The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase
of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms. The
bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its
value, its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the
kings. Their capital, being invested in trade, was necessarily subject
to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so
forth, that its holders, however individually brave, were timid as a
class. They could never hold out on strike against the governments, and
had to submit to the powers that were, whatever they were, under penalty
of ruin.
But on the Continent, and especially in France and Germany, unable to
strengthen itself by intermarriage with the noblesse, they retained that
timidity which is the fruit of the insecurity of trade; and had to submit
to a more and more centralised despotism, and grow up as they could, in
the face of exasperating hindrances to wealth, to education, to the
possession, in many parts of France, of large landed estates; leaving the
noblesse to decay in isolated uselessness and weakness, and in many cases
debt and poverty.
The system--or rather anarchy--according to which France was governed
during this transitional period, may be read in that work of M. de
Tocqueville's which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all
classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent translation. Every student of
history is, of course, well acquainted with that book. But as there is
reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common,
both in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know
it, or have not understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from
it somewhat largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de
Tocqueville's book is founded on researches into the French Archives,
which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him; and contains
innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am
aware) in no other accessible work.
The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, in 1789, the greatest
effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their
destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had
heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter. But he
had long thought that they had succeeded in this singular attempt much
less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first supposed
themselves. He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from
the former state of society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even
the opinions, by means of which they had effected the destruction of that
state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its
remains to rebuild the edifice of modern society. This is his thesis,
and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary
evidence. Not only does he find habits which we suppose--or supposed
till lately--to have died with the eighteenth century, still living and
working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions
which we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth
century, he shows to have been born in the eighteenth. France, he
considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Regime made her.
He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination
to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of liberty, had been long
growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my first lecture.
He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised
administration; the expectation that the government should do everything
for the people, and nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local
liberties, local peculiarities; the helplessness of the towns and the
parishes: and all which issued in making Paris France, and subjecting the
whole of a vast country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in
the capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien
Regime which preceded it; and that Robespierre and his "Comite de Salut
Public," and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in
bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down,
according to their wicked will, were only handling, somewhat more
roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations by
the Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their provincial
intendants.
"Do you know," said Law to the Marquis d'Argenson, "that this kingdom of
France is governed by thirty intendants? You have neither parliament,
nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters of request,
despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their
fertility or their sterility, entirely depend."
To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for
themselves--this was the Ancien Regime. To be more wise and more loving
than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for the sons of
men, but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter need, and after a
most Spartan mode of education; who allows them to burn their hands as
often as they are foolish enough to put them into the fire; and to be
filled with the fruits of their own folly, even though the folly be one
of necessary ignorance; treating them with that seeming neglect which is
after all the most provident care, because by it alone can men be trained
to experience, self-help, science, true humanity; and so become not
tolerably harmless dolls, but men and women worthy of the name; with
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
The perfect spirit, nobly planned
To cheer, to counsel, and command.
Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the
voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum, and the education, therefore, which
the man of science will accept and carry out. But the men of the Ancien
Regime--in as far as it was a Regime at all--tried to be wiser than the
Almighty. Why not? They were not the first, nor will be the last, by
many who have made the same attempt. So this Council of State settled
arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and
everything. Its members meddled, with their whole hearts and minds. They
tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent
out plans for every public work. A town could not establish an octroi,
levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or administer their property,
without an order in council. The Government ordered public rejoicings,
saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses--in one case
mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard
for absenting himself from a Te Deum. All self-government was gone. A
country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but "an assemblage of cabins,
and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwelt in." Without an
order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or
repair the parsonage gable. If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw
some of the chief persons into prison, and made the parish pay the
expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of
France. Everywhere was meddling. There were reports on
statistics--circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless--as statistics are
too often wont to be. Sometimes, when the people were starving, the
Government sent down charitable donations to certain parishes, on
condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part. When
the sum offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote on the
margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, "Good--express
satisfaction." If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, "Good--express
satisfaction and sensibility." There is nothing new under the sun. In
1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start
one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the _Gazette
de France_. So the public newsmongers were of course to be the
provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the
sub-delegates.
But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little
news, or very little which it was politic to publish. One reports that a
smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another
that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that
a dreadful storm has happened, but--has done no mischief; a fourth--living
in some specially favoured Utopia--declares that in spite of all his
efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will
subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons
to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal
seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his
minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing,
like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.
Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped
there. But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more
causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular
tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council. Before the
intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.
Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville
asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a
local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the
galleys, and even to death. Under such a system, under which an
intendant must have felt it his interest to pretend at all risks, that
all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous
exposure of himself and his chiefs--one can understand easily enough that
scene which Mr. Carlyle has dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the
canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:
"A dumb generation--their voice only an inarticulate cry. Spokesman, in
the king's council, in the world's forum, they have none that finds
credence. At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their
hoes, and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and
thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles. Turgot
is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is
dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of
broad. And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do
here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces,
squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing
their petition of grievances. The chateau-gates must be shut; but the
king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the
king's face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked
at. In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high,
and the rest driven back to their dens for a time."
Of course. What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling
powers was possible than this? To persist in being needy and wretched,
when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them prosperous
and happy? An insult only to be avenged in blood. Remark meanwhile,
that this centralised bureaucracy was a failure; that after all the
trouble taken to govern these masses, they were not governed, in the
sense of being made better, and not worse. The truth is, that no
centralised bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented
on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything
else: because it is founded on an error; because it regards and treats
men as that which they are not, as things; and not as that which they
are, as persons. If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with a
hundred hands, helping the weak throughout the length and breadth of the
empire, the system might be at least tolerable. But what if the
Government were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a Hydra with a
hundred heads and mouths, each far more intent on helping itself than on
helping the people? What if sub-delegates and other officials, holding
office at the will of the intendant, had to live, and even provide
against a rainy day? What if intendants, holding office at the will of
the Comptroller-General, had to do more than live, and found it prudent
to realise as large a fortune as possible, not only against disgrace, but
against success, and the dignity fit for a new member of the Noblesse de
la Robe? Would not the system, then, soon become intolerable? Would
there not be evil times for the masses, till they became something more
than masses?
It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human
beings in a nation. He who uses it speaks of them not as human beings,
but as things; and as things not bound together in one living body, but
lying in a fortuitous heap. A swarm of ants is not a mass. It has a
polity and a unity. Not the ants but the fir-needles and sticks, of
which the ants have piled their nest, are a mass.
The term, I believe, was invented during the Ancien Regime. Whether it
was or not, it expresses very accurately the life of the many in those
days. No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of the masses
of the United States; for there every man is, or is presumed to be, a
personage; with his own independence, his own activities, his own rights
and duties. No one, I believe, would have talked of the masses in the
old feudal times; for then each individual was someone's man, bound to
his master by ties of mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base,
but still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and dividing him
from his class.
Dividing, I say. The poor of the Middle Age had little sense of a common
humanity. Those who owned allegiance to the lord in the next valley were
not their brothers; and at their own lord's bidding, they buckled on
sword and slew the next lord's men, with joyful heart and good
conscience. Only now and then misery compressed them into masses; and
they ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog. Some wholesale
wrong made them aware that they were brothers, at least in the power of
starving; and they joined in the cry which was heard, I believe, in
Mecklenburg as late as 1790: "Den Edelman wille wi dodschlagen." Then,
in Wat Tyler's insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they
proved themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking for awhile,
by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimless--soon to be
dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact
aristocracy. Yet not always dispersed, if they could find a leader; as
the Polish nobles discovered to their cost in the middle of the
seventeenth century. Then Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not
without his sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski and the
Poles, found that the neighbouring noble's steward had taken a fancy to
his windmill and his farm upon the Dnieper. He was thrown into prison on
a frivolous charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his wife
dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest
son scourged for protesting against the wrong. And he returned, at the
head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free
the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia,
Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the altars of God, and slay his
servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble
ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his
Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after battle, to
inaugurate an era of misery and anarchy from which Poland never
recovered.
Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation at
least, that they were not many things, but one thing; a class, capable of
brotherhood and unity, though, alas! only of such as belongs to a pack of
wolves. But such outbursts as this were rare exceptions. In general,
feudalism kept the people divided, and therefore helpless. And as
feudalism died out, and with it the personal self-respect and loyalty
which were engendered by the old relations of master and servant, the
division still remained; and the people, in France especially, became
merely masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things intent on
the necessaries of daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a
cheese.
Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a
little ambition, a little scholarship, or a little money, endeavouring to
become members of the middle class by obtaining a Government appointment.
