GREVILLE AND SAINT-SIMON.
Mr. Charles Greville was not a La Bruyère,[86] but, as he appears in his Memoirs, he might have sat very well for that portrait of Arrias which the inimitable imitator of Theophrastus has drawn in his chapter on society and conversation: “Arrias has read everything, has seen everything; at least he would have it thought so. ’Tis a man of universal knowledge, and he gives himself out as such; he would sooner lie than be silent or appear ignorant of anything.… If he tells a story, it is less to inform those who listen than to have the merit of telling it. It becomes a romance in his hands; he makes people think after his own manner; he puts his own habits of speaking in their mouths; and, in fine, makes them all as talkative as himself. What would become of him and of them, if happily some one did not come in to break up the circle and contradict the whole story?”
This exact picture of the late clerk of H.B.M. Privy Council might have been written the morning after his Memoirs appeared in the London bookstores, instead of nearly two hundred years ago. It is at once a proof of the penetrating genius of La Bruyère, and a photograph every one will recognize of the author of the journal which has lately made so much noise in society. This clever Newmarket jockey—rebus Newmarketianis versatus, as he says of himself—to whom every point of the betting book is familiar, carelessly refreshes his jaded intellect with the Life of Mackintosh, as he rides down in his carriage to the races. With affable profusion he scatters broadcast to the mob of readers scraps of Horace and Ovid, mingled with the latest odds on the Derby. He has seen everything from S. Giles’s to S. Peter’s, and, with the blasé air of a man at once of genius and fashion, proclaims “there is nothing in it.” He knows everything, from the most questionable scandal of the green-room to the best plan of forming a cabinet; such second-rate men as Melbourne, Palmerston, and Stanley he sniffs at with easy disdain; and if at times he gently bemoans a few personal deficiencies, it is with a complacent conviction that it needed only a little early training to have made him a Peel, a Burke, or a Chatham! That he would “sooner lie than be silent,” one needs only remember his infamous stories about Mrs. Charles Kean and Lady Burghersh; his calumnies against George IV. and William IV.—the masters whose gracious kindness he repaid by bribing their valets for evidence against them—his unfounded attacks upon Peel, Stanley, O’Connell, and Lyndhurst; his slanders even against obscure men, like Wakley and others. As to his habit of “making people think after his own manner,” and putting “his own mode of speaking in their mouths,” the profanity and vulgarity which disfigure his pages are the best evidence.
That this is a true estimate of the merits of The Greville Memoirs is now generally admitted. The most respectable critical exponents of English opinion have united in condemning the bad taste and breach of trust which made either their composition or publication possible. It needs no refinement of reasoning to prove that the expressions everywhere so freely quoted from this journal are such as could not honorably be uttered by any gentleman holding the office Mr. Greville did. Readers will easily be found for them, either from a love of sensation or because of the illustration they offer of the character of the persons described or the writer; but nothing can condone their real offensiveness. Such, however, was far from being the first opinion of the press. The leading English journal, in two lengthy reviews such as rarely appear in its columns, handled Mr. Greville’s work with a delicacy, an admiration, a regretful and half-tender daintiness of touch for the author, that promised everything to the reader. This criticism was followed by a general outburst of applause on the part of the press, which soon began to waver, however, when it was found that the best section of English society regarded the book with disapproval.
So conscious, indeed, were the American publishers of its intrinsic lack of interest or literary merit that one firm has presented it to the public with nearly all the political portions left out and the private gossip retained. “It is said,” says the Saturday Review not long ago, “that an American compiler has published a pleasant duodecimo volume containing only those passages which may be supposed to gratify a morbid taste.” The London critic intended, no doubt, to be pungent and satirical; but how innocuously does such satire fall upon the head of the average “compiler”!
If Mr. Greville has not made good his claim to stand among the masters of his craft, least of all is he to be named in the same day with the prince of memoir-writers—Saint-Simon; unless, indeed, it be to point the moral that more is needed for excellency in such an art than an inquisitive mind and a biting pen. Yet Mr. Greville’s opportunity was great—greater, probably, than will happen to any other memoir-writer for some generations to come. Like Saint-Simon, he began active life in an age of great events and great men. Whatever may be said of the pettiness of the regency, of its profligacy and mock brilliancy, no one can forget that those were days of great perils; of vast struggles, military and civil; of giants’ wars, and of a race of combatants not unworthy to take part in them. Nor were the twenty years succeeding—which make up, as we may roughly say, that portion of his journal now printed—wanting in great interests and momentous events. The age which gave birth to Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, while it still numbered among its chiefs the veterans of the great Continental war, could not fail to offer subjects for treatment that would be read eagerly by all succeeding times. If Saint-Simon witnessed the culmination of the glories of the reign of Louis XIV., and saw De Luxembourg and Catinat, the last survivors of that line of victorious marshals beginning with the great Condé and Turenne, who had carried the lilies of France over Europe, not less was it Greville’s fortune to converse familiarly with the great duke who, repeating the triumphs of Marlborough, had beaten down the arms of the empire in a later age. And if Saint-Simon lived also to see the disasters, the weakness, the desolation, and bankruptcy of his country which succeeded the long splendor of his youth, Greville too looked on as a spectator, almost, one might say, as a registrar, at the hardly less terrible civil struggles and social depression which threatened to rend the kingdom asunder.
Both were of noble families, although the Duc de Saint-Simon was the head of his house, and Mr. Greville only a cadet of his. Both were courtiers; and although Saint-Simon’s position as a peer of France lifted him far above Greville’s in his day, who was rather a paid servant of the crown than strictly a courtier, yet the very office of the latter gave him advantages which the elder memoir-writer did not always possess. Here, however, all parallel ceases. The radical incapacity of Mr. Greville’s mind to lift him above the common race of diarists prevents all further comparison. He had neither the genius of assimilation nor description to make the portraits of men and manners live, like Saint-Simon’s, in the gallery of history. His informants are valets, his satire mere backbiting, his reflections trivial, his descriptions a confused mass of petty details.
It is not proposed here to weary the reader with long quotations from a work which so many already have read or skimmed over. Nor do we intend, on the other hand, to follow the fashion of some critics, and carefully gather up all the points which might be woven into an indictment against Mr. Greville’s honor or candor or wit. Such a task would be endless; it would take in almost every other page of his volumes. But that it may be seen that the unfavorable opinion which, after a careful examination, we have been led—much to our disappointment—to entertain of his work is not misplaced, we shall proceed to give some passages that sustain, in our judgment, the correctness of the view we have taken.
