CHAPTER V.
INSPICERE tanquam in speculum, in vitas omnium
Jubeo.*--TERENCE.
* "I bid you look into the lives of all men, as
it were into a mirror."
ERNEST MALTRAVERS still lingered at Paris: he gave up all notion of
proceeding farther. He was, in fact, tired of travel. But there was
another reason that chained him to that "Navel of the Earth,"--there is
not anywhere a better sounding-board to London rumours than the English
_quartier_ between the Boulevard des Italiennes and the Tuileries; here,
at all events, he should soonest learn the worst: and every day, as he
took up the English newspapers, a sick feeling of apprehension and fear
came over him. No! till the seal was set upon the bond, till the Rubicon
was passed, till Miss Cameron was the wife of Lord Vargrave, he could
neither return to the home that was so eloquent with the recollections of
Evelyn, nor, by removing farther from England, delay the receipt of an
intelligence which he vainly told himself he was prepared to meet.
He continued to seek such distractions from thought as were within his
reach; and as his heart was too occupied for pleasures which had, indeed,
long since palled, those distractions were of the grave and noble
character which it is a prerogative of the intellect to afford to the
passions.
De Montaigne was neither a Doctrinaire nor a Republican,--and yet,
perhaps, he was a little of both. He was one who thought that the
tendency of all European States is towards Democracy; but he by no means
looked upon Democracy as a panacea for all legislative evils. He thought
that, while a writer should be in advance of his time, a statesman should
content himself with marching by its side; that a nation could not be
ripened, like an exotic, by artificial means; that it must be developed
only by natural influences. He believed that forms of government are
never universal in their effects. Thus, De Montaigne conceived that we
were wrong in attaching more importance to legislative than to social
reforms. He considered, for instance, that the surest sign of our
progressive civilization is in our growing distaste to capital
punishments. He believed, not in the ultimate _perfection_ of mankind,
but in their progressive _perfectibility_. He thought that improvement
was indefinite; but he did not place its advance more under Republican
than under Monarchical forms. "Provided," he was wont to say, "all our
checks to power are of the right kind, it matters little to what hands
the power itself is confided."
"AEgina and Athens," said he, "were republics--commercial and
maritime--placed under the same sky, surrounded by the same neighbours,
and rent by the same struggles between Oligarchy and Democracy. Yet,
while one left the world an immortal heirloom of genius, where are the
poets, the philosophers, the statesmen of the other? Arrian tells us of
republics in India, still supposed to exist by modern investigators; but
they are not more productive of liberty of thought, or ferment of
intellect, than the principalities. In Italy there were commonwealths as
liberal as the Republic of Florence; but they did not produce a
Machiavelli or a Dante. What daring thought, what gigantic speculation,
what democracy of wisdom and genius, have sprung up amongst the
despotisms of Germany! You cannot educate two individuals so as to
produce the same results from both; you cannot, by similar constitutions
(which are the education of nations) produce the same results from
different communities. The proper object of statesmen should be to give
every facility to the people to develop themselves, and every facility to
philosophy to dispute and discuss as to the ultimate objects to be
obtained. But you cannot, as a practical legislator, place your country
under a melon-frame: it must grow of its own accord."
I do not say whether or not De Montaigne was wrong! but Maltravers saw at
least that he was faithful to his theories; that all his motives were
sincere, all his practice pure. He could not but allow, too, that in his
occupations and labours, De Montaigne appeared to feel a sublime
enjoyment; that, in linking all the powers of his mind to active and
useful objects, De Montaigne was infinitely happier than the Philosophy
of Indifference, the scorn of ambition, had made Maltravers. The
influence exercised by the large-souled and practical Frenchman over the
fate and the history of Maltravers was very peculiar.
De Montaigne had not, apparently and directly, operated upon his friend's
outward destinies; but he had done so indirectly, by operating on his
mind. Perhaps it was he who had consolidated the first wavering and
uncertain impulses of Maltravers towards literary exertion; it was he who
had consoled him for the mortifications at the earlier part of his
career; and now, perhaps he might serve, in the full vigour of his
intellect, permanently to reconcile the Englishman to the claims of life.
