A Masterful Monk

...Christ's life should be our life and its every detail is all important to us...

...Didon had in him the elements of greatness...

...Young Didon was pampered, as indeed he was to be all his life, and his rather overwhelming personality was allowed full play...

...To tell the truth, he must have been a great egotist who, apart from his unquestionable apostolic zeal, loved people for what he got out of them...

...A few months later the superiors of Pere Didon sent him to a small convent of the order at Corbara in Corsica where he was to be given time to study and meditate...

...In 1880, preaching at SaintPhilippe-du-Roule, Paris, on divorce, while the French Chambers were discussing that question, he startled Catholic opinion by suggesting a way out of the difficulty which was for the legislative body not to allow divorce to those French citizens whose religion forbade it...

...The book appeared in 1886 and was an extraordinary success...

...In less than eighteen months he was allowed to leave his "desert"—which most visitors describe as an Eden—and given full liberty to undertake long and expensive travels in Germany, Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land destined to complete his preparation for his book...

...As a matter of fact they are not only unimpeachable but cold...

...No friar-preacher between the days of Lacordaire and those of the prior of Jerusalem, Pere Lagrange, forced himself so irresistibly on public attention as did Henri Didon...

...Here again he is simplicity itself...

...A Catholic Flaubert in whom devotion to Christ would replace devotion to art is Pere Didon...

...But those letters, just republished in two volumes by Plon-Nourrit, compel us to revise our appreciation of the man who wrote them...

...What strikes us at first sight is his remarkable absence of complication: letter after letter shows him in the same light, no puzzling subtleties ever appear in his consciousness, none of those nuances which, when we read- Lacordaire, make us wonder whether he was, in his own words, hard as a diamond or tender as a mother...

...There is something symbolic in what he says about the Holy Sepulchre: the saintly mother of Constantine was a woman who hid the holy place under churches and compels us to peep at the very rock of Calvary through a window in an altar...

...He was in Corsica when she died and arrived too late...

...This being realized, his many shortcomings hardly matter and the man appears as the brother of the great monks of past ages...

...But after nineteen centuries this Parisian monk so unlike Saint Paul in his surroundings is strikingly like him in his spiritual life: the same tenseness, the same personality, the same simplicity, and above all, the same capacity for living every minute of night or day in union with Christ, not because it is a duty but because it is an irresistible want...

...Christ fills this correspondence as He filled the soul of Henri Didon at every hour...

...Didon, superbly equipped as a man, was a Christian in the full force of the term, that is to say, one haunted by Christ as a primitive might be...

...The following of Pere Didon consisted of the many people of all classes and ages who believed in the reconciliation of the Church and the Zeitgeist, but the students in the Latin quarter were most enthusiastic about him...

...At twenty-seven he was pointed out by the Figaro as a modern Lacordaire, as eloquent and more modern than his predecessor...

...It is by this conviction, carried into every item of his existence, that Pere Didon is a great monk...

...In fact Didon, though bewailing his so-called exile with the vehemence of a pasionate disposition, started immediately on a course of reading preparatory to writing a two-volume Life of Christ...

...But four days after the funeral he had the grave and the coffin reopened and covered the dead face with kisses...

...Many writers would welcome such a retreat, which the Dominican authorities were at great pains to make as pleasant as possible...

...He was modern as Lacordaire had been, by a passionate longing to show the world that even the members of a mediaeval order could believe in the right of civil society, defend democracy and liberty, and side with Leo XIII with a violence implying that under the previous Pope, they would have minimized the syllabus and tried to represent the French Revolution as a Christian movement...

...One letter is signed "Yours, yours, yours," which, from another man, would be fraught with significance...

...Had I had to write about Pere Didon at any time between his death and the very recent publication in the Revue des Deux Mondes of a long correspondence with a talented niece of Flaubert's, Madame Commanville, I might have spoken of him as a brilliant, a rarely influential monk, but I should certainly not have spoken of him as a great monk...

...The converse of this proposition was too obvious...