Charles C. F. Greville was, as his editor, Mr. H. Reeve, informs us, the eldest son of Mr. Charles Greville, grandson of the Earl of Warwick, and Lady Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland. He was born in 1794. At the age of nineteen he was appointed private secretary by Earl Bathurst, and almost at the same time family influence procured for him a clerkship in the Board of Trade. Both offices had comfortable salaries attached to them; neither of them any duties. Thus at the outset of his career, fortunate in his family influence and his friends, Mr. Greville was started, fairly equipped, on the road of life. Unencumbered by any responsibility, nor weighed down by that sharp and bitter load of poverty that men of humbler birth have commonly to carry on their galled shoulders, while they strive to gain an insecure foothold on the slippery road to fame or fortune, he had every incentive and every advantage to secure success. A subject for thanksgiving, shall we say, to this accomplished sinecurist? By no means! Years afterwards he bemoans the fact that he had nothing to do, no spur to honorable ambition. He forgot that at the same or an earlier age Saint-Simon, whom he appears to have read only to copy his sometimes coarse language, was handling a pike as a volunteer in the service of his king, and carrying sacks of grain on his shoulders to the starving troops in the trenches at Namur, disdaining those little offices into which Greville insinuated himself as soon as he left college. Or if it be said—what no man could then (1812) predict—that the war was nearly over, and there was little prospect of another, what was there to prevent him from seeking a place in Parliament—not hard to gain with his family influence—and there carving out for himself a place like that of Burke, to whom he sometimes lifts his eyes? The truth is, to use a vulgar phrase, Mr. Greville had “other fish to fry.” He knew well he had other easier and more profitable game to follow. He was scarcely of age when the influence of his uncle, the Duke of Portland, obtained for him the sinecure office of Secretary of Jamaica, a deputy being allowed to reside in the island; better still, the same influential relative secured him the reversion of the clerkship of the Council! Henceforward not the camp nor parliamentary struggles occupied Mr. Greville’s mind; the glorious task of “waiting for a dead man’s shoes,” varied by the congenial study of the stables, occupied that powerful intellect which, in these Memoirs, looks down with contempt on all the names most distinguished in European statesmanship during the first half of this century. The office fell to him in 1821, and he continued to hold it for nearly forty years. The net income of the two offices, we are elsewhere informed, amounted to about four thousand pounds; and as he died worth thirty thousand pounds, the charitable supposition of the Quarterly Review is that “probably he was a gainer on the turf.” He died in 1865.
The bent of Mr. Greville’s genius was early shown.
“Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
Collegisse juvat.”
The clerk of the Council was one of them. The blue ribbon of the turf, not parliamentary honors or the long vigil of laborious nights—except over the card-table—was the centre around which his ambition and aspirations circled. Early smitten by the betting fever, he became as nearly a professional turfman as the security of his office would permit; and there is something ludicrous in those expressions of regret, which have drawn such tender sympathy from his critics, that he gave himself up to the passion instead of becoming the scholar or statesman he is always hinting he might have been. Mr. Greville, in fact, makes the blunder of supposing that the craving for fame is equivalent to the faculty for winning it. Not the turf, but original defect of capacity, hindered him from being more than he was—a clerk with a taste for gambling, held in check by a shrewd eye for the odds. His contemporary, the late Lord Derby, whom he seldom lets pass without a sneer in these Memoirs, was an example showing that, had true genius existed, a taste for the turf without participation in gambling, need not have prevented him from becoming both an accomplished scholar and a brilliant statesman.
An early entry in Mr. Greville’s journal gives the measure of the man. Under date of February 23, 1821, he says:
“Yesterday the Duke of York proposed to me to take the management of his horses, which I accepted. Nothing could be more kind than the manner in which he proposed it.”
“March 5.—I have experienced a great proof of the vanity of human wishes. In the course of three weeks I have attained the three things I have most desired in the world for years past, and upon the whole I do not feel that my happiness is increased.”
This is a good example, but far from the best of its kind, of that vein of apparently philosophical reflection running here and there through his journal, with which Mr. Greville deliberately intended, we believe, to hoodwink the critics, and in which anticipation he has been wonderfully successful. Coolly examined, it resolves itself as nearly as possible into a burlesque. His reflections, as La Bruyère says elsewhere of a like genius, “are generally about two inches deep, and then you come to the mud and gravel.” What were the three highest objects of human ambition in the mind of this ardent young man of twenty-seven, with the world before him to choose from? 1st. A berth in the civil service to creep into for the rest of his life. 2d. The place of head jockey and trainer in the prince’s stables. 3d. Unknown.
Alas! poor Greville, that the bubble of life should have burst so soon, leaving thee flat on thy back in a barren world, after having thus airily mounted to such imperial heights! Had either Juvenal or Johnson known thy towering ambition and thy fall, he would have placed thee side by side with dire Hannibal or the venturous Swede “to point a moral or adorn a tale”!
It is wonderful, however, how easily the diarist lays aside his philosophic tone to take up the more congenial rôle of a spy upon the kings whose names are so ostentatiously displayed on his title-page, and from whose service alone he derived all the consideration he had.
On January 12, 1829, Lord Mount Charles comes to him for some information. Thereupon, under the guise of friendship and confidence, he avows with a curious shamelessness that he proceeded to interrogate his visitor about George IV.’s private life and habits. When he has got all he wants out of the unsuspecting Mount Charles, he sets it down in his journal and winds up with this reflection, everywhere quoted: “A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist than this king.” These were strong words to apply to a sovereign whose bread he was eating, and who had always personally treated him with marked confidence and kindness. Perhaps those who read Mr. Greville’s journal with attention, and note the slow portrait he therein unconsciously draws of himself, will be better able to judge where the terms more aptly apply. As a work of art, indeed, the journalist’s picture of himself is far superior to anything else in his book. Touch by touch he elaborates his own character. It is not a flattering one; it was never revealed to the artist. How pitiably does this coarse generalization of Greville’s compare with the fine but vigorous and indelible strokes of Saint-Simon’s pencil in his portrait of Louis XIV.! It is not a character, but a gross and clumsy invective.
