FRANCE.
PUT back the Fleur de Lys! Within the gates
Of Rhodes the misbelieving Ishimaelite
On hall and hostelry hath left unharmed
The scutcheons of the military monks,
Save where the Cross or Human Face appeared,
Alike repugnant to his law. Yet now
On all the ancient citadels of France,
Sea-gates and palaces, the hand of wrath
With foolish diligence hath knocked away
The triple lilies from the fretted shield.
And is it thus ye strive to quell the thought
Of the crowned Capets? Is it thus, forsooth,
Ye seek to stifle in your growing sons
Those risings of the heart towards the past,
Which kindle patriots' tears to fertilize
The soil whence noblest aspirations spring,
From out whose blossoms even now depends
A holier future, their legitimate fruit?
O wrath is blind: ye were in this your act
Wisely unwise, and yet ye meant it not!
Ye could not have devised a feast, or reared
A pillar more memorial of the past,
Or forced it on the fancy of your youth
With more continuous admonition, rites
More grave, than this dumb sacrifice of fear!
Go to the Asian cemeteries, thread
The cypress lanes of Smyrna or Stamboul:
Spite of yourself one thought is uppermost,
The slaughtered Janissaries! nay the cry
Of the red Hippodrome seems ever blent
With soft incessant cooing, for such spots
Are populous with doves; and whence is this
But from the broken sepulchres which stand
All turbanless amid their turbaned peers?
And quickened by the infantine display
Of the great despot's anger, memory dwells
Upon the doom of those praetorians: thus
The very absence of the Fleur de Lys
Writes it more deeply on the vacant shield
Than the strong chisel; and within the mind,
Nay oft with strange illusion to the eye,
Obliterates, where such hath been engraved,
The Jewish emblem. See, in this poor toil
Of mischief, how the timorous insolence
Of insecure success hath overreached
Itself, and most reluctant homage paid
Unto the very symbols of a past
From which it deemed itself emancipate.
O France! methinks it were a manlier game
To make a plaything of old fetters, thus
Attesting present freedom, and to keep
In thoughtful ease the shackles in thy hands,
Neither as things of shame nor spells of fear.
Why tremble at thy lilies? If they be
Less frail in stone than when the garden breeze
Scatters the gold dust from their nodding bells,
Yet freedom is itself a flower, which tops
All growths except the weedy licence bred
Within its rich vicinity. And yet
Thou haply mightst reply that it was well
To raze the wicked lily from thy walls,
And by this outward action so to teach
Thy children hatred of the bitter past,
Which that pale flower doth symbolize. But hate
Begets not wholesome fear, and bitterness
Teaches no wisdom. They, whose savage tongues
Hoot loudest round the scaffold, soonest come
To a like end. Men profit not by wrong,
Except they love the doers of the wrong,
With such compassion as the fear of God
Suggests, or sense of justice can admit.
What though the later Bourbons, with their crew
Of courtiers, and effeminate parasites,
And smooth-tongued peers, O how unlike the peers
Of the French court in good chivalric times!
Weighed heavily on the land, their abject yoke,
Once shaken off, was barely worth a thought,
A loathsome dream which one would studiously forbear
To call to mind, a tyranny too vile
To be thus honored with enduring hate,
Too impotent and stupid to become
A national tradition in a land
So rich in such remembrances.
Ye Priests
And catholic scholars! by whose sacred toils
That realm is waking to a better sense
Of her grand functions, you would I beseech,
Alien in name yet wholly one in heart
To throw the Bourbon cause unto the winds,
Or leave such loyal treason to the men
Whose quest is in the world and worldly things.
Ye have to build again the Church of Christ,
Ye have Rome's lawful honor to retrieve,
Ye have a pagan France within your France
To be converted, meddle not with plans
Of mundane policy, but stand on high
Above the interests of the passing hour,
And all the pitiful politics of the day,
And so shall revolutions' awful cloud
Dash its forked lightnings far below your feet.
Forewarned, forearmed! the cause of Holy Church
Mates with no other; let the Bourbon name
Pass from your watchwords as a doubtful thing
Which may or may not prosper: stand alone,
Aloof if need be; give unto the Church
The lilies of the monarchy, and God
Himself will give you kings.
Those royal flowers
Are virgin white: their spirit-stirring past
They keep unsullied, and themselves have power
To outgrow defilement, rooted in the tomb
Of great St. Louis. O ye men of France!
