CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Critical Miscellanies. Second Series. CONTENTS : Robespierre Turgot Mill Macaulay- Popular Culture &C. RoUSSeaU. New Edition. Voltaire. Third Edition. Diderot. 2 vois. On Compromise. New Edition, y. 6d. CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. FIRST SERIES. BY JOHN MORLEY. NEW EDITION. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1878. (All rights reserved. ) CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. SfacR Annex Sll CONTENTS. VAUVENARGUES. PAGE The Influence of Pascal 3 Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the votaries of Per- fectibility 5 Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues ..... 6 Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire 9 His religious sentiment . . . . . . . . .n His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality 13 Certain inability to appreciate marked originality 14 Criticisms on Moliere, Racine, and Corneille 15 Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists . . .16 Character the key to his theory of greatness 18 His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against Rochefoucauld and Pascal 1 9 His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same . . . .21 His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine of Character . . 22 Antipathy to ascetic restrictions 25 Two ways of examining character : that followed by Vauvenargues . . 25 Examples of his style 26 The beauty of his nature to be read in his face 29 CONDORCET. Condorcet's peculiar position and characteristics 33 Birth, instruction, and early sensibility 35 Friendship with Voltaire, and with Turgot 38 vi CONTENTS. PAGE Compared with these two great men 39 Currents of French opinion and circumstance in 1774 . . . -43 Condorcet's principles drawn from two sources 45 His view of the two English Revolutions 45 His life up to the convocation of the States-General 47 Energetic interest in the elections 5 Want of prevision 5 2 His participation in political activity down to the end of 1792 . . -53 Chosen one of the secretaries of the Legislative Assembly . . .57 Elected to the Convention 5^ Resistance to the Jacobins, proscription, and death 61 Condorcet's tenacious interest in human welfare 65 Two currents of thought in France at the middle of the eighteenth century 68 Quesnay and the Physiocrats 69 Montesquieu 7 1 Turgot completed Montesquieu's historical conception . . . -73 Kant's idea of a Universal or Cosmo-Political History . . . .75 Condorcet fuses the conceptions of the two previous sets of thinkers . . 77 Account of his Tableau des Progrh ........ 7^ Omits to consider history of moral improvement 80 And misinterprets the religious element . . . . . . .81 His view of Mahometanism .84 Of Protestantism 85 And of philosophic propagandism ........ 85 Various acute remarks in his sketch 87 His boundless hopes for the future . . . . ' . . .88 Three directions which our anticipations may take : (1) International equality 89 (2) Internal equality ......... 90 (3) Substantial perfecting of nature and society . . . .91 Natural view of the formation of character 93 Central idea of all his aspirations . .94 JOSEPH DE MAISTRE. The Catholic reaction in France at the beginning of the century . . 99 De Maistre the best type of the movement 102 Birth, instruction, and early life 103 I nvasion of Savoy, and De Maistre's flight 107 At Lausanne, Venice, and Cagliari ....... 108 Sent in 1802 as minister to St. Petersburg in Hardships of his life there from 1802 to 1817 112 CONTENTS. vil PAGE Circumstances of his return home, and his death 1 18 De Maistre's view of the eighteenth century . . . . . .119 And of the French Revolution . . . . . . . .122 The great problem forced upon the Catholics by it 123 De Maistre's way of dealing with the question of the divine method of government . . . . . . . . . . .123 Nature of divine responsibility for evil . . . . . . 1 24 On Physical Science 127 Significance of such ideas in a mind like De Maistre's . . . .128 Two theories tenable by social thinkers after the Revolution . . .130 De Maistre's appreciation of the beneficent work of the Papacy in the _ Past 133 Insists on the revival of the papal power as the essential condition of a restored European order. 137 Views Christianity from the statesman's point of view . . . .138 His consequent hatred of the purely speculative temper of the Greeks . 139 His object was social or political 140 Hence his grounds for defending the doctrine of Infallibility . . .141 The analogy which lay at the bottom of his Ultramontane doctrine. . 142 His hostility to the authority of General Councils 144 His view of the obligation of the Canons on the Pope .... 145 His appeal to European statesmen 146 Comte and De Maistre . 148 His strictures on Protestantism ........ 149 Futility of his aspirations . . . . . . . . .152 CARLYLE. Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability . . . .157 His literary services . .160 .No label useful in characterising him .161 The poetic and the scientific temperaments 163 Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle 165 The poetic method of handling social questions 166 Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it ...... 168 Founded on the purest individualism 1 70 Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction . . . . 1 72 Coleridge 173 Byron 175 Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism . . . . . . . 1 76 Goethe 177 Mr. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled . . . .178 viii CONTENTS. PAGE His identification of material with moral order 1 80 And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the means . . 181 Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological principle . . . 182 Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them 184 His reticences 185 Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme pretensions of the physicist 185 Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth . . . .187 Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism : (i) Contempt for excess of moral nicety . . . . .189 (3) Defect of sympathy with masses of men 191 Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life . . . 193 Hero-worship, and its inadequateness 194 Theories of the dissolution of the old European order .... 197 Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution . . . . . .198 Of the Reformation and Protestantism . . . . . . .199 Inability to understand the political point of view 201 BYRON. Byron's influence in Europe 205 In England 206 Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life . . . . 208 Function of synthetic criticism 210 Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare . . .211 Contrasted with Shelley in this respect 212 Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature 216 Revolutionary sentimentalism . . . . . . . .217 And revolutionary commonplace in Byron 218 Byron's reasonableness 219 Size and difficulties of his subject 219 His mastery of it . . . . . . . . . . . 221 The reflection of Danton in Byron 223 The reactionary influence upon him ....... 224 Origin of his apparent cynicism 226 His want of positive knowledge . . . . . . . .227 .(Esthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity . . . 228 Significance of his dramatic predilections ...... 230 His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics . . . .231 Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment . . . 232 His public career better than one side of his creed 234 CONTENTS. ix PAGE Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature .... 235 His ethical poverty 236 Conclusion ............ 237 SOME NOTES ON GEORGE ELIOT. First condition of literary production 241 Readers seek texts and not sermons , 243 Illustration from George Eliot 244 Her impressiveness 245 Freedom from transcendental artifices 245 Illustration from one of Lord Lytton's novels . . . . . . 247 Artistic invention ........... 248 Scientific ideas of conduct 249 Humour ............ 250 Humaneness of spirit 25 1 Carlyle and George Eliot 252 Indirect effect of her work on religious sentiment ..... 253 HARRIET MARTINEAU. Introductory 257 Early days 259 Literary ordeal ........... 260 Success of the Tales on Political Economy 261 Her feeling, not literary, but truly social 262 London Society (1832) 263 Character of her judgments on Men 265 The Whigs 266 Carlyle's influence 267 Interest in American slavery ......... 268 Her first novel 269 The Atkinson Letters 271 Her new religious opinions ......... 272 Eastern travels 273 Retirement to the Lakes 274 x CONTENTS. PAG* Her manner of life 2 75 Translation of Comte 2 7 Her right estimate of literary work 2 77 Her Biographic Sketches 2 79 Characteristics 28 APPENDIX. I. CONDORCET'S PLEA FOR THE CITIZENSHIP OF WOMEN. A TRANSLATION II. NOTES ON JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 294 CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. VAUVENARGUES. .... VAUVENARGUES. ONE of the most important phases of French thought in the great century of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on con- dition that in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential representative of that way of viewing human nature and its circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a hundred years after the publication of the Pensees, Condorcet thought it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations, protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent philosophy. The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty B 2 4 VA UVENAR G UES. of man, rather filled the mind with exaltation than really de- pressed or humiliated it. From Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second ; so the main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as this, that " men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a new form of madness not to be mad ; " that man is nothing but masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in respect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, and shrinking from telling it to anybody else ; J that the will, the imagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealed infirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery of justice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss the mark than hit. 2 Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their own misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destinies of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole surface of the earth would be different ? Imagine, in a word, " a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death ; some of them each day butchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch their own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another in anguish and hopelessness, wait their turn ; such is the situation of man." 3 It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities 1 Pcnstes> i. v. 8. a Ibid. i. vi. 16. 3 find. i. vii. 6. VA UVENARG UES. 5 of life beyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towards realities. The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less than of pain ; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discovery of protective and fruitful knowledge ; the affections with their large capacities for giving and receiving delight ; the spontaneous inner impulse towards action and endurance in the face of outward circumstances all these things reassured men, and restored in theory to them with ample interest what in practice they had never lost a rational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of finding out truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness. On this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit. The hap- less and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the angels. Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we mean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and that there is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively. This moralist was Vauvenargues. Vauvenargues was born of a good Provengal stock at Aix, in the year 1715. He had scarcely any of that kind of education which is usually performed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latin or Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writers among the ancients was in translations. Of English literature, though its influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramount in France, and though he had a particular esteem for the English character, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise Lost? Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers and writers whose personal history shows, what men of letters sometimes appear to be in a conspiracy to make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robust judgment on human nature and 1 M. Gilbert's edition of the Works and Correspondence of Vauvenargues (2 vols. Paris : Furne, 1857), ii. 133. 6 VA UVENAR G UES. life, active and sympathetic contact with men in the transaction of the many affairs of their daily life is a better preparation than any amount of wholly meditative seclusion. He is also one of the many who show that a weakly constitution of body is not incompatible with fine and energetic qualities of mind, even if it be not actually friendly to them. Nor was feeble health any dis- qualification for the profession of arms. As Arms and the Church were the only alternatives for persons of noble birth, Vauve- nargues, choosing the former, became a subaltern in the King's Own Regiment at the age of twenty (1735). Here in time he saw active service ; for in 1740 the death of Charles vi. threw all Europe into confusion, and the French Government, falling in with the prodigious designs of the Marshal Belle-Isle and his brother, took sides against Maria Theresa, and supported the claims of the unhappy Elector of Bavaria who afterwards became the Emperor Charles vn. The disasters which fell upon France in consequence are well known. The forces despatched to Bavaria and Bohemia, after the brief triumph of the capture of Prague, were gradually overwhelmed without a single great battle, and it was considered a signal piece of good fortune when in the winter of 1742-43 Belle-Isle succeeded, with a loss of half his force, in leading by a long circuit, in the view of the enemy, and amid the horrors of famine and intense frost, some thirteen thousand men away from Prague. The King's Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and in this frightful march which closed it ; Vauvenargues with the rest. To physical sufferings during two winters was added the distress of losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached ; he perished in the spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The Eloge in which Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste. 1 He complained that nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not remembering that even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has found stilted and turgid 1 Eloge de P. //. de Scytres. (Euvres, i. 141-150. VAUVENARGUES. . 7 expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their own personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the way of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and quality that the perpetual untowardness of circumstances left no evil print upon him ; hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise, and there is no surer sign of noble temper. The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials. Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters to Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to which he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story all over the world, and Vauve- nargues did the same things that young men in want of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he passed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him on one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. " Why should I not undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not have repaid it by the time fixed ? " ' We must make allowance for the youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its significance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret. Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of common- place, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can elevate low souls. 2 That depends. If poverty means pinching and fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense, but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import. 1 (Euvres, ii. 233. See too p. 267. = No. 579, i. 455. 8 . VAUVENARGUES. Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxurious and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent contempt for merit ; these were the characteristics of the men in high military place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and encouraged ; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation. 1 To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. The winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had been frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after a service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainly solicited em- ployment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open to the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyeres in the early part of the fourteenth century. 2 But the only road to employment lay through the Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless they were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted Versailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a parasite as well. " Permit me to assure you, sir," Vauvenargues wrote courageously to Amelot, then the minister, " that it is this moral impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever reaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that is observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which ex- tinguishes all ambition." 