Studies in Literature Part 3

"Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done, as fear of the ill that may come to us in consequence."

And everybody here knows the saying that "In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing."

We cannot wonder that in spite of their piquancy of form, such sentences as these have aroused in many minds an invincible repugnance for what would be so tremendous a calumny on human nature, if the book were meant to be a picture of human nature as a whole. "I count Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_," says one critic, "a bad book. As I am reading it, I feel discomfort; I have a sense of suffering which I cannot define. Such thoughts tarnish the brightness of the soul; they degrade the heart." Yet as a faithful presentation of human selfishness, and of you and me in so far as we happen to be mainly selfish, the odious mirror has its uses by showing us what manner of man we are or may become. Let us not forget either that not quite all is selfishness in La Rochefoucauld. Everybody knows his saying that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. There is a subtle truth in this, too,--that to be in too great a hurry to discharge an obligation is itself a kind of ingrat.i.tude. Nor is there any harm in the reflection that no fool is so troublesome as the clever fool; nor in this, that only great men have any business with great defects; nor, finally, in the consolatory saying, that we are never either so happy or so unhappy as we imagine.

No more important name is a.s.sociated with the literature of aphorism than that of Pascal; but the Thoughts of Pascal concern the deeper things of speculative philosophy and religion, rather than the wisdom of daily life, and, besides, though aphoristic in form, they are in substance systematic. "I blame equally," he said, "those who take sides for praising man, those who are for blaming him, and those who amuse themselves with him: the only wise part is search for truth--search with many sighs." On man, as he exists in society, he said little; and what he said does not make us hopeful. He saw the darker side. "If everybody knew what one says of the other, there would not be four friends left in the world." "Would you have men think well of you, then do not speak well of yourself." And so forth.

If you wish to know Pascal's theory you may find it set out in brilliant verse in the opening lines of the second book of Pope's _Essay on Man_. "What a chimera is Man!" said Pascal. "What a confused chaos! What a subject of contradiction! A professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth; the great depository and guardian of truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty; the glory and the scandal of the universe." Shakespeare was wiser and deeper when, under this quintessence of dust, he discerned what a piece of work is man, how n.o.ble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable. That serene and radiant faith is the secret, added to matchless gifts of imagination and music, why Shakespeare is the greatest of men.

There is a smart, spurious wisdom of the world which has the bitterness not of the salutary tonic but of mortal poison; and of this kind the master is Chamfort, who died during the French Revolution (and for that matter died of it), and whose little volume of thoughts is often extremely witty, always pointed, but not seldom cynical and false. "If you live among men," he said, "the heart must either break or turn to bra.s.s." "The public, the public," he cried; "how many fools does it take to make a public!" "What is celebrity? The advantage of being known to people who don't know you."

All literatures might be ransacked in vain for a more repulsive saying than this, that "A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be quite sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over." We cannot be surprised to hear of the lady who said that a conversation with Chamfort in the morning made her melancholy until bedtime. Yet Chamfort is the author of the not unwholesome saying that "The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed."

One of his maxims lets us into the secret of his misanthropy.

"Whoever," he said, "is not a misanthropist at forty can never have loved mankind." It is easy to know what this means. Of course if a man is so superfine that he will not love mankind any longer than he can believe them to be demiG.o.ds and angels, it is true that at forty he may have discovered that they are neither. Beginning by looking for men to be more perfect than they can be, he ends by thinking them worse than they are, and then he secretly plumes himself on his superior cleverness in having found humanity out. For the deadliest of all wet blankets give me a middle-aged man who has been most of a visionary in his youth.

To correct all this, let us recall Helvetius's saying that I have already quoted, which made so deep an impression on Jeremy Bentham: "In order to love mankind, we must not expect too much from them." And let us remember that Fenelon, one of the most saintly men that ever lived, and whose very countenance bore such a mark of goodness that when he was in a room men found they could not desist from looking at him, wrote to a friend the year before he died, "I ask little from most men; I try to render them much, and to expect nothing in return, and I get very well out of the bargain."

Chamfort I will leave, with his sensible distinction between Pride and Vanity. "A man," he says, "has advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity. The first is lofty, calm, immovable; the second is uncertain, capricious, unquiet.

