JOSEPH DE MAISTRE.

A PASSING reference by an eminent statesman of our time to the distinguished diplomatist and philosophical writer who has been selected as the subject of this paper, suggested to the compiler of these biographical sketches the idea of endeavouring to briefly indicate the scope and tendency of those works that acquired for Joseph de Maistre a European reputation. Indeed, a series of pen-and-ink portraits of Continental Catholic celebrities, roughly outlined though they be, in which the author of the Considerations sur la France and the Soirées de St. Petersbourg should not occupy a prominent place, would be like the typical play with the name rôle omitted.

One of those great primordial thinkers who, if he had not entirely moulded and directed the thought of his epoch, at least transfused into the moribund society of a degenerate age the vital sap of sound principles, and helped to save from utter extinction, from the corrosive and dissolvent action of triumphant sophistry, some still venerated remnants of the old Christian and Catholic order, the grand figure of Joseph de Maistre looms large and lustrous in the midst of the dark and dismal retrospect which, viewed in its religious and moral aspects, the history of the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the present century presents to the contemplation of the thoughtful historical enquirer. Although he never ambitioned founding a school, being wholly divested of that narrow individualism which has dwarfed so many lesser intellects, and finding in the Church, with whose Catholic genius he was essentially and deeply imbued, all that could satisfy his lofty mind and broad sympathies, he may be regarded as the highest intellectual type of the Catholic writer, the exemplar, to a great extent, of those who have followed in his wake, the Bonalds, Châteaubriands, Genoudes, Cortes, Veuillots, &c., who seem to have been providentially called to do the work of lay Christian apologists, and, in critical times, loyally and effectively supplement that official defence of the Church, which is the special function of the Ecclesia docens. The first lay publicist who ventured to treat questions until then exclusively reserved to ecclesiastics, strong reasons impelled him-one might say compelled him, so pressing was the need of such a combatant in the then sadly thinned ranks of the defenders of the Christian constitution of civil society, against which the Revolution, in its first wild outburst, had hurled all its forces-to enter the polemical lists and grapple with the common foe on the ground of philosophic argument, challenging his opponents to a searching discussion of first principles.

A thousand causes had long combined to weaken the sacerdotal order, despoiled, exiled, and massacred by the Revolution, which had swept like a tornado over Western Europe. The civil constitution of the clergy-consequence and chastisement of the declaration of 1682-had manacled and degraded the French priesthood, whose chronic contests with the Parliament of Paris under the old régime were like the mutterings of the gathering storm, the sinister forebodings of still graver conflicts between the spiritual and temporal powers culminating in the unhallowed divorce proclaimed by the apostles of the new order in their gospel of revolt, the famous "principles of '89." Long ravaged by the three moral plagues of Gallicanism, Jansenism, and Voltaireanism, with which the clergy and aristocracy were more or less infected, France saw itself deprived of one of the most militant orders in the Church, the firmest support of the Holy See and the ablest opponent of philosophism, at a time when it most needed them. Expelled from England in 1604, from Venice in 1606, from France in 1764, and from nearly every European state and their colonial dependencies, the Jesuits, like their Divine Master, were without a place whereon to lay their heads. Struck at in its head. and its members, the Church was being stripped of every vestige of independent action, notably in the Austrian dominions by Joseph II., and in Italy by the Duke of Parma, in pursuance of that systematic, concerted plan of oppression and spoliation of which it has been reserved to our days to witness the complete development, and recognise in the disaster of Sadowa, the extinction of the petty sovereignties of Parma and Modena, as well as the long ostracism of the Bourbon princes from power, the retributive justice of Him" who executeth the judgment for them who suffer wrong." Louis XV., who allowed the ancient Catholic kingdom of Poland, once the bulwark of Christendom against the Turks, to be erased from the map of Europe without the pretence of war, or even the colour of right "the first great breach in the modern political system of Europe," as Burke called it-was also forging fetters for the Church, instead of being less harmfully engaged, like his successor, in forging locks at Versailles-sumptuous Versailles! long stripped of its regal splendour, and now only a name for guide-book compilers and exploiters of the tourist mania to conjure with-where this modern Sardanapa'us enjoyed his semi-pagan, semi-Mahommedan fool's paradise, until his putrid remains were hurriedly consigned to the vaults of St. Denis, to be disentombed years later, and unceremoniously flung into a fosse commune by rude, rough rabble hands, when the destroying angel (or demon) of Democracy rose in his wrath and swept away every vestige of the decrepid old monarchy. While the Greek schism, exalted and transmuted into Muscovite Czarasim or Cæsarism, dominated the east, Voltaireanism the west, and the various forms of Protestantism divided northern and central Europe, a