3 Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as 1 Reflexions sur Divers Sujcts, i. 104. 2 (Euvrcs, ii. 249. 3 md. ii. 265. VA UVENARG UES. 9 usual in good offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote, and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable opportunity should present itself. 1 Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the disappointment with cheerful fortitude. " Misfortune itself," he had once written, " has its charms in great extremities ; for this opposition of fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces that before were un- employed : it is in indolence and littleness that virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight and forces it to creep along in bonds." 2 He was true to the counsel which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life, he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neither scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and relations always the worst foes to superior character on critical occasions could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 he took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of Medicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France which it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopaedia was still unconceived, and the mo- mentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of organizing the philosophers and men of letters into an army with banners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the new school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by a letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism comparing Corneille dis- advantageously with Racine. Coming from a young officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as " very 1 QLuvres, ii. 266. 2 Consals a un Jeune Homme, i. 124. i o VA UVENARG UES. noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous," this criticism was peculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards Voltaire was surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such a book as the Felicite Publique of the Marquis de Chastellux. To Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the great author of Cinna. " // is the part of a man like you" he said admirably, " to have preferences, but no exclusions."* The correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and mutual respect. " If you had been born a few years earlier," Voltaire wrote to him, " my works would be worth all the more for it ; but at any rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that you pursue." 2 The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity of visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the grave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. " It was at this time," says the light-hearted Marmontel, " that I first saw at home the man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good, the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body, he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in him Fenelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of his conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see some traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his writings, he was even more so still in his conversa- tion." 3 Marmontel felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the Epistle to Voltaire expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain the happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, " ce caeur sto'ique et tendre." 4 In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his 1 CEuvres, iL 252. 2 Ibid. ii. 272. 3 Memoires de Marmontel, vol. i. 189. 4 The reader of Marmontel's Memoires will remember the extraordinary and .grotesque circumstances under which a younger brother of Mirabeau (of I' ami des hommcs, that is) appealed to the memory of Vauvenargues. See vol. i. 256-260. VA UVENARG UES. 1 1 time. That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accept- ing no dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals God, immortality, and the like he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book. At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by-and-by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human impressions. There is a Meditation on the Faith, including a Prayer, among his writings ; and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition, that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling. 1 It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the question of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith. 2 Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass by on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One of these few is worth quoting, where he says : " The strength or weakness of our belief depends more on our courage than our light ; not all those who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in them." 3 The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than thirty-two. Perhaps in spite of his physical 1 (Eitvres, i. 225-232. - Letter to Saint- Vincens, ii. 146. 3 No. 318. 1 2 VA UVENAR G UES. miseries, these two years in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the great centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally awarded. A year of inter- course with so full and alert and brilliant a mind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with subalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be very near at hand, he had made his account before. " To execute great things," he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, " a man must live as though he had never to die." z This mood was common among the Greeks and Romans but the religion which Europe accepted in the time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the body. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that the dreary memento mori and its hateful emblems should be deliberately effaced. " The thought of death," said Vauvenargues, " leads us astray, because it makes us forget to live." He did not understand living in the sense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regiment called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his days had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness, and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, the only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the licence of the time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have given widely effective. Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the peda- 1 Napoleon said on some occasion, " // faut voidoir vivre et savoir mourir." M. Littre prefaces the third volume of that heroic monument of learning and industry, his Dictionary of the French Language, by the words : " He who wishes to employ his life seriously ought always to act as if he had long to live, and to govern himself as if he would have soon to die." VA UVENAR G UES. 1 3 gogue or the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. The stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy, of sympathy, and of freshness ; he attempts to compensate for this by excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades. Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and half-reserved tender- ness. Everything that he has said is coloured and warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist. He had borne the burdens. " The looker-on," runs one of his maxims, "softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence over the safety of the land." 1 Vauvenargues had been something very different from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles, and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. They are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources ; from high poetic imagination, which Vauvenarges did not possess, or else from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature. "The cause of most books of morality being so insipid," he says, " is that their authors are not sincere ; is that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments." 2 One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their pretentiousness and insincerity. Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negative distinction of never being emphatic. His sayings are nearly always moderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimes they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn. Compared with him La Rochefoucauld's manner is hard, and that of La Bruyere sententious. In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by their best side instead of their 1 No. 223. a No. 300. 1 4 VA UVENAR G UES, worst, the absence of this hardness and the presence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truths of perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality. In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism is usually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example. We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of his qualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certain inability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too strongly and boldly marked. "It is easy to criticise an author," he has said, "but hard to estimate him." 1 This was never more unfortunately proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great Moliere. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say that " La Bruyere, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Moliere ; but I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in La Bruyere's images." 2 Without at all undervaluing La Bruyere, one of the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly disastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the preference given to Racine over Moliere, not merely for the conclusion arrived at, but for the reasons on which it is founded. Moliere's subjects, we read, are low, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters bizarre and eccentric. Racine, on the other hand, takes sublime themes, presents us with noble types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It is not enough to concede to Racine the glory of art, while giving to Moliere or Corneille the glory of genius. " When people speak of the art of Racine the art which puts things in their place ; which characterises men, their passions, manners, genius ; which banishes obscurities, superfluities, false brilliancies ; which paints nature with fire, sublimity, and grace what can we think of such art as this, except that it is the genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those rules that writers without genius embrace with so much zeal and so little success?" 3 And it is certainly true that the art of Racine implied genius. The defect of the 1 No. 264. a Reflexions Critiques sur quclqiies Poeles, i. 237. 3 CEuv. i. 248. VA UVENAR G UES. 1 5 criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to see that there is glory enough in both ; in the art of highly-finished composition and presentation, and in the art of bold and striking creation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of the popularity of Moliere, and the foundation of the common opinion that no other dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Moliere had carried his ; " the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than any of the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishes to write." 1 He did not see how nearly everything went in this concession, that Moliere was, above all, natural. With equal truth of perception he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the French tragedians to classical personages who were in truth simple and natural, as the principal defect of the national- drama, and the common rock on which their poets made shipwreck. 2 Let us, however, rejoice for the sake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable to read Shakespeare. One for whom Moliere is too eccentric, grotesque, inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but most irregular of all dramatists. A man's prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing him to be cultivated enough to have any prepossessions, furnish the most certain clue that we can get to the spirit in which he inwardly regards character and conduct. The uniform and reasoned preference which Vauvenargues had for Racine over Moliere and Corneille, was only the transfer to art of that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphatically harmonious temper, which he brought to the survey of human nature. Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in every form was disagree- able to him ; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries, and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. He failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce com- plete and artistic wholes. 3 Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' think- 1 Reflexions Critiques sur quelques Potites, i. 238. 2 (Euvres, i. 243. 3 Ibid. i. 275. 16 VA UVENARG UES. ing ; balance, evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. He is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of immutable first principles. Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeau meant when he wrote to Vauve- nargues, who was his cousin: "You have the English genius to perfection," and what Vauvenargues meant when he wrote of himself to Mirabeau : " Nobody in the world has a mind less French than I." I These international comparisons are among the least fruitful of literary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremely misleading ; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the English Pascal, a description which can only be true on condition that the qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most of his characteristic traits. And if we compare Vauvenargues with any of ^our English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to make the contrast instructive. The obvious truth is that in this department our literature is particularly weak, while French literature is parti- cularly strong in it With the exception of Bacon, we have no writer of apophthegms of the first order ; and the difference between Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference between Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of Hamlet. Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortune, than to the inner composition of character, or to the " wide, gray, lampless " depths of human destiny. We find the same national characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element is predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling, not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in their com- position we could not expect to find them there. We seek in vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heights in Pascal. 2 Addison may have the delicacy 1 Correspondance. (Euvres, ii. 131, 207. - Long-winded and tortuous and difficult to seize as Shaftesbury is as a whole, in detached sentences he shows marked aphoristic quality; e.g. "The VA UVENAR G UES. 1 7 of Vauvenargues, but it is a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy, tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly lost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but as undoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect and delightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of English poets. It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great French moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, which made Vauvenargues for instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope. Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. "Who has more imagination," he asks, "than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all of them great philosophers ? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Moliere, all of them poets full of genius ? // is not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others ; on the contrary, they suppose them. I should be much surprised if a great poet were without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy, and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totally devoid of imagination." 1 With imagination in the highest sense Vauve- nargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essential to reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not the single, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. " All my philosophy," he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty years old, an age when the intellect is most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system ;" " The liker anything is to wisdom, if it be not plainly the thing itself, the more directly it becomes its opposite." 1 No. 278 (i. 411). C 1 8 VA UVENAR G UES. usually most exigent of supremacy, "all my philosophy has its source in my heart." ' In the same spirit he had well said that there is more clever- ness in the world than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with lofty character. 