The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862

As, dwelling on thy gentle face,
Its twilight smile, its tender grace,
We fill the shadowy years to be
With what had been thy destiny.
And still, amid our sorrow's pain,
We feel the loss is yet our gain;
For through the death we know the life,
Its gold in thought, its steel in strife,—
And so with reverent kiss we say
Adieu! O Bayard of our day!

HINDRANCE

Much that is in itself undesirable occurs in obedience to a general law which is not only desirable, but of infinite necessity and benefit. It is not desirable that Topper and Macaulay should be read by tens of thousands, and Wilkinson only by tens. It is not desirable that a narrow, selfish, envious Cecil, who could never forgive his noblest contemporaries for failing to be hunchbacks like himself, should steer England all his life as it were with supreme hand, and himself sail on the topmost tide of fortune; while the royal head of Raleigh goes to the block, and while Bacon, with his broad and bountiful nature,—Bacon, one of the two or three greatest and humanest statesmen ever born to England, and one of the friendliest men toward mankind ever born into the world,—dies in privacy and poverty, bequeathing his memory "to foreign nations and the next ages." But it is wholly desirable that he who would consecrate himself to excellence in art or life should sometimes be compelled to make it very clear to himself whether it be indeed excellence that he covets, or only plaudits and pounds sterling. So when we find our purest wishes perpetually hindered, not only in the world around us, but even in our own bosoms, many of the particular facts may indeed merit reproach, but the general fact merits, on the contrary, gratitude and gratulation. For were our best wishes not, nor ever, hindered, sure it is that the still better wishes of destiny in our behalf would be hindered yet worse. Sure it is, I say, that Hindrance, both outward and inward, comes to us not through any improvidence or defect of benignity in Nature, but in answer to our need, and as part of the best bounty which enriches our days. And to make this indubitably clear, let us hasten to meditate that simple and central law which governs this matter and at the same time many others.

And the law is, that every definite action is conditioned upon a definite resistance, and is impossible without it. We walk in virtue of the earth's resistance to the foot, and are unable to tread the elements of air and water only because they are too complaisant, and deny the foot that opposition which it requires. Precisely that, accordingly, which makes the difficulty of an action may at the same time make its possibility. Why is flight difficult? Because the weight of every creature draws it toward the earth. But without this downward proclivity, the wing of the bird would have no power upon the air. Why is it difficult for a solid body to make rapid progress in water? Because the water presses powerfully upon it, and at every inch of progress must be overcome and displaced. Yet the ship is able to float only in virtue of this same hindering pressure, and without it would not sail, but sink. The bird and the steamer, moreover,—the one with its wings and the other with its paddles,—apply themselves to this hindrance to progression as their only means of making progress; so that, were not their motion obstructed, it would be impossible.

The law governs not actions only, but all definite effects whatsoever. If the luminiferous ether did not resist the sun's influence, it could not be wrought into those undulations wherein light consists; if the air did not resist the vibrations of a resonant object, and strive to preserve its own form, the sound-waves could not be created and propagated: if the tympanum did not resist these waves, it would not transmit their suggestion to the brain; if any given object does not resist the sun's rays,—in other words, reflect them,—it will not be visible; neither can the eye mediate between any object and the brain save by a like opposing of rays on the part of the retina.

These instances might be multiplied ad libitum, since there is literally no exception to the law. Observe, however, what the law is, namely, that some resistance is indispensable,—by no means that this alone is so, or that all modes and kinds of resistance are of equal service. Resistance and Affinity concur for all right effects; but it is the former that, in some of its aspects, is much accused as a calamity to man and a contumely to the universe; and of this, therefore, we consider here.

Not all kinds of resistance are alike serviceable; yet that which is required may not always consist with pleasure, nor even with safety. Our most customary actions are rendered possible by forces and conditions that inflict weariness at times upon all, and cost the lives of many. Gravitation, forcing all men against the earth's surface with an energy measured by their weight avoirdupois, makes locomotion feasible; but by the same attraction it may draw one into the pit, over the precipice, to the bottom of the sea. What multitudes of lives does it yearly destroy! Why has it never occurred to some ingenious victim of a sluggish liver to represent Gravitation as a murderous monster revelling in blood? Surely there are woful considerations here that might be used with the happiest effect to enhance the sense of man's misery, and have been too much neglected!