But Mr. Greville had already plumbed a lower depth of baseness in his prurient eagerness for details.
August 29, 1828.—“I met Bachelor, the poor Duke of York’s old servant, and now the king’s valet de chambre, and he told me some curious things about the interior of the palace. But he is coming to call on me, and I will write down what he tells me then.” On the 16th of September he sent for Bachelor, and had a long conversation with him, drawing out all he could from the valet about his master’s habits.
May 13, 1829.—“Bachelor called again, telling me all sorts of details concerning Windsor and St. James.”
What a picture for the author of Gil Blas! It reminds one of some of those Spanish interiors the novelist has so deftly painted, where valet and adventurer put their heads together, scheming how best to open some rich don’s purse-strings, or ensnare his confidence before beginning some villanous game at his expense. If these be the springs of history, Clio defend us against her modern sister!
What makes all this prying the more indefensible is that Mr. Greville was without need of it even for the composition of these Memoirs. Elsewhere he boasts of the “great men” he has known. And it is true that he knew them; and had his ability equalled his opportunity, enough sources of information were honorably open to him to have made his journal valuable and interesting. But the truth is, Mr. Greville loved to dabble in dirty waters, as he has elsewhere plainly shown in his book.
A large part of these volumes—the major part of them, indeed—is taken up with political gossip. It would not be correct to give it any higher title. Its weight as a contribution to history, to use La Bruyère’s illustration, would be about two ounces. It consists chiefly of what he gathered at the council-table. But disloyal as this tampering with his oath may have been, his singular inaptitude to gather what was really important hardly offers even the poor excuse of interesting his readers in its results. The consideration of the eccentricities and sarcasms of his bête noir, the chancellor (Lord Brougham), during a large portion of the time covered by this journal, generally puts to flight in Mr. Greville’s mind all other topics. The rest of his political reminiscences are made up of conversations with the actors in the parliamentary scenes here presented; but even these lose the greater part of their value from his inveterate habit of confounding his own opinions and language with those of the person he happens to be “interviewing.” This confusion in Mr. Greville’s mind between what he thought and said and what others thought and said has been fully exposed by the numerous letters which have been drawn forth in England from the survivors of the persons named in his Memoirs or from their friends. Mr. Greville adds very little to our knowledge of the events of the period he treats of. Nearly everything of importance in his journal has been anticipated. The correspondence of William IV. and Lord Grey, the life and despatches of Wellington, and the lives of Denman, Palmerston, and others, have left little to be supplied of this era of English history.
One of the most curious features—we might almost say the distinguishing feature—in a work full of curious traits of levity, conceit, and immature judgment, is the universal tone of depreciation in which the author speaks of the men of his acquaintance. This is not confined to ordinary personages who lived and died obscure, but embraces, as we have heretofore said, a large number of the names most illustrious in statesmanship and diplomacy in his times. Lord Althorpe, Melbourne, the late Earl Derby, Graham, Palmerston, O’Connell, Guizot, Thiers—one scarcely picks out a single name of eminence that he has not attempted to belittle. His opinions and prophecies have been in every instance flatly contradicted by events. Of Palmerston especially—of his stupidity, his ignorance, his lightness, his general want of capacity, and the certainty that he would never rise to be anybody—he is never done speaking slightingly. It is true that the late English premier passed through many years of obscurity in office, making, perhaps, some sort of excuse for Mr. Greville’s blindness; but this example is not an isolated one. The late Lord Derby comes in for an almost equal share of it, although he is allowed the possession of some brains—a claim denied to his after-rival. Mr. Greville is equally impartial in discoursing about crowned heads and plain republicans. His neat and finely-pointed satire stigmatized the king whose paid servant he was as a “blackguard,” a “dog,” and a “buffoon”; and he held his nose, as in the case of Washington Irving, did any “vulgar” American democrat come “between the wind and his nobility.”
Those of Mr. Greville’s subjects who have virtues are imbeciles; those who have talent are adventurers or knaves. He appears to have centred all the admiration of which he was capable upon Lord de Ros, a young nobleman absolutely unknown outside a small English circle. Mr. Greville seems, in fact, to have been one of those men who seek, and sometimes gain, a certain reputation for sagacity by depreciating everybody around them. Of the late Lord Derby he says: “He (Stanley) must be content with a subordinate part, and act with whom he may, he will never inspire real confidence or conciliate real esteem.” In another place, in summing up a conversation with Peel, he accuses him (Stanley), by direct implication, of being “a liar and a coward,” although he puts these ugly words in another’s mouth. How far these predictions and this estimate were just history has already decided. High and low all dance to the same music in Mr. Greville’s journal. On September 10, 1833, speaking of a speech of William IV.—not very wise, perhaps, but natural enough under the circumstances—he says: “If he (William IV.) was not such an ass that nobody does anything but laugh at what he says, this would be important. Such as it is, it is nothing.”
The circumstances that influenced his pique are sometimes of the most trivial character. Under date September 3, 1833, he notes that the king complained that no one was present to administer the oath to a new member of the Privy Council whom Brougham had introduced. “And what is unpleasant,” he says, “the king desires a clerk of the council to be present when anything is going on.” Inde iræ. A few days afterwards, in a notice of the prorogation of Parliament, he thus revenges himself for the king’s implied censure:
“He (William IV.) was coolly received; for there is no doubt there never was a king less respected. George IV., with all his occasional popularity, could always revive the external appearance of loyalty when he gave himself the trouble.” Thus one master, who was a “dog,” is made to do duty on occasion against an other who was an “ass.” But this is not all he has to say of the same monarch. At page 520, vol. ii., summing up his character after his death, he says:
“After his (William IV.’s) accession he always continued to be something of a blackguard and something more of a buffoon. It is but fair to his memory at the same time to say that he was a good-natured, kind-hearted, and well-meaning man, and that he always acted an honorable and straightforward, if not always a sound and discreet, part.”
