TO OCTAVE MIRBEAU
here is no need for me to tell over again here the life of Monsieur l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard, professor of oratory at the college of Beauvais, librarian to Monseigneur de Séez, Sagiensis episcopi bibliothecarius solertissimus, as his epitaph has it, later on secretary at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and finally curator of that queen of libraries (the Astaracian), whose loss is for ever to be deplored. He perished, assassinated, on the Lyons road, by a Jew cabalist of the name of Mosaïde (Judæa manu nefandissima), leaving several incomplete works, and the memory of his admirable familiar conversation. All the circumstances of his odd existence and tragic end have been reported by his disciple Jacques Menétrier, called Tournebroche, or Turnspit, because he was the son of a cook in the Rue St. Jacques. This Tournebroche professed for him whom it was his habit to speak of as his good master, a lively and tender admiration. "His was the kindliest soul," said he, "that ever blossomed on this earth." Modestly and faithfully he edited the memoirs of the Abbé, who lives again in the work as Socrates does in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.
Observant, exact, and charitable, he drew a portrait full of life and instinct with a loving faithfulness. It is a work that makes one think of those portraits of Erasmus by Holbein that one sees in the Louvre, at Bale, or at Hampton Court, the delicacy of which never wearies the sense of appreciation. In short, he left us a masterpiece. It will cause surprise no doubt, that he was not careful to have it printed. Moreover, he could have published it himself, for he set up as a bookseller in the Rue St. Jacques at the sign of the Image de Sainte Catherine, where he succeeded Blaizot.
Perhaps, living as he did among books, he feared to add, if it were but a few leaves, to the horrible hoard of blackened paper that mildews unseen on the book-stalls. We may share his disgust when we pass the twopenny box on the quays, where the sun and the rain slowly consume pages written for immortality. Like those pathetic death's-heads that Bossuet sent to the Abbot of la Trappe to divert his solitude, here are subjects for reflection fitted to make the man of letters conceive the vanity of writing. I may say, for my part, that between the Pont Royal and the Pont Neuf, I have felt that vanity to the full. I should incline to believe that Abbé Coignard's pupil never printed his work because, formed by so good a master, he judged sanely of literary glory, and esteemed it at its worth, and that is exactly nothing. He knew it for uncertain, capricious, subject to every vicissitude, and dependent on circumstances themselves petty and wretched. Seeing his contemporaries, ignorant, abusive, and mediocre, he saw no reason to hope that their posterity would suddenly become learned, balanced, and reliable. He merely divined that the Future, a stranger to our quarrels, would accord indifference in default of justice. We are well-nigh assured that, great and small, the Future will unite us in oblivion and cover us in a peaceful uniformity of silence. But if, by some extraordinary chance, that hope deceives us, if future generations keep some memory of our name and writings, we can foresee that they will only make acquaintance with our thoughts by the ingenious labour of gloss and super-gloss which alone perpetuates works of genius through the ages. The long life of a masterpiece is assured only at the price of quite pitiable intellectual hazards, in which the gabble of pedants reinforces the ingenious word-twisting of æsthetic souls. I am not afraid to say that, at the present day, we do not understand a single line of the Iliad, of the Divine Comedy, in the sense primitively attaching to it. To live is to change, and the posthumous life of our written-down thoughts is not free from the rule: they only continue to exist on condition that they become more and more different from what they were when they issued from our minds. Whatsoever in future may be admired in us, will have become altogether alien from us.
Possibly Jacques Tournebroche, whose simplicity we know, did not put himself all these questions in reference to the little book under his hand. It would be an insult to think that he had an exaggerated opinion of himself.
I think I know him. I have meditated over his book. Everything he says, and everything he doesn't say, betrays an exquisite modesty of soul. If, however, he was not without knowledge of his talent, he knew also that it is precisely talent that is least pardonable. In people of note we tolerate easily bareness of soul and falseheartedness. We are quite content that they should be bad or cowardly, and their good-luck even does not raise over much envy so long as it is not merited. Mediocrities are at once raised up, and carried along, by the surrounding nobodies who are honoured in them. The success of a commonplace person disturbs nobody. Rather, it secretly flatters the mob. But there is an insolence of talent which is expiated by dumb hatred, and calumnies not loud but deep. If Jacques Tournebroche consciously renounced the painful honour of irritating the foolish and the wicked by eloquent writing, one can only admire his good sense, and hold him the worthy scholar of a master who knew mankind. However it may be, the manuscript of Jacques Tournebroche, being left unpublished, was lost for more than a century.