2 Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and impressive of his aphorisms ; that famous one, for instance, " Great thoughts come from the heart" and the rest which hang upon the same idea. " Virtuous instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it." " Reason misleads us more often than nature." " Reason does not know the interests of the heart." "Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatest advantages of the intellect" Such sayings are only true on condition that instinct and nature and passion have been already moulded under the influence of reason ; just as this other saying, which won the warm admiration of Voltaire, " Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to prudence" is only true on condition that by magna- nimity we understand a mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence. 3 But in the eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in their lower and narrower sense, and thus one coming like Vauvenargues to see this lowness and narrowness, sought to invest ideas and terms that in fact only involved modifications of these, with a significance of direct antagonism. Magnanimity was contrasted inimically with pru- dence, and instinct and nature were made to thrust from their throne reason and reflection. Carried to its limit, this tendency developed the speculative and social excesses of the great senti- mental school. In Vauvenargues it was only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protest of a fine observer, against the supre- macy among ideals of a narrow, deliberative, and calculating spirit. His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is in a curious 1 (Euvres, ii. 115. 2 Ibid. i. 87. 3 Doch Zuweilen ist des Sinns in einer Sache Auch mehr, als wir vermuthen ; und es ware So unerhort doch nicht, dass uns der Heiland Auf Wegen zu sich zoge, die der Kluge Von selbst nicht leicht betreten wiirde. Nathan der Weise, iii. 10. VA UVENAR G UES. 1 9 way parallel to Burke's memorable exaltation over reason of prejudice. " Prejudice," said Burke, " previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts ; through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature." * What Burke designated as prejudice, Vauvenargues less philosophically styled virtuous instinct ; each meant precisely the same thing, though the dif- ference of phrase implied a different view of its origin and growth : and the side opposite to each of them was the same namely, a sophisticated and over-refining intelligence, narrowed to the consideration of particular circumstances as they presented themselves. Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart, nature instinct of Vauvenargues all mean character. He insisted upon spontaneous impulse as a condition of all greatest thought and action. Men think and work on the highest level when they move without conscious and deliberate strain after virtue : when, in other words, their habitual motives, aims, methods, their character, in short, naturally draw them into the region of what is virtuous. " It is by our ideas that we ennoble our passions or we debase them ; they rise high or sink low according to the man's sou!." 2 All this has ceased to be new to our generation, but a hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer to us than that, the key to all nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing and prudential calculation. A book like C/arissa Harlowe shows us this prudential and calculating temper under- neath a varnish of sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and circles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that exaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherence to a low prudence, nor to that fragment of reason which has so constantly usurped the name and place of the whole. He eschewed the too common compromise 1 Reflections on the French Revolution, Works (ed. 1842), i. 414. 2 CEuvres, ii. 170. C 2 20 VA UVENARGUES. which the sentimentalist makes with reflection and calculation, and it was this which saved him from being a sentimentalist. That doctrine of the predominance of the heart over the head, which has brought forth so many pernicious and destructive fantasies in the history of social thought, represented in his case no more than a reaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld had surveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoistic propensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons in whom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world in so far as these pro- pensities happen to influence them. Pascal, on the one hand, leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very much on one side, had directed all his efforts to showing the pitiful feeble- ness and incurable helplessness of man in the sphere of the understanding. Vauvenargues is thus confronted by two sinister pictures of humanity the one of its moral meanness and little- ness, the other of its intellectual poverty and impotency. He turned away from both of them, and found in magnanimous and unsophisticated feeling, of which he was conscious in himself and observant in others, a compensation alike for the selfishness of some men and the intellectual limitations of all men. This com- pensation was ample enough to restore the human self-respect that Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done their best to weaken. The truth in that disparagement was indisputable so far as it went. It was not a kind of truth, however, on which it is good for the world much to dwell, and it is the thinkers like Vauve- nargues who build up and inspire high resolve. " Scarcely any maxim," runs one of his own, "is true in all respects." 1 We must take them in pairs to find out the mean truth; and to understand the ways of men, so far as words about men can help us, we must read with appreciation not only Vauvenargues, who said that great thoughts come from the heart, but La Roche- foucauld, who called the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and Pascal, who saw only desperate creatures, miserably perishing before one another's eyes in the grim dungeon of the universe. 1 No. in. VA UVENAR G UES. 2 1 Yet it is the observer in the spirit of Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that he has chosen the better part. Vauve- nargues' own estimate was sound. " The Duke of La Roche- foucauld seized to perfection the weak side of human nature; maybe he knew its strength too ; and only contested the merit of so many splendid actions in order to unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design, the effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with delicate invective against hypocrisy, even to this day turns men away from virtue, by persuading them that it is never genuine." 1 Or, as he put it elsewhere, without express personal reference : " You must arouse in men the feeling of their prudence and strength, if you would raise their character ; those who only apply themselves to bring out the absurdities and weak- nesses of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far less than they deprave its inclination." 2 This principle was implied in Goethe's excellent saying, that if you would improve a man, it is best to begin by persuading him that he is already that which you would have him to be. To talk in this way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism on the one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them, back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and the ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggerating blemishes, distorting pro- portions, filling the eye with ugly and disgusting illusions. 3 Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with the thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were a plea for a return to a healthy and normal sense of relations. " These philosophers," he cried, "are men, yet they do not speak in human language ; they change all the ideas of things, and misuse all their terms." 4 These are some of the most direct of his retorts upon Pascal and La Roche- foucauld : 1 (Euvres, ii. 74. 2 No. 285. 3 "A man may as well pretend to cure himself of love by viewing his mis- tress through the artificial medium of a microscope or prospect, and beholding there the coarseness of her skin and monstrous disproportion of her featxires, as hope to excite or moderate any passion by the artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus." Hume's Essays (xviii. The Sceptic], 4 (Euvres, i. 163. 22 VA UVENAR G UES. " I have always felt it to be absurd for philosophers to fabri- cate a Virtue that is incompatible with the nature of humanity, and then after having pretended this, to declare coldly that there is no virtue. If they are speaking of the phantom of their imagi- nation, they may of course abandon or destroy it as they please, for they invented it ; but true virtue which they cannot be brought to call by this name, because it is not in conformity with their definitions ; which is the work of nature and not their own ; and which consists mainly in goodness and vigour of soul that does not depend on their fancies, and will last for ever with characters that cannot possibly be effaced." " The body has its graces, the intellect its talents ; is the heart then to have nothing but vices ? And must man, who is capable of reason, be incapable of virtue ? " " We are susceptible of friendship, justice, humanity, com- passion, and reason. O my friends, what then is virtue ? " " Disgust is no mark of health, nor is appetite a disorder ; quite the reverse. Thus we think of the body, but we judge the soul on other principles. We suppose that a strong soul is one that is exempt from passions, and as youth is more active and ardent than later age, we look on it as a time 'of fever, and place the strength of man in his decay." 1 The theological speculator insists that virtue lies in a con- stant and fierce struggle between the will and the passions, between man and human nature. Vauvenargues founded his whole theory of life on the doctrine that the will is not something independent of passions, inclinations, and ideas, but on the con- trary is a mere index moved and fixed by them, as the hand of a clock follows the operation of the mechanical forces within. Character is an integral unit. " Whether it is reason or passion that moves us, it is we who determine ourselves ; it would be madness to distinguish one's thoughts and sentiments from one's self. . . . No will in men, which does not owe its direction to their temperament, their reasoning, and their actual feelings." 2 1 Nos. 296-98, 148. 2 Sur le Libre Arbilre. (Euvres, i. igg. VA UVENARGUES. 23 Virtue, then, is not necessarily a condition of strife between the will and the rest of our faculties and passions ; no such strife is possible, for the will obeys the preponderant passion or idea, or group of passions and ideas ; and the contest lies between one passion or group and another. Hence, in right character there is no struggle at all, for the virtuous inclinations naturally and easily direct our will and actions ; virtue is then independent of struggle ; and the circumstance of our finding pleasure in this or that practice, is no reason why both the practice and the pleasure should not be unimpeachably virtuous. It is easy to see the connection between this theory of the dependence of the will, and the prominence which Vauvenargues is ever giving to the passions. These are the key to the move- ments of the will. To direct and shape the latter, you must educate the former. It was for his perception of this truth, we may notice in passing, that Comte awarded to Vauvenargues a place in the Positivist Calendar ; " for his direct effort, in spite of the universal desuetude into which it had fallen, to reorganize the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge of human nature, of which this noble thinker discerned the centre to be affective." 1 This theory of the will, however, was not allowed to rest here ; the activity of man was connected with the universal order. " What prevents the mind from perceiving the motive of its actions, is only their infinite quickness. Our thoughts perish at the moment in which their effects make themselves known ; when the action commences, the principle has vanished ; the will appears, the feeling is gone ; we cannot find it ourselves, and so doubt if we ever had it. But it would be an enormous defect to have a will without a principle ; our actions would be all hap- hazard ; the world would be nothing but caprice ; all order would be overturned. It is not enough, then, to admit it to be true that it is reflection or sentiment that leads us : we must add further that it would be monstrous for this to be otherwise. 2 . . . " The will recalls or suspends our ideas ; our ideas shape or 1 Politique Positive, iii. 589. 2 Ibid. i. 194. 24 VA UVENAR G UES. vary the laws of the will ; the laws of the will are thus dependent on the laws of creation ; but the laws of creation are not foreign to ourselves, they constitute our being, and form our essence, and are entirely our own, and we can say boldly that we act by our- selves, when we only act by them. 1 . . . " Let us recognise here, then, our profound subjection. . . . Let us rend the melancholy veil which hides from our eyes the eternal chain of the world and the glory of the Creator. . . . External objects form ideas in the mind, these ideas form senti- ments, these sentiments volitions, these volitions actions in our- selves and outside of ourselves. So noble a dependence in all the parts of this vast universe must conduct our reflections to the unity of its principle ; this subordination makes the true greatness of the beings subordinated. The excellence of man is in his dependence ; his subjection displays two marvellous images the infinite power of God, and the dignity of our own soul. . . . Man independent would be an object of contempt ; the feeling of his own imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope ; it reveals to. him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can satisfy his desires in the possession of himself." ~ Vauvenargues showed his genuine healthiness not more by a plenary rejection of the doctrine of the incurable vileness and frenzy of man, than by his freedom from the boisterous and stupid transcendental optimism which has too many votaries in our time. He would not have men told that they are miserable earth-gnomes, the slaves of a black destiny, but he still placed them a good deal lower than the angels. For instance : " We are too inattentive or too much occupied with ourselves, to get to the bottom of one another's characters ; whoever has watched masks at a ball dancing together in a friendly manner, and joining hands without knowing who the others are, and then parting the moment afterwards never to meet again nor ever to regret, or be 1 Politique Positive, 205. 2 Ibid. 206, 207. VA UVENARG UES. 2 5 regretted, can form some idea of the world." 1 But then, as he said elsewhere : " We can be perfectly aware of our imperfection, without being humiliated by the sight. One of the noblest qualities of our nature is that we are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection" 2 In all this we mark the large and rational humane- ness of the new time, a tolerant and kindly and elevating estimate of men. The faith in the natural and simple operation of virtue, with- out the aid of all sorts of valetudinarian restrictions, comes out on every occasion. The Trappist theory of the conditions of virtue found no quarter with him. Mirabeau for instance com- plained of the atmosphere of the Court, as fatal to the practice of virtue. Vauvenargues replied that the people there were doubt- less no better than they should be, and that vice was dominant. " So much the worse for those who have vices. But when you are fortunate enough to possess virtue, it is, to my thinking, a very noble ambition to lift up this same virtue in the bosom of corruption, to make it succeed, to place it above all, to indulge and control the passions without reproach, to overthrow the obstacles to them, and to surrender yourself to the inclinations of an upright and magnani- mous heart, instead of combating or concealing them in retreat, without either satisfying or vanquishing them. I know nothing so weak and so vain as to flee before vices, or to hate them without measure ; for people only hate them by way of reprisal because they are afraid of them, or else out of vengeance because these vices have played them some sorry turn but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge of the heart, a gentle and tranquil humour will protect you against the risk of being either surprised, or keenly wounded by them." 3 There is a tolerably obvious distinction between two prin- cipal ways of examining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation, in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves with a certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in the heart of another, such as only music stirs into consciousness in ourselves. Besides this 1 No. 330. 2 Nos. 462, 463. 3 Correspondance. CEuvres, ii. 163. 