(_Edinburgh Review_, July, 1832.)
This {37}is a very amusing and a very instructive book; but, even if it
were less amusing and less instructive, it would still be interesting as
a relic of a wise and virtuous man. M. Dumont was one of those persons,
the care of whose fame belongs in an especial manner to mankind. For he
was one of those persons who have, for the sake of mankind, neglected
the care of their own fame. In his walk through life there was no
obtrusiveness, no pushing, no elbowing, none of the little arts which
bring forward little men. With every right to the head of the board, he
took the lowest room, and well deserved to be greeted with--Friend, go
up higher. Though no man was more capable of achieving for himself
a separate and independent renown, he attached himself to others; he
laboured to raise their fame; he was content to receive as his share of
the reward the mere overflowings which redounded from the full measure
of their glory. Not that he was of a servile and idolatrous habit of
mind:--not that he was one of the tribe of Boswells,--those literary
Gibeonites, born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the
(1) _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, et sur les deux Premieres
Assemblées Lêgislatives_. Par Etienne Dumont, de Genève:
ouvrage posthume publié par M. J. L. Duval, Membre du
Conseil Représentatif du Canton du Genève. 8vo. Paris: 1832.
{38}higher intellectual castes. Possessed of talents and acquirements
which made him great, he wished only to be useful. In the prime of
manhood, at the very time of life at which ambitious men are most
ambitious, he was not solicitous to proclaim that he furnished
information, arguments, and eloquence to Mirabeau. In his later years
he was perfectly willing that his renown should merge in that of Mr.
Bentham.
The services which M. Dumont has rendered to society can be fully
appreciated only by those who have studied Mr. Bentham’s works, both in
their rude and in their finished state. The difference both for show and
for use is as great as the difference between a lump of golden ore and
a rouleau of sovereigns fresh from the mint. Of Mr. Bentham we would
at all times speak with the reverence which is due to a great original
thinker, and to a sincere and ardent friend of the human race. If a
few weaknesses were mingled with his eminent virtues,--if a few
errors insinuated themselves among the many valuable truths which he
taught,--this is assuredly no time for noticing those weaknesses or
those errors in an unkind or sarcastic spirit. A great man has gone from
among us, full of years, of good works, and of deserved honours. In some
of the highest departments in which the human intellect can exert
itself he has not left his equal or his second behind him. From his
contemporaries he has had, according to the usual lot, more or less than
justice. He has had blind flatterers and blind detractors--flatterers
who could see nothing but perfection in his style, detractors who
could see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will now have judges.
Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision; and that
decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank {39}with
Galileo, and with Locke, the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and
left it a science. Never was there a literary partnership so fortunate
as that of Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which Mr. Bentham
furnished was most precious; but it was unmarketable. He was, assuredly,
at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. But the effect of
his logic was injured by a vicious arrangement, and the effect or his
rhetoric by a vicious style. His mind was vigorous, comprehensive,
subtle, fertile of arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he spoke in
an unknown tongue; and, that the congregation might be edified, it was
necessary that some brother having the gift of interpretation should
expound the invaluable jargon. His oracles were of high import; but they
were traced on leaves and flung loose to the wind. So negligent was he
of the arts of selection, distribution, and compression, that to persons
who formed their judgment of him from his works in their undigested
state he seemed to be the least systematic of all philosophers. The
truth is, that his opinions formed a system, which, whether sound or
unsound, is more exact, more entire, and more consistent with itself
than any other. Yet to superficial readers of his works in their
original form, and indeed to all readers of those works who did not
bring great industry and great acuteness to the study, he seemed to be a
man of a quick and ingenious but ill-regulated mind,--who saw truth
only by glimpses,--who threw out many striking hints, but who had never
thought of combining his doctrines in one harmonious whole.
M. Dumont was admirably qualified to supply what was wanting in Mr.
Bentham. In the qualities in which the French writers surpass those
of all other nations,--{40}neatness, clearness, precision,
condensation,--he surpassed all French writers. If M. Dumont had never
been horn, Mr. Bentham would still have been a very great man. But he
would have been great to himself alone. The fertility of his mind would
have resembled the fertility of those vast American wildernesses in
which blossoms and decays a rich but unprofitable vegetation, “wherewith
the reaper filleth not his hand, neither he that bindeth up the sheaves
his bosom.” It would have been with his discoveries as it has been with
the “Century of Inventions.” His speculations on laws would have been
of no more practical use than Lord Worcester’s speculations on
steam-engines. Some generations hence, perhaps, when legislation had
found its Watt, an antiquarian might have published to the world the
curious fact, that, in the reign of George the Third, there had been a
man called Bentham, who had given hints of many discoveries made since
his time, and who had really, for his age, taken a most philosophical
view of the principles of jurisprudence.
Many persons have attempted to interpret between this powerful mind and
the public. But, in our opinion, M. Dumont alone has succeeded. It is
remarkable that, in foreign countries, where Mr. Bentham’s works are
known solely through the medium of the French version, his merit is
almost universally acknowledged. Even those who are most decidedly
opposed to his political opinions--the very chiefs of the Holy
Alliance--have publicly testified their respect for him. In England,
on the contrary, many persons who certainly entertained no prejudice
against him on political grounds were long in the habit of mentioning
him contemptuously. Indeed, what was said {41}of Bacon’s Philosophy may
be said of Bentham’s. It was in little repute among us, till judgments
in its favour came from beyond sea, and convinced us, to our shame, that
we had been abusing and laughing at one of the greatest men of the age.
M. Dumont might easily have found employments more gratifying to
personal vanity than that of arranging works not his own. But he could
have found no employment more useful or more truly honourable. The book
before us, hastily written as it is, contains abundant proof, if proof
were needed, that he did not become an editor because he wanted the
talents which would have made him eminent as a writer.
Persons who hold democratical opinions, and who have been accustomed
to consider M. Dumont as one of their party, have been surprised and
mortified to learn that he speaks with very little respect of the
French Revolution and of its authors. Some zealous Tories have naturally
expressed great satisfaction at finding their doctrines, in some
respects, confirmed by the testimony of an unwilling witness. The date
of the work, we think, explains every thing. If it had been written ten
years earlier, or twenty years later, it would have been very different
from what it is. It was written, neither during the first excitement
of the Revolution, nor at that later period when the practical good
produced by the Revolution had become manifest to the most prejudiced
observers; but in those wretched times when the enthusiasm had abated,
and the solid advantages were not yet fully seen. It was written in the
year 1799,--a year in which the most sanguine friend of liberty might
well feel some misgivings as to the effects of what the National
Assembly had done. The evils which attend every great change had been
{42}severely felt. The benefit was still to come. The price--a heavy
price--had been paid. The thing purchased had not yet been delivered.
