François de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
Book XII
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Translated by A. S. Kline © 2005 All Rights Reserved.
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Contents
Book XII: Chapter 2: DIGRESSIONS: Old Novels – New novels – Richardson – Walter Scott
Book XII: Chapter 3: DIGRESSIONS: The new poetry – Beattie
Book XII: Chapter 4: DIGRESSIONS: Lord Byron
London, April to September 1822. (Revised February 1845)
My studies related to Le Génie du Christianisme led
me gradually (as I have said) to a deeper study of English literature. When,
after 1792, I sought refuge in
As regards the poets, Elegant Extracts introduced the exile to selections from Dryden: one did not excuse Pope’s rhymes, though one visited his house at Twickenham and cut a twig from the weeping willow planted by him, withering like his fame.
Blair was considered a critic tedious after the French manner: he was placed well below Johnson. As for the old Spectator, it was consigned to the attic.
English political works held little interest for us. Treatises on economics were less limited; calculations concerning the wealth of nations, the employment of capital, and the balance of trade, applied in part to European countries.
Burke took on a national political identity: in declaring himself opposed to the French Revolution, he drew his country into that long train of hostilities which ended on the field of Waterloo.
However, the great figures remained. One encountered Milton and Shakespeare in particular. Did Montmorency, Biron, Sully, successively French ambassadors to Elizabeth I and James I, never hear tell of a strolling player, an actor in his own comedies and those of others? Did they ever pronounce the name, so barbarous in French, of Shakespeare? Did they suspect that there a glory existed before which their honours, their pomp, their rank, would be nullified? Well! The actor charged with the role of the ghost in Hamlet, was the great phantom, the shadow of the Middle Ages who rose above the world, like the star of night, at the moment in which those ages descended among the dead: vast centuries which Dante opened and Shakespeare closed.
In the Memorials of Whitelocke, a contemporary of the bard of Paradise Lost, one reads of: ‘A certain blind person, named Milton, Latin Secretary to the Parliament.’ Molière, the ham, played Pourceaugnac, while Shakespeare, the buffoon, grimaced as Falstaff.
Those veiled travellers, who appear from time to time to sit at our table, are treated by us as ordinary guests; we ignore their true nature until they day they vanish. Leaving earth, they are transfigured, and say to us like the heavenly messenger to Tobit: ‘I am one of the seven who appear before the Lord.’ But if they are misjudged by men in their travels, these divinities are not misjudged by each other. ‘What needs my Shakespeare,’ wrote Milton, ‘for his honour’d bones, the labour of an age in piled stones?’ Michelangelo envying the destiny and genius of Dante; cried:
‘Fuss’io pur lui! …
Per l’aspro esilio suo, co’ la virtute,
Dare’
‘To be such as him! For his bitter exile and his virtue, I would give the world’s greatest joys!’
Tasso celebrated Camoëns who was still almost unknown, and served to make him famous. Is there anything more admirable than this society of illustrious equals revealing themselves to each other by means of signs, greeting each other, and speaking together in a language belonging only to themselves?
Was Shakespeare lame like Lord Byron, Walter Scott and the Prayers,
daughters of Jupiter? If indeed he was, the
‘…lame by fortune’sdearest spite.’
Shakespeare should have had many loves, if one reckoned one per sonnet. The creator of Desdemona and Juliet grew old without ceasing to be in love. Was the unknown woman addressed in delightful verse proud and happy to be the subject of Shakespeare’s sonnets? One may doubt it: fame is for an old man what diamonds are for an old woman; they adorn but cannot improve.
‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’, says the English tragedian to his mistress, ‘…if you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it; for I love you so, that I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, if thinking on me then should make you woe. Oh, if, I say, you look upon this verse, when I perhaps compounded am with clay, do not so much as my poor name rehearse, but let your love even with my life decay…’
Shakespeare loved, but he thought no more of love than other things: a woman for him was a flower, a bird, a breeze, something delightful that passes. Through heedlessness or ignorance of his future destiny, through his birth, which found him far from rank, beyond conditions which he could not affect, he seems at first to have taken life for a thoughtless, unoccupied hour, as a swift, sweet moment of leisure.
