A UGUSTIN C 0 C HIN.*
IT is annoying, when we have to review so interesting a book as this, to be compelled to notice little blemishes which attention on the part of the translator, printer, and publisher ought to have removed ; but this kind of drudgery is too useful to be shirked. Mr. Augustus Craven is, we presume, so accustomed to French, that he does not know what is idiomatic English and what is not. This, for example, is not a correct English sentence :—" England had inaugurated universal exhibitions, and France was not dis- posed to leave her the exclusive honour of a similar enterprise." The following are not sound English expressions,—a "necro- logical article" (for obituary), a " candidacy," "our transcendent publicists" (in the sense, as shown by the context, of transcend- ental), "he suscitated committees," an "ill-begotten sum" of money. It grates on one's sensibilities to be told not to despair " like those who have no hopes," and who that respects his aspirates can hear, without a slight shudder, of eloquence of " an higher order "? Messrs. Chapman and Hall's reader ought not to have let these things pass.
Augustin Cochin was one in a group of eminent person- ages, in which figured Montalembert, Lacordaire, Perreyve, and Ozanam, who have obtained an honourable place in French and in European history, by zealously and disinterestedly striving, for upwards of half-a-century, to combine fidelity to the Roman Catholic Church with enthusiastic acceptance of the liberal and progressive ideas of modern civilisation. They were admirable men, sincere, intrepid, passionately benevolent, and of shining parts, but characterised by a fervour of enthusiasm, a power of hoping, a tendency to believe all the world as noble as themselves, which caused them to underrate the difficulty of the problem which they attempted to solve, and which go far to account for what must clearly be called their failure as a party. Religion, on the one hand, and liberal ideas on the other, seemed to them so irresistibly fascinating, so unspeakably beneficent, so obviously in harmony with each other, that they exultingly pro- claimed an alliance between the two, and took it for granted that all rational persons would unite to celebrate the wedding. They were mistaken. They found themselves between the fell points of mighty opposites. Their meed from the Radical and the atheist was scorn, from the Ultramontaue hatred. " Religion alone," wrote Augustin Cochin in his twenty-fourth year, " is the sovereign teacher of duty." Christianity was to secure that the Government should respect the people, and that the people should respect authority. "I die," said M. Cochin at forty-eight, " victim of the vicissitudes of the Church and my country." And of all the disappointments and pangs which broke his heart, none perhaps was quite so bitter as that occa- sioned by an article in the Univers, written apparently with the express purpose of blasting his political career, and describing him as "a tikeral Catholic, a rebel to the Syllabus." Antagonist parties want not deferential acknowledgment or sympathetic advice, but blind, thorough-going, narrow partisanship, It is to the honour of Montalembert and his friends that they could be blind partisans neither of the Papacy nor of its foes, and their history as it party exhibits with nice felicity of illustration the difference between words and things, between abstract principles and concrete interests,• in defining the limits of political co- operation.
Nothing is so easy as to write out general propositions to which people will assent, but when a thing is to be done, it can be done only in one way. Few, for example, would call in question the general propositions in which M. Cochin and his biographer express their belief in the power of religion to promote harmony in social arrangements. "No social state so urgently requires the infiltration of Christianity into the masses as democracy ; the more a man is free from earthly restraints, the more he stands in need of heavenly checks. When morality disappears from the consciences of individuals, tyranny makes its appearance in their codes ; when moral order does not reign paramount in a demo- cratic community, anarchy is close at hand, and despotism follows on the heels of anarchy." How foolishly disputatious would be the person who should maintain the contradictory of such truths ! " Christianity and liberty are the two poles of the moral andpolitical world." What essayist might not take that for his motto ? But when it had to be decided, yea or nay, whether public instruction in France should be committed to the religious Orders, the specific emergency could be met only by a specific vote. M. Cochin and his party voted for the religious Orders, and all who, in the matter of
* Augvattn Cochin. By Count do Falloux, of the French Academy. Translated from the French by Augustus Craven. London: Chapman and Hall. 187i.
education, accentuated the liberty rather than the Catholicism, the knowledge rather than the religion, drew sharply aside from such allies. In like manner, there could be no political co-opera- tion between those who held that the Republic of France ought to restore the Pope, and those who held that the Pope and the Romans ought to be let alone. It was all very well for the organ of Liberal Catholicism to talk of the temporal power of the Popes, " not as an instrument of sovereignty, but as a sovereign instru- ment of civilisation ;" the out-and-out Liberal could see, in the replacement of the Pope by the aid of French bayonets, nothing less than a palpable and gross offence to freedom.