Europe was swarming with French exiles. The fleets and armies of the
second coalition were victorious. Within France, the reign of terror was
over; but the reign of law had not commenced. There had been, indeed,
during three or four years, a written Constitution, by which rights
were defined and checks provided. But these rights had been repeatedly
violated; and those checks had proved utterly inefficient. The laws
which had been framed to secure the distinct authority of the
executive magistrates and of the legislative assemblies--the freedom of
election--the freedom of debate--the freedom of the press--the personal
freedom of citizens--were a dead letter. The ordinary mode in which
the Republic was governed was by _coups d’état_. On one occasion,
the legislative councils were placed under military restraint by the
directors. Then, again, directors were deposed by the legislative
councils. Elections were set aside by the executive authority. Shiploads
of writers and speakers were sent, without a legal trial, to die
of fever in Guiana. France, in short, was in that state in which
revolutions, effected by violence, almost always leave a nation. The
habit of obedience had been lost. The spell of prescription had been
broken. Those associations on which, far more than on any arguments
about property and order, the authority of magistrates rests had
completely passed away. The power of the government consisted merely in
the physical force which it could bring to its support. Moral force it
had none. It was itself a government sprung from a recent convulsion.
Its own fundamental maxim was, that rebellion might be justifiable.
{43}Its own existence proved that rebellion might be successful. The
people had been accustomed, during several years, to offer resistance to
the constituted authorities on the slightest provocation, and to see the
constituted authorities yield to that resistance. The whole political
world was “without form and void”--an incessant whirl of hostile atoms,
which, every moment, formed some new combination. The only man who could
fix the agitated elements of society in a stable form was following a
wild vision of glory and empire through the Syrian deserts. The time was
not yet come, when
“Confusion heard his voice; and wild uproar
Stood ruled:”
when, out of the chaos into which the old society had been resolved,
were to rise a new dynasty, a new peerage, a new church, and a new code.
The dying words of Madame Roland, “Oh Liberty! how many crimes are
committed in thy name!” were at that time echoed by many of the
most upright and benevolent of mankind. M. Guizot has, in one of his
admirable pamphlets, happily and justly described M. Laine as “an honest
and liberal man discouraged by the Revolution.” This description, at the
time when M. Dumont’s Memoirs were written, would have applied to almost
every honest and liberal man in Europe; and would, beyond all doubt,
have applied to M. Dumont himself. To that fanatical worship of the
all-wise and all-good people, which had been common a few years before,
had succeeded an uneasy suspicion that the follies and vices of the
people would frustrate all attempts to serve them. The wild and joyous
exultation with which the meeting of the States-General {44}and the
fall of the Bastile had been hailed, had passed away. In its place
was dejection, and a gloomy distrust of specious appearances. The
philosophers and philanthropists had reigned. And what had their reign
produced? Philosophy had brought with it mummeries as absurd as any
which had been practised by the most superstitious zealot of the darkest
age. Philanthropy had brought with it crimes as horrible as the massacre
of St. Bartholomew. This was the emancipation of the human mind. These
were the fruits of the great victory of reason over prejudice. France
had rejected the faith of Pascal and Descartes as a nursery fable, that
a courtezan might be her idol, and a madman her priest. She had asserted
her freedom against Louis, that she might bow down before Robespierre.
For a time men thought that all the boasted wisdom of the eighteenth
century was folly: and that those hopes of great political and social
ameliorations which had been cherished by Voltaire and Condorcet were
utterly delusive.
Under the influence of these feelings, M. Dumont has gone so far as
to say that the writings of Mr. Burke on the French Revolution, though
disfigured by exaggeration, and though containing doctrines subversive
of all public liberty, had been, on the whole, justified by events, and
had probably saved Europe from great disasters. That such a man as the
friend and fellow-labourer of Mr. Bentham should have expressed such
an opinion is a circumstance which well deserves the consideration of
uncharitable politicians. These Memoirs have not convinced us that the
French Revolution was not a great blessing to mankind. But they have
convinced us that very great indulgence is due to those who, while
the Revolution was actually {45}taking place, regarded it with unmixed
aversion and horror. We can perceive where their error lay. We can
perceive that the evil was temporary, and the good durable. But we
cannot be sure that, if our lot had been cast in their times, we should
not, like them, have been discouraged and disgusted--that we should not,
like them, have seen, in that great victory of the French people, only
insanity and crime.
It is curious to observe how some men are applauded, and others reviled,
for merely being what all their neighbours are,--for merely going
passively down the stream of events,--for merely representing the
opinions and passions of a whole generation. The friends of popular
government ordinarily speak with extreme severity of Mr. Pitt, and with
respect and tenderness of Mr. Canning. Yet the whole difference, we
suspect, consisted merely in this,--that Mr. Pitt died in 1806, and Mr.
Canning in 1827. During the years which were common to the public life
of both, Mr. Canning was assuredly not a more liberal statesman than his
patron. The truth is, that Mr. Pitt began his political life at the end
of the American War, when the nation was suffering from the effects of
corruption. He closed it in the midst of the calamities produced by the
French Revolution, when the nation was still strongly impressed with the
horrors of anarchy. He changed, undoubtedly. In his youth he had brought
in reform bills. In his manhood he brought in gagging bills. But the
change, though lamentable, was, in our opinion, perfectly natural, and
might have been perfectly honest. He changed with the great body of his
countrymen. Mr. Canning, on the other hand, entered into public life
when Europe was in dread of the Jacobins. He closed his public life when
Europe was suffering under {46}the tyranny of the Holy Alliance. He,
too, changed with the nation. As the crimes of the Jacobins had turned
the master into something very like a Tory, the events which followed
the Congress of Vienna turned the pupil into something very like a Whig.
So much are men the creatures of circumstances. We see that, if M.
Dumont had died in 1799, he would have died, to use the new cant word,
a decided “Conservative.” If Mr. Pitt had lived in 1832, it is our firm
belief that he would have been a decided Reformer.
The judgment passed by M. Dumont in this work on the French Revolution
must be taken with considerable allowances. It resembles a criticism on
a play of which only the first act has been performed, or on a building
from which the scaffolding has not yet been taken down. We have no doubt
that, if the excellent author had revised these memoirs thirty years
after the time at which they were written, he would have seen reason to
omit a few passages, and to add many qualifications and explanations.