The one adds to a man's stature; the other only puffs him out. The one is the source of a thousand virtues; the other is that of nearly all vices and all perversities. There is a kind of pride in which are included all the commandments of G.o.d; and a kind of vanity which contains the seven mortal sins."

I will say little of La Bruyere, by far the greatest, broadest, strongest, of French character-writers, because his is not one of the houses of which you can judge by a brick or two taken at random. For those in whom the excitements of modern literature have not burnt up the faculty of sober meditation on social man, La Bruyere must always be one of the foremost names. Macaulay somewhere calls him thin. But Macaulay has less ethical depth, and less perception of ethical depth, than any writer that ever lived with equally brilliant gifts in other ways; and _thin_ is the very last word that describes this admirable master. If one seeks to measure how far removed the great cla.s.sic moralists are from thinness, let him turn from La Bruyere to the inane subtleties and meaningless conundrums, not worth answering, that do duty for a.n.a.lysis of character in some modern American literature.

We feel that La Bruyere, though retiring, studious, meditative, and self-contained, has complied with the essential condition of looking at life and men themselves, and with his own eyes. His aphoristic sayings are the least important part of him, but here are one or two examples:--

"Eminent posts make great men greater, and little men less."

"There is in some men a certain mediocrity of mind that helps to make them wise."

"The flatterer has not a sufficiently good opinion either of himself or of others."

"People from the provinces and fools are always ready to take offence, and to suppose that you are laughing at them: we should never risk a pleasantry, except with well-bred people, and people with brains.

"All confidence is dangerous, unless it is complete, there are few circ.u.mstances in which it is not best either to hide all or to tell all."

"When the people is in a state of agitation, we do not see how quiet is to return; and when it is tranquil, we do not see how the quiet is to be disturbed."

"Men count for almost nothing the virtues of the heart, and idolise gifts of body or intellect. The man who quite coolly, and with no idea that he is offending modesty, says that he is kind-hearted, constant, faithful, sincere, fair, grateful, would not dare to say that he is quick and clever, that he has fine teeth and a delicate skin."

I will say nothing of Rivarol, a caustic wit of the revolutionary time, nor of Joubert, a writer of sayings of this century, of whom Mr. Matthew Arnold has said all that needs saying. He is delicate, refined, acute, but his thoughts were fostered in the hothouse of a coterie, and have none of the salt and sapid flavour that comes to more masculine spirits from active contact with the world.

I should prefer to close this survey in the sunnier moral climate of Vauvenargues. His own life was a pathetic failure in all the aims of outer circ.u.mstance. The chances of fortune and of health persistently baulked him, but from each stroke he rose up again, with undimmed serenity and undaunted spirit. As blow fell upon blow, the sufferer hold, firmly to his incessant lesson,--Be brave, persevere in the fight, struggle on, do not let go, think magnanimously of man and life, for man is good and life is affluent and fruitful. He died a hundred and forty years ago, leaving a little body of maxims behind him which, for tenderness, equanimity, cheerfulness, grace, sobriety, and hope, are not surpa.s.sed in prose literature. "One of the n.o.blest qualities in our nature," he said, "is that we are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection."

"Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its motives."

"To do great things a man must live as though he had never to die."

"The first days of spring have less grace than the growing virtue of a young man."

"You must rouse in men a consciousness of their own prudence and strength if you would raise their character."

Just as Tocqueville said: "He who despises mankind will never get the best out of either others or himself."[1]

[Footnote 1: The reader who cares to know more about Vauvenargues will find a chapter on him in the present writer's _Miscellanies_, vol.

ii.]

The best known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far-reaching sentence already quoted, that "Great thoughts come from the heart." And this is the truth that s.h.i.+nes out as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the "wide, grey, lampless depths" of time. Those have been greatest in thought who have been best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort. And next to them come the great stern, mournful men, like Tacitus, Dante, Pascal, who, standing as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection of some of the moods of Sh.e.l.ley or Keats as from the savage fury of Swift, watch with a prophet's indignation the heedless waste of faculty and opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and paltry aim, as if we were the flies of a summer noon, which do more than any active malignity to distort the n.o.ble lines, and to weaken or to frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human nature. For practical purposes all these complaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson found the complaint that of the globe so large a s.p.a.ce should be occupied by the uninhabitable ocean, enc.u.mbered by naked mountains, lost under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat or petrified by perpetual frost, and so small a s.p.a.ce be left for the production of fruits, the pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of men.

