Memoires des Sanson

Review of:
Sept Générations d’Exécuteurs, 1688-1847 (by H. Sanson, 1863)

For rather more than a year one of the strangest books of our generation has been in the course of publication at Paris, and it is now just completed. It is a book in six handsome volumes, containing the memoirs of the family of Sanson, which supplied executioners to the town of Paris for 159 years. The office passed during the whole of this time in regular succession from father to son, and went out of the family at last chiefly because the present author had only daughters. We live in an age when curiosities of all sorts are rapidly passing away, but certainly the presence in such a city as Paris of a quasi-hereditary executioner, the living depositary of the traditions of such scenes as the execution of Damiens and Count Horn, to say nothing of the Reign of Terror, was about as strange a curiosity as could well be imagined. The memoirs themselves are perhaps even more singular than the facts of which they relate the history. The last of the Sansons writes very good French in the modern style. He is a convert to all the modern anti-capital-punishment theories, and has evidently caught the style of French sensation novelists. A lover carries off his mistress on horseback in a storm—“Ils passaient dans la nuit comme un groupe de spectres qu’emporte un tourbillon." Scenes of professional robbers talking argot are introduced which read like bits of the Mystères de Paris or Les Misérables. In a word, the book is the natural product of an age of feuilletons. Notwithstanding this blemish, which is a great one, the tone of the work is by no means bad. It is neither vulgar nor, even when the topics to be dealt with are in the last degree repulsive, is it disgusting. It is the work of a man of feeling and education, who obviously respects himself, and who has a genuine feeling of disgust in thinking of the functions which he himself discharged for nearly a quarter of a century, and which his ancestors had discharged since 1688.

The founder of the Sanson family was a certain Sanson de Longval, who was, as his descendant declares, a gentilhomme by birth, and highly connected. He lived in Normandy in the middle of the seventeenth century, and was in early life a sailor, and afterwards an officer in the army. In giving an account of his adventures his descendant falls into the regular novel style—so much so that it is hardly unfair to assume that some professional novelist has given him a helping hand. The story of Sanson de Longval is not worth repeating. It is made up of a variety of unpleasing incidents about his brother's widow and an executioner’s daughter, the last of whom he marries on condition of adopting her father's business. He started in his profession at Rouen, whence he was promoted to Paris, where he lived in a good deal of splendour for many years. If the present M. Sanson is right—and he can hardly he wrong—the original position of the executioners of Paris was marvellous. They had various rights in the nature of import duties on the goods sold in the markets of Paris. The most important of these was the droit de havée, or right to take a handful of flour from every sack brought in for sale. This right was worth at one time as much as 60,000 livres a year. It is remarkable that one of precisely the same character existed till quite lately in Scotland, where the hangman was called the lockman, from the lock or bowl in which the meal was taken. With his droit de havée and a considerable number of assistants who did the coarser parts of the work, Sanson de Longval appears to have lived in a sort of semi-feudal state, his tranquility being disturbed only by the occasional obligation of beheading a noble, or superintending the process of breaking on the wheel some more vulgar criminal. At last he died, and his son Charles Sanson reigned in his stead.

Charles Sanson was of a pious and retiring disposition. He had a very handsome house, a large garden, a large income, and except on execution days, not very much to do. Indeed, he and all his family filled up their time by an unauthorized practice of surgery and medicine. Their historian observes that Sanson do Longval first set the fashion, thinking that the number of dead bodies which came under his care afforded an excellent opportunity for acquiring a knowledge of anatomy. “We have preserved from him,” says his descendant, “curious observations on the play of the muscles and joints, and several recipes against affections of this part of the frame." Charles Sanson, however, had hideous interruptions to his pursuits. He had to break on the wheel Count Horn, who murdered the Jew in the Rue Quincampoix during the South Sea excitement. He had also to perform the same office for the famous robber Cartouche and his band. Cartouche was a sort of Parisian Robin Hood, who, by means of ingenious robberies spiced with a dash of audacious wit, had obtained, not merely fame, but something not altogether unlike a kind of popularity. His fate, and that of his followers, are horrible illustrations of the barbarity of the old French law. He was broken on the wheel, after being frightfully tortured, and several of his companions met with the same fate. It is remarkable that, after going through the torture—which one would have supposed was the hardest trial of all—-these poor wretches made a whole series of confessions with no other object than that of putting off their death during the short time occupied in making them. In consequence of these disclosures, between 200 and 300 persons were arrested, all of whom, if we rightly understand M. Sanson, were punished, many being either hung or broken on the wheel.

In 1726 Charles Sanson died, and was succeeded by his son Jean Baptiste, who at the time was only seven years old. His mother, however, made interest for him, and succeeded in having him appointed to his father’s place. As he could not perform the duties of the office personally, he was brought up, whenever an execution took place, to look on and legalize the proceedings, which were conducted by people hired for the purpose. As Sanson remarks, he was too young to keep a journal, and therefore nothing but traditions of his impressions survive. Considering that these impressions relate to scenes of the most exquisite torture, prolonged sometimes over several hours, he certainly must have had the strangest education that ever fell to a child’s lot. It is difficult to the imagination to realize the fact that, within a hundred and forty years, it was considered impossible in Paris to have a man properly broken on the wheel unless a little child of seven years old stood by to see it done decently and in order. In 1754 Jean Baptiste was struck by paralysis at the age of thirty-five, and it may be charitably hoped that the terrible scenes in which his early life had been passed had something to do with it. This was a fortunate deliverance for him, for in 1757 an incident occurred which may be considered as the culminating point of the old system of executions, and as the most shameful and horrible scene that has in modern times disgraced a civilized country by public authority. This was the execution of Damiens. He appears to have been a half-rogue, half-madman, and, partly from excitement, partly from a prurient love of crime, he inflicted a wound on Louis XV. which might have been serious if he had used the large blade of his knife instead of the small one. For this offense he was first frightfully tortured at Versailles itself. The garde des sceaux, having, as soon as he was arrested, amused himself by heating the tongs red hot and pinching his legs with. them, he was then strapped down on a mattress in the Conciergerie in such a way that he could hardly move hand or foot for nearly two months. After this, he was put to the torture of the boot, and at last his hand was burnt with sulphur, while the fleshy parts of his body were torn with rod-hot pincers, and the wounds scalded with melted lead, wax, sulphur, and resin. Finally, he was quartered by four horses, the whole operation lasting for about three hours in broad daylight in the most public part of Paris.

This part of the story was sufficiently familiar long ago. But M. Sanson gives it from the executioner's point of view. The proper person to execute the sentence was a certain Gabriel Sanson, who was the Court executioner—a species of sinecure which for this once became an insupportable burden. Gabriel was altogether incompetent to do the work, and had to let his nephew, Charles Henry, the son of Joan Baptiste, to help him. Charles Henry was only seventeen, but he appears to have been equal to the occasion. He got together his staff, one of whom was an old torturer, who in his youth had heard, as a tradition of his family, all the details of the execution of Ravaillac. They contrived between them to go through the business. M. Sanson tells the story with hideous accuracy. He knows the names of all the assistants, one of whom got drunk before the execution began, and failed to bring the proper materials, whilst another undertook the most horrible part of the task for a special fee of 100 livres. Gabriel Sanson resigned his office in his nephew's favour, and the nephew himself thus began a career which has given his name as unenviable an immortality as has fallen to the lot of almost any human creature who was not a positive criminal.  He was the Sanson of the Reign of Terror.

Before arriving at this eminence, he passed through a variety of strange experiences. He and his father, Jean Baptiste who came forward on that occasion only, beheaded the famous Lally De Tollendal. M. Sanson works up the story of the execution into a romance. Lally, when a young man, he says, happened with a party of friends to lose his way, and was taken in by Jean Baptiste Sanson, who that night gave his marriage supper. After the ball, having learnt his host's name, Lally asked to see the tools of his trade, and had his fancy greatly taken by a particular sword with which Sanson promised, in case of need, to behead him. Thirty-five years afterwards he was beheaded accordingly. The old man came with the intention of merely looking on, but the young Charles Henry having made a false stroke which inflicted only a wound, the old man seized the sword and cut off Lally's head with his own hand. The present M. Sanson says that his grandfather told him this story. There is a difficulty in point of dates about it which makes the whole matter suspicious. Jean Baptiste Sanson, we are told, was seven years old when his father died in 1726. He was therefore born in 1719. But Lally was beheaded in 1766, and if Sanson's marriage took place thirty-five years before—namely, in 1731—he must have been married at the early age of twelve. This makes a considerable hole in the fidelity of M. Sanson's traditions.

Soon after executing Lally, Charles Henry Sanson had to execute the Chevalier De la Barre, who was supposed to have been guilty of profanity at Abbeville. A crucifix had been disfigured, and as it was proved that De la Barre had on another occasion passed a procession without taking off his hat, he appears to have been made responsible. He showed wonderful courage at his execution, refusing even to kneel down, and Sanson, to make up for his mistake in the case of Lally, cut off his head so neatly that it did not fall for the first moment. The execution of La Barre was one of the last of the old aristocratic executions. Several others which took place before the French Revolution are referred to by M. Sanson, but they are not interesting except for their horror, and the history of the crimes which led to them is thrown into a quasi-romantic shape. He gives a long account, for instance, of the last occasion on which the punishment of the wheel was employed. A young man who had killed his father—as he said by accident, as the Court found by design—was sentenced to undergo this punishment at Versailles in 1788. The mob rescued him, and burnt the wheel and the scaffold on the spot. One of their number is represented as observing very appropriately to Sanson, “Laissons l'enfer au bon Dieu.” The wonder is how so hideous a spectacle was ever permitted. The description of it makes the blood run cold. The criminal's arms and legs were smashed in eight places with a heavy iron bar, he received a ninth blow over the chest, and was then laid over a wheel placed horizontally on the scaffold till he died. This punishment was horribly common. It was, for some strange reason, the favourite punishment of the Parliament of Paris, and when they decided on appeals from inferior jurisdictions, the common result, if we are to believe M. Sanson, was the substitution of the wheel for the gallows. Such, up to the time of the Revolution, were the official duties of the Parisian executioners. Their descendant gives a singular picture of their private life. Jean Baptiste Sanson was very fond of anatomy, and had a great practice amongst both rich and poor, of whom, as his great grandson observes, the first paid him very handsomely, whilst the others received advice gratis. He was a very busy man. There was a good deal of correspondence about provincial executions, and, as he was at the head of his profession, all the young country executioners used to come to his house as pupils before entering on their own professional careers. The executioners formed a kind of clan; for obvious reasons they intermarried almost exclusively amongst each other. Jean Baptiste had a large family, and his sons became executioners in every part of France. They used to come home at Christmas, and in order to avoid the difficulties which arose from the variety of Christian names, the servants (who were assistant executioners) spoke of them as M. de Strasbourg, M. d’Orleans, &c., the head of the family or caste being “M. de Paris.”