He would not probably have been inclined to retract the censures, just,
though severe, which he has passed on the ignorance, the presumption,
and the pedantry, of the National Assembly. But he would have admitted
that, in spite of those faults, perhaps even by reason of those faults,
that Assembly had conferred inestimable benefits on mankind. It is clear
that, among the French of that day, political knowledge was absolutely
in its infancy. It would indeed have been strange if it had attained
maturity in the time of censors, of _lettres-de-cachet_, and of beds of
justice. The electors did not know how to elect. The representatives
did not know how to deliberate. M. Dumont taught the constituent body
of Montreuil how to perform their functions, and {47}found them apt to
learn. He afterwards tried, in concert with Mirabeau, to instruct the
National Assembly in that admirable system of Parliamentary tactics
which has been long established in the English House of Commons, and
which has made the House of Commons, in spite of all the defects in its
composition, the best and fairest debating society in the world. But
these accomplished legislators, though quite as ignorant as the mob of
Montreuil, proved much less docile, and cried out that they did not
want to go to school to the English. Their debates consisted of endless
successions of trashy pamphlets, all beginning with something about the
original compact of society, man in the hunting state, and other such
foolery. They sometimes diversified and enlivened these long readings by
a little rioting. They bawled; they hooted; they shook their fists. They
kept no order among themselves. They were insulted with impunity by
the crowd which filled their galleries. They gave long and solemn
considerations to trifles. They hurried through the most important
resolutions with fearful expedition. They wasted months in quibbling
about the words of that false and childish Declaration of Rights on
which they professed to found their new constitution, and which was at
irreconcilable variance with every clause of that constitution. They
annihilated in a single night privileges, many of which partook of the
nature of property, and ought therefore to have been most delicately
handled.
They are called the Constituent Assembly. Never was a name less
appropriate. They were not constituent, but the very reverse of
constituent. They constituted nothing that stood or that deserved to
last. They had not, and they could not possibly have, the information or
the habits of mind which are necessary {48}for the framing of that most
exquisite of all machines--a government. The metaphysical cant with
which they prefaced their constitution has long been the scoff of
all parties. Their constitution itself,--that constitution which
they described as absolutely perfect, and to which they predicted
immortality,--disappeared in a few months, and left no trace behind it.
They were great only in the work of destruction.
The glory of the National Assembly is this, that they were in truth,
what Mr. Burke called them in austere irony, the ablest architects of
ruin that ever the world saw. They were utterly incompetent to perform
any work which required a discriminating eye and a skilful hand. But the
work which was then to be done was a work of devastation. They had
to deal with abuses so horrible and so deeply rooted that the highest
political wisdom could scarcely have produced greater good to mankind
than was produced by their fierce and senseless temerity. Demolition
is undoubtedly a vulgar task; the highest glory of the statesman is to
construct. But there is a time for every thing,--a time to set up, and a
time to pull down. The talents of revolutionary leaders and those of the
legislator have equally their use and their season. It is the
natural, the almost universal, law, that the age of insurrections, and
proscriptions shall precede the age of good government, of temperate
liberty, and liberal order.
And how should it be otherwise? It is not in swaddling-bands that
we learn to walk. It is not in the dark that we learn to distinguish
colours. It is not under oppression that we learn how to use freedom.
The ordinary sophism by which misrule is defended is, when truly stated,
this:--The people must continue {49}in slavery, because slavery has
generated in them all the vices of slaves. Because they are ignorant,
they must remain under a power which has made and which keeps them
ignorant. Because they have been made ferocious by misgovernment, they
must be misgoverned for ever. If the system under which they live were
so mild and liberal that under its operation they had become humane
and enlightened, it would be safe to venture on a change. But, as this
system has destroyed morality, and prevented the development of the
intellect,--as it has turned men, who might under different training
have formed a virtuous and happy community, into savage and stupid wild
beasts,--therefore it ought to last for ever. The English Revolution,
it is said, was truly a glorious Revolution. Practical evils were
redressed; no excesses were committed; no sweeping confiscations took
place; the authority of the laws was scarcely for a moment suspended;
the fullest and freest discussion was tolerated in Parliament; the
nation showed, by the calm and temperate manner in which it asserted its
liberty, that it was fit to enjoy liberty. The French Revolution was,
on the other hand, the most horrible event recorded in history,--all
madness and wickedness,--absurdity in theory, and atrocity in practice.
What folly and injustice in the revolutionary laws! What grotesque
affectation in the revolutionary ceremonies! What fanaticism! What
licentiousness! What cruelty! Anacharsis Clootz and Marat,--feasts of
the Supreme Being, and marriages of the Loire--trees of liberty, and
heads dancing on pikes--the whole forms a kind of infernal farce, made
up of every thing ridiculous, and every thing frightful. This it is to
give freedom to those who have neither wisdom nor virtue. {50}It is not
only by bad men interested in the defence of abuses that arguments like
these have been urged against all schemes of political improvement.
Some of the highest and purest of human beings conceived such scorn and
aversion for the follies and crimes of the French Revolution that they
recanted, in the moment of triumph, those liberal opinions to which they
had clung in defiance of persecution. And, if we inquire why it was that
they began to doubt whether liberty were a blessing, we shall find that
it was only because events had proved, in the clearest manner, that
liberty is the parent of virtue and of order. They ceased to abhor
tyranny merely because it had been signally shown that the effect of
tyranny on the hearts and understandings of men is more demoralising and
more stupifying than had ever been imagined by the most zealous friend
of moral rights. The truth is, that a stronger argument against the old
monarchy of France maybe drawn from the _noyades_ and the _fusillades_
than from the Bastile and the _Parc-aux-cerfs_. We believe it to be a
rule without an exception, that the violence of a revolution corresponds
to the degree of misgovernment which has produced that revolution.
Why was the French Revolution so bloody and destructive? Why was our
revolution of 1641 comparatively mild? Why was our revolution of 1688
milder still? Why was the American Revolution, considered as an internal
movement, the mildest of all? There is an obvious and complete solution
of the problem. The English under James the First and Charles the First
were less oppressed than the French under Louis the Fifteenth and Louis
the Sixteenth. The English were less oppressed after the Restoration
than before the great Rebellion. And America under George the Third was
less oppressed than England under the Stuarts. The re-action {51}was
exactly proportioned to the pressure,--the vengeance to the provocation.