There were, indeed, certain conversations which Maltravers held with De
Montaigne, the germ and pith of which it is necessary that I should place
before the reader,--for I write the inner as well as the outer history of
a man; and the great incidents of life are not brought about only by the
dramatic agencies of others, but also by our own reasonings and habits of
thought. What I am now about to set down may be wearisome, but it is not
episodical; and I promise that it shall be the last didactic conversation
in the work.
One day Maltravers was relating to De Montaigne all that he had been
planning at Burleigh for the improvement of his peasantry, and all his
theories respecting Labour-Schools and Poor-rates, when De Montaigne
abruptly turned round, and said,--
"You have, then, really found that in your own little village your
exertions--exertions not very arduous, not demanding a tenth part of your
time--have done practical good?"
"Certainly I think so," replied Maltravers, in some surprise.
"And yet it was but yesterday that you declared that all the labours of
Philosophy and Legislation were labours vain; their benefits equivocal
and uncertain; that as the sea, where it loses in one place, gains in
another, so civilization only partially profits us, stealing away one
virtue while it yields another, and leaving the large proportions of good
and evil eternally the same."
"True; but I never said that man might not relieve individuals by
individual exertion: though he cannot by abstract theories--nay, even by
practical action in the wide circle--benefit the mass."
"Do you not employ on behalf of individuals the same moral agencies that
wise legislation or sound philosophy would adopt towards the multitude?
For example, you find that the children of your village are happier, more
orderly, more obedient, promise to be wiser and better men in their own
station of life, from the new, and, I grant, excellent system of school
discipline and teaching that you have established. What you have done in
one village, why should not legislation do throughout a kingdom? Again,
you find that, by simply holding out hope and emulation to industry, by
making stern distinctions between the energetic and the idle, the
independent exertion and the pauper-mendicancy, you have found a lever by
which you have literally moved and shifted the little world around you.
But what is the difference here between the rules of a village lord and
the laws of a wise legislature? The moral feelings you have appealed to
exist universally, the moral remedies you have practised are as open to
legislation as to the individual proprietor."
"Yes; but when you apply to a nation the same principles which regenerate
a village, new counterbalancing principles arise. If I give education to
my peasants, I send them into the world with advantages _superior_ to
their fellows,--advantages which, not being common to their class, enable
them to _outstrip_ their fellows. But if this education were universal
to the whole tribe, no man would have an advantage superior to the
others; the knowledge they would have acquired being shared by all, would
leave all as they now are, hewers of wood and drawers of water: the
principle of individual hope, which springs from knowledge, would soon be
baffled by the vast competition that _universal_ knowledge would produce.
Thus by the universal improvement would be engendered a universal
discontent.
"Take a broader view of the subject. Advantages given to the _few_
around me--superior wages, lighter toils, a greater sense of the dignity
of man--are not productive of any change in society. Give these
advantages to the _whole mass_ of the labouring classes, and what in the
small orbit is the desire of the _individual_ to rise becomes in the
large circumference the desire of the _class_ to rise; hence social
restlessness, social change, revolution, and its hazards. For
revolutions are produced but by the aspirations of one order, and the
resistance of the other. Consequently, legislative improvement differs
widely from individual amelioration; the same principle, the same agency,
that purifies the small body, becomes destructive when applied to the
large one. Apply the flame to the log on the hearth, or apply it to the
forest, is there no distinction in the result? The breeze that freshens
the fountain passes to the ocean, current impels current, wave urges
wave, and the breeze becomes the storm."
"Were there truth in this train of argument," replied De Montaigne, "had
we ever abstained from communicating to the Multitude the enjoyments and
advantages of the Few, had we shrunk from the good, because the good is a
parent of the change and its partial ills, what now would be society? Is
there no difference in collective happiness and virtue between the
painted Picts and the Druid worship, and the glorious harmony, light, and
order of the great English nation?"
