Page images
PDF
EPUB

vages might have reconciled him to the palaces of kings. Vain wishes!-M. Chenier remained upon the theatre of his agitations and his gifts. Attacked while yet young with a mortal disease, you saw him, gentlemen, decline slowly towards the tomb, and quit for ever....I have never heard any account of his last moments.

We who have lived amid the troubles of revolutions, can none of us escape the attention of history. Who can flatter himself with remaining unspotted in a time of delirium when no one retained the full use of his reason. Let us then exercise the utmost indulgence towards each other; let us excuse what we cannot approve. Such is the weakness of human nature, that talents, that genius, that virtue itself are sometimes the occasion of our overstepping the bounds of duty. M. Chenier adored liberty; can that be imputed to him as a crime. The Chevaliers themselves, if they could quit their tombs, would follow the superior light of our age, we should see an illustrious alliance formed between man and liberty, as under the race of Valois, the gothic battlements crowned with infinite grace, our monuments built according to the orders borrowed from Greece. Is not liberty the greatest good of man, the most urgent want of man. It inflames genius, it elevates the heart, it is as necessary to the friend of the Muses as the air which he breathes. The arts may, to a certain point, live in dependence, because they make use of a language peculiar to themselves, which is not understood by the multitude; but letters, which speak an universal language, languish and die in chains.

How will pages worthy of history ever be traced, if the writer be interdicted every magnanimous sentiment, every forcible and elevated thought. Liberty is so naturally the friend of the sciences and of letters, that they fly with her when she is banished from among any people; it is you, gentlemen, whom she charges to write her annals,

to revenge her on her enemies, and to transmit her name and worship to posterity.

That my idea may not be mistaken by any, I here declare that I speak of that liberty which is the child of order, and produced by the laws, not of that daughter of licentiousness, who is the mother of slavery. The author of the tragedy of Charles IX, was not to be condemned for offering up his incense to the first of these deities, but for believing that the rights she confers are incompatible with a monarchical government. A Frenchman was always free at the foot of the throne; it is in his opinions that he places that freedom, which others place in their laws. Liberty is to him a sentiment rather than a principle, he is a citizen by instinct, and a subject by choice. If the writer, whose loss you lament, had made this distinction, he would not have embraced with equal love the liberty which creates and that which destroys.

Here, gentlemen, I conclude the task which the customs of the academy have delegated to me. On the point of terminating this address, I am struck with an idea which afflicts me deeply. It is not long since M. Chenier delivered some opinions, which he proposed to pub. lish, upon my works, and it is to my lot that it falls at this moment to judge my judge, I say it in all the sincerity of my heart, I had rather be still exposed to the shafts of satire, and live at peace in some solitude, than remind you by my presence here of the rapid succession of men upon the earth; of the sudden appearance of that death which overthrows all our projects and all our hopes, which carries us off in a moment, and sometimes consigns the care of our memory to men whose principles and sentiments are directly in opposition to our own,

This tribunal is a sort of field of battle, where talents by turn shine and vanish. What variety of genius has passed over it; a Corncille, a Racine, a Boileau, a La

Bruyère, a Bossuet, a Fénélon, a Voltaire, a Buffon, a Montesquieu? Who may not be alarmed, gentlemen, at the idea that he is about to form a link in this august chain? Oppressed with the weight of these immortal names, not having the powers necessary to make myself recognized as a lawful heir, I will endeavour at least to prove my descent by my sentiments. When When my turn shall arrive to yield my place to the orator who is to deliver his oration over my tomb, he may treat my works with severity, but he shall be obliged to say, that I loved my Country passionately, that I would have suffered a thousand ills rather than have cost her a single tear, that I would, without hesitation, have sacrificed my life in support of these noble sentiments, the only ones which cart give value to life and dignity to death.

DEFENCE

OF THE BEAUTIES OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE only noble answer, perhaps, that can be given by an author when attacked, is silence. It is at least the surest way of gaining credit in the public opinion.

If a work be really good, it cannot be affected by censure; if it be bad, it cannot be justified by apologies.

Convinced of these truths, the author of the Spirit of Christianity determined not to take any notice of the animadversions of critics, and till the present moment he has adhered to this resolution. He has borne praises without pride, and insults without discouragement: the former are often lavished upon mediocrity, and the latter upon merit. He has with perfect indifference beheld certain critics proceed from abuse to calumny, either becausé they ascribed the author's silence to contempt, or becausé they could not forgive him after their affronts had been offered to him in vain.

Methinks I hear the reader ask why then does the author now break silence? Why has he deviated from the rule which he laid down for himself? To these questions I reply: Because it is obvious, that under the pretext of attacking the author, there now lurks a design to annihilate that little benefit which the work may be calculated to produce. Because it is neither his own person nor his own talent, real or reputed, that the author is about to defend, but the book itself; and this book he will defend not as literary, but as a religious work.

The Beauties of Christianity have been received by the public with some indulgence. At this symptom of a change in opinion, the spirit of sophistry took the alarm; she considered it as prophetic of the approaching termination of her too long reign. She had recourse to all her weapons, she took every disguise, and even assumed the cloak of religion, to blast a work written in behalf of religion herself.

Under these circumstances, the author deems it his duty to keep silence no longer. The same spirit which prompted him to write his book, now impels him to step forth in its defence. It is pretty evident that the critics, to whom he alludes in this defence, were not honest in their animadversions; they pretended to misconceive the object of the work; they loudly accused it of being profane; they took good care not to perceive that the author treated of the grandeur, the beauty, the poetry of the Christian religion, merely because it had been the fashion for half a century to insist on its meanness, absurdity, and barbarism. When he has explained the reasons which induced him to undertake the work, when he has specified the class of readers to whom it is particularly addressed, he hopes that his intentions and the object of his labours will cease to be mistaken. The author, in his own opinion, cannot give a stronger proof of his devotion to the cause which he has espoused, than in addressing this reply to the critics, in spite of the repugnance which he. has always felt for controversies of the kind.

It has in the first place been asked, whether the author had a right to compose such a work. This is either a serious question or a sneer. If it be serious, the critic proves that he is not much conversant with his subject.

Needs any one be told that in difficult times every Christian is a priest and confessor of Jesus Christ ?*

* S. Nieron, Dial. c. Lucif.

« PreviousContinue »