Probably there are few children to whom the fancy has not occurred, How convenient, how fine were it to weigh nothing! We smile at the little wiseacres; we know better. How much better do we know? That ancient lament, that ever iterated accusation of the world because it opposes a certain hindrance to freedom, love, reason, and every excellence which the imagination of man can portray and his heart pursue,—what is it, in the final analysis, but a complaint that we cannot walk without weight, and that therefore climbing is climbing?

Instead, however, of turning aside to applications, let us push forward the central statement in the interest of applications to be made by every reader for himself,—since he says too much who does not leave much more unsaid. Observe, then, that objects which so utterly submit themselves to man as to become testimonies and publications of his inward conceptions serve even these most exacting and monarchical purposes only by opposition to them, and, to a certain extent, in the very measure of that opposition. The stone which the sculptor carves becomes a fit vehicle for his thought through its resistance to his chisel; it sustains the impress of his imagination solely through its unwillingness to receive the same. Not chalk, not any loose and friable material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance to constitute active Power. Man, in order to obtain instrumentalities and uses, blends his will and intelligence with a force that vigorously seeks to pursue its own separate free course; and while this resists him, it becomes his servant.

But why not look at this fact in its largest light? For do we not here touch upon the probable reason why God must, as it were, be offset by World, Spirit by Matter, Soul by Body? The Maker must needs, if it be lawful so to speak, heap up in the balance against His own pure, eternal freedom these numberless globes of cold, inert matter. Matter is, indeed, movable by no fine persuasions: brutely faithful to its own law, it cares no more for AEschylus than for the tortoise that breaks his crown; the purpose of a cross for the sweetest saint it serves no less willingly than any other purpose,—stiffly holding out its arms there, about its own wooden business, neither more nor less, centred utterly upon itself. But is it not this stolid self-centration which makes it needful to Divinity? An infinite energy required a resisting or doggedly indifferent material, itself quasi infinite, to take the impression of its life, and render potentiality into power. So by the encountering of body with soul is the product, man, evolved. Philosophers and saints have perceived that the spiritual element of man is hampered and hindered by his physical part: have they also perceived that it is the very collision between these which strikes out the spark of thought and kindles the sense of law? As the tables of stone to the finger of Jehovah on Sinai, so is the firm marble of man's material nature to the recording soul. But even Plato, when he arrives at these provinces of thought, begins to limp a little, and to go upon Egyptian crutches. In the incomparable apologues of the "Phaedrus" he represents our inward charioteer as driving toward the empyrean two steeds, of which the one is virtuously attracted toward heaven, while the other is viciously drawn to the earth; but he countenances the inference that the earthward proclivity of the latter is to be accounted pure misfortune. But to the universe there is neither fortune nor misfortune; there is only the reaper, Destiny, and his perpetual harvest. All that occurs on a universal scale lies in the line of a pure success. Nor can the universe attain any success by pushing past man and leaving him aside. That were like the prosperity of a father who should enrich himself by disinheriting his only son.

Principles necessary to all action must of course appear in moral action. The moral imagination, which pioneers and produces inward advancement, works under the same conditions with the imagination of the artist, and must needs have somewhat to work upon. Man is both sculptor and quarry,—and a great noise and dust of chiselling is there sometimes in his bosom. If, therefore, we find in him somewhat which does not immediately and actively sympathize with his moral nature, let us not fancy this element equally out of sympathy with his pure destiny. The impulsion and the resistance are alike included in the design of our being. Hunger—to illustrate—respects food, food only. It asks leave to be hunger neither of your conscience, your sense of personal dignity, nor indeed of your humanity in any form; but exists by its own permission, and pushes with brute directness toward its own ends. True, the soul may at last so far prevail as to make itself felt even in the stomach; and the true gentleman could as soon relish a lunch of porcupines' quills as a dinner basely obtained, though it were of nightingales' tongues. But this is sheer conquest on the part of the soul, not any properly gastric inspiration at all; and it is in furnishing opportunity for precisely such conquest that the lower nature becomes a stairway of ascent for the soul.

