Louis Veuillot
Stuart, Henry Longan
November 12, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL Is LOUIS...
...As for Jean-Jacques RousCridques ci Romanciers, by Andrt Brawnier...
...Centenaries are occasions, as a rule, when enemies and panegyrists arrive at a sort of mutual liquidation...
...I-Ic knew the bitter side of conversion...
...He was the man who "fought all goverranents and served nfl...
...He vocalizes...
...Its very truces and arrnistices are fallacious and they know it well...
...If Napoleon was a Mahomedan at heart, Louis XVIII was a Voltairean sceptic...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...B&ranger is "the Horace of the commercial traveler, the Tyrtacus of back-parlor Catalines, the Anacreon of boucloirs where all the world is made welcome...
...The prefect asaisted at high mass and dined with the bishop...
...How, in short, refuse to admit that what the world mistook for blindness was only a refusal to be dazzled...
...If you revolt, we will kill you...
...Like Alan Breck in Stevenson's romance, his heart sometimes swelled involuntarily at the thought that he was indeed a "bonny fechter...
...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...
...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...
...Even at the distance of fifty and sixty years their audacity staggers us...
...But the sight of a man entering a church on a week day made every head turn...
...He had the pridc of race which, with an uncorrupted peasantry (as with Fogazzaro) takes the pl.ace of family pride...
...i6 THE COMMONWEAL November ii...
...Of Baudclaire—"In being merely ~strange he used up power that might have made him original...
...The bigger they were, Veuillot thought, the harder they would fall...
...Franvois de Sales) and "hatcd to lose...
...Prejudicc$' if you will...
...Even as a child his passions were tempestuous...
...Veujilot loved to recur again and again to his humble birth...
...No quarter...
...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...
...and not the result of misspent days and nights...
...And indeed, his sword, if stainless, was merciless...
...The first of ft...
...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...
...For the humble foot soldiers, the "pietons" who are trampled under foot anyhow, by friend or foe, his great heart held only pity...
...For him no reputation was "established"—no sublimity toplofty enough...
...But Veulilot was no revolutionary...
...The people at large were inheritors of the day when, in the entire army of Italy, the o&ers and men who practised their religiori would not have made up a company...
...Why should he show mercy to the thing against which his Master, once for all, had preached unending war...
...He tore the pages out of his alphabet book to prove he had learnt his letters...
...Sainte-Beuve (of all men) could pull an evangelical face and accuse him of a lack of Christian charity...
...To Tame he was "Monsieur Veujilot," the dishonest broker between "cassock and epaulette...
...No irterprcta6on of Vcuillot 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...
...They have their triumph1 but its hosannas echo through the streets tiE no earthly city...
...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...
...Let us have at this pack I" The anecdote is one of several related by M. Andr6 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...
...November 12, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL Is LOUIS VEUILLOT By HENRY LONGAN STUART MORE than thirty years have passed since Louis VeujiJot, 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...
...His exacerbated sense found it lacking everywherc: 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...
...Today it is a guard roam where drunken soldkrs meditate, between blasphemks, on the commandments of their corporal...
...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...
...It saved him from taking refuge in man-made panaceas and threw him back upon eternal verities...
...The campaign to which they were called is one that knows no decision...
...The Church had paid for its function as prop to the throne by a profound dis-esteem in popular sentiment...
...There never has been a writer who earned more abounding hatred, or who might be prouder of the hatred he earned...
...He asked for no quarter and w6uld give none...
...He liked good wine and good food ("a sound old French vice...
...They leave behind them a battle into which every generation pours fresh levies, conscripts of God or Satan...
...Of Rabelais, whom he nevertheless ranks as one of the founders of the French language, he could cxclaim—"Regard him well...
...He was not as age goes, a very old man when he died, having barely passed the psalmist's allotted span...
...My charger is neighing...
...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...
...Paris: Let Editions C. Cr...
...I swear it by God I I can feel the spurs sprouting at my very heels...
...My disillusionments arc basic ones" he told the pessimistic young poets of his generation...
...Sacrisry beadle I" Hugo could cry, and the taunt was some measure how deep had been the wound and how headlong the fall...
...It was not the revolution but Napoleon that had given religion its deadliest blow...
...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...
...He never reasons, never even sings...
...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...
...scau, Veujilot's b&tc-noirc-——"He sought every manner of misfortune, and there was not one but was a legitimate penalty either of his baseness or his pride...
...My sword quivers in its sheath...
...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...
...Evidences of the decay met the eyc everywhere, in dosed churches, convents and monasteries turned into barracks...
...Hc played cards (Eke St...
...If you steal, we will poison you...
...These judgments could be terrible...
...But Veuillot was too obses~ed and driven by a single ideal to prevent his work for the cause of the Catholic church in France from overshadowing all subsidiary activities...
...He fought two duels before he was twenty...
...Opposition and calumny seemed to be the breath of life in his ireful nostrils...
...The cry "they run 1', is never shouted into their benumbed ears...
...These do not dose their eyes on victory, but open them upon it...
...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...
...He was no converted rake...
...The denial of justice, wherever he encountered it, drove him, not to madness, but to a kind of fatidic utterance...
...He cursed "not work, not poverty...
...It is none otT our business which...
...He tried to throw himself into a well when scolded...
...Circumarnbient worldliness reeled and cried aloud under the thrusts which this sore soldier of the cross knew so well how to deliver...
...His mind was set on something beyond...
...If you have no bread, you can go to the workhouse or die...
...But such are not the lives nor the deaths of the saints...
...He had no discoverable austerities...
...De Musset in the story of his youth gives the measure of even suc5 official religion as persisted under the Bourbons...
...Of Lamartine—"He is a sceptic under a covering of insipid religiosity...
...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...
...How were the pompous laws inscribed on charter rolls intcrprctcd for him ?" he asks, speaking of his harassed father, dead in poverty...
...Veujilot could use the rapier, but, where his foes wcre judged unworthy of clean steel, the whip as well...
...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...
...Judge what its effect must have been on the very morrow of apotheosis...
...But let those whom a difficult task attracts try to separate the prejudice from the insight Veujilot, in fact (no honest critic would deny it) possessed to the full one requirement of the Croceara school...
...Few men, even among the elect of our net have ever been so eaten up with a hunger and thirst after justicc...
...What a revolutionary, had he not been a Catholic...
...shaMe...
...From a Catholic point of view the France into which Veuillot was born two years before Waterloo was a depressing one...
...There are lives which outlast the struggle that has burned away their vital flame...
...cries M. Lemaitre...
...From whom do you descend...
...But the impiety which robs the little ones of compensation that God willed should attach to the lowliness of their condition...
...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...
...If you are ill, we can do nothing to help you...
Vol. 1 • November 1924 • No. 1
