Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
of the Palace;" and hence the court systematically declined the aids it might so often have derived from the honesty, the popularity, and sometimes the good sense of the American volunteer. At all events, we know that the assassination of Lafayette – twice it seems plotted – would have left the National Guards in the hands of some less popular and more pliant chief; and that, when the general specifically accused his rival of the horrid project, naming time, place, and means, he won no better defense than the reply, "You were sure of it, and I am alive! How good of you! And you aspire to play a leading part in a revolution!" The compact with the Comte de Provence was of short duration: the queen began to distrust the personal views of her brother-in-law, who threatened to become the Duke D'Orleans of a philosophical party, and Mirabeau, to whom popularity was the only capital, probably found that he could not afford the sacrifices his employers demanded.
To preserve the status quo, and wait events, became now, for some weeks or months, as much his policy as his accessibility to passion and sudden influences would permit. He seemed to feel that he should give time to the molten lava of his volcanic greatness to settle, harden, and assume its individualism among things received. Holding aloof, therefore, from indentification with either party – leaning now on one side, now on the other; his speeches more with the movement, his policy more with the court; forcing both parties into explanations, while keeping himself, however, disengaged – he constituted himself their arbitrator and moderator, overawing both extremes; and while maintaining his pre-eminence of political influence, held himself ready to take advantage, at the least cost of consistency, of any fundamental change in the position of affairs.
In the month of May or June, however, a private interview with the queen, in the Royal Garden of St. Cloud, followed by others, to the renewed scandal of her fame, laid the foundation of a new compact with the court, and a more decided policy. The chivalry of Mirabeau revived under the enthusiasm won by "Earth's loveliest vision" – a queen in distress and a suppliant – and he pledged himself, as the Hungarians to her royal mother, to die in the service of saving her throne. But the highest endeavors of Mirabeau have always at their base, like the monuments of his country, the filthy and the repulsive; and the chivalry of this new saviour of the monarchy received sustentation in a bribe – higgled for through months – of twenty thousand pounds, and a pension of more than that per annum.
About the end of the year, three or four months before his death, he opened systematically his great campaign for what professedly was the restoration of regal authority. He was to out-Herod in patriotism the Herods of the Jacobin club: the court was to dare every thing short of civil war – perhaps even that; and the existing confusion, whatever it might be, was to be cured by another of greater extent, artificially induced by the charlatanism of art political. His scheme, in some points, it must be allowed, successfully imitated in our own days in Prussia, was:
First – To reorganize the party of Order in the Assembly; and while, as far as possible, winning for it the sympathy of the country, to excite, by all available agencies, distrust and discontent with the opposing majority.
Secondly – To inundate the provinces with publications against the Assembly; and by commissioners, sent nominally for other purposes, to obtain remonstrances from the departments against its further continuance.
Thirdly – At a proper opportunity, to dissolve the Assembly, and order fresh elections; at the same time canceling the constitution as illegal, and granting another by royal charter, formed on a popular basis, and on the written instructions which (on a system unknown to England) had originally been drawn up for each deputy by his electors.
I shall not descend to discuss the oft-mooted point, how far the wholesale venality that based the project is justified or palliated by the object it is supposed to have had in view, because I know that with Mirabeau money was not a means to his defense of constitutional monarchy, but his defense of constitutional monarchy a means to money. If we except his relentless hate to French despotism in any hands not his own, the principles, moral or political, of this leader of a nation had no other tenure but the interest of his personal aggrandizement.
On another debate, whether with a longer life he could have carried his counter-revolution to success, I will only remark, that, conceding that in robust health he would have had it at heart as sincerely as in the recorded hours of his sickness and despondency, it may be admitted, that a struggle which, under every imprudence, seemed long to hang in doubt, with the aid of his energetic and masterly polity might, perhaps, have poised for royalty. But it is not to be concealed that the difficulty of arresting and unmaking were even greater than those of creating and consolidating the revolution. The king's aversion to decisive measures, and well-known horror of civil war, made him the worst of colleagues for the only policy his tool could wield with effect; and the great demagogue himself, when obliged to discard the mask of democratic hypocrisy that still partly hid the subtle and venal traitor of his party, would have lost, like Strafford, many of the elements of his potency; and despoiled, especially, of the miraculous resources of his eloquence, must have contented himself with that lucid, common-sense, consecutive daring, and power of strategic combination, which his new friends were so ill-fitted to support.
Fortunately, perhaps, for his future fame, he died ere the structure his arts had undermined tested his powers of reparation, and before that wonderful magic of popularity which had so long survived, as it had, indeed, so long anticipated, his deserts, had time to vanish under the cock-crow of truth. His death was as well-timed as his political advent, and has been praised by French wit as the best evidence of his tact; for the expectations which the unparalleled rapidity, no less than the innate marvelousness of his achievements had raised, no future activity and fortune, scarcely those of a Napoleon, could have realized.
But if the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so short a period never accomplished so much before, against such disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any one rest so wholly for his amazing achievements on the sole power of intrinsic genius. It was intellect that did all with Mirabeau; and made his head, according to his own boast, a power among European states. It united almost every possible capacity and attainment. His rare and penetrating powers of observation were sustained by the equal depth and justness of his discrimination, and the rapidity and accuracy of his judgment. Uniting, to his admirable natural capacity, an activity and habitual power of application, more marvelous almost in their extent than even in their rare combination, he possessed an understanding full, beyond precedent, both of the recorded knowledge of books, and of that priceless experience of men and things, without which all else is naught; and as the complement of these amazing and unparalleled advantages, he had the still rarer advantage of a felicity and power of diction every way worthy of so incomparable a genius.
Looking with contempt at the stiff, ornamental, and childishly antithetical style of his day and nation, he welded the flimsy elements of the French language into instruments of strength akin to his own conceptions, and wrought out of them a style for himself in which a Demosthenic simplicity and severity of language is sustained by an earnest and straightforward power which vivifies and amplifies all that it touches. Startled by an innovation far beyond the conceptions of the French academy, the writer was smiled at and neglected by the critics; and it was not till they heard him launching from the tribune the thunders of justice, disposing at pleasure of the inclinations of the multitude, and subjugating even the captious by the imperious power of his eloquence, that they began to discover that there was a "power of life"10 in his rude and singular language; that "things, commonplace, in his hand became of electric power;"11 and that, standing "like a giant among pigmies,"12 his style, albeit "savage,"13 dominated the assembly, stupefying, and thundering down all opposition.
It is the affliction of history, that, while raising her monuments to gigantic genius, she is compelled so often to record an immorality of parallel proportions. It is right that the infamy of Mirabeau should be as eternal as his greatness. He was a man who, in his political, as in his private life, had no sense of right for its own sake, and from whom conscience never won a sacrifice. With great and glorious aims at times, he never had a disinterested one. His ambition, vanity, or passions, were his only standard
Madame de Staël.
Bertrand de Moleville.
De Levis.
De Ferrieres.