And now, if in the relations between every manly spirit and the world around him we discover the same fact, are we not by this time prepared to contemplate it altogether with dry eyes? What if it be true, that in trade, in politics, in society, all tends to low levels? What if disadvantages are to be suffered by the grocer who will not sell adulterated food, by the politician who will not palter, by the diplomatist who is ashamed to lie? For this means only that no one can be honest otherwise than by a productive energy of honesty in his own bosom. In other words,—a man reaches the true welfare of a human soul only when his bosom is a generative centre and source of noble principles; and therefore, in pure, wise kindness to man, the world is so arranged that there shall be perpetual need of this access and reinforcement of principle. Society, the State, and every institution, grow lean the moment there is a falling off in this divine fruitfulness of man's heart, because only in virtue of bearing such fruit is man worthy of his name. Honor and honesty are constantly consumed between men, that they may be forever newly demanded in them.

We cannot too often remind ourselves that the aim of the universe is a personality. As the terrestrial globe through so many patient aeons climbed toward the production of a human body, that by this all-comprehending, perfect symbol it might enter into final union with Spirit, so do the uses of the world still forever ascend toward man, and seek a continual realization of that ancient wish. When, therefore, Time shall come to his great audit with Eternity, persons alone will be passed to his credit. "So many wise and wealthy souls,"—that is what the sun and his household will have come to. The use of the world is not found in societies faultlessly mechanized; for societies are themselves but uses and means. They are the soil in which persons grow; and I no more undervalue them than the husbandman despises his fertile acres because it is not earth, but the wheat that grows from it, which comes to his table. Society is the culmination of all uses and delights; persons, of all results. And societies answer their ends when they afford two things: first, a need for energy of eye and heart, of noble human vigor; and secondly, a generous appreciation of high qualities, when these may appear. The latter is, indeed, indispensable; and whenever noble manhood ceases to be recognized in a nation, the days of that nation are numbered. But the need is also necessary. Society must be a consumer of virtue, if individual souls are to be producers of it. The law of demand and supply has its applications here also. New waters must forever flow from the fountain-heads of our true life, if the millwheel of the world is to continue turning; and this not because the supernal powers so greatly cared to get corn ground, but because the Highest would have rivers of His influence forever flowing, and would call them men. Therefore it is that satirists who paint in high colors the resistances, but have no perception of the law of conversion into opposites, which is the grand trick of Nature,—these pleasant gentlemen are themselves a part of the folly at which they mock.

As a man among men, so is a nation among nations. Very freely I acknowledge that any nation, by proposing to itself large and liberal aims, plucks itself innumerable envies and hatreds from without, and confers new power for mischief upon all blindness and savagery that exist within it. But what does this signify? Simply that no nation can be free longer than it nobly loves freedom; that none can be great in its national purposes when it has ceased to be so in the hearts of its citizens. Freedom must be perpetually won, or it must be lost; and this because the sagacious Manager of the world will not let us off from the disciplines that should make us men. The material of the artist is passive, and may be either awakened from its ancient rest or suffered to sleep on; but that marble from which the perfections of manhood and womanhood are wrought quits the quarry to meet us, and converts us to stone, if we do not rather transform that to life and beauty. Hostile, predatory, it rushes upon us; and we, cutting at it in brave self-defence, hew it above our hope into shapes of celestial and immortal comeliness. So that angels are born, as it were, from the noble fears of man,—from an heroic fear in man's heart that he shall fall away from the privilege of humanity, and falsify the divine vaticination of his soul.