That this statement, that “never was there a king less respected,” was false, it needs hardly the popular verdict about William IV. to prove. Mr. Greville contradicts himself on page 251 of the same volume, where he notes the “strong expressions of personal regard and esteem” entertained for the king by such competent witnesses as two of his ministers, Wellington and Lord Grey. Even their testimony is not needed. Whatever may have been William IV.’s private weakness and foibles, the regret felt for him was general, and the esteem for his character as a popular sovereign publicly expressed. In any case, the indecency in Mr. Greville’s mouth of the expressions he makes use of is too plain to need argument. Speaking, in one place, of Lord Brougham and referring to the chancellor’s habit of sarcasm, he says:
“He reminds me of the man in Jonathan Wild who couldn’t keep his hand out of his neighbor’s pocket, although there was nothing in it, nor refrain from cheating at cards, although there were no stakes on the table.”
This description is true enough, in another sense, of Mr. Greville himself. A Sir Fretful Plagiary, he could see no man succeed without carping at him, nor resist criticising another’s performance for the sole reason that he had no hand in it. Noting the appearance of a political letter by Lord Redesdale, he says: “There is very little in it.” This single phrase gives the key to his character and the tone of his journal. At page 69, vol. ii., he sums up the whole subject of Irish national education in the profoundly-disgusted remark that there is nothing more in it than “whether the brats at school shall read the whole Bible or only parts of it.”
Page 105, vol. ii.: “O’Connell is supposed to be horribly afraid of the cholera.” “He dodges between London and Dublin” to avoid it, “shuns the House of Commons,” and neglects his duties. On pages 414-15: “He (O’Connell) is an object of execration to all those who cherish the principles and feelings of honor”—a high-toned remark, coming from a man of such delicate honor that, according to his own confession, he had no scruple in greasing the palm of a king’s valet for the secrets of his master’s bed-chamber; who avows without a blush that he deliberately led Lord Mount Charles, and Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence into confidences he there and then meant to betray; who in these Memoirs is continually invading the privacy of homes in which he was a guest; and who, finally, takes advantage of his official position under oath to disclose the conversations of the Privy Council! Surely, no juster piece of self-satire was ever written!
“’Tis a man of universal knowledge,” says La Bruyère. His familiarity with constitutional law would lead him to unseat the bench. Judges Park and Aldersen, famous lawyers, known to all the courts, are “nonsensical” in a decision they come to about the sheriff’s lists. Mr. Justice Park is “peevish and foolish.”
His loose way of damaging private character is not less remarkable. To give a single instance: he gives a bon mot about a certain Mr. Wakley, a parliamentary candidate of the day, who was forced to bring an action against an insurance company, which resisted the claim on the ground that the plaintiff was concerned in the fire. No further information is given—the verdict of the jury or the judgment. But Mr. Greville thus coolly concludes:
“I forget what was the result of the trial; but that of the evidence was a conviction of his instrumentality.” A “conviction” by whom? By Mr. Greville—who “forgets the result of the trial”! There is nothing to show that the friends or family of this Mr. Wakley are not still living to suffer from this unsupported libel. “Jesters,” says a French humorist, “are wretched creatures; that has been said before. But those who injure the reputation or the fortunes of others rather than lose a bon mot, merit an infamous punishment; this has not been said, and I dare say it.”
His “blackguards” are not all seated on a throne. His hatred of the “mob” was greater, if possible, than his envy of his superiors. “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” is the head-line of all his pages. Look at this entry, where the whole character of the man breaks forth irresistibly:
“Newmarket, October 1, 1831.—Came here last night, to my great joy, to get holidays, and leave reform and politics and cholera for racing and its amusements. Just before I came away I met Lord Wharncliffe, and asked him about his interview with radical Jones. This blackguard considers himself a sort of chief of a faction, and one of the heads of the sans-culottins of the present day.”
From radical Jones to Washington Irving is but a step for Mr. Greville’s nimble pen. The one is—what he says; the other, essentially “vulgar.” The same “vulgarity” offends his delicate taste in Thiers, Macaulay, and a score of others “the latchet of whose shoes he was unworthy to loose.” Is it to be wondered at that the venerable pontiff Pius VIII. (page 325, vol. i.) fails to satisfy this fastidious critic? The pope, however, escapes tolerably well. As a matter of course, “there is nothing in him”; but the distinguished urbanity and refined wit of the condescending Mr. Greville is satisfied to pronounce him a good-natured “twaddle.” These large airs of superior wisdom and refinement, this tone of pitying kindness, which Mr. Greville adopts towards the most illustrious men in Europe of his day, remind us of nothing so much as the majestic demeanor of the burgo, or great lord of Lilliput, who harangued Capt. Gulliver the morning after his arrival in that island. “He seemed to me,” says Capt. Gulliver, “to be somewhat longer than my middle finger. He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatening, and others of promises, pity, and kindness.”
The distinguished author of these Memoirs was not always, however, as we have seen, in the same amiable mood that the burgo afterwards manifested. After lashing each one of the persons he has known, separately and in turn, in the words which we have quoted, in another passage his acquaintances are all collected in a group and dashed off with graphic effect.
October 12, 1832.—Immediately after an entry giving a conversation with the accomplished Lady Cowper, he says: “My journal is getting intolerably stupid and entirely barren of events. I would take to miscellaneous and private matters, if any fell in my way. But what can I make out of such animals as I herd with and such occupations as I am engaged in?” A week after, at Easton, besides Lady Cowper, he names some other “animals”: “The Duke of Rutland, the Walewskis, Lord Burghersh and Hope—the usual party,” he exclaims with a sigh. Sad fate! The adventurous Capt. Gulliver elsewhere, in a letter to his cousin Sympson, says: “Pray bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the motive of Public Good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example.”
Such appear to have been the melancholy reflections forced upon the mind of Mr. Houyhnhnm Greville by the Yahoos he tells us he was compelled to “herd with”! Ever and anon he turns a regretful eye to the nobler race he was suited to, and lets us into the secret of the company and occupations that relieved him from the desolating ennui of uncongenial society.
“June 11, 1833.—At a place called Buckhurst all last week for the Ascot races. A party at Lentifield’s; racing all the morning; then eating, drinking, and play at night. I may say with more truth than anybody, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.”
“Not at all,” it might have been answered. “A jockey and gamester ab ovo usque ad mala. Fortune has now placed thee in the rank kind nature fitted thee to adorn, had not a too avid uncle snatched thee therefrom, and dry mountains of crackling parchment and red tape crushed thy yearning ardor for the loose boxes and the paddock!”