Jean Baptiste Sanson was a good deal reduced from the splendour of his ancestors in the matter of money. His ancient droit de havée was commuted for sixteen thousand livres a year, very irregularly paid. At one time he received from the Regent fifty thousand livres in Law's notes. These were the greenbacks of the period. “I have them still,” says M. Sanson, “in the pocket-book where they were put at the end of the audience.” M. Sanson's own recollections of the vestiges of the old régime in which he and his ancestors played so singular a part are exceedingly curious. He recollects an old man, called Chesneau, who gave him a gun in 1803, and who was then a sort of pensioner at large in the family house of M. de Paris. This old man had been a servant of the Comte de Charolais, who laboured (falsely according to M. Sanson) under the imputation of having shot a tiler to amuse himself, and of having been pardoned by Louis XV, with the pleasing observation that a pardon was ready for any one who liked to assassinate the Comte de Charolais. From the service of the Comte de Charolais, he passed successively into those of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., whom he served as a gunmaker.  In the course of his career, Sanson cured him of a wound caused by the bursting of a gun; and when his last master was turned out of house and home by the Revolution, M. Chesneau betook himself to his old friend the executioner.  By way of paying for his board, he made him all sorts of handsome arms, and at last took to grinding the knife of the guillotine, and setting its grooves to rights. He thought the least he could do for his old friends was to have their heads cut off promptly and smoothly. “Tuez-les,” he said to the servants, “puisqu'on vous y force, mais ne les massacrez pas.”

The luxurious and patriarchal position of the old executioners passed away, like other picturesque but cumbrous institutions, after the Revolution; but, for about two years, the Sanson family put into such a position as no people ever occupied before in a civilized country. Charles Henry Sanson kept a journal during the Reign of Terror, of which his grandson, who well remembers him, has republished the greater part. There is a dreadful sameness about it which is not unimpressive. Day after day comes a long list of persons—some known to all the world, others completely obscure—whom he and his assistants put to death by tens, by twenties, and at last by fifties at a time. Some of the scenes which he describes, such as the execution of the King, and those of Charlotte Corday, the Girondins, Danton, and Robespierre, are matters of history, but a few are less well known. Perhaps the most singular is the account of the execution of the magistrates of the old Parliament of Paris, from whom for nearly forty years Sanson had taken his orders. He was, he says, horrified at what he had to do, and at the dignified courage of the sufferers. One venerable old President encouraged him in his task:—“Faites, la loi même injuste est toujours la loi.” The particular men were no doubt worthy of pity and respect, but the thought of their own sentences, the wheel, the pincers, and the torture-chamber, recalls other recollections. There is something very impressive in their destruction by the very man who had at their bidding performed such indescribable cruelties. Of all the revolutionary executions, those of Fouquier Tinville and Hebert perhaps inspire the most disgust. The brutal ferocity of the first ruffian and the contemptible cowardice of the second are illustrations of the capacity of human nature for infamy which will hardly be surpassed.

After finishing his grandfather's journal, M. Sanson comes down to his father's and his own experiences. They are not very impressive—indeed, they take the form of short notices of the most remarkable crimes of the first half of the present century. To do M. Sanson justice, they are not at all prurient. He obviously has a genuine hatred for capital punishments, and 's real disgust at having been so long concerned in them. Personally, both he and his father were little more than sinecurists. Their business was to be present at executions, and to give the signal for the fall of the knife; but they never even ascended the said themselves, so that there was nothing menial in their occupation, It is not surprising that in course of time it should have occurred to the Government that 400L. a year was a high salary to pay to a man who did absolutely nothing except nod to his servant to pull a cord; and in the year 1847 the last of the Sansons—much to his delight, as he says, and as we can readily believe—laid down for ever the position of M. de Paris, which he and his ancestors had held for nearly 160 years.

The Mémoires des Sanson are intended by their author to furnish an argument against capital punishments, but they add nothing to a very old controversy. They prove abundantly that an execution is a very dreadful thing, but that is the case for the other side. We do not hang people to please them. If an execution was not horrible, it would not be worth while to have executions. The only arguments in the book, if they can be so called, consist in dwelling upon the old phrases about the sacredness of human life. One of the strongest reasons for upholding capital punishment is that they are a practical protest against a monstrous absurdity which these words, as generally used, assert. They are a protest against the notion that mere animal existence has anything specially sacred about it; and they emphatically assert the true doctrine, that many other things are much more important, and that a man cannot behave himself with moderate inoffensiveness in this world, he ought to be turned out of it. What would have been the good of keeping a man like Palmer or Rush, or like the assassin Lacenaire, whom M. Sanson executed, locked up for life in some dungeon? He is much better dead. There is a limit of atrocity, after passing which it may fairly be said that a man has had his chance, and shown himself a public evil unfit to be tolerated any longer. To hang him, or cut of his head  and have done with him, is a much better way of recognising this fact than to shut him up, perhaps for thirty or forty years, in a cell where he can do nothing worth doing.  It may be said he could repent. For aught we know, he can do that just as well elsewhere. We can hardly suppose that the justice and mercy of God depend upon the acts of man. At all events he is not fit for this world, and it is with this world that we are concerned, and for it and its interests that our laws ought to be made. To admit that mere animal life, mere physical existence, is so sacred a thing that it ought in no case to be taken away, that it is in no degree dependent upon human conduct, is to fly in the face of all the analogies of nature, and to admit a doctrine which is fundamentally base and cowardly.

M. Sanson constantly dwells on the inconsistency which he says exists between the popular contempt for executioners and the legalization of capital punishments. Why despise a man for discharging a lawful and necessary act? The answer is plainness itself. Executioners are despised, not for doing a lawful and necessary act, but for choosing for their profession a way of life which can please no one but a brute; and every one is presumed to like his profession. An execution is a necessary and righteous act, but it is a dreadful one, and it is rendered necessary by the humiliating fact that human nature is very far no from righteousness. It is also an act which requires no remarkable gifts, either mental or bodily, and which is free from all risk. Hence, if a person voluntarily makes his living by hiring himself out to perform these acts, it is impossible not to have a low opinion of him. No one in England thinks the worse of a sheriff for putting to death, by his paid agent, a man convicted of murder; for he is bound by his oath, and compelled by the law of the land, to do so. No one ought to blame him if he did it himself, supposing that no agent was to be found; and, in fact, no one thinks of blaming soldiers or sailors who take part in a military execution. But where a man chooses for money to undertake such a duty, he can hardly complain if the public at large think that he shows a degraded character. M. Sanson’s own book shows conclusively that his family did so for generations. His own reason for adopting the profession was, he says— no doubt truly—that he wished to please his father, who would have felt that, if his son refused the office, ho would show disrespect to those who had held it. All that can be said is, that the father asked the son to sacrifice himself, and that the son did so; but how could the public know anything of that? With the elder Sansons—with Jean Baptiste, or rather with his mother, and with Charles Henry—the place was obviously an object of ambition, and it would not be easy to persuade any reasonable person to doubt that the high pay attached to the place had as much to do with this as more sentimental reasons. The true inference from M. Sanson’s book is that, like many other French institutions, the institution of executioners was monstrously absurd. The English plan is obviously the right one. Compel the sheriff to execute all judgments, and leave him to provide for details.

It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the old French criminal law was so horribly cruel that no one who voluntarily associated himself with the worst part of its cruelties can escape a certain share of blame. This, no doubt, bears on the judges as well as on the executioner; but they had other functions to discharge of the highest importance, and calling for the exercise of the highest powers. The executioner had only to mangle and torture living creatures as a wild beast might have mangle them. The morals of one age are not those of another, but it is hard to acquit entirely the man who lived by breaking people on the wheel. Even those who accepted an office of which it was one of the duties to cause people to be broken on the wheel, after being horribly tortured, stand in a rather questionable position. There is a point at which the fact that a system exists does not excuse those who work it. If a general ordered a soldier to shoot prisoners of war in cold blood, it would be hard to excuse the soldier, and the old French penal law came unpleasantly near the line. The same, indeed, may be said of some of our own laws. It would not be pleasant for a man to think, in old age or on a dying bed, that he had in his youth contributed, as a barrister or as a judge, to the execution of a number of poor wretches for shoplifting or sheep-stealing. As to the Reign of Terror, it is surely not unjust to say that a man of the proper stamp would have said, “No earthly power shall make me the agent of your infernal butcheries. Exterminate me and mine if you will, but I will have neither part nor lot in the guilt of your den of assassins.” A man is not to be blamed for not being a hero, but neither is he to be praised for it. Charles Henry Sanson had the opportunity of doing an act of heroism of no common order. He thought of it, his grandson tells us, his wife urged him to it, and he shrank from it for the sake of his son. It may be doubted whether his grandson ought to thank him, though no one who has not been tried has the right to condemn him.

Saturday Review, November 7, 1863.

Edmund Burke

Review of:
“History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke” (by Thomas Macknight, 1858)

It would be difficult to say anything new of Burke as a statesman or as an orator, but there is still room for a faithful record of his personal character and history. Two bulky volumes devoted to a portion of his Life and Times, offer much that is superfluous, and may perhaps not present the individual portrait which is wanting. "Mr. Macknight is a laborious and useful writer, who, after condemning himself to the invidious task of composing a hostile life of a living politician, now revels in the opportunity of indulging a genuine biographical passion for a not unworthy object. If the annals of George III. had been buried in oblivion, instead of occupying innumerable letters, memoirs, essays, commentaries, and compilations—if Fox and Pitt, Grenville and Sheridan, had been unknown to fame—a Life of Burke might naturally have been extended into a contemporary History of England but the story of the American War, the Coalition, and the India Bill may be repeated too often. Within three or four years the Memoirs and Correspondence of Fox and the Grenville Papers have partially satisfied the popular curiosity which may be supposed to have concerned itself with the fate of the Rockingham party. It is much to be wished that biographers would assume in their readers some knowledge of the general facts of history; for it is impossible to study the siege of Troy from its commencement to the close, as often as the Cyclic poets think fit to celebrate the separate adventures of each associated chieftain. There was a time when every private bill for a canal or railway contained all the necessary provisions for purchases, works, capital, and administration; but the Legislature long since found it necessary to frame a few general enactments, which now regulate the common arrangements of all such undertakings. A Consolidation or History-Clauses Bill, to be incorporated in all biographies of the eighteenth century, would be a valuable boon to students of limited voracity. The Chinese themselves at last discovered that it was inconvenient to burn down the house as often as they had occasion to roast a pig.

