country solely from his position in the army, and as he draws all the
distinction and the competency he enjoys from the same source, he does
not retire from his profession or is not superannuated till toward the
extreme close of life. The consequence of these two causes is that
when a democratic people goes to war after a long interval of peace
all the leading officers of the army are old men. I speak not only of
the generals, but of the non-commissioned officers, who have most of
them been stationary, or have only advanced step by step. It may be
remarked with surprise that in a democratic army after a long peace
all the soldiers are mere boys, and all the superior officers in
declining years; so that the former are wanting in experience, the
latter in vigor. This is a strong element of defeat, _for the first
condition of successful generalship is youth_. I should not have
ventured to say so if the greatest captain of modern times had not
made the observation. [The unequaled success of the aged Von Moltke in
the conduct of the Prussian war against France in 1870 is here a
curious comment on the text.]
* * * * *
I am therefore of opinion that when a democratic people engages in a
war after a long peace, it incurs much more risk of defeat than any
other nation; but it ought not easily to be cast down by its reverses,
for the chances of success for such an army are increased by the
duration of the war. When a war has at length by its long continuance
roused the whole community from their peaceful occupations and ruined
their minor undertakings the same passions which made them attach so
much importance to the maintenance of peace will be turned to arms.
War, after it has destroyed all modes of speculation, becomes itself
the great and sole speculation, to which all the ardent and ambitious
desires which equality engenders are exclusively directed. Hence it is
that the self-same democratic nations which are so reluctant to engage
in hostilities sometimes perform prodigious achievements when once
they have taken the field.
As the war attracts more and more of public attention, and is seen to
create high reputations and great fortunes in a short space of time,
the choicest spirits of the nation enter the military profession. All
the enterprising, proud, and martial minds, no longer of the
aristocracy solely, but of the whole country, are drawn in this
direction. As the number of competitors for military honors is
immense, and war drives every man to his proper level, great generals
are always sure to spring up. A long war produces upon a democratic
army the same effects that a revolution produces upon a people; it
breaks through regulations, and allows extraordinary men to rise above
the common level. Those officers whose bodies and minds have grown old
in peace are removed, or superannuated, or they die. In their stead a
host of young men are pressing on whose frames are already hardened,
whose desires are extended and inflamed by active service. They are
bent on advancement at all hazards, and perpetual advancement. They
are followed by others with the same passions and desires, and after
these are others yet, unlimited by aught but the size of the army. The
principle of equality opens the door of ambition to all, and death
provides chances for ambition. Death is constantly thinning the ranks,
making vacancies, closing and opening the career of arms.
There is, moreover, a secret connection between the military character
and the character of democracies which war brings to light. The men of
democracies are naturally passionately eager to acquire what they
covet, and to enjoy it on easy conditions. They, for the most part,
worship chance, and are much less afraid of death than of difficulty.
This is the spirit which they bring to commerce and manufactures; and
this same spirit, carried with them to the field of battle, induces
them willingly to expose their lives in order to secure in a moment
the rewards of victory. No kind of greatness is more pleasing to the
imagination of a democratic people than military greatness--a
greatness of vivid and sudden luster, obtained without toil, by
nothing but the risk of life.
Thus, while the interest and the tastes of the members of a democratic
community divert them from war, their habits of mind fit them for
carrying on war well; they soon make good soldiers when they are
roused from their business and their enjoyments.
If peace is peculiarly hurtful to democratic armies, war secures to
them advantages which no other armies ever possess; and these
advantages, however little felt at first, cannot fail in the end to
give them the victory. An aristocratic nation which, in a contest with
a democratic people, does not succeed in ruining the latter at the
outset of the war always runs a great risk of being conquered by it.
"Democracy in America" must be credited with a very important teaching
influence on the political thought of mankind. This influence is more
than the impulse of stimulating speculation. It is a practical force
fruitful of solid political result. The present writer remembers hearing
Tocqueville taught to eager audiences of French students in the College
de France, at Paris, by M. Laboulaye, a popular professor in that
national institution. This was while in France the second empire
remained as yet apparently firm on its base, and while in this country
the great duel between section and section remained as yet apparently
doubtful. The applause with which the lecturer's praise of free
institutions was greeted signified much. It signified that the leaven of
Tocqueville's ideas was working in those youthful hearts. (M.
Laboulaye's lectures, which possessed original merit of their own, were
finally published in a volume.) Present republican France owes, in no
despicable degree, its existence to the fact that Tocqueville had
visited, and reported, and interpreted the United States to his
countrymen. Perhaps, also, it is true that the American Union is
standing to-day partly because the popular sentiment created by
Tocqueville in France favorable to American democracy was too strong,
too vivid, and too universal, for the emperor safely to disregard it, in
imperial acts, long threatened, hostile to the integrity of the
republic. If Tocqueville's guess is right, if democratic institutions
are indeed ultimately to prevail throughout the world, certainly it
cannot be denied that the prophet himself will have done his part toward
fulfilling his prophecy.