new invasion of the barbarians seized upon Rome and turned the city of the Popes into an atheistic republic, whose birth was inaugurated by sacrilegious orgies. In all Europe there was not a man of genius or a power really devoted to the Church. Everywhere kings and statesmen struck at the sacerdotal order in the hope of erecting upon the ruins of priestly power a monarchical despotism, now menaced in its turn by a worse despotism-the despotism of the nouvelles couches sociales. In France the old athletes of the sacred militia had descended into the tomb, and the young recruits, slowly advancing to take their places in the ranks, were necessarily few: the enemy, with fatal forethought, having cut off the supplies. "During this species of interstice which, in other respects, will not be lost to religion, I do not see" says De Maistre-writing at the time, and with all the startling evidences of the great changes wrought by the Revolution before his eyes"I do not see why men of the world, drawn by their inclinations to serious studies, should not range themselves alongside the dcfenders of the holiest of causes. Even if they only served to fill the gaps in the army of the Lord, they could not be fairly denied the merit of those courageous women who have been sometimes seen to mount the ramparts of a besieged city to distract the eyes of the enemy. Another consideration, too, encouraged me not a little. The priest who defends religion, no doubt does his duty, and merits our esteem; but to numbers of unreflecting or preoccupied men, he seems to be defending his own cause, and, although his good faith is equal to ours, every observer must have had a thousand opportunities of perceiving that the unbeliever is less distrustful of the man of the world, and often allows himself to be come at without the least repugnance. Now, all those who have closely examined this wild and flighty bird, know that it is incomparably more difficult to get at him than to seize him. Will I be permitted to say: if a man who has all his life been occupied with an important subject to which he has devoted every moment he could spare, and who has directed all his knowledge to that end-if this man, I say, feels within him, I know not what undefinable force which makes him feel the need of dissiminating his ideas, doubtless he ought to distrust the illusions of self-love; still he has, perhaps, some right to think that there is something in this kind of inspiration, particularly if it is not wholly disapproved of by others."* This conception of the function of lay Catholic publicist has long ceased to be a novelty, and it is greatly owing to the impulse to this species of propagandism which the encouraging and stimulating example of De Maistre supplied, that we owe the foundation and rapid growth of a school of writers who, thoroughly en rapport with Rome, have proved that the Church is no friend to obscurantism, or intellectual stagnation.

*Preface to the treatise, Du Pape.

"I am ever convinced," says an eminent French bishop, referring to the action of laymen in the Church, "that God more than ever calls them to become not only docile children of His household, but active workers and armed soldiers precisely to baffle the hypocritical manœuvres of that impious system disguised under the name of lay state, lay power, lay society, which, in the mind. of its authors, would signify the state, power, and society without religion. It is then to prove to the world that laicism and religion are in no way antagonistic, that in our days God has raised up those innumerable armies of pious laymen whom, in almost every country in the Catholic world, and particularly in France, He has made the propagators of the faith, the instruments of charity, and the auxiliaries of the apostolic ministry." And Mgr. Dupanloup, with that breadth of view so characteristic of him, in the third volume of his great work on higher intellectual education, says, "In the order of truth, as in the order of charity, laymen may lend a valuable concurrence to the Church. Not to speak here of contemporaries, whose names are sufficiently illustrious-Prudentius, St. Prosper, Lactantius, St. Justin, Athenagoras, Aristides, and Minutius Felix were laymen. Certainly to fill an honourable place in the ranks of the athletes of religion, and devote his life and talents to the defence of the great religious truths, which are, at the same time, the highest social truths, cannot be the mission of all, but it is assuredly a grand and noble destiny."†