When Mr. Burke was reminded in his later years of the zeal which he had
displayed in the cause of the Americans, he vindicated himself from the
charge of inconsistency, by contrasting the wisdom and moderation of the
Colonial insurgents of 1776 with the fanaticism and wickedness of the
Jacobins of 1792. He was in fact bringing an argument _a fortiori_
against himself. The circumstances on which he rested his vindication,
fully proved that the old government of France stood in far more need
of a complete change than the old government of America. The difference
between Washington and Robespierre,--the difference between Franklin and
Barere,--the difference between the destruction of a few barrels of
tea and the confiscation of thousands of square, miles,--the difference
between the tarring and feathering of a tax-gatherer and the massacres
of September,--measure the difference between the government of America
under the rule of England and the government of France under the rule of
the Bourbons.
Louis the Sixteenth made great voluntary concessions to his people;
and they sent him to the scaffold. Charles the Tenth violated the
fundamental laws of the state, established a despotism, and butchered
his subjects for not submitting quietly to that despotism. He failed in
his wicked attempt. He was at the mercy of those whom he had injured.
The pavements of Paris were still heaped up in barricades;--the
hospitals were still full of the wounded;--the dead were still
unburied;--a thousand families were in mourning;--a hundred thousand
citizens were in arms. The crime was recent;--the life of the criminal
was in the hands {52}of the sufferers;--and they touched not one hair of
his head. In the first, revolution, victims were sent to death by scores
for the most trifling acts proved by the lowest testimony, before the
most partial tribunals. After the second revolution, those ministers who
had signed the ordinances,--those ministers, whose guilt, as it was of
the foulest kind, was proved by the clearest evidence,--were punished
only with imprisonment. In the first revolution, property was attacked.
In the second, it was held sacred. Both revolutions, it is true, left
the public mind of France in an unsettled state. Both revolutions were
followed by insurrectionary movements. But, after the first revolution,
the insurgents were almost always stronger than the law; and, since the
second revolution, the law has invariably been found stronger than the
insurgents. There is, indeed, much in the present state of France which
may well excite the uneasiness of those who desire to see her free,
happy, powerful, and secure. Yet, if we compare the present state of
France with the state in which she was forty years ago, how vast a
change for the better has taken place! How little effect, for example,
during the first revolution, would the sentence of a judicial body have
produced on an armed and victorious body! If, after the 10th of August,
or after the proscription of the Gironde, or after the 9th of Thermidor,
or after the carnage of Vendémiaire, or after the arrests of Fructidor,
any tribunal had decided against the conquerors in favour of the
conquered, with what contempt, with what derision, would its award have
been received! The judges would have lost their heads, or would have
been sent to die in some unwholesome colony. The fate of the victim whom
they had endeavoured to save would only have been made darker and more
hopeless {53}by their interference. We have lately seen a signal proof
that, in France, the law is now stronger than the sword. We have seen a
government, in the very moment of triumph and revenge, submitting itself
to the authority of a court of law. A just and independent sentence
has been pronounced--a sentence worthy of the ancient renown of
that magistracy to which belong the noblest recollections of French
history--which, in an age of persecutors, produced L’Hôpital,--which,
in an age of courtiers, produced D’Aguesseau--which, in an age of
wickedness and madness, exhibited to mankind a pattern of every virtue
in the life and in the death of Malesherbes. The respectful manner in
which that sentence has been received is alone sufficient to show how
widely the French of this generation differ from their fathers. And how
is the difference to be explained? The race, the soil, the climate are
the same. If those dull, honest Englishmen, who explain the events of
1793 and 1791 by saying that the French are naturally frivolous and
cruel, were in the right, why is the guillotine now standing idle?
Not surely for want of Carlists, of aristocrats, of people guilty of
incivism, of people suspected of being suspicious characters. Is not the
true explanation this, that the Frenchman of 1832 has been far better
governed than the Frenchman of 1798,--that his soul has never been
galled by the oppressive privileges of a separate caste,--that he has
been in some degree accustomed to discuss political questions, and
to perform political functions,--that he has lived for seventeen or
eighteen years under institutions which, however defective, have yet
been far superior to any institutions that had before existed in France?
As the second French Revolution has been far milder {54}than the first,
so that great change which has just been effected in England has
been milder even than the second French Revolution,--milder than any
revolution recorded in history. Some orators have described the
reform of the House of Commons as a revolution. Others have denied the
propriety of the term. The question, though in seeming merely a
question of definition, suggests much curious and interesting matter for
reflection. If we look at the magnitude of the reform, it may well
be called a revolution. If we look at the means by which it has been
effected, it is merely an act of Parliament, regularly brought in, read,
committed, and passed. In the whole history of England, there is no
prouder circumstance than this,--that a change, which could not, in any
other age, or in any other country, have been effected without physical
violence, should here have been effected by the force of reason,
and under the forms of law. The work of three civil wars has been
accomplished by three sessions of Parliament. An ancient and deeply
rooted system of abuses has been fiercely attacked and stubbornly
defended. It has fallen; and not one sword has been drawn; not one
estate has been confiscated; not one family has been forced to emigrate.
The bank has kept its credit. The funds have kept their price. Every man
has gone forth to his work and to his labour till the evening. During
the fiercest excitement of the contest,--during the first fortnight of
that immortal May,--there was not one moment at which any sanguinary
act committed on the person of any of the most unpopular men in England
would not have filled the country with horror and indignation.
And, now that the victory is won, has it been abused? An immense mass of
power has been transferred {55}from an oligarchy to the nation. Are
the members of the vanquished oligarchy insecure? Does the nation seem
disposed to play the tyrant? Are not those who, in any other state of
society, would have been visited with the severest vengeance of the
triumphant party,--would have been pining in dungeons, or flying to
foreign countries,--still enjoying their possessions and their honours,
still taking part as freely as ever in public affairs? Two years ago
they were dominant. They are now vanquished. Yet the whole people would
regard with horror any man who should dare to propose any vindictive
measure. So common is this feeling,--so much is it a matter of course
among us,--that many of our readers will scarcely understand what we see
to admire in it.
To what are we to attribute the unparalleled moderation and humanity
which the English people have displayed at this great conjuncture? The
answer is plain. This moderation, this humanity, are the fruits of a
hundred and fifty years of liberty. During many generations we have had
legislative assemblies which, however defective their constitution might
be, have always contained many members chosen by the people, and many
others eager to obtain the approbation of the people;--assemblies in
which perfect freedom of debate was allowed;--assemblies in which the
smallest minority had a fair hearing;--assemblies in which abuses,
even when they were not redressed, were at least exposed. For many
generations we have had the trial by jury, the Habeas Corpus Act, the
freedom of the press, the right of meeting to discuss public affairs,
the right of petitioning the legislature. A vast portion of the
population has long been accustomed to the exercise of political
functions, and has been thoroughly {56}seasoned to political excitement.