We feel that we shall have done scant justice to the high and serious
spirit who forms the subject of these concluding pages of the present
chapter, if we do not go from the one work itself, by example out of
which we have shown him, to expressions of his in his correspondence
that may let us a little deeper into the personal secret of the man
himself. Tocqueville, although, as we have intimated, a believer in the
democratic destiny of the world, was not such in virtue of being a
democrat by preference himself. On the contrary, his own aristocratic
blood favoring it perhaps, his individual choice would apparently have
gone, not for, but against, democracy. This seems to be indicated in
what follows, written to a friend concerning the purpose of his work,
"Democracy in America":
I wished to show what in our days a democratic people really was, and,
by a rigorously accurate picture, to produce a double effect on the
men of my day. To those who have fancied an ideal democracy, as a
brilliant and easily realized dream, I undertook to show that they had
clothed the picture in false colors; that the democratic government
which they desired, though it may procure real benefits to the people
who can bear it, has none of the elevated features with which their
imaginations would endow it; and moreover, that such a government can
only maintain itself under certain conditions of faith, enlightenment,
and private morality, which we have not yet reached, and which we must
labor to attain before grasping their political results.
To men for whom the word "democracy" is the synonym of overthrow,
spoliation, anarchy, and murder, I have endeavored to prove that it
was possible for democracy to govern society, and yet to respect
property, to recognize rights, to spare liberty, to honor religion;
that if democratic government is less fitted than other forms to
develop some of the finest faculties of the human soul, it has yet its
noble and its lovely features; and that perhaps, after all, it may be
the will of God to distribute a moderate degree of happiness to the
mass of men, and not to concentrate great felicity and great
perfection on a few. I have tried, moreover, to demonstrate that,
whatever might be their opinion upon these points, the time for
discussing them was past; that the world marched onward day by day
towards a condition of social equality, and dragged them and every one
along with it; that their only choice now lay between evils henceforth
inevitable; that the practical question of this day was not whether
you would have an aristocracy or a democracy, but whether you would
have a democratic society, without poetry and without grandeur, but
with morality and order; or a democratic society disorganized and
depraved, delivered over to a furious frenzy, or else bent beneath a
yoke heavier than any that have weighed upon mankind since the fall of
the Roman Empire.
The "Commune" in France, "Nihilism" in Russia, "Socialism" in Germany,
"Nationalism" in the United States, are all of them, each in its own
different way, remarkable historical commentaries on the prophetic
political forecast contained in the foregoing letter.
Here is ripe practical wisdom occurring in a letter written by
Tocqueville about two years before his death:
You know that my most settled principle is, that there is no period of
a man's life at which he is entitled to _rest_; and that effort out of
one's self, and still more above one's self, is as necessary in age as
in youth--nay, even more necessary. Man in this world is like a
traveler who is always walking towards a colder region, and who is
therefore obliged to be more active as he goes farther north. The
great malady of the soul is _cold_. And in order to counteract and
combat this formidable illness, he must keep up the activity of his
mind not only by work, but by contact with his fellow-men and with the
world. Retirement from the great conflicts of the world is desirable
no doubt for those whose strength is on the decline; but absolute
retirement, away from the stir of life, is not desirable for any man,
nor at any age.
His experience as practical politician made him write thus:
It is a sad side of humanity that politics uncovers. We may say,
without making any exception, that nothing there is either thoroughly
pure or thoroughly disinterested; nothing really generous, nothing
hearty or spontaneous. There is no _youth_, even among the youngest;
and something cold, selfish, and premeditated may be detected even in
the most apparently passionate proceedings.
There was so much wholesome reaction in Tocqueville's moral nature that,
notwithstanding the disparaging views, on his part, thus revealed of
human worth, he never became cynical. He could even write as follows to
a friend of his who, he thought, went too far in decrying mankind:
You make humanity out worse than it is. I have seen many countries,
studied many men, mingled in many public transactions, and the result
of my observation is not what you suppose. Men in general are neither
very good nor very bad; they are simply _mediocre_. I have never
closely examined even the best without discovering faults and
frailties invisible at first. I have always in the end found among the
worst certain elements and _holding-points_ of honesty. There are two
men in every man: it is childish to see only one; it is sad and unjust
to look only at the other.... Man, with all his vices, his weaknesses,
and his virtues, this strange mixture of good and bad, of low and
lofty, of sincere and depraved, is, after all, the object most
deserving of study, interest, pity, affection, and admiration to be
found upon this earth; and since we have no angels, we cannot attach
ourselves to anything greater or worthier than our fellow-creatures.