“March 27.—Jockeys, trainers, and blacklegs are my companions, and it is like dram-drinking: having once entered upon it, I cannot leave it, although I am disgusted with the occupation all the time.” Truly a long and fond “disgust,” since it lasted from his eighteenth year until his death!
“While the fever it excites is raging and the odds are varying, I can neither read nor write nor occupy myself with anything.”
Let us not be unjust to Mr. Greville. Kings, pontiffs, statesmen, and authors may have been “blackguards” or “vulgar buffoons,” the most refined society of both sexes in England a “herd” of Yahoos; but that he was not insensible to real merit, that he had a true appreciation of the good and the beautiful when he found it, one single example, shining out in these many pages of depreciation, proves beyond peradventure. In the flood of universal cynicism that pours over them, one man there is at least who lifts his head above the waters—one other gentle Houyhnhnm, fit companion for Mr. Greville, possessing all that wisdom and discretion denied to the rest of the world, and, more wonderful still, that elegant taste the fastidious critic finds nowhere else. This phenomenon is Mr. John Gully, prize-fighter retired! “Strong sense,” “discretion,” “reserve and good taste”—these are the encomiums heaped upon him; to crown all, “remarkably dignified and graceful in his manners and actions.” Ah! poor Macaulay, or thou, gentle Diedrich Knickerbocker, where wanders now thy ghost, condemned for thy “vulgarity” to pace the borders of the sluggish Styx, while the “champion heavy-weight” is ferried over to immortality by this new Charon of gentility?
We decline to soil our pages with any of Mr. Greville’s impure stories. Those who have seized on the book for the purpose of reading them must have been sadly disappointed if they hoped to find in them a doubtful amusement. Not a scintilla of wit relieves their baseness. Their vileness is equalled only by their dulness. They are simply falsehoods from beginning to end. Where Mr. Greville, with a singular depravity, does not himself admit them to be false while wilfully publishing them, they have been elsewhere fully and indignantly disproved. In a single word, as Mrs. Charles Kean aptly says in her letter published in the Times, “the grossness was in Mr. Greville’s mind,” not in the conduct of those he slanders.
If it be said that our criticism upon these volumes and their author has been too unsparing; that the old saying, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, should have inspired a smoother tone, the answer is given by Mr. Greville himself. “Memoirs of this kind,” he said in a conversation held some time before his death with his editor, Mr. Reeve, “ought not to be locked up till they had lost their principal interest by the death of all those who had taken any part in the events they describe.” In other words, the diseased vanity and cynicism which made him rail at everybody while he lived made him unwilling to lose the pleasure by anticipation of wounding everybody after his death. The shallow eagerness to have himself talked about after he was gone made him insensible to those ideas which seem to have animated Saint-Simon, who was content to look forward to an indefinite time for the publication of his Memoirs, desiring them rather to be a truthful and interesting contribution to history than a hasty means of venting his passing spleen. Mr. Greville has indeed been talked about sufficiently; but that the conversation would be pleasing to him, could he hear it, is more doubtful.
One thing at least is to be commended in Mr. Greville—his style. This, for certain uses, is admirable. It is easy and plain. He is a master of that part of the art of writing which Horace describes in the 10th Satire:
“Interdum urbani, parcentis viribus atque
Extenuantis eas consulto.”
His is “the language of the well-bred man,” the pure English of the society in which he lived. We do not take account here of his occasional coarseness, and even oaths—these were of the character of the man, not of his style. The latter, for purposes of correspondence, or even a short diary, might generally be taken for a model. Any single page will be read with pleasure. But as, on the other hand, he neglects the other side of the Venusian’s advice, seldom rising to “support the part of the poet or rhetorician,” these closely-printed volumes eventually become tiresome to the reader. Even good English will grow monotonous if it has nothing else to sustain it.
Little room is left to speak of the greatest of French memoir-writers, or perhaps of any literature—Saint-Simon. A few remarks may be jotted down, having reference chiefly to the points of contrast suggested by the Greville Memoirs. Of the substance and texture of Saint-Simon’s great and voluminous work, as it unrolls itself slowly before us—the opening splendor, the daring, the eccentricities, the wit, and the vices of the courts under which he lived; the prodigies of baseness and monuments of heroic virtue that rear themselves opposed in that marvellous age; the long line of portraits, dark, lurid, threatening, radiant, gentle, so full of surprises to the student of history as ordinarily written; the turning of the fate of campaigns by the caprice of an angry woman; the crippling of fleets by the jealousy of a minister; the desolation of whole provinces by the corruption of intendants; the closing scenes of profligacy and bankruptcy under the regency—many pages would be required to give even an outline. The analysis of his genius and character would make a distinct essay. Sainte-Beuve and other masters of criticism have labored in the field; yet the soil is so rich that humbler students will still find enough to repay them. We indicate the landmarks of the country, without entering on it. Nor would we be supposed to endorse or give our sanction to many of the opinions and sentiments Saint-Simon so freely gives utterance to. His Gallicanism, which he shared with the court; his sympathy with the Jansenist leaders, if not with their heresy; his violent hatred of the Jesuits—these are blots on his work that cover many pages.
The Duc de Saint-Simon was born in 1675. During the lifetime of his father he bore the name of the Vidame de Chartres, and in a subsequent passage of his Memoirs, relating to the birth of his own eldest son, he gives a highly characteristic account of the title. At his first appearance at court the king was already privately married to Mme. de Maintenon, the widow Scarron, whose character and astonishing fortunes are nowhere more vividly described than in the pages of Saint-Simon. Louis XIV. was at the summit of his glory. Henceforward, though none could then foresee it, the course was all down-hill. Saint-Simon in his first campaigns accompanied the king into Flanders. Some discontent about promotion, to which he believed himself entitled, caused him to retire from the service. Henceforward he continued to live chiefly at court, having already begun the composition of his Memoirs. On the death of his father, the confidential adviser of Louis XIII., even under the ministry of the famous Cardinal Richelieu, he succeeded to the title and the government of Blaye. At this early age he was accustomed secretly to visit the monastery of La Trappe for meditation and retreat. His gravity and seriousness of mind are everywhere felt through his Memoirs, although these qualities do not lessen the pungency of his style, nor blunt the bon mots of the court, or his graphic description of the surprising adventures of the men of his day. He married Mlle. de Durfort, the daughter of Marshal de Durfort. This union was one of singular happiness, interrupted only by her death.