"The question is popular," said Maltravers, with a smile; "and were you
my opponent in an election, would be cheered on any hustings in the
kingdom. But I have lived among savage tribes,--savage, perhaps, as the
race that resisted Caesar; and their happiness seems to me, not perhaps
the same as that of the few whose sources of enjoyment are numerous,
refined, and, save by their own passions, unalloyed; but equal to that of
the mass of men in States the most civilized and advanced. The artisans,
crowded together in the fetid air of factories, with physical ills
gnawing at the core of the constitution, from the cradle to the grave;
drudging on from dawn to sunset and flying for recreation to the dread
excitement of the dram-shop, or the wild and vain hopes of political
fanaticism,--are not in my eyes happier than the wild Indians with hardy
frames and calm tempers, seasoned to the privations for which you pity
them, and uncursed with desires of that better state never to be theirs.
The Arab in his desert has seen all the luxuries of the pasha in his
harem; but he envies them not. He is contented with his barb, his tent,
his desolate sands, and his spring of refreshing water.
"Are we not daily told, do not our priests preach it from their pulpits,
that the cottage shelters happiness equal to that within the palace? Yet
what the distinction between the peasant and the prince, differing from
that between the peasant and the savage? There are more enjoyments and
more privations in the one than in the other; but if, in the latter case,
the enjoyments, though fewer, be more keenly felt,--if the privations,
though apparently sharper, fall upon duller sensibilities and hardier
frames,--your gauge of proportion loses all its value. Nay, in
civilization there is for the multitude an evil that exists not in the
savage state. The poor man sees daily and hourly all the vast
disparities produced by civilized society; and reversing the divine
parable, it is Lazarus who from afar, and from the despondent pit, looks
upon Dives in the lap of Paradise: therefore, his privations, his
sufferings, are made more keen by comparison with the luxuries of others.
Not so in the desert and the forest. There but small distinctions, and
those softened by immemorial and hereditary usage--that has in it the
sanctity of religion--separate the savage from his chief. The fact is,
that in civilization we behold a splendid aggregate,--literature and
science, wealth and luxury, commerce and glory; but we see not the
million victims crushed beneath the wheels of the machine,--the health
sacrificed, the board breadless, the jails filled, the hospitals reeking,
the human life poisoned in every spring, and poured forth like water!
Neither do we remember all the steps, marked by desolation, crime, and
bloodshed, by which this barren summit has been reached. Take the
history of any civilized state,--England, France, Spain before she rotted
back into second childhood, the Italian Republics, the Greek
Commonwealths, the Empress of the Seven Hills--what struggles, what
persecutions, what crimes, what massacres! Where, in the page of
history, shall we look back and say, 'Here improvement has diminished the
sum of evil'? Extend, too, your scope beyond the State itself: each
State has won its acquisitions by the woes of others. Spain springs
above the Old World on the blood-stained ruins of the New; and the groans
and the gold of Mexico produce the splendours of the Fifth Charles!
"Behold England, the wise, the liberal, the free England--through what
struggles she has passed; and is she yet contented? The sullen oligarchy
of the Normans; our own criminal invasions of Scotland and France; the
plundered people, the butchered kings; the persecutions of the Lollards;
the wars of Lancaster and York; the new dynasty of the Tudors, that at
once put back Liberty, and put forward Civilization! the Reformation,
cradled in the lap of a hideous despot, and nursed by violence and
rapine; the stakes and fires of Mary, and the craftier cruelties of
Elizabeth,--England, strengthened by the desolation of Ireland, the Civil
Wars, the reign of hypocrisy, followed by the reign of naked vice; the
nation that beheaded the graceful Charles gaping idly on the scaffold of
the lofty Sidney; the vain Revolution of 1688, which, if a jubilee in
England, was a massacre in Ireland; the bootless glories of Marlborough;
the organized corruption of Walpole, the frantic war with our own
American sons, the exhausting struggles with Napoleon!