In most other countries there is no middle course between absolute
submission and open rebellion. In England there has always been for
centuries a constitutional opposition. Thus our institutions had been so
good that they had educated us into a capacity for better institutions.
There is not a large town in the kingdom which does not contain better
materials for a legislature than all France could furnish in 1789. There
is not a spouting-club at any pot-house in London in which the rules of
debate are not better understood, and more strictly observed than in the
Constituent Assembly. There is scarcely a Political Union which could
not frame in half an hour a declaration of rights superior to that which
occupied the collective wisdom of France for several months.
It would be impossible even to glance at all the causes of the French
Revolution, within the limits to which we must confine ourselves. One
thing is clear. The government, the aristocracy, and the church, were
rewarded after their works. They reaped that which they had sown. They
found the nation such as they had made it. That the people had become
possessed of irresistible power before they had attained the slightest
knowledge of the art of government--that practical questions of vast
moment were left to be solved by men to whom politics had been only
matter of theory--that a legislature was composed of persons who were
scarcely fit to compose a debating society--that the whole nation was
ready to lend an ear to any flatterer who appealed to its cupidity, to
its fears, or to its thirst for vengeance--all this was the effect of
misrule, obstinately continued in defiance of solemn warnings, and of
the visible signs of an approaching retribution. {57}Even while the
monarchy seemed to be in its highest and most palmy state, the causes
of that great destruction had already begun to operate. They may be
distinctly traced even under the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. That
reign is the time to which the Ultra-Royalists refer as the Golden Age
of France. It was in truth one of those periods which shine with an
unnatural and delusive splendour, and which are rapidly followed by
gloom and decay.
Concerning Louis the Fourteenth himself, the world seems at last to
have formed a correct judgment. He was not a great general; he was not
a great statesman; but he was, in one sense of the words, a great king.
Never was there so consummate a master of what our James the First would
have called king-craft,--of all those arts which most advantageously
display the merits of a prince, and most completely hide his defects.
Though his internal administration was bad,--though the military
triumphs which gave splendour to the early part of his reign, were not
achieved by himself,--though his later years were crowded with defeats
and humiliations,--though he was so ignorant that he scarcely understood
the Latin of his mass-book,--though he fell under the control of a
cunning Jesuit, and of a more cunning old woman,--he succeeded in
passing himself off on his people as a being above humanity. And this
is the more extraordinary, because he did not seclude himself from the
public gaze like those Oriental despots, whose faces are never seen, and
whose very names it is a crime to pronounce lightly. It has been said
that no man is a hero to his valet;--and all the world saw as much
of Louis the Fourteenth as his valet could see. Five hundred people
assembled to see him shave and put on his breeches in the morning.
{58}He then kneeled down at the side of his bed, and said his prayer,
while the whole assembly awaited the end in solemn silence,--the
ecclesiastics on their knees and the laymen with their hats before their
faces. He walked about his gardens with a train of two hundred courtiers
at his heels. All Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was put to
bed at night in the midst of a crowd as great as that which had met
to see him rise in the morning. He took his very emetics in state, and
vomited majestically in the presence of all the _grandes_ and _petites
entrées_. Yet, though he constantly exposed himself to the public gaze
in situations in which it is scarcely possible for any man to preserve
much personal dignity, he to the last impressed those who surrounded him
with the deepest awe and reverence. The illusion which he produced on
his worshippers can be compared only to those illusions to which lovers
are proverbially subject during the season of courtship. It was an
illusion which affected even the senses. The contemporaries of Louis
thought him tall. Voltaire, who might have seen him, and who had
lived with some of the most distinguished members of his court, speaks
repeatedly of his majestic stature. Yet it is as certain as any fact
can be, that he was rather below than above the middle size. He had, it
seems, a way of holding himself, a way of walking, a way of swelling his
chest and rearing his head, which deceived the eyes of the multitude.
Eighty years after his death, the royal cemetery was violated by the
revolutionists; his coffin was opened; his body was dragged out; and
it appeared that the prince, whose majestic figure had been so long and
loudly extolled, was in truth a little man. (1) That fine
(1) Even M de Chataubriand, to whom we should have thought
all the Bourbons would have seemed at least six feet high,
admits this fact. “C’est une erreur,” says he in his strange
memoirs of the Duke of Berri, “de croire que Louis XIV.
étoit d’une haute stature. Une cuirasse qui nous reste de
lui, et les exhumations de St. Denys, n’ont laissé sur ce
point aucun doute.”
{59}expression of Juvenal is singularly applicable, both in its literal
and in its metaphorical sense, to Louis tin; Fourteenth:
“Mors sola fatetur,
Quantula sint hominum corpuscula.”
His person and his government have had the same fate. He had the art of
making both appear grand and august, in spite of the clearest evidence
that both were below the ordinary standard. Death and time have exposed
both the deceptions. The body of the great king has been measured more
justly than it was measured by the courtiers who were afraid to look
above his shoe-tie. His public character has been scrutinized by men
free from the hopes and fears of Boileau and Molière. In the grave, the
most majestic of princes is only five feet eight. In history, the hero
and the politician dwindles into a vain and feeble tyrant,--the slave
of priests and women,--little in war,--little in government,--little in
every thing but the art of simulating greatness.
He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable people, a
beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into deserts by misgovernment
and persecution, factions dividing the court, a schism raging in the
church, an immense debt, an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an
innumerable household, inestimable jewels and furniture. All the sap and
nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated and
unwholesome excrescence. The nation was withered. The court was morbidly
flourishing. {60}Yet it does not appear that the associations which
attached the people to the monarchy had lost strength during his reign.
He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests; but he had
struck their imaginations. The very things which ought to have made him
most unpopular,--the prodigies of luxury and magnificence with which his
person was surrounded, while, beyond the inclosure of his parks, nothing
was to be seen but starvation and despair,--seemed to increase the
respectful attachment which his subjects felt for him. That governments
exist only for the good of the people, appears to be the most obvious
and simple of all truths. Yet history proves that it is one of the most
recondite. We can scarcely wonder that it should be so seldom present
to the minds of rulers, when we see how slowly, and through how much
suffering, nations arrive at the knowledge of it.
There was indeed one Frenchman who had discovered those principles which
it now seems impossible to miss,--that the many are not made for the use
of one,--that the truly good government is not that which concentrates
magnificence in a court, but that which diffuses happiness among a
people,--that a king who gains victory after victory, and adds province
to province, may deserve, not the admiration, but the abhorrence and
contempt of mankind. These were the doctrines which Fénelon taught.
