THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. LACORDAIRE: A STUDY. Euvres du R. P. H.-D. Lacordaire. Paris. 1861 THIRTY years ago, in an article in the Edinburgh Review on "Oxford Catholicism," republished in his "Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography" under the more appropriate title of "The Evangelical Succession," Sir James Stephen, in his kindly way, anticipated the bitter and contemptuous complaints which have been recently urged against the dulness and ineffectiveness of English preaching : "Every seventh day a great company of preachers raise their voices in the land to detect our sins, to explain our duty, to admonish, to alarm, and to console. Compare the prodigious extent of this apparatus with its perceptible results, and, inestimable as they are, who will deny that they disappoint the hopes which, antecedently to experience, the least sanguine would have indulged? The preacher has, indeed, no novelties to communicate. His path has been trodden hard and dry by constant use; yet he speaks as an ambassador from heaven, and his hearers are frail, sorrowing, perplexed, and dying men. The highest interests of both are at stake. The preacher's eye rests on his manuscript; the hearer's turns to the clock; the half-hour glass runs out its sand; and the portals close on well-dressed groups of critics, looking for all the world as if just dismissed from a lecture on the tertiary strata." Had the brilliant essayist crossed the Channel he would have discovered that the eloquence of the pulpit was not extinct, and that France had a living preacher who knew how to fascinate the intellect, kindle the imagination, and touch the heart of the most cultivated and of the most illiterate. Whenever Lacordaire was announced to preach in Notre Dame, the cathedral was surrounded, long before the doors were open, by an immense and heterogeneous crowd. Before he appeared in the pulpit the vast nave, the aisles, and the sidechapels were thronged with statesmen and journalists, members of the academy and tradesmen, working-men and high-born women, sceptics, socialists, devout Catholics, and resolute Protestants, who were all compelled to surrender themselves for the time to the irresistible torrent of his eloquence. The Archbishop of Paris, who seems to have been a timid and cautious man, and who, in 1834, had interdicted Lacordaire from continuing his Conferences in the Collége Stanislas, and who hesitated very much about offering him the pulpit at Notre Dame, was swept away at last by the universal enthusiasm, and at the close of the Conferences of 1835-36, rising from his archiepiscopal throne, he hailed the preacher before all Paris as "the new prophet." What was the secret of this remarkable success? Can the Frenchman teach us English preachers how to change the weary indifference of our audiences into earnest and sustained attention? To preach as he preached may be possible only to men of rare and exceptional genius in rare and exceptional circumstances; but can we learn from him how to redeem our sermons from the common reproach of being altogether uninteresting and unimpressive? I think he can teach us some things which many of us have never discovered for ourselves. M. Edmond Scherer, indeed, maintains that the discourses of Lacordaire are unreadable." He thinks that all their charm vanished as soon as they were printed. There is, no doubt, some truth in what Charles James Fox said of parliamentary eloquence, that no good speech ever reads well; and it is equally true that very often sermons which were effective when delivered to a great congregation become intolerably dull when collected into a volume and read quietly by the fire-side. But Lacordaire's Conferences, though they owed a great deal to the living presence of the orator, to whom may be applied the words which Sir James Stephen applies to George Whitefield, "Vividus vultus, vividi oculi, vividæ manus, denique omnia vivida," will reward patient and thoughtful study. It was not his habit to write his sermons fully. They were taken down from his lips by reporters, and are printed with only very slight changes. But they must be accepted for what they are. To read them for any other purpose than to discover how, among an irreligious and sceptical people, a great preacher compelled thousands of men to listen to him with respect, and sometimes kindled them into pas *"Littérature Contemporaine," p. 166. sionate excitement, would be to waste time and strength. Lacordaire was a great preacher-nothing more. But to be that was something. His learning was neither extensive nor profound. In the discussion of the theories of modern unbelief, he was plainly, as M. Scherer phrases it, "dépaysé." His philosophy had neither depth nor acuteness. His logic was often feeble and incoherent. Even his rhetoric was sometimes vitiated by a glaring want of taste. But still he was a magnificent preacher; and it is as a preacher, and a preacher only, that I propose to consider him. The story of his life is very pleasantly told by Dora Greenwell in the little volume recently reviewed in these pages. "The