocos Risus-que-
faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. By wit, ,
even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far
within the limits of an allowable liberty.
More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word
having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away
with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the
milder caverns of Trophonius, or as in some den where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that un-
ruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have
bathed with stillness. . Oh, when the spirit is sore fretted, even
tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the
world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself for
a quiet half-hour upon some undisputed corner of a bench among
the gentle Quakers!
Their garb and stillness conjoined present a uniformity tran-
quil and herd-like, as in the pasture,- forty feeding like one. ”
The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving
a soil, and cleanliness in them to be something more than the
absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when
they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening
the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United
Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.
MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST
From the Essays of Elia)
“A
CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game. ” This
was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with
God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of
whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-
and-half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you
want one to make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no
pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose
another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a
card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will
## p. 8840 (#464) ###########################################
8840
CHARLES LAMB
desire an adversary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up
and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a
table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may
be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing
at them.
Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them as
I do, from her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a strik-
ing emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with
them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy.
She took and gave no concessions. She hated favors. She never
made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without
exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight, cut
and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) "like a
dancer. ” She sate bolt upright, and neither showed you her cards
nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind side -
their superstitions; and I have heard her declare under the rose
that hearts was her favorite suit.
I never in my life and I knew Sarah Battle many of the
best years of it — saw her take out her snuff-box when it was
her turn to play, or snuff a candle in the middle of a game, or
ring for a servant till it was fairly over. She never introduced
or connived at miscellaneous conversation during its process. As
she emphatically observed, cards were cards; and if I ever saw
unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was
at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had
been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand, and who in his
excess of candor declared that he thought there was
no harm
in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in
recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble
occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in
that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came
into the world to do,- and she did it. She unbent her mind
afterwards over a book.
Pope was her favorite author; his Rape of the Lock' her
favorite work. She once did me the favor to play over with
me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem,
and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points
it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations
were apposite and poignant, and I had the pleasure of sending
the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they came
too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that
author.
## p. 8841 (#465) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8841
Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist
had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was
showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The
uncertainty and quick shifting of partners - a thing which the
-
constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal in-
vestiture of spadille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure
aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter gave him no
proper power above his brother nobility of the aces; the giddy
vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone; above
all, the overpowering attractions of a sans prendre vole, to the
triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approach-
ing in the contingencies of whist;— all these, she would say, make
quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic.
But whist was the solider game; that was her word. It was a
long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two
rubbers might coextend in duration with an evening. They gave
time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She
despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alli-
ances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say,
reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little
Italian States depicted by Machiavel: perpetually changing pos-
tures and connections; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-
morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;- but the wars of
whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational
antipathies of the great French and English nations.
A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favor-
ite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage
— nothing superfluous. No flushes, - that most irrational of all
pleas that a reasonable being can set up: that any one should
claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and
color, without reference to the playing of the game, or the indi-
vidual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held
this to be a solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as allitera-
tion is in authorship. She despised superficiality; pegging teased
her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-pound stake)
because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which
would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the
disgraceful tenure of declaring «Two for his heels. There is
something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah
Battle was a gentlewoman born.
Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons,
though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms,- such as
## p. 8842 (#466) ###########################################
8842
CHARLES LAMB
on
pique, repique, the capot: they savored (she thought) of affecta-
tion. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared
for. She loved the quadrate or square.
She would argue thus:
Cards are warfare: the ends are gain, with glory. But cards
are war in disguise of a sport: when single adversaries encounter,
the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves it is too
close a fight; with spectators it is not much bettered. No looker-
can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere
affair of money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or
for your play. Three are still worse: a mere naked war of
every
man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alli-
ance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succes-
sion of heartless leagues and not much more hearty infractions
of them, as in tradrille. But in square games (she meant whist)
all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished.
There are the incentives of profit with honor, common to every
species; though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in
those other games where the spectator is only feebly a partici.
pator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals
too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not
wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence.
Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You
glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a
cold or even an interested — bystander witnesses it, but because
your partner sympathizes in the contingency. You win for two.
You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are morti-
fied; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by
taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are
better reconciled than one to one in that close butchery. The
hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War
becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady
was accustomed to defend her favorite pastime.
No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any
game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing.