When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the time that is absorbed in sleep, or appropriated to the other demands of nature, or the inevitable requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn from us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly stolen from us by languor, we may realise of how small a portion of our time we are truly masters. And the same consideration of the ceaseless and natural pre-occupations of men in the daily struggle will reconcile the wise man to all the disappointments, delays, shortcomings of the world, without shaking the firmness of his own faith, or the intrepidity of his own purpose.

MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT.[1]

[Footnote 1: February 1886.]

"If the government of the Many," says the distinguished author of the volume before us, "be really inevitable, one would have thought that the possibility of discovering some other and newer means of enabling It to fulfil the ends for which all governments exist would have been a question exercising all the highest powers of the strongest minds, particularly in the community which, through the success of its popular inst.i.tutions, has paved the way for modern Democracy. Yet hardly anything worth mentioning has been produced on the subject in England or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, Is strangely to ignore three or four very remarkable books that have been published within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have excited immense attention and discussion, and that are the work of minds that even Sir Henry Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We are no adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, but there are important public men who think that his work on the _Election of Representatives_ is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the _Principia_ was in natural philosophy. J.S. Mill's volume on _Representative Government_, which appeared in 1861, was even a more memorable contribution towards the solution of the very problem defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was the older Mill's article on Government In 1820 to the political difficulties of the eve of the Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on Parliamentary Government failed in making its expected mark on legislation, but it was worth mentioning because It goes on the lines of the very electoral law in Belgium which Sir Henry Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most respectful attention--an attention, I suspect, which it is as little likely to receive from either of our two political parties as Lord Grey's suggestions. Nor should we neglect Sir G.C. Lewis's little book, or Mr. Harrison's volume on _Order and Progress_, which abounds in important criticism and suggestion for the student of the abstract politics of modern societies. In the United States, too, and In our own colonies, there have been attempts, not without merit, to state and to deal with some of the drawbacks of popular government.

Nothing has been done, however, that makes the appearance in the field of a mind of so high an order as Sir Henry Maine's either superfluous or unwelcome. It is hardly possible that he should discuss any subject within the publicist's range, without bringing into light some of its less superficial aspects, and adding observations of originality and value to the stock of political thought. To set people thinking at all on the more general and abstract truths of that great subject which is commonly left to be handled lightly, unsystematically, fragmentarily, in obedience to the transitory necessities of the day, by Ministers, members of Parliament, journalists, electors, and the whole host who live intellectually and politically from hand to mouth, is in itself a service of all but the first order. Service of the very first order is not merely to propound objections, but to devise working answers, and this is exactly what Sir Henry Maine abstains from doing.

No one will think the moment for a serious political inquiry ill chosen. We have just effected an immense recasting of our system of parliamentary representation. The whole consequences of the two great Acts of 1884 and 1885 are a.s.suredly not to be finally gauged by anything that has happened during the recent election. Yet even this single election has brought about a crisis of vast importance in one part of the United Kingdom, by forcing the question of an Irish const.i.tution to the front. It is pretty clear, also, that the infusion of a large popular element into the elective House has made more difficult the maintenance of its old relations with the hereditary House. Even if there were no others, these two questions alone, and especially the first of them, will make the severest demands on the best minds in the country. We shall be very fortunate if the crisis produces statesmen as sagacious as those American publicists of whom Sir Henry Maine rightly entertains so exalted an opinion.

Whether or not we are on the threshold of great legislative changes, it is in any case certain that the work of government will be carried on under new parliamentary and social conditions. In meeting this prospect, we have the aid neither of strong and systematic political schools, nor powerful and coherent political parties. No one can pretend, for instance, that there is any body of theoretic opinion so compact and so well thought out as Benthamism was in its own day and generation. Again, in practice, there are ominous signs that Parliament is likely to break up into groups; and the subst.i.tution of groups for parties is certain, if continental experience is to count for anything, to create new obstacles in the way of firm and stable government. Weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was. This was abundantly shown during the last five years by a variety of unfortunate public adventures. Then, does the excitement of democracy weaken the stability of national temperament? By setting up what in physics would be called a highly increased molecular activity, does it disturb not merely conservative respect for inst.i.tutions, but respect for coherence and continuity of opinion and sentiment in the character of the individual himself? Is there a fluidity of character in modern democratic societies which contrasts not altogether favourably with the strong solid types of old? Are Englishmen becoming less like Romans, and more like disputatious Greeks? These and many other considerations of the same kind are enough to secure a ready welcome for any thinker who can light up the obscurities of the time.