Hence follows the fine result, that in life to hold your own is to make advance. Destiny comes to us, like the children in their play, saying, "Hold fast all I give you"; and while we nobly detain it, the penny changes between our palms to the wealth of cities and kingdoms. The barge of blessing, freighted for us by unspeakable hands, comes floating down from the head-waters of that stream whereon we also are afloat; and to meet it we have only to wait for it, not ourselves ebbing away, but loyally stemming the tide. It may be, as Mr. Carlyle alleges, that the Constitution of the United States is no supreme effort of genius; but events now passing are teaching us that every day of fidelity to the spirit of it lends it new preciousness; and that an adherence to it, not petty and literal, but at once large and indomitable, might almost make it a charter of new sanctities both of law and liberty for the human race.

THE STATESMANSHIP OF RICHELIEU

Thus far, the struggles of the world have developed its statesmanship after three leading types.

First of these is that based on faith in some great militant principle. Strong among statesmen of this type, in this time, stand Cavour, with his faith in constitutional liberty,—Cobden, with his faith in freedom of trade,—the third Napoleon, with his faith that the world moves, and that a successful policy must keep the world's pace.

The second style of statesmanship is seen in the reorganization of old States to fit new times. In this the chiefs are such men as Cranmer and Turgot.

But there is a third class of statesmen sometimes doing more brilliant work than either of the others. These are they who serve a State in times of dire chaos,—in times when a nation is by no means ripe for revolution, but only stung by desperate revolt: these are they who are quick enough and firm enough to bind all the good forces of the State into one cosmic force, therewith to compress or crush all chaotic forces: these are they who throttle treason and stab rebellion,—who fear not, when defeat must send down misery through ages, to insure victory by using weapons of the hottest and sharpest. Theirs, then, is a statesmanship which it may be well for the leading men of this land and time to be looking at and thinking of, and its representative man shall be Richelieu.

Never, perhaps, did a nation plunge more suddenly from the height of prosperity into the depth of misery than did France on that fourteenth of May, 1610, when Henry IV. fell dead by the dagger of Ravaillac. All earnest men, in a moment, saw the abyss yawning,—felt the State sinking,—felt themselves sinking with it. And they did what, in such a time, men always do: first all shrieked, then every man clutched at the means of safety nearest him. Sully rode through the streets of Paris with big tears streaming down his face,—strong men whose hearts had been toughened and crusted in the dreadful religious wars sobbed like children,—all the populace swarmed abroad bewildered,—many swooned,—some went mad. This was the first phase of feeling.

Then came a second phase yet more terrible. For now burst forth that old whirlwind of anarchy and bigotry and selfishness and terror which Henry had curbed during twenty years. All earnest men felt bound to protect themselves, and seized the nearest means of defence. Sully shut himself up in the Bastille, and sent orders to his son-in-law, the Duke of Rohan, to bring in six thousand soldiers to protect the Protestants. All un-earnest men, especially the great nobles, rushed to the Court, determined, now that the only guardians of the State were a weak-minded woman and a weak-bodied child, to dip deep into the treasury which Henry had filled to develop the nation, and to wrench away the power which he had built to guard the nation.

In order to make ready for this grasp at the State treasure and power by the nobles, the Duke of Epernon, from the corpse of the King, by whose side he was sitting when Ravaillac struck him, strides into the Parliament of Paris, and orders it to declare the late Queen, Mary of Medici, Regent; and when this Parisian court, knowing full well that it had no right to confer the regency, hesitated, he laid his hand on his sword, and declared, that, unless they did his bidding at once, his sword should be drawn from its scabbard. This threat did its work. Within three hours after the King's death, the Paris Parliament, which had no right to give it, bestowed the regency on a woman who had no capacity to take it.

At first things seemed to brighten a little. The Queen-Regent sent such urgent messages to Sully that he left his stronghold of the Bastille and went to the palace. She declared to him, before the assembled Court, that he must govern France still. With tears she gave the young King into his arms, telling Louis that Sully was his father's best friend, and bidding him pray the old statesman to serve the State yet longer.