Considered as an epic poem, Telemachus can scarcely be placed above
Glover’s Leonidas or Wilkie’s Epigoniad. Considered as a treatise on
politics and morals, it abounds with errors of detail; and the truths
which it inculcates seem trite to a modern reader. But, if we compare
the spirit in which it is written with the spirit which pervades the
rest of the French literature {61}of that age, we shall perceive that,
though in appearance trite, it was in truth one of the most original
works that have ever appeared. The fundamental principles of Fenelon’s
political morality, the tests by which he judged of institutions and of
men, were absolutely new to his countrymen. He had taught them indeed,
with the happiest effect, to his royal pupil. But how incomprehensible
they were to most people, we learn from Saint Simon. That amusing
writer tells us, as a thing almost incredible, that the Duke of Burgundy
declared it to be his opinion that kings existed for the good of
the people, and not the people for the good of kings. Saint Simon is
delighted with the benevolence of this saying; but startled by its
novelty, and terrified by its boldness. Indeed he distinctly says that
it was not safe to repeat the sentiment in the court of Louis. Saint
Simon was, of all the members of that court, the least courtly. He was
as nearly an oppositionist as any man of his time. His disposition was
proud, bitter, and cynical. In religion he was a Jansenist; in politics,
a less hearty royalist than most of his neighbours. His opinions and his
temper had preserved him from the illusions which the demeanour of Louis
produced on others. He neither loved nor respected the king. Yet even
this man,--one of the most liberal men in France,--was struck dumb
with astonishment at hearing the fundamental axiom of all government
propounded,--an axiom which, in our time, nobody in England or France
would dispute,--which the stoutest Tory takes for granted as much as the
fiercest Radical, and concerning which the Carlist would agree with the
most republican deputy of the “extreme left.” No person will do justice
to Fenelon, who does not {62}constantly keep in mind that Telemachus
was written in an age and nation in which bold and independent thinkers
stared to hear that twenty millions of human beings did not exist
for the gratification of one. That work is commonly considered as a
school-book, very fit for children, because its style is easy and its
morality blameless, but unworthy of the attention of statesmen and
philosophers. We can distinguish in it, if we are not greatly mistaken,
the first faint dawn of a long and splendid day of intellectual
light,--the dim promise of a great deliverance,--the undeveloped germ of
the charter and of the code.
What mighty interests were staked on the life of the Duke of Burgundy!
and how different an aspect might the history of France have borne if he
had attained the age of his grandfather or of his son;--if he had been
permitted to show how much could be done for humanity by the highest
virtue in the highest fortune! There is scarcely anything in history
more remarkable than the descriptions which remain to us of that
extraordinary man. The fierce and impetuous temper which he showed in
early youth,--the complete change which a judicious education produced
in his character,--his fervid piety,--his large benevolence,--the
strictness with which he judged himself,--the liberality with which he
judged others,--the fortitude with which alone, in the whole court, he
stood up against the commands of Louis, when a religious scruple
was concerned,--the charity with which alone, in the whole court,
he defended the profligate Orleans against calumniators,--his great
projects for the good of the people,--his activity in business,--his
taste for letters,--his strong domestic attachments,--even the
ungraceful person and the shy and awkward manner which concealed
{63}from the eyes of the sneering courtiers of his grandfather so many
rare endowments,--make his character the most interesting that is to
be found in the annals of his house. He had resolved, if he came to the
throne, to disperse that ostentatious court, which was supported at
an expense ruinous to the nation,--to preserve peace,--to correct the
abuses which were found in every part of the system of revenue,--to
abolish or modify oppressive privileges,--to reform the administration
of justice,--to revive the institution of the States General. If he had
ruled over France during forty or fifty years, that great movement
of the human mind, which no government could have arrested, which bad
government only rendered more violent, would, we are inclined to think,
have been conducted, by peaceable means, to a happy termination.
Disease and sorrow removed from the world that wisdom and virtue of
which it was not worthy. During two generations France was ruled by men
who, with all the vices of Louis the Fourteenth, had none of the art
by which that magnificent prince passed off his vices for virtues. The
people had now to see tyranny naked. That foul Duessa was stripped
of her gorgeous ornaments. She had always been hideous; but a strange
enchantment had made her seem fair and glorious in the eyes of her
willing slaves. The spell was now broken; the deformity was made
manifest; and the lovers, lately so happy and so proud, turned away
loathing and horror-struck.
First came the Regency. The strictness, with which Louis had, towards
the close of his life, exacted from those around him an outward
attention to religious duties, produced an effect similar to that which
the rigour of the Puritans had produced in England. It {64}was the boast
of Madame de Maintenon, in the time of her greatness, that devotion had
become the fashion. A fashion indeed it was; and, like a fashion, it
passed away. The austerity of the tyrant’s old age had injured the
morality of the higher orders more than even the licentiousness of his
youth. Not only had he not reformed their vices, but, by forcing them to
be hypocrites, he had shaken their belief in virtue. They had found it
so easy to perform the grimace of piety, that it was natural for them
to consider all piety as grimace. The times were changed. Pensions,
regiments, and abbeys, were no longer to be obtained by regular
confession and severe penance; and the obsequious courtiers, who had
kept Lent like monks of La Trappe, and who had turned up the whites of
their eyes at the edifying parts of sermons preached before the king,
aspired to the title of _roué_ as ardently as they had aspired to that
of _dévot_; and went, during Passion Week, to the revels of the Palais
Royal as readily as they had formerly repaired to the sermons of
Massillon.
The Regent was in many respects the fac-simile of our Charles the
Second. Like Charles, he was a good-natured man, utterly destitute
of sensibility. Like Charles, he had good natural talents, which a
deplorable indolence rendered useless to the state. Like Charles, he
thought all men corrupt and interested, and yet did not dislike them
for being so. His opinion of human nature was Gulliver’s; but he did not
regard human nature with Gulliver’s horror. He thought that he and his
fellow-creatures were Yahoos; and he thought a Yahoo a very agreeable
kind of animal. No princes were ever more social than Charles and Philip
of Orleans; yet no princes ever had less capacity for {65}friendship.