26 VA UVENAR G UES. rarer poetic method, there is what may be styled the diplomatist's method; it classifies characters objectively, according to the kinds of outer conduct in which they manifest themselves, and accord- ing to the best ways of approaching and dealing with them. The second of these describes the spirit in which Vauvenargues ob- served men. He is French, and not German, and belongs to the eighteenth century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth. His Characters, very little known in this country, are as excellent as any work in this kind that we are acquainted with, or probably as excellent as such work can be. They are real and natural, yet while abstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere does from grotesque and extravagant traits, they avoid equally the vice of presenting the mere bald and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may read. As we have said, he had the quality possessed by so few of those who write about men ; he watched men, and drew from the life. In a word, he studied concrete examples and interrogated his own experience the only sure guarantee that one writing on his themes has anything which it is worth our while to listen to. Among other consequences of this reality of their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures are free from that clever bitter- ness and easy sarcasm, by which crude and jejune observers, thinking more of their own wit than of what they observe, some- times gain a little reputation. Even the coxcombs, self-duping knaves, simpletons, braggarts, and other evil or pitiful types whom he selects, are drawn with unstrained and simple con- formity to reality. The pictures have no moral label pinned on to them. Yet Vauvenargues took life seriously enough, and it was just because he took it seriously, that he had no inclination to air his wit or practise a verbal humour upon the stuff out of which happiness and misery are made. One or two fragments will suffice. Take the Man of the World, for instance : " A man of the world is not he who knows other men best, who has most foresight or dexterity in affairs, who is most in- structed by experience and study ; he is neither a good manager, nor a man of science, nor a politician, nor a skilful officer, nor a * VA UVENAR G UES. 2 7 painstaking magistrate. He is a man who is ignorant of nothing but who knows nothing ; who, doing his own business ill, fancies himself very capable of doing that of other people ; a man who has much useless wit, who has the art of saying flattering things which do not flatter, and judicious things which give no in- formation; who can persuade nobody, though he speaks well; en- dowed with that sort of eloquence which can bring out trifles, and which annihilates great subjects ; as penetrating in what is ridiculous and external in men, as he is blind to the depths pf their minds. One who, afraid of being wearisome by reason, is wearisome by his extravagances; is jocose without gaiety, and lively without passion." " Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and Lycas or the Firm Man : " Such a man seems really to possess more than one character. A powerful imagination makes his soul take the shape of all the objects that affect it ; he suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity and courage which were never expected of him ; the image of virtue inflames, elevates, softens, masters his heart ; he receives the impression from the loftiest, and he surpasses them. But when his imagination has grown cold, his courage droops, his generosity sinks ; the vices opposed to these virtues take pos- session of his soul, and after having reigned awhile supreme, they make way for other objects. . . . We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light ; it is a swift and im- perious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all their being, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes for them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights and those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or madness." 2 " Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spirit of reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of his passions, which leads him by impenetrable motives, and makes him advance to his ends by many paths. He is one of 1 (Euvres, i. 310. " Ibid. i. 325. 28 VAUVENARGUES. * those long-sighted men, who consider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish a design begun ; who are capable, I do not say of dissembling either a misfortune or an offence, but of rising above either, instead of letting it depress them ; deep natures, independent by their firmness in daring all and suffering all ; who, whether they resist their inclinations out of foresight, or whether, out of pride and a secret consciousness of their resources, they defy what is called prudence, always, in good as in evil, cheat the acutest conjectures." 1 Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from that favourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming a series of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications of extravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He resists this besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms to identify woman and fool. On the one or two occasions in which he begins the maxim with the fatal words, Les femmes, he is as little profound as other people who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species. "Women," for example, "have ordinarily more vanity than temperament, and more temperament than virtue" which is fairly true of all human beings, and in so far as it is true, de- scribes men just as exactly and no more so as it describes women. In truth, Vauvenargues felt too seriously about conduct and character to go far in this direction. Now and again he is content with a mere smartness, as when he says : " There are some thoroughly excellent people who cannot get rid of their ennui except at the expense of society." But such a mood is not common. He is usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty, delicate without being weak, and subtle without obscurity ; as for example : " People teach children to fear and obey ; the avarice, pride, or timidity of the fathers, instructs the children in economy, arro- gance, or submission. We stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which they are only too disposed to be, as it is ; nobody thinks of making them original, hardy, independent." 1 CEuvres, i. 326. VA UVENAR G UES. 2 9 " If instead of dulling the vivacity of children, people did their best to raise the impulsiveness and movement of their characters, what might we not expect from a fine natural temper ? " Again : " The moderation of the weak is mediocrity." " What is arrogance in the weak is elevation in the strong ; as the strength of a sick man is frenzy, and that of a whole man is vigour." " To speak imprudently and to speak boldly are nearly always the same thing. But we may speak without prudence, and still speak what is right ; and it is a mistake to fancy that a man has a shallow intelligence, because the boldness of his character or the liveliness of his temper may have drawn from him, in spite of himself, some dangerous truth." " It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise moderately." . Vauvenargues has a saying to the effect that men very often, without thinking of it, form an idea of their face and expression from the ruling sentiment of which they are conscious in them- selves at the time. He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb always believes himself to be handsome. 1 And in a letter to Mirabeau, he describes pleasantly how sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himself with an air of lofti- ness, of majesty, of penetration, according to the idea that is occupying his mind, and how if by chance he sees his face in the mirror, he is nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or a Tartar. 2 Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait, revealed itself in his face ; it is one of the most delightful to look upon, even in the cold inarticulateness of an engraving, that the gallery of fair souls contains for us. We may read the beauty of his character in the soft strength of the brow, the meditative lines of mouth and chin, above all, the striking clearness, the self-collection, the feminine solicitude, that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy in his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some 1 No. 236. 2 OSuvrts, ii. 188. 30 VA UVENAR G UES. ever-flowing inward stream of divine melody. We think of that gracious touch in Bacon's picture of the father of Solomon's House, that " he had an aspect as though he pitied men." If we reproach France in the eighteenth century with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty, cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists. CONDORCET. CONDORCET. OF the illustrious thinkers and writers who for two generations had been actively scattering the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcet survived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Those who had sown the wind were no more ; he only was left to see the reaping of the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention ; the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in due season to partake of its fruit ; at once a precursor, and a sharer in the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured first in the Legislative Assembly, and then in the Con- vention. Now, as a rule, the political parties that have most admired the Convention have had least sympathy with the Economists, and the historians who are most favourable to Turgot and his followers, are usually most hostile to the actions and associations of the great revolutionary chamber successively swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robespierre. Between the two, Condorcet's name has been allowed to lie hidden for the most part in a certain obscurity, or else has been covered with those taunts and innuendoes, which partisans are wont to lavish on men of whom they do not know exactly whether they are with or against them. D 34 CONDORCET. Generally the men of the Revolution are criticised in blocks and sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under any of these received schools. He was an Economist, but he was something more; for the most characteristic article in his creed was a passionate belief in the infinite perfectibility of human nature. He was more of a Girondin than a Jacobin, yet he did not always act, any more than he always thought, with the Girondins, and he did not fall when they fell, but was proscribed by a decree specially levelled at himself. Isolation of this kind is assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the coldness with which Condorcet's memory has been treated ; it flowed from some marked singularities both of character and opinion which are of the highest interest, if we consider the position of the man and the lustre of that ever-memorable time. "Condorcet," said D'Alembert, "is a volcano covered with snow." Said another, less picturesquely : " He is a sheep in a passion." " You may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to his person," wrote Madame Roland, " that it is a subtle essence soaked in cotton." The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these, of warm impulse and fine purpose with im- movable reserve, only shows that he of whom they were spoken belonged to the class of natures which may be called non- conducting. They are not effective, because without this efflu- ence of power and feeling from within, the hearer or onlooker is stirred by no sympathetic thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because consciousness of the . inequality between expression and meaning, between the influence intended and the impression con- veyed, must be as tormenting as to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If to be of this non-conducting tempera- ment is impossible in the really greatest characters, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at least it is no proper object of blame, for it is constantly the companion of lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps unfortunate that Condorcet should have permitted himself to be drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality by which even Marat could gain the sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible. The character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers CONDORCET. 35 nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willing to weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for human well- being, his eager and resolute belief in its indefinite expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by a destiny that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical days. Until the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of Condorcet's life were as little externally disturbed or specially remarkable as those of any other geometer and thinker of the time. He was born at a small town in Picardy, in the year 1743. His father was a cavalry officer, but as he died when his son was only three years old, he could have exerted no influence upon the future philosopher, save such as comes of transmission through blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record of any intercourse between them. His mother was a devout and trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl, by way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of a vile world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage in a state of educational and political subjection, which prevents the growth of a large intelligence made healthy and energetic by knowledge and by activity, we may expect pious extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was weakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing ; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shield their persons from pro- scription and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable instance D 2 36 CONDORCET. how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official instructors of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left behind them an army of the bitterest enemies that Christianity has ever had. To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which they had developed and sharpened, turned inevitably against the incurable faults in their own system. They were admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the Jesuits at Rheims, was able when he was only fifteen years old to go through such per- formances in analysis as to win especial applause from illustrious judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut. It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of knowledge, but the mental energy that mathematics first touched is sure to turn itself by-and- by to more complex and dangerous subjects in the scientific hierarchy. At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to solve. " For thirty years," he wrote in 1790, " I have hardly ever passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences." 1 Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardour of even the choicest spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it after- wards attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of 1 (Euvres de Condorcet (12 vols. 1847-49), i x - 4^9. CONDORCET. 37 syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational entrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him. 1 To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceived that the character which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to the finest impressions of humanity. It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the specialist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits. That he values knowledge only as a means to social action, is one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time and chance have been more favourable in making that temper per- manently productive. There is a fine significance in his words, after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office : " We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the future labouring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself for a while that one was working for the public weal." It is true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal ; but the process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised disappoint- ment at having to exchange active public labour for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally pro- fessed by statesmen when driven from place to their books. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to 1 CEuvrrs, i. 22O. 38 CONDORCET. stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strength of justice in society. It would have been in one sense more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember the contention of his latter days and the catas- trophe which brought them to a frightful close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in revolution. In measuring other men of science as his two volumes of Eloges abundantly show one cannot help being struck by the eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, any signal of anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to consummate it. " You are very happy," he once wrote to Turgot, " in your passion for the public good and your power to satisfy it ; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study." 1 In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with the Academy, to the mortification of his relations who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of horse as his father had been before him. About the same time, or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In com- pany with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. 2 To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the repre- sentatives of a powerful organization and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was absolutely 1 (Euvres, i. 20 1. See Target's wise reply, p. 202. 2 Sept. 1770. Voltaire's Corresp. vol. Ixxi. p. 147. CONDORCET. 