But soon this good scene changed. Mary had a foster-sister, Leonora Galligai, and Leonora was married to an Italian adventurer, Concini. These seemed a poor couple, worthless and shiftless, their only stock in trade Leonora's Italian cunning; but this stock soon came to be of vast account, for thereby she soon managed to bind and rule the Queen-Regent,—managed to drive Sully into retirement in less than a year,—managed to make herself and her husband the great dispensers at Court of place and pelf. Penniless though Concini had been, he was in a few months able to buy the Marquisate of Ancre, which cost him nearly half a million livres,—and, soon after, the post of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and that cost him nearly a quarter of a million,—and, soon after that, a multitude of broad estates and high offices at immense prices. Leonora, also, was not idle, and among her many gains was a bribe of three hundred thousand livres to screen certain financiers under trial for fraud.

Next came the turn of the great nobles. For ages the nobility of France had been the worst among her many afflictions. From age to age attempts had been made to curb them. In the fifteenth century Charles VII. had done much to undermine their power, and Louis XI. had done much to crush it. But strong as was the policy of Charles, and cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility.

Despite, then, the curb put upon many old pretensions of the nobles, the serf-owning spirit continued to spread a net-work of curses over every arm of the French government, over every acre of the French soil, and, worst of all, over the hearts and minds of the French people. Enterprise was deadened; invention crippled. Honesty was nothing; honor everything. Life was of little value. Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. The serf-owning spirit was an iron wall between noble and not-noble,—the only unyielding wall between France and prosperous peace.

But the serf-owning spirit begat another evil far more terrible: it begat a substitute for patriotism,—a substitute which crushed out patriotism just at the very emergencies when patriotism was most needed. For the first question which in any State emergency sprang into the mind of a French noble was not,—How does this affect the welfare of the nation? but,—How does this affect the position of my order? The serf-owning spirit developed in the French aristocracy an instinct which led them in national troubles to guard the serf-owning class first and the nation afterward, and to acknowledge fealty to the serf-owning interest first and to the national interest afterward.

So it proved in that emergency at the death of Henry. Instead of planting themselves as a firm bulwark between the State and harm, the Duke of Épernon, the Prince of Condé, the Count of Soissons, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Bouillon, and many others, wheedled or threatened the Queen into granting pensions of such immense amount that the great treasury filled by Henry and Sully with such noble sacrifices, and to such noble ends, was soon nearly empty.

But as soon as the treasury began to run low the nobles began a worse work, Mary had thought to buy their loyalty; but when they had gained such treasures, their ideas mounted higher. A saying of one among them became their formula, and became noted:—"The day of Kings is past; now is come the day of the Grandees."

Every great noble now tried to grasp some strong fortress or rich city. One fact will show the spirit of many. The Duke of Épernon had served Henry as Governor of Metz, and Metz was the most important fortified town in France; therefore Henry, while allowing D'Épernon the honor of the Governorship, had always kept a Royal Lieutenant in the citadel, who corresponded directly with the Ministry. But, on the very day of the King's death, D'Épernon despatched commands to his own creatures at Metz to seize the citadel, and to hold it for him against all other orders.

But at last even Mary had to refuse to lavish more of the national treasure and to shred more of the national territory among these magnates. Then came their rebellion.

Immediately Condé and several great nobles issued a proclamation denouncing the tyranny and extravagance of the Court,—calling on the Catholics to rise against the Regent in behalf of their religion,—calling on the Protestants to rise in behalf of theirs,—summoning the whole people to rise against the waste of their State treasure.

It was all a glorious joke. To call on the Protestants was wondrous impudence, for Condé had left their faith, and had persecuted them; to call on the Catholics was not less impudent, for he had betrayed their cause scores of times; but to call on the whole people to rise in defence of their treasury was impudence sublime, for no man had besieged the treasury more persistently, no man had dipped into it more deeply, than Condé himself.

The people saw this and would not stir. Condé could rally only a few great nobles and their retainers, and therefore, as a last tremendous blow at the Court, he and his followers raised the cry that the Regent must convoke the States-General.

