240 L A M L A M
universal and equal freedom of conscience, of instruction, of meeting, and of the press. Methods of worship were to be criticized, improved, or abolished, and all in absolute submission to papal spiritual but not temporal authority. The Jesuits and the prelates grew alarmed, and "the modern Savonarola" was denounced to Gregory XVI. On their spiritual obedience the writers of L'Avenir were ordered to suspend the journal, which they did (1831), and Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert set out for Rome to get the papal pardon and blessing. They were not received, and "Catiline departed," to be overtaken by a bitter encyclical letter at Munich from the pope condemning the new doctrines, So interested was Gregory in the questions raised that under an assumed name he published a work of refutation. To his demand of submission Lamennais signed obedience, with a saving clause as to his country and humanity. The iron had entered his soul, and deeply wounded he retired to La Chenaie, the scene of his youthful inquiries and memories. His genius had turned the entire Christian church against him, and those whom he fought for so long, the ultramontanes, were the fiercest of all his opponents. The famous Words of a Believer appeared in 1834, and his final rupture with the church took place. "Small in size but immense in its perversity," was the pope's criticism in a new encyclical letter. A tractate of aphorisms, it has the vigour and sacred breathing of a Hebrew prophet.
Henceforth Lamennais is the apostle of the people alone. The Affairs of Rome and the Ills of the Church and Society came from old habit of religious discussions rather than from his real mind of 1837, or at most it was but a last word. Modern Slavery, The Book of the People, Politics for the People, two volumes of articles from the journal of the extreme democracy, Le Monde, are titles of works which show that he has arrived among the missionaries of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and he soon gets a share of their martyrdom. The Country and the Government caused him a year's imprisonment in Ste Pélagie. He struggled through difficulties of lost friendships, limited means, and personal illnesses, faithful to the last to his hardly won dogma of the sovereignty of the people, and, to judge by his contribution to Louis Blanc's Review of Political Progress, was ready for something like communism. He was named president of the "Societé de la Solidarité republicaine," which counted half a million adherents in fifteen days. The Revolution of 1848 had his sympathies, and he started Le Peuple Constituant, but was compelled to stop it on 10th July, complaining that silence was for the poor; but again he was at the head of La Révolution Democratique et Sociale, which also succumbed. He managed his own publications; and pamphlets without number, and at intervals volumes of Mélanges, kept his influence fresh and his republican aims to the front as much as possible. In the constituent assembly he sat on the left till the coup d'état of Napoleon III. in 1851 put an end to all hopes of popular freedom. While deputy he drew up a constitution, but it was rejected as too radical. A translation of Dante chiefly occupied him till his death in the fourth year of the second empire. He refused to be reconciled to the church, and was buried at Père La Chaise without funeral rites, according to his own directions, mourned for by a countless concourse of democratic and other admirers.
During the most difficult time of his republican period he had one resource by which to find solace for his intellect from the noise of daily politics. From 1841 till 1846 he was engaged on the work which will remain longest as evidence of his thinking power and of his clear brilliant style, his Sketch of a Philosophy. Of the four volumes, the third, which is an exposition of art as development
from the necessities and aspirations of the temple, stands pre-eminent. The rest of the work somewhat answers to the modest title of the book. Some papers which he wished to be published intact after his death were kept back by the religious zeal of his brother and sister, but in 1855 and afterwards till 1859 six volumes appeared under the care of Émile Forgues. Blaize, the nephew of Lamennais, disputed various rights with Forgues, and in his biography of his uncle he questions facts in the account of the life prefixed by the editor to the Posthumous Works. But the whole matter is of private rather than public interest, affecting the position of Lamennais in little degree.
The complete works have been published twice at Paris, in 12 volumes, 1836-37, and in 11 volumes by Pagnerre, 1844 sq. Neither edition is anything like complete, but that of Pagnerre is the more so. Besides the biographical matter given by Forgues and Blaize as preface – the former to the Posthumous Works, the latter to the Unedited Works, Sainte-Beuve has Lamennais as one of his skilful Portraits Contemporains, Castille has him among the Portraits politiques au dix-neuvième siècle, and George Sand's thoughts of "the Breton" can be read in French Authors at Home. Robinet, Gerbet, and Regnault may be selected from many others who give personal details. Querard's Les Supercheries Littéraires Devoilées, article "La Mennais," will give ample introduction to all that is known of the author's works, and of the works connected with
him. (T. SI.)
LAMENTATIONS, Book of. The Old Testament book
of Lamentations bears in Hebrew Bibles the superscription
n ?^, "Ah how!" the opening word of the first chapter,
and also of chaps, ii. and iv. The Talmud, however, and
Jewish writers in general call it the book of ^^>, "elegies"
or "dirges,"[1] of which the Septuagint title p^yvot and the
Latin Lamentationes or Lamenta are translations. The
fuller title Lamentationes Jeremiæ Prophetæ, Lamentations of Jeremiah, expresses the ancient tradition as to the
authorship of the book. It is found in the Syriac and in
some MSS. of the LXX., e.g., in N, but not in A and B;
and the shorter anonymous form is undoubtedly older.
The dirges which make up the book are five in number, and the first four are alphabetical acrostics, – successive verses in chaps, i., ii., iv., or successive sets of three verses in the case of chap, iii., beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. The last chapter has twenty-two verses, like chaps i., ii., and iv., but is not an acrostic.
It is noteworthy that in chaps, ii. , iii., and iv. the letter Pe ()
precedes Ayin (]}), contrary to the ancient and established order
common to the Hebrew alphabet with its Greek and Latin deriva
tives, in which stands for J7. The sense sliovs that this irregu
larity is not due to a transposition of the original order of the verses,
while the fact that the same transposition occurs three times makes
it plain that the deviation from the common order is not due to
want of skill to make the acrostic perfect, but rests on a variation
in the order of the alphabet as used by the author. Thus it has
not unnaturally been argued by Thenius that chap. i. , which takes
the alphabet in the common order, must have a different author from
chaps ii.-iv. ; but it is quite as probable that in chap, i., as Ewald
suggests in the 2d ed. of his Dichter, p. 326, ver. 16 originally followed
ver. 17, and was transposed to reduce the acrostic to the usual form.
In the other chapters the sense forbade such transposition.
The subject of the five dirges is not the death of an
individual; they refer to a national calamity – the widowhood of Jerusalem and the overthrow of the Judæan state by the Chaldæans. But the examples of Amos v. 1, 2, Jer. ix. 19 [18], Ezek. xix., show that they are not less properly called dirges on that account; the lamentations of Israel over the desolation of Zion, the agonies of the last desperate struggle and the extinction of national existence, appropriately took a form modelled on the death-wail sung by "cunning women" (Jerem. ix. 17) and poets "skilful
of lamentation" (Amos v. 16) at the wake (?3^) of the
illustrious dead. Among the Hebrews, as among other
primitive peoples, this type of poetry was much cultivated,
1 This name, as will appear below, is perhaps as old as the book of Chronicles, and is the Hebrew title known to Jerome (Prol. Gal.).
- ↑ 1