The death of the Dauphin, the pupil of Fénelon, destroyed the hopes that were opening up before Saint-Simon of becoming the chief minister of the next reign. Under the regency he continued to be the intimate and sometimes confidential adviser of the Duke of Orleans, although supplanted in state affairs by Cardinal Dubois. His embassy to Madrid to negotiate the marriage of the young king, Louis XV., with the Infanta of Spain, is well known. After the death of the regent he retired to his château of La Ferté-Vidame, where chiefly he continued henceforward to live in retirement, composing his immortal Memoirs. He died in Paris in 1755. Having known the subtle sway of a Maintenon, he lived to see the audacious empire of the Pompadour; and having served in his first campaigns under Luxembourg, he witnessed before his death the Great Frederick launch his thunderbolts of war, and the rise of Prussia among the great powers of Europe.
To attempt, in these few concluding remarks, to give any criticism of Saint-Simon’s great work would be a hopeless task. Its character is so many-sided, even contradictory, that any single judgment about it would be deceptive. We were impelled to connect the author’s name with that of the later memoir-writer by the contrasts which irresistibly suggested themselves.
Stated broadly, the main distinction between Saint-Simon and such writers as Greville and his kind is this: that Saint-Simon presents a connected narrative, flowing on largely, fully, evenly, abundantly, like a majestic river sweeping slowly past many varieties of scenery; while Greville gives nothing more than a hodge-podge diary, with no connection except the illusory one of dates, a jumble of short stories, petty details, and ill-natured remarks, bubbling like a noisy brook over stones and shingle, often half lost in the mud and sand, and not unlikely to end in a common sewer. It follows that, while it is difficult to remember particular events or conversations in Greville’s journal, many scenes from Saint-Simon remain for ever fixed in the memory. Take, for instance, one—not the most striking—that of the death of Monseigneur. Who can forget the picture of the old king, in tears, only half-dressed, hastening to the bedside of his son; the sudden terror of the prince’s household; the flight of La Choin, hastily gathering up her jewelry; the row of officers on their knees in the long avenue, crying out to the king to save them from dying of hunger; the well-managed eyes of the courtiers at Marly!
Greville is cynical or satirical by dint of the child’s art of using hard words. Saint-Simon seldom, comparatively speaking, puts on the garb of a cynic; but his narrative, with scarcely any obtrusion of the writer, often becomes a satire as terrible as that of some passages of Tacitus, or, in another vein, of Juvenal.
Many of the historical characters introduced into these works are no favorites of ours; but our purpose in this article has been, not to discuss them, but rather the capacity and good taste, or otherwise, of their critics.
Sainte-Beuve, in one of his felicitous periods, expresses the wish that every age might have a Saint-Simon to chronicle it. As a paraphrase of this remark, it might be said that it is to be wished no other age may have a Greville to slander it.
DOM GUÉRANGER AND SOLESMES.[87]
I.
The church in France has just sustained a severe loss in the death of Dom Guéranger, the illustrious Abbot of Solesmes, who, on the 30th of January last, rendered up his soul to God in the noble abbey which he had restored at the same time that he brought back the Benedictine Order to France; and where, during the last forty years of his life, he had lived in the practice of every monastic virtue, and in the pursuit of literary labors which have rendered him one of the oracles of ecclesiastical learning.
We are not about to enter into details of the religious life of the venerable abbot. It belongs rather to those who have been its daily witnesses to trace its history; but we feel that it may be of interest to touch upon certain features of the character and public works of this humble and patient religious, this vigorous athlete, the loss of whom is so keenly felt by the Holy Father, whose friend and counsellor he was, and by the church, of which he was the honor and the unwearied defender.
Dom Guéranger, in mental temperament, belonged to that valiant generation of Catholics who, after 1830, energetically undertook the cause of religion in their unhappy country, more than ever exposed to the attacks of the Revolution. The university had become a source of antichristian teaching; the press everywhere overflowed with evil and daring scandals of every kind were rife. A new generation of Jacobins had sprung from the old stock, and were eager to invade everything noble, venerable, and sacred; legal tyranny threatened to do away with well-nigh all liberty of conscience, while the government, either not daring or not desiring to sever itself from the ambitious conspirators to whom it owed its being, allowed free course to the outrages and persecutions against the church. It was the most critical and ominous period of the century, and French society was rapidly sinking into an abyss.
One man, who had foreseen all this evil, and whose genius would have probably sufficed victoriously to combat it, had he only possessed the virtue of humility, was M. de Lamennais. Happily, the pleiades of chosen minds whom he had gathered around him did not lose courage after the melancholy defection of their brilliant master. The three most illustrious of these shared among them the defence of the faith against the floods of unbelief that threatened to overwhelm the country. Montalembert remained to defend the church in the public assemblies; Lacordaire adopted as his own the words of S. Paul to his disciple, Prædica verbum, insta opportune, importune,[88] and succeeded so effectually that he brought back the robe of S. Dominic into the pulpit of Notre Dame, amid the applause of the conquered multitude; Guéranger felt that prayer and sound learning were the two great wants of society. The number of priests was insufficient for the labors of the sacred ministry. The needs of the time had indeed called forth some few weighty as well as brilliant apologists; but deep and solid learning as yet remained buried in the past, and the patient study so necessary for the polemics of the present and the future threatened indefinitely to languish. It was to this point, therefore, that the Abbé Guéranger directed his especial attention, and he it was who was chosen of God to rekindle the expiring, if not extinguished, flame.
He was led to this sooner than he himself had perhaps anticipated, and by a circumstance which rather appeared likely to have disturbed his projects. Solesmes, which, up to the Revolution, had been a priory dependent on S. Vincent de Mans, had just been sold to one of those “infernal bands” who in the course of a few years destroyed the greatest glories of France. Everything was to be pulled down: the cloister of eight centuries and the church, renowned for the admirable sculptures now doomed to fall beneath the “axe and hammer”; the authorities of the time doing nothing to check the devastation effected by the bandits who were rifling their country after having assassinated her.