It is strange that a life so full of action and influence as De Maistre's, placed as he was in the fore-front rank of the diplomatists and writers of his time, should not have found a competent biographer to give us a faithful picture of the vie intime, as well as the public career of one who, standing as it were between two eventful periods, between the receding past, bearing away with it the last wrecks of the old feudal system, and the near future, full of mystery and menace, disclosing dim vistas of another age, was eye-witness of one of the most extraordinary and momentous events in the world's history. But a modern poet has said—

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men ;"

and the saying is in part true of De Maistre, as of those meteoric minds whose transient brilliancy shed a momentary gleam across some gloomy phase in the history of a people at one of those critical epochs when they seem to have lost their way in the world's wilderness:

*Letter from the Bishop of Langres to Montalembert, on the part laymen may take in discussions relative to the affairs of the Church

+ Lettres aux hommes du monde, p. 430.

The materials for a biographical sketch are scanty and easily exhausted. Count Joseph de Maistre, who joined nobility of mind to nobility of blood, was a native of Savoy, a country singularly productive in men of genius-tellus clara viris-the natal' ground of St. Bernard de Menthon, the apostle of the Alps; St. Francis de Sales, the new Doctor of the Church; President Favre, the celebrated jurist, and friend and co-operator of the great Bishop of Geneva in the establishment of the Academy Florimontana; the grammarian, Vaugelas; the historians, St. Réal and Michaud; the venerable and erudite Cardinal Gerdil, who would have probably succeeded Pius VI. in the Papal chair, were it not for his great age; Mgr. Dupanloup, the late illustrious Bishop of Orleans; and of many others illustrious in arms and arts-from that brave André de Montfort, who, besieged in the citadel of Nice by the combined fleets of Soliman and Francis I., haughtily replied to the summons to surrender, "Je me nomme Montfort, Montfort ne se rend; mes armoires sont des pals, et ma devise 'est, il faut tenir !" to that other beau sabreur, General Mollard, the hero of San Martino. Born at Chambery, on the 1st of April, 1754, he was the eldest of a family of ten, issue of the marriage of Count Francis Xavier de Maistre, President of the Savoy Senate, and Christine de Metz, daughter of the learned Senator Joseph de Metz. Destined for the magistracy, his studies were early directed to that end by his maternal grandfather, who simultaneously cultivated the nascent talents of his younger brother, Xavier de Maistre, subsequently a general in the Russian service, and the author of some works of fiction that have attained considerable celebrity. The elder brother was a very hard reader, and, endowed with a retentive memory, made very rapid progress under the tutelage of the Jesuits at their College in Chambery, from whence, in time, he was sent to the University of Turin. Fifteen hours daily were devoted to the assiduous study of jurisprudence, mathematics, and ancient and modern languages. At a later period, we are told, he acquired the habit, which he seems to have never abandoned, of copying extracts from all the books he read, and noting down those suggestions to which he afterwards gave a more finished and definite form, a process of mental culture which, adopted by a less methodical or appreciative student, would only result in the accumulation of so much learned lumber. It is also noted as a very characteristic trait, early revealing his intuitive respect for the principle of authority, of which every page of his writings bears the imprint, that he never, during his entire university career, took up the reading of any book without having first written to his parents to get permission. "My mother," he used to say, "was an angel to whom God had lent a body. I would never do anything without an order or an advice from her; my happiness was to divine her wishes in my regard, and I was like the youngest of my sisters in her hands." Having finished hist