speak too loudly against Jean Jacques or his book, for he is rather a
king in the Halles."[33] This must have been a new word in the ears of
the old man, who had grown up in the habit of thinking of public opinion
as the opinion, not of markets where the common people bought and sold,
but of the galleries of Versailles. Except for its theology, the age of
Louis XIV always remained the great age to Voltaire, the age of pomp and
literary glory, and it was too difficult a feat to cling on one side to
the Grand Monarch, and to stretch out a hand on the other to the _Social
Contract_. It was too difficult for the man who had been embraced by
Ninon de l'Enclos, who was the correspondent of the greatest sovereigns
in Europe, and the intimate of some of the greatest nobles in France, to
feel much sympathy with writings that made their author king of the
Halles. Frederick offered Rousseau shelter, and so did Voltaire; but
each of them disliked his work as warmly as the other. They did not
understand one who, if he wrote with an eloquence that touched all
hearts, repulsed friends and provoked enemies like a madman or a savage.
The very language of Rousseau was to Voltaire as an unknown tongue, for
it was the language of reason clothing the births of passionate
sensation. _Émile_ only wearied him, though there were perhaps fifty
pages of it which he would have had bound in morocco.[34] It is a stale
romance, he cries, while the _Social Contract_ is only remarkable for
some insults rudely thrown at kings by a citizen of Geneva, and for four
insipid pages against the Christian religion, which are simply
plagiarized from Bayle's centos.[35] Partly, no doubt, this extreme
irritation was due to the insults with which Jean Jacques had repulsed
his offers of shelter and assistance, had repudiated Voltaire's attempts
to defend him, and had held up Voltaire himself as a proper object for
the persecutions of Geneva. But there was a still deeper root of
discrepancy, which we have already pointed out. Rousseau's exaggerated
tone was an offence to Voltaire's more just and reasonable spirit; and
the feigned austerity of a man whose life and manners he knew assumed in
his eyes a disagreeable shade of hypocrisy.[36] Besides these things, he
was clearly apprehensive of the storms which Rousseau's extraordinary
hardihood had the very natural effect of raising in the circles of
authority, though it is true that the most acute observers of the time
thought that they noticed a very perceptible increase of Voltaire's own
hardihood as a consequence of the example which the other set him.
The rivalry between the schools of Rousseau and Voltaire represents the
deadlock to which social thought had come; a deadlock of which the
catastrophe of the Revolution was both expression and result. At the
time of Voltaire's death there was not a single institution in France
with force enough to be worth a month's purchase. The monarchy was
decrepit; the aristocracy was as feeble and impotent as it was arrogant;
the _bourgeoisie_ was not without aspiration, but it lacked courage and
it possessed no tradition; and the Church was demoralized, first by the
direct attack of Voltaire and the not less powerful indirect attack of
the _Encyclopædia_, and second by the memory of its own cruelty and
selfishness in the generation just closing. But Voltaire's theory, so
far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal
order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had
transformed thought and prepared the way for a _régime_ of enlightenment
and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of
passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of
freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of
rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by
law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It
was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order
until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had
gradually thrown off the demoralizing burden of superstition. But then
the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were
practically extinct, and consequently such an attack as Rousseau's was
inevitable, and was at the same time and for the same reasons
irresistible. To overthrow the power of the Church only was to do
nothing in a society perishing from material decay and political
emasculation. Yet to regenerate such a society without the aid of moral
and spiritual forces, with whose activity the existence of a dominant
ecclesiastical power was absolutely incompatible, was one of the wildest
feats that ever passionate sophist attempted.
GEORGE W. KITCHIN
Two sayings which characterize the two speakers are recorded of this
time. The one is that of Louis XV, who with all his odious vices, his
laziness, and unkingly seclusion, was not devoid of intelligence. "All
this," he said, "will last as long as I shall," and his forecast was
justified: the "deluge" came long after he had gone to his account; and
the phrase stands against him as an expression of his base selfishness,
which saw the coming troubles without caring about them, because he
believed that they would not come in his day. The other saying is that
of Voltaire, who, in 1762, exclaimed in an ecstasy of hope and prophecy,
"Happy the young men, for they shall see many things." And yet those
youths were mostly gray-headed when the "many things" began, and not a
few of them lost those gray heads, instead of looking on as interested
spectators of a new order of things.