It may be added that Burke, although he was in many respects superior to all his contemporaries, was not the central figure of the age. After furnishing the Rockingham Opposition with a policy through his speeches and pamphlets, he willingly acquiesced in the leadership of Fox; and when his later writings were laying the foundation of modern Liberal Conservatism, Pitt was the undisputed champion of authority and resistance. An intelligent Asiatic who attended a debate in the House of Commons about the close of the last century, said that the Minister appeared to him as a professor instructing his pupils. Burke was a far more learned teacher, and he was at all times ready to lecture, but he never found or commanded an equally docile audience. Mr. Macknight naturally exaggerates the supremacy of his hero with a zeal which betrays itself often in inflated language, and sometimes in useless resentment against the dulness and injustice which allowed him to occupy a subordinate position. The possession of power depends, however, on a combination of character and circumstances, and it may well happen that an orator “fraught with all learning" may be deficient in the art of governing men, or in that of persuading them to be governed.

Mr. Macknight's tendency to magniloquence displays itself on some occasions where, it is not excused by his biographical loyalty to his hero. Like many writers of the present day, he is ironical without humour, and familiar, abrupt, or excited where a level narrative would have expressed his meaning far more forcibly; but his most ambitious bursts of eloquence are reserved for o: of sweeping eulogy. The style of a forgotten pamphlet becomes, in his description, “this inimitable weapon, so bright and so powerful, and of which the rust of a century has not blunted the edge, forged in the true Vulcanian smithy and gleaming with an immortal radiance.” Hamilton, losing Burke's services—

‘struck a coward's blow, expecting that his slave would fall and beg for mercy at his feet. To his amazement the slave rose up in all the pride of insulted manhood and moral dignity, and as he towered above his oppressor flung the yellow shackle (i.e., a pension of £300 a year on the Irish establishment), in his face, thus preferring to the luxuries of a menial dependence, his freedom and the unpensioned desert. Yes! the slave was free. The Ariel had found within himself the power to effect his own emancipation, and feeling superior to the sordid elements he had escaped from, could now soar proudly to the highest heaven.’

 In other words, Burke left Hamilton, and soon after attached himself to Lord Rockingham—certainly a more desirable patron or Prospero. The deserted Single-speech Sycorax was—

‘as the slave in the triumphal procession, through a long series of years fated to behold in ignominious silence the illustrious progress of the man whom he had attempted to degrade and to dishonour. He saw him [perhaps this is an anticlimax] become the confidential Secretary of a high-minded statesman. He saw him enter the House of Commons. . . . . He saw him, &c. &c. He saw him, &c. &c. He saw him rise with unexampled rapidity to the first rank among the Parliamentary speakers of his time. He saw him advance from yictory to victory, until Europe and America were filled with his fame, and he became universally acknowledged to be the most richly gifted of politicians, the most eloquent of writers, and the most imaginative and comprehensive of orators that the world had ever seen. All this, and more than this, Hamilton had silently to see.’

Hyperbolical phrases of this kind tend rather to provoke contradiction than to exalt the glory which they are intended to celebrate. The test of oratory is success with the audience immediately addressed; and when it is admitted that Burke was sometimes thought tedious, it is idle to reproach the House of Commons with the bad taste of its impatience. His knowledge of individual character was undoubtedly defective, so that he exercised comparatively little influence over his personal friends; but it may be doubted whether the powers of Fox or of Pitt, added to his own, would have enabled him to rise to the first rank in a party which never professed to class its members in the exact order of capacity or merit. Burke, deliberately associated himself with an aristocratic body, in the belief that the influence of rank and property furnished the best security for the maintenance of constitutional liberty. In the speech on Economical Reform, in the Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, and on many other occasions, he entered into the elaborate justification of his attachment to the party connexion which he had chosen:--

‘If [he said, in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol] I have wandered out of the paths of rectitude into those of interested faction, it was in company with the Saviles, the Dowdeswells, the Wentworths, the Bentincks—with the Lennoxes, the Manchesters, the Keppels, the Saunderses—with the temperate, permanent, hereditary virtue of the whole House of Cavendish—names among which some have extended your fame and empire in arms, and all have fought the battle of your liberty in fields not less glorious.’

Burke was well aware that he had himself done more to serve the common cause than all the members of the great Whig families whom he vouches as sureties for his patriotism; but he also knew that, except as the adherent of a great aristocratic league, he would have found himself wholly powerless. When the struggle of fifteen years was at last rewarded by a passing success, it was not surprising that the Treasury was occupied by a Wentworth, the Admiralty by a Keppel, or that the Exchequer was dignified by the temperate, permanent, and hereditary virtue of Lord John Cavendish. The great orator who, at the Foreign Office and in the House of Commons, directed and inspired the whole Administration, was himself a nephew of the house of Lennox; and the gifted son of a Dublin attorney thought that he had no reason to complain because he was relegated to the inferior office of Paymaster of the Forces. The party had, rightly or wrongly, devoted all their energies to counteract the King in his supposed policy of aggrandizing the preroative. Burke himself had taught them that “Kings are naturally overs of low company—they are so elevated above the rest of mankind, that they must look upon all their subjects as on a level;" and he had recorded with complacency the observation that “men of condition naturally love to be about a court; and women of condition love it much more.” It would have been an inconsistency unworthy of the dignity and modesty of his character, if he had claimed in his own favour an exemption from the natural conditions of an aristocratic connexion and policy.

 It was not surprising that the numerous enemies whom he provoked should designate their opponent as an Irish adventurer, or his personal circumstances might excite a reasonable suspicion when he had not yet disarmed calumny by a life of disinterested purity. In 1761, he had been willing, as a penniless man of letters, to follow the fortunes of Gerard Hamilton, then Secretary at Dublin. In 1768, without any ostensible accession of fortune, he purchased the not inconsiderable estate of Gregories, with a house which, according to his biographer, “was very pleasantly situated, and with its noble colonnades and graceful porticoes, its statuaries, paintings, gardens, conservatory, and pleasure grounds, all arranged with excellent taste, and carefully kept in order, had a most refined and even classical appearance.” Mr. Macknight mistranslates a well-known quotation when he represents, Johnson as simply admiring the splendours of Beaconsfield. Non equidem invideo, miror magis, was a natural remark from a visitor who had known the owner of the house in his humbler days. It would have been illiberal to grudge splendour and luxury to one who so well deserved them fit it was certainly a matter of wonder that they should have been so easily acquired. Mr. Macknight perhaps furnishes a sufficient explanation of Burke's comparative prosperity. His brother Richard and his kinsman William Burke had speculated largely and successfully in India Stock, and a part of their gains was certainly invested in the new purchase. At a later period, Lord Rockingham, who had already lent or given considerable sums for the same purpose, advanced the means of paying off the encumbrances held by the family, and at his death he discharged Burke by his will from all liabilities to his estate. The total amount of these benefactions was not less than £30,000, a sum which may have considerably exceeded the purchase money of Gregories. For three or four years Burke held, with questionable propriety, the agency for the Province of New York, with a salary of £500 a year. During his brief tenure of the Paymastership he received £400 a year, and in his old age his public services were scantily rewarded by the pension which occasioned his famous letter to the Duke of Bedford. His narrow means were rendered still more insufficient by a princely liberality, which resulted equally from his disposition and his principles. He advised his son, then entirely dependent on himself, always to give away something, however poor he might be, if only that he might not lose the habit of giving. His generous patronage of Crabbe, and of Barry the painter, proves his discrimination as well as his liberality. Mr. Macknight copies from a predecessor the pleasant story of his good nature in treating all the children at an Irish fair to a strolling theatrical exhibition:--‘This must be my own pleasure,” he said to a friend who offered to share the expense; “I shall perhaps never again have the opportunity of making at so small a cost so many human beings happy.”

Burke would have exercised a wider influence if he had lived in the days of full Parliamentary reports. His speeches are almost undistinguishable from his written compositions, and while his pamphlets might have been spoken with effect, the logical and elaborate arguments which he addressed to the House of Commons would have gained rather than lost by being read. It was not unnatural that he should take an active part in modifying or suspending the privileges of the House in favour of newspaper printers. Thus, in the singular language of his present biographer, “the foul spectre which darkness had engendered shrank away from that glorious Lucifer, son of the morning, the reporter in the gallery.” In those days, however, Parliament kept better hours, so that, even when Burke was speaking, the reporter seldom found himself, like the morning star, adorning the gallery at two or three o'clock in the morning. The faithful biographer naturally protests against Goldsmith's admiring satire on the orator:—

‘Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,
And thought of convincing while they thought of dining.’

 It appears, in fact, that at the time to which the poet refers Burke was in the habit of speaking, not while his hearers were waiting for dinner, but at an hour still more unfavourable to patience and attention—when they had not only dined, but sat long after dinner. A House with a third of its members the better or the worse for wine, must certainly have furnished a troublesome audience to the most systematic and voluminous of speakers. It would not be difficult to show that Goldsmith's graceful criticism is in other respects unfounded. A man of genius, fraught with all statesmanlike learning, was better employed “straining his throat” to influence the House of Commons than in any other position or occupation which fortune could have offered; for what he gave to his party was then most directly applied to the service of mankind. The charge of unseasonable profundity and unintelligible refinement is perfectly inapplicable to an orator who never lapses into obscurity, enigma, or paradox. It is highly probable that Burke may have been too honest, too wise, and often too long for his hearers; but the strain which was imposed on their continuous endurance involved no effort of concentrated attention. His speeches are so full, so lucid, and so flowing, that they require no collateral study to render them interesting to readers in the present day who are only moderately, well informed. The famous exposition of his plan of Economical Reform, although the topic might even at the time have been thought dry and repulsive, may still amuse and interest a generation wholly indifferent to the obsolete jobbery of the eighteenth century. The ingenious devices of corruption were sufficiently ludicrous in themselves, although their assailant was certainly not a deep or subtle humorist. The failure of previous schemes of reform, “because the King's turnspit was a member of Parliament,” was the most effective of ready-made epigrams:—

‘The King's domestic servants were all undone, his tradesmen remained unpaid and became bankrupt, because the turnspit of the King's kitchen was a member of Parliament. His Majesty's slumbers were interrupted, his pillow was stuffed with thorns, and his peace of mind entirely broken, because the King's turnspit was a member of Parliament. The judges were unpaid, the justice of the kingdom bent and gave way; the Foreign Ministers remained inactive and unprovided; the system of Europe was dissolved; the chain of our alliances broken; all the wheels of Government at home and abroad were stopped, because the King's turnspit was a member of Parliament.’