I had the extraordinary good luck to find it again at a general broker's on the Boulevard Montparnasse, who spreads behind the dirtied panes of his shop, croix du Lis, médailles de Sainte-Hélène, and decorations de Juillet, without a suspicion that he is furnishing the generations a melancholy lesson on peacemaking. This manuscript was published under my care in 1893, under the title: La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. I refer the reader to it. He will find there more novelties than he looks for ordinarily in an old book. But it is not with that book that we have to do here.
Jacques Tournebroche was not content to make known the doings and sayings of his master in a connected recital. He was careful to collect much discourse and conversation of Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard that had not found place in the memoirs (for that is the name we must give to La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque) and he made a little note-book of it, which has fallen into my hands along with his other papers.
It is the note-book that I print now under the title: The Opinions of The Abbé Jérôme Coignard. The kind and gracious welcome the public gave the preceding work by Jacques Tournebroche, encourages me to commence forthwith these dialogues, in which we meet once more the former librarian of Monseigneur de Séez with his indulgent wisdom, and that kind of generous scepticism to which his considerations tend, so mingled with contempt and kindliness for man. I have no notion of taking responsibility for the ideas expressed by this philosopher on divers questions of politics and morality. My duties, as editor, merely bind me to present my author's thought in the most favourable light. His unfettered understanding trampled vulgar beliefs underfoot, and did not side uncritically with popular opinion, except in matters touching the Catholic faith, wherein he was immovable. In anything else he did not fear to oppose his age. Were it only for that he would merit esteem. We owe him the gratitude due to minds that have fought against prejudices. But it is easier to praise than to imitate them. Prejudices melt away and grow unceasingly with the eternal mobility of the clouds. They are by nature most imposing, until they become hateful, and men are rare who are free from the superstition of their period, and look squarely at what the crowd dares not face. Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard was independent in a humble walk of life; enough, I think to put him far above a Bossuet, and above all the great people that glitter, according to their degree, in the traditional pomp of custom and belief.
But while we hold that Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard lived as a free man, enfranchised from common errors, and that the spectre of common passions and fears had no empire over him, we must further observe that his surpassing intelligence had originality of outlook on nature and society, and only wanted, in order to astonish and delight mankind by some vast and beautiful mental engineering feat, the skill or the will to scatter sophisms, like cement, in the interstices between truth and truth. It is only in that way that great systems of philosophy are built up and held together by the mortar of sophistry.
The synthetic faculty was wanting in him, or, (if you like), the art and law of symmetry. Without it, he was bound to appear, as in fact he did, a kind of wonderful compound of Epicurus and St. Francis of Assisi.
Those two, it seems to me, were the best friends that suffering humanity has yet met on its confused progress through life.
Epicurus freed the soul from empty fears and taught it to proportion its idea of happiness to its miserable nature and feeble powers. Good St. Francis, tenderer and more material, led the way to happiness by interior vision, and would have had souls expand like his, in joy, in the depths of an enchanted solitude. Both were helpful, one, to destroy illusions that deceive, the other, to create illusions from which one does not wake.
But it does not do to exaggerate. Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard was certainly not the equal, in action or in thought, of the boldest of the sages, nor of the most ardent of the saints. The truths that he discovered he could not fling himself upon headlong. In his hardiest exploration he maintained the pose of a peaceful pedestrian. He did not sufficiently except himself from the contempt other men inspired in him. He lacked that valuable illusion that sustained Descartes and Bacon, who believed in themselves when they believed in no one else. He had doubts of the witness he bore, and scattered heedlessly the treasures of his mind. That confidence, however common in thinkers, was withheld from him, the confidence in himself as the superior of the greatest wits. It is an unpardonable fault, for glory is only given to those who importune it. In Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard it was, moreover, a weakness, and an illogicality. Since he pushed philosophical audacity to its farthest limits, he should not have scrupled to proclaim himself the first of men. But his heart remained simple and his soul pure, and his poorness of spirit that knew not how to rear itself above the world, did him an irreparable wrong. But need I say that I love him better as he was? I am not afraid to affirm that Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, philosopher and Christian, mingled in an incomparable union the epicurism that wards off grief, and the holy simplicity that conducts to joy.