"A man," says M. de Tocqueville, "endowed with some education and small
means, thought it not decorous to die without having been a Government
officer." "Every man, according to his condition," says a contemporary
writer, "wants to be something by command of the king."
It was not merely the "natural vanity" of which M. de Tocqueville accuses
his countrymen, which stirred up in them this eagerness after place; for
we see the same eagerness in other nations of the Continent, who cannot
be accused (as wholes) of that weakness. The fact is, a Government
place, or a Government decoration, cross, ribbon, or what not, is, in a
country where self-government is unknown or dead, the only method, save
literary fame, which is left to men in order to assert themselves either
to themselves or their fellow-men.
A British or American shopkeeper or farmer asks nothing of his
Government. He can, if he chooses, be elected to some local office
(generally unsalaried) by the votes of his fellow-citizens. But that is
his right, and adds nothing to his respectability. The test of that
latter, in a country where all honest callings are equally honourable, is
the amount of money he can make; and a very sound practical test that is,
in a country where intellect and capital are free. Beyond that, he is
what he is, and wishes to be no more, save what he can make himself. He
has his rights, guaranteed by law and public opinion; and as long as he
stands within them, and (as he well phrases it) behaves like a gentleman,
he considers himself as good as any man; and so he is. But under the
bureaucratic Regime of the Continent, if a man had not "something by
command of the king," he was nothing; and something he naturally wished
to be, even by means of a Government which he disliked and despised. So
in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale,
anyone, it seems, who had saved a little money, found it most profitable
to invest it in a beadledom of some kind--to the great detriment of the
country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own
clear gain, for he thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens,
and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes. The petty
German princes, it seems, followed the example of France, and sold their
little beadledoms likewise; but even where offices were not sold, they
must be obtained by any and every means, by everyone who desired not to
be as other men were, and to become Notables, as they were called in
France; so he migrated from the country into the nearest town, and became
a member of some small body-guild, town council, or what not, bodies
which were infinite in number. In one small town M. de Tocqueville
discovers thirty-six such bodies, "separated from each other by
diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which was still a mark of
honour." Quarrelling perpetually with each other for precedence,
despising and oppressing the very _menu peuple_ from whom they had for
the most part sprung, these innumerable small bodies, instead of uniting
their class, only served to split it up more and more; and when the
Revolution broke them up, once and for all, with all other privileges
whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and each man stood alone, proud of
his "individuality"--his complete social isolation; till he discovered
that, in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also of
fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the
bundle of sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire,
to a tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was freedom itself.
For, in France at least, the Ancien Regime was no tyranny. The middle
and upper classes had individual liberty--it may be, only too much; the
liberty of disobeying a Government which they did not respect. "However
submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of
the king, one sort of obedience was altogether unknown to them. They
knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate and contested power--a
power but little honoured, frequently despised, but willingly endured
because it may be serviceable, or because it may hurt. To that degrading
form of servitude they were ever strangers. The king inspired them with
feelings . . . which have become incomprehensible to this generation . . .They loved him with the affection due to a father; they revered him
with the respect due to God. In submitting to the most arbitrary of his
commands, they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty; and thus they
frequently preserved great freedom of mind, even in the most complete
dependence. This liberty, irregular, intermittent," says M. de
Tocqueville, "helped to form those vigorous characters, those proud and
daring spirits, which were to make the French Revolution at once the
object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations."
This liberty--too much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued for
awhile--seems to have asserted itself in continual petty resistance to
officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were more
than a little afraid of the very men out of whose ranks they had sprung.
The French Government--one may say, every Government on the Continent in
those days--had the special weakness of all bureaucracies; namely, that
want of moral force which compels them to fall back at last on physical
force, and transforms the ruler into a bully, and the soldier into a
policeman and a gaoler. A Government of parvenus, uncertain of its own
position, will be continually trying to assert itself to itself, by
vexatious intermeddling and intruding pretensions; and then, when it
meets with the resistance of free and rational spirits, will either
recoil in awkward cowardice, or fly into a passion, and appeal to the
halter and the sword. Such a Government can never take itself for
granted, because it knows that it is not taken for granted by the people.
It never can possess the quiet assurance, the courteous dignity, without
swagger, yet without hesitation, which belongs to hereditary legislators;
by which term is to be understood, not merely kings, not merely noblemen,
but every citizen of a free nation, however democratic, who has received
from his forefathers the right, the duty, and the example of
self-government.