 Another passage from the same speech offers a good example of the plain idiomatic English which is the proper vehicle of contemptuous invective:—

‘The Province of Nova Scotia was the youngest and favourite child of the Board. Good God! what sums the nursing of that ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat has cost to this wittol nation! This colony has stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred thousand pounds. To this day it has made no repayment. It does not even support those offices of expense, which are miscalled its Government; the whole of that job still lies upon the patient, callous shoulders of the people of England.’

In language of this kind there is assuredly nothing too refined or too deep for the simplest hearer; but it may be admitted that Burke's oratory was unduly copious and didactic, and in his later years too elaborately gorgeous. The feelings and the reason are scarcely ever in full operation at the same moment. An elaborate demonstration, founded on an exhaustive collection of facts, must be addressed to a calm judgment inconsistent with the excitement which it is the function of eloquence to excite and to sustain.

Mr. Macknight has brought his narrative down to the death of Lord Rockingham, in 1780, including the brightest and happiest portion of his hero's career. The efforts of subsequent years were not less extraordinary, but they were frequently wasted and comparatively hopeless. The violent and one-sided prosecution of Hastings led to no satisfactory result; and even the protest against French Jacobinism, though it determined the course of English opinion for more than one generation, ultimately took the form of violent and exaggerated hostility to the inevitable progress of events. The veteran statesman at last became the dupe of unworthy French exiles, who played on his vanity and on his paternal affection by employing his son, in make-believe diplomacy, while they pretended to seek the father's advice in the hope of receiving his political support. The biographer will do wisely to approach the old age of Burke in a calmer and more critical frame of mind than that which has been applied to the efforts of his earlier manhood; yet some enthusiasm may be excused in an admirer who has long been engaged in the contemplation of an extraordinary intellect united with a blameless character. The greatest politician must sometimes be influenced by the illusions of the time, and it is easy to smile at the terror which the supposed projects of the Court excited in the minds of the Rockingham Whigs and of their illustrious partisan. The final triumph of the King in 1784 has not led to the consequences which contemporary patriots anticipated when they found that the political inheritance of the Duke of Newcastle had not devolved on Lord Rockingham; but if the policy which Burke shared with his party is obsolete, his larger and more distinctive political principles have become the rule of modern legislation and government. A sound political economist before Adam Smith, and a supporter of  Catholic Emancipation when Plunket and O'Connell were in their infancy, Burke repeatedly protested against paper constitutions and abstract theories of policy long before the French Revolution inoculated the world with a spurious and morbid Liberalism. It is in his speeches and writings that foreigners may study to the best advantage the principles which, in their historical operation, bear the name of the English Constitution.

Saturday Review, April 10, 1858.

Sir Archibald Alison

Review of:
“History of Europe from the commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815” (by Sir Archibald Alison, 1853-55)

In one way or another, Sir Archibald Alison contrives to be a good deal before the public. What with a History of Europe from 1789 to 1815, a ditto from 1815 to 1852, a Life of Marlborough, four or five volumes of Miscellaneous Essays, and “ laborious professional avocations"—which would seem, however, to have considerable “intervals,” inasmuch as they admit of the composition of such light reading as we have referred to—Sir Archibald, one would suppose, must find enough to do. But such is hardly his own opinion. Wherever Scotchmen congregate, Sir Archibald comes down, a Deus ex machina, a demigod with a return ticket, to deliver his judgment upon all things and persons, military and political. Within the last few months, besides a considerable amount of oratory, he has published the fourth volume of his History of Europe, No. 2, and completed the publication of a railway edition, in weekly numbers, of his History of Europe, No. 1. As it is upon the latter of these works that his reputation principally depends, we propose to confine our present remarks to it, or rather to that portion of it upon which those who do not profess to understand all arts and sciences can express an opinion. We can only say that if, when Sir Archibald writes upon tactics, he is as hasty, as inaccurate, and as illogical as he is when he writes about politics and literature, he ill deserves the reputation he has acquired as a military historian.

The mass of materials collected, and of books quoted by Sir Archibald is so great that it would be quite impossible, within our present limits, to attempt any kind of examination of any considerable part of them. Observing, therefore, that he has given the fullest facilities for the verification of his statements, and that hastiness and inaccuracy are the worst charges which can be brought against him, we must say that there are so many mistakes and contradictions apparent on the face of his book that we cannot but feel very great doubts as to his substantial accuracy in more important matters.

In vol. i. p.101, note, occurs a translation of Lacretelle's account of Damian’s execution which ends thus—“and finally he was broken on the wheel." Lacretelle's words are—"enfin on l'ecartela." If Sir Archibald did not know that “ecarteler” meant “to quarter," he might have remembered “Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel." In vol. ii. p.125, it is said that William Pitt was born “on the 28th May, 1759." In vol. ii. p. 126. he is spoken of as being “a young man of six and twenty" in January 1784. At p.127 of the same volume, we are told that Burke's “early proficiency in learning was not remarkable." Two sentences further on, it appears that he was sent to school at thirteen, where  his great powers soon developed themselves." Again, Sir Archibald says of the same great man, that whereas he was in the early part of his career distinguished for strength of judgment and memory, “it was not till late in life that his imagination shone forth with such lustre, a peculiarity common to him with Milton, Shakspeare, Bacon, and many other of the greatest poets and orators that ever existed." The thought is adopted (without acknowledgment) from a well-known passage in Mr. Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon, but Mr. Macaulay confined the parallel to Burke and Bacon. Sir Archibald has added Milton, Shakspeare, and the  many others," by way of a flourish. If he wrote less at random, he would remember that Lycidas is almost entirely composed of imagery, and that the most exquisite creations of Shakspeare’s imagination—Ariel and Caliban —are to be found in one of his earliest plays.

Sir Archibald has rather a turn for this kind of quasi plagiarism. Having in his mind Tindal's well-known description of Lord Chatham’s oratory (quoted by Mr. Macaulay), as being “less diffuse than Cicero, more ornamented than Demosthenes," he tries his hand upon Montesquieu in the same manner, and describes (i. p.75) his style as “less eloquent and ornate than the first of these Roman writers" (Cicero), “less condensed and caustic than the last" (Tacitus). It would have been well if Sir Archibald had remembered Mr. Macaulay 's criticism as well as his quotation:—“The vogue which this unmeaning phrase has obtained, may serve to show in how slovenly a way most people are content to think. It would be no very flattering compliment to a man's figure to say that he was shorter than the giant O'Brien, and taller than the Polish Count, thinner than Daniel Lambert, fatter than the Anatomic Vivante." In vol. ii., p. 122, occurs a paragraph, to which the reference in the Index is, “Slumber of the national mind of England during the 18th century." Considering that in this century there lived and died, amongst others, Addison, Swift, Pope, Bolinbroke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Butler, Hume, Reid, Mansfield, Thurlow, Johnson, Gibbon, Robertson, Burke, Chatham, Pitt, Henry and Charles Fox, Brindley, Arkwright, Watt, and John Hunter, this statement is surprising enough. But this is not all. It appears that during “the greater part of the 18th century, England slumbered on, contented, prosperous, and for the most part inglorious." Did Sir Archibald never hear of the establishment of the Indian empire, the conquest of Canada, the settlement of North America, the consolidation of the Revolution Government in spite of two unsuccessful rebellions, the great Parliamentary struggles which overthrew Walpole, and those which were excited by the arrest of Wilkes, the battle of Fontenoy, and the declaration of American independence? The negative of this question is supported by the circumstance that he goes on to assert that “the administration of Chatham and the victories of Frederick alone cast a fleeting lustre over the general monotony of the period." On the other hand, he mentions the victories of Rodney, the defence of Gibraltar, and the blockade of Plymouth, in the preceding page. The fact appears to be, that on that particular occasion Sir Archibald wanted to make a moral reflection about “the erroneous views of philosophers on the tendency of human affairs," to which he considered the paradox we have noted to be essential; and he consequently ventured on it, though it was not only absurd on the face of it, but was contradicted by the page before.

The truth is, Sir A. Alison's style is the necessary result of the fundamental fault of his history. It was, he informs us, “the recreation of many years during the intervals of laborious professional avocations.’ It bears every trace of its origin. To write the History of Europe from 1789 to 1815 would employ, not the leisure moments of one man, but the united labours of many. His book contains, as it at present stands, sketches of the history, geography, and social position of England, France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States of America. It comprises a detailed account of all the wars which occurred between the European nations during the period in question, besides Sir Arthur Wellesley's Indian campaigns. It gives the whole history of the internal government and policy of the principal nations concerned. It discusses the doctrines of some of the most remarkable writers of France. It glances at all sorts of subjects connected with the literary and moral condition of England. It aims at being a standard book upon tactics. In short, there is hardly a subject on which Sir A. Alison has not held a sort of amateur commission of oyer and terminer “in the intervals of laborious professional avocations." It is not given to any man to be, par parenthese, a Thucydides, a Tacitus, a Guizot, a Hallam, and a Jomini, all in one; and if he is determined to aim at this impossibility, he must wield a pen far more ready than impressive.

Accordingly we find that Sir Archibald writes a style which, whilst it has the great merits of clearness and vivacity, often in a remarkable degree, is extremely slipshod, incorrect, and slovenly. It abounds with strings of epithets, such as “the blood of the brave and persevering Romans, of the simple and honest Saxons, of the ruthless and rapacious Danes, and of the chivalrous and haughty Normans."—(ii. 112.) Next to double-barreled epithets, Sir Archibald's greatest predilection is for classical quotations and translations. With the second book of the Aeneid and other stock Latin he gets on pretty well; but if there is the slightest involution or delicacy in a sentence, he invariably misses it. In vol. i. p. 3, we have, “Non modo priores civitatis, quibus claritudo sua obsequiis protegenda erat, sed omnes consulares, &c., certatim exsurgerent foedaque et nimia censerent." The second clause is translated, "to whom their lustre should have proved a shield," instead of, “who had to protect their dignity by obsequiousness." How “obsequiis protegenda" could mean “prove a shield," is as inconceivable as the sense of the remark would be if it did. “Certatim exsurgerent foedaque et nimia censerent," is paraphrased by the unmeaning “vied with each other in base and disgraceful actions." The technical meaning of "censerent" is completely lost; “nimia," we suppose, stands for “disgraceful." If the word had had that meaning, Tacitus would hardly have coupled it with an adjective denoting “base.”

