artistic fashion in which their counsel passed from the Metamorphoses of Ovid to some of the most terrible passages of Holy Writ. We all thought that the children

were sure of their dole, and that so rare an eloquence would keep their kitehen-fire forever alight. But alas for the inconstancy of fortune! Though the lawyer got plenty of praises, the children got no bread. The cause was adjourned, which means that the poor little wretches will have to plead again on an empty stomach, while the Bench went gravely to dinner." 1

And even the Church had not escaped a taste for 'figures ill-paired and similes unlike.' The spirit of the Ciceros of Sarlat still spoke through the mouth of many a popular preacher of the capital, for, as La Bruyère will tell us, profane eloquence had quitted its true home, the Bar, to mount the pulpit, where it had no place. Sermons were become a mere display, to the preacher a means of advancement more rapid, though not less hazardous, than the profession of arms, to his hearers one among the thousand amusements of fashionable life. They came to criticize, not to learn; he strove to interest, not to teach; it was much if he remembered, by an afterthought, to slip in a word or two of praise to God.2

Formerly it had been necessary to have enormous learning in order to preach so badly, and country congregations were still edified by sermons in which there was more Greek and Latin than French. But now every curate was an orator, though he had neither wit nor piety nor eloquence, though he must fly for refuge to a Concordance or an Anthology, or else sew together ill-fitting passages from old sermons he had bought. However lacking he might be in solid theology, it was easy to abound in phrases and epigrams and showy misapplications of Scripture, in a network of reasoning all the more brilliant, because superficial and probably false.3

1 Wks., vii. p. 395, and see the remarks of Lotheissen, iii. p. 395. 'See La Bruyère, De la Chaire, passim.

3 Fén. Wks., vi. p. 578.

Nor did the evils of the filagree style of pulpit oratory rest within that School itself; like all other such absurdities, it provoked a violent reaction. Under pretence of apostolic simplicity, numbers of zealous young men forswore eloquence altogether, and, with it, learning and lucidity and order; they did not even soberly expound the Scriptures, but 'froze our blood with their perspiring efforts,' as they roared and ranted, filling their sermons with the Devil and Hell, and thinking they had failed in their duty, unless they left the pulpit breathless and exhausted.1

But far above these pygmies rose the two giants Bossuet and Bourdaloue, differing much from one another, and leaders of rival schools of oratory, but alike in their perfect moderation of language, in their clearness and simplicity, in their recognition that "the highest law of the pulpit was the service of the children of God." 2

Bossuet's was the oratory of Scripture. He was above all things a divine, one who made of his eloquence a stately, willing vassal of theology, though it found God tributaries in every realm of thought and feeling, in poetry, philosophy and history. Bourdaloue stood at the head of a colder school. Far poorer than Bossuet in natural gifts, less daring in thought, less splendid in imagination, he was a logician and a moralist, a great searcher of the human heart, busied with practice rather than dogmas, quicker to analyze than to teach his sermons, said Fénelon, were magnificent reasonings about Christianity, but they were not religion.1

For Fénelon leaves no doubt about his sympathies; the Dialogues are through and through a plea for Bossuet, at the expense of the great Jesuit, who had supplanted him in popular favour. Bourdaloue is brought almost maliciously before the reader's eye, as he stood in his pulpit with eyes shut fast, his arms continually sawing the air, his voice

1 p. 597.

Bossuet, Sermon on the Conception of the Virgin : qu. Lanson, p. 102.

melodious but badly managed, with no more variety than a peal of bells. And his style is pronounced no less monotonous than his delivery; never for a moment easy or familiar, never tender, never grand or sublime, he ploughed his way through closely serried arguments and portraits of contemporary vices, often rousing by his logic the opposition of the intellect, but leaving the springs of passion untouched. And therefore his critic denies him the very title of orator: "He is a great man; he has done much for the pulpit, has delivered it from the rhetoricians, but-he has not eloquence." 1

"1

A judgment so sweeping, passed on one of the greatest orators that ever adorned the Church of France, might well seem a mere freak of juvenile impertinence. But Fénelon, who, all his life, was to keep much of the visionary hopefulness and extravagance of youth, had none of its irresponsible iconoclasm; ageless self-confidence had early given him an adult seriousness of mind, which, little as it cared for established reputations, was never at pains to attack them without just cause.