...No duties were forced upon him, his correspondence was unwatched, and his friends visited him freely...

...A simple and perhaps easy attitude...

...Finally, during the last ten years of his life, Pere Didon was prevailed upon to conduct the educational establishments of his order, especially the celebrated Arcueil School, and acquitted himself of these duties, which he took up without much enthusiasm, with unsurpassed eclat...

...He had only one passionate attachment: his mother...

...He was a powerfullooking monk, with magnificent eyes...

...He loved nature and solitude and speaks of them with what tenderness is at his command, that is to say not much, for without being hard he was rough: he seldom speaks of people in trouble and never of anybody struggling with poverty, never of an animal...

...The letters to Madame Commanville will help to form a correct judgment of a religious who after being unduly exalted is now unjustly diminished...

...There is one passage of a letter in which he describes himself writing his Life of Christ in the attitude of prayer: for one moment we are surprised, then we see the rare beauty of this allpervading love...

...His Life of Christ is in the sixtyeighth edition and still sells, but the man himself has decidedly lost...

...He was a great orator, a commanding and magnetic personality...

...What is really great in Didon and will inevitably make his letters precious to many Christians—they appeal quite as much to non-Catholics as to Catholics —is his religious attitude...

...Pere Didon, during the past two decades has become rather nebulous...

...He was more famous than ever when he died...

...Pere Didon visibly uses these three monosyllables because he is in a hurry and tries to produce an affectionate effect quickly...

...Didon has no other devotion: the Blessed Virgin is never mentioned, the Blessed Sacrament exactly in the style of Corinthians...

...The Dominicans had not created as yet those famous theological schools at Fribourg and Le Saulchoir where solidity comes before brilliance...

...Whatever separates him from Christ, even if it be of good repute and might fill another person's soul, he discards...

...His physical superabundance, his success, his being spoiled by his superiors, the exaggeration with which he speaks of his not very formidable trial, the recurrence of a comparison between himself and Savonarola, even occasionally Saint Paul, a slightly patronizing tone in speaking of Lacordaire, all tend to show us in him the magnetic and beloved egotist who feels the excess of his personality and knows it is an element of greatness, but does not care to submit it to rules...

...Let anybody tryl It takes a man with the strength of ten men, and that is why Didon in spite of his littlenesses is great...

...His two correspondences with women (the one just out and another with a Mademoiselle Vianzon which I read without much interest in 1903) are affectionate in a way and might sometimes be misinterpreted by a person who read them unsympathetically...

...With this supreme passion burning in his soul, Henri Didon can do anything and say anything about himself in childlike vaunting, in high reviling about his enemies: the political Catholics, the reactionaries in the Church, the careful old "Senators" in Rome or in the Dominican order, or Renan and the rationalists who dream of weakening his Christian certitudes...

...But people generally have not realized that, and being conscious of an eclipse in the orator's reputation which showed no sign of coming to an end, they have wondered about his real significance...

...The young orator, feeling that his success came chiefly from his liberalism, overemphasized this liberal side till he gradually gave alarm...

...many of them still believed that success in the pulpit was what mattered above all things, and Didon being their greatest possibility, they did not rein him in as they would have twenty years later...

...The press gave it publicity and the excitement became such that the then archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, thought it best to ask Didon hot to go on with i6 THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 his lenten course...

...There was too much discrepancy, an almost ridiculous contrast, between what he thought of himself and the judgment which, after a few years, literary history bore on him, viz., an orator, as ephemeral as most orators have been...

...Physically he was a powerful man who could read out loud six hours at a stretch, climb Corsican mountains, bathe in midsummer in icy cold Corsican torrents, ride horseback under the sun of Egypt and smoke incessantly...

...His name recurs incessantly between jeremiads about Corbara and naive boasting...

...The reason is that as a writer he was an insufficient artist and literature has taken its revenge of his groundless disdains for literary men...

...One of them was Maupassant whose superiority he failed entirely to recognize...

...The superiors of such a promising young preacher are inevitably tempted to give him all possible chances...