The writers of this time, whatever their faults, form the true
aristocracy of France: the rest of the nation, sinking lower and lower,
left their superiority all the more marked and uncontested. The series
of great writers of the age may be said to begin with Montesquieu,
though Voltaire had published his _OEdipus_ in 1718, and the _Lettres
Persanes_ did not appear till 1721. Montesquieu, a man of noble birth,
was brought up as a lawyer. We trace in him accordingly an aristocratic
and legal tone of mind, which naturally took pleasure in England and the
law-abiding conservatism of her constitution, as it appeared to him in
the middle of the eighteenth century. Like so many of his fellows,
Montesquieu chafed under the influence of a corrupt clergy, and declared
against them, with the philosophers. This was almost the only point he
had in common with Voltaire, whom he heartily disliked. We may say that
he represents the aristocratic and constitutional resistance to the
state of things in France, while Voltaire is champion of liberty of
thought and tolerance. Montesquieu resists the Jesuit influences of his
day on conservative grounds alone; Voltaire resists them by resting on
the enlightened despotism of his time, and appealing to it, rather than
to the laws or constitution of his country. Lastly, at a later day,
Rousseau, sworn foe to society, from which he had suffered much, the
sentimentalist, enemy of aristocracy and monarchy, instinctively
antagonistic to the legal temperament, speaks directly to the people,
even as Montesquieu had spoken to the educated and the well-to-do, and
Voltaire to kings; and they, stirred to the heart by his appeals,
elected him the prophet of their cause, believed in him, and at his
bidding subverted the whole fabric of society.
Montesquieu's great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, which followed his
_Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Fall of the Romans_
(1734), and appeared in 1748, forms an epoch in French prose style. He
and Voltaire are the two parents of modern French prose literature. The
_Esprit des Lois_ was far more greedily read in England than in France.
Society there had little taste for so solid a work; they vastly
preferred the lively sparkle of the _Persian Letters_; the book was
perhaps too clearly influenced by an admiration for the Constitution of
England, and by a love for liberty, face to face with the weak arbitrary
despotism which was dragging France to a catastrophe.
If Montesquieu is the advocate of political freedom, Voltaire is the
champion of tolerance and freedom of conscience; and that, in his day
and with his surroundings, meant that he was the deadly foe of the
established faith, as he saw it in its acts in France. When we regard
this apostle of toleration, and watch his pettinesses and vanity, note
him at kings' courts, see him glorifying Louis XIV, that great
antagonist of all tolerance, whether religious or political or social,
we are inclined to think that the most difficult of all toleration is
that of having to endure its champion and to try to do him justice.
Voltaire was no deep thinker: he had amazing cleverness, was very
susceptible of the influence of thought, and unrivalled in expression.
We shall expect to find him taking color from what was round him, nor
shall we be astonished if that color is dazzling and brilliant. Five
successive influences marked his earlier life. First, his education
under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system;
secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the
fashionable _abbes_ of the day, which showed him another side of the
official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the
Abbé de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ambitious
subjects, and led him to write the _Henriade_, and probably also to
begin projecting his _Siècle de Louis XIV_; fourthly, the enforced
leisure of the Bastille, whither he went a second time in 1726 for
having resented an insult put on him by a coarse nobleman, one of the
Rohans; lastly--thanks to the order for his exile--his sojourn in
England after release from the Bastille, and his friendship for the
chief writers and thinkers of this country. Hitherto he had been a
purely literary man; henceforth he was fired with an ambition to be a
philosopher and a liberator. Certainly France was unfortunate in the
education she gave this brilliant and wayward child of her genius.
There was hardly a Frenchman of eminence in this period who did not
either visit England or learn the English language, many doing both. And
one so bright and receptive as Voltaire could not fail to notice many
things. He could see how free thought was: he could make a contrast
between the respect paid to letters in London, and their degradation
under Louis XIV and later; he saw Newton and Locke in places of honor,
Prior and Gay acting as ambassadors, Addison as secretary of state; he
reached England in time to see the national funeral given to the remains
of Newton. Bolingbroke took him in hand; he was astonished to find a
learned and literary _noblesse_; Locke was his true teacher.