"Well, we close the page; we say, Lo! a thousand years of incessant
struggles and afflictions! millions have perished, but Art has survived;
our boors wear stockings, our women drink tea, our poets read Shakspeare,
and our astronomers improve on Newton! Are we now contented? No! more
restless than ever. New classes are called into power; new forms of
government insisted on. Still the same catchwords,--Liberty here,
Religion there; Order with one faction, Amelioration with the other.
Where is the goal, and what have we gained? Books are written, silks are
woven, palaces are built,--mighty acquisitions for the few--but the
peasant is a peasant still! The crowd are yet at the bottom of the
wheel; better off, you say. No, for they are not more contented! The
artisan is as anxious for change as ever the serf was; and the
steam-engine has its victims as well as the sword.
"Talk of legislation: all isolated laws pave the way to wholesale changes
in the form of government! Emancipate Catholics, and you open the door
to democratic principle, that Opinion should be free. If free with the
sectarian, it should be free with the elector. The Ballot is a corollary
from the Catholic Relief-bill. Grant the Ballot, and the new corollary
of enlarged suffrage. Suffrage enlarged is divided but by a yielding
surface (a circle widening in the waters) from universal suffrage.
Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the
aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are
they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon,
Aristophanes--the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action,
the penetrating Wit--have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the
martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude. Brutus died
for a republic, but a republic of Patricians! What form of government is
then the best? All dispute, the wisest cannot agree. The many still say
'a Republic;' yet, as you yourself will allow, Prussia, the Despotism,
does all that Republics do. Yes, but a good despot is a lucky accident;
true, but a just and benevolent Republic is as yet a monster equally
short-lived. When the People have no other tyrant, their own public
opinion becomes one. No secret espionage is more intolerable to a free
spirit than the broad glare of the American eye.
"A rural republic is but a patriarchal tribe--no emulation, no glory;
peace and stagnation. What Englishman, what Frenchman, would wish to be
a Swiss? A commercial republic is but an admirable machine for making
money. Is man created for nothing nobler than freighting ships and
speculating on silk and sugar? In fact, there is no certain goal in
legislation; we go on colonizing Utopia, and fighting phantoms in the
clouds. Let us content ourselves with injuring no man, and doing good
only in our own little sphere. Let us leave States and senates to fill
the sieve of the Danaides, and roll up the stone of Sisyphus."
"My dear friend," said De Montaigne, "you have certainly made the most of
an argument, which, if granted, would consign government to fools and
knaves, and plunge the communities of mankind into the Slough of Despond.
But a very commonplace view of the question might suffice to shake your
system. Is life, mere animal life, on the whole, a curse or a blessing?"
"The generality of men in all countries," answered Maltravers, "enjoy
existence, and apprehend death; were it otherwise, the world had been
made by a Fiend, and not a God!"
"Well, then, observe how the progress of society cheats the grave! In
great cities, where the effect of civilization must be the most visible,
the diminution of mortality in a corresponding ratio with the increase of
civilization is most remarkable. In Berlin, from the year 1747 to 1755,
the annual mortality was as one to twenty-eight; but from 1816 to 1822,
it was as one to thirty-four! You ask what England has gained by her
progress in the arts? I will answer you by her bills of mortality. In
London, Birmingham, and Liverpool, deaths have decreased in less than a
century from one to twenty, to one to forty (precisely one-half!).
Again, whenever a community--nay, a single city, decreases in
civilization, and in its concomitants, activity and commerce, its
mortality instantly increases. But if civilization be favourable to the
prolongation of life, must it not be favourable to all that blesses
life,--to bodily health, to mental cheerfulness, to the capacities for
enjoyment? And how much more grand, how much more sublime, becomes the
prospect of gain, if we reflect that, to each life thus called forth,
there is a soul, a destiny beyond the grave, multiplied immortalities!
What an apology for the continued progress of States! But you say that,
however we advance, we continue impatient and dissatisfied: can you
really suppose that, because man in every state is discontented with his
lot, there is no difference in the _degree_ and _quality_ of his
discontent, no distinction between pining for bread and longing for the
moon? Desire is implanted within us, as the very principle of existence;
the physical desire fills the world, and the moral desire improves it.