It is to be remarked that not only did he accept the idea of God as furnished him by the Catholic faith, but further, that he tried to uphold it against argument of the rationalistic kind. He never imitated that practical address of professed Deists, who make a moral, philanthropical and prudish God for their own use, with whom they enjoy the satisfaction of a perfect understanding. The strict relations they establish with Him give much authority to their writings, and much consideration to their persons, before the public. And this God, akin to the government, temperate, weighty, exempt from fanaticism, and who has His following, is a recommendation to them in salons, academies, and public meetings. Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard did not figure the Eternal to himself in so profitable a light. But considering the impossibility of conceiving of the world otherwise than under the category of intelligent beings, and that the cosmos must be held to be intelligible, even if but to demonstrate its absurdity, he referred the cause to an intelligence he called God, leaving the term in its infinite vagueness, relying for the rest on theology, which as we know, treats of the unknowable with minutest accuracy.
This reserve, which marks the limits of his understanding, was fortunate if, as I believe, it deprived him of the temptation to nibble at some appetising system of philosophy, and kept him from putting his nose into one of those mousetraps wherein independent minds are in such hurry to get caught. At his ease in the big old rat-run, he found more than one opening to look out on the world and observe nature. I do not share his religious beliefs, and am of opinion that they deceived him, as they have deceived, for their good or ill, so many generations of men. But it looks as if the old errors were less vexatious than the new, and that, since we are bound to go wrong, it were best to hold by illusions that have lost their sparkle.
It is certain, though, that Abbé Coignard, in accepting Christian and Catholic principles, did not deny himself the deduction of some original conclusions therefrom. Rooted in orthodoxy, his luxuriant spirit flourished singularly in epicurism and in humility. As I have said before he always tried to chase away those phantoms of the night, those empty fears, or as he called them, those gothic diabolisms, which make the pious existence of the simple bourgeois a kind of sordid and day-long witches' sabbath. Theologians have, in our own day, accused him of carrying hope to excess, and even beyond bounds. I meet the reproach once more under the hand of an eminent philosopher.[1]
I do not know if Monsieur Coignard really reposed an exaggerated trust in divine goodness. But certainly he conceived the meaning of grace in a large and natural sense, and the world, in his eyes, less resembled the deserts of the Thebaid than the garden of Epicurus. He took his way through it with that daring ingenuousness which is the most marked trait in his character, and the foundation of his teaching.
Never did a mind show itself at once so bold and so pacificatory, nor soften its disdain with greater gentleness. His rule conjoined the freedom of the cynics and the innocence of the primitive community of the Portiuncula. Tenderly, he despised men. He tried to show them that having no measure of greatness about them save their capacity for sorrow, they could lay up for themselves nothing useful or beautiful save pity; that fit only for desire or suffering, they should practise themselves in the indulgent and the pleasure-giving virtues. He came to consider pride as the source of greatest evil, and the one vice against nature.
It seems likely indeed, that men make themselves miserable by the exaggerated opinion they have of themselves and their kind, and that if they could form a humbler and truer notion of human nature they might be kinder to others and kinder to themselves.
His sympathetic regard, then, urged him to humiliate his fellows, in their opinions, their knowledge, their philosophy, and institutions. He put his heart into showing them that their weak and silly nature has never constructed nor imagined anything worth the trouble of attacking and defending very briskly, and that if they knew the crudity and weakness of their greatest works, such as their laws and their empires, they would only fight in fun or in play, like children building sandcastles by the sea.