With profound respect for Sir Henry Maine's attainments, and every desire to profit by illumination wherever it may be discerned, we cannot clearly see how the present volume either makes the problems more intelligible, or points the way to feasible solutions. Though he tries, in perfect good faith, to be the dispa.s.sionate student, he often comes very close to the polemics of the hour. The truth is that scientific lawyers have seldom been very favourable to popular government; and when the scientific lawyer is doubled with the Indian bureaucrat, we are pretty sure beforehand that in such a tribunal it will go hard with democracy. That the author extremely dislikes and suspects the new order, he does not hide either from himself or us. Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the forum and the market-place has infected him with a touch of that chagrin which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable _nec amore et sine odio_, the disgust is ill concealed. There are pa.s.sages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win. He is dangerously near the frame of mind of Scipio Emilia.n.u.s, after the movement of the Gracchi and the opening of the Roman revolution.

Scipio came to the conclusion that with whichever party he took sides, or whatever measures a disinterested and capable statesman might devise, he would only aggravate the evil. Sir Henry Maine would seem to be nearly as despondent. Hence his book is fuller of apprehension than of guidance, more plausible in alarm than wise or useful in direction. It is exclusively critical and negative. There Is, indeed, an admirable account of the const.i.tution of the United States. But on the one great question on which the const.i.tution of the United States might have been expected to shed light--the modification of the House of Lords--Sir Henry Maine explicitly admits (p. 186) that it is very difficult to obtain from the younger inst.i.tution, the Senate, any lessons which can be of use in the reconstruction of the older. At every turn, the end of the discussion lands us in a philosophical _cul-de-sac_, and nothing is so depressing as a _cul-de-sac_. The tone is that of the political valetudinarian, watching with uneasy eye the ways of rude health. Unreflecting optimism about Popular Government is sickening, but calculated pessimism is not much better.

Something, no doubt, may often be gained by the mere cross-examination of catchwords and the exposure of plat.i.tudes. Popular government is no more free from catchwords and plat.i.tudes than any other political, religious, or social cause which interests a great many people, and is the subject of much discussion. Even the Historical Method has its own claptrap. But one must not make too much of these things. "In order to love mankind," said Helvetius, "one must not expect too much from them." And fairly to appreciate inst.i.tutions you must not hold them up against the light that blazes in Utopia; you must not expect them to satisfy microscopic a.n.a.lysis, nor judge their working, which is inevitably rough, awkward, clumsy, and second-best, by the fastidious standards of closet logic.

Before saying more as to the substance of the hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_ and the _Speech on Taxation_ from the magnificent panegyric on the British Const.i.tution in 1790. "Not many persons in the last century could have divined from the previous opinions of Edmund Burke the real substructure of his political creed, or did in fact suspect it till it was uncovered by the early and comparatively slight miscarriage of French revolutionary inst.i.tutions." This is, as a statement of fact, not at all correct. Lord Chatham detected what he believed to be the mischievous Conservatism in Burke's const.i.tutional doctrines at the very outset. So did the Const.i.tutional Society detect it. So did Mrs.

Macaulay, Bishop Watson, and many other people. The story of Burke's inconsistency is, of course, as old as Sheridan. Hazlitt declared that the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely opposite persons, but deadly enemies. Mr. Buckle, who is full of veneration for the early writings, but who dislikes the later ones, gets over the difficulty by insisting that Burke actually went out of his mind after 1789. We should have expected a subtler judgment from Sir Henry Maine.

Burke belonged from first to last to the great historic and positive school, of which the founder was Montesquieu. Its whole method, principle, and sentiment, all animated him with equal force whether he was defending the secular pomps of Oude or the sanct.i.ty of Benares, the absolutism of Versailles, or the free and ancient Parliament at Westminster.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is satisfactory to have the authority of Mr. Lecky on the same side. _England in the Eighteenth Century_, vol. iii. chap.

ix. p. 209.]