Where there is desire, there must be discontent: if we are satisfied with
all things, desire is extinct. But a certain degree of discontent is not
incompatible with happiness, nay, it has happiness of its own; what
happiness like hope,--what is hope but desire? The European serf, whose
seigneur could command his life, or insist as a right on the chastity of
his daughter, desires to better his condition. God has compassion on his
state; Providence calls into action the ambition of leaders, the contests
of faction, the movement of men's aims and passions: a change passes
through society and legislation, and the serf becomes free! He desires
still, but what? No longer personal security, no longer the privileges
of life and health; but higher wages, greater comforts, easier justice
for diminished wrongs. Is there no difference in the quality of that
desire? Was one a greater torment than the other is? Rise a scale
higher: a new class is created--the Middle Class,--the express creature
of Civilization. Behold the burgher and the citizen, and still
struggling, still contending, still desiring, and therefore still
discontented. But the discontent does not prey upon the springs of life:
it is the discontent of _hope_, not _despair_; it calls forth faculties,
energies, and passions, in which there is more joy than sorrow. It is
this desire which makes the citizen in private life an anxious father, a
careful master, an _active_, and therefore not an unhappy, man. You
allow that individuals can effect individual good: this very
restlessness, this very discontent with the exact place that he occupies,
makes the citizen a benefactor in his narrow circle. Commerce, better
than Charity, feeds the hungry and clothes the naked. Ambition, better
than brute affection, gives education to our children, and teaches them
the love of industry, the pride of independence, the respect for others
and themselves!
"In other words, a deference to such qualities as can best fit them to
get on in the world, and make the most money!"
"Take that view if you will; but the wiser, the more civilized the State,
the worse chances for the rogue to get on! There may be some art, some
hypocrisy, some avarice,--nay, some hardness of heart,--in paternal
example and professional tuition. But what are such sober infirmities to
the vices that arise from defiance and despair? Your savage has his
virtues, but they are mostly physical,--fortitude, abstinence, patience:
mental and moral virtues must be numerous or few, in proportion to the
range of ideas and the exigencies of social life. With the savage,
therefore, they must be fewer than with civilized men; and they are
consequently limited to those simple and rude elements which the safety
of his state renders necessary to him. He is usually hospitable;
sometimes honest. But vices are necessary to his existence as well as
virtues: he is at war with a tribe that may destroy his own; and
treachery without scruple, cruelty without remorse, are essential to him;
he feels their necessity, and calls them _virtues_! Even the
half-civilized man, the Arab whom you praise, imagines he has a necessity
for your money; and his robberies become virtues to him. But in
civilized States, vices are at least not necessary to the existence of
the majority; they are not, therefore, worshipped as virtues. Society
unites against them; treachery, robbery, massacre, are not essential to
the strength or safety of the community: they exist, it is true, but they
are not cultivated, but punished. The thief in St. Giles's has the
virtues of your savage: he is true to his companions, he is brave in
danger, he is patient in privation; he practises the virtues necessary to
the bonds of his calling and the tacit laws of his vocation. He might
have made an admirable savage: but surely the mass of civilized men are
better than the thief?"
Maltravers was struck, and paused a little before he replied; and then he
shifted his ground. "But at least all our laws, all our efforts, must
leave the multitude in every State condemned to a labour that deadens
intellect, and a poverty that embitters life."