The Abbé Guéranger could not endure to witness the annihilation of so much that was sacred and venerable; besides, the ruins of Solesmes were especially dear to him, and had been the favorite haunt of his early childhood and youth, so much so that from this and other characteristic circumstances he was at that period known among his school comrades at Le Sablé as The Monk. In concert with Dom Fontaine and other ecclesiastics of the neighborhood he rescued the abbey from the hands of its intending destroyers. It had already suffered considerably from the Revolution, but remained intact in all essential particulars. He spent the winter of 1833 at Paris, going about the city in his monk’s habit—which at that time had become a novelty—and knocking at every door, without troubling himself about the religious opinions or belief of those to whom he addressed himself. The sceptical citizens of the time amused themselves not a little at his expense; but the learned world received with distinction the energetic young priest who was so bent upon giving back the Benedictine Order to France. He never once allowed any obstacles to hinder or discourage him in the prosecution of his undertaking. In 1836 he repaired to Rome, there to make his novitiate; and, after a year passed in the Benedictine Abbey of San Paolo Fuora Muri, he pronounced his solemn vows, and occupied himself in preparing the constitutions of Solesmes. These, on the 1st of September, 1837, were approved by Pope Gregory XVI., who at the same time raised the Priory of Solesmes into an abbey, and authoritatively nominated Dom Guéranger to be its first abbot.
Solesmes and the grand Order of S. Benedict were thus restored to France. The new abbot was soon surrounded by men nearly all of whom have taken a distinguished rank in learning and science, and during forty years the austere discipline and deep and extensive studies of the sons of S. Benedict flourished under his able rule.
Dom Guéranger, moreover, restored Ligugé, the oldest monastery in France, built in 360 by S. Martin of Tours. He also founded the Priory of S. Madeleine at Marseilles, and at Solesmes the Abbey of Benedictine Nuns of S. Cecilia.
The attention he bestowed upon these important foundations did not hinder this indefatigable religious from amassing the treasures of erudition which he dispensed with so much ability in defence of the truth and of sound doctrine. To the end of his life his pen was active either in writing the numerous works which have rendered his name so well known, or in correcting the errors of polemics and answering his adversaries when the interests of religion required it; habitually going straight to the point in his replies, fearlessly attacking whatever was false or mistaken, and never allowing any approach to a compromise with error. The defence of the church was his constant and engrossing thought, and no important controversy arose but he was sure to appear with the accuracy of his learning and the always serious but unsparing process of a logic supported by a thorough acquaintance with doctrine and facts.
The Abbot of Solesmes was endowed with a large amount of prudence and good sense. When his former companions of La Chesnaie undertook to popularize “liberal Catholicism,” the precise creed of which has never yet been ascertained, and the unfailing results of which have been scandal and division, he undertook to bring back the church in France to unity of prayer by writing his book entitled Institutions Liturgiques, which, exhibiting in all their beauty the forgotten rites and symbols, succeeded in securing for them the appreciation they merit; so that from that time the liturgy in France began to disengage itself from the multiplicity of particular observances.
In this matter Dom Guéranger had engaged in no trifling combat, his opponents being many and powerful; but he energetically defended his ground, and did not die until he had seen his undertaking crowned with full success by the restoration of the Roman liturgy in France.
Besides these liturgical labors, which chiefly occupied him, and his Letters to the Archbishops of Rheims and Toulouse, as likewise to Mgr. Fayet, Bishop of Orleans, in defence of the Institutions, he undertook the Liturgical Year, which, unfortunately, was left unfinished at his death. His Mémoire upon the Immaculate Conception was included among those memorials sent to the bishops by the Sovereign Pontiff on the promulgation of the dogma. His Sainte Cécile, remarkable for its historical accuracy, as well as for its excellence as a literary composition, is a finished picture of Christian manners during the earliest centuries.
When the Vatican Council was sitting, Dom Guéranger appeared for the last time in the breach. Confined a prisoner by sickness, but intrepid as those old captains who insist on being borne into the midst of the fight, he wished to take part in the great debate which was being carried on in the church. He fought valiantly, and answered the adversaries of tradition by his work on The Pontifical Monarchy, defending Pope Honorius against the attacks of an ill-informed academician.
We are unable to give a complete list of the writings of Dom Guéranger, numerous articles having been published by him in the Univers—notably those on Maria d’Agreda and the reply to an exaggerated idea of M. d’Haussonville on the attitude of the church under the persecution of the First Bonaparte. We will only name, in concluding this part of the subject, his Essais sur le Naturalisme, which dealt a heavy blow to free-thinking; his Réponses upon the liturgical law to M. l’Abbé David, now Bishop of St. Brieuc; and a Défense des Jesuites.
Should it be asked how the Abbot of Solesmes could find the time for so many considerable works, the answer is given in the Imitation: Cella continuata dulcescit. He had made retreat a willing necessity for himself, and, being in the habit of doing everything in its proper time, he had time for everything without need of haste.
From the day that he became Abbot of Solesmes he was scarcely ever seen in the world, never absenting himself without absolute necessity or from obedience. Of middle height, decided manner, with a quick eye and serious smile, Dom Guéranger attracted those who came to him by the simplicity and kindness of his reception, and those who sought his advice by the discerning wisdom of his counsels. High ecclesiastical dignities might have been his had he not preferred to remain in the seclusion of his beloved abbey.
He leaves behind him something far better than even his books, in bequeathing to the church and to society a family of monks strongly imbued with his spirit, and destined to perpetuate the holy traditions which he was the first to revive in his native land.
The imposing ceremonies of the funeral of Dom Guéranger, which took place on the 4th of February at the Abbey of Solesmes, were conducted by the Bishops of Mans, Nantes, and Quimper; there were also present the Abbots of Ligugé, La Trappe de Mortagne, Aiguebelle, and Pierre-qui-Vire, besides more than two hundred priests of La Sarthe.
The remains of the reverend father, clothed in pontifical vestments, with the mitre and crozier, were exposed in the church from the evening of the 30th (Saturday) for the visits of the faithful, crowds of whom came from all the country round, in spite of the exceeding inclemency of the weather, to pay their last respects and to be present at the funeral of the illustrious man, who, during his forty years’ residence among them, had made himself so greatly beloved. Just before the close of the ceremony, when the Bishop of Mans invited those present to look for the last time upon the holy and beautiful countenance of the departed abbot, who had been a father to many outside as well as within the cloister walls, a general and irrepressible burst of sobs and tears arose from the multitude which thronged the church.