The tempers of these clever cynics were so easy, and their minds so
languid, that habit supplied in them the place of affection, and made
them the tools of people for whom they cared not one straw. In love,
both were mere sensualists without delicacy or tenderness. In politics,
both were utterly careless of faith and of national honour. Charles shut
up the Exchequer. Philip patronised the System. The councils of Charles
were swayed by the gold of Barillon; the councils of Philip by the gold
of Walpole. Charles for private objects made war on Holland, the natural
ally of England. Philip for private objects made war on the Spanish
branch of the house of Bourbon, the natural ally, indeed the creature,
of France. Even in trifling circumstances the parallel might be carried
on. Both these princes were fond of experimental philosophy, and passed
in the laboratory much time which would have been more advantageously
passed at the council-table. Both were more strongly attached to their
female relatives than to any other human being; and in both cases it was
suspected that this attachment was not perfectly innocent. In personal
courage, and in all the virtues which are connected with personal
courage, the Regent was indisputably superior to Charles. Indeed Charles
but narrowly escaped the stain of cowardice. Philip was eminently brave,
and, like most brave men, was generally open and sincere. Charles added
dissimulation to his other vices.
The administration of the Regent was scarcely less pernicious, and
infinitely more scandalous, than that of the deceased monarch. It was
by magnificent public works, and by wars conducted on a gigantic scale,
that Louis had brought distress on his people. The Regent aggravated
that distress by frauds of which a lame {66}duck on the stock-exchange
would have been ashamed. France, even while suffering under the most
severe calamities, had reverenced the conqueror. She despised the
swindler.
When Orleans and the wretched Dubois had disappeared, the power passed
to the Duke of Bourbon; a prince degraded in the public eye by the
infamously lucrative part which he had taken in the juggles of the
System, and by the humility with which he bore the caprices of a loose
and imperious woman. It seemed to be decreed that every branch of the
royal family should successively incur the abhorrence and contempt of
the nation.
Between the fall of the Duke of Bourbon and the death of Fleury, a few
years of frugal and moderate government intervened. Then recommenced the
downward progress of the monarchy. Profligacy in the court, extravagance
in the finances, schism in the church, faction in the Parliaments,
unjust war terminated by ignominious peace,--all that indicates and all
that produces the ruin of great empires, make up the history of that
miserable period. Abroad, the French were beaten and humbled every
where, by land and by sea, on the Elbe and on the Rhine, in Asia and in
America. At home, they were turned over from vizier to vizier, and from
sultana to sultana, till they had reached that point beneath which there
was no lower abyss of infamy,--till the yoke of Maupeou had made them
pine for Choiseul,--till Madame du Barri had taught them to regret
Madame de Pompadour.
But, unpopular as the monarchy had become, the aristocracy was more
unpopular still;--and not without reason. The tyranny of an individual
is far more {67}supportable than the tyranny of a caste. The old
privileges were galling and hateful to the new wealth and the
new knowledge. Every thing indicated the approach of no common
revolution,--of a revolution destined to change, not merely the form
of government, but the distribution of property and the whole social
system,--of a revolution the effects of which were to be felt at every
fireside in France,--of a new Jaquerie, in which the victory was to
remain with _Jaques bonhomme_. In the van of the movement were the
moneyed men and the men of letters,--the wounded pride of wealth and
the wounded pride of intellect. An immense multitude, made ignorant and
cruel by oppression, was raging in the rear.
We greatly doubt whether any course which could have been pursued by
Louis the Sixteenth could have averted a great convulsion. But we are
sure that, if there was such a course, it was the course recommended
by M. Turgot. The church and the aristocracy, with that blindness to
danger, that incapacity of believing that anything can be except what
has been, which the long possession of power seldom fails to generate,
mocked at the counsel which might have saved them. They would not have
reform; and they had revolution. They would not pay a small contribution
in place of the odious corvées; and they lived to see their castles
demolished, and their lands sold to strangers. They would not endure
Turgot; and they were forced to endure Robespierre.
Then the rulers of France, as if smitten with judicial blindness,
plunged headlong into the American war. They thus committed at once two
great errors. They encouraged the spirit of revolution. They augmented
{68}at the same time those public burdens, the pressure of which is
generally the immediate cause of revolutions. The event of the war
carried to the height the enthusiasm of speculative democrats. The
financial difficulties produced by the war carried to the height the
discontent of that larger body of people who cared little about theories
and much about taxes.
The meeting of the States-General was the signal for the explosion of
all the hoarded passions of a century. In that assembly, there were
undoubtedly very able men. But they had no practical knowledge of the
art of government. All the great English revolutions have been conducted
by practical statesmen. The French Revolution was conducted by mere
speculators. Our constitution has never been so far behind the age as to
have become an object of aversion to the people. The English revolutions
have therefore been undertaken for the purpose of defending, correcting,
and restoring,--never for the mere purpose of destroying. Our countrymen
have always, even in times of the greatest excitement, spoken reverently
of the form of government under which they lived, and attacked only what
they regarded as its corruptions. In the very act of innovating they
have constantly appealed to ancient prescription; they have seldom
looked abroad for models; they have seldom troubled themselves with
Utopian theories; they have not been anxious to prove that liberty is a
natural right of men; they have been content to regard it as the lawful
birthright of Englishmen. Their social contract is no fiction. It
is still extant on the original parchment, sealed with wax which was
affixed at Runnymede, and attested by the lordly names of the Marischals
and Fitzherberts. No general arguments about the original equality of
men, no fine {69}stories out of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, have
ever affected them so much as their own familiar words,--Magna
Charta,--Habeas Corpus,--Trial by Jury,--Bill of Rights. This part of
our national character has undoubtedly its disadvantages. An Englishman
too often reasons on politics in the spirit rather of a lawyer than of
a philosopher. There is too often something narrow, something exclusive,
something Jewish, if we may use the word, in his love of freedom. He
is disposed to consider popular rights as the special heritage of the
chosen race to which he belongs. He is inclined rather to repel than to
encourage the alien proselyte who aspires to a share of his privileges.
Very different was the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. They had
none of our narrowness; but they had none of our practical skill in the
management of affairs. They did not understand how to regulate the order
of their own debates; and they thought themselves able to legislate for
the whole world. All the past was loathsome to them. All their agreeable
associations were connected with the future. Hopes were to them all that
recollections are to us. In the institutions of their country they found
nothing to love or to admire. As far back as they could look, they saw
only the tyranny of one class and the degradation of another,--Frank
and Gaul, knight and villein, gentleman and _roturier_. They hated the
monarchy, the church, the nobility. They cared nothing for the States or
the Parliament. It was long the fashion to ascribe all the follies which
they committed to the writings of the philosophers. We believe that
it was misrule, and nothing but misrule, that put the sting into those
writings. It is not time that the French abandoned experience for
theories. They took up with theories because {70}they had no experience
of good government. It was because they had no charter that they ranted
about the original contract. As soon as tolerable institutions were
given to them, they began to look to those institutions. In 1830 their
rallying cry was _Vive la Charte_. In 1789 they had nothing but theories
round which to rally. They had seen social distinctions only in a
bad form; and it was therefore natural that they should be deluded by
sophisms about the equality of men. They had experienced so much evil
from the sovereignty of kings that they might be excused for lending a
ready ear to those who preached, in an exaggerated form, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the people.