On the whole, Alexis de Tocqueville's own practice in life showed that
he wrote not only with sincerity, but with earnestness, when he wrote
those words. It was not of such Frenchmen as was Tocqueville that the
author of that heavy sentence on France could have been thinking--that
the French character was made up without conscience. We, for our part,
cannot but maintain that Tocqueville is as much more solid as he may be
less brilliant than his predecessor and fellow, Montesquieu. They were
both too theoretical; that is, too exclusively French as distinguished,
for instance, from English, in political philosophy. They began to be
deductive, when to be inductive yet longer would have been their wiser
part. In a word--like Guizot, too, the author of the "History of
Civilization," and the minister of Citizen-King Louis Philippe--both
Montesquieu and Tocqueville failed of escaping what the French would
call the defect of their quality.
XV.
VOLTAIRE.
1694-1778.
By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of
his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal
fame, Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow,
among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of
the world. He was not a great man, he produced no great single work, but
he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any
species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he
did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he succeeded splendidly
in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he failed abjectly in
none. There is not a great thought, and there is not a flat expression,
in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and multifarious works. Read him
wherever you will, in the ninety-seven volumes (equivalent, probably in
the aggregate, to two hundred volumes like the present) which, in one
leading edition, collect his productions, you may often find him
superficial, you may often find him untrustworthy, you will certainly
often find him flippant, but not less certainly you will never find him
obscure, and you will never find him dull. The clearness, the vivacity
of this man's mind were something almost preternatural. So, too, were
his readiness, his versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of
himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him
from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were
required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic
poem--to be classed with the "Iliad" and the "AEneid "--the "Henriade"
was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from
flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he
lightly undertook the task of extinguishing a venerable form of
Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably repeated, of his
tormenting pen.
A very large part of the volume of Voltaire's production consists of
letters, written by him to correspondents perhaps more numerous, and
more various in rank, from kings on the throne down to scribblers in the
garret, than ever, in any other case, exchanged such communications with
a literary man. Another considerable proportion of his work in
literature took the form of pamphlets, either anonymously or
pseudonymously published, in which this master-spirit of intellectual
disturbance and ferment found it convenient, or advantageous, or safe,
to promulge and propagate his ideas. A shower of such publications was
incessantly escaping from Voltaire's pen. More formal and regular, more
confessedly ambitious, literary essays of his, were poems in every
kind--heroic, mock-heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic,
satiric--historical and biographical monographs, and tales or novels of
a peculiar class.
Voltaire's poetry does not count for very much now. Still, its first
success was so great that it will always remain an important topic in
literary history. Besides this, it really is, in some of its kinds,
remarkable work. Voltaire's epic verse is almost an exception, needful
to be made, from our assertion that this author is nowhere dull. "The
Henriade" comes dangerously near that mark. It is a tasteless
reproduction of Lucan's faults, with little reproduction of Lucan's
virtues. Voltaire's comedies are bright and witty, but they are not
laughter-provoking; and they do not possess the elemental and creative
character of Shakespeare's or Moliere's work. His tragedies are better;
but they do not avoid that cast of mechanical which seems necessarily to
belong to poetry produced by talent, however consummate, unaccompanied
with genius. Voltaire's histories are luminous and readable narratives,
but they cannot claim the merit either of critical accuracy or of
philosophic breadth and insight. His letters would have to be read in
considerable volume in order to furnish a full satisfactory idea of the
author. His tales, finally, afford the most available, and, on the
whole, likewise the best means of arriving shortly and easily at a
knowledge of Voltaire.
But, before coming to these, we owe it to our readers, and perhaps to
ourselves, to justify with example what, a little way back, we said of
Voltaire as epic poet.
Voltaire was profoundly influenced by his personal observations of what
England was, alike in her literary, her political, and her theological
aspects. Voltairism may, in fact, be pronounced a transplantation from
English soil. It was English deism "mixed with cunning sparks
of"--French wit. A very short passage from the "Henriade" will suffice
the double purpose of showing what in quality of style that poem of
Voltaire's is, and of suggesting its author's sense of debt to the
England which, for its freedom and its free-thinking, he so much
admired. The reader will not fail to note the skill with which Voltaire
manages in praising another country to give a very broad hint to his
own. The old-fashioned formal heroic couplet, with rhyme, in which the
following passage appears translated, is not inapposite to the
artificial cast and style of the original. Various passions, such as
"Fear," are not only personified in the "Henriade," but made to play the
part of veritable characters in the action of the poem. Supernatural
interferences occur. History is boldly fabricated or falsified at the
pleasure of the poet. Of this audacious freedom the passage from which
we take our extract presents an instance. Voltaire sends his hero on a
mythical mission to England to solicit help from Queen Elizabeth. He
here meets every reader's familiar old friend, "a venerable hermit," who
instructs him in English history and manners. Voltaire wrote prefaces
and notes to vindicate his epic practices. He went to Virgil for
precedents. Lucan he censured for not making free enough with his
history. "Eliza" is, of course, Queen Elizabeth, and "Bourbon," is the
hero of the epic, Henry IV. of France, from whose name, it need not be
said, comes the title, "Henriade." We quote from the first canto of the
poem:
A virgin queen the regal scepter sway'd,
And fate itself her sovereign power obeyed.
