days his life was despaired of, and he only recovered to be for many years the victim of sleeplessness and other kindred ailments, aggravated, as he afterwards thought, by his own neglect, with a temperament very different from that of his great rival, the robust Burgundian Bossuet, to whom 'by God's mercy, sun, wind, rain—all were good.' But his intelligence developed very quickly, fed on a generous diet of those Greek and Latin classics, which were to become inseparable companions of his after-life. And it is to this early familiarity with the Ancients that his biographer traces the singular grace and ease of style that, with Fénelon, were no hard-won gain of age or experience, but seem to have sprung, already perfect, from his brain.1 At twelve years old he left his father's house to begin a three years' residence at the neighbouring University of Cahors. There he took his degrees in Arts, and at once set out for Paris to begin his preparation for the priesthood. Of the causes which determined him to this step Fénelon has left no record, perhaps because an ecclesiastical career seemed, to his relatives and himself, a simple matter of course. In the days of Louis XIV. a love of books and a want of bodily vigour must often enough have done duty for more interior signs of a vocation to the altar, more especially in such families as commanded some influence in the Church, or could point, like the Fénelons, to a neighbouring bishopric, then, as frequently beforehand, held by a bearer of their name. Yet, if the Comte de Fénelon dreamed of mitres and rich abbeys for his studious child, these grosser arguments can have had but little weight on the imaginative and highstrung nature of his son. Fénelon was ambitious, but his ambition was of that rare and ethereal sort that can at first be scarcely distinguished from the more unselfish buoyancy of youth, and is at all times a desire to gain ascendancy over the wills of others rather than a lust after commoner earthly glories. Its full extent Fénelon hardly gauged 1 Bausset, i. p. 9. himself; it was an instinctive need of his nature, that defied his careful analysis,-no vice, says the kindly Lamartine, but a force mounting upwards of itself,1 a power and will to dominate Which I must exercise; they hurt me else. Again, Fénelon was proud, proud not only with the scholar's contempt for the unlearned, or the great Churchman's for the wretched Huguenot, or the philanthropic noble's disdainful kindness to the common folk, 'the people that is always the people, gross and credulous, blind and capricious, the enemy of its own best interests, to be driven like sheep before a master's will.' There was all this in Fénelon and much more also; there was a pride of that imperial sort, which delights in being a law unto itself, in caring nothing for the praise or blame of men or for the standards of excellence recognised by others, but affects, in earlier and unchastened days, such singularities of thought as mark it out from among the common herd, till it learns, with time, to discard even this ironic subservience to public opinion and go forward on its own chosen path, looking neither to the right nor to the left. There were not many who would have ventured, like Fénelon, to correspond on matters of religion with the infamous Duke of Orleans, afterwards Regent of France, a man so steeped in vices that even his infidelity loomed small beside them. And still fewer would have dared, in the face of the Church's condemnation of Comedy, to discuss in print the genius of Molière, or themselves give birth to a Télémaque, destined to shock the censoria gravitas of their intimates, and to be pronounced by Bossuet a frivolous work, unworthy of a Christian priest. And Fénelon's temperament was curiously complex; art, even artifice, was its nature; it embraced within itself a great diversity of characters, the Christian, the prelate, the noble, the writer; it could travel at one and the same time along 1 Fénelon, par A. de Lamartine (Paris, 1876), p. 57. * See Wks., vi. p. 241. several different planes of morality. Admirers have sought to blend these various elements into a single unity, but his friends did not know Fénelon as he knew himself" When I examine into my mind," he wrote, "I seem to dream; I am to my own conscience like a vision of the night."1 Within him two opposite forces struggled for the mastery: on the one side a passionate eagerness to become meek and humble and poor in spirit, to give himself 'the simplicity loved of God and man,' on the other, an all-powerful instinct of self-assertiveness, that could not move without involuntarily posing, or see the truth that made against its own advantage. Never was a mind more utterly subjective, never a horizon more quickly changed, and, changed, more over-clouded by a single idea; prudence, logic, memory, must all give way before it, appearances were nothing to him, extravagance was welcome; his religion must be more loving than love, his daily life more kind than kindness, his words be truer than truth itself. Everywhere the Self is the touch-stone, determines his opinions as well as his acts, places him, whether in life or writings, at the point where he can make the best display. "Little as I know my mind," he said, "one fault is lasting and easy to fix; almost everywhere I think too much of self, am almost always guided by my own advantage." 