Among those present were many noble and learned friends of the deceased, besides the mayor and municipal council of Solesmes, and also of Sablé (Dom Guéranger’s native place), a deputation of the marble-workers of the district, and people of every class.
II.
“La voyez vous croitre,
La tour du vieux cloitre?”
Before concluding our notice we must devote a page or two to the “Old Cloister Tower,” which is discernible from a considerable distance, with its four or five stories and its heraldic crown rising above the walls of the ancient borough of Solesmes. The abbey itself next appears in sight, majestically seated on the slope of a wide valley, through which flows the Sarthe, on a level with its grassy borders.
The locality, which is pleasing rather than picturesque, is fertile, animated, and cheerful. Besides several châteaux of recent construction, which face the abbey from the opposite side of the river, may be seen, at some distance off, the splendid convent of Benedictine Nuns, built some years ago by a lady of Marseilles, and on the horizon appears the Château of Sablé, with its vast terraces and (according to the country-people) its three hundred and sixty-five windows.
The Abbey of Solesmes, founded about the year 1025, has preserved, in spite of several reconstructions, the architectural arrangement, so suitable for community life, copied by its first monks from the Roman houses of the order. The enclosure consists of a quadrangle, with an almost interminable cloister, out of which are entrances into the church, the chapter-house, the refectory, the guest-chamber, and all the places of daily assembly. There silence and recollection reign supreme. Excepting only during the times of recreation, no sound is to be heard save the twittering of birds, the sound of the Angelus or some other occasional bell, or the subdued voice of a monk who, with some visitor, is standing before a sculptured saint, or examining the fragments of some ancient tomb.
It is chiefly the abbey church which attracts the curiosity and interest of artists and antiquaries. There is not an archæologist who has not heard of the “Saints of Solesmes,” as the groups of statues and symbolic sculptures are called which fill the chapels of the transept from roof to pavement. These wonderful works, executed for the most part under the direction of the priors of Solesmes, form one of the finest monuments of mediæval sculpture to be found in France. They are mystic and somewhat mannered in style, but of bold conception, vigorously expressed.
A multitude of personages, sacred, historical, or allegorical, intermingle with coats-of-arms, heraldic devices, bandrols, and all the details of an ornamentation of which the skilfully-studied arrangement corrects the redundance, which would otherwise be confused. This, however, is but the purely decorative portion; the principal works being enshrined in deep niches or recesses, in which may be seen groups of seven or eight figures, the size of life, and wonderfully effective in attitude and action.
In a low-vaulted crypt resting on pillars, to the right, is represented the Entombment. This group, which is the earliest in date, having been executed in 1496 under the direction of Michel Colomb, “habitant de Tours et tailleur d’ymaiges du roy,” is the most considerable, and perhaps also the most striking. All the figures, ten in number, have impressed on their countenances and movements the feeling of the dolorous function in which they are engaged. Most of them are represented in the costume, and probably with the features, of persons of the time. Joseph of Arimathea in particular has the look and bearing of the lord of the place, or, it may be, of the prior of the monastery. But nothing attracts the attention more than a little statue with features so refined that it might have descended from the canvas of Carlo Dolci. It is the Magdalen, seated in the dust; the elbows supported on the knees, the hands joined, the eyes closed. All her life seems concentrated in her soul; and that is absorbed in penitence and prayer, grief, love, and resignation—she is as if still shedding her sanctified odors at the Saviour’s feet.
The left transept is devoted to the honor of the Blessed Virgin. She has fallen asleep in the Lord, surrounded by the apostles. Then follow her burial, her Assumption, and finally her glorification. She tramples under foot the dragon, who, with bristling horns and claws, vainly endeavors to reach her. He is bound for a thousand years. This subject, rarely attempted, is here powerfully treated; all these heads, with horrible grimaces, appear to be howling and blaspheming in impotent fury—Et iratus est draco in mulierem[89]—but the Woman is raised on high, and with her virginal foot tramples on the enemy of mankind. Facing this subject are the patriarchs and prophets, in niches royally decorated. This work was executed in 1550 by Floris d’Anvers, after the plan given by Jean Bouglet, Doctor of the Sorbonne, and Prior of Solesmes.
But time would fail us to describe all these remarkable sculptures, which so narrowly escaped destruction or desecration at the hands of the revolutionists. The First Napoleon had the idea of transporting them to some museum as curiosities of art. It would have been a sacrilege, and one which, alas! has been too often perpetrated in other countries besides France. But what Catholic that visits the garden even, to say nothing of the museum, of the ancient monastery of Cluny (now Musée de Cluny, at Paris), is not pained at seeing saints and virgins, angels and apostles, more or less shattered and dismembered, torn from their places in the sanctuary, and figuring as statues on the lawn, or mere groups of sculpture picturesquely placed to assist the effect of the gardener’s arrangement of the shrubs and flower-beds?
Bonaparte, however (after testing with gimlet and saw the hardness of the stone), found himself obliged to leave the “Saints of Solesmes” where they were, as, unless the whole were to be ruined, the entire transept would have had to be transported all in one piece, every part of this immense sculptured fresco being connected and, as it were, enwound with the other portions, and each detail having only its particular excellence in the completeness of the rest.
It is amid the ceremonies of Solesmes that those who enter into the spirit of Christian art can penetrate more deeply into the meaning of the vast poem carved upon the walls of the church. During the simple recital of the psalms, as in the most solemn and magnificent ceremonies, there is a striking harmony between the decoration and the action, the one being a commentary on the other. The monks, motionless in their carven stalls, or disposed on the steps of the altar, seem to make one with the Jerusalem in stone, while the saints in their niches may almost be imagined to sing with the psalmody and meditate during the solemn rites at which they are present. At the most solemn moment of the Mass, when clouds of incense are filling the holy place, the mystic dove descends, bearing between her silver wings the Bread of Heaven, and, when it is deposited in the pyx, mounts again into her aerial shrine, which is suspended from a lofty cross.
This custom of elevating the tabernacle between heaven and earth was not the only one in which the venerable abbot exactly copied the ancient rites. The ceremonies of Solesmes are full of the spirit of the church’s liturgy, and the community formed by his teaching and example will not fail to perpetuate the pious and venerable observances which he was the first to restore in France.