We are not surprised that politicians who, at each successive application of the practical test, were found on the side of priest and king, should give mortal offence to all those French- men who sympathised with Cavour, and to all those Frenchmen who sympathised with Garibaldi ; but it is not quite so easy to understand why a party which, on all critical occasions, voted as the Ultramontanes wished, should have been at least as cordially detested, at least as bitterly reviled, by them as by the Radicals. Nothing could be more cruelly contemptuous than M. Veuillot's attacks upon M. Cochin, The idea of M. Cochin's being named Ambassador to Rome was declared to be an insult to the Pope, though it might not be intended as such. If M. Cochin, said his assailant, was a Catholic, he was "something else besides." He was "sufficiently insinuating to receive the bread of life in Montakmbert's chapel, and to break political bread with M. Quinet." " Liberal soap," said M. Veuillot, with more force than gracefulness, served well to " lubricate the passage from a principle to a post," and to whitewash mass-goers who were "anxious to enter the academical and political taverns." All this could mean duly that M. Cochin was a hypocrite and traitor, selfish at heart, and pre- served from clear consciousness of his hypocrisy by mere feebleness of thinking faculty. There is not a shadow of doubt that M. Cochin was honest, disinterested, high-minded, and devout ; it is almost as certain that the editor of the Univers believed himself to be saying of M. Cochin what was substantially true. The explanation seems to be that, though voting with the Ultramontanes, M. Cochin spoke with the Liberals. His words gave umbrage to the one party, his acts abruptly separated him from the other. We can hardly imagine that if M. Veuillot had known as much as this biography reveals of M. Cochin's heart-felt devotion to Catholicism, —if be had read those notes in which M. Cochin describes his in- terviews with the Pope, and the enraptured humility with which he knelt before the Pontiff, kissing the pontifical feet and hands, —if he had observed with what quick facility M. Cochin accepted appearances in guarantee of the beneficence of the Pope's Govern- ment, and in refutation of the calumnies of Lord Palmerston and the Sack, and with what delighted readiness he detected " a slave, yes, a real slave," a Hindoo, whom the English Protestant, " Colonel R.," was carrying away from his native land, and who " sleeps at his chamber-door on the ground, and has only permission to eat once a day,"—if M. Veuillot, we say, had known all this, it is scarcely conceivable that he should have clung to the belief that M. Cochin was but a sham Catholic. " I came here," wrote M. Cochin from Rome, " to increase my faith, and I regu- late my journey accordingly. I have, therefore, carefully com- menced by opening wide the gates of my soul, in order to give free access to admiration. I refused to listen to a single political or critical conversation until I had received the Pope's blessing, humbled myself before the remains of the true cross deposited by the Empress Helena in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusa- lemme, listened to the music on Good Friday in the Sixtine Chapel, visited the tombs on the Via Apple at sunset, feasted my eyes on the Transfiguration' in the Vatican, and admired the contents of Overbeek's studio." Might not a man who thus pre- pared himself for discovering British slaves and unmasking Pahiuerstonian fabrications have stormed the fortress even of M. Veuillot's confidence ? But the editor of the Univers had not access to M. Cochin's private correspondence, and took the vaguely-generous expressions in which, in his articles in the Correspondent, he referred to modern society, and the exuberant faith which he avowed in the facility of reconciling the Papacy and progress, to evince a much more lax and sentimental allegiance to the Church than M. Cochin cherished.
The result, at all events, was that M. Cochin fell between two stools. The implacable Veuillot, with truth enough to be ruin- ously damaging, could describe him as "citizen Cochin, a Repub- lican for ever, who offered himself to the electors of Paris on the list of 'conciliation,' at the head of which figured the citizens Quinet, Hugo, Louis Blanc, and other good Catholics," and could thus, with pungent irony, estimate the success of the scheme :— " On this list, he occupied nearly the centre ; but a conciliation' was effected on his behalf between the clericals and the atheists ; both parties unanimously agreed to expunge his name, and ho was not elected." In 1871, M. Cochin declared himself " too Catholic to succeed in Paris, too liberal to be elected in any Catholic district." The union which it had been the hope and the ambition of his life to promote had proved imprac- ticable. He died soon after writing these words, and the glance which from his death-bed he cast upon the future of his country was one of deep despondency. In an unfinished letter, addressed to M. Thiers, he entreated that statesman to stick to monarchy. "The Republic," he said, " has been murdered by its own offspring ; the horrors of 1703, the imbecility of 1848, and the crimes of 1870 have buried it for ever." M. Cochin's intellectual force had not been sufficient to enable him to perceive and understand the settled determination of France to have done with dynasties, monarchical and imperial, and therefore he could not estimate the stability and strength of the Republic. Decisive intellectual force was what he always lacked, but on the moral side he was unimpeachable. The Count de Falloux, his present biographer, formed an extremely high opinion of his talents, and gave him a seat on the Commission of Public Instruction when he was still quite a young man. Among the members of the Commission was M. Thiers, who, we are told, was by no means displeased to hear M. Cochin spoken of as " a Catholic Thiers," and used, perhaps with some touch of irony, to express admiration for the facility with which M. Cochin could pass from financial and other worldly questions to " the contemplation of eternal truths ;" but when, twenty years afterwards, M. Thiers was at the bead of the French Government, and his Minister of the Interior recommended M. Cochin for Mayor of the Central District of Paris, M. Thiers declined to accept him, graciously remarking at the same time that ho founded great hopes on his "young friend." M. Thiers, we fancy, meant that M. Cochin was one of those who are promising young men at twenty-five, and continue promising young men at fifty. Surely, however, it is much to be able to say of any one, as can be said of M. Cochin, that his personal disinterestedness, his purity of character, his elevation of aim were admitted by his bitterest antagonists, even by M. Veuillot.
Previous page
