Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 by Various

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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 Epernon, the Prince of Conde, 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 Epernon had served
Henry as Governor of Metz, and Metz was the most important fortified
town in France; therefore Henry, while allowing D'Epernon 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'Epernon 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 Conde 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 Conde 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 Conde himself.

The people saw this and would not stir. Conde 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-Menehould, Conde 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; Conde 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 Senece, "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."_

After this the Third Estate demanded the convocation of a general
assembly every ten years, a more just distribution of taxes, equality
of all before the law, the suppression of interior custom-houses, the
abolition of sundry sinecures held by nobles, the forbidding to leading
nobles of unauthorized levies of soldiery, some stipulations regarding
the working clergy and the non-residence of bishops; and in the midst of
all these demands, as a golden grain amid husks, they placed a demand
for the emancipation of the serfs.

But these demands were sneered at. The idea of the natural equality in
rights of all men,--the idea of the personal worth of every man,--the
idea that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out
by no smooth-clad idlers,--these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners
of those days as they are beyond slave-owners of these days. Nothing was
done. Augustin Thierry is authority for the statement that the clergy
were willing to yield something. The nobles would yield nothing. The
different orders quarrelled until one March morning in 1615, when, on
going to their hall, they were barred out and told that the workmen were
fitting the place for a Court ball. And so the deputies separated,--to
all appearance no new work done, no new ideas enforced, no strong men
set loose.

So it was in seeming,--so it was not in reality. Something had been
done. That assembly planted ideas in the French mind which struck more
and more deeply, and spread more and more widely, until, after a century
and a half, the Third Estate met again and refused to present petitions
kneeling,--and when king and nobles put on their hats, the commons put
on theirs,--and when that old brilliant stroke was again made, and the
hall was closed and filled with busy carpenters and upholsterers, the
deputies of the people swore that great tennis-court oath which blasted
French tyranny.

But something great was done _immediately_; to that suffering nation a
great man was revealed. For, when the clergy pressed their requests,
they chose as their orator a young man only twenty-nine years of age,
the Bishop of Lucon, ARMAND JEAN DU PLESSIS DE RICHELIEU.

He spoke well. His thoughts were clear, his words pointed, his bearing
firm. He had been bred a soldier, and so had strengthened his will;
afterwards he had been made a scholar, and so had strengthened his mind.
He grappled with the problems given him in that stormy assembly with
such force that he seemed about to _do_ something; but just then came
that day of the Court ball, and Richelieu turned away like the rest.

But men had seen him and heard him. Forget him they could not. From that
tremendous farce, then, France had gained directly one thing at least,
and that was a sight at Richelieu.

The year after the States-General wore away in the old vile fashion.
Conde revolted again, and this time he managed to scare the Protestants
into revolt with him. The daring of the nobles was greater than ever.
They even attacked the young King's train as he journeyed to Bordeaux,
and another compromise had to be wearily built in the Treaty of Loudun.
By this Conde was again bought off,--but this time only by a bribe of
a million and a half of livres. The other nobles were also paid
enormously, and, on making a reckoning, it was found that this
compromise had cost the King four millions, and the country twenty
millions. The nation had also to give into the hands of the nobles some
of its richest cities and strongest fortresses.

Immediately after this compromise, Conde returned to Paris, loud,
strong, jubilant, defiant, bearing himself like a king. Soon he and his
revolted again; but just at that moment Concini happened to remember
Richelieu. The young bishop was called and set at work.

Richelieu grasped the rebellion at once. In broad daylight he seized
Conde and shut him up in the Bastille; other noble leaders he declared
guilty of treason, and degraded them; he set forth the crimes and
follies of the nobles in a manifesto which stung their cause to death in
a moment; he published his policy in a proclamation which ran through
France like fire, warming all hearts of patriots, withering all hearts
of rebels; he sent out three great armies: one northward to grasp
Picardy, one eastward to grasp Champagne, one southward to grasp Berri.
There is a man who can _do_ something! The nobles yield in a moment:
they _must_ yield.

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