He went back to France another man, after three years' absence: above
all, he carried with him the then popular English way of thinking as to
the supernatural, and became a somewhat cold, common-sense deist,
opposed to the atheism of some and the dull bigotry of the established
creed in the hands of others. God was to him conscious creator of the
world, and only faintly, if at all, its ruler; he recognized the need of
a deity as a starting-point for his system, though he did not feel the
need of his care and presence in life; not God our Father, only God our
Creator.
He brought over with him a great ripening of humane feelings: this is
his noblest quality and parent of his best acts. When we see him as a
champion of oppressed Huguenots, combating wrong and ill-doing with all
the vehemence of his fiery soul, we find a common ground, which is lost
sight of as we contemplate his equally hot attacks on Christianity, or
his dwelling in kings' courts, or his panegyrics on great sovereigns who
had so fiercely crushed down that liberty of thought of which he was the
life-long defender.
In his _OEdipus_ he had assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved
severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his
_Henriade_ (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified
Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England
we have his _Brutus_ (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his _Zaïre_
(1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time
onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if sometimes rather
disingenuous, strife with a superior power. Throughout, the poet and man
of taste struggles against the philosophic freethinker: he loves the
surface impressions, perhaps the reflective illusions; "his sentiments
are worth more than his ideas." The _English Letters_ of 1735, written
some years before, and now issued with much hesitation, created a great
storm: they boldly attacked the royal power, the clergy, the faith; they
were burned by the hangman; and Voltaire had to go into voluntary exile
for a while. There his literary activity was unwearied: many of his
works were written, or at least sketched, during the next five years.
Strange problem of the human mind. While he here composed his _Mahomet_
and other serious works, he also wrote his scandalous _Pucelle_; as if
he could not rest without destroying all nobility of sentiment and faith
in heroism. While Jeanne d'Arc is the helpless victim of his shameless
attack, he is also busy with his _Siècle de Louis XIV_, a hero
apparently more to his taste than the great Maid of Orléans.
The influence of Voltaire on opinion grew slowly but steadily through
these years: no one more sedulously undermined the established faiths.
It was in these years that he enjoyed a passing favor at the French
court, whence his febrile energy, his roughnesses, his want of the true
gloss of courtiership, soon lost him the good-will of his old friend
Madame de Pompadour. He then tried Berlin, finding it equally untenable
ground; eventually he withdrew to Ferney in the territory of Geneva,
whence he kept up incessant war against all the injustices which touched
his heart. His defence of Calas, of Servin, of the luckless Lally, all
date from this time. In these days he animated the Encyclopædists with
his spirit, encouraging them in their gigantic undertaking, the
"Carroccio of the battle of the eighteenth century." It was a huge
dictionary of human knowledge, written in direct antagonism to all
belief in spiritual powers or religion. It sold incredibly, and the
effect of it on society was immense. This great edifice, "built half of
marble, half of mud," as Voltaire himself said, had as its chief
architects Diderot and D'Alembert. Nothing contributed more to undermine
the foundations on which all institutions, and not least royalty, were
built.
A little later than Voltaire came Rousseau, "the valet who did not
become a cardinal." His influences are also later, and touched society
far more widely. Voltaire had spoken to society; Rousseau spoke to the
heart of the people. He was above all things a sentimentalist, this son
of a Genevan clockmaker. Society treated him harshly; and he avenged
himself by making fierce war on society. The savage state is the
best--society being revolting in its falseness and shallow varnish: all
men are naturally equal and free; society is nothing but an artificial
contract, an arrangement by which, in the end, the strong domineer over
the weak; the state of nature is divine: there is a Garden of Eden for
those who will cast society behind them. Sciences and arts, civilization
and literature, Encyclopædists included, are hateful as corrupters of
mankind; all progress has been backward, if one may venture to say
so--downward, certainly. Rousseau embroidered these paradoxes with a
thousand sweet sentiments: he shut his eyes to history, to facts, to the
real savage, the very disagreeable "primitive man," as he may yet
sometimes be seen. "Follow nature" was his one great precept: then you
will scourge away the false and conventional, and life will grow pure
and simple; there will be no rank, no cunning law devised to keep men
from their rights, no struggle for life, no competition. All France
panted and groaned to emulate the "noble savage"--with what success, we
know.