Versailles reminds us of a singular overstatement by Sir Henry Maine of the blindness of the privileged cla.s.ses in France to the approach of the Revolution. He speaks as if Lord Chesterfield's famous pa.s.sage were the only antic.i.p.ation of the coming danger. There is at least one utterance of Louis XV. himself, which shows that he did not expect things to last much beyond his time. D'Argenson, in the very year of Chesterfield's prophecy, p.r.o.nounced that a revolution was inevitable, and he even went so close to the mark as to hint that it would arise on the first occasion when it should be necessary to convoke the States General. Rousseau, in a page of the _Confessions_, not only divined a speedy revolution, but enumerated the operative causes of it with real precision. There Is a striking prediction In Voltaire, and another in Mercier de la Riviere. Other names might be quoted to the same effect, including Maria Theresa, who described the ruined condition of the French monarchy, and only hoped that the ruin might not overtake her daughter. The mischief was not so much that the privileged cla.s.ses were blind as that they were selfish, stubborn, helpless, and reckless. The point is not very important in itself, but it is characteristic of a very questionable way of reading human history. Sir Henry Maine's readiness to treat revolutions as due to erroneous abstract ideas naturally inclines him to take too narrow a view both of the preparation in circ.u.mstances, and of the preparation in the minds of observant onlookers.

In pa.s.sing, by the way, we are curious to know the writer's authority for what he calls the odd circ.u.mstance that the Jacobins generally borrowed their phrases from the legendary history of the early Roman Republic, while the Girondins preferred to take metaphors from the literature of Rousseau (p. 75). There was plenty of nonsense talked about Brutus and Scaevola by both parties, and It Is not possible to draw the line with precision. But the received view Is that the Girondins were Voltairean, and the Jacobins Rousseauite, while Danton was of the school of the Encyclopaedia, and Hebert and Chaumette were inspired by Holbach.

The author seems to us greatly to exaggerate the whole position of Rousseau, and even in a certain sense to mistake the nature of his influence. That Jean-Jacques was a far-reaching and important voice the present writer is not at all likely to deny; but no estimate of his influence in the world is correct which does not treat him rather as moralist than publicist. _Emilius_ went deeper into men's minds in France and in Europe at large, and did more to quicken the democratic spirit, than the _Social Contract_ Apart from this, Sir Henry Maine places Rousseau on an isolated eminence which does not really belong to him. It did not fall within the limited scope of such an essay as Sir Henry Maine's to trace the leading ideas of the _Social Contract_ to the various sources from which they had come, but his account of these sources is, even for its scale, inadequate. Portions of Rousseau's ideas, he says truly, may be discovered in the speculations of older writers; and he mentions Hobbes and the French Economists.

But the most characteristic of all the elements in Rousseau's speculation were drawn from Locke. The theoretic basis of popular government Is to be found in more or less definite shape in various authors from Thomas Aquinas downwards. But it was Locke's philosophic vindication of the Revolution of 1688, in the famous essay on Civil Government, that directly taught Rousseau the lesson of the Sovereignty of the People. Such originality as the _Social Contract_ possesses is due to its remarkable union of the influence of the two antagonistic English Thinkers. The differences between Hobbes and Rousseau were striking enough. Rousseau looked on men as good, Hobbes looked on them as bad. The one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war. The first believed that laws and inst.i.tutions had depraved man, the second that they had improved him. In spite of these differences the influence of Hobbes was important, but only important in combination. "The total result is," as I have said elsewhere, "a curious fusion between the premises and the temper of Hobbes, and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the _Social Contract_ was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image of the Sovereign People. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the _Leviathan_, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the _Social Contract_."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Rousseau_, chap. xii.]

One more word may be said by the way. The very slightest account of Rousseau is too slight to be tolerable, if it omits to mention Calvin.

Rousseau's whole theory of the Legislator, which produced such striking results in certain transitory phases of the French Revolution, grew up in his mind from the const.i.tution which the great reformer had so predominant a share in framing for the little republic where Rousseau was born.

This omission of Locke and Calvin again exemplifies the author's characteristic tendency to look upon political ideas as if speculative writers got them out of their own heads, or out of the heads of other people, apart from the suggestions of events and the requirements of circ.u.mstance, Calvin was the builder of a working government, and Locke was the defender of a practical revolution.