But with Bourdaloue and his following there was cause enough. Their colourless sense and solid exactitude grated at every step on Fénelon's more emotional nerves; his simpler palate was offended by their artificiality, by the rounded periods and polished aphorisms, that told of a long imprisonment in the study, to the neglect of the preacher's holier calls; their brilliant useless moral sketches, which converted no one, and were listened to less like a sermon than a satire or a farce, came as a scandal to this stern young censor, who held that only virtuous which was useful.3

Against them he invokes his masters, the great orators of Greece and Rome. For he had studied with Demosthenes, who fired and swayed the heart, filled even to self-forgetfulness with love of his Republic, and much also with the

1 p. 584. At the end of his life Fénelon spoke more kindly of Bourdaloue. See p. 615. 2 p. 599. 3 p. 572.

poets, for 'poetry only differs from eloquence in that it paints more boldly and with enthusiasm.'1 From Homer he had learnt to prize the 'antique simplicity, for which we have lost all relish,' that preferred facts to reasons, details to generalities, and proved the greatness of such a man as Cyrus, not by any wealth of arguments or adjectives, but by telling the plain story of his life.2 In Plato reason had forestalled religion to show how pleasure is the means of working, but virtue the final end of art, how all that stops short at mere diversion must be banished from the true Republic.3

And Bourdaloue's critic carried his appeal to loftier tribunals yet. Akin to the Greek in form and movement, almost in narrative and substance, was another literature still higher; Demosthenes must yield place to St Paul, and Homer to Moses and the Prophets, for the Scriptures, in their grand simplicity, were the true, the Divine, model of Christian eloquence.*

And so it was Fénelon came to wage his war on behalf of the Scriptural natural style of Bossuet, lord of his language, not the slave of its machinery, who needed no anxious preparation, no committal to memory of his phrases, but dare abandon himself to the impulse of the moment, and speak out of the abundance of his heart."

Into a closer analysis of his master's genius Fénelon was too wise to enter, still less to try to reduce it to a code of formal rules. Eloquence, he held, was not to be learnt from books on Rhetoric; from Aristotle's 'dry and curious precepts' the pupil must turn to Longinus and his living, real examples, and 'study the Sublime sublimely' among those great ancient and modern masters, whose art it was to have no art.6 For Fénelon was of the same opinion as Erasmus,

1

p. 581.

2 p. 591, referring to the Cyropædia of Xenophon, afterwards (p. 646) seen to be a philosophical romance.'

3

P. 571.

4 p. 596.

5

P. 587.

6 p. 570. The Classics, however, are only a counsel of perfection: on peut s'en passer (p. 598). Longinus had been translated by Boileau in 1674.

who once bade men of letters despise the art of writing, after they had learned to write "The whole secret of eloquence," he said, "lies in carefully watching what Nature does, when she is unconstrained." 1

And already in the Dialogues are traces of a wish, afterwards more fully realized, to carry simplicity and naturalness to a still higher point than Bossuet; Fénelon, like La Bruyère, looks back wistfully to the Early Church and the informal homilies and pastoral instructions, whose day was now gone by. These were far better suited to his genius than more elaborate discourses, for Fénelon had but little grasp of the majestic qualities of eloquence; on the few State occasions when he preached he was clearly cowed and ill at ease among surroundings that would have given Bossuet new strength, and there results therefrom a frigid, academic sermon, a polished, but lifeless, imitation of his master.

And, as Fénelon's character developed, their differences became more clear. Bossuet was the Handel of oratory, the interpreter of grand, universal, ideas of Providence and Death and Immortality; he took his station far above mankind, judging and not being judged of men; they went away from his tribunal, more guilty, if not more virtuous, than they came. But Fénelon set before himself a higher model than Daniel or Ezekiel. Even the Apostles, he said, stumbled under the burden of their message, but Jesus Christ had all the calmness of a master. He needed no effort, but said whatsoever He would; He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven as His Father's House. The glories that fill us with awe, were to Him a matter of course; He had been born among them, and told men only what He had seen Himself.1

The thought was not a new one: Pascal had bidden men notice how Jesus said great things so simply that He scarcely seemed to have thought of them, and yet so clearly

1 p. 585.

2

p. 603.

'See M. Gustave Merlet's introduction to his edition of the Epiphany Sermon. Paris: Hachette, 1880, 'p. 596.