These were the chief literary luminaries of this time: and they all
helped to pull down the fabric of the old society. That society,
however, little understood the tendency of things; to a large extent it
became the fashion to be philosophic, to be free-minded, to attack
religion: with pride in their rank, and cold scorn for their humbler
brethren, and high-bred contempt for their clergy, and ruinous vices
sometimes made amusing by their brightness and their vivacious vanity,
the French upper classes thought it great sport to pull merrily at the
old walls of their country's institutions, never dreaming that they
could be so ill-ordered as to fall down and crush them in their ruin.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Vauban and Boisguillebert are both to be found in _Les Economiste
Financiers du XVIIIième Siècle_, published by Guillaumin, 1851.
[32] _Confessions_, pt. i. liv. v. Date of 1736.
[33] _OEuvres_, lxxv. 182.
[34] Corr. 1762. _OEuvres_, lxxv. 188.
[35] _OEuvres_, lxvii. 432.
[36] Condorcet, 170.
BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT
A.D. 1755
WINTHROP SARGENT GEORGE WASHINGTON
CAPTAIN DE CONTRECOEUR
The repeated wars between France and England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had involved also their colonies in America and
India. In America the Indians had been employed as allies upon both
sides, and thus encouraged in their hideous deeds of massacre and
torture. Hence there had grown an ever-increasing bitterness between
the French in Canada and the English colonists along the Atlantic
coasts, and this finally led to the momentous French and Indian war,
which, contrary to the course of the earlier contests, originated in
America and spread thence to Europe.
Its immediate cause was the disputed possession of the interior of
the continent, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. These had been
first explored by the French, and when English pioneers began to
penetrate thither the French built a chain of forts to resist them.
An expedition of Virginians under the command of their youthful
leader, Major George Washington, had a sharp encounter with the
enemy in 1754; and then the English government determined to assert
its authority by an overwhelming force. No war was declared against
France, nor even against Canada; but a distinguished English
general, Braddock, was sent over with three thousand regular troops
to seize the French forts in the Ohio Valley, especially Fort
Duquesne, on the site of the modern city of Pittsburg.
Braddock's expedition thus started the war which ended in the
expulsion of France from the North American continent. It did more
than that: it sowed the seeds of lasting dissension between the
American colonial troops and the British regulars. The British
despised their uninformed allies, and the latter soon learned in
their turn to despise the regulars.
The English general liked the young Virginian major, Washington, and
invited him, as one who knew the ground, to accompany the projected
expedition and give advice--which Braddock never took. Its caution
seemed to him to savor too much of cowardice, and he persisted in
marching through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne as though his
forces had been upon parade, with drums beating and colors flying.
The French were very near to being frightened into flight, but
determined on making one effort at resistance. Its results are here
told by the standard Pennsylvania historian, Sargent, and also in
briefer form by Washington himself in a letter to the Virginian
Governor, and by the French commander of Fort Duquesne in his
official report.
WINTHROP SARGENT
With a commendable discretion--the utmost, perhaps, that he was capable
of--Braddock had concluded his arrangements for passing what he regarded
as the only perilous place between his army and the fort, which he
designed to reach early on the 10th. Had the proposition, started and
abandoned by St. Clair, to push forward that very night a strong
detachment to invest it before morning, been actually made to him, it is
very probable he would have discountenanced it. As in all human
likelihood it would have been crowned with success, it is as well for
the general's reputation that the suggestion aborted.