In p. 6 we are informed that πολιτική is the Greek for “a political body." At . 160, Calonne’s “if possible, it is done, if impossible, it shall be done," drew forth, in former editions, the following note, “Vulcan is represented by Homer as using the same flattery to Thetis—

τιλίσαι δί με θύμος άνωγει
έι όυναμύι τελίσαι γε και ίι τιτιλισμίνον ίοτι

So that Sir Archibald considered that it was the same thing to say, “I will do it if I can, and I will do it if I cannot.” In the resent edition, Pope's translation is substituted for the Greek, but Sir Archibald does not see that the note contradicts the text.

But our quarrel with Sir Archibald goes far deeper than mere inaccuracy of style, of statement, or of scholarship. He writes throughout in an ungenerous, and we will add, in an unphilosophical and unchristian spirit. His whole conception of the French Revolution is narrow and weak in the extreme. We may illustrate this by a juxtaposition of some of Sir Archibald's dicta with the corresponding reflections of Carlyle. The following is Sir Archibald’s criticism on the French peasantry for their conduct towards the noblesse. It is characteristically summed up in a marginal note—“Sins of the peasantry and people” (i. 314). After mentioning the slight resistance made by the monarchy to the revolution, he proceeds:—

‘Everything, therefore, called for humanity and moderation in the use of victory.  Never had so few deaths required to be avenged. Yet the people generally evinced the most savage and malignant spirit, and assailed the unresisting landlords  with a degree of barbarity of which history has preserved few examples. It was no excuse for these hideous atrocities that were avenging centuries of oppression and rising against the chains of feudal slavery. It belongs to God alone, and his inscrutable wisdom, to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. The French were unfit for liberty, and unworthy of that blessing, for they had not yet laid the corner-stone of the structure, in learning to be just.’

It is most true that the inscrutable wisdom of God alone can visit the sins of the fathers upon the children; but it is also true that the same wisdom alone can always apportion existing grievances between the fathers and the children. How much wiser are such words as these:—

‘Fancy, then, some five full-grown millions of gaunt figures, with their haggard faces, starting up to ask virtually this question, “How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you?" The answer can be read in flames over the nightly summer sky. “This is the feeding and leading we have had of you. Emptiness of pocket, of stomach, of head and of heart. Behold, there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature  gives her wild children of the desert—ferocity and appetite—strength grounded on hunger."

“It was thought," says Young, " the people from hunger would revolt, an we see they have done it. . . . . . . Ferocity, atrocity, hunger, and revenge" did “such work as we can imagine." “Judge not, that ye may not be judged," said a wiser than either of these writers. Which of the two best obeys the precept—he who states the fact, but does not presume to allot the guilt, or he who curses the French through many volumes, and determines, in several successive paragraphs, “who did wrong at this stage of the Revolution"?

With all his indignation, we cannot find that Sir Archibald has any particular principles, except hatred of “revolutions passions.’ He rages at them on every possible occasion. We have the most wonderful exposition of his principles upon this subject in vol. i. 207—9. “A Revolution," he says, “is the result of a diseased state of the national mind" (the italics are his own). It arises from a spirit “wholly distinct from the love of freedom." “Hypocrisy is the invariable characteristic of the Revolutionary principle." It is “characterized" always “by a total and avowed irreligion." The Revolutionist is “ever willing to fall down and worship the most frightful tyranny," and lastly, the “springs of Revolution are to be found in" the circumstances which give “vice an ascendancy over virtue."

This is meant for a description of Revolution in the abstract; but, in the next page, Sir Archibald is seized with an uneasy consciousness that, though it describes pretty accurately his own notion of the French Revolution, it does not fit any other. He wishes to argue that the events which took place in France illustrate the truth that Revolution is always diseased, hypocritical, atheistical, and tyrannical. It suddenly occurs to him that it would be hard to show that the Revolution of 1688 was tyrannical; that the League or the Huguenots were atheistical; that the Jacquerie was hypocritical, and so on. Finding, therefore, that the major premiss is inconveniently large, be cute it down to suit the minor. Wat Tyler's rising was not a revolution. The change of dynasty in 1688 "has been erroneously" so “called." Then the Puritans were not irreligious—so what is called the Great Rebellion was not a revolution. The Reformation was not a revolution. In short, the only revolution known to history (except one in Rome) was the French Revolution. When the major and minor coincide, the usual consequences follow; and we get the identical proposition, that, as there never was any revolution (worth speaking of) except the French, which was atheistical, tyrannical, hypocritical, &c" therefore all revolutions are atheistical, &c. There never was any genuine Alison except Sir Archibald, who is an historian; therefore all the Alisons are historians; and therefore Sir Archibald, being an Alison, is an historian. Apart from the logic, there is something pitiable in the narrow resumption of the conclusion. "It was the coincidence" of “the taille, the lettres de cachet, the privileges of the noblesse, and the sufferings of the peasantry," &c., “with a total disruption of the moral and religious bulwarks of society," which reduced the disaster of France. "Voltaire and Rousseau stand forth as the real authors of the Revolution; for it was they who tainted the mind, in both its assailants and defenders, with the fatal gangrene of individual selfishness." Sir Archibald does not see that he might as well any that it was the coincidence of a broken leg with pain that rendered amputation necessary.  Wisely says Mr. Carlyle, on the same theme, "To gauge and measure this immeasurable thing, and what is called account for it, and reduce it to a dead logic-formula, attempt not. Much less shalt thou shriek thyself hoarse cursing it, or that to all needful lengths has been already done."

It is not only in respect of France, however, that Sir Archibald self-sufficient verbosity is a grief to the spirit. His English politics are just as bad. For example, in vol ix. p.288, we have a wonderful jeremiad over the Sinking Fund. The 3rd March, 1813, was, it seems, “one of the most disastrous days ever known in England,"for on that day we first began to break in upon the system. After praising the Sinking Fund, however, through many volumes, in the most persevering manner, Sir Archibald at last finds out that it was, perhaps, a little unwise to pay our debts with borrowed money, especially when we borrowed at 5 1/2 or 6 percent to liquidate debts contracted at a lower interest. With characteristic versatility, he changes his ground as soon as the thought crosses his mind. It was not, he intimates (p.89), giving up the Sinking Fund, but giving up the extra taxes which supported it, which did the mischief. The answer is obvious—that it was not the Sinking Fund, but the surplus revenue, that did any good. In fact, the Sinking Fund was not, and could not be, anything but a particular way of applying the surplus revenue; and during a time of deficit it was not only useless, but cost large sums in management. Yet Sir Archibald has the naiveté to say, “If a man adopts a regimen which improves and ensures his health at ordinary times, we never think of condemning it because he accidentally takes the typhus fever, and during its continuance the good effects on the system are overlooked.” If a man improved his digestion, when in health, by walking round Hyde Park every morning before breakfast, we suppose that if he took a fever, Sir Archibald would advise him to keep up the habit by getting an expensive invalid carriage so contrived as to take him over his accustomed round without his being aware of it. In estimating the policy of repealing the Sinking Fund taxation on the return of peace, Sir Archibald never takes into account the increase of the material resources of the country, by the diminution of imposts. He seems to think that if a person, having a mortgaged estate, and paying interest at 4 per cent were to receive a legacy, and to invest it at 6 per cent, instead of paying off his debt, he would be as much a loser as if he threw the money into the sea.

If the peculiar Scotch doggedness and perversity which never will be convinced or comforted—which persists in considering England a ruined nation, and takes a gloomy pleasure in the contemplation of “the comer-stone of revolution, general corruption"—were relieved by Scotch humour or shrewdness, we should have more patience with Sir Archibald; but he has little appreciation either of the picturesque or of the ludicrous. Compare the following descriptions of the scene of “Oh, Richard! oh. mon Roi! "

This is Sir Archibald’s:—

‘At these sounds the transports of the moment overcame restraint; the officers drew their swords and scaled the boxes, where they were received with enthusiasm by the ladies of the court, and decorated with white cockades by fair hands trembling with agitation.’

And this is Mr. Carlyle's:—

‘Could feather-headed young ensigns do other than, by white Bourbon cockades, handed them from fair fingers, by waving of swords drawn to pledge the Queen's health, by trampling on national cockades, by sealing the boxes whence intrusive murmurs may come; by vociferation, tripudiation, sound, fury, and distraction within doors and without—testify what tempest-test state of vacuity they are in? Till champagne and tripudiation do their work, and all lie silent, horizontal, passively slum ring with meed-of-battle dreams.’

The following character of the Abbé Maury is by Sir Archibald:—

‘A vivid imagination, a memory richly stored with the image of the East, a happy power of applying the sublime language of Scripture, great facility of elocution, &c.  His speeches recalled those sublime instances of ancient heroism when the inspired prophets poured forth in burning strains against a blind generation thirsting for their blood, the awful denunciation of wrath to come.’

The same personage is thus depicted by Mr. Carlyle:

‘Mark, also, the Abbé Maury: his broad bold face, mouth accurately primmed; full eyes that ray out intelligence, falsehood, the sort of sophistry which is astonished you should find it sophistical. Skilfullest vamper up of rotten leather to make it look like new; always a rising man. Thou shalt have a cardinal’s hat and plush and glory; but, alas! also, in the long run, more oblivion like the rest of us, and six feet of earth! What boots it vamping rotten leather on these terms?’

Sir Archibald sketches Robespierre thus:—

‘Robespierre was a great, nay, in some respects he was a good man; but he was a sanguinary bigot, a merciless fanatic. His talents were of the very highest order; his eloquence was condensed, his reasoning powerful, his intellect cool, his sagacity great, his perseverance unconquerable [how all this reads like the newspaper puffs of the last new novel]. He adhered steadily to principle, and constantly appealed to it. . . . He was the incarnation of a principle, the touchstone of a system; that principle was the natural innocence of man—that system to do evil that good may come of it.’

On the other hand, Mr. Carlyle says:—

‘If Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these six hundred may be the meanest? Shall we say that anxious, slight, ineffectual man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eye (were the glasses off) troubled, careful, with upturned face snuffing dimlv the uncertain future time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green. With a strict, painful mind, an understanding small, but clear and ready, he grew in favour with official persons, who could foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quits free from genius.’

