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.