The wise Eliza, whose directing hand
Had the great scale of Europe at command;
And ruled a people that alike disdain
Or freedom's ease, or slavery's iron chain.
Of every loss her reign oblivion bred;
There, flocks unnumbered graze each flowery mead.
Britannia's vessels rule the azure seas,
Corn fills her plains, and fruitage loads her trees.
From pole to pole her gallant navies sweep
The waters of the tributary deep.
On Thames's banks each flower of genius thrives,
There sports the Muse, and Mars his thunder gives.
Three different powers at Westminster appear,
And all admire the ties which join them there.
Whom interest parts the laws together bring,
The people's deputies, the peers and king.
One whole they form, whose terror wide extends
To neighboring nations, and their rights defends.
Thrice happy times, when grateful subjects show
That loyal, warm affection which is due!
But happier still, when freedom's blessings spring
From the wise conduct of a prudent king!
O when, cried Bourbon, ravished at the sight,
In France shall peace and glory thus unite?
A poem flaunting on its front invidious praise like the foregoing of a
foreign government so different from the government of France, could not
be very acceptable to the ruling classes of his time in the author's own
country. But in England, during the poet's two years' stay in that
island, a revised edition of the "Henriade" was issued under auspices
the most august and imposing. Queen Caroline headed the list of
subscribers, and such was the brilliancy of the patronage extended to
the poem that Voltaire, as is with probability said, netted forty
thousand dollars from his English edition--a sum of money equivalent to,
say, one hundred thousand dollars, present value. This early success
laid the foundation of a fortune for Voltaire, which the skill, the
prudence, the servility, the greed, and the unscrupulousness of the
owner subsequently built into proportions that were nothing less than
princely. Voltaire's annual income at his death was about a hundred
thousand dollars. It seems incredible that a man so rich, and, in some
ways, it must be acknowledged, so generous, should have been at the same
time so mean, so sordid, so literally perjured in sordidness, as
Voltaire is demonstrated, and admitted even by his farthest-going
admirers, for instance, Mr. John Morley, to have been.
Among Voltaire's tales doubtless the one most eligible for use, to serve
our present purpose, is his "Candide." This is a nondescript piece of
fiction, the design of which is, by means of a narrative of travel and
adventure, constructed without much regard to the probability of
particular incidents, to set forth, in the characteristic mocking vein
of Voltaire, the vanity and misery of mankind. The author's invention is
often whimsical enough; but it is constantly so ready, so reckless, and
so abundant, that the reader never tires as he is hurried ceaselessly
forward from change to change of scene and circumstance. The play of
wit is incessant. The style is limpidity itself. Your sympathies are
never painfully engaged, even in recitals of experience that ought to be
the most heart-rending. There is never a touch of noble moral sentiment
to relieve the monotony of mockery that lightly laughs at you and
tantalizes you, page after page, from the beginning to the end of the
book. The banter is not good-natured; though, on the other hand, it
cannot justly be pronounced ill-natured; and it is, in final effect upon
the reader's mind, bewildering and depressing in the extreme. Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity; such is the comfortless doctrine of the book.
The apples are the apples of Sodom, everywhere in the world. There is no
virtue anywhere, no good, no happiness. Life is a cheat, the love of
life is a cruelty, and beyond life there is nothing. At least, there is
no glimpse given of any compensating future reserved for men, a future
to redress the balance of good and ill experienced here and now. Faith
and hope, those two eyes of the soul, are smilingly quenched in their
sockets, and you are left blind, in a whirling world of darkness, with a
whirling world of darkness before you.
Such is "Candide." We select a single passage for specimen. The passage
we select is more nearly free than almost any other passage as long, in
this extraordinary romance, would probably be found, from impure
implications. It is, besides, more nearly serious in apparent motive
than is the general tenor of the production. Here, however, as
elsewhere, the writer keeps carefully down his mocking mask. At least,
you are left tantalizingly uncertain all the time how much the grin you
face is the grin of the man, and how much the grin of a visor that he
wears.
Candide, the hero, is a young fellow of ingenuous character brought
successively under the lead of several different persons wise in the
ways of the world, who act toward him, each in his turn, the part of
"guide, philosopher, and friend." Candide, with such a mentor bearing
the name Martin, has now arrived at Venice. Candide speaks: