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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
New York: The MacMillan Company
1905
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE.
PAGE
The Catholic reaction in France at the beginning of the century 257
De Maistre the best type of the movement 262
Birth, instruction, and early life 263
Invasion of Savoy, and De Maistre's flight 268
At Lausanne, Venice, and Cagliari 270
Sent in 1802 as minister to St. Petersburg 275
Hardships of his life there from 1802 to 1817 276
Circumstances of his return home, and his death 285
De Maistre's view of the eighteenth century 287
And of the French Revolution 291
The great problem forced upon the Catholics by it 293
De Maistre's way of dealing with the question of the divine
method of government 293
Nature of divine responsibility for evil 294
On Physical Science 298
Significance of such ideas in a mind like De Maistre's 299
Two theories tenable by social thinkers after the Revolution 303
De Maistre's appreciation of the beneficent work of the
Papacy in the past 307
Insists on the revival of the papal power as the essential
condition of a restored European order 313
Views Christianity from the statesman's point of view 314
His consequent hatred of the purely speculative temper of
the Greeks 316
His object was social or political 318
Hence his grounds for defending the doctrine of Infallibility 319
The analogy which lay at the bottom of his Ultramontane
doctrine 320
His hostility to the authority of General Councils 323
His view of the obligation of the canons on the Pope 325
His appeal to European statesmen 326
Comte and De Maistre 329
His strictures on Protestantism 331
Futility of his aspirations 335
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE.
Owing to causes which lie tolerably near the surface, the remarkable
Catholic reaction which took place in France at the beginning of the
present century, has never received in England the attention that it
deserves; not only for its striking interest as an episode in the
history of European thought, but also for its peculiarly forcible and
complete presentation of those ideas with which what is called the
modern spirit is supposed to be engaged in deadly war. For one thing,
the Protestantism of England strips a genuinely Catholic movement of
speculation of that pressing and practical importance which belongs to
it in countries where nearly all spiritual sentiment, that has received
any impression of religion at all, unavoidably runs in Catholic forms.
With us the theological reaction against the ideas of the eighteenth was
not and could not be other than Protestant. The defence and
reinstatement of Christianity in each case was conducted, as might have
been expected, with reference to the dominant creed and system of the
country. If Coleridge had been a Catholic, his works thus newly coloured
by an alien creed would have been read by a small sect only, instead of
exercising as they did a wide influence over the whole nation, reaching
people through those usual conduits of press and pulpit, by which the
products of philosophic thought are conveyed to unphilosophic minds. As
naturally in France, hostility to all those influences which were
believed to have brought about the Revolution, to sensationalism in
metaphysics, to atheism in what should have been theology, to the notion
of sovereignty of peoples in politics, inevitably sought a
rallying-point in a renewed allegiance to that prodigious spiritual
system which had fostered the germs of order and social feeling in
Europe, and whose name remains even now in the days of its ruin, as the
most permanent symbol and exemplar of stable organisation. Another
reason for English indifference to this movement is the rapidity with
which here, as elsewhere, dust gathers thickly round the memory of the
champions of lost causes. Some of the most excellent of human
characteristics--intensity of belief, for example, and a fervid anxiety
to realise aspirations--unite with some of the least excellent of them,
to make us too habitually forget that, as Mill has said, the best
adherents of a fallen standard in philosophy, in religion, in politics,
are usually next in all good qualities of understanding and sentiment to
the best of those who lead the van of the force that triumphs. Men are
not so anxious as they should be, considering the infinite diversity of
effort that goes to the advancement of mankind, to pick up the
fragments of truth and positive contribution, that so nothing be lost,
and as a consequence the writings of antagonists with whom we are
believed to have nothing in common, lie unexamined and disregarded.
In the case of the group of writers who, after a century of criticism,
ventured once more with an intrepid confidence--differing fundamentally
from the tone of preceding apologists in the Protestant camp, who were
nearly as critical as the men they refuted--to vindicate not the bare
outlines of Christian faith, but the entire scheme, in its extreme
manifestation, of the most ancient and severely maligned of all
Christian organisations, this apathy is very much to be regretted on
several grounds. In the first place, it is impossible to see
intelligently to the bottom of the momentous spirit of ultramontanism,
which is so deep a difficulty of continental Europe, and which, touching
us in Ireland, is perhaps already one of our own deepest difficulties,
without comprehending in its best shape the theory on which
ultramontanism rests. And this theory it is impossible to seize
thoroughly, without some knowledge of the ideas of its most efficient
defenders in its earlier years. Secondly, it is among these ideas that
we have to look for the representation in their most direct, logical,
uncompromising, and unmistakable form of those theological ways of
regarding life and prescribing right conduct, whose more or less rapidly
accelerated destruction is the first condition of the further elevation
of humanity, as well in power of understanding as in morals and
spirituality. In all contests of this kind there is the greatest and
most obvious advantage in being able to see your enemy full against the
light. Thirdly, in one or two respects, the Catholic reactionaries at
the beginning of the century insisted very strongly on principles of
society which the general thought of the century before had almost
entirely dropped out of sight, and which we who, in spite of many
differences, still sail down the same great current, and are propelled
by the same great tide, are accustomed almost equally either to leave in
the background of speculation, or else deliberately to deny and
suppress. Such we may account the importance which they attach to
organisation, and the value they set upon a common spiritual faith and
doctrine as a social basis. That the form which the recognition of these
principles is destined to assume will at all correspond to their hopes
and anticipations, is one of the most unlikely things possible. This,
however, need not detract from the worth for our purpose of their
exposition of the principles themselves. Again, the visible traces of
the impression made by the writings of this school on the influential
founder of the earliest Positivist system, are sufficiently deep and
important to make some knowledge of them of the highest historical
interest, both to those who accept and those who detest that system.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were three chief
schools of thought, the Sensational, the Catholic, and the Eclectic; or
as it may be put in other terms, the Materialist, the Theological, and
the Spiritualist. The first looked for the sources of knowledge, the
sanction of morals, the inspiring fountain and standard of æsthetics, to
the outside of men, to matter, and the impressions made by matter on the
corporeal senses. The second looked to divine revelation, authority and
the traditions of the Church. The third, steering a middle course,
looked partly within and partly without, relied partly on the senses,
partly on revelation and history, but still more on a certain internal
consciousness of a direct and immediate kind, which is the supreme and
reconciling judge of the reports alike of the senses, of history, of
divine revelation.[1] Each of these schools had many exponents. The
three most conspicuous champions of revived Catholicism were De Maistre,
De Bonald, and Chateaubriand. The last of them, the author of the _Génie
du Christianisme_, was effective in France because he is so deeply
sentimental, but he was too little trained in speculation, and too
little equipped with knowledge, to be fairly taken as the best
intellectual representative of their way of thinking. De Bonald was of
much heavier calibre. He really thought, while Chateaubriand only felt,
and the _Législation Primitive_ and the _Pensées sur Divers Sujets_
contain much that an enemy of the school will find it worth while to
read, in spite of an artificial, and, if a foreigner may judge, a
detestable style.
De Maistre was the greatest of the three, and deserves better than
either of the others to stand as the type of the school for many
reasons. His style is so marvellously lucid, that, notwithstanding the
mystical, or, as he said, the illuminist side of his mind, we can never
be in much doubt about his meaning, which is not by any means the case
with Bonald. To say nothing of his immensely superior natural capacity,
De Maistre's extensive reading in the literature of his foes was a
source of strength, which might indeed have been thought indispensable,
if only other persons had not attacked the same people as he did,
without knowing much or anything at all at first-hand about them. Then
he goes over the whole field of allied subjects, which we have a right
to expect to have handled by anybody with a systematic view of the
origin of knowledge, the meaning of ethics, the elements of social order
and progressiveness, the government and scheme of the universe. And
above all, his writings are penetrated with the air of reality and life,
which comes of actual participation in the affairs of that world with
which social philosophers have to deal. Lamennais had in many respects a
finer mind than De Maistre, but the conclusions in which he was finally
landed, no less than his liberal aims, prevent him from being an example
of the truly Catholic reaction. He obviously represented the Revolution,
or the critical spirit, within the Catholic limits, while De Maistre's
ruling idea was, in his own trenchant phrase, '_absolument tuer
l'esprit du dix-huitième siècle_.' On all these accounts he appears to
be the fittest expositor of those conceptions which the anarchy that
closed the eighteenth century provoked into systematic existence.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] See Damiron's _La Philosophie en France au XIXième Siècle_.
Introduction to Vol. I. (Fifth edition.)
I.
Joseph de Maistre was born at Chambéry in the year 1754.[2] His family
was the younger branch of a stock in Languedoc, which about the
beginning of the seventeenth century divided itself into two, one
remaining in France, the other establishing itself in Piedmont. It is
not wonderful that the descendants of the latter, settled in a country
of small extent and little political importance, placed a high value on
their kinship with an ancient line in the powerful kingdom of France.
Joseph de Maistre himself was always particularly anxious to cultivate
close relations with his French kinsfolk, partly from the old
aristocratic feeling of blood, and partly from his intellectual
appreciation of the gifts of the French mind, and its vast influence as
an universal propagating power. His father held a high office in the
government of Savoy, and enjoyed so eminent a reputation that on his
death both the Senate and the King of Sardinia deliberately recorded
their appreciation of his loss as a public calamity. His mother is said
to have been a woman of lofty and devout character, and her influence
over her eldest son was exceptionally strong and tender. He used to
declare in after life that he was as docile in her hands as the youngest
of his sisters. Among other marks of his affectionate submission to
parental authority, we are told that during the whole time of his
residence at Turin, where he followed a course of law, he never read a
single book without previously writing to Chambéry to one or other of
his parents for their sanction. Such traditions linger in families, and
when he came to have children of his own, they too read nothing of which
their father had not been asked to express his approbation. De Maistre's
early education was directed by the Jesuits; and as might have been
expected from the generous susceptibility of his temper, he never ceased
to think of them with warm esteem. To the end of his life he remembered
the gloom which fell upon the household, though he was not nine years
old at the time, when the news arrived of the edict of 1764, abolishing
the Society in the kingdom of France. One element of his education he
commemorates in a letter to his favourite daughter. 'Let your brother,'
he says, 'work hard at the French poets. Let him learn them by heart,
especially the incomparable Racine; never mind whether he understands
him yet or not. I didn't understand him when my mother used to come
repeating his verses by my bedside, and lulled me to sleep with her
fine voice to the sound of that inimitable music. I knew hundreds of
lines long before I knew how to read; and it is thus that my ears,
accustomed betimes to this ambrosia, have never since been able to
endure any sourer draught.'
After his law studies at the University of Turin, then highly renowned
for its jurisconsults, the young De Maistre went through the successive
stages of an official career, performing various duties in the public
administration, and possessing among other honours a seat in the Senate,
over which his father presided. He led a tranquil life at Chambéry, then
as at all other times an ardent reader and student. Unaided he taught
himself five languages. English he mastered so perfectly, that though he
could not follow it when spoken, he could read a book in that tongue
with as much ease as if it had been in his own. To Greek and German he
did not apply himself until afterwards, and he never acquired the same
proficiency in them as in English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.
To be ignorant of German then, it will be remembered, was not what it
would be now, to be without one of the literary senses.
Like nearly every other great soldier of reaction, he showed in his
early life a decided inclination for new ideas. The truth that the
wildest extravagances of youthful aspiration are a better omen of a
vigorous and enlightened manhood than the decorous and ignoble faith in
the perfection of existing arrangements, was not belied in the case of
De Maistre. His intelligence was of too hard and exact a kind to
inspire him with the exalted schemes that present themselves to those
more nobly imaginative minds who dream dreams and see visions. He
projected no Savoyard emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna or
Delaware, to found millennial societies and pantisocratic unions. These
generous madnesses belong to men of more poetic temper. But still, in
spite of the deadening influences of officialism and relations with a
court, De Maistre had far too vigorous and active a character to subside
without resistance into the unfruitful ways of obstruction and social
complacency. It is one of the most certain marks, we may be sure, of a
superior spirit, that the impulses earliest awakened by its first fresh
contact with the facts of the outer world are those which quicken a
desire for the improvement of the condition of society, the increase of
the happiness of men, the amelioration of human destiny. With this
unwritten condition of human nature De Maistre, like other men of his
mental calibre, is found to have complied. He incurred the suspicion and
ill-will of most of those by whom he was immediately surrounded, by
belonging to a Reform Lodge at Chambéry. The association was one of a
perfectly harmless character, but being an association, it diffused a
tarnishing vapour of social disaffection and insurgency over the names
of all who ventured to belong to it, and De Maistre was pointed out to
the Sardinian court as a man with leanings towards new things, and
therefore one of whom it were well to beware. There was little ground
for apprehension. In very small countries there is seldom room enough
for the growth of a spirit of social revolution; not at least until some
great and dominant country has released the forces of destruction. So,
when the menacing sounds of the approaching hurricane in France grew
heavy in the air, the little lodge at Chambéry voluntarily dissolved
itself, and De Maistre was deputed to convey to the king, Victor Amadeo
III., the honourable assurance of its members that they had assembled
for the last time.
In 1786, at the age of thirty-two, De Maistre had married, and when the
storm burst which destroyed all the hopes of his life, he was the father
of two children. In one of his gay letters to a venerable lady who was
on intimate terms with them both, he has left a picture of his wife,
which is not any less interesting for what it reveals of his own
character. 'The contrast between us two is the very strangest in the
world. For me, as you may have found out, I am the _pococurante_
senator, and above all things very free in saying what I think. She, on
the contrary, will take care that it is noon before allowing that the
sun has risen, for fear of committing herself. She knows what must be
done or what must not be done on the tenth of October 1808, at ten
o'clock in the morning, to avoid some inconvenience which otherwise
would come to pass at midnight between the fifteenth and sixteenth of
March 1810. "But, my dear husband, you pay attention to nothing; you
believe that nobody is thinking of any harm. Now I know, I have been
told, I have guessed, I foresee, I warn you," etc. "Come now, my dear,
leave me alone. You are only wasting your time: I foresee that I shall
never foresee things: that's your business." She is the supplement to
me, and hence when I am separated from her, as I am now, I suffer
absurdly from being obliged to think about my own affairs; I would
rather have to chop wood all day.... My children ought to kiss her very
steps; for my part, I have no gift for education. She has such a gift,
that I look upon it as nothing less than the eighth endowment of the
Holy Ghost; I mean a certain fond persecution by which it is given her
to torment her children from morning to night to do something, not to do
something, to learn--and yet without for a moment losing their tender
affection for her. How can she manage it? I cannot make it out.' She was
laughingly called by himself and her friends, Madame Prudence. It is
certain that few women have found more necessity for the qualities
implied in this creditable nickname.
They had not been married many years before they were overtaken by
irreparable disaster. The French Revolution broke out, and Savoy was
invaded by the troops of the new Republic. Count De Maistre, with his
wife and children, fled from Chambéry across the Alps to Aosta. '_Ma
chère amie_,' he said to his wife, by the side of a great rock which he
never afterwards forgot, 'the step that we are taking to-day is
irrevocable; it decides our lot for life;' and the presentiment was
true. Soon the _Loi des Allobroges_ was promulgated, which enjoined upon
all who had left their homes in Savoy to return instantly, under pain of
confiscation of all their property. It was the very depth of winter.
Madame de Maistre was in the ninth month of her pregnancy. She knew that
her husband would endure anything rather than expose her to the risks of
a journey in such a season. So, urged by a desire to save something from
the wreck of their fortune by compliance with the French decree, she
seized the opportunity of her husband's absence at Turin, and started
for Savoy without acquainting him with her design. She crossed the Great
St. Bernard in the beginning of January on the back of a mule,
accompanied by her two little children wrapped in blankets. The Count,
on his return to Aosta two or three days afterwards, forthwith set off
in her steps, in the trembling expectation of finding her dead or dying
in some Alpine hovel. But the favour of fate and a stout heart brought
her safe to Chambéry, where shortly afterwards she was joined by her
husband. The authorities vainly tendered him the oath, vainly bade him
inscribe his name on the register of citizens; and when they asked him
for a contribution to support the war, he replied curtly that he did not
give money to kill his brothers in the service of the King of Sardinia.
As soon as his wife was delivered of their third child, whom he was
destined not to see again for nearly twenty years, he quitted her side,
abandoned his property and his country, and took refuge at Lausanne,
where in time his wife and his two eldest children once more came to
him.
Gibbon tells us how a swarm of emigrants, escaping from the public ruin,
was attracted by the vicinity, the manners, and the language of
Lausanne. 'They are entitled to our pity,' he reflected, 'and they may
claim our esteem, but they cannot in their present state of mind and
fortune contribute much to our amusement. Instead of looking down as
calm and idle spectators on the theatre of Europe, our domestic harmony
is somewhat embittered by the infusion of party spirit.' Gibbon died in
London almost at the very moment that De Maistre arrived at Lausanne,
but his account of things remained true, and political feuds continued
to run as high as ever. Among the people with whom De Maistre was thrown
was Madame de Staël. 'As we had not been to the same school,' he says,
'either in theology or in politics, we had some scenes enough to make
one die of laughter; still without quarrelling. Her father, who was then
alive, was the friend and relative of people that I love with all my
heart, and that I would not vex for all the world. So I allowed the
_émigrés_ who surrounded us to cry out as they would, without ever
drawing the sword.' De Maistre thought he never came across a head so
completely turned wrong as Madame de Staël's, the infallible
consequence, as he took it to be, of modern philosophy operating upon a
woman's nature. He once said of her: 'Ah! if Madame de Staël had been
Catholic, she would have been adorable, instead of famous.' We can
believe that his position among the French _émigrés_ was not
particularly congenial. For though they hated the Revolution, they had
all drunk of the waters of the eighteenth century philosophy, and De
Maistre hated this philosophy worse than he hated the Revolution itself.
Then again, they would naturally vapour about the necessities of strong
government. 'Yes,' said the Savoyard exile, 'but be quite sure that, to
make the monarchy strong, you must rest it on the laws, avoiding
everything arbitrary, too frequent commissions, and all ministerial
jobberies.' We may well believe how unsavoury this rational and just
talk was to people who meant by strong government a system that should
restore to them their old prerogatives of anti-social oppression and
selfish corruption. The order that De Maistre vindicated was a very
different thing from the deadly and poisonous order which was the object
of the prayers of the incorrigible royalists around him.
After staying three years at Lausanne, De Maistre went to Turin, but
shortly afterwards the Sardinian king, at the end of a long struggle,
was forced to succumb to the power of the French, then in the full tide
of success. Bonaparte's brilliant Italian campaign needs no words here.
The French entered Turin, and De Maistre, being an _émigré_, had to
leave it. Furnished with a false passport, and undergoing a thousand
hardships and dangers, he made his way, once more in the depth of a
severe winter (1797), to Venice. He went part of the way down the Po in
a small trading ship, crowded with ladies, priests, monks, soldiers, and
a bishop. There was only one small fire on board, at which all the
cooking had to be done, and where the unhappy passengers had to keep
themselves warm as they could. At night they were confined each to a
space about three planks broad, separated from neighbours by pieces of
canvas hanging from a rope above. Each bank of the river was lined by
military posts--the left by the Austrians, and the right by the French;
and the danger of being fired into was constantly present to aggravate
the misery of overcrowding, scanty food, and bitter cold. Even this
wretchedness was surpassed by the hardships which confronted the exiles
at Venice. The physical distress endured here by De Maistre and his
unfortunate family exceeded that of any other period of their
wanderings. He was cut off from the court, and from all his relations
and friends, and reduced for the means of existence to a few fragments
of silver plate, which had somehow been saved from the universal wreck.
This slender resource grew less day by day, and when that was exhausted
the prospect was a blank. The student of De Maistre's philosophy may see
in what crushing personal anguish some of its most sinister growths had
their roots. When the cares of beggary come suddenly upon a man in
middle life, they burn very deep. Alone, and starving for a cause that
is dear to him, he might encounter the grimness of fate with a fortitude
in which there should be many elevating and consoling elements. But the
destiny is intolerably hard which condemns a man of humane mould, as De
Maistre certainly was, to look helplessly on the physical pains of a
tender woman and famishing little ones. The anxieties that press upon
his heart in such calamity as this are too sharp, too tightened, and too
sordid for him to draw a single free breath, or to raise his eyes for a
single moment of relief from the monstrous perplexity that chokes him.
The hour of bereavement has its bitterness, but the bitterness is
gradually suffused with soft reminiscence. The grip of beggary leaves a
mark on such a character as De Maistre's which no prosperity of after
days effaces. The seeming inhumanity of his theory of life, which is so
revolting to comfortable people like M. Villemain, was in truth the only
explanation of his own cruel sufferings in which he could find any
solace. It was not that he hated mankind, but that his destiny looked as
if God hated him, and this was a horrible moral complexity out of which
he could only extricate himself by a theory in which pain and torment
seem to stand out as the main facts in human existence.
To him, indeed, prosperity never came. Hope smiled on him momentarily,
but, in his own words: 'It was only a flash in the night.' While he was
in Venice, the armies of Austria and Russia reconquered the north of
Italy, and Charles Emanuel IV., in the natural anticipation that the
allies would at once restore his dominions, hastened forward. Austria,
however, as De Maistre had seen long before, was indifferent or even
absolutely hostile to Sardinian interests, and she successfully opposed
Charles Emanuel's restoration. The king received the news of the perfidy
of his nominal ally at Florence, but not until after he had made
arrangements for rewarding the fidelity of some of his most loyal
adherents.
It was from Florence that De Maistre received the king's nomination to
the chief place in the government of the island of Sardinia. Through the
short time of his administration here, he was overwhelmed with vexations
only a little more endurable than the physical distresses which had
weighed him down at Venice. During the war, justice had been
administered in a grossly irregular manner. Hence, people had taken the
law into their own hands, and retaliation had completed the round of
wrong-doing. The taxes were collected with great difficulty. The higher
class exhibited an invincible repugnance to paying their debts. Some of
these difficulties in the way of firm and orderly government were
insuperable, and De Maistre vexed his soul in an unequal and only
partially successful contest. In after years, amid the miseries of his
life in Russia, he wrote to his brother thus: 'Sometimes in moments of
solitude that I multiply as much as I possibly can, I throw my head back
on the cushion of my sofa, and there with my four walls around me, far
from all that is dear to me, confronted by a sombre and impenetrable
future, I recall the days when in a little town that you know well'--he
meant Cagliari--'with my head resting on another sofa, and only seeing
around our own exclusive circle (good heavens, what an impertinence!)
little men and little things, I used to ask myself: "Am I then condemned
to live and die in this place, like a limpet on a rock?" I suffered
bitterly; my head was overloaded, wearied, flattened, by the enormous
weight of Nothing.'
But presently a worse thing befell him. In 1802 he received an order
from the king to proceed to St. Petersburg as envoy extraordinary and
minister plenipotentiary at the court of Russia. Even from this bitter
proof of devotion to his sovereign he did not shrink. He had to tear
himself from his wife and children, without any certainty when so cruel
a separation would be likely to end; to take up new functions which the
circumstances of the time rendered excessively difficult; while the
petty importance of the power he represented, and its mendicant attitude
in Europe, robbed his position of that public distinction and dignity
which may richly console a man for the severest private sacrifice. It is
a kind destiny which veils their future from mortal men. Fifteen years
passed before De Maistre's exile came to a close. From 1802 to 1817 he
did not quit the inhospitable latitudes of northern Russia.