The English, content with their own national recollections and names,
have never sought for models in the institutions of Greece or Rome. The
French, having nothing in their own history to which they could look
back with pleasure, had recourse to the history of the great ancient
commonwealths: they drew their notions of those commonwealths, not from
contemporary writers, but from romances written by pedantic moralists
long after the extinction of public liberty. They neglected Thucydides
for Plutarch. Blind themselves, they took blind guides. They had no
experience of freedom; and they took their opinions concerning it
from men who had no more experience of it than themselves, and whose
imaginations, inflamed by mystery and privation, exaggerated the unknown
enjoyment;--from men who raved about patriotism without having ever had
a country, and eulogised tyrannicide while crouching before tyrants.
The maxim which the French legislators learned in this school was, that
political liberty is an end, and not a means; that it is not merely
valuable as the great safe-guard of order, of property, {71}and of
morality, but that it is in itself a high and exquisite happiness to
which order, property, and morality ought without one scruple to be
sacrificed. The lessons which may be learned from ancient history are
indeed most useful and important; but they were not likely to be learned
by men who, in all their rhapsodies about the Athenian democracy, seemed
utterly to forget that in that democracy there were ten slaves to one
citizen; and who constantly decorated their invectives against the
aristocrats with panegyrics on Brutus and Cato,--two aristocrats,
fiercer, prouder, and more exclusive, than any that emigrated with the
Count of Artois.
We have never met with so vivid and interesting a picture of the
National Assembly as that which M. Dumont has set before us. His
Mirabeau, in particular, is incomparable. All the former Mirabeaus
were daubs in comparison. Some were merely painted from the
imagination--others were gross caricatures: this is the very individual,
neither god nor demon, but a man--a Frenchman,--a Frenchman of the
eighteenth century, with great talents, with strong passions, depraved
by bad education, surrounded by temptations of every kind,--made
desperate at one time by disgrace, and then again intoxicated by fame.
All his opposite and seemingly inconsistent qualities are in this
representation so blended together as to make up a harmonious and
natural whole. Till now, Mirabeau was to us, and, we believe, to most
readers of history, not a man, but a string of antitheses. Henceforth he
will be a real human being, a remarkable and eccentric being indeed, but
perfectly conceivable.
He was fond, M. Dumont tells us, of giving odd compound nicknames. Thus,
M. de Lafayette was {72}Grandison-Cromwell; the king of Prussia was
Alaric-Cottin; D’Espremenil was Crispin-Catiline. We think that Mirabeau
himself might be described, after his own fashion, as a Wilkes-Chatham.
He had Wilkes’s sensuality, Wilkes’s levity, Wilkes’s insensibility to
shame. Like Wilkes, he had brought on himself the censure even of men
of pleasure by the peculiar grossness of his immorality, and by the
obscenity of his writings. Like Wilkes, he was heedless, not only of
the laws of morality, but of the laws of honour. Yet he affected, like
Wilkes, to unite the character of the demagogue to that of the fine
gentleman. Like Wilkes, he conciliated, by his good humour and his high
spirits, the regard of many who despised his character. Like Wilkes,
he was hideously ugly; like Wilkes, he made a jest of his own ugliness;
and, like Wilkes, he was, in spite of his ugliness, very attentive to
his dress, and very successful in affairs of gallantry.
Resembling Wilkes in the lower and grosser parts of his character, he
had, in his higher qualities, some affinity to Chatham. His eloquence,
as far as we can judge of it, bore no inconsiderable resemblance to that
of the great English minister. He was not eminently successful in long
set speeches. He was not, on the other hand, a close and ready debater.
Sudden bursts, which seemed to be the effect of inspiration--short
sentences which came like lightning, dazzling, burning, striking down
every thing before them--sentences which, spoken at critical moments,
decided the fate of great questions--sentences which at once became
proverbs--sentences which everybody still knows by heart--in these
chiefly lay the oratorical power both of Chatham and of Mirabeau. There
have been far greater speakers, and far greater statesmen, than either
{73}of them; but we doubt whether any men have, in modern times,
exercised such vast personal influence over stormy and divided
assemblies. The power of both was as much moral as intellectual. In true
dignity of character, in private and public virtue, it may seem
absurd to institute any comparison between them; but they had the same
haughtiness and vehemence of temper. In their language and manner there
was a disdainful self-confidence, an imperiousness, a fierceness of
passion, before which all common minds quailed. Even Murray and Charles
Townshend, though intellectually not inferior to Chatham, were always
cowed by him. Barnave, in the same manner, though the best debater in
the National Assembly, flinched before the energy of Mirabeau. Men,
except in bad novels, are not all good or all evil. It can scarcely be
denied that the virtue of Lord Chatham was a little theatrical. On the
other hand there was in Mirabeau, not indeed any thing deserving the
name of virtue, but that imperfect substitute for virtue which is found
in almost all superior minds,--a sensibility to the beautiful and the
good, which sometimes amounted to sincere enthusiasm; and which, mingled
with the desire of admiration, sometimes gave to his character a lustre
resembling the lustre of true goodness,--as the “faded splendour wan”
which lingered round the fallen archangel resembled the exceeding
brightness of those spirits who had kept their first estate.
There are several other admirable portraits of eminent men in these
Memoirs. That of Sieyes in particular, and that of Talleyrand, are
masterpieces, full of life and expression. But nothing in the book has
interested us more than the view which M. Dumont has presented to
us, unostentatiously, and, we {74}may say, unconsciously, of his own
character. The sturdy rectitude, the large charity, the good-nature, the
modesty, the independent spirit, the ardent philanthropy, the unaffected
indifference to money and to fame, make up a character which, while it
has nothing unnatural, seems to us to approach nearer to perfection than
any of the Grandisons and Allworthys of fiction. The work is not indeed
precisely such a work as we had anticipated--it is more lively, more
picturesque, more amusing than we had promised ourselves; and it is, on
the other hand, less profound and philosophic. But, if it is not, in
all respects, such as might have been expected from the intellect of M.
Dumont, it is assuredly such as might have been expected from his heart.