Interior Life of Lacordaire," by Chocarne, which has been translated into English, reveals the intensity of his devotion, and contains curious and pathetic illustrations of the severity of his asceticism. M. Montalembert's sketch is a glowing panegyric. "Lacordaire's Correspondence with Madame Swetchine" is really an interesting Autobiography, covering several of the most important years of his life. It is understood that an authoritative memoir is being prepared by M. de Falloux. Lacordaire's first sermon was delivered while he was still in the seminary. He preached it in the refectory while a hundred and thirty men were dining. His voice had to make itself heard above the rattle of plates and spoons. "I do not believe," he says, "that there can be any position more unfavourable to an orator than to have to speak to men who are eating. Cicero could not have delivered his orations against Catiline at a dinner of senators, unless, indeed, he had compelled them to throw down their forks at his first sentence. How would it have been if he had had to speak to them on the mystery of the Incarnation?" Certainly the subject does not seem to have been very felicitously chosen, and it is not wonderful that when the young preacher looked at his audience, who appeared to be devoting all their attention to their dinner and none to himself, he felt very much disposed to throw his square cap at their heads-"il me venait comme des pensées de leur jeter mon bonnet carré à la tête." He left the pulpit with the full conviction that he had preached very badly. He dined hurriedly, and went into the garden mortified and humiliated; however, he soon learned that he had done better than he thought, and that his congregation had been strongly impressed by his discourse. In the spring of 1833 he preached for the first time in public. It was in the great church of St. Roch. "I was there," writes M. Montalembert, "with MM. de Corcelles, Ampère, and some others, who must remember it as I do. He failed completely, and coming out, every one said, 'This is a man of talent, but he never will be a preacher.' Lacordaire himself thought the same, 'It is evident to me that I have neither sufficient physical energy, nor sufficient intellectual flexibility, nor sufficient knowledge of the world in which I always lived, and always shall live, alone,-nor, in short, sufficient of anything that a man ought to have in order to be a preacher in the full sense of the word." A year later he delivered his famous Conferences in the Collége Stanislas, and within two years of his failure at St. Roch he was at Notre Dame, surrounded by an audience such as I suppose no French preacher had addressed for more than a hundred and twenty years. He had, no doubt, the oratorical temperament. It was difficult for him to speak in private. There was a coldness and reserve in his manner which surprised those who had seen his frankness and fire in the pulpit. He was conscious of the inspiration which every true speaker derives from the sight of his audience; he was surprised himself that his imagination and all his intellectual powers should be so stimulated when he came face to face with the people. He was acutely sensitive to the merely accidental circumstances in which he had to speak. He would have liked to have carried off the beautiful pulpit which he saw in the cathedral at Sienna and have had it placed in Notre Dame. Standing in such a pulpit he thought he could preach better. "These things," he says, " are not indifferent to eloquence; far from it." He liked a great crowd before him," I have met with a saying of Cicero's which has greatly pleased me :- Non est magnus orator sine multitudine audiente." "§ He was ardent; was easily excited to passion; his mind had a natural tendency to what the French call les mouvements oratoires; there was great boldness, enthusiasm, and vehemence about him. These things are not to be acquired by any culture. If they do not come to a man at birth they can never be his. But though these high endowments cannot be acquired they may be suppressed; and I think it very possible that if Lacordaire had been a clergyman of the English Church or an English Nonconformist minister, the chances against the development of his characteristic genius would have been overwhelming. How is it that while our great political orators are unsurpassed, we rarely have a preacher "Le Père Lacordaire," par Montalembert, p. 92. +"What difficulty I have in speaking! Yesterday I made great efforts to entertain a young ecclesiastic, who is rather seriously ill at our house, and who begged me to tell him something that would amuse him; it was impossible for me to speak alone.” He goes on to say that he cannot but admire the faculty that ladies have; "they are able to talk as much as they please, and how they please; their heart is a spring that flows naturally. The heart of man, mine especially, is like those volcanoes the lava of which flows only at intervals after a shock."-Correspondance du R. P. Lacordaire et de Madame Swetchine, p. 75. "Correspondance du R. P. Lacordaire et de Madame Swetchine," p. 59. § Ibid. |