We must not be astonished or scandalised then, that he depreciated every conception which makes for the honour and glory of mankind, at the expense of their peace. The majesty of the law did not impose on his clear-sighted intellect, and he deplored the fact that the wretched were subjected to so many restraints, of which in most cases, they could not discover the origin or the meaning. All principles appeared equally contestable to him. He had at last come to believe that members of a state would never condemn so many of their kind to infamy, if it were not to taste, by contrast, the pleasure of respectability. Such a view made him prefer bad company to good, after the example of Him who lived among publicans and sinners. But he kept his purity of heart, his gift of sympathy, and the treasure of his pity. I shall not speak here of his actions, which are recounted in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. I have no means of knowing whether, as was said of Madame de Mouchy, he was more worthy than his life. Our actions are not altogether our own; they depend less on us than on fortune. They come to us from all sides. We do not always merit them. Our inviolable mind is all we have of our very own. Thence the vanity of the world's judgments. Nevertheless, I can say with pleasure that our leading lights have found Monsieur Coignard an amiable and pleasing person. Indeed one must be a Pharisee not to see in him a beautiful creation of God. So much said I hasten to return to his teachings, which alone matter here.
What he had least of was the bump of veneration. Nature had denied it him, and he took no steps to acquire it. He feared lest, in exalting some, he should cast down others, and his universal charity was extended equally to the humble and the proud. It bore itself to the victims with a greater solicitude, but the executioners themselves seemed to him too wretched to be worthy of hate. He wished them no harm, and merely pitied them that they were wicked.
He had no belief that reprisals, whether spontaneous, or according to law, did anything but add ill to ill. He viewed with complacence neither the vengeance that is private and much to the point, nor the majestic cruelty of the law, and if he happened to smile when the police were being drubbed, it was simply the result of his being but flesh and blood, and naturally a good fellow.
He had, in fact, formed a very simple and sensible notion of evil. He ascribed it altogether to man's functions and natural feelings, without mixing up with it all the prejudices that take on an artificial consistency in the codes. I have said that he formed no system, being little inclined to resolve his difficulties by sophistry. It is evident that, at the outset, a difficulty stopped him short in his meditations on the means of establishing happiness or even peace on earth. He was convinced that man is by nature a vicious animal, and that communities are not abominable simply because he uses all his wits to shape them. Consequently he looked for no benefit from a return to nature. I doubt if he would have changed his opinion if he had lived to read Emile. When he died, Jean-Jacques had not yet stirred the world by eloquence of the sincerest feeling joined to logic or the falsest. He was still but a little vagabond, and unhappily for him, found other Abbés than Monsieur Jérôme Coignard on the benches of Lyons' deserted walks. We may regret that Monsieur Coignard, who knew all sorts of people, never met by chance Madame de Warens' young friend. But it could only have been an amusing incident, a romantic scene. Jean-Jacques would not have found the wisdom of our disillusioned philosopher much to his taste. Nothing could be less like the philosophy of Rousseau than that of Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard. The latter is marked with a kindly irony. It is easy and indulgent. Founded on human infirmity it is solid at bottom. The other is lacking in its gay scepticism and fleeting smile.
Taking its seat on an imaginary base, that of the original virtue of our kind, it finds itself in an awkward position, the comicality of which is not quite evident to itself. It is the doctrine for men who have never laughed. Its embarrassment is seen in its bad humour. It is ungracious. There would be nothing in that but it reinstals man among the monkeys, and then gets unreasonably angry when the monkey is not virtuous. In which it is absurd and cruel. This was well exemplified when statesmen wished to apply the teachings of the Contrat Social to the best of Republics.
Robespierre venerated the memory of Rousseau. He would have held Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard for a bad man. I would not make the remark if Robespierre had been a monster. But, for the learned, there are no monsters. Robespierre was an optimist, who believed in good. Statesmen of this turn do all the evil possible. If one meddles in the government of mankind one must never lose sight of the fact that they are monkeys, and mischievous. Only thus can you have a humane and kindly polity. The folly of the Revolution was to wish to establish virtue on earth. When one would make men good and wise, free, moderate, and liberal, one is led to the fatal desire of killing them all. Robespierre believed in virtue and he brought about the Terror. Marat believed in justice; he demanded two hundred thousand heads. Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard is perhaps, of all the minds of the eighteenth century, the one whose principles were most opposed to the principles of the Revolution. He would not have signed a line of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, because of the excessive and unfair separation it establishes between man and the gorilla.