After all, in our days there are histories for women, for children, and for all sorts and conditions of men. And Sir Archibald writes for the majority. It would be ill-natured to deny him very great merits. He vies with Mr. Dickens in popularity, and we do not wonder at it. Much no doubt is due to the surpassing interest of the story, but a great deal is owing to the qualities of the writer. Though hasty and incorrect, his style is full of life, energy, and spirit. You see that his book is a labour of love, and he careers over all sorts of subjects with a cheerful gloominess and a complacent despondency which are by no means unpleasant condiments to a no very fastidious appetite. In describing the decline, and foreseeing the fall of his country, Sir Archibald is not inaccessible to the consolations which may be supposed to solace a cheerful undertaker as he looks on at a magnificent funeral. It is impossible not to feel kindly towards a man who so thoroughly enjoys himself. If he would have his hobby better broken-in and more carefully groomed, no one need desire a better animal. If his twenty volumes were cut down into some live or six, the rush and riot of life which now leads him into a thousand mistakes and inaccuracies would impart to his style a force which would raise him to a high rank amongst historians. As it is, he is not to be taxed with any of the graver historical sins. He is honest, impartial, and truthful, however inaccurate and illogical. His superiority to the herd of book-makers, who are the plague of the day, is for more marked than his inferiority to the great historians who are its glory.

Saturday Review, December 22, 1855.

Alexander Hamilton

Review of:
“Alexander Hamilton and his Contemporaries” (by Christopher James Riethmüller, 1864).

The name of Alexander Hamilton is well, though somewhat vaguely, known to the few Englishmen who are moderately well acquainted with the history of the United States; and Mr. Riethmüller has done a service to all who care to get a clear notion of one of the greatest events in modern history by writing his life in a short, clear, and interesting way. The book itself is not one of any great research, nor does it appear whether or not there are any materials for a life of Hamilton which it would be worth while to examine at the expense of any considerable amount of labour. Mr. Riethmüller seems to have written his book in England, and from materials accessible to every one, but he has put the result together with a good deal of literary skill and in an amusing form. His book has also the merit of being short. It is all to the point, and contains hardly anything which the reader feels inclined to skip. It has, however, one great defect; it is grievously bare of dates.

Alexander Hamilton appears to have been, in many respects, the most considerable man in the history of the American Revolution. He was born at Nevis, in the West Indies, on the 11th of January 1757, and was the son of a Scotch gentleman belonging to the great Hamilton family, who married a French Huguenot of the name of Faucette.  Alexander Hamilton was the only child of the marriage who grew up, and was left an orphan at an early age. After serving as a clerk in one or two merchants' offices, he was at last sent to King's College at New York, where he distinguished himself amongst the students for ability of various kinds. When the revolutionary war broke out, he betook himself to the study of fortification and gunnery, and got the command of a company of artillery, the good discipline of which attracted Washington's attention and led him to form the acquaintance of its captain, then a youth of about nineteen years of age. As the war went on, Hamilton was attached to the staff, and became a lieutenant-colonel and aide-decamp, and, finally, secretary to the Commander-in-Chief. He seems to have shown extraordinary ability in this position, especially when his youth and the extreme importance and delicacy of the business which he had to transact are taken into account. Every sort of negotiation was entrusted to him, and he drew up instructions, proclamations, and, in a word, all the documents which the management of the campaign required. On some occasions he had to assume responsibilities requiring personal qualities of a very uncommon kind. Thus, he gave peremptory orders to General Gates and General Putnam, in the full pride of the victory at Saratoga, as to the reinforcements which they were to forward to Washington; and he contrived to smoothe down the wounded pride of D'Estaing, the French Admiral, when he had been grossly insulted by a protest against his conduct by certain other American officers who charged him with deserting their interests. He also had the credit of dissuading Congress from accepting the invitation, made by the French Government at the suggestion of Lafayette, to join them in undertaking the invasion of Canada. Hamilton pointed out with extreme shrewdness the power which success in this enterprise would give to allies who cared far more for their own interests than for those of the United States. Hamilton also played an important part in the affair of Major André. He was at breakfast with Mr. and Mrs. Arnold at the very moment when Arnold made an excuse to leave the room and go on board an o ship of war, and he used every possible effort to overcome Washington's resolution to execute André as a spy. His want of success appears to have wounded him deeply and Mr. Riethmüller conjectures with much plausibility that the mortification which he then experienced was the real reason of his resigning his position on Washington’s staff shortly afterwards. The extreme triviality of the ostensible grounds of this proceeding certainly confirms this opinion. Washington found fault with Hamilton, using a rather sharp expression, for keeping him waiting for a minute or two; and Hamilton thereupon immediately resigned his position, and could not be persuaded even to receive the explanation which Washington was willing to give. During the remainder of the war Hamilton served as a colonel in the army, and in that capacity distinguished himself greatly, especially at the siege of Yorktown, where he was the first man who entered the redoubt the capture of which led to the capitulation of Cornwallis.

On the conclusion of the war, and at the age of twenty-five, Hamilton betook himself to the profession of the law. He practised at New York, then a place of only 25,000 inhabitants, and rose to eminence in his profession. He did not, however, neglect politics. On the close of the war, the Confederation fell into such confusion that it was nearly dissolved. Congress, as it was then constituted, could do no important act except with the consent of nine States, and the taxes necessary for carrying out Federal objects were raised and levied by the State Legislatures, and not by the central Government. In short, Congress had no power, or none worth speaking of. This was practically felt so deeply that little interest seems to have been taken in its proceedings. When Washington formally resigned the power he had enjoyed during the war, the representatives of seven States only took part in the ceremony; and when the Treaty of Peace with England was ratified, three-and-twenty members only were present, and it was many weeks before the attendance of even that small number could be secured. For several years the credit of the Confederation continued to sink, and it appeared likely to be altogether dissolved. Hamilton, however, by writing and speaking, called public attention to the subject; and after himself devising the scheme of a Constitution which he hoped would give national strength and unity to the States, he took a leading part in the debates in the Philadelphia Convention that at last agreed upon the Constitution which became the supreme law of the United States, and which Mr. Lincoln and others are now doing their best to explain according to their own views. The Convention sat through the summer of 1787, and by the middle of 1788 the Constitution was ratified by eleven States. Delaware adopted it in December 1787, and New York in July 1788. North Carolina and Rhode Island withheld their assent for a considerable time. The matter was hotly debated in New York, and at one moment that great State seems to have been inclined to try the experiment of setting up for itself. Virginia also showed extreme reluctance to come in. Indeed, in all the important States, the difficulties to overcome appear to have been extremely formidable.

Hamilton's original wish was to make the Constitution resemble the British Constitution as nearly as circumstances would permit. He would have reduced the separate States to the position of local governments, and have vested sovereign power in all respects in Congress. He wished the President to hold office for life, and to be removable only on impeachment by two-thirds of the Legislature, and the Senators to hold office during good behaviour, and to be removable only on legal conviction of some legal offence. To this great power he would have given absolute control over the whole population of the Union for all purposes. Every one knows how different was the result actually obtained. Hamilton, however, and the other members of the Convention agreed to sink their differences, to recommend the Constitution unanimously to the nation at large, and to do all in their power to get the different States to accept it. The slowness with which it was accepted shows how great were the difficulties of this enterprise. They were overcome to a great extent by the aid of the public press. Hamilton took a leading share in this, and explained and advocated his principles in a series of essays, collected under the title of the Federalist, which we hope before long to notice independently. It has certainly happened but seldom in the history of the world to a man of thirty to take so prominent a part in affairs of such importance. Mr. Riethmüller, not without justice, compares Hamilton with the younger Pitt, and the comparison is not without foundation. As soon as the Constitution was adopted, it had to be got into working order, and Washington was unanimously elected President. He appointed Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury. In that position Hamilton managed, though not without great difficulty, to prevail on Congress to fund the whole of the debts incurred in obtaining independence, whether the money was originally borrowed by the Confederacy or by the separate States, and without distinguishing, as many of his contemporaries wished to do, between the original lenders and those who had purchased obligations from others.

Jefferson was Secretary of State in Washington's first Cabinet, and was the head of the Republican, as Hamilton was the head of the Federalist, party. When the French Revolution broke out, the opposition between their views became at once manifest. Jefferson eagerly sympathized with the French, and strove to promote their interests, in every way in his power. He was the great patron of the French envoy Genet, whose extravagant antics—they deserve no better name—nearly involved the United States in war with England, and ended in the most outrageous violations of American neutrality and sovereignty. Amongst the many instances which history affords of a sort of iron in the current of human affairs, few are so well marked as that which is supplied by the end of Genet's career. After repeated acts of monstrous insolence he was at length recalled, on the remonstrances of the United States. He knew his own country too well to return to it, and preferred a quiet life as an American citizen in the land which he had insulted to a more or less glorious martyrdom in the streets of Paris.

Besides protecting and favouring Genet, Jefferson appears to have organized all sorts of ferocious attacks in the public papers on Hamilton. These attacks went so far as to give garbled extracts of letters which appeared to imply official, fraud, but which, on their full publication, turned out to involve nothing more than private immorality. Hamilton, though married, had a mistress, and his enemies had the brutality to force him to make this fact public in order to clear his official character. In the year 1795 Hamilton retired from office at the age of thirty-eight. He was disgusted with the treatment he had received, and was besides obliged to do something to provide for his family, who had been much neglected by his attention to public affairs. He continued, however, to advise the President, and to take a leading though a private part in politics. In 1798 the excessive insolence of the French Government brought the country to the brink of war, and the army was called out and reorganized. Washington was to be Commander-in-chief, and he nominated Hamilton as his second in command. Hamilton distinguished himself by his exertions in this capacity, but the quarrel with France was settled, and his active services were not required. This was the last of his public employments. He continued, however, for several years to direct the policy of the Federalist party, and to write on public questions.