Chance, she would argue - and here again admire the subtlety
of her conclusion — chance is nothing, but where something else
depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot be glory. What
rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size
ace a hundred times together by himself, or before spectators,
where no stake was depending? Make a lottery of a hundred
thousand tickets with but one fortunate number, and what possi-
ble principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it
## p. 8843 (#467) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8843
gratify to gain that number as many times successively without
a prize ? Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in back-
gammon, where it was not played for money. She called it
foolish, and those people idiots who were taken with a lucky hit
under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little
to her fancy Played for a stake, they were a mere system of
overreaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one
man's wit -- his memory or combination-faculty, rather -- against
another's; like a mock engagement at a review, bloodless and
profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the spritely
infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two
people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was
stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror
and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of castles and knights, the
imagery of the board, she would argue (and I think in this case
justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head
contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject
form and color. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were
the proper arena for such combatants.
To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad
passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal. He
must be always trying to get the better in something or other;
that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon
a game at cards; that cards are a temporary illusion,- in truth,
a mere drama — for we do but play at being mightily concerned
where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet during the illusion
we are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and
kingdoms. They are a sort of dream fighting: much ado, great
battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means for disproportioned
ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than
many of those more serious games of life which men play with-
out esteeming them to be such.
With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these mat-
ters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life when
playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I
am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for
the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin
Bridget — Bridget Elia.
I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a tooth-
ache or a sprained ankle,-- when you are subdued and humble, -
you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action.
## p. 8844 (#468) ###########################################
8844
CHARLES LAMB
There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick
whist.
I grant it is not the highest style of man; I deprecate the
manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas! to whom I should
apologize.
At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to
come in as something admissible. I love to get a tierce or a
quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an infe-
rior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me.
That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)
— (dare I tell thee how foolish I am ? )— I wished it might have
lasted for ever, though we gained nothing and lost nothing, though
it was a mere shade of play; I would be content to go on in
that idle folly forever. The pipkin should be ever boiling that
was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget
was doomed to apply after the game was over; and as I do not
much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and
I should be ever playing.
## p. 8845 (#469) ###########################################
8845
LAMENNAIS
(1782-1854)
BY GRACE KING
UGUES FÉLICITÉ ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS was born at St. Malo
in 1782. His family, the Roberts, belonged to the old bour-
geoisie of Brittany. The seigneurial termination of De La
Mennais came from his father, a wealthy ship-owner, who was en-
nobled by Louis XVI. for services during the American war. His
mother, of Irish extraction, was noted for her brilliant accomplish-
ments and fervid piety. The mother dying when Félicité was but five
years old, the child was left by his busy, preoccupied father entirely
in the care of an elder brother, Jean, and
of an eccentric free-thinking uncle, who
lived in the country in his château of La
Chenaie. From Jean, Felicité received the
rudiments of his education; and almost at
the same time, such was his precocity, he
acquired in the great library of La Chenaie
the erudition of constant and indiscriminate
reading. Hence his first misunderstanding
by, rather than with, his Church. In the
instruction for his first communion, certain
points aroused his spirit of discussion, and
into the argument with the priest he poured
the mass of his ill-digested philosophical
LAMENNAIS
reading: the result was that he was refused
the communion. It was not until his twenty-second year upon the
occasion of his brother Jean's ordination, that he rectified his posi-
tion and became an active member of his church. Shortly afterward,
the two brothers, having inherited jointly La Chenaie from their uncle,
retired there. From this retreat, two years later, 1807, appeared
Lamennais's first literary essay: a (Guide Spirituel,' the translation
of Louis de Blois's tract the "Speculum Monacharum. The transla-
tion, perfect in itself, is accompanied by a preface which in pure
spirituality of thought and expression equals, if it does not surpass,
the original tract. Lamennais himself never afterwards surpassed it.
It was his next publication a year later, however, that sounds the
## p. 8846 (#470) ###########################################
8846
LAMENNAIS
true note, the war-cry of his genius, - his (Reflections upon the State
of the Church during the Eighteenth Century and the Actual Situa-
tion,' -- a fierce arraignment of the despotism which held the Church
in a cringing position before the government. The book, published
anonymously, was promptly suppressed by Napoleon's police. Jean,
now Vicar of St. Malo and director of the ecclesiastical seminary
there, withdrew his brother from La Chenaie, and gave him the posi-
tion of professor of mathematics in the seminary, persuading him
about the same time to receive the tonsure. In collaboration the
two brothers wrote “The Tradition of the Church on the Institution of
Bishops. The downfall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bour-
bons opportunely opening the way to Paris, Félicité went thither
with the manuscript. The book came out, but it did not sell.
Polemical by nature, the project of an ecclesiastical journal, a
Catholic organ, came to him as a necessity of the hour; but, help-
lessly dependent upon his brother, he urged him to come to Paris
and make the venture a possible one. Jean refused to be diverted
from his vocation as parish priest. The return of Napoleon put an
end to situation and projects. Lamennais went into exile in London.