39 unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor organization for its maintenance. Again, there have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent contri- bution to the ideas which have extended the powers and elevated the happiness of men ; but these great spirits for the most part laboured for the generation that followed them, and won com- paratively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire during his life enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expres- sion in a country where that art is more highly prized than anywhere else ; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion ; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks vigour and fresh- ness and sparkle ; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely inde- fatigable champion of e^ery victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye. It is not difficult to perceive the fascination which Voltaire, with this character and this unrivalled splendour of public position, would have for a man like Condorcet. He conceived the wannest attachment to Voltaire, and Voltaire in turn the highest respect for him. Their correspondence (1770-1778) is 40 CONDORCET. perhaps as interesting as any letters of that period that we possess : Voltaire is always bright, playful, and affectionate ; Condorcet more declamatory and less graceful, but full of reverence and loyalty for his " dear and illustrious " master, and of his own peculiar eagerness for good causes and animosity against the defenders of evil ones. Condorcet was younger than the Patriarch of Ferney by nearly half a century, but this did not prevent him from loyal remonstrances on more than one occasion against conduct on Voltaire's part in this matter or that, which he held to be un- worthy of his character and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to print in the Mercure a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleen placed Montesquieu below D'Aguesseau. " My attachment," he says, " bids me say what will be best for you, and not what might please you most. If I loved you less, I should not have the courage to thwart you. I am aware of your grievances against Montesquieu ; it is worthy of you to forget them." There was perhaps as much moral courage in doing this, as in defying the Men of the Mountain in the days of the Terror. It dispels some false impressions of Voltaire's supposed intolerance of criticism, to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. He showed himself worthy of such courageous conduct. " One sees things ill," he writes, " when one sees them from too far off. After all, we ought never to blush to go to school, if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeat, my acknowledgments to you." 1 Condorcet did not conceive that either to be blind to a man's errors or to compro- mise them is to prove yourself his friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns, and he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of direct personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it is about another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the writer himself. Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his corre- spondence with Turgot. What Turgot loved in Condorcet was his " simplicity of character." 2 Turgot was almost as much 1 (Euvres, i. 41. s CEuv. de Turgot, ii. 817. CONDORCET. 41 less vivacious than Condorcet, as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quite distinct types of cha- racter, but this may be a condition of the most perfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is most conscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, and sure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow by being watchfully held under the control of reason ; whose ideas are no less vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and ordered train ; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses or crimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besetting infirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this. Whatever he wished, he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of the epoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe something theological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters the distant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and at every mention of false opinion or evil-doing a sombre and angry shadow seems to fall upon, the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of human nature, and the correspondingly infinite augmentation of human happiness ; but Condorcet's ever-smouldering im- petuosity would be content with nothing less than the arrival of at least a considerable instalment of this infinite quantity now and instantly. He went so far as to insist that by-and-by men would acquire the art of prolonging their lives for several genera- tions, instead of being confined within the fatal span of three- score years and ten. He was impatient of any frittering away of life in scruple, tremors, and hesitations. " For the most part," he once wrote to Turgot, " people abounding in scruple are not fit for great things : a Christian will throw away in subduing the darts of the flesh the time which he might have employed on things of use to mankind ; or he will lack courage to rise against a tyrant for fear of his judgment being too hastily formed." 1 Turgot's reply may illustrate the difference between the two men : " No virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses with 1 (Euvres, i. 228. 42 CONDORCET. justice ; and I think no more of the people who do great things as you say at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they produce great beauties of imagination without regularity. I know that excessive exactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and of action ; but there is a mean in every- thing. It has never been a question in our controversy of a Capucin who throws away his time in quenching the darts of the flesh (though, by-the-way, in the total of time thrown away the term that expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts is most likely far greater) ; no more is it a question of a fool who is afraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rash judg- ment." 1 This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not among Condorcet's gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of excess, alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured the motives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christian was one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh ; anybody who declined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavish scrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller, to whom the especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, at each step that it takes, it inflicts upon Moses." Well, this temper is not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance with rich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we are par- ticularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatient humour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolent reluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers have been so conscientious as he was, in the labour that he bestowed upon subjects which he held to be worthy of deliberate scrutiny and consideration. His defect was in finding too few of such sub- jects, and in having too many foregone conclusions. Turgot and Montesquieu are perhaps the only two eminent men in France during this part of the century, of whom the same defect might not be alleged. Again, Condorcet's impatience of underlying temperament did not prevent him from filling his compositions 1 (Euvres, i. 232. " Ibid. i. 299. CONDORCET. 43 with solid, sober, and profound reflections, the products of grave and sustained meditation upon an experience, much of which must have been- severely trying and repugnant to a man of his constitution. While recognising this trait, then, let us not over- state either it or its consequences. The main currents of opinion and circumstance in France, when Condorcet came to take his place among her workers, are now well understood. The third quarter of the century was just closing. Lewis xv. died in 1774; and though his death was of little intrinsic consequence, except as the removal of every corrupt heart is of consequence, it is justly taken to mark the date of the beginning of the French Revolution. It was the accidental shifting of position which served to disclose that the existing system was smitten with a mortal paralysis. It is often said that what destroyed the French kingdom was despotism. A sounder explanation discovers the causes less in despotism than in anarchy anarchy in every department where it could be most ruinous. No substantial reconstruction was possible, because all the evils came from the sinister interests of the nobles, the clergy, or the financiers ; and these classes, informally bound together against the common weal, were too strong for either the sovereign or the ablest minister to thrust them aside. The material condition of France was one of supreme embarrassment and disorder, only curable by remedies which the political and social condition of the country made it impossible to employ. This would explain why a change of some sort was inevitable. But why was the change which actually took place in that direc- tion rather than another ? Why did not France sink under her economical disorders, as greater empires than France had done ? Why, instead of sinking and falling asunder, did the French people advance with a singleness of impulse unknown before in their history to their own deliverance ? How was it that they overthrew the system that was crushing them, and purged them- selves with fire and sword of those who administered and main- tained it, defying the hopes of the nation ; and then successfully encountered the giant's task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, and reconstructing the fabric of their own society 44 CONDORCET. with the other? The answer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition of France. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenth century, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organization of Catholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but cor- ruption remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what inspired them with hope and -energy when they thought of the possible new, was the spiritual prepara- tion that had been in swift progress since the third decade of the century. The forms and methods of this preparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath its influence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and the schools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots, all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief in human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. They impregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is true that we find Voltaire complaining towards the close of his days, of the century being satiated and weary, un siede degoutc, not knowing well what it wanted. " The public," he said, " has been eighty years at table, and now it drinks a little bad cognac at the end of its meal." 1 In literature and art this was true : going deeper than these, the public was eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and more fruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keen appetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, men had now risen up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after social righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, by this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionate conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. That destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously" confined in the hands of castes and official churches, which systematically and of their very consti- 1 Letters to Condorcet (1774). (Etivres, i. 35. CONDORCET. 45 tution bury justice under the sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition. Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from two sources. He' was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to the Church, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaire flourished, the destructive move- ment only reached theology, and Voltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the original impulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economical writers and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look upon societies with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence of institutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible of modification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural, therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movement which set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of Lewis xv. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire ; he was hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot ; and he was urgent, heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own. In a word, he was the incarnation of the revo- lutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spirit existed in geometers and Encyclopaedists ; at once too reasonable and too little reason- able ; too precise and scientific and too vague ; too rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is of ruinous potency. Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and there- fore he hated it ; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific knowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty in unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by bloodshed. " Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France ; observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two revolutions of England fanatical 4 5 CONDORCET. and England enlightened. We see on the one side contem- poraries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that they are fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country with blood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell ; on the other, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacific wisdom the freest constitution in the world." 1 It is not wonderful that his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved English Whigs, but hated English Republicans ; who could forgive an aristocratic faction grasping power for their order, but who could not sympathise with a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smote in the name of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power with noble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in the heart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never known since, simply because this ruler knew nothing about pri napes or the Rights of Man. However, Nemesis comes. By-and-by Condorcet found himself writing a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior in lawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August. 2 ii. The course of events after 1774 is in its larger features well known to every reader. Turgot, after a month of office at the Admiralty, was in August made Controller-General of Finance. With his accession to power, the reforming ideas of the century became practical. He nominated Condorcet to be Inspector of Coinage, an offer which Condorcet deprecated in these words : " It is said of you in certain quarters that money costs you nothing when there is any question of obliging your friends. I should be bitterly ashamed of giving any semblance of foundation to these absurd speeches. I pray you, do nothing for me just now. Though not rich, I am not pressed for money. Entrust to me some important task the reduction of measures for instance ; then wait till my labours have really earned some reward." 3 In 1 F.loge de Franklin, iii. 422. " Inflexions sur la Rev. de 1688, et sur celle du 10 Aofit, xii. 197. 3 (Euvres, i. 71. CONDORCET. 47 this patriotic spirit he undertook, along with two other eminent men of science, the task of examining certain projects for canals which engaged the attention of the minister. " People will tell you," he wrote, " that I have got ah office worth two hundred and forty pounds. Utterly untrue. We undertook it out of friend- ship for M. Turgot ; but we refused the payment that was offered." x We may profitably contrast this devotion to the public interest with the rapacity of the clergy and nobles, who drove Turgot from office because he talked of taxing them like their neighbours, and declined to glut their insatiable craving for place and plunder. Turgot was dismissed (May, 1776), and presently Necker was installed in his place. Condorcet had defended with much vigour and some asperity the policy of free internal trade in corn against Necker, who was for the maintenance of the restrictions on commercial intercourse between the different provinces of the kingdom. Consequently, when the new minister came into office, Condorcet wrote to Maurepas resigning his post. "I have," he said, " declared too decidedly what I think about both M. Necker and his works, to be able to keep any place that depends upon him." 2 This was not the first taste that Maurepas had had of Condorcet's resolute self-respect. The Duke de la Vrilliere, one of the most scandalous persons of the century, was an honorary member of the Academy, and he was the brother-in-law of Maurepas. It was expected from the perpetual secretary that he should compose a eulogy upon the occasion of his death, and Condorcet was warned by friends, who seldom reflect that a man above the common quality owes something more to himself than mere pru- dence, not to irritate the powerful minister by a slight upon his relation. He was inflexible. " Would you rather have me per- secuted," he asked, " for a wrong than for something just and moral ? Think, too, that they will pardon my silence much more readily than they would pardon my words, for my mind is fixed not to betray the truth." 3 In 1782 Condorcet was elected into the Academy. His 1 (Euvres, i. 73, 74. 2 Ibid. i. 296. 3 md. i. 78. 48 CONDORCET. competitor was Bailly, over whom he had a majority of one. The true contest lay less between the two candidates than be- tween D'Alembert and Buffon, who on this occasion are said to have fought one of the greatest 'battles in the not peaceful history of the Academy, for mighty anger burns even in celestial minds. D'Alembert is said to have exclaimed, we may hope with some exaggeration, that he was better pleased at winning that victory, than he would have been to find out the squaring of the circle. * Destiny, which had so pitiful a doom in store for the two candi- dates of that day, soon closed D'Alembert's share in these struggles of the learned and in all others. He died in the follow- ing year, and by his last act testified to his trust in the generous character of Condorcet. Having by the benevolence of a lifetime left himself on his death-bed without resources, he confided to his friend's care two old and faithful servants, for whom he was unable to make provision. This charge the philosopher accepted cheerfully, and fulfilled to the end with pious scrupulosity. The affection between Condorcet and D'Alembert had been warm and close as that of some famous pairs of antiquity ; a natural attraction of character had clothed community of pursuit and interest with the grace of the highest kind of friendship. Even Condorcet's too declamatory manner only adds a certain dignity to the pathetic passage with which he closes the noble eloge on his lost friend. 