It was in the course of these avocations that he provoked the enmity which brought his life to a tragical end. There was at New York a contemporary of Hamilton's whose career, alike in the revolutionary war, at the bar, and in politics, had run parallel to his own. This was Aaron Burr, a man whose life would afford an admirable subject for an historical romance. He was the grandson of the well-known theologian Jonathan Edwards, and the son of a Presbyterian minister, and was himself originally intended for the same profession. It seems probable, from his course of life, that he supplied one of the many instances in which the inhuman ferocity of extreme Calvinism has driven a powerful mind and a courageous temper into downright atheism. His whole career was marked by selfish ambition, no less than by extraordinary ability, and he was as immoral in private as in public life. At an early stage of his career, when they were both beginning to practise at the New York bar, Hamilton was disgusted with him, and Burr seems to have resented his aversion deeply. In the course of his various public employments Hamilton repeatedly crossed Burr's path, and inflicted on him defeat after defeat. At last Burr was chosen Vice-President, but was shortly after foiled, principally by Hamilton's interest, in the attempt to become Governor of the State of New York. Burr could not forgive this. With deadly malignity he contrived to fix on Hamilton a personal quarrel for which there was no real ground whatever. At the age of forty-seven, being one of the most important men in the State of New York, and the father of a family of seven children scantily provided for, Hamilton considered himself compelled to go out and fight. He solemnly recorded his conviction that he was doing an act wrong in the eyes of God and man, wrong towards his family and wrong towards his creditors, but he said he must do it, and this though his eldest son—a youth of twenty—had just before lost his life in the same way. He also recorded his resolution not to fire at Burr, at least not the first time. Burr shot him at the first fire, and Hamilton's pistol went off as he fell. He died two days afterwards. The rest of Burr's life was a continual romance. He attempted to set up a Western kingdom in the Valley of the Mississippi, was tried for treason and acquitted, and passed the rest of his life down to extreme old age in wandering over Europe.

The moral which Mr. Riethmüller constantly presses upon his readers is the degeneracy of American public men, and the fatal character of the democratic envy which has made them degenerate. Hamilton, he says, was the earliest victim of that indecent ferocity which, gradually increasing, has at last driven from political life in America all the men of highly cultivated minds, and made politics the profession of the worst part of the community. There is no doubt a good deal of truth in this, though it wants much additional explanation. One remarkable question is, how there came to be so many considerable men amongst the Americans at the time of the Revolution? The aristocratic constitution of some of the States, especially of Virginia, may have had something to do with it. Washington was a country gentleman. So was Jefferson, though he was the first founder of American democracy. But Hamilton, though a model of gentlemanly feeling and refinement of thought, did not owe these things to his circumstances. He began life at twelve, as a merchant's clerk, in the poorest circumstances. Franklin was a printer, and John Adams a Boston lawyer. Burr, who was in intellect far superior to any man brought forward by the present struggle, was a minister's son. These men and others, such as Jay and Randolph, displayed a degree of wisdom, moderation, and statesmanship which has hardly ever been equalled in the management of the affairs of any nation. Any one who knows what our colonies are may form some notion of the difficulty of the task which they performed by supposing himself charged with the duty of moulding into one homogeneous nation the communities which in the present day are scattered over Australia. Would any English statesman even think of such an undertaking? Yet these men actually accomplished it on a far larger scale, and in the face of much greater difficulties, and the work of their hands endured, with little serious difficulty and with gigantic effects, for more than seventy years. Even now, the framework which they set up has proved strong enough to withstand, more or less successfully, a strain of unparalleled violence, and to affect in the most powerful manner—how far for good, and how far for evil, no man living can even conjecture—the fortunes of an important section of the human race. It is a wonderful spectacle, and the great actors in it deserve, if ever men did, to be carefully studied and to have their work authentically described. Mr. Riethmüller has introduced Hamilton to Englishmen, and he has done so gracefully and pleasantly, but he only excites a curiosity towards satisfying which no living author has. done anything material. How came the great American Union into existence? why has it done so much, and why has it done no more? what does it teach as to the powers, and lead us to conjecture as to the destiny, of the richest, the most energetic, and the youngest member of the great family of nations? To be alive to the depth, interest, and difficulty of such questions is the next best thing to knowing the solution of them.

Saturday Review, February 13, 1864.

Voltaire's Essai Sur Les Moeurs

Review of:
Essai sur les Moeurs (by Voltaire)

The calibre of any one generation can hardly be better tested than by the views, which prevailed amongst its leading men of the generations which preceded it; and this is one of the many reasons which gives to general histories their great importance and interest. When we read a book which either is or has been a popular general history, we learn not merely particular facts of more or less interest and value, but we discover what views of their predecessors appeared natural to our predecessors, and this is in itself a most valuable piece of knowledge. In this point of view, Voltaire's Essai sur les Moeurs is, perhaps, hardly less interesting to the present generation than it was to those for whom it was written. It is a book typical of the age and of its author; and even now, after making from its intrinsic value all the deductions which increased knowledge and experience suggest, it is, for almost all practical purposes, the best—as, indeed, it is almost the only—book of the kind. Its extraordinary compression makes it difficult to give shortly any adequate, notion of its contents, but it is possible to describe its general character and method. It was originally written for Madame du Chatelet, Voltaire's mistress, known to the readers of Mr. Carlyle's Frederic II. as “the Divine Emilie:”—

‘You wish (says the author in opening his work) to overcome the disgust that you feel at modern history since the fall of the Roman Empire, and to get a general notion of the nations which inhabit and desolate the earth. You seek in this immense matter only what it is worth your while to know —the spirit, the manners, and the usages of the principal nations, proved by facts of which it is not permitted to be ignorant.

In short, Voltaire's plan was to boil down, as it were, all modern history into a very small compass, and to show shortly and pointedly what is the general result to be deduced from it. In the execution of this plan he begins by a short and pungent attack on the Old Testament. The chief points which he makes are that there is evidence that the world itself and human society are much older than the Old Testament, according to the interpretation of it then accepted, supposed them to be—that Jewish history ought not to be taken as the root of the history of the whole human race—and that both the characters and writing of the Jews showed marks of human infirmity. In order to do justice to this part of the book, which was naturally regarded at the time of its composition with the utmost horror, it is right to remember the circumstances under which it was written. A fair writer in the present day, even if he were not a Christian, would no doubt take a very different view of the Jews, of their history, and of their literature; but his readers, though Christians, would take a very different view of history and science from that which was held by any considerable body of Christians, especially by Roman Catholics, in Voltaire's time. In the present day, geological theories infinitely surpassing anything advanced by Voltaire are held without reproach by Church dignitaries; and such questions as those raised by Sir Charles Lyell's recent book on the probable antiquity of the so race are discussed upon their merits, and without the feeling that the establishment of the views of the scientific inquirer will of necessity be fatal to Christian belief. It is but justice to Voltaire to recognise the truth, that those who in the present day have the greatest horror of his name hold many opinions for holding which he was held in horror. They may not draw the inference which he drew from the fact that the world is more than six thousand years old, but they believe the fact, and if they had been living in his time they would, no doubt, have refused to believe it.

The heretical prologue to the Essai sur les Moeurs is the least interesting part of it. Its real interest is to be found in the attempts made by Voltaire to carry out his immense plan. He goes over the history of the whole world, selecting, with reference to every country in succession, such matters as appear to him instructive or characteristic, and giving a rapid, compressed sketch of them, stripped of all detail, and owing its value exclusively to the vigour of the style and to the interest of the subject-matter. The effect of this is surprising. The reader goes on from one striking sketch to another. His attention is constantly kept alive, and is rewarded at every page by something which, oft, he knew it before or not, he had never, seen put in so vigorous and lively a form. By degrees, the whole history of modern Europe, from the days of Charlemagne to the middle of the seventeenth century, passes before his eyes, and impresses on his mind a picture which is too crowded to be quite distinct, but which it is nevertheless extremely pleasant to contemplate. The Essai sur les Moeurs is a little—a very little — longer than Mr. Trollope's North America, and it claims, not without considerable plausibility, to give the net result of the history of the world for about a thousand years. It is a curious question why such an enterprise appeared possible to Voltaire, and why his attempt to achieve it earned universal applause; whereas, in our own days, such an undertaking would be received with universal ridicule. No doubt early schemes are usually more comprehensive than later ones. It is in the early stages of national existence that great institutions are founded, and it is in the early stages of inquiry that comprehensive literary schemes are carried out. In the middle ages, a complete education involved a degree of knowledge of all arts and sciences which, in relation to the existing sum total of knowledge, was no doubt considerable. Even in Voltaire's time, omniscience upon particular branches of knowledge was far from being such a chimera as it is now. The history of Europe for the preceding one thousand years was then what it now is, as far as the possibility of ultimately writing it was concerned. The original authorities were in existence, and were capable of being collected; but in the absence of the study which has been expended upon it for the last century, especially during the last two generations, its complexity, its intricacy, and its meaning were most imperfectly appreciated, and therefore it was by no means so hopeless an enterprise then as it would be now to try to collect into one book all that had been said on the subject which was worth saying. When the subordinate parts of so great a subject as the history of England, for instance, have been examined in minute detail by such writers as Palgrave or Hallam, the business of a general historian is simplified in one way, but in another his difficulties are greatly increased. He feels himself on much firmer ground, but he is made aware of the existence of a vast variety of questions which earlier writers did not handle, and he learns to see connexions and relations, formerly unsuspected, between matters which appear at first sight independent of each other.  The Essai sur les Moeurs may be described as an admirable summary of the substantial results of historical investigation up to the middle of the eighteenth century. It states, correctly enough for the purposes of a general view, the leading facts of the vast period of history over which it ranges, and it draws from them, not unfairly, such inferences as bare facts of that kind suggest. It leaves untouched the more subtle and accurate theories which history may be made to support, and its extent is of course incompatible with any attempt to be picturesque. On the other hand, every page of it is full of interest, and though it may contain errors of detail, its principal assertions are true, and the general outline which it draws affords to this day far the best chart of European history that at present exists. If it were not for the obvious objections attaching to Voltaire's name, and to his specific religious views, it would form a text-book which might serve as an incomparable introduction to almost every special branch of historical study.

The interest which the Essai sur les Moeurs derives from these great merits must, with most readers, be subordinate to that which belongs to it as a highly characteristic specimen of the thoughts and beliefs of the generation which must be regarded as the immediate progenitor of the state of society in which we at present live. The Essai sur les Moeurs represents what the first man of that age regarded as the net result of human history after it had been duly sifted and purged of useless or fabulous details. This was, as it were, the historical capital lying ready in a fixed available form for investment in practical pursuits, such as politics. It was the contribution of the most influential and thoughtful of all Frenchmen to the discharge of the tremendous tasks which the course of events had laid upon his country and generation. There can be few more interesting questions in their way than the questions, What did Voltaire suppose the history of mankind to prove? What in his eyes was the result of it all? What lessons did he believe it to afford for the guidance of his contemporaries?