"Supposing this were true, still there are multitudes besides _the_
multitude. In each State Civilization produces a middle class, more
numerous to-day than the whole peasantry of a thousand years ago. Would
Movement and Progress be without their divine uses, even if they limited
their effect to the production of such a class? Look also to the effect
of art, and refinement, and just laws, in the wealthier and higher
classes. See how their very habits of life tend to increase the sum of
enjoyment; see the mighty activity that their very luxury, the very
frivolity of their pursuits, create! Without an aristocracy, would there
have been a middle class? Without a middle class, would there ever have
been an interposition between lord and slave? Before commerce produces a
middle class, Religion creates one. The Priesthood, whatever its errors,
was the curb to Power. But, to return to the multitude,--you say that in
all times they are left the same. Is it so? I come to statistics again:
I find that not only civilization, but liberty, has a prodigious effect
upon human life. It is, as it were, by the instinct of self-preservation
that liberty is so passionately desired by the multitude. A negro slave,
for instance, dies annually as one to five or six, but a free African in
the English service only as one to thirty-five! Freedom is not,
therefore, a mere abstract dream, a beautiful name, a Platonic
aspiration: it is interwoven with the most practical of all
blessings,--life itself! And can you say fairly that by laws labour
cannot be lightened and poverty diminished? We have granted already that
since there are degrees in discontent, there is a difference between the
peasant and the serf: how know you what the peasant a thousand years
hence may be? Discontented, you will say,--still discontented. Yes; but
if he had not been discontented, he would have been a serf still! Far
from quelling this desire to better himself, we ought to hail it as the
source of his perpetual progress. That desire to him is often like
imagination to the poet, it transports him into the Future--
'Crura sonant ferro, sed canit inter opus.'
It is, indeed, the gradual transformation from the desire of Despair to
the desire of Hope, that makes the difference between man and man,
between misery and bliss."
"And then comes the crisis. Hope ripens into deeds; the stormy
revolution, perhaps the armed despotism; the relapse into the second
infancy of States!"
"Can we, with new agencies at our command, new morality, new wisdom,
predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were
slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens
twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy
decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,--a handful of soldiers and
philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the
circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the
existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, neither
too confined nor too vast, have created new hopes, which history cannot
destroy. As a proof, look to all late revolutions: in England the Civil
Wars, the Reformation,--in France her awful Saturnalia, her military
despotism! Has either nation fallen back? The deluge passes, and,
behold, the face of things more glorious than before! Compare the French
of to-day with the French of the old _regime_. You are silent; well, and
if in all States there is ever some danger of evil in their activity, is
that a reason why you are to lie down inactive; why you are to leave the
crew to battle for the helm? How much may individuals by the diffusion
of their own thoughts in letters or in action regulate the order of vast
events,--now prevent, now soften, now animate, now guide! And is a man
to whom Providence and Fortune have imparted such prerogatives to stand
aloof, because he can neither foresee the Future nor create Perfection?
And you talk of no certain and definite goal! How know we that there is
a certain and definite goal, even in heaven? How know we that excellence
may not be illimitable? Enough that we improve, that we proceed. Seeing
in the great design of earth that benevolence is an attribute of the
Designer, let us leave the rest to Posterity and to God."
"You have disturbed many of my theories," said Maltravers, candidly; "and
I will reflect on our conversation; but, after all, is every man to
aspire to influence others; to throw his opinion into the great scales in
which human destinies are weighed? Private life is not criminal. It is
no virtue to write a book, or to make a speech. Perhaps, I should be as
well engaged in returning to my country village, looking at my schools,
and wrangling with the parish overseers--"
"Ah," interrupted the Frenchman, laughing; "if I have driven you to this
point, I will go no further. Every state of life has its duties; every
man must be himself the judge of what he is most fit for. It is quite
enough that he desires to be active, and labours to be useful; that he
acknowledges the precept, 'Never to be weary in well-doing.' The divine
appetite once fostered, let it select its own food. But the man who,
after fair trial of his capacities, and with all opportunity for their
full development before him, is convinced that he has faculties which
private life cannot wholly absorb, must not repine that Human Nature is
not perfect, when he refuses even to exercise the gifts he himself
possesses."
Now these arguments have been very tedious; in some places they have been
old and trite; in others they may appear too much to appertain to the
abstract theory of first principles. Yet from such arguments, _pro_ and
_con_, unless I greatly mistake, are to be derived corollaries equally
practical and sublime,--the virtue of Action, the obligations of Genius,
and the philosophy that teaches us to confide in the destinies, and
labour in the service, of mankind.