Any who have read much in the history of France, and especially in the history of the French Revolution, know, in part, how terrible this cry was. By the Court, and by the great privileged classes of France, this great assembly of the three estates of the realm was looked upon as the last resort amid direst calamities. For at its summons came stalking forth from the foul past the long train of Titanic abuses and Satanic wrongs; then came surging up from the seething present the great hoarse cry of the people; then loomed up, dim in the distance, vast shadowy ideas of new truth and new right; and at the bare hint of these, all that was proud in France trembled.

This cry for the States-General, then, brought the Regent to terms at once, and, instead of acting vigorously, she betook herself to her old vicious fashion of compromising,—buying off the rebels at prices more enormous than ever. By her treaty of Sainte-Ménehould, Condé received half a million of livres, and his followers received payments proportionate to the evil they had done.

But this compromise succeeded no better than previous compromises. Even if the nobles had wished to remain quiet, they could not. Their lordship over a servile class made them independent of all ordinary labor and of all care arising from labor; some exercise of mind and body they must have; Condé soon took this needed exercise by attempting to seize the city of Poitiers, and, when the burgesses were too strong for him, by ravaging the neighboring country. The other nobles broke the compromise in ways wonderfully numerous and ingenious. France was again filled with misery.

Dull as Regent Mary was, she now saw that she must call that dreaded States-General, or lose not only the nobles, but the people: undecided as she was, she soon saw that she must do it at once,—that, if she delayed it, her great nobles would raise the cry for it, again and again, just as often as they wished to extort office or money. Accordingly, on the fourteenth of October, 1614, she summoned the deputies of the three estates to Paris, and then the storm set in.

Each of the three orders presented its "portfolio of grievances" and its programme of reforms. It might seem, to one who has not noted closely the spirit which serf-mastering thrusts into a man, that the nobles would appear in the States-General not to make complaints, but to answer complaints. So it was not. The noble order, with due form, entered complaint that theirs was the injured order. They asked relief from familiarities and assumptions of equality on the part of the people. Said the Baron de Sénecé, "It is a great piece of insolence to pretend to establish any sort of equality between the people and the nobility": other nobles declared, "There is between them and us as much difference as between master and lackey."

To match these complaints and theories, the nobles made demands,—demands that commoners should not be allowed to keep fire-arms,—nor to possess dogs, unless the dogs were hamstrung,—nor to clothe themselves like the nobles,—nor to clothe their wives like the wives of nobles,—nor to wear velvet or satin under a penalty of five thousand livres. And, preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they carried them into practice. A deputy of the Third Estate having been severely beaten by a noble, his demands for redress were treated as absurd. One of the orators of the lower order having spoken of the French as forming one great family in which the nobles were the elder brothers and the commoners the younger, the nobles made a formal complaint to the King, charging the Third Estate with insolence insufferable.

Next came the complaints and demands of the clergy. They insisted on the adoption in France of the Decrees of the Council of Trent, and the destruction of the liberties of the Gallican Church.

But far stronger than these came the voice of the people.

First spoke Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles. Then spoke Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with rhetoric, crushing them with statements of facts.

But chief among the speakers was the President of the Third Estate, Robert Miron, Provost of the Merchants of Paris. His speech, though spoken across the great abyss of time and space and thought and custom which separates him from us, warms a true man's heart even now. With touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders,—their thankless toil, their constant misery; then, with a sturdiness which awes us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation,—next, the whole upper class for its oppressions,—and then, daring death, he thus launched into popular thought an idea:—

"It is nothing less than a miracle that the people are able to answer so many demands. On the labor of their hands depends the maintenance of Your Majesty, of the clergy, of the nobility, of the commons. What without their exertions would be the value of the tithes and great possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates of the nobility, or of our own house-rents and inheritances? With their bones scarcely skinned over, your wretched people present themselves before you, beaten down and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of living men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has appointed you to reign over them,—who made you a man, that you might be merciful to other men,—and who made you the father of your subjects, that you might be compassionate to these your helpless children. If Your Majesty shall not take means for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the sufferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant bearing arms; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken up his arquebuse, he should cease to become an anvil only that he may become a hammer."