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Updated: June 12, 2025
A visit of his youth to the Island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made himself the god of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in the days of L'Avenir; his memories of Lamennais' sombre figure, of Maurice de Guérin's feverish ethereal charm; his account of the opposition salons under the Empire they had all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the next with the 'inevitableness' of true art.
She had, so he opined, neither force of conception, nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor the art of the pathetic. The French language she used she did not thoroughly know, but she had style. Of her glory she made little account, and despised the public. Her fate was to be duped and duped she had been by Bocage, by de Lamennais, by Liszt, by Madame d'Agoult.
One feels the need of relaxation after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which makes one long for recreation and relief. But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points of departure of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon.
He was no longer the mild teacher who delivered the "Sermon on the Mount," who had met with neither resistance nor difficulty. The passion that underlay his character led him to make use of the keenest invectives. This singular mixture ought not to surprise us. M. de Lamennais, a man of our own times, has strikingly presented the same contrast.
Up to a certain point we seem to follow more or less intelligently the working of the restless soul of De Lamennais; but at the last and great crisis of his life we find all our calculations at fault; "we try to understand him; we wish that penetrating into the inmost recesses of his wounded soul, we could force it to yield up its secret, and once more sympathize with him, perhaps console him; but we cannot.
Perhaps if Gregory XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his Affaires de Rome, makes the same remark in so many words.
M. HELVETIUS, "Treatise on Man, his Intellectual Faculties and Education: translated by W. Hooper, M. D.," I. 247. M. LAMENNAIS, "Esquisse d'une Philosophie," I. 95. "Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man." NOVALIS, quoted in T. Carlyle's Essays, II. 43. "Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, by H. G. ATKINSON and HARRIET MARTINEAU," p. 241. Psalm 14: 1; 53: 1. Psalm 10: 4, 11, 13.
For no one can deny that from his first conversion to his unhappy death De Lamennais was dominated by the highest and noblest and most unselfish motives; that he was a man of absolute sincerity of purpose. His earliest enthusiasm was for the defence and exaltation of the Catholic Faith, for the liberation of the Church from the bonds of nationalism and Erastianism.
Having thus established his trinity of hypotheses, M. Lamennais deduces therefrom, by a badly connected chain of analogies, his whole philosophy. And it is here especially that we notice the syncretism which is peculiar to him. The theory of M. Lamennais embraces all systems, and supports all opinions. Are you a materialist?
I do not pretend, however, to deny that "L'Esquisse" contains some excellent things; but, by the author's declaration, these things are not original with him; it is the system which is his. That is undoubtedly the reason why M. Lamennais speaks so contemptuously of his predecessors in philosophy, and disdains to quote his originals.
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