De Maistre's letters during this desolate period furnish a striking
picture of his manner of life and his mental state. We see in them his
most prominent characteristics strongly marked. Not even the
painfulness of the writer's situation ever clouds his intrepid and
vigorous spirit. Lively and gallant sallies of humour to his female
friends, sagacious judgments on the position of Europe to political
people, bits of learned criticism for erudite people, tender and playful
chat with his two daughters, all these alternate with one another with
the most delightful effect. Whether he is writing to his little girl
whom he has never known, or to the king of Sardinia, or to some author
who sends him a book, or to a minister who has found fault with his
diplomacy, there is in all alike the same constant and remarkable play
of a bright and penetrating intellectual light, coloured by a humour
that is now and then a little sardonic, but more often is genial and
lambent. There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the
bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more
elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and
bouquet of some of the fortifying and stimulating wines of Burgundy,
from which time and warmth have not yet drawn out a certain native
roughness that lingers on the palate. This hardness, if one must give
the quality a name that only imperfectly describes it, sprang not from
any original want of impressionableness or sensibility of nature, but
partly from the relentless buffetings which he had to endure at the
hands of fortune, and partly from the preponderance which had been given
to the rational side of his mind by long habits of sedulous and accurate
study. Few men knew so perfectly as he knew how to be touching without
ceasing to be masculine, nor how to go down into the dark pits of human
life without forgetting the broad sunlight, nor how to keep habitually
close to visible and palpable fact while eagerly addicted to
speculation. His contemplations were perhaps somewhat too near the
ground; they led him into none of those sublimer regions of subtle
feeling where the rarest human spirits have loved to travel; we do not
think of his mind among those who have gone
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
If this kind of temper, strong, keen, frank, and a little hard and
mordent, brought him too near a mischievous disbelief in the dignity of
men and their lives, at least it kept him well away from morbid weakness
in ethics, and from beating the winds in metaphysics. But of this we
shall see more in considering his public pieces than can be gathered
from his letters.
The discomforts of De Maistre's life at St. Petersburg were extreme. The
dignity of his official style and title was an aggravation of the
exceeding straitness of his means. The ruined master could do little to
mitigate the ruin of his servant. He had to keep up the appearance of an
ambassador on the salary of a clerk. 'This is the second winter,' he
writes to his brother in 1810, 'that I have gone through without a
pelisse, which is exactly like going without a shirt at Cagliari. When I
come from court a very sorry lackey throws a common cloak over my
shoulders.' The climate suited him better than he had expected; and in
one letter he vows that he was the only living being in Russia who had
passed two winters without fur boots and a fur hat. It was considered
indispensable that he should keep a couple of servants; so, for his
second, De Maistre was obliged to put up with a thief, whom he rescued
under the shelter of ambassadorial privilege from the hands of justice,
on condition that he would turn honest. The Austrian ambassador, with
whom he was on good terms, would often call to take him out to some
entertainment. 'His fine servants mount my staircase groping their way
in the dark, and we descend preceded by a servant carrying _luminare
minus quam ut præesset nocti_.' 'I am certain,' he adds pleasantly,
'that they make songs about me in their Austrian patois. Poor souls! it
is well they can amuse themselves.'
Sometimes he was reduced so far as to share the soup of his valet, for
lack of richer and more independent fare. Then he was constantly fretted
by enemies at home, who disliked his trenchant diplomacy, and distrusted
the strength and independence of a mind which was too vigorous to please
the old-fashioned ministers of the Sardinian court. These chagrins he
took as a wise man should. They disturbed him less than his separation
from his family. 'Six hundred leagues away from you all,' he writes to
his brother, 'the thoughts of my family, the reminiscences of childhood,
transport me with sadness.' Visions of his mother's saintly face
haunted his chamber; almost gloomier still was the recollection of old
intimates with whom he had played, lived, argued, and worked for years,
and yet who now no longer bore him in mind. There are not many glimpses
of this melancholy in the letters meant for the eye of his beloved
_trinité féminine_, as he playfully called his wife and two daughters.