Friendless and without resources, he was wandering around the streets
in search of employment, when he met the Abbé Caron, the dispenser
of royal charity to French exiles in London. The Abbé befriended
Lamennais, and in the end gained over him an influence similar to
that of his brother Jean. As a result of their intimacy, and before
the Hundred Days were over, Lamennais was persuaded to take the
last step in his profession and become a priest. It is in elucidating
this period of Lamennais's life that the publication of his private
letters has been of most service to his memory. When he returned
to Paris he was ordained priest. Two years later the first volume of
his “Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion appeared. Its suc-
cess was instantaneous and immense.
To quote Sainte-Beuve: “Its
effect upon the world was that of a sudden explosion; the author
was bombarded into celebrity by it. ” Lamennais was soon surrounded
by a party of the most brilliant men among the clergy and laity.
The essay, falling into the hands of the law-student Lacordaire,
converted him into a student of theology. It must suffice here to
state that Lamennais's creed at this time was that of the strictest
Ultramontane. Upon the appearance of the second volume, the debate
which the first volume caused waxed into a violent tempest of dis-
cussion. To satisfy the orthodox an appeal was made to Rome.
Lamennais himself went there for a personal interview with the
Pope. He was welcomed by Leo XII. as the foremost living cham-
pion of the Church; and returned to Paris, encouraged to continue
his warfare. He now entered the period of his highest ecclesiastical
»
## p. 8847 (#471) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8847
over-
.
devotion and his greatest literary activity. He wrote for Château-
briand's paper the Conservateur, for the Drapeau Blanc, and for the
Mémorial Catholique; he published his Religion Considered in its
Relations to Civil and Political Order,' and his Progress of the
Revolution and of the War against the Church,' for both of which
he was prosecuted and fined; his famous open letters to the Arch-
bishop of Paris appeared.
Lamennais came revolutionized out of the Revolution of July (1839),
and joined the Liberals in politics. It was the beginning of the strug-
gle which now took place in his mind between his Ultramontane ideal
and his ideal of political liberty. With Montalembert and Lacordaire
for associates, he founded the Avenir, which bore for its motto and
had for its platform “God and Liberty”; and he organized an agence
générale, a secular arm to carry its principles into practice. The
government, the Gallicans, and the Jesuits combined into an
whelming opposition against the Avenir; and Lamennais was de-
nounced to the Pope, Gregory XVI. , as a modern Savonarola. The
Avenir was ordered to suspend; the editors obeyed, starting imme-
diately for Rome. Lamennais published the account of this journey
years afterwards; the book furnishes to the religious and political
history of the nineteenth century a page that can never lose its value
or interest. It is a masterpiece.
After long days of waiting in Rome, an interview was obtained
from the Pope upon condition that no allusion should be made to the
object of the interview; after another wearisome period of waiting
for definite action or response from the Vatican, the pilgrims decided
to return to Paris. At Munich the Pope's encyclical overtook them;
it condemned political freedom in some of its most essential forms.
Lamennais wrote an act of submission to the Pope; but it was not
an unqualificd pledge of adherence to the encyclical, and of absolute
obedience to the Pope in temporal as well as spiritual matters. The
Pope in a brief, demanded this. Lamennais hesitated, struggled;
the pressure of his most intimate affections was brought to bear upon
him; «The arts adopted against him," writes Mazzini, “constituted a
positive system of moral torture. ” He signed the act of submission
demanded, and retired to his old refuge, La Chenaie. Here a small
group of devoted scholars gathered around him; among them was
Maurice de Guérin, who has described the place and the master in
his letters. Before the year was over, the Words of a Believer)
appeared in print. Its effect also was that of an explosion. Sainte-
Beuve, who superintended the publication of it, found the printers
abandoning their work at it, awe-struck by reading the pages. A
council of ministers was called. “It is a red cap stuck on a cross,”
said one; “That book could wake the dead," said the Archbishop of
>
## p. 8848 (#472) ###########################################
8848
LAMENNAIS
»
Paris. Guizot demanded the prosecution of the author; the insane
asylum was suggested. A hundred thousand copies were sold imme-
diately; it was translated into all European languages. Gregory XVI.
condemned its contents as “falsas, calumniosas, temerarias,
impias, scandalosas, erroneas. ” In Mazzini's words: “The priest of
the Romish Church became the priest of the church universal. ”
Modern Slavery,' the Book of the People, Politics for the Peo-
ple,' followed. A paper on (The Country and the Government) cost
Lamennais three months' imprisonment. For eighteen years he now
fought with incessant activity in the ranks of the Radicals, and con-
tributed to the most pronounced Radical papers.
