agreed, there are so many faults in the works of Rousseau and Voltaire, what shall we say of those of Raynal and Diderot ?1 The luminous method of our late metaphysicians has, no doubt with reason, been extolled. It should, nevertheless, have been remarked that there are two sorts of perspicuity: the one belongs to a vulgar order of ideas, (a commonplace notion, for example, may be clearly comprehended;) the other proceeds from an admirable faculty of conceiving and expressing with precision a strong and complex idea. The pebbles at the bottom of a brook may easily be seen, because the stream is shallow; but amber, coral, pearls, attract the eye of the diver at immense depths beneath the pellucid waters of the abyss.

If our age, in a literary point of view, is inferior to that of Louis XIV., let us seek no other cause for it than our irreligion. We have already shown how much Voltaire would have gained by being a Christian; he would, at this day, dispute the palm of the Muses with Racine. His works would have acquired that moral tint without which nothing is perfect; we should also find in them those charming aliusions to other times the want of which occasions so great a void. He who denies the God of his country is almost always destitute of respect for the memory of his forefathers; for him the tombs are without interest, and he considers the institutions of his ancestors as barbarous customs; he takes no pleasure in calling to mind the sentiments, the wisdom, and the manners, of his antique mother.

Religion is the most powerful motive of the love of country; pious writers have invariably disseminated that noble sentiment in their works. With what respect, in what magnificent terms, do the writers of the age of Louis XIV. always mention France! Wo be to him who insults his country! Let our country become weary of being ungrateful before we are weary of loving her; let our heart be greater than her injustice!

If the religious man loves his country, it is because his mind is simple, and the natural sentiments which attach us to the land of our nativity are the ground, as it were, and the habit of his heart. He gives the hand to his forefathers and to his children; he is planted in his native soil, like the oak which sees its aged

1 See note DD.

roots below striking deep into the earth, while at its top young shoots are aspiring to heaven.

Rousseau is one of the writers of the eighteenth century whose style is the most fascinating, because, designedly eccentric, he created for himself a shadow, at least, of religion. He believed in something, which was not Christ, but yet was the gospel. This phantom of Christianity, such as it is, has sometimes imparted ineffable graces to his genius. Would not he, who has inveighed with such energy against sophists, have done better to give full scope to the tenderness of his soul, than to bewilder himself, like them, in empty systems, whose obsolete errors he has merely dressed up in the garb of youth ?1

Buffon would be deficient in nothing, were his sensibility equal to his eloquence. We frequently have occasion to make the remark, which cannot be sufficiently impressed upon the present age, that without religion there can be no feeling. Buffon delights us by his style, but seldom excites our sensibility. Read, for instance, his admirable description of the dog: every kind of dog is depicted there-the hunter's dog, the shepherd's dog, the wild dog, the master dog, the foppish dog, &c. But what is wanting to complete the list? The blind man's dog. This is the first that would have struck the mind of a Christian.

Buffon has paid little attention to the tender relations of life. We must, however, do justice to this great painter of nature, who possesses a rare excellence of style. He who can observe such an exact propriety, who is never either too high or too low, must have a great command over his mind and conduct. It is well known that Buffon respected whatever it becomes a man to respect. He did not think that philosophy consisted in the public profession of infidelity and in wantonly insulting the altars of twenty-four millions of men. He was regular in the performance of his duties as a Christian, and set an excellent example to his domestics. Rousseau, embracing the groundwork and rejecting the forms of Christianity, displays in his performances the tenderness of religion, together with the bad tone of the sophist; Buffon, for the contrary reason, has the dryness of philosophy, with the decorum of piety. Christianity has infused into the style of

1 See note EE.

the former its charm, its ease, its warmth, and invested the style of the latter with order, perspicuity, and magnificence. Thus the works of both these celebrated men bear, in their good as well as in their bad qualities, the stamp of what they themselves chose and rejected in religion.

In naming Montesquieu, we call to mind the truly great man of the eighteenth century. The Spirit of Laws, and the essay on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Roman Empire, will live as long as the language in which they are written. If Montesquieu, in a production of his youth, unfortunately assailed religion with some of those shafts which he aimed at our manners, this was but a transient error, a species of tribute paid to the corruption of the regency.1 But in the work which has placed Montesquieu in the rank of illustrious men, he has made a magnificent reparation for the injury by the panegyric he pronounces on that religion which he had the imprudence to attack. The maturity of his years, and even an interest for his fame, taught him that in order to erect a durable monument he must lay its foundations in a more stable soil than the dust of this world; his genius, which embraced all ages, rested upon religion alone, to which all ages are promised.

From all our observations we conclude that the writers of the eighteenth century owe most of their defects to a delusive system of philosophy, and that, if they had been more religious, they would have approached nearer to perfection.

There has been in our age, with some few exceptions, a sort of general abortion of talents. You would even say that impiety, which renders every thing barren, is also manifested in the impoverishment of physical nature. Cast your eyes on the generations which immediately succeeded the age of Louis XIV. Where are those men with countenances serene and majestic, with dignified port and noble attire, with polished language and air at once military and classical-the air of conquerors and lovers of the arts? You look for them, but you find them not. The diminutive, obscure mortals of the present times walk like pigmies beneath the lofty porticos of the structures raised by a former age. On their harsh brows sit selfishness and the contempt of

1 See note FF.

God; they have lost both the dignity of dress and the purity of language. You would take them not for the descendants, but for the buffoons, of the heroic race which preceded them.

The disciples of the new school blast the imagination with I know not what truth, which is not the real truth. The style of these men is dry, their mode of expression devoid of sincerity, their imagination destitute of love and of warmth; they have no unction, no richness, no simplicity. You find in their works nothing that fills, nothing that satisfies; immensity is not there, because the Divinity is wanting. Instead of that tender religion, that harmonious instrument which the authors of the age of Louis XIV. made use of to pitch the tone of their eloquence, modern writers have recourse to a contracted philosophy, which goes on dividing and subdividing all things, measuring sentiments with compasses, subjecting the soul to calculation, and reducing the universe, God himself included, to a transient subtraction from nothing.

Thus, the eighteenth century is daily fading away in the perspective, while the seventeenth is gradually magnified, in proportion as we recede from it: the one grovels on the earth, the other soars to the skies. In vain would you strive to depreciate the genius of a Bossuet or a Racine; it will share the immortality of that venerable form of Homer which is seen behind the long lapse of centuries. Sometimes it is obscured by the dust which a crumbling age raises in its fall; but no sooner is the cloud dispersed than you again perceive the majestic figure, but of augmented size, to overlook the new ruins.1

1 See note GG.

BOOK V.

THE HARMONIES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION WITH THE SCENES OF NATURE AND THE PASSIONS OF THE HUMAN HEART.

CHAPTER I.

DIVISION OF THE HARMONIES.

BEFORE we proceed to the ceremonies of religion, we have yet to examine some subjects which we could not sufficiently develop in the preceding books. These subjects relate either to the physical or the moral side of the arts. Thus, for example, the sites of monasteries and the ruins of religious monuments belong to the material part of architecture; while the effects of the Christian doctrine, with the passions of the human heart and the scenery of nature, are referable to the dramatic and descriptive departments of poetry.

Such are the subjects which we comprehend in this book under the general head of Harmonies.

CHAPTER II.

PHYSICAL HARMONIES.

The Sites of Religious Monuments-The Convents of Maronites, Copts, &c.

THERE are in human things two kinds of nature, placed the one at the beginning, the other at the end, of society. Were not this the case, man, advancing farther and farther from his origin, would have become a sort of monster: but, by a particular law of Providence, the more civilized he grows the nearer he approaches