And before blotting his page, he enables us to comprehend in a single glance the parallel movements of the time.
"Soon with this reformation in religion will come the reformation in government. Political tyranny is interlinked with ecclesiastical tyranny. Against them are turned the two branches of the forward movement,[401] the one in the direction of moderate democracy, the other towards adoring God in mind and heart alone. We give up the attempt to do anything more with these two forms of government, and in politics and society we see matters as they ought to be.... Nature tells us all that we need; we listen and follow her when the imposture of tyranny exists no longer."[402]
We have only to compare Citizen d'Argenson with the former Absolutist of 1732 to realise the rate at which France was travelling.
If the revolution, political and moral, was the chief, it was not the only interest of d'Argenson's Journal. His pages reflect the many-featured life of a great and old society.[403] We can only advert to his luminous criticism of economics and finance:[404] his strange apologies for the debauchery of the King: and the heart-sick comparisons which he sometimes makes between the condition and government of France and England. He beheld, with apprehension and despair, the avowed resolution of the English nation to destroy the colonial influence of France; he beheld, with astonishment and alarm, the abandonment of the traditional French foreign policy by the Treaty of Versailles in 1756. He was oppressed more than all by the critical state of the interior. His descriptions of the French provinces are the most striking examples of d'Argenson's power. They display, not merely a mastery of facts, but a masterful hold upon their meaning; and they are informed by the pure and unaffected habit of humanity which he had learnt in an older than the Philosophic school. Again, "C'est par le cœur que son esprit est grand!"
Unkindly were it to lay down the Journal without a grateful reference to d'Argenson's style. It is a vexed question, though all that is necessary has long been said with the noble generosity of Ste. Beuve. Those of d'Argenson's friends who were gifted with a pretty wit used to tell him that he wanted style. What they meant was that he wanted stylishness. In those days, before Buffon had let in light upon the darkness, the meaning of style was very undefined. People used the word to denote delicacy and refinement. To those qualities d'Argenson could never pretend. His diction was of a heterogeneous character, the language of polite society mingling with expressions from the gutter or the farmyard, or places more unsavoury still. The structure of his sentences is often erratic, and he is never embarrassed by the importunities of grammar. Such necessary niceties he regarded with unconcern, or as a mark of coxcombry or pedantry; in learning and literature he hated both. What he valued was mother wit; and he was content to express it in his mother tongue. He was not inclined to cavil at a word which had been good enough for Rabelais, nor was French the less French for being Tourangeau, as that great master proved. Such licence however as he took, he could well afford to take. D'Argenson's style resembles his statesmanship. Delicacy, finesse, those smaller aptitudes that come by practice, he had never been able to acquire; yet he displays no slight command of the larger qualities of style. His writing wins us, not by the charm of symmetry and grace, but by the kind of rude dignity which comes of will and energy and power. He cleaves his way to his own meaning with a certain two-handed effectiveness by no means unimposing; and we have never to fear having lost one jot or tittle of the idea he is trying to convey. Often ungrammatical, he is never obscure. The reader has scarcely a knot to unravel in the whole nine volumes of his Journal. Though unformed and unrefined by art, his literary instinct is of the surest. He never misses the point of a story, or fails to convey it to his readers. His handling of episodes, grave, sure and convincing, compels the regret that he was not born poor, in order that he might have achieved distinction as a master of style. But the binding charm of d'Argenson is his perennial flow and freshness. Brisk, alert, ever unwearied, his reader cannot weary of him. His vitality scatters the dust from his pages, leaving them bright as the day they were written. He is a foe, as ever, to pomp and ceremony; his narrative opens readily, it closes with a clasp. He has none of St. Simon's breadth of elaboration; yet he has something which makes us feel, as we lay down the ninth volume, that we owe the writer no grudge, and that if life were long enough, we would open a tenth with unblunted curiosity and pleasure.
Indeed the style is a faithful reflection of the man—perhaps the most faithful we possess. Known only through his acts, we know him only as he was spoilt by his unhappy training. It is in his writings that we see the real man, as he was by himself and as he strove to be with others. In the world he was stiff, shy, rudely straightforward, despising chicanery and abhorring clamour. Alone in his library he was another being, free, natural, powerful, and great. From the windows he could look out upon a world unthinking, heedless, the prey of knaves and the sport of fools, and needing to be guided by a philosopher and an honest man. His belief that he was wise and strong enough to give such guidance may be called an illusion, if any one thinks it worth while. Within those walls the illusion, if illusion it was, was a very natural one; and natural or not, we have no right to complain, for it has bequeathed to us one of the most interesting of journals and revealed to us one of the most interesting of men.
D'Argenson's life during these last ten years is seen upon an engaging background, the château and domain of Segrez, about thirty miles from Paris. It was a very charming place, which its master loved, and was fond of describing both with pen and pencil.[405] He used to liken it to the Elysian Fields,[406] and if his own affectionate sketches of it are to be trusted, the hyperbole may readily be pardoned. There he passed the years of his retirement, organising his correspondence, inditing his Journal, entertaining his friends, and protecting the peasantry against the revenue officers.[407] Sometimes too in moments of blissful idleness, he would prop himself up in that portable reading cabinet which M. Aubertin has made so famous,[408] and laugh and weep through a translation of "Tom Jones,"[409] a new book by that ingenious writer, Mr. Henry Fielding. His life was broken by an occasional visit to the Court or to his family estates in Touraine; and he was constantly in and out of Paris. Often might he be seen descending from the mud-bespattered coach, reading with affright and horror some placards which the police had not yet torn down, condoling with one of his learned friends in the agitated court of the Palais de Justice, denouncing the Jesuits in the company of d'Alembert, or hurrying away to preside at a meeting of the Academy of Letters.[410] But his heart was always thirty miles away. We can picture him, after an exciting month at Paris, arriving at Segrez, handing off his cloak, flinging himself into the arms of some cherished chair, and dreaming of a week of peace and solitude.
"Here I am again in the country for six days. I shall have less news of the world and the Court, but far better news of myself. How delightful it is to be at rest, in the company of oneself and one's books!
"Yesterday evening there was a beautiful aurora borealis, and immediately afterwards the weather cleared up and the wind veered round to the south. There is good promise for the harvest. The rain came when it was wanted, and the crops, kept back by the cold weather we have been having lately, are now coming forward in fine style."[411]
At this time d'Argenson presents a pleasant picture, the picture of a man who has striven, and not in vain. He had not obtained all he had hoped for, but what he had achieved was no little thing. It is easy to have the defects of one's qualities; it is harder to acquire, as d'Argenson had done, the very qualities of his defects. The vices of his nature he had employed more usefully than many virtues. Cut off from the many, he had won his way into the ranks of the elect; if he could not be witty, he could at least be wise. Fortune had decreed his failure as a politician: she could not deny him the secondary distinction of being, as a political thinker, the foremost man of his time. And this was the end of a lifelong struggle, not unworthy of his stubborn blood. True that he had faults, and retained them to the last; and to the last he strove to quell them. They were in spite of him; his greatness was his own. Faults though they be, they are not unamiable; their generous admission extorts generosity: and they have forgiven them most readily who have known them best. If, under the pen of M. Edmond Scherer[412] and others less distinguished than he, they have been raised to a hateful prominence of contumely, they have been reduced to their due place of utter subordination by the humanity and the insight of an Aubertin[413] and a Ste. Beuve.
The Marquis d'Argenson died on the 26th of January, 1757. Rousseau five years afterwards inscribed his epitaph—