Last week I had a visit from an anarchist-comrade who honours me with his friendship, and whom I like, because having taken no part as yet in the government of his country, he has kept much of his innocence. He wants to blow up everything merely because he believes men to be naturally good and virtuous. He thinks that, deprived of their goods, and delivered from laws, they would shed their egoism and wickedness. The tenderest optimism has led him to the most savage ferocity. His only misfortune and his only crime, is that he has brought an elysian soul, made for the golden age, into the business of a cook, to which he is condemned. He is a Jean-Jacques, very simple, and very honest, who has never let himself be worried by the sight of a Madame d'Houdetot, nor softened by the refined generosity of a Maréchal de Luxembourg. His candour leaves him at the mercy of his logic, and renders him terrible. He reasons better than a minister, but he starts from an absurd principle. He does not believe in original sin, and yet, for all that, it is a dogma of such solid and stable truth that we have been able to build on it everything we have chosen to.
Why were you not with him in my study, Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, to make him feel the falsity of his doctrine? You would not have talked to this generous Utopian of the benefits of civilization and of state interests. You knew these to be pleasantries, indecent to vent on the unfortunate. You knew that public order is but public violence, and that each man can judge of the interest he has in it. But you would have drawn a true and terrible picture of that state of nature he wishes to re-establish; you would have shown him in the idyll of his dreams, an infinity of bloody and domestic tragedies, and in his too happy anarchy the beginning of a dreadful tyranny.
And that leads me to define the attitude that Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard at the Petit Bacchus, took in regard to governments and peoples. He respected neither the supports of society nor the vault of Empire. He held as subject to doubt and as matter for dispute the very virtue of the Holy Ampulla, then a principle in the constitution such as universal suffrage is to-day. Such a liberty which would then have scandalised every Frenchman shocks us no longer.
But it would be to misunderstand our philosopher to make excuses for the liveliness of his criticisms on the old order of things.
Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard made no great difference between governments called absolute, and those we call free, and we may well suppose that had he lived in our day he would still have kept a strong dose of that generous discontent of which his heart was full.
Since he dealt in principles, no doubt he would have discovered the vanity of ours. I judge by a remark of his which has come down to us. "In a democracy," said Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, "a people is subjected to its own will—a very hard slavery. In fact, it has as little knowledge of its own will, and is as opposed to it, as it could be to that of a prince. For the universal will is to be seen scarcely or not at all in the individual, who nevertheless suffers the constraint of all. And universal suffrage is a hoax, like the dove that brought the Sacred Chrism in its beak. Popular government, like monarchy, rests on fiction and lives by expedient. It suffices that the fiction be accepted, and the expedient happy."
This maxim is enough to make us believe that he would have preserved in our day the proud and smiling freedom which was the ornament of his mind in the age of kings. Still, he was never a revolutionary. He had too few illusions for that, and thought that governments should not be destroyed otherwise than by the blind and inexorable forces, slow and irresistible, that carry away all things.
He held that the one people could not be governed two ways at the same time, for this reason, that, nations being indeed bodies, their functions depend on the structure of their parts, and the condition of their organs; that is to say, of the land and the people, and not of the ruling powers, who must be adjusted to a nation as a man's clothes are to his body.
"The misfortune is," added he, "that the people are suited by them like a Harlequin or a Jack-in-the-green. Their coat is ever too loose or too tight, ill-fitting, ridiculous, grubby, covered with stains, and crawling with vermin. We may mend things by shaking it out, cautiously, putting in a stitch here, and when necessary, applying the scissors there, with discretion, so as to avoid being at the expense of another equally bad, but not clinging too obstinately to the old garment when the body has changed its shape by growth."