2 In short, Fénelon was far from being the saintly priest that legend has made him; despite all his efforts, he remained to the end altogether lacking in the disinterested energy, the hardy singleness of purpose, that alone make possible the highest achievement. Only stupidity or pure genius and sanctity is a form of genius-can bear confinement within narrow bounds; the rich many-coloured natures that belong, rather to talent, yet often rise above it, can never be entirely hidden under a cassock or a uniform, least of all when they are natures such as Fénelon's, abundant in graces rather than strength, ethereal rather than profound, and great chiefly in that they hold in concordant subjection 1 Wks., vii. p. 348. 2 Ibid. viii. p. 589. a large number of different, and often contradictory, qualities. Fénelon was never unfaithful to his sacred duties, never chafed under the many restrictions of his state, never slackened in the young enthusiasm that had seen in every priest "a mouth-piece of the Holy Ghost, a steward of the mysteries of God, whose time was his Creator's, whose worldly wealth was the portion of the poor and an atonement for the sins of the people." If his life was not always attuned to this lofty pitch, if the feet of the courtier and writer sometimes stumbled on the narrow path of sacerdotal perfection, can we very greatly blame him? His choice of a profession was certainly not unwelcome to the relative under whose guardianship he passed on coming to Paris. His father's brother, the Marquis Antoine de Fénelon, once a soldier of distinction, was ending his days in an atmosphere of austere military piety traced out for him by M. Olier, founder of the famous theological college of Saint Sulpice. Thither his nephew was transferred so soon as he had gone through a preliminary training in philosophy at the Collège du Plessy, and at Saint Sulpice, Fénelon was fated to spend the next ten years of his life, years associated in later days with the most pleasing memories. His devoted affection for the seminary never decayed; only the fear of compromising them with the King prevented him from entrusting his own college at Cambrai to Sulpician Fathers; on his death-bed he declared that he knew of no institution more venerable or more apostolic. Of his own tutor, M. Tronson, he spoke in even warmer terms: "Never have I known his equal," he wrote to Clement XI., "for piety and prudence, for love of discipline and insight into character; I glory in the thought that I was brought up under his wing." 2 Indeed M. Tronson won his pupil's confidence as no other man or woman ever succeeded in winning it, and remained ever afterwards his most trusted friend and counsellor. And, on the whole, 1 Wks., v. p. 586. 2 Ibid. vii. p. 613. Fénelon's praises of St Sulpice were well deserved. The Seminary, then in the first flush of its enthusiasm, was far from being St Simon's home of ignorant Ultramontanism and trumpery devotions, far from M. Renan's school of voluntary mediocrity. A principal fruit of the great Catholic revival at the beginning of the century, it was an embodiment, a perpetuation in action, of all the forces of that movement, of its very real piety and earnestness on the one hand, of its frosty austerity and almost theatrical sentimentalism on the other. It was founded by a group of men sprung from that severe and orderly upper-middle class, that nobility of the ermine, which had furnished three-quarters of its great names to the Age of Louis Quatorze, and, in revenge, had stamped with its own characteristics the whole spirit of the age. An accident of his position-he was rector of a 'peculiar' immediately dependent on the Pope-working on a gentle visionary nature, had made M. Olier into an Ultramontane and coated his Seminary with a layer of somewhat feminine Italian devotion, but it had not robbed him and his colleagues of those essential qualities of their class, for which Jansenism became the natural expression. There was something of Port Royal's obstinate rationality at St Sulpice; there was a deep sense of moral responsibility, not to be tricked by the elegant chicanery of Jesuit casuists; there was a yearning after some closer union with the Divine than was afforded by the stiff official Catholicism brought into fashion by King Henry of Navarre. This last want it was the special mission of St Sulpice to supply. The Seminary was to build up again the Interior Life in France, by devoting itself to the education of the priesthood 'not so much in theological science as in the practice of that science and in the virtues proper to the ecclesiastical state.' Asceticism, not learning, became the corner-stone of M. Olier's system, his house was to be like the hedge of the Gospel, which fences off the vineyard of the Lord, and pierces with its thorns the flesh of him who passes through it.' Not that he wished to revive the un |