He served in the
Constituent Assembly, and as member of the Committee on Constitu-
tion drew up a draught that was rejected as too radical. He changed
the aristocratic form of his name into the familiar Lamennais. The
Coup d'Etat of Napoleon, by destroying all hopes of political liberty,
freed him from politics; as the encyclical of the Pope, by destroying
all hopes of religious liberty, freed him from the Church. Estranged
friends, resentful pride, straitened resources, and ill health, are the
private chronicle of his life of retirement; during which he employed
his indefatigable mind upon a (Sketch of Philosophy) in four vol-
umeş, and a translation of Dante.
In January 1854, seized with his last illness, he expired, surrounded
by a few devoted friends, who enforced his orders against priestly
visits. According to his instructions, no religious services were held
over his body; he was conveyed to the cemetery in the hearse of the
city poor, and was buried in the common trench, no cross or name
marking the spot. Twenty thousand people, headed by Lamartine,
,
Béranger, and Cousin, followed the funeral.
Grau tuua
A SPIRITUAL ALLEGORY
1
T was a dark night; a starless sky hung heavily above the earth
like the lid of black marble over a tomb.
And nothing troubled the silence of the night; unless that
it were a strange sound, like the light flapping of wings now and
again, was audible over city and country.
## p. 8849 (#473) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8849
seven
And then the darkness deepened, and every one felt his heart
oppressed, while a shiver ran through his veins.
And in a hall hung with black and lighted by a ruddy lamp,
men clad in purple, and with heads bound with crowns,
were seated on seven iron chairs.
And in the midst of the hall rose a throne built out of bones;
and at the foot of the throne, in the form of a footstool, was an
overthrown crucifix; and before the throne an ebony table; and
on the table a vase full of red and foaming blood, and a human
skull.
And the seven crowned men seemed sad and thoughtful; and
from the depths of sunken orbits their eyes from time to time
emitted sparks of livid fire.
And one of them having risen, approached the throne, totter-
ing as he went, and set his foot upon the crucifix.
At that moment his limbs trembled, and he seemed about
to faint. The others looked on silently; they did not make the
slightest movement, but an indescribable something crept over
their brows, and a smile which is not of man contracted their
eyes.
And he who had seemed ready to faint stretched out his hand,
seized the vase full of blood, poured some into the skull, and
drank it.
And this drink seemed to fortify him.
And he lifted up his head, and this cry burst from his breast
like a hollow rattle:
"Accursed be Christ who has brought back liberty to earth!
And the six other crowned men all rose together, and all
together uttered the same cry:-
"Accursed be Christ who has brought back liberty to earth! ”
After which, when they had resumed their iron seats, the first
said:
“My brothers, what can we do to stifle liberty ? For our reign
is at an end, if his begins. We have a common cause. Let each
suggest what seems good to him. Here is my advice: Before
Christ came, did any stand before us? His religion has destroyed
us. Let us abolish the religion of Christ. ”
And all answered, “That is true.
«
Let us abolish the religion
of Christ! »
And a second advanced toward the throne, took the human
skull, poured in the blood, drank it, and then said: -
>>
c
XV-554
## p. 8850 (#474) ###########################################
8850
LAMENNAIS
»
"We must abolish not only religion, but also science and
thought: for science wishes to know what it is not good for us
that man should know; and thought is always ready to struggle
against force. ”
And all answered, "It is true.
<<
Let us abolish science and
thought. ”
And when he had followed the example of the first two, a
third said:-
"When we shall have plunged man back into brutishness by
taking away religion, science, and thought, we shall have done
much; but something will still remain to do. The brute has
dangerous instincts and dangerous sympathies. One people should
never hear the voice of another people, lest it should be tempted
to follow an example of complaint and agitation. Let no sound
from without penetrate to us. ”
And all answered, "It is true. Let no sound from without
penetrate to us. ”
And a fourth said:-
“We have our interests, and the nations too have theirs which
are opposed to ours. If they were to unite in self-defense, how
could we resist them ? Let us divide to reign. In every hamlet,
every city, every province, let us establish an interest opposed to
that of other hamlets, other cities, other provinces. Then all
will hate each other, and will not think to unite against us.
And all answered, "It is true. Let us divide to reign!
Concord would destroy us. ”
And a fifth, when he had twice filled with blood and twice
emptied the human skull, said:
"I approve all these means; they are good, but inadequate.