One sees from this that Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, was a friend to order and progress, and altogether was not a bad citizen. He incited no man to revolt, and had rather that instituted things were worn and ground-down by incessant friction, than overturned and broken by any great strokes. He was for ever pointing out to his disciples that the harshest laws grew wonderfully smoother in practice, and that the clemency of time is surer than that of man. As for seeing the sprawling Corpus of the law one day re-shaped, he neither hoped it nor wished for it; laying no store by the benefits of hasty legislation. Jacques Tournebroche asked him at times whether he were not afraid that his critical philosophy, as exercised on institutions he himself judged necessary, might not have the inopportune effect of toppling down what he would wish preserved.
"Why, oh best of masters," said his faithful disciple, "why reduce to dust the foundations of all right, of justice, and law, and generally of all civil and military rule, since you acknowledge the necessity of right, justice, armies, magistrates and drill-sergeants?"
"My son," replied Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, "I have ever remarked that men's prejudices are the source of their ills, just as spiders and scorpions issue from the gloom of cellars and the damp of back-gardens. It is just as well to pass the Turk's head or the broom at random now and then in these dark corners. It is not a bad thing even to give a touch of the pick here and there on the walls of the cellar and garden. It scares the vermin and prepares the way for the ruin that must come."
"I agree willingly," replied the mild Tournebroche; "but when you have destroyed every principle, my master, what will be left?"
And his master replied: "After the destruction of every false principle society will still cohere, because it is founded on necessity, whose laws, older than Saturn, will still prevail when Prometheus shall have dethroned Jupiter."
Prometheus has dethroned Jupiter more than once since the time when Abbé Coignard spoke these words, and the prophecies of the sage have been so literally verified that at the present day one feels doubts, so much does the new resemble the old order, whether the power does not still rest in ancient Jove. There are those who deny the coming of the Titan. There is no sign on his breast, they say, of the wound whence the eagle, the creature of injustice, tore out his heart, the wound that should bleed for ever. He knows nothing of the griefs and insurgence of the exile. This is not the workaday divinity promised, and expected by us. This is the full-fed Jove from the hoary and laughable Olympus. When shall he appear again, the strong friend of men, the fire-kindler, the Titan still nailed to his crag? A terrible noise from out the mountains makes known that he is lifting his lacerated shoulders from off the iniquitous rock, and we can feel, flaming on us, his distant breath.
A stranger to business, Monsieur Coignard inclined to pure speculation and dealt readily in general ideas. This disposition of his, which may have damaged him in the eyes of his contemporaries, gives his reflections some worth and usefulness after a century and a half. We can there learn to know the manners of our own day and disentangle what there is of evil in them.
Injustice, stupidity, and cruelty, do not strike us when they are the common lot. We see them in our ancestors but not in ourselves. Still, since there is no past epoch whatever, when mankind does not seem absurd to us, savage and unjust, it would be a miracle if our age had, by some privilege, cast away every shred of folly, malice, and savagery. The opinions of Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard would help us to make our examination of conscience, if we were not like those idols which have eyes and see not, and ears and hear not. With a little good faith and impartiality we should soon see that our legal codes are still but a hotbed of injustice, that we preserve in our manners the inherited hardness of avarice and pride; that we value wealth alone, and have no respect for labour. Our system of affairs would appear to us what it really is, a wretched and precarious system, condemned by abstract justice if not by that of man, and the ruin of which is beginning. Our rich men would seem to us as foolish as cockchafers continuing to eat the leaves of a tree, while the little beetle on their body devours their entrails. No more would we be lulled to sleep by the false speeches of our statesmen; we should conceive a positive pity for our economists arguing with one another about the cost of the furniture in a burning house. Abbé Coignard's disquisitions reveal to us a prophetic disdain of the great principles of the Revolution and of the rights of the people, on which we have established these hundred years, with every kind of violence and usurpation, an incoherent succession of insurrectionary governments, themselves, innocent of irony, condemning insurrection. If we could begin to smile a little at follies, which once appeared majestic and at times were stained with blood; if we could perceive that our modern prejudices are, like the old, the outcome of something, either ridiculous or hateful; if we could judge one another with a charitable scepticism,[2] quarrels would be less sharp, in the fairest country in the world, and Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard, for one, would have laboured for the universal good.
ANATOLE FRANCE