Such was the political and social state of the Ancien Regime, not only in
France, but if we are to trust (as we must trust) M. de Tocqueville, in
almost every nation in Europe, except Britain.
And as for its moral state. We must look for that--if we have need,
which happily all have not--in its lighter literature.
I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French memoirs--of which those
of Madame de Sevigne are on the whole, the most painful (as witness her
comments on the Marquise de Brinvilliers's execution), because written by
a woman better and more human than ordinary. Nor with "Menagiana," or
other 'ana's--as vain and artificial as they are often foul; nor with
novels and poems, long since deservedly forgotten. On the first perusal
of this lighter literature, you will be charmed with the ease, grace,
lightness with which everything is said. On the second, you will be
somewhat cured of your admiration, as you perceive how little there is to
say. The head proves to be nothing but a cunning mask, with no brains
inside. Especially is this true of a book, which I must beg those who
have read it already, to recollect. To read it I recommend no human
being. We may consider it, as it was considered in its time, the typical
novel of the Ancien Regime. A picture of Spanish society, written by a
Frenchman, it was held to be--and doubtless with reason--a picture of the
whole European world. Its French editor (of 1836) calls it a _grande
epopee_; "one of the most prodigious efforts of intelligence, exhausting
all forms of humanity"--in fact, a second Shakespeare, according to the
lights of the year 1715. I mean, of course, "Gil Blas." So picturesque
is the book, that it has furnished inexhaustible motifs to the
draughtsman. So excellent is its workmanship, that the enthusiastic
editor of 1836 tells us--and doubtless he knows best--that it is the
classic model of the French tongue; and that, as Le Sage "had embraced
all that belonged to man in his composition, he dared to prescribe to
himself to embrace the whole French language in his work." It has been
the parent of a whole school of literature--the Bible of tens of
thousands, with admiring commentators in plenty; on whose souls may God
have mercy!
And no wonder. The book has a solid value, and will always have, not
merely from its perfect art (according to its own measure and intention),
but from its perfect truthfulness. It is the Ancien Regime itself. It
set forth to the men thereof, themselves, without veil or cowardly
reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man loves himself, the
Ancien Regime loved "Gil Blas," and said, "The problem of humanity is
solved at last." But, ye long-suffering powers of heaven, what a
solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral,
base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world
of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is
its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance
of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the
actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of
course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman
mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find no
more interest than in a pathological museum.
That last, indeed, "Gil Blas" is; a collection of diseased specimens. No
man or woman in the book, lay or clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I
can remember, do their duty in any wise, even if they recollect that they
have any duty to do. Greed, chicane, hypocrisy, uselessness are the
ruling laws of human society. A new book of Ecclesiastes, crying,
"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity;" the "conclusion of the whole matter"
being left out, and the new Ecclesiastes rendered thereby diabolic,
instead of like that old one, divine. For, instead of "Fear God and keep
his commandments, for that is the whole duty of main," Le Sage sends
forth the new conclusion, "Take care of thyself, and feed on thy
neighbours, for that is the whole duty of man." And very faithfully was
his advice (easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a century
after "Gil Blas" appeared.
About the same time there appeared, by a remarkable coincidence, another
work, like it the child of the Ancien Regime, and yet as opposite to it
as light to darkness. If Le Sage drew men as they were, Fenelon tried at
least to draw them as they might have been and still might be, were they
governed by sages and by saints, according to the laws of God.
"Telemaque" is an ideal--imperfect, doubtless, as all ideals must be in a
world in which God's ways and thoughts are for ever higher than man's;
but an ideal nevertheless. If its construction is less complete than
that of "Gil Blas," it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because
the form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter. If its
political economy be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind
of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order
the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him. M. de
Lamartine, in his brilliant little life of Fenelon, does not hesitate to
trace to the influence of "Telemaque," the Utopias which produced the
revolutions of 1793 and 1848. "The saintly poet was," he says, "without
knowing it, the first Radical and the first communist of his century."
