Bernard Le Bouyer de Fenelon

“ M. de Brias, Archbishop of Cambrai, had died, and the King had given that valuable preferment to the Abbe de Fenelon, preceptor of the children of France. Fenelon was a man of quality, without fortune, whom the consciousness of wit—of the insinuating and captivating kind—united with much ability, gracefulness of intellect, and learning, inspired with ambition. ”

“ In August, 1714, Fénelon lost the last of that special group who had stuck to him more closely than brothers, the Duke de Beauvilliers. They had never met since he left Versailles, but their hearts were most closely knit. “Our best friends,” he wrote, “are the source of our greatest sorrow and bitterness. One is tempted to say that all good friends should wait and die on the same day. Friendship will be the cause of my death.” ”

“ Fénélon became at once the friend and pupil of this great man. He listened to him with docility: he admired his erudition and his eloquence; he revered his character, his age, his labours. He visited him at Germany, his country residence; where they had stated hours of prayer, meditation, and conversation; and passed their days in holy and instructive intercourse. Fénélon lived also in society with the most distinguished and excellent men of the age. The duke de Beauvilliers, governor of the duke of Burgundy, had begged him to write a treatise on the education of girls ”

“ He learnt to refer the problem of government, like the conduct of private life, to the mere standard of morals, and extended further than any one the plain but hazardous practice of deciding all things by the exclusive precepts of enlightened virtue. If he did not know all about policy and international science, he could always tell what would be expected of a hypothetically perfect man. Fénelon feels like a citizen of Christian Europe, but he pursues his thoughts apart from his country or his church, and his deepest utterances are in the mouth of pagans. ”

“ He came just at a time when the characteristic ideas of the 17th century—the ideas of Louis XIV., of Bossuet and Boileau—had lost their savour, and before another creed could arise to take their place. Hence, like most of those who break away from an established order, he seems by turns a revolutionist and a reactionary. Such a man expresses his ideas much better by word of mouth than in the cold formality of print; and Fénelon’s contemporaries thought far more highly of his conversation than his books. ”

“ One other point deserves mention before we pass from this interesting period of Fénelon’s life. In entering on his office he laid down to himself a rule, to which he rigidly adhered, never to ask of the court a favor for himself, his friends, or his family. The virtue of this stands out the more when we consider how very rare in those days was disinterestedness, and that men were none the less esteemed because they strove to profit themselves and their families to the utmost in whatever position they filled. ”

“ Hitherto the post of superior had been filled by much older men, but, though only twenty-seven, Fénelon was found to combine all those qualities which fitted him for the employment—distinguished talents, education, amiable manners, unusual prudence and discretion, much love to God, and great benevolence to man. The archbishop who selected him, M. de Harlai, was, as we have already noted, by no means of Fénelon’s stamp. He was a courtier, a man of the world, regardless of morality, and ever scheming for his own advancement. ”

“ Two years after, she was privately married to the king by the Archbishop of Paris in the presence of Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor, after whom the famous cemetery in Paris is named. Such was the woman who ruled at Versailles when Fénelon came into office. He excited her interest on their first meeting, at or before 1683; for she wrote, under that date, to Madame de St. Geran: “Your Abbé de Fénelon is very well received; but the world does not do him justice. He is feared; he wishes to be loved; and is lovable.” ”

“ A nobler effusion of the indignation of insulted virtue and genius, eloquence has never produced. In the very first lines of it Fénelon placed himself above his antagonist, and to the last preserves his elevation. Never did genius and virtue obtain a more complete triumph. ”

“ The story is not, indeed, complete; her religious life had other elements, not found, or only partially found, in Fenelon; elements centering directly in Christ and His gospel, and which had their inspiration in her Daily Food and her New Testament. What attracted her to Fenelon was not the doctrine of salvation as taught by him—she found it better taught in Bunyan and Leighton—it was his marvellous knowledge of the human heart, his keen insight into the proper workings of nature and grace, his deep spiritual wisdom, and the sweet mystic tone of his piety. ”

“ It is no longer the desert of the penitents of Port-Royal, or the strict cloister of Mother Angelica; Fenelon is for only inward restrictions and an abstention purely spiritual; from afar and in his retreat at Cambrai, he watches over his faithful flock with a tender pre-occupation which does not make him overlook the duties of their position. “Take as penance for your sins,” he wrote, “the disagreeable liabilities of the position you are in: the very hinderances which seem injurious to our advancement in piety turn to our profit, provided that we do what depends on ourselves. ”

“ Enemies are upon thy track. Defend not defenseless womanhood: knowest thou not what they have said of her? Speak what thou art taught and keep thy inmost thoughts for thyself alone. Have a care, Fenelon! thy bishopric hangs by a spider's thread.
The years kept slipping past as the years will. Twelve summers had come, and twelve times had autumn leaves known their time to fall. Madame Guyon was again in prison. A stranger was Archbishop of Cambrai: Fenelon no longer a counselor of kings—a tutor of royalty. His voice was silenced, his pen chained. He was allowed to retire to a rural parish. ”

“ Their happiness is no greater than that of the rest of mankind. They achieve no marked success, they gain no resplendent victory, They live as the others live—in the fret and expectation of the thing that we choose to call happiness, because it has yet to come. Fenelon incurs the displeasure of the crafty, bigoted king, who, for all his pride, would resent the most trivial offence with the humbleness of humblest vanity ”