Your lilies will not fade alone; high thoughts
And masculine purposes, the sense devout
Of solemn destiny and loyal zeal
For the true faith of Christ, all, all will fade,
And trampled lilies can exhale no scent.
O then forget the heartless faults of kings:
Freedom hath blood to be forgiven; 'twere well
That had not stained the argent Fleur de Lys.
See to it, men of France! if with those flowers
Ye have not even now unthroned yourselves.
The kingly habit of obedience lost,
What lingers that is worth a patriot's love?
Goodness is greatness: and of Christian states
None taught this lesson to the world so well
As ancient France. O call to mind the days
When good king Robert lived, or think of Blanche,
Blanche and St. Louis, reigning first on earth,
Thenceforth to reign in heaven; and not unsung,
For I am English and have need to love
Those royal names, be pious Errninilde,
And Bertha, saintly queen of Ethelbert.
Look o'er the width of this most various realm!
Upon the heights above Grenoble stood
The austere Bruno, planting there the Tree,
Which mid the wild confusions of the world
Blooms in tranquillity. See there the vales
Of Burgundy, from whose chivalric youth
Bernard began to build his living house
Deep in the Vale of Absinth. Yonder lies
Clermont, where once the enthusiast Peter preached,
And suddenly upon ten thousand tongues
The will of God alighted, and outspake
As through a multitude of seers. And there,
Alas how little prized! the holy cells
Of Grandmont and Premontre, and the site,
Now desecrate, of Clugni's sumptuous pile.
There like a jewel in the Midland Sea,
Far off discerned, the isle of Lerins hangs
Upon the coast of Provence, no fit haunt,
As from its beauty might at first appear,
For summer revel or a moonlit masque,
But where in studious cloister Vincent lived
And taught, and in the simple panoply
Of catholic tradition armed, struck down
The heretics. And in the west behold,
(Looking towards England with instinctive wish,
Daily developed through the Christian West,
To appease the factions of that separate land,)
The work of younger days, De Ranee's home,
The stern La Trappe, with its three sullen lakes
Hard by Mortagne. O France! are these to count
As nothing in the presence of the change
Which hath been wrought on thee, these ancient things
And great historic sanctities, which grew
Beneath the shadow of the Fleur de Lys?
O write the past once more upon thy walls,
And so shall it be written in thy soul.
For thine is still the character that learns
More by the outward eye than listening heart.
It is not as a poet only, one
Who dreams bright things and cares not if they come
To pass, that I implore the sons of France
To reinstate their Lily; as a man,
A citizen, a priest, I plead the cause
Of those religious times which are embalmed
Within that flowery symbol. They who strive
To dim the illumination of the past,
And specially in such traditionary forms
As have a hold upon the popular heart,
Are like the devotees at whose dark rites
The lamps were straightway quenched, that what was good
Within them might not put to shame the bad,
And meddle with the liberty of sin.
O cast not off the famous France of yore!
Cling to the very cyphers which attest
Her old magnificence: and tear away
From the wide surface of your provinces
That cumbrous network of unsightly names,
Which have no music to the generous ear.
Enrich yon barren olive-spotted slopes
With the sweet name of Provence; let the towers
Of those fair minsters look around and see
The woods of Normandy outspread; let eve
Cast her rich gloom upon the Pyrenees
To beautify the wolds of Aquitaine;
Let Burgundy, Guienne, and green Poitou
Call, through the potency of their brave names,
Fresh knighthood from the earth for thy fresh needs:
And let there be a king of France once more,
A Dauphiny for appanage, and Rheims
The keeper of the Chrism, and at the helm
Of thy new destinies let Europe see
The spirit of St. Louis: then, O then,
Shall it be well with thee, O France, and us,
(For in how many things we hang on thee,)
And all good things shall prosper in the West.
Rise, then, thou Christian Realm! and be thyself
Once more, and this the sign that thou shalt give
Of thy religious aims and brave intent:
Replace the Fleur de Lys upon its shield!
Let thy sons' hearts be living shields, whereon
To exalt again the authority of Rome.
Think of St. Louis, let thy future be
One long and steadfast vigil round his tomb;
For so shalt thou be recognized once more,
And by the emulous English most of all,
The peerless nation of the Catholic West!
Père Frederick Faber
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