2 Voltaire had been dead these five years, and Turgot, too, was gone. Society offered the survivor no recompense. He found the great world tiresome and frivolous, and he described its pursuits in phrases that are still too faithful to the fact, as " dissipation without pleasure, vanity without meaning, and idle- ness without repose." It was perhaps to soften the oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that in 1786 Condorcet married. 3 1 (Euvres, i. 89. Condorcet had 16 votes, and Bailly 15. " Jamais aucunc election" says La Harpe, who was all for Buffon, " ri avail offert nice nombre ni cc partage. " Philos. du \%eme Siccle, i. 77. A full account of the election, and of Condorcet's reception, in Grimm's Corr. Lit. xi. 50-56. - (Euvres, iii. 109, no. 3 His wife, said to be one of the most beautiful women of her time, was twenty-three years younger than himself, and survived until 1822. Cabanis married another sister, and Marshal Grouchy was her brother. Madame Con- CONDORCET. 49 Events were now very close at hand, in comparison with which even the most critical private transactions of Condorcet's life were pale and insignificant. In the tranquil seasons of history, when the steady currents of circumstance bear men along noiseless, the importance of the relations which we contract seems superlative ; in times of storm and social wreck these petty fortunes and private chances are engulfed and lost to sight. The ferment was now rapidly rising to its intensest height, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to the burning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly ten years ago he expressed his preference for political activity over the meditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into the Revolu- tion with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixed and unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that the great ones whom he had known, the immortal Voltaire, the lofty-souled Turgot, had been carried away by the unkind gods, before their eyes had seen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign of justice on the earth. The gods after all were kinder than he knew, for they veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of '89 the spectres of '93. History might pos- sibly miss most of its striking episodes, if every actor could know the work to which he was putting his hand ; and even Condorcet's faith might have wavered if he had known that between him and the fulfilment of his desires there was to intrude a long and de- plorable period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision which then presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime ; and just as, when some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it is a consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship, so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring social dreams, the wreck of the aspira- tion is not total nor unrecompensed. The next best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to have sought them. During the winter of '88 and '89, while all France was astir with elections and preparation for elections for that meeting of the States-General, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a dorcet wrote nothing of her own, except some notes to a translation which she made of Adam Smith's Theory of Aloral Sentiments, 5 o CONDORCET. long night of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could best serve the movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides of their duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of the subjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which his countrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery and the slave trade. 1 With a terseness and force not always characteristic of his writings, he appealed to the electors, while they were reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forget the half-million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefully torn away from them, and whose need of justice was more urgent than their own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingenious protest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingo plantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly incon- sistent it was with every idea of a free and popular chamber that men should sit as representatives of others who had never chosen them, and that they should invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the same instant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed natural rights of mankind in their own country. 2 Of general precepts he never tired ; one series of them fol- lowed another. To us many of them may seem commonplace ; but we should reflect that the election of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, and Condorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of political inexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because he will follow his own interest and not yours ; but at the same time beware of choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, because you need ability quite as much as you need probity. Do not choose a man who has ever taken sides against the liberty of any portion of mankind ; nor one whose principles were never known until he 1 Montesquieu, Raynal, and one or two other writers, had attacked slavery long before, and Condorcet published a very effective piece against it in 1781, {Reflexions sur VEsdavage des Negres ; GEuvres, vii. 63), with an epistle dedi- cated to the enslaved blacks. About the same time an Abolition Society was formed in France, following the example set in England. 2 Au Corps Electoral, contre VEsdavage des Noirs. 3 Fev. 1789. Sur r Admission des Deputes des Planteurs de Saint Domingue. 1789. ix. 469-485. CONDORCET. 51 found out that he wanted your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat of soul ; because what you want is not heat but force, not violence but steadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man's actions from the accidents of his life ; for one may be the enemy or the victim of a tyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by a candidate's solici- tations : but at the same time, make allowance for the existing effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decided opinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation ; those who are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity for the misfortunes of the people ; those who speak of justice and reason, to those who speak of political interests and of the prosperity of commerce. Distrust those who appeal to senti- ment in matters that can be decided by reason ; prefer light to eloquence ; and pass over those who declare themselves ready to die for liberty, in favour of those who know in what liberty consists. 1 In another piece he drew up a list of the rights which the nation had a claim to have recognised, such as the right to make laws, to exact responsibility from the ministers of the crown, to the protection of personal liberty, and to the legal administration of justice by regular judges. These rights he declared it to be the first duty of the Assembly to draw up in a chart that should be the chief corner-stone of the new constitution. Then he pro- ceeded to define the various tasks to which he conceived that the legislative body should forthwith apply itself ; and among them, be it said, is no mention of any of those projects of confiscation which circumstances so speedily forced upon the Assembly when it met. 2 Though many of these precepts designed to guide the electors in their choice of men are sagacious and admirable, they smack strongly of that absolute and abstract spirit which can never become powerful in politics without danger. It is certain that in the spring of '89, Condorcet held hereditary monarchy to be 1 Lettres d'ttn Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat, ix. 255-259. 2 Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions donner par las Provinces & leurs Deputes aux Etats- Centraiix, ix. 263-283. E 2 52 CONDORCET. most suitable to " the wealth, the population, the extent of France, and to the political system of Europe." 1 Yet the reasons which he gives for thinking this are not very cogent, and he can hardly have felt them to be so. It is significant, however, of the little distance which all the most uncompromising and most thoughtful revolutionists saw in front of them, that even Condorcet should, so late as the eve of the assembly of the States-General, have talked about attachment to the forms of monarchy and respect for the royal person and prerogative ; and should have repre- sented the notion of the property of the Church undergoing any confiscation, as an invention of the enemies of freedom/ Before the year was out, the property of the Church had under- gone confiscation ; before two years had gone he was an ardent Republican; and in less than twelve months after that he had voted the guilt of the king. It is worth while to cite here a still more pointed example of the want of prevision, so common and so intelligible at that time. Writing in July, 1791, he confutes those who asserted that an established and limited monarchy was a safeguard against a usurper, whose power is only limited by his own audacity and address, by pointing out that the extent of France, its divisions into departments, the separation between the various branches of the administration, the freedom of the press, the multitude of the public prints, were all so many insurmountable barriers against a French Cromwell. " To anybody who has read with attention the history of the usurpation of Cromwell, it is clear that a single newspaper would have been enough to stop his success. It is clear that if the people of England had known how to read other books beside their Bible, the hypocritical tyrant, unmasked from his first step, would soon have ceased to be dangerous." Again, is the nation to be cajoled by some ambitious general, gratifying its desire to be an empire-race? " Is this what is asked by true friends of liberty, those who only seek that reason and right should have empire over men ? What provinces, conquered by a French general, will he despoil 1 Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions ct donner par les Provinces d Imrs Deputes aux Etals- GJnfraux, ix. 266. " Ibid. ix. 264. CONDORCET. 53 to buy our sitffrages ? Will he promise our soldiers, as the consuls promised the citizens of Rome, the pillage of Spain or of Syria ? No, assuredly ; it is because we cannot be an empire-nation that we shall remain a free nation." 1 How few years, alas, between this conclusive reasoning, and the pillage of Italy, the campaign in Syria, the seizure of Spain ! Condorcet was not a member of the Assembly in whose formation and composition he had taken so vivid and practical an interest. The first political functions which he was invited to undertake, were those of a member of the municipality of Paris. In the tremendous drama of which the scenes were now opening, the Town-hall of Paris was to prove itself far more truly the centre of movement and action than the Constituent Assembly. The efforts of the Constituent Assembly to build up were tardy and ineffectual. The activity of the municipality of Paris in pulling down was after a time ceaseless, and it was thoroughly successful. The first mayor was the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet's defeated competitor at the Academy. With the fall of the Bastille, summary hangings at the nearest lantern-post, October insurrection of women, and triumphant and bloody compulsion of king, queen, and Assembly to Paris from Ver- sailles, the two rivals, now colleagues, must have felt that the contests for them were indeed no longer academic. The astro- nomy of the one and the geometry of the other were for ever done with ; and Condorcet's longing for active political life in preference to mere study was gratified to the very full. Unhappily or not, the movement was beyond the control of anybody who, like Condorcet, had no other -force than that of disciplined reason and principle. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in with oceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention and irrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments were loyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises of this overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell and mere good-will does not tell. Exaltation reaches a pitch at which the physical sensibilities 1 Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs el Instructions cl donner par les Provinces h leurs Deputes aux Etats- Generanx, xii. 228, 229, 234. 54 CONDORCET. are so quickened as to be supreme over the rest of the nature ; and in these moods it is the man gifted with the physical quality, as mysterious and indescribable as it is resistless, of a Marat, to take a bad example, or a Danton, to take a good one, who can " ride the whirlwind and direct the storm." Of this quality Condorcet had nothing. His personal presence inspired a decent respect, but no strong emotion either of fear or admiration or physical sympathy. His voice was feeble, his utterance indistinct; and he never got over that nervous apprehension which the spectacle of large and turbulent crowds naturally rouses in the student. In a revolution after the manner of Lord Somers he would have been invaluable. He thoroughly understood his own principles, and he was a master of the art, so useful in its place and time and so respectable in all places and times, of considering political projects point by point with reference to a definite framework of rational ideas. But this was no time for such an art ; this was not a revolution to be guided by reason, not even reason like Condorcet's, streaked with Jacobinical fibre. The national ideas in which it had arisen had transformed themselves into tumultuous passion, and from this into frenzied action. Every politician of real eminence as a reformer possesses one of three elements. One class of men is inspired by an intel- lectual attachment to certain ideas of justice and right reason : another is moved by a deep pity for the hard lot of the mass of every society : while the third, such men as Richelieu for example, have an instinctive appreciation and passion for wise and orderly government. The great and typical ruler is moved in varying degrees by all three in modern times, when the claims of the poor, the rank and file of the social army, have been raised to the permanent place that belongs to them. Each of the three types has its own peculiar conditions of success, and there are circumstances in which some one of the three is more able to grapple with the obstacles to order than either of the other two. It soon became very clear that the intellectual quality was not the element likely to quell the tempest that had arisen now. CONDORCET. 55 Let it be said, however, that Condorcet showed himself no pedantic nor fastidious trifler with the tremendous movement which he had contributed to set afoot. The same practical spirit which drove him into the strife, guided him in the midst of it. He never wrung his hands, nor wept, nor bewailed the unreason of the multitudes to whom in vain he preached reason. Unlike the typical man of letters for he was without vanity he did not abandon the cause of the Revolution because his suggestions were often repulsed. " It would be better," he said to the Girondins, " if you cared less for personal matters and attended only to public interests." Years ago, in his eloge on L'Hopital, he had praised the famous Chancellor for incurring the hostility of both of the two envenomed factions, the League and the Huguenots, and for disregarding the approbation or disapprobation of the people. "What operation," he asked, "capable of producing any durable good, can be understood by the people ? How should they know to what extent good is possible ? How judge of the means of producing it ? It must ever be easier for a charlatan to mislead the people, than for a man of genius to save it." 1 Re- membering this law, he never lost patience. He was cool and intrepid, if his intrepidity was of the logical sort rather than physical ; and he was steadfast to one or two simple aims, if he was on some occasions too rapid in changing his attitude as to special measures. He was never afraid of the spectre, as the incompetent revolutionist is. On the contrary, he understood its whole internal history ; he knew what had raised it, what passion and what weakness gave to it substance, and he knew that pre- sently reason would banish it and restore men to a right mind. The scientific spirit implanted in such a character as Condorcet's, and made robust by social meditation, builds up an impregnable fortitude in the face of incessant rebuffs and discouragements. Let us then picture Condorcet as surveying the terrific welter 1 (Euvres, iii. 533. As this was written in I777> Condorcet was perhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tells us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was wretched. See vol. i. of Madame De Staffs Considerations, 56 CONDORCET. from the summer of 1789 to the summer of 1793, from the taking of the Bastille to the fall of the Girondins, with something of the firmness and self-possession of a Roman Cato. After the flight of the king in June, and his return in what was virtually captivity to Paris, Condorcet was one of the party, very small in numbers and entirely discountenanced by public opinion, then passing through the monarchical and constitutional stage, who boldly gave up the idea of a monarchy and proclaimed the idea of a republic. In July (1791) he published a piece strongly arguing for a negative answer to the question whether a king is necessary for the preservation of liberty. 