'_A quoi bon vous attrister_,' he asked bravely, '_sans raison et sans
profit?_' Occasionally he cannot help letting out to them how far his
mind is removed from composure. 'Every day as I return home I found my
house as desolate as if it was yesterday you left me. In society the
same fancy pursues me, and scarcely ever quits me.' Music, as might be
surmised in so sensitive a nature, drove him almost beside himself with
its mysterious power of intensifying the dominant emotion. 'Whenever by
any chance I hear the harpsichord,' he says, 'melancholy seizes me. The
sound of the violin gives me such a heavy heart, that I am fain to leave
the company and hasten home.' He tossed in his bed at night, thinking he
heard the sound of weeping at Turin, making a thousand efforts to
picture to himself the looks of that 'orphan child of a living father'
whom he had never known, wondering if ever he should know her, and
battling with a myriad of black phantoms that seemed to rustle in his
curtains. 'But you, M. de Chevalier,' he said apologetically to the
correspondent to whom he told these dismal things, 'you are a father,
you know the cruel dreams of a waking man; if you were not of the
profession I would not allow my pen to write you this jeremiad.' As De
Maistre was accustomed to think himself happy if he got three hours'
sound sleep in the night, these sombre and terrible vigils were ample
enough to excuse him if he had allowed them to overshadow all other
things. But the vigour of his intellect was too strenuous, and his
curiosity and interest in every object of knowledge too
inextinguishable. 'After all,' he said, 'the only thing to do is to put
on a good face, and to march to the place of torture with a few friends
to console you on the way. This is the charming image under which I
picture my present situation. Mark you,' he added, 'I always count books
among one's consoling friends.'
In one of the most gay and charming of his letters, apologising to a
lady for the remissness of his correspondence, he explains that
diplomacy and books occupy every moment. 'You will admit, madam, there
is no possibility of one's shutting up books entirely. Nay, more than
ever, I feel myself burning with the feverish thirst for knowledge. I
have had an access of it which I cannot describe to you. The most
curious books literally run after me, and hurry voluntarily to place
themselves in my hands. As soon as diplomacy gives me a moment of
breathing-time I rush headlong to that favourite pasture, to that
ambrosia of which the mind can never have enough--
_Et voilà ce qui fait que votre ami est muet._'
He thinks himself happy if, by refusing invitations to dinner, he can
pass a whole day without stirring from his house. 'I read, I write, I
study; for after all one must know something.' In his hours of
depression he fancied that he only read and worked, not for the sake of
the knowledge, but to stupefy and tire himself out, if that were
possible.
As a student De Maistre was indefatigable. He never belonged to that
languid band who hoped to learn difficult things by easy methods. The
only way, he warned his son, is to shut your door, to say that you are
not within, and to work. 'Since they have set themselves to teach us how
we ought to learn the dead languages, you can find nobody who knows
them; and it is amusing enough that people who don't know them, should
be so obstinately bent on demonstrating the vices of the methods
employed by us who do know them.' He was one of those wise and laborious
students who do not read without a pen in their hands. He never shrank
from the useful toil of transcribing abundantly from all the books he
read everything that could by any possibility eventually be of service
to him in his inquiries. His notebooks were enormous. As soon as one of
them was filled, he carefully made up an index of its contents, numbered
it, and placed it on a shelf with its unforgotten predecessors. In one
place he accidentally mentions that he had some thirty of these folios
over the head of his writing-table.
'If I am a pedant at home,' he said, 'at least I am as little as
possible a pedant out of doors.' In the evening he would occasionally
seek the society of ladies, by way of recovering some of that native
gaiety of heart which had hitherto kept him alive. 'I blow on this
spark,' to use his own words, 'just as an old woman blows among the
ashes to get a light for her lamp.' A student and a thinker, De Maistre
was also a man of the world, and he may be added to the long list of
writers who have shown that to take an active part in public affairs and
mix in society give a peculiar life, reality, and force to both
scholarship and speculation. It was computed at that time that the
author of a philosophic piece could not safely count upon more than a
hundred and fifty readers in Russia; and hence, we might be sure, even
if we had not De Maistre's word for it, that away from his own house he
left his philosophy behind. The vehemence of his own convictions did not
prevent him from being socially tolerant to others who hated them. 'If I
had the good fortune to be among his acquaintances,' he wrote of a
heretical assailant, 'he would see that among the people with
convictions it would be hard to find one so free from prejudice as I am.
I have many friends among the Protestants, and now that their system is
tottering, they are all the dearer to me.' In spite of his scanty means,
his shabby valet, his threadbare cloak, and the humbleness of his
diplomatic position, the fire and honesty of his character combined with
his known ability to place him high in the esteem of the society of St.
Petersburg. His fidelity, devotion, and fortitude, mellowed by many
years and by meditative habits, and tinged perhaps by the patrician
consciousness of birth, formed in him a modest dignity of manner which
men respected. They perceived it to be no artificial assumption, but the
outward image of a lofty and self-respecting spirit. His brother
diplomatists, even the representatives of France, appear to have treated
him with marked consideration. His letters prove him to have been a
favourite among ladies. The Emperor Alexander showed him considerable
kindness of the cheap royal sort. He conferred on his brother, Xavier de
Maistre, a post in one of the public museums, while to the Sardinian
envoy's son he gave a commission in the Russian service.
