The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866, page 99 by Various Authors
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mself to the service of the Church were written by Lacordaire. They are a faithful transcript from nature, but from a nature not at all resembling that to which they have been applied. The circumstances under which the book was composed will exhibit the difference. The author was then intimate with Lamennais, whose eloquent voice, soon afterwards to be raised in support of the opposite cause, was proclaiming the sternest doctrines of a renovated Catholicism. A spell which acted so widely and so marvellously could not be altogether unfelt by a mind whose peculiar property it was to yield itself to every influence in order to extort its secret and comprehend its power. Beyond this point the magic failed. "In all my transitions,"--thus he has written of himself,--"I have never alienated my judgment and my will; I have never pledged my belief. But I had a power of comprehending persons and things which gave rise to the strongest hopes on the part of those who wished to convert me and who thought me entirely their own." Thus Lamartine, in a rapturous strain, had congratulated himself on having been the instrument of saving his friend from the abysm of unbelief. When Lamennais was forming the group of disciples who retired with him to La Chesnaye, M. Sainte-Beuve was invited to join them. While declining the proposal, he imagined the position in which he might have been led to embrace it, and--wrote Volupté.
The revolution of 1830, with the events that led to it, marks a turning-point in literary as well as in political history. The public mind was in a state of ebullition very unlike that of an ordinary political contest, in which one party pulls while the other applies the drag, one seeks to maintain, the other to destroy. All parties were pulling in different directions; all sought to destroy, in order to reconstruct; principles, except with the extremists, were simply expedients, adopted to-day, abandoned on the morrow. Nor is this to be explained, as English writers generally explain it, by