But it is something to have preached to princes doctrines till then
unknown, or at least forgotten for many a generation--free trade, peace,
international arbitration, and the "carriere ouverte aux talents" for all
ranks. It is something to have warned his generation of the dangerous
overgrowth of the metropolis; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew might
have done, that the despotism which he saw around him would end in a
violent revolution. It is something to have combined the highest
Christian morality with a hearty appreciation of old Greek life; of its
reverence for bodily health and prowess; its joyous and simple country
society; its sacrificial feasts, dances, games; its respect for the gods;
its belief that they helped, guided, inspired the sons of men. It is
something to have himself believed in God; in a living God, who, both in
this life and in all lives to come, rewarded the good and punished the
evil by inevitable laws. It is something to have warned a young prince,
in an age of doctrinal bigotry and practical atheism, that a living God
still existed, and that his laws were still in force; to have shown him
Tartarus crowded with the souls of wicked monarchs, while a few of kingly
race rested in Elysium, and among them old pagans--Inachus, Cecrops,
Erichthon, Triptolemus, and Sesostris--rewarded for ever for having done
their duty, each according to his light, to the flocks which the gods had
committed to their care. It is something to have spoken to a prince, in
such an age, without servility, and without etiquette, of the frailties
and the dangers which beset arbitrary rulers; to have told him that
royalty, "when assumed to content oneself, is a monstrous tyranny; when
assumed to fulfil its duties, and to conduct an innumerable people as a
father conducts his children, a crushing slavery, which demands an heroic
courage and patience."
Let us honour the courtier who dared speak such truths; and still more
the saintly celibate who had sufficient catholicity of mind to envelop
them in old Grecian dress, and, without playing false for a moment to his
own Christianity, seek in the writings of heathen sages a wider and a
healthier view of humanity than was afforded by an ascetic creed.
No wonder that the appearance of "Telemaque," published in Holland
without the permission of Fenelon, delighted throughout Europe that
public which is always delighted with new truths, as long as it is not
required to practise them. To read "Telemaque" was the right and the
enjoyment of everyone. To obey it, the duty only of princes. No wonder
that, on the other hand, this "Vengeance de peuples, lecon des rois," as
M. de Lamartine calls it, was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis
XIV., and completed the disgrace of one who had dared to teach the future
king of France that he must show himself, in all things, the opposite of
his grandfather. No wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court looked
on its portraits of wicked ministers and courtiers as caricatures of
themselves; portraits too, which, "composed thus in the palace of
Versailles, under the auspices of that confidence which the king had
placed in the preceptor of his heir, seemed a domestic treason." No
wonder, also, if the foolish and envious world outside was of the same
opinion; and after enjoying for awhile this exposure of the great ones of
the earth, left "Telemaque" as an Utopia with which private folks had no
concern; and betook themselves to the easier and more practical model of
"Gil Blas."
But there are solid defects in "Telemaque"--indicating corresponding
defects in the author's mind--which would have, in any case, prevented
its doing the good work which Fenelon desired; defects which are natural,
as it seems to me, to his position as a Roman Catholic priest, however
saintly and pure, however humane and liberal. The king, with him, is to
be always the father of his people; which is tantamount to saying, that
the people are to be always children, and in a condition of tutelage;
voluntary, if possible: if not, of tutelage still. Of self-government,
and education of human beings into free manhood by the exercise of self-
government, free will, free thought--of this Fenelon had surely not a
glimpse. A generation or two passed by, and then the peoples of Europe
began to suspect that they were no longer children, but come to manhood;
and determined (after the example of Britain and America) to assume the
rights and duties of manhood, at whatever risk of excesses or mistakes:
and then "Telemaque" was relegated--half unjustly--as the slavish and
childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, where it still
remains.
But there is a defect in "Telemaque" which is perhaps deeper still. No
woman in it exercises influence over man, except for evil. 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, I must believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that such men
as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.
In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain
of its leaders was part of the retribution itself. For the noblesse
existed surely to make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very
opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had
made wicked. For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs,
there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the
springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom
of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt,
and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the
Revolution.
It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those
horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters
and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to
signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by
_artistes_--producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians,
and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke-maker with two fiery
torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the
saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a
patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the
wind out of him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the
barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The distracted peruke-maker
may have had his wrongs--perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the
fool, in "Le Roi s'amuse"--and his own sound reasons for blowing down the
Bastile, and the system which kept it up.
For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled art--from the periwig-
maker to the play-actor--who like them had seen the frivolity, the
baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered,
whom they despised while they adored! Figaro himself may have looked up
to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long as the law enabled
the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro
may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were
abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public.
Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like
Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not?
Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men
and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it
may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than
had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet: and no man was a
hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own
helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman. The
nobleman had played the mountebank: why should not the mountebank, for
once, play the nobleman? The nobleman's God had been his five senses,
with (to use Mr. Carlyle's phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should
not the mountebank worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see
what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?
But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect,
there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth
sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the
respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to
which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse,
would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.
Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I mean:
what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than two, in
France, in Italy, and--I am sorry to have to say it--Germany likewise.
All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil. I only
wonder that they have so much overlooked that item in the causes of the
Revolution. It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in the
sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the
political and economic wrongs put together. They might have issued in a
change of dynasty or of laws. That, issued in the blood of the
offenders. Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.'s Petit Trianon, or
other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents nursing
shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the ill-gotten
price of their daughter's honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some
unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were
transformed--and who will blame him?--into righteous indignation, and a
very sword of God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if
education helped him to see, that the maiden's acquiescence, her pride in
her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most
potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things
in which such a fate was thought an honour and a gain, and not a disgrace
and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had
learnt to think it more noble to become--that which they became--than the
wives of honest men.
If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Regime, whether in
France or elsewhere, you will see that my facts are true. If you have
human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation
of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground
of madness--an hypothesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand
what madness is) is no explanation at all.
An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon
worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien
Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own
landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with
the prince's game; a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins;
and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its French
fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood
likewise, which the prince has partially paid for, by selling a few
hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees. The river, too,
is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was
blown up in the Seven Years' War; and there is but a single lazy barge
floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene
Highness; the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are
at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in
the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are
very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.
How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic
beauty of the scene destroyed;--to have steamers puffing up and down the
river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old
World, in exchange for the wealth of the New--or hurrying, it may be,
whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they
know for what. How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists,
and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure. How sad to see
the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to
the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a new crucifix by
the wayside. How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of
England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the
land they till has become their own, and not the prince's; while their
sons are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West. Very
unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety,
cleanliness and comfort. But they possess advantages unknown to the
Ancien Regime, which was, if nothing else, picturesque. Men could paint
amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and its places.
Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the notion of art which it
expresses, are the children of the Ancien Regime--of the era of decay.
The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of
admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the
fashion sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century; it lingered on
during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from
1815-25. It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and
progressive thought. An admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a
sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like
a medieval illumination. He has learnt to look on that which went by the
name of picturesque in his great-grandfather's time, as an old Greek or a
Middle Age monk would have done--as something squalid, ugly, a sign of
neglect, disease, death; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it
cannot be restored. At Carcassone, now, M. Viollet-le-Duc, under the
auspices of the Emperor of the French, is spending his vast learning, and
much money, simply in abolishing the picturesque; in restoring stone for
stone, each member of that wonderful museum of Middle Age architecture:
Roman, Visigothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English, later French, all is
being reproduced exactly as it must have existed centuries since. No
doubt that is not the highest function of art: but it is a preparation
for the highest, a step toward some future creative school. As the early
Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the
beauty and meaning of old Greek and Roman art; so must the artists of our
days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They must learn
to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must
learn--indeed they have learnt--that decay is ugliness, and the imitation
of decay, a making money out of the public shame.
The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can discover, suddenly, during the
time of exhaustion and recklessness which followed the great struggles of
the sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of the earliest
professors of picturesque art, have never been since surpassed. For
indeed, they drew from life. The rags and the ruins, material, and alas!
spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay
waste. There was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe;
unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes; churches and
monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and
all the wretchedness which Callot has immortalised--for a warning to evil
rulers--in his Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all gone wrong: but
as for setting it right again--who could do that? And so men fell into a
sentimental regret for the past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the
foreshortening of time; while they wanted strength or faith to reproduce
it. At last they became so accustomed to the rags and ruins, that they
looked on them as the normal condition of humanity, as the normal field
for painters.
Only now and then, and especially toward the latter half of the
eighteenth century, when thought began to revive, and men dreamed of
putting the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of
an Arcadian ideal. Country life--the primaeval calling of men--how
graceful and pure it might be! How graceful--if not pure--it once had
been! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to
present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in
the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so
men took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting them on
canvas, and modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions
of what they had been once, and always ought to be. We smile now at
Sevres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in
them a certain pathos. They indicated a craving after something better
than boorishness; and the many men and women may have become the gentler
and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to themselves:
"Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not been for
devastations of the Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills
of emperors and kings."