More than thirty years have passed since Louis Veuillot, the great Catholic champion and editor of l'Univers, laid down his pen forever, but the fascination of his personality, for friends and enemies alike, shows no signs of abating. He was not as age goes, a very old man when he died, having barely passed the psalmist's allotted span. But it would have been the same had he attained eighty or ninety years, or even lived on, a centenarian, into our own bewildered century and generation. There are lives which outlast the struggle that has burned away their vital flame. But such are not the lives nor the deaths of the saints. These do not dose their eyes on victory, but open them upon it. The cry "they run!," is never shouted into their benumbed ears. The campaign to which they were called is one that knows no decision. Its very truces and arrnistices are fallacious and they know it well. They leave behind them a battle into which every generation pours fresh levies, conscripts of God or Satan. They have their triumph but its hosannas echo through the streets of no earthly city.
Centenaries are occasions, as a rule, when enemies and panegyrists arrive at a sort of mutual liquidation. Veuillot's, held on the eve of the war, only gave the signal for fresh recrimination, fresh proof, were proof needed, how irreconcilable were the issues he had flung into the face of the world and the mask of worldly religion.
There never has been a writer who earned more abounding hatred, or who might be prouder of the hatred he earned. Opposition and calumny seemed to be the breath of life in his ireful nostrils. For him no reputation was "established"—no sublimity toplofty enough. The bigger they were, Veuillot thought, the harder they would fall. For the humble foot soldiers, the "pietons" who are trampled under foot anyhow, by friend or foe, his great heart held only pity. It was at the world's paladins he set his lance, the champions blazing in mundane pride and garlanded with the applause of the multitude. Like Alan Breck in Stevenson's romance, his heart sometimes swelled involuntarily at the thought that he was indeed a "bonny fechter."
Circumambient worldliness reeled and cried aloud under the thrusts which this sore soldier of the cross knew so well how to deliver. "Sacrisry beadleI" Hugo could cry, and the taunt was some measure how deep had been the wound and how headlong the fall. To Tame he was "Monsieur Veuillot," the dishonest broker between "cassock and epaulette." Sainte-Beuve (of all men) could pull an evangelical face and accuse him of a lack of Christian charity.
And indeed, his sword, if stainless, was merciless. He asked for no quarter and would give none. Why should he show mercy to the thing against which his Master, once for all, had preached unending war? "Do you remember," he replies to a friend and colleague who had pleaded with him for greater moderation, "the word of worthy Joinville, who, watching the Saracens harry a Christian camp, although it was a Sunday, cried to a friend: 'Let us try what one charge on these Mussulman dogs will do 1' And what were Mussulmans in comparison with this infamous gang for whom you ask quarter? No quarter! I swear it by God I I can feel the spurs sprouting at my very heels. My charger is neighing. My sword quivers in its sheath. Let us have at this pack!"
The anecdote is one of several related by M. Andre Beaunier, the eminent French critic, in a volume just published entitled Critiques et Romanciers. Veuillot, as critic rather than Catholic polemist, is the subject of the essay with which the book opens. But Veuillot was too obsessed and driven by a single ideal to prevent his work for the cause of the Catholic church in France from overshadowing all subsidiary activities. Every word he wrote after his conversion at the age of twenty-eight was the expression of a vivid faith, held so intensely that it reacted immediately, not only to hostility but to compromise.
How explain, to the satisfaction of those who have inherited only the tradition of his "intolerance" that this swashbuckling crusadcr was also a keen and luminous critic (one of the five or six great masters of the nineteenth century, thinks Jules Lemaitre) whose judgments are not losing, but acquiring authority as years pass? How account for the fact that the strictures passed by him upon the gods of his day--literary blasphemies set down to prejudice and bile—are perceived, as the gilt wears off the haloes, to hold a content of truth denied to the emancipated spirits who mocked him? How, in short, refuse to admit that what the world mistook for blindness was only a refusal to be dazzled?
These judgments could be terrible. Even at the distance of fifty and sixty years their audacity staggers us. Judge what its effect must have been on the very morrow of apotheosis.
Of Lamartine—"He is a sceptic under a covering of insipid religiosity. . . He never reasons, never even sings. He vocalizes." Beranger is "the Horace of the commercial traveler, the Tyrtacus of back-parlor Catalines, the Anacreon of boucloirs where all the world is made welcome." As for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Veuillot's bete noir—“He sought every manner of misfortune, and there was not one but was a legitimate penalty either of his baseness or his pride." Of Baudclaire—"In being merely strange he used up power that might have made him original." Veuillot could use the rapier, but, where his foes wcre judged unworthy of clean steel, the whip as well. Of Rabelais, whom he nevertheless ranks as one of the founders of the French language, he could cxclaim—"Regard him well! Never has an exalted thought issued from those lips, whence blasphemy scans to exhale with an odor of strong wine and chees&' This is the whip. "Prejudicc$' if you will. But let those whom a difficult task attracts try to separate the prejudice from the insight
Veuillot, in fact (no honest critic would deny it) possessed to the full one requirement of the Croceara school. He found himself, from the moment of his change of heart, in full possession of an "aesthetic"— a central point from which no sophistrics could make him budge. Few men, even among the elect of our net have ever been so eaten up with a hunger and thirst after justice. The denial of justice, wherever he encountered it, drove him, not to madness, but to a kind of fatidic utterance. His exacerbated sense found it lacking everywhere: in the praise bestowed upon some unworthy and overweening pontiff of letters, in the obstacles thrown in the way of the Church's secular task of peacc and amelioration, in the cry of the hungry sheep, given wohes as shepherds and wind to eat. It saved him from taking refuge in man-made panaceas and threw him back upon eternal verities. "How were the pompous laws inscribed on charter rolls intcrprctcd for him ?" he asks, speaking of his harassed father, dead in poverty. "If you revolt, we will kill you. If you steal, we will poison you. If you are ill, we can do nothing to help you. If you have no bread, you can go to the workhouse or die. It is none otT our business which." "What a revolutionary, had he not been a Catholic!" cries M. Lemaitre. But Veulilot was no revolutionary. His mind was set on something beyond. He was the man who "fought all goverranents and served nfl." He cursed "not work, not poverty. But the impiety which robs the little ones of compensation that God willed should attach to the lowliness of their condition."
No interpretation of Veuillot is possible without sonic understanding of his origins and the times into which he was born in the year 1813, at Boynes, in the Loiret. From the cradle to the grave he was a man of the people. His father was a poor traveling cooper— his mother a peasant girl who brought as her marriage dowry only "the treasures of her youth and goodness." Veuillot loved to recur again and again to his humble birth. He had the pridc of race which, with an uncorrupted peasantry (as with Fogazzaro) takes the pl.ace of family pride. To an aristocratic colleague in whose remarks he detected a vcilcd insolence, be replied (the phrase has become famous)—"L have risen frGm a cooper's family, monsieur. From whom do you descend?" "If I could reestablish the nobility tomorrow, I would do so," he once declared, adding with a haughty humility that is tremendously imprcssive—"I wouldn't care to be one of them myself." Even as a child his passions were tempestuous. He tried to throw himself into a well when scolded. He tore the pages out of his alphabet book to prove he had learnt his letters. He fought two duels before he was twenty. He was physically powerful.~ "When I was a young man," he admitted to his colleagues late in life, "I thought the ground shook as I waIked~" After an evening spent with his friends, Gustave Olivier and the poet Casimir Delavigne, he would pitch sand on the quays to help pay his tutor's fees. He had no discoverable austerities. He liked good wine and good food ("a sound old French vice"). Hc played cards (Eke St. Franvois de Sales) and "hatcd to lose." He was no converted rake. "My disillusionments arc basic ones" he told the pessimistic young poets of his generation. "and not the result of misspent days and nights." But he was a td-bloodcd saint, paying for his fugue and twiperaxnent with temptations that kept him humble and fearful to the end of his life. I-Ic knew the bitter side of conversion. "The pleasures for which I had such contempt when I yielded to them," be confessed, "now, when I have quitted th:rn give me the thirst of the damned."
From a Catholic point of view the France into which Veuillot was born two years before Waterloo was a depressing one. If Napoleon was a Mahomedan at heart, Louis XVIII was a Voltairean sceptic. The Church had paid for its function as prop to the throne by a profound dis-esteem in popular sentiment. "Religion was already sick," says Jules Janiri, "and the revolution of i S3o gave it its death blow:' Louis Philippe paraded his disbeliefs to the extent of keephig masons and plasterers busy on the Tuilerics throughout Sunday. Evidences of the decay met the eyc everywhere, in dosed churches, convents and monasteries turned into barracks. "Here was once a school where the children of the neighborhood were taught the cornniandments of God," Veulilot muses, standing before one of these last. "Today it is a guard roam where drunken soldiers meditate, between blasphemks, on the commandments of their corporal." De Musset in the story of his youth gives the measure of even such official religion as persisted under the Bourbons. "The prefect asaisted at high mass and dined with the bishop. But the sight of a man entering a church on a week day made every head turn."
It was not the revolution but Napoleon that had given religion its deadliest blow. The people at large were inheritors of the day when, in the entire army of Italy, the others and men who practised their religiori would not have made up a company.