“ A glow still more delightful must have pervaded the bosom of Fenelon when meditating the most beautiful lessons which wisdom ever announced to the powerful and the rulers of the people. To these privileged beings it belongs, to give a powerful impulse to minds, and to trace a new path for the generations to come. ”

“ FENELON—Reared in the study and admiration of antiquity and a witness of the power of Louis XIV, Fenelon naturally adopted the idea that mankind should be passive, and that its misfortunes and its prosperities, its virtues and its vices, are caused by the external influence that is exercised upon it by the law, or by the makers of the law. Thus, in his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men, with their interests, their faculties, their desires, and their possessions, under the absolute direction of the legislator. ”

“ French literature, unfortunately, is on the whole such in character as to need all that it can show to be cast into the scale of moral elevation and purity. Fénelon alone—he was not alone, as the instance of Madame Guyon has just freshly been reminding us—but Fénelon alone were enough, in quality supported by quantity, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the perverse inclination of the balance. ”

“ In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon, the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and another, that genius poured in torrents from his eyes. ”

“ There was indeed one Frenchman who had discovered those principles which it now seems impossible to miss,—that the many are not made for the use of one,—that the truly good government is not that which concentrates magnificence in a court, but that which diffuses happiness among a people,—that a king who gains victory after victory, and adds province to province, may deserve, not the admiration, but the abhorrence and contempt of mankind. These were the doctrines which Fenelon taught. Considered as an epic poem, Telemachus can scarcely be placed above Glover's Leonidas or Wilkie's Epigoniad. ”

“ Fenelon departed to an exile which was to last as long as his life; on his departure, he wrote to Madame de Maintenon, “I shall depart hence, madame, to-morrow, Friday, in obedience to the king. My greatest sorrow is to have wearied him and to displease him. I shall not cease, all the days of my life, to pray God to pour His graces upon him. I consent to be crushed more and more. The only thing I ask of his Majesty is, that the diocese of Cambrai, which is guiltless, may not suffer for the errors imputed to me. ”

“ Fenelon had not been mistaken, when he wrote once upon a time to Madame de Maintenon, who consulted him about her defects, “You are good towards those for whom you have liking and esteem, but you are cold so soon as the liking leaves you; when you are frigid your frigidity is carried rather far, and, when you begin to feel mistrust, your heart is withdrawn too brusquely from those to whom you had shown confidence.” ”

“ The reputation of Fenelon as a philosopher would probably have been higher and more universal than it is, if he had not added to the depth, comprehension, and soundness of his judgment, so rich a variety of those more pleasing and attractive qualities, which are commonly regarded rather as the flowers than the fruits of study. The same remark may be extended to the Fenelon of England, whose ingenious and original essays on the Pleasures of Imagination would have been much more valued by modern metaphysicians, had they been less beautifully and happily written. ”

“ It is now our privilege to bid farewell to the noise of battle, and look at the good archbishop in the peaceful retirement of his great diocese, where, as all admit, his episcopal duties were perfectly performed. Even the most captious carpers and cavilers at Fénelon, who can see little or no good in any other part of his life and try hard to find some unworthy motive at the bottom of the acts that seem so fair, are sore put to it, when they come to this portion, to withhold a meed of hearty praise. ”

“ It was no small privation for a man like Fénelon—born for Olympus as it were, bred to the best society, and fitted to shine in it with so much luster, and in a time when, even more than now, everything centered around the court at the capital—to be shut out from it all, losing the sympathy and friendship which his earlier years had 162 brought him, the daily intercourse with minds that reflected his own thoughts yet inspired and exhilarated him. ”

“ He accepted, simply, sincerely, sweetly, with no reservation or concealment or half-heartedness, what he regarded as, under the circumstances, the voice of God. His brother, the Compte de Fénelon, 154 heard the tidings first in Paris, and started instantly for Cambrai, thinking that the reception of the news through a kindly channel might at least lighten somewhat the blow. He arrived on the Festival of the Annunciation, just as the archbishop was about to preach in the cathedral. However keenly he felt the blow—and he was, of course, human—he was not disconcerted, or cast down, or perplexed. ”

“ His enemies, we are told, practiced the shameful artifice of placing about him an ecclesiastic of high birth whom he considered only as one of his grand vicars, but who was to act as a spy upon him. The man who had consented to take so base an office had, however, the magnanimity to punish himself for it. Utterly subdued by the purity and gentleness of spirit that he witnessed in Fénelon, he threw himself at his feet and confessed the unworthy part he had been led to act, and withdrew from the world to conceal in retirement his grief and shame. ”

“ The 17th century has treated literature as it treated politics and religion; each of the three was cooped up in a water-tight compartment by itself. Fénelon was one of the first to break down these partition-walls, and insist on viewing all three as products of a single spirit, seen at different angles. ”

“ Almost everything he finds will, we believe, thus commend itself. But there will be an occasional use of language before which he will pause and make a note of question or dissent. There will be unguarded expressions which need explanation. Perhaps the chief words which he will find cause to challenge will be those of most frequent occurrence—self and self-love. Fénelon does not use these terms quite accurately, and whoever takes them literally will be led into trouble. ”

“ The truth above all things, facts at any cost whether to ourselves or other people, is the better attitude. No 208 gain can come from falsity on the one side, any more than on the other. To delight unspeakably in the will of God, even when it involves contempt from those who misunderstand our position, is not the same as delighting in contempt itself. To insist on the lowest place when our recognized and lawful place is higher, would be neither wise nor edifying. Fénelon himself took his proper place as archbishop in the cathedral and palace and elsewhere, without diminution from his humility. ”