the only quality on which it is possible to count; his Vernunft, that higher Reason which is also character, developed but slowly; he was twenty before it got the upper hand,1 Much, no doubt, must be set down to the count of his environment. Versailles, truly, was not the place where healthy freedom of thought and will could flourish abundantly; it is no wonder that M. de Broglie looks wistfully away from Louville's stuffy details to the mountain-air of Béarn, where Henry of Navarre first learnt to be a man. As Fénelon well knew, his pupil's great wealth of affection was slowly starving to death in that vast ice-chamber of a Court, where, as the preacher said, even at midsummer all was frozen. He had no mother; his father cared little for any of his children, and least of all for him; of his grandfather he stood, not in fear, but in positive dread. What was more natural than that Fénelon should eagerly dig a channel for the warm affections thus running grievously to waste-what more inevitable than that, in doing so, he should overlook the claims of the more masculine qualities, and unconsciously lead to himself what was meant for God, till he later turned in alarm at their tumultuous outflow, and bade Télémaque be less tender and more courageous in his love of one who would not always be with him, and learn to seek out truth and virtue for himself, rather than lean for ever on his guide ? 2 Excellently as he could discourse on the following and assisting of Nature, Fénelon himself was wanting in this supreme gift of his profession; neither as teacher nor as spiritual counsellor could he lead men onward while respecting their individuality, while preserving what St Francis of Sales has called the 'particular difference' of each mind. St Francis held each soul to be a little world, existing in and for itself as completely as the whole universe; but Fénelon saw in a new soul only a fresh world to conquer. His persuasiveness, says St Simon, had been 1 Sallwürk, p. 57. Télémaque, bk. x. Wks., vi. p. 475. spoilt by its own success, till it could bear no longer with resistance; to be an oracle had become with him a kind of second nature; over great things and small he must rule as an autocrat, commanding, but giving his reasons to none.1 A bitter after-experience was to show him his mistake, to prove what helpless, clinging things the feelings and the conscience are, how vain was the hope of teaching Burgundy by their means to be "a son of valour and to fight the battles of the Lord." 2 And this intensely personal education was disturbed by no influence from without. The Dauphin had had three or four little Children of Honour' always round him, but Burgundy and his brothers were only allowed youthful companions out of doors, and neither to them nor to one another might they speak apart or in a whisper. For Fénelon and Beauvilliers had early seen in their Prince the Ezra, who was to restore the Temple and the People of God after the present Babylonish Captivity, and they were resolved to keep him unspotted from that heathen world, where the Gospel was but little known.3 Not that Fénelon had in view the monkish youth that Burgundy, under other influences, actually became; their little Prince, he told Beauvilliers, must, above all men, bien faire vers le monde sans y ténir. But it was his mistake to fancy that he could do the whole work alone, that, with no assistance from the outside world, he could transfuse his own incomparable mastery over social graces into a Télémaque, who was by nature good and thoughtful, but not gracious, slow to think of what would give pleasure to others, ignorant how to make a present.5 It was well enough to bid Burgundy be gay without folly, dignified without arrogance, amiable without weakness, and appear to give himself to all, while in reality he gave himself to none: it was impossible to enforce these lessons, when the pupil's 1 St Simon, x. p. 287. 3 St Simon, viii. p. 424. 5 Bk. x. Wks., vi. p. 504. 2 See below, ch. xiv. 4 Fén. Wks., vii. p. 240. 6 Wks., vii. p. 291. inborn awkwardness and love of solitude were being daily intensified by all the surroundings of his life. And, in a larger sense, it may be said of Fénelon that he aimed wrongly at a great ideal. Saint Louis se sanctifia en grand roi, wrote the Preceptor to his pupil, and Burgundy was to emulate alike the spiritual grandeur of his ancestor and the temporal glories of that other Christian hero, Charlemagne, was so to balance and contrive his two ideals that each would lend assistance to the other: his sanctity would call forth new qualities of greatness, and greatness, in its turn, become a means of sanctity. But Fénelon blundered in that he did not carry on the two halves of his moral ideal side by side. Our popular axiom grounds the truest unworldliness on knowledge of the world, but Burgundy's knowledge of the world was to be grafted on unworldliness; firmly as Fénelon was resolved to give his pupil 'the royal wisdom of a Solomon, and a heart as large as the sea," it was only after education had made him a Saint that his master could think of making him a man and King. And it was here that time and fortune failed him. In the midst of his work he was called away to Cambrai, and, two years later, was banished from the Court, while the inheritance of his labours fell to Chevreuse and Beauvilliers, poor but willing substitutes, and to the Jesuit Confessor, Father Martineau, an influence both grotesque and harmful. Thus the Burgundy that we know is the result of a hazardous experiment only half completed, or, rather, finished by bungling apprentices while the master-spirit was no longer by. Every trait in his character witnesses to a suddenly arrested development: his piety had all the feverishness of adolescence; he offended the prudes by an awkward schoolboy devotion to his wife, behaved in the presence of ladies "like a seminarist on his holidays," in camp was helpless, undecided and given to nursery pastimes; even Chevreuse, so late as 1709, found him indolent, childish, wanting in 2 pp. 320, 343. 1 p. 235. Except in the one vigour and tact and knowledge of men. article of piety, where he developed strongly in a wrong direction, he remained-alike to his master's glory and his shame exactly where that master had left him, a living monument to the vast capabilities of education, a warning also, against its dangers, when the whole of virtue, knowledge and religion is summed up in the person of a single Mentor. CHAPTER VI MYSTICISM AND THE MAXIMS OF THE SAINTS FRO O Deus, ego amo te Nec amo te, ut salves me, Sed sieut tu amasti me Sie amo et amabo te, Solum quia Rex meus es, Et solum quia Deus es.-ST FRANCIS XAVIER. ROM the Preceptorate of Burgundy and the Letter to the King is a long step to the Maxims of the Saints. As a buoyant reforming energy marks the one, so nervous despondency in search of rest is the characteristic of the other; and the reader must be warned to suspend judgment on the whole man, till he has passed from the sanguine outward Fénelon of society and the schoolroom to the inner Fénelon of the oratory, trembling before his God. Of the present chapter this second, less known, Fénelon is the subject, more especially in relation to those wrangles over Quietism, of which his Maxims was at once an outcome and a cause. Inasmuch, however, as that ill-starred volume is little comprehensible in itself, to the account of it has been prefaced a brief outline of the earlier mystical theories, out of which it took its rise. In the Catholic Church Mystical Theology has always borne a special and restricted meaning, that often differs as widely from our vague a priori notion of mysticism as a hand-book of Chancery practice from our idea of natural equity. We loosely give the name of mystical to every |