The first departure of this son for the campaign of 1807 occasioned some
of the most charming passages in De Maistre's letters, both to the young
soldier himself and to others. For though without a touch of morbid
expansiveness, he never denied himself the solace of opening his heart
to a trusted friend, and a just reserve with strangers did not hinder a
humane and manly confidence with intimates. 'This morning,' he wrote to
his stripling, soon after he had joined the army, 'I felt a tightening
at my heart when a pet dog came running in and jumped upon your bed,
where he finds you no more. He soon perceived his mistake, and said
clearly enough, after his own fashion: _I am mistaken; where can he be
then?_ As for me I have felt all that you will feel, if ever you pursue
this mighty trade of being a father.' And then he begs of his son if he
should find himself with a tape line in his hand, that he will take his
exact measure and forward it. Soon came the news of the battle of
Friedland, and the unhappy father thought he read the fate of his son in
the face of every acquaintance he met. And so it was in later campaigns,
as De Maistre records in correspondence that glows with tender and
healthy solicitude. All this is worth dwelling upon, for two reasons.
First, because De Maistre has been too much regarded and spoken of as a
man of cold sensibility, and little moved by the hardships which fill
the destiny of our unfortunate race. And, secondly, because his own keen
acquaintance with mental anguish helps us to understand the zeal with
which he attempts to reconcile the blind cruelty and pain and torture
endured by mortals with the benignity and wisdom of the immortal. 'After
all,' he used to say, 'there are only two real evils--remorse and
disease.' This is true enough for an apophthegm, but as a matter of fact
it never for an instant dulled his sensibility to far less supreme forms
of agony than the recollection of irreparable pain struck into the lives
of others. It is interesting and suggestive to recall how a later
publicist viewed the ills that dwarf our little lives. 'If I were asked
to class human miseries,' said Tocqueville, 'I would do so in this
order: first, Disease; second, Death; third, Doubt.' At a later date, he
altered the order, and deliberately declared doubt to be the most
insupportable of all evils, worse than death itself. But Tocqueville was
an aristocrat, as Guizot once told him, who accepted his defeat. He
stood on the brink of the great torrent of democracy, and shivered. De
Maistre was an aristocrat too, but he was incapable of knowing what
doubt or hesitation meant. He never dreamt that his cause was lost, and
he mocked and defied the Revolution to the end. We easily see how
natures of this sort, ardent, impetuous, unflinching, find themselves in
the triumphant paths that lead to remorse at their close, and how they
thus come to feel remorse rather than doubt as the consummate agony of
the human mind.
Having had this glimpse of De Maistre's character away from his books,
we need not linger long over the remaining events of his life. In 1814
his wife and two daughters joined him in the Russian capital. Two years
later an outburst of religious fanaticism caused the sudden expulsion of
the Jesuits from Russia, to De Maistre's deep mortification. Several
conversions had taken place from the Orthodox to the Western faith, and
these inflamed the Orthodox party, headed by the Prince de Galitzin, the
minister of public worship, with violent theological fury. De Maistre,
whose intense attachment to his own creed was well known, fell under
suspicion of having connived at these conversions, and the Emperor
himself went so far as to question him. 'I told him,' De Maistre says,
'that I had never changed the faith of any of his subjects, but that if
any of them had by chance made me a sharer of their confidence, neither
honour nor conscience would have allowed me to tell them that they were
wrong.' This kind of dialogue between a sovereign and an ambassador
implied a situation plainly unfavourable to effective diplomacy. The
envoy obtained his recall, and after twenty-five years' absence returned
to his native country (1817). On his way home, it may be noticed, De
Maistre passed a few days in Paris, and thus, for the first and last
time, one of the most eminent of modern French writers found himself on
French soil.
The king accorded De Maistre an honourable reception, conferred upon him
a high office and a small sum of money, and lent his ear to other
counsellors. The philosopher, though insisting on declaring his
political opinions, then, as ever, unwaveringly anti-revolutionary,
threw himself mainly upon that literary composition which had been his
solace in yet more evil days than these. It was at this time that he
gave to the world the supreme fruit of nearly half a century of study,
meditation, and contact with the world, in _Du Pape_, _Les Soirées de
Saint Pétersbourg_, and _L'Eglise Gallicane_. Their author did not live
long to enjoy the vast discussion which they occasioned, nor the
reputation that they have since conferred upon his name. He died in
February 1821 after such a life as we have seen.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] The facts of De Maistre's life I have drawn from a very meagre
biography by his son, Count Rodolphe de Maistre, supplemented by two
volumes of _Lettres et Opuscules_ (Fourth edition. Paris: Vaton. 1865),
and a volume of his _Diplomatic Correspondence_, edited by M. Albert
Blanc.
II.