To create brutes is well; but intimidate these brutes — strike
them with terror by an inexorable justice and frightful penalties
- if you would not sooner or later be devoured by them. The
executioner is the prime minister of a good prince. ”
And all answered, “It is true. The executioner is the prime
minister of a good prince. ”
And a sixth said:-
"I acknowledge the advantage of prompt, terrible, inevitable
penalties. Yet there are brave spirits and despairing spirits who
.
brave penalties. If you would govern men easily, soften them
by pleasure. Virtue is naught to us; it nourishes force: let us
exhaust it by means of corruption. ”
C
»
## p. 8851 (#475) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8851
And all answered, "It is true. Let us exhaust strength and
energy and courage by means of corruption. ”
Then the seventh, having like the others drunk from the
human skull, with feet on the crucifix, spoke thus:-
« Down with Christ ! - there is war to the death, eternal war
between him and us. But how can we tear the nations from
him ? It is a vain attempt. What then shall we do? Listen to
me. We must win the priests of God with goods, honors, and
power. And they will command the people in the name of
Christ to submit to us in all things, whatever we may do, what-
ever we may order. And the people will believe them; and will
obey from conscience, and our power will be stronger than ever
before. "
And all answered, "It is true. We must win over the priests
of Christ ! »
And suddenly the lamp which lighted the hall went out, and
the seven men separated in the darkness.
And to a just man, who at that moment was watching and
praying before the Cross, it was said: “My day is drawing near.
Adore and fear nothing. ”
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature) by Jane G. Cooke.
CHAPTERS FROM (WORDS OF A BELIEVER)
INTRODUCTORY, TO THE PEOPLE
T"
his book was made principally for you; it is to you that I
offer it. May it, amid so many ills that are your portion,
so many sorrows that bear you down almost without any
rest, reanimate and console you a little.
You who carry the burden of the day, I would that it might
be to your poor tired souls what, at midday in the corner of a
field, the shade of a tree no matter how stunted it may be —
is to one who has worked all the morning under the hot rays
of the sun.
You are living in evil times, but these times will pass away.
After the rigors of winter, Providence sends a season less rude;
and the little bird blesses in his morning songs the beneficent
hand which has returned to him warmth and abundance, his com-
panion and soft nest.
## p. 8852 (#476) ###########################################
8852
LAMENNAIS
:
Hope and love. Hope softens all things; and love renders all
things easy. There are at this moment men who are suffering
much because they have loved you much. I their brother, I
have written the account of what they have done for you, and
what has been done against them on account of it; and when
violence shall have worn itself out I shall publish it, and you
will read then with tears less bitter, and you also will love these
men who have so loved you. At present, if I should speak to
you of their love and of their sufferings, I should be thrown into
the dungeon with them. I would descend into it with great joy
if your misery could thereby be lightened a little; but you would
not recover any ease from it, and that is why it is better to wait
and pray God that he shorten the trial. Now it is men who
judge and strike; soon it will be He who will judge. Happy
those who see his justice!
I am old: listen to the words of an old man. The earth is
sad and dried up, but it will turn green again. The breath of
the wicked will not eternally pass over it, like a wind that blasts.
What is being done, Providence wishes should be done for
your instruction, so that you may learn to be good and just
when your hour comes. When those who make an abuse of
power shall have passed before you, like the mud of the running
gutters in a day of storms, then you will understand that good
alone is durable, and you will fear to soil the air which the
breath of heaven has purified.
Prepare your souls against that time, for it is not far off, - it
nears.
Christ, laid upon the cross, has promised to deliver you.
Believe in his promise: and to hasten its fulfillment, reform that
which needs reformation within you; exercise yourselves in all
virtues, and love one another, as the Savior of the human race
loved you till his death.
IN The name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit, Amen.
Glory to God in the highest of heaven, and peace on earth to
men of good-will.
The Father begot the Son, his Word, his Verb: and the Verb
became flesh, and dwelt amongst us; and it came into the world,
and the world knew it not
## p. 8853 (#477) ###########################################
LAMENNAIS
8853
The Son promised to send the consoling Spirit, which proceeds
from the Father and himself, and which is their mutual love:
will come and renew the face of the earth, and it will be like
a second creation.
Eighteen centuries ago the Verb scattered the divine seed, and
the Holy Spirit fertilized it. Men saw it flourish; they tasted the
fruit, the fruit of the Tree of Life, replanted in their poor hab-
itations. I tell you there was a great joy among them when
they saw the light appear, and felt themselves all penetrated by
a celestial fire.