Shakespeare, in his youth, met aged monks turned out of their cloisters, who had met with Henry VIII’s reforms, his dissolution of the monasteries, his fools, wives, mistresses, executioners. When the poet left this life, Charles I was sixteen years old.
So, with one hand Shakespeare might have touched the white hairs, which the sword of the last Tudor but one threatened, with the other the dark haired poll of the second Stuart, removed by the axe of the Parliamentarians. Pressing on those tragic brows, high Tragedy thrust them into the grave; he filled the intervening years of his life with ghosts, blind kings, ambitious men punished, and unfortunate women, in order to link, by his parallel fictions, the reality of the past to the reality of the future.
Shakespeare is among the
five or six writers who possessed all that was needed to nourish thought; these
mother-geniuses seem to have given birth to and suckled all the rest. Homer created Classical antiquity: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, Virgil
are his sons. Dante engendered modern
Frequently one renounces these great masters; one rebels against them; one tallies their faults; one accuses them of being boring, over-long, idiosyncratic, in bad taste, while stealing and dressing oneself in their feathers; but one struggles in vain under their yoke. All is painted in their colours; everywhere is imprinted with their steps; they invented words and names which went to swell the common vocabulary of nations; their expressions became proverbs, their fictional characters changed into real characters which possess heirs and a lineage. They opened up horizons from which rays of light pour; they sowed ideas, seeds of a thousand others; they furnished images, subjects, styles to all the arts: their works are the mines or the wombs of the human spirit.
Such geniuses occupy the first rank; their immensity,
variety, fecundity, originality, made them known above all for their rules,
examples, forms, types of diverse intelligence, as if there were four or five
human races, derived from a single stem of which the rest are merely the
branches. Let us be wary of criticising the disorder into which these powerful
beings sometimes fell; let us not imitate the cursed Ham; let us not laugh if we encounter, naked and
asleep, in the shadow of the grounded
Shakespeare, in his lifetime, never thought he would live on after his life was done: what does my hymn of admiration matter to him today? In admitting all these suppositions, in reasoning about the truths or errors with which the human spirit is penetrated or filled, what does fame mean to Shakespeare, the noise of which cannot rise to his level? A Christian? In the midst of eternal joys, does he trouble himself about the nothingness of earth? A Deist? Free of the shades of matter, lost among the splendours of God, does he cast a glance towards the grain of sand where he passed his life? An Atheist? He lies in a sleep without breath or re-awakening, called death. Nothing is vainer, then, than glory beyond the tomb, unless it has given life to friendship, been an aid to virtue, a helper in adversity, and allowed us to enjoy the heaven of an idea, consoling, generous, and liberating, left behind by us on earth.
London, April to September 1822.
The novel, at the end of the last century, was included in the general condemnation. Richardson rested forgotten; his compatriots found traces in his style of the inferior society at the heart of which he had lived. Fielding held his own, Sterne, purveyor of originality, was passé. One still read The Vicar of Wakefield.
If
From Clarissa and Tom Jones derive the two
principal branches of the genre of modern English novels, those novels picturing
the family and domestic drama, and the novels of adventure showing society in
general. After
Among those thousands of novels which have
flooded
But these diverse schools of sedentary novelists, of novelists who travel in stage-coach and carriage, of novelists of lake and mountain, ghosts and ruins, novelists of cities and salons, have recently been subsumed in the new school of Walter Scott, even as poetry has thrown itself at Lord Byron’s feet.
The illustrious portrayer of
Burke pinned
English politics to the past, Walter Scott took the English back to the Middle
Ages; everything he wrote, made, built, was Gothic: books, furniture, houses,
churches, mansions. But the lords of Magna Carta are today the fashionables of
London, April to September 1822.