In the first place, it is bare justice to a man who has met with little justice either from his friends or his enemies, to say that he seems to have been deeply impressed with the importance of these questions, and that he studied history, not merely as an occupation, or with a view to the gratification of his own curiosity—as was apparently, the case with Gibbon, a greater historian, though a far less considerable man—but because he did really believe that history might be made to teach valuable lessons to the human race, and because he had a genuine wish, though in some ways a very odd one, to benefit mankind. In every part of the book the moral of the story which he is telling is kept in view. No doubt Voltaire was as much pleased with the brilliancy of his own logic as a boy with a sharp pocket-knife, and this is the principal ground of the accusations of flippancy and heartlessness which are so often poured upon him. This, however, was a small matter after all. He was a man of very warm feelings, and had a hearty admiration for characters which appeared to him to deserve it; nor can it be said that the objects of his admiration were unworthy. It would be difficult, for example, to find a juster or more discriminating account of St. Louis than that which is contained in the Fifty-first Chapter of the Essai sur les Moeurs:—

‘Louis IX. (he says) appeared a prince destined to reform Europe if it could have been reformed; to make France triumphant and well governed, and to be in everything a model to men. His piety, which was that of an anchorite, deprived him of no royal virtue. A wise economy did not interfere with his liberality. He reconciled profound policy with exact justice, and is, perhaps, the only sovereign who deserves that praise; prudent and firm in counsel, intrepid in war without rashness, as compassionate as if he had always been unhappy. It is not given to man to carry virtue further.’

This is not the way in which mere scoffers write. Those who would stigmatize Voltaire as such overlook, or are ignorant of, many of the most striking features of his histories. His religious belief, as far as it went, was perfectly sincere, and he was far from being blind to the good which religious institutions have done in the world. The following passages are very characteristic, though few readers would perhaps recognise them, in the first instance, as Voltaire's:-

‘It was long a consolation to the human race that there were such asylums (monasteries) open to all those who wished to avoid the oppressions of the Gothic and Vandal governments. Almost every one except the lords of castles was a slave. Men escaped tyranny and war in the gentle cloisters. The feudal laws of the West, it is true, forbade a serf to be received as a monk without his lord's leave, but the convents knew how to evade the law. The little knowledge which remained amongst the barbarians was perpetuated in the monasteries.’

. . . . 

It cannot be denied that there have been great virtues in monasteries. There is hardly a monastery which does not contain admirable souls which are an honour to human nature. Too many writers take pleasure in seeking out the disorders and vices by which these asylums of piety have been sometimes soiled. It is certain that secular life has always been more vicious, and that the greatest crimes have not been committed in monasteries. Such as have, have attracted more attention from their contrast with the rules.’

The following criticism on the Papal power is still more remarkable. It occurs in the chapter on Henry II. and Becket:

‘The interest of the human race requires a check on the power of sovereigns for the protection of the people. This religious check might, by general agreement, have been put in the hands of the Popes. . . . These pontiffs, by interfering in temporal quarrels only to appease them, by warning kings and peoples of their duties, by rebuking their crimes, by reserving excommunications for great atrocities, would have been always regarded as the images of God upon earth; but men are reduced for their defence to the laws and morals of their country — laws often despised, and morals often corrupted.’

These are characteristic passages, and others of the same sort might easily be cited to prove that the popular estimate of Voltaire, as a mere enemy to religion and religious establishments, is very unfair; but there can be no question that his conception of the general result of human history is to the last degree stern and forbidding. Apart from occasional exceptions, he seems to have looked upon the history of modern Europe with intense contempt. Take, for instance, the following:—

‘The impudent charlatanry of the physicians was thus as great as the imbecility of Louis XI., and his imbecility was equal to his tyranny. This portrait is not only that of this monarch, but that of nearly all Europe. The history of these times needs to be known only that it may be despised. If princes and private persons had not some interest in instructing themselves in the revolutions of so many barbarous Governments, reading history would be the worst way of employing one's time.’

This contempt for past times in general was backed up by a contempt even more hearty for the people at large. M. Louis Blanc has taken some trouble in the first volume of his History of the French Revolution to collect, from his letters, proofs of the aristocratic sympathies of Voltaire; but the following passage, which escaped his notice, stands alone for its passionate and eloquent disdain:—

‘Stop for a moment by the unburied corpse of this great Emperor, Henry IV. [of Germany], more wretched than our Henry IV., King of France. Search the source of so many humiliations and misfortunes on one side, so much audacity on the other, so many horrors reputed to be sacred, so many princes sacrificed to religion — you will find that the sole origin of it is the common people. It is they who set superstition in motion. It was for the blacksmiths and wood-cutters of Germany that the Emperor appeared barefooted before the Bishop of Rome; the common people, slaves of superstition, will that their masters also shall be its slaves. When you have allowed your subjects to be blinded by fanaticism, they force you to appear a fanatic like themselves; and if you shake off the yoke which they carry and love, they revolt. You thought that if the chains of religion, which ought to be light, were hard and heavy, your people would be all the more submissive. You are mistaken; they use those chains to shackle you on the throne, or to make you descend from it.’

This fierce and bitter contempt for the mass of mankind, combined with the notion that their history was as contemptible as themselves, is one of the most prominent characteristics of the Essai sur les Maurs. It is closely connected with, and related to, the general religious theory which pervades the book. Though a perfectly sincere Deist, Voltaire appears to have disbelieved the existence of a Providential government of the world, not only in the narrow sense in which it is asserted by those who regard as a Providential interposition on their behalf every combination of circumstances which happens to favour their own party or their own views, but also in the broader sense of the word—in the sense of those who believe that human affairs are so arranged as to work together towards great, and, on the whole, beneficial results. In every part of the book two thoughts are continually recurring. First, that general causes are at work throughout the world, and give to its history its specific character; and, next, that the special facts which occur in virtue of these general causes are whimsically absurd and unmeaning. Sydney Smith's well known observation about the toucan is something in Voltaire's vein:-“What is the use of a bird with a beak a foot and a half long, looking for insects all over South America, and barking like a puppy dog?"

‘It is a great proof (says Voltaire, speaking of the Janissaries) of the oddities of this world, that most of these proud enemies of the Christians were the children of oppressed Christians. A greater proof of the fatal and invincible destiny by which the Supreme Being chains together the events of the universe is that Constantine built Constantinople for the Turks, as Romulus founded the Capitol for the Pontiffs of the Catholic Church.’

So, in describing the suppression of Christianity in Japan, he says, “When we think of a Portuguese captain called Moro, and a Dutch captain called Kokbeker, producing such strange events in Japan, we are convinced of the fatality which disposes of nations.” To the same effect is the remark on St. Louis—“The ruins of Carthage saw the death of a Christian king who came to fight the Mussulmans in a country into which Dido had introduced the gods of Syria.” An observer, more witty than reverent, once observed that many of the events of the world appeared to him to suggest the notion of an ironical Providence; and the phrase happily sums up one of the chief inferences which Voltaire drew from his historical inquiries. “Fatality”—often “invincible fatality”—is one of his favourite expressions. It is a very remarkable circumstance that not only the notion of a progressive improvement in human affairs, but the notion of anything like unity in history, is almost, if not altogether, unknown to Voltaire. The history of the world, with certain exceptions, appears to him a history of vice and folly:—

‘In going over the history of the world, we see weaknesses punished, and great crimes successful. The universe is a vast scene of brigandage abandoned to fortune. . It must be confessed that this history in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, amongst which we have seen some virtues, some happy times, as we discover habitations here and there in savage deserts.’

The wider and deeper inquiries of our own age have made language like this appear not only false, but antiquated. A calmer, more sympathizing, and better instructed study of past times, has taught us to understand the meaning of many things which to Voltaire appeared mere fits of general madness. Indeed, we find a difficulty in understanding how he came to judge his fellow-creatures so furiously, and to view their institutions with so fierce a mixture of contempt and hatred. The answer is to be found principally in the character of the times in which he lived. They were not, perhaps, worse than other times, but they certainly presented, especially in France, the most striking contrast that the world has ever seen between the theories which prevailed amongst the few and the principles which were put in practice upon the many. It was the contrast between the philosophers—who as yet had not had to put their shoulders to the wheel, and whose theories enjoyed the advantages of bachelors' wives and old maids' children—and the government, which never had been good, and had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, become detestable, that inspired Voltaire with passionate indignation against this world and its governors, natural and supernatural. No less pungent medicine would ever have roused a great European nation to the point of breaking with the past altogether, and making a clean sweep of all its institutions, good, bad, and indifferent. That such an event had to happen in order that modern Europe might go on at all is a fact which no one in these days will seriously dispute; and Voltaire's historical works, as well as other matters, ought to be criticized with reference to it. They were not mere historical or philosophical productions. They must, to a great extent, be regarded as party pamphlets intended to produce a specific effect. The Essai sur les Moeurs is, to a considerable degree, a reply to the Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, and the Politique tirée de l'Ecriture Sainte, of Bossuet. It is the vehement assertion of the case against existing institutions and constituted authorities; and it would be bold, indeed, to deny either that such a case existed, or that it was then a matter of the first necessity that it should be stated in the most conspicuous and peremptory way.

It is curious to guess what sort of continuation to the Essai sur les Moeurs Voltaire would write if he could in the present day revisit the world for that purpose. Though the most influential innovator that the world ever saw, the account given above of his work sufficiently shows that he had many points of sympathy with those who, in our days, are the enemies of innovation. His horror of the common people would, no doubt, have been aggravated in the highest degree by the incidents of the Revolution; and the sudden and almost supernatural increase of all kinds of knowledge would have made the sort of omniscience which was his forte a manifest foible. He would have found it necessary to take the lower place in respect of numerous subjects on which he used to dogmatize. Of the millions of men who might be astonished on revisiting the world, not one can be mentioned whose astonishment would be more complete. The concluding chapter of the Essai sur les Moeurs is an attempt to extract from the whole book the gist and pith of the lesson which it teaches. There is something almost affecting in the incapacity of the writer to find out what comes of all that he has been saying. He makes remark after remark, all more or less, pungent and brilliant, but none hitting the point. He is like a man guessing at a riddle. He sees that the story which he has told means something, that it points to some broad conclusion, that its intricacy, confusion, and incompleteness suggest he knows not what. Standing where we do, we can see a few steps further into the dark mystery, and catch some tones running through its subtle and intricate music, which were probably inaudible to him; but with all our increased knowledge, the riddle, which he tried to solve with surpassing vigour and animation is still beyond the reach of human genius.

Saturday Review, July 4, 1863.