What precautionary steps his education and capacity could suggest were
here taken by Braddock. Before three o'clock on the morning of the 9th
Gage was sent forth with a chosen band to secure both crossings of the
river, and to hold the farther shore of the second ford till the rest of
the army should come up. At four, St. Clair, with a working party,
followed to make the roads. At 6 A.M. the general set out, and, having
advantageously posted about four hundred men upon the adjacent heights,
made, with all the wagons and baggage, the first crossing of the
Monongahela. Marching thence in order of battle toward the second ford,
he received intelligence that Gage had occupied the shore, according to
orders, and that the route was clear. The only enemy he had seen was a
score of savages, who fled without awaiting his approach. By eleven
o'clock the army reached the second ford; but it was not until after one
that the declivities of the banks were made ready for the artillery and
wagons, when the whole array, by a little before two o'clock, was safely
passed over. Not doubting that from some point on the stream the enemy's
scouts were observing his operations, Braddock was resolved to strongly
impress them with the numbers and condition of his forces; and
accordingly the troops were ordered to appear as for a dress-parade. In
after-life Washington was accustomed to observe that he had never seen
elsewhere so beautiful a sight as was exhibited during this passage of
the Monongahela. Every man was attired in his best uniform; the
burnished arms shone bright as silver in the glistening rays of the
noonday sun, as, with colors waving proudly above their heads, and amid
inspiring bursts of martial music, the steady files, with disciplined
precision, and glittering in scarlet and gold, advanced to their
position. While the rear was yet on the other side, and the van was
falling into its ordained course, the bulk of the army was drawn up in
battle array on the western shore, hard by the spot where one Frazier, a
German blacksmith in the interest of the English, had lately had his
home. Two or three hundred yards above the spot where it now stood was
the mouth of Turtle Creek--the "Tulpewi Sipu" of the Lenape--which,
flowing in a southwestwardly course to the Monongahela, that here has a
northwestward direction, embraces, in an obtuse angle of about one
hundred twenty-five degrees, the very spot where the brunt of the battle
was to be borne.
The scene is familiar to tourists, being, as the crow flies, but eight
miles from Pittsburg, and scarce twelve by the course of the river. For
three-quarters of a mile below the entrance of the creek the Monongahela
was unusually shallow, forming a gentle rapid or "ripple," and easily
fordable at almost any point. Its common level is from three to four
hundred feet below that of the surrounding country; and along its upper
banks, at the second crossing, stretches a fertile bottom of a rich
pebbled mould, about a fourth of a mile in width and twenty feet above
low-water mark. At this time it was covered by a fair, open walnut-wood,
uncumbered with bush or undergrowth.
The ascent from the river, however, is rarely abrupt; but by a
succession of gentle alluvial slopes or bottoms the steep hillsides are
approached, as though the waters had gradually subsided from their
original glory to a narrow bed at the very bottom of the ancient
channel. At this particular place the rise of the first bottom does not
exceed an angle of three degrees. Above it again rises a second bottom
of the same width and about fifty feet higher than the first, and
gradually ascending until its farther edge rests upon the bold, rocky
face of the mountain line, climbing at once some two hundred feet to the
usual level of the region around. A firm clay, overlaid with mould,
forms the soil of the second bottom, which was heavily and more densely
timbered than the first; and the underwood began to appear more
plentifully where the ground was less exposed to the action of the
spring floods. In the bosom of the hill several springs unite their
sources to give birth to a petty rivulet that hurries down the steep to
be lost in the river. Its cradle lies in the bed of a broad ravine,
forty or fifty feet deep, that rises in the hill-side, and, crossing the
whole of the second bottom, debouches on the first, where the waters
whose current it so far guides, trickle oozily down through a swampy
bed. Great trees grew within and along this chasm, and the usual smaller
growth peculiar to such a situation; and a prodigious copse of wild
grape-vines, not yet entirely gone, shrouded its termination upon the
first bottom and shadowed the birth of the infant brook.
About two hundred yards from the line of hills, and three hundred south
of the ravine just described, commences another of a more singular
nature; with its steep sides, almost exactly perpendicular, it perfectly
resembles a ditch cut for purposes of defence. Rising near the middle of
the second bottom, it runs westwardly to the upper edge of the first,
with a depth at its head of four or five feet, increasing as it
descends, and a width of eight or ten. A century ago its channel was
overhung and completely concealed by a luxurious thicket of pea-vines
and trailers, of bramble-bushes and the Indian plum; its edges closely
fringed with the thin, tall wood-grass of summer. But even now, when the
forests are gone and the plough long since passed over the scene, the
ravine cannot be at all perceived until one is directly upon it; and
hence arose the chief disasters of the day. Parallel with and about one
hundred fifty yards north of this second gulley ran a third; a dry, open
hollow, and rather thinly wooded; but which afforded a happy protection
to the enemy from the English fire. Either of these ravines would have
sheltered an army; the second--the most important, though not the
largest--would of itself afford concealment to a thousand men.