1 In one sense, this composition is favourable to Condorcet's foresight ; it was not everyone who saw with him that the destruction of the monarchy was inevitable after the royal flight. This want of preparation in the public mind for every great change as it came, is one of the most striking circumstances of the Revolution, and it explains the violent, confused, and inadequate manner in which nearly every one of these changes was made. It was proposed at that time to appoint Condorcet to be governor to the young dauphin. But Condorcet in this piece took such pains to make his sentiments upon royalty known, that in the constitutional frame of mind in which the Assembly then was, the idea had to be abandoned. It was hardly likely that a man should be chosen for such an office,, who had just declared the public will to be " that the uselessness of a king, the needfulness of seeking means of displacing a power founded on illusions, should be one of the first truths offered to his reason ; the obligation of concurring in this himself, one of the first of his moral duties ; and the desire not to be freed from the yoke of law by an insulting inviolability, the first sentiment of his heart. People are well aware that at this moment the object is much less how to mould a king, than to teach him not to wish to be one." 2 As all France was then bent on the new constitution, a king included, Condorcet's republican assurance was hardly warranted, and it was by no means well received. 1 CEuvres, ni. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a young mechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel's chess- player, who would answer all constitutional purposes perfectly. Ibid. 239-241. 2 Ibid. xii. 236. CONDORCET. 57 in. When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a municipal officer, that the Parisians re- turned him for one of their deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August, 1791, had mitigated the loyalty that had even with- stood the trial of the king's flight. When the Legislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakable element of repub- licanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous ad- dresses in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative, what Barere afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid, labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither the hard force of Napoleon's pro- clamations, nor the flowery eloquence of the Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such circum- stances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagina- tion and perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor the other, but only reason a hard anvil, out of which he laboriously struck flashes and single sounds. Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation of the Assembly, between a hostile court and a sus- picious and distrustful nation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from the beginning desperate. In De- cember, 1791, the Legislative through its secretary informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king's measures in the face of the menaces of foreign war. 1 Within eight months, when the king's person was in captivity and his power suspended, the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king had treated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual league with the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly after the violent events of the Tenth of August, 1792, 1 Declaration de V Assemblee Nationalc, 29 Dec. 1791. CEuvres, xii. 25. 58 CONDORCET. are not edifying, and imply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye for revolutionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but most momentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr. Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked a process truly called, " especially in times of swift change, one of the sorrowmllest tasks poor humanity has." You might read the Exposition of the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed the Convention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King* without dreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out of distrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king away from his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated the very chamber that was thus professing to expound its motives for doing what the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power, in fact, was all outside the chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Under such circumstance it is of no interest to men to learn that " in the midst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, took its oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post ; took the oath to save France, and looked about for means." 2 Still more impotent and hollow, be- cause still more pompous, is the address of six days later. 3 A few days after this ; occurred the massacres of prisoners in Sep- tember scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody and iniquitous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland six years afterwards by English troops. When the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris re- jected Condorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of the Aisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and a much more important personage the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soon to stupefy the Con- vention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face set immovable as bronze : " An individual has no right to be either virtuous or celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly are not made to admire anybody." The electors of the depart- ment of the Aisne had unconsciously sent two typical revo- 1 August 13, 1792. (Euvres, x. 547. 2 Ibid. x. 560. 3 19 August. Ibid. x. 565. CONDORCET. 59 lutionists : the man of intellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. In their persons the Encyclopaedia and the Guillotine met. Condorcet, who had been extreme in the Legis- lative, but found himself a moderate in the Convention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the new members : " Better try to moderate them than quarrel." But in this case, not even in their ruin, were fire and water reconciled. On the first great question that the Convention had to decide the fate of the king Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wise man would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that the king was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for the punishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediate issue, whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or should be submitted to the people for ratification, he voted as a wise man should not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people. Such an appeal must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles, and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that, though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previously laid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that they were neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How, he asked, without violating every principle of jurisprudence, can you act at the same time as legislators consti- tuting the crime, as accusers, and as judges ? His proposal was that Lewis xvi. should be tried by a tribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body of the departments. 1 With true respect for Condorcet's honourable anxiety that the con- ditions of justice should be rigorously observed for, as he well said, " there is no liberty in a country where positive law is not the single rule of judicial proceedings" it is difficult to see why the Convention, coming as it did fresh from the electoral bodies, who must have had the question what was to be done with the imprisoned king foremost in their minds, why the members of the Convention should not form as legitimate a tribunal as any body whose composition and authority they had themselves defined and 1 Opinion sur le Jugement de Louis XVI. Nov. 1792. QLuvres, xii. 267-303. 60 CONDORCET. created, and which would be chosen by the very same persons who less than a month before had invested them with their own offices. Reading this most scrupulous and juristic composition, we might believe the writer to have forgotten that France lay mad and frenzied outside the hall where he stood, and that in political action the question what is possible is at least as important as what is compatible with the maxims of scientific jurisprudence. It was to Condorcet's honour as a jurisconsult that he should have had so many scruples ; it is as much to his credit as a politician that he laid them aside and tried the king after all. It is highly characteristic of Condorcet's tenacity of his own view of the Revolution and of its methods, that on the Saturday (January 19, 1793) when the king's fate was decided against Con- dorcet's conviction and against his vote the execution taking place on the Monday morning he should have appealed to the Convention, at all events to do their best to neutralise the effect of their verdict upon Europe, by instantly initiating a series of humane reforms in the law among them, including the abolition of the punishment of death. " The English ministers," he cried, " are now seeking to excite that nation against us. Do you suppose that they will venture to continue their calumnious de- clamations, when you can say to them : ' We have abolished the penalty of death, while you still preserve it for the theft of a few shillings ? You hand over debtors to the greed or spite of their creditors ; our laws, wiser and more humane, know how to respect poverty and misfortune. Judge between us and you. and see to which of the two peoples the reproach of inhumanity may be addressed with most justice.'" 1 This was the eve of the Terror. Well may Comte distinguish Condorcet as the one philosopher who pursued in the midst of the tempest his regenerating meditations. But let us banish the notion that the history of the Convention is only the history of the guillotine. No chamber in the whole annals of governing assemblies ever displayed so much alertness, energy, and capacity, in the face of difficulties that might well 1 1 9 Jan. 1793. (Euvres, xii. 311. CONDORCET. 61 have crushed them. Besides their efforts, justly held incom- parable, to hurl back the enemy from the frontiers, they at once in the spirit of Condorcet's speech, made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less noble task of legal reforms and political reorganization. The unrivalled ingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts of compact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. The civil code was drawn up in a month. 1 Constitutions abounded. Cynical his- torians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months that followed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution ; and, so far as they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills, their faith was assuredly not according to know- ledge. It shows, however, the fundamental and seemingly in- eradicable respect for authority which their history has engendered in the French, that even in this, their most chaotic hour, they craved order and its symbols. Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sieyes, and others, was a member of the .first committee for framing a constitution. They laboured assiduously from September to February, 1793, when the project was laid upon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet's composition. 2 The time was inauspicious. The animosities between the Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and terror, Condorcet at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he 1 See M. Edgar Quinet's remarks on this achievement. La Revolution, ii. no. 2 GEitvres, xii. 333, 417. M. Louis Blanc has contrasted the principles laid down as the basis of this project with Robespierre's rival Declaration of the Rights of Man, printing the two side by side in parallel columns. " Les voila done face a face, apres leur commune victoire stir le principe d'autorife, ces deux principes dindividualisme et de fratemite, entre lesquels, aujourd'hui mime, le monde balance, in-vinciblement emu ! Efun cote la philosophic du rationalisme pur, qui divisc ; tfn autre cdtt la philosophic du sentiment, gui rapproche et reunit. Id Voltaire et Condorcet, laJ.J. Rousseau et Robespierre" Hist. d<; la Revol. Fran. bk. ix. c. 5. 62 CONDORCET. had neither an idea in his head nor a feeling in his heart still pertinaciously kept crying out for the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. The revolution of the Second of June came, and swept the Girondins out of the Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days were numbered. " What did you do all that time ? " somebody once asked of a member of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning and which lasted until Thermidor in 1794. " I lived," was the reply. Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life as Danton or Saint-Just cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down among the men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the Mountain to the face. Herault de Sechelles, at the head of another committee, brought in a new constitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Of this, Sieyes said privately, that it was " a bad table of contents." Condorcet denounced it publicly, and, with a courage hardly excelled, he declared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyed the integrity of the national representation. The Bill he handled with a severity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of its designers. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot, one of those weak and excitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the in- tensity, multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercer air of such an event as the Revolution is a real poison, rose and in the name of the Committee of General Security called the attention of the Chamber to what he styled a sequel of the Girondist Brissot. This was no more nor less than Condorcet's document criticising the new constitution. "This man," said Chabot, "has sought to raise the depart- ment of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he has happened to sit by the side of a handful of savants of the Academy, it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic." 1 So a decree was passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in the list of those who were tried before 1 Extrait du Moniteur. CEuvrcs, xii. 677- CONDORCET. 63 the Revolutionary Tribunal on the Third of October for con- spiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. He was condemned in his absence, and declared to be hors la loi, This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhood upwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the common weal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will best remember his name, though only a few months intervened between his flight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enacted, he fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet, a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and one of those beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach. " Is he an honest and virtuous man ? " she asked ; " in that case let him come, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized." The same night Condorcet intrusted his life to her keeping, and for nine months he remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of the execution of the Girondins condemned on the same day with himself, he perceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protectress, and made up his mind to flee. "I am an outlaw," he said, " and if I am discovered you will be dragged to the same death." " The Convention," Madame Vernet answered, with something of the heroism of more notable women of that time, "may put you out of the law; it has not the power to put you out of humanity. You stay." This was no speech of the theatre. The whole household kept the most vigorous watch over the prisoner thus generously detained, and for many months Madame Vernet's humane firmness was successful in preventing his escape. This time his soul grievously burdened by anxiety as to the fate of his wife and child, and by a restless eagerness not to compromise his benefactress, a bloody death staring him every moment in the face Condorcet spent in the composition, without the aid of a single book, of his memorable work on the progress of the human mind. Among the many wonders of an epoch of portents, this feat of intellectual abstrac- tion is not the least amazing. 