Minerva, the guiding and inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male form; but her speech and thought is essentially masculine, and not feminine.Antiope is a mere lay-figure, introduced at the end of the book because Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of marrying someone or other.Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhauser legends of the Middle Age.Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral element of the plot.She, with the other women or nymphs of the romance, in spite of all Fenelon's mercy and courtesy towards human frailties, really rise no higher than the witches of the Malleus Maleficanum.Woman--as the old monk held who derived femina from fe, faith, and minus, less, because women have less faith than men--is, in "Telemaque,"whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the enchantress; the victim (according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often more lawless, than man's.
Such a conception of women must make "Telemaque," to the end of time, useless as a wholesome book of education.It must have crippled its influence, especially in France, in its own time.For there, for good and for evil, woman was asserting more and more her power, and her right to power, over the mind and heart of man.
Rising from the long degradation of the Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, often lawlessly, always triumphantly, her just freedom; her true place as the equal, the coadjutor, the counsellor of man.Of all problems connected with the education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the France of the Ancien Regime, the most important.And it was just that which Fenelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he most certainly could not have solved.Meanwhile, not only Madame de Maintenon, but women whose names it were a shame to couple with hers, must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have been the helpmeet of the ideal king.
To those who believe that the world is governed by a living God, it may seem strange, at first sight, that this moral anarchy was allowed to endure; that the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the French Revolution, inevitable from Louis XIV.'s latter years, was not allowed to burst two generations sooner than it did.Is not the answer--that the question always is not of destroying the world, but of amending it? And that amendment must always come from within, and not from without? That men must be taught to become men, and mend their world themselves? To educate men into self-government--that is the purpose of the government of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that lesson.As the century rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful activity, increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and usefulness.With mistakes and confusions innumerable they worked: but still they worked; planting good seed; and when the fire of the French Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the rotten and the withered, only to let the fresh herbage spring up from underneath.
But that purifying fire was needed.If we inquire why the many attempts to reform the Ancien Regime, which the eighteenth century witnessed, were failures one and all; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda in Spain, Joseph II.in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline in Naples--for these last, be it always remembered, began as humane and enlightened sovereigns, patronising liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the condition of the poor, till they were driven by the murder of Marie Antoinette into a paroxysm of rage and terror--why, above all, Louis XVI., who attempted deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, failed more disastrously than any--is not the answer this, that all these reforms would but have cleansed the outside of the cup and the platter, while they left the inside full of extortion and excess? It was not merely institutions which required to be reformed, but men and women.The spirit of "Gil Blas" had to be cast out.The deadness, selfishness, isolation of men's souls; their unbelief in great duties, great common causes, great self-sacrifices--in a word, their unbelief in God, and themselves, and mankind--all that had to be reformed; and till that was done all outward reform would but have left them, at best, in brute ease and peace, to that soulless degradation, which (as in the Byzantine empire of old, and seeming in the Chinese empire of to-day) hides the reality of barbarism under a varnish of civilisation.
Men had to be awakened; to be taught to think for themselves, act for themselves, to dare and suffer side by side for their country and for their children; in a word, to arise and become men once more.
And, what is more, men had to punish--to avenge.Those are fearful words.But there is, in this God-guided universe, a law of retribution, which will find men out, whether men choose to find it out or not; a law of retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, though not necessarily by just men.The public executioner was seldom a very estimable personage, at least under the old Regime;and those who have been the scourges of God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace old sins by new.But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, Imust believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that such men as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.