64 CONDORCET. When his task was accomplished, Condorcet felt with more keenness than ever the deadly peril in which his presence placed Madame Vernet. He was aware that to leave her house was to seek death, but he did not fear. He drew up a paper of directions to be one day given to his little daughter, when she should be of years to understand and follow them. They are written with minute care, and though tender and solicitous, they show perfect composure. His daughter is above all things to banish from her mind every revengeful sentiment against her father's enemies; to distrust her filial sensibility, and to make this sacrifice for her father's own sake. This done, he marched downstairs, and having by an artful stratagem thrown Madame Vernet off her guard, he went out at ten o'clock in the morning imperfectly disguised into, the street. This was the fifth of April, 1794. By three in the afternoon, exhausted by fatigue which his strict confinement for nine months made excessive, he reached the house of a friend in the country, and prayed for a night's shelter. His presence excited less pity than alarm. The people gave him refreshment, and he borrowed a little pocket copy of Horace, with which he went forth into the loneliness of the night. He promised himself shelter amid the stone quarries of Clamart. What he suffered during this night, the whole day of the sixth of April, the night, and again the next day, there is no one to tell. The door of the house in the Rue Servandoni was left on the latch night and day for a whole week. But Madame Vernet's generous hope was in vain ; while she still hoped and watched, the end had come. On the evening of the seventh, Condorcet, with one of his legs torn or broken, his garments in rags, with visage gaunt and hunger-stricken, entered an inn in the hamlet of Clamart, and called for an omelette. Asked how many eggs he would have in it, the famishing man answered a dozen. Carpenters, for such he had given himself to be, do not have a dozen eggs in their omelettes. Suspicion was aroused, his hands were not the hands of a workman, and he had no papers to show, but only the pocket Horace. The villagers seized him and hastened to drag him, bound hand and foot, to Bourg-la- CONDORCET. 65 Reinc, then called for a season Bourg-1'Egalite. On the road he fainted, and they set him on a horse offered by a pitying wayfarer. When they reached the prison, Condorcet, starving, bleeding, way-worn, was flung into his cell. On the morrow, when the gaolers came to seek him, they found him stretched upon the ground, dead and stark. So he perished of hunger and weari- ness, say some; of poison ever carried by him in a ring, say others. 1 So, to the last revolving supreme cares, this high spirit was overtaken by annihilation. His memory is left to us, the fruit of his ideas, and the impression of his character. An eminent man, who escaped by one accident from the hatchets of the Septembriseurs, and by another from the guillotine of the Terror, while in hiding and in momentary expectation of capture and death, wrote thus in condemnation of suicide, " the one crime which leaves no possibility of return to virtue." " Even at this incomprehensible moment "the spring of 1793 "when morality, enlightenment, energetic love of country, only render death at the prison-wicket or on the scaffold more inevitable ; when it might be allowable to choose among the ways of leaving a life that can no longer be preserved, and to rob tigers in human form of the accursed pleasure of dragging you forth and drinking your blood ; yes, on the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but voice, I could still cry, Take care, to a child that should come too near the wheel : perhaps he may owe his life to me, perhaps the country shall one day owe its salvation to him." 2 More than one career in those days, famous or obscure, was marked by this noble tenacity to lofty public ideas even in the final moments of existence. Its general acceptance as a binding- duty, exorcising the mournful and insignificant egotisms that haunt and wearily fret and make waste the remnants of so many lives, will produce the profoundest of all possible improvements in 1 The Abbe Morellet, in his narrative of the death of Condorcet (Mttmoires, c. xxiv.), says that he died of poison, a mixture of stramonium and opium. He adds that the surgeon described death as due to apoplexy. See Musset- Pathay'sy. J, Rousseau, ii. 42. 2 Dupont de Nemours. Les Physiocrates, i. 326. 66 CONDORCET. men's knowledge of the sublime art of the happiness of their kind. The closing words of Condorcet's last composition show the solace which perseverance in taking thought for mankind brought to him in the depths of personal calamity. He had concluded his survey of the past history of the race, and had drawn what seemed in his eyes a moderate and reasonable picture of its future. " How this picture," he exclaims, with the knell of his own doom sound- ing full in the ear while he wrote, " this picture of the human race freed from all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom the victim ! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives the reward of his efforts for the pro- gress of reason, for the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the destinies of man : it is there that he finds the true recompense of virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate can no longer undo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the recollection of his persecutors can never follow him ; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy ; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights." ' It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction which Coleridge led and Carlyle has spread and popu- larised, to dwell exclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism and the defect of enthusiasm, that are sup- posed to have characterised the eighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both in England and France was life- less and mechanical, it has been taken for granted that the level of thought and feeling was a low one universally ; as if the highest 1 Progrh de V Esprit Humain. (Euvres, vi. 276. CONDORCET. 67 moods of every era necessarily clothed themselves in religious forms. The truth is that, working in such natures as Condorcet's, the principles of the eighteenth century, its homage to reason and rational methods, its exaltation of the happiness of men, not excluding their material well-being, into the highest place, its passion for justice and law, its large illumination, all engendered a fervour as truly religious as that of Catholicism or of Calvinism at their best, while its sentiment was infinitely less interested and personal. The passage just quoted is as little mechanical, as little material, as the most rapturous ejaculations of the Christian saints and confessors. Read in connection with the circumstances of its composition, it may show that the eighteenth century was able at any rate to inspire its sons with a faith that could rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory, as effectually as if it had rested on a mystery instead of on reason, and been supported by the sanctions of eternal pain and eternal bliss, instead of moving from a confident devotion to humanity. IV. The shape of Condorcet's ideas upon history arose from the twofold necessity which his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing his aspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined and scientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to find adequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypothetical Utopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope ; and distinct grounds for the faith that was in him, as essential as the faith itself. The result of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditions of the time being what they were, was the rise in his mind of the great and central conception of there being a law in the succession of social states, to be ascertained by an examination of the collective phenomena of past history. The merit of this admirable effort, and of the work in which it found expression, is very easily underrated, be- cause the effort was insufficient and merely preparatory, while modern thought has already carried us far beyond it, and at least into sight of the more complete truths to which this effort only F 2 68 CONDORCET. pointed the way. Let us remember, however, that it did point the way distinctly and unmistakably. A very brief survey of the state of history as a subject of systematic study enables us to appreciate with precision what service it was that Condorcet rendered ; for it carries us back from the present comparatively advanced condition of the science of society to a time before his memorable attempt, when conceptions now become so familiar were not in existence, and when even the most instructed students of human affairs no more felt the need of a scientific theory of the manner in which social effects follow social causes, than the least instructed portion of the literary public feels such a need in our own time. It is difficult after a subject has been separated from the nebulous mass of unclassified knowledge, after it has taken independent shape, and begun to move in lines of its own, to realise the process by which all this was effected, or the way in which before all this the facts concerned presented themselves to the thinker's mind. That we should overcome the difficulty is one of the conditions of our being able to do justice to the great army of the precursors. Two movements of thought went on in France during the middle of the eighteenth century, which have been comparatively little dwelt upon by historians ; their main anxiety has been to justify the foregone conclusion, so gratifying alike to the partisans of the social reaction and to the disciples of modern transcenden- talism in its many disguises, that the eighteenth century was almost exclusively negative, critical, and destructive. Each of these two currents was positive in the highest degree, and their influence undeniably constructive, if we consider that it was from their union into a common channel, a work fully accomplished first in the mind of Condorcet, that the notion of the scientific treatment of history and society took its earliest start. The first of the two movements, and that which has been most unaccountably neglected, consisted in the remarkable attempts of Quesnay and his immediate followers to withdraw the organization of society from the sphere of empiricism, and to substitute for the vulgar conception of arbitrary and artificial in- stitutions as the sole foundation of this organization, the idea that CONDORCET. 69 there is a certain Natural Order, conformity to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their being advan- tageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from uninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered by continuous and methodical observation. It con- sisted of physical law and moral law. Physical law is the regu- lated course of every physical circumstance in the order evidently most advantageous to the human race. Moral law is the rule of every human action in the moral order, conformed to the physical order evidently most advantageous to the human race. This order is the base of the most perfect government, and the funda- mental rule of all positive laws ; for positive laws are only such laws as are required to keep up and maintain the natural order that is evidently most advantageous to the race. 1 Towards the close of the reign of Lewis xiv. the frightful impoverishment of the realm attracted the attention of one or two enlightened observers, and among them of Boisguillebert and Vauban. They had exposed, the former of them with especial force and amplitude, the absurdity of the general system of administration, which seemed to have been devised for the express purpose of paralysing both agriculture and commerce, and exhausting all the sources of the national wealth. 2 But these speculations had been mainly of a fiscal kind, and pointed not much further than to a readjustment of taxation and an improve- ment in the modes of its collection. The disciples of the New Science, as it was called, the Physiocrats, or believers in the supremacy of Natural Order, went much beyond this, and in theory sought to lay open the whole ground of the fabric of society. Practically they dealt with scarcely any but the economic circumstances of societies, though some of them mix up with their reasonings upon commerce and agriculture crude and incomplete hints upon forms of government and other questions that belong 1 Quesnay ; Droit Nature!, c. 5. Les Physiocrates, i. 52. 2 Economises Financiers du iSitme Su-c/e. Vauban's Projet (tune Dime Roy ale (p. 33), and Boisguillebert's Factum de la France, &c. (p. 248 ct seq.). 70 CONDORCET. not to the economical but to the political side of social science/ Quesnay's famous Maxims open with a declaration in favour of the unity of the sovereign authority, and against the system of counterbalancing forces in government. Almost immediately he passes on to the ground of political economy, and elaborates the conditions of material prosperity in an agricultural realm. With the correctness of the definitions and principles of economic science as laid down by these writers, we have here nothing to do. Their peculiar distinction in the present connection is the grasp which they had of the principle of there being a natural, and therefore a scientific, order in the conditions of a society ; that order being natural in the sense that they attached to the term, which from the circumstances of the case is most beneficial to the race. From this point of view they approach some of the problems of what is now classified as social statics ; and they assume, without any consciousness of another aspect being pos- sible, that the society which they are discussing is in a state of equilibrium. It is evident that with this restriction of the speculative horizon, they were and must remain wholly unable to emerge into the full light of the completely constituted science of society, with laws of movement as well as laws of equilibrium, with defi- nite methods of interpreting past and predicting future states. They could account for and describe the genesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in different ways been able to do many centuries before ; and they could prescribe some of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour and compactness. Some of them could even see in a vague way the interdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests of different nations, each nation, as De la Riviere expressed it, being only a province of the vast kingdom of nature, a branch from the same trunk as the rest. 2 What they could not see was the great fact of social evolution ; and here too, in the succession of social states, 1 De la Riviere, for instance, very notably. Cf. his Ordre Naturel des Societes Politiques. Physiocrales, ii. 469, 636, &c. See also Baudeau on the superiority of the Economic Monarchy. Ibid, pp. 783-791. 2 Ordre Nat. des Soc. Pol. p. 526. CONDORCET. 71 th6re has been a natural and observable order. In a word, they tried to understand society without the aid of history. Conse- quently they laid down the truths which they discovered as abso- lute and fixed, when they were no more than conditional and relative. Fortunately inquirers in another field had set a movement afoot, which was destined to furnish the supplement of their own speculation. This was the remarkable development of the con- ception of history, which Montesquieu's two memorable books first made conspicuous. Bossuet's well-known discourse on universal history, teeming as it does with religious prejudice, just as Condorcet's sketch teems with prejudice against religion, and egregiously imperfect in execution as it must be pronounced when judged from even the meanest historical standard, had perhaps partially introduced the spirit of Universality, as Comte says, into the study of history. But it was impossible from the nature of the case for any theojogian to know fully what this spirit means ; and it was not until the very middle of the following century that any effective approach was made to that universality Avhich Bossuet did little more than talk about. Then it came not from theology, but from the much more hopeful sources of a rational philosophy. Before Mon- tesquieu no single stone of the foundation of scientific history can be said to have been laid. Of course, far earlier writers had sought after the circumstances which brought about a given transaction. Thucydides, for example, had attributed the cause of the Peloponnesian war to the alarm of the Lacedaemonians at the greatness of the power of Athens. 1 It is this sense of the need of explanation, however rudimentary it may be, which distinguishes the great historian from the chronicler, even from a very superior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great an event as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of what happened, without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begun his Histories with remarks upon the condition of Rome, the feeling of the various armies, the 1 Bk. i. 23. 7 2 CONDORCET. attitude of the provinces, so that, as he says, " non modo casus eventiisque rerum, qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, sed ratio etiam causaque noscantur." 1 But these and the like instances in his- torical literature were only political explanations, more or less adequate, of particular transactions ; they were no more than the sagacious remarks of men with statesmanlike minds, upon the origin of some single set of circumstances. The rise from this to the high degree of generality which marks the speculations of Montesquieu, empirical as they are, was as great as the rise from the mere maxims of worldly wisdom to the widest principles of ethical philosophy. Polybius, indeed, in the remarkable chapters with which his Histories open, uses expressions that are so modern as almost to startle us. " People who study history," he says, " in separate and detached portions, without reference to one another, and suppose that from them they acquire a knowledge of the whole, are like a man who in looking on the severed members of what had once been, an animated and comely creature, should think that this was enough to give him an idea of its beauty and force when alive. The empire of Rome was what by its extent in Italy, Africa, Asia, Greece, brought history into the condition of being organic ((r