BkXII:Chap3:Sec1
At the same instant that
the novel entered a Romantic state, poetry was subject to a like
transformation. Cowper abandoned the French
school in order to revive the national school; Burns,
in
Thomas Moore, Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, Knowles, Lord Holland, Canning, Croker, still live to honour English letters; but one must be born English to wholly appreciate the merits of an intimate style of composition particularly to the taste of men of that country.
Nothing, in a living literature, is judged competent except works written in the native language. It is in vain to think you possess a foreign idiom in all its depth, you failed to imbibe it with your nurses’ milk, those first words that she taught you at her breast, on your tongue; certain notes belong to their homeland. Among our forms of literature, English and German own to the strangest ideas: they delight in what we scorn, they scorn what we take delight in; they pay no attention to Racine, La Fontaine, nor Molière in his entirety. It makes one laugh to learn what they make of our great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, Cologne, to learn what they read there avidly, and what they do not read.
When an author’s chief merit is his verbal style, a stranger will never fully comprehend his merit. The more intimate, individual, national a talent, the more its mysteries escape the mind that is not, so to speak, a compatriot of that talent. We admire the Greek and Romans by hearsay; our admiration comes to us by tradition, and the Greeks and Romans are not here to mock our Barbarian pronunciation. Who of us has any idea of the harmony of Demosthenes’ prose, or Cicero’s, of the cadence of Alcaeus’ verse or Horace’s, such as they were received by a Greek or Latin ear? It is said that true beauty is of all time, and every country: yes, beauties of feeling and thought; not the beauties of style. Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, a sky, a sun of its own.
Burns, Mason,
Cowper died during my exile in
Beattie had announced a new era of the lyre. The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius, depicts the first effects of the Muse on a young bard, still ignorant of whose breath torments him. Now the future poet goes and sits by the sea-shore during a storm; now he leaves the village fair to listen, apart, to the sound of distant music.
Beattie has covered the entire series of daydreams and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other poets thought themselves discoverers. Beattie intended to continue his poem; in fact he wrote the second canto of it: Edwin hears a solemn voice lifted one evening from a valley’s depths; it is that of a solitary who, having come to know the world’s illusions, has buried himself in this retreat in order to win back his soul and sing the wonders of the Creator. This hermit instructs the young minstrel and reveals the secret of his genius to him. The idea was a happy one; the execution did not quite match the happiness of the idea. Beattie was destined to weep; the death of his son broke the father’s heart; like Ossian after the loss of his son Oscar, he hung his harp from the branches of an oak-tree. Perhaps Beattie’s son was that young minstrel that a father sang of and whom he no longer saw walking the mountain-side.
London, April to September 1822.
There are striking resemblances to The Minstrel
in Lord Byron’s verse: at the
time of my English exile, Lord Byron was not yet at
‘When I rov’d a young Highlander o’er the dark heath,
And climb’d thy steep summit, oh Morven of snow!
To gaze on the torrent that thunder’d beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gather’d below…’
In
my journeys around
‘Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky; …
Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,
With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod…
When fate shall chill, at length, this fevered breast,
And calm its cares and passions into rest…
(Where)…here it lingered, here my heart might lie;
Here might I sleep, where all my hopes arose,
Blest by the tongues that charmed my youthful ear,
Mourned by the few my soul acknowledged here;
Deplored by those in early days allied,
And unremembered by the world beside.’
And I salute the
ancient elm, at whose foot the young Byron gave himself to the caprices of
youth, not long after I had dreamed of René in its shade, that same shade where
later the Poet came to dream in turn of Childe
Harold! Byron asked of that
cemetery, witness of his first childhood games, an unknown grave: a vain prayer
that fame denied him. However Byron’s name is no longer what it has been; staying
in
If I had passed
through
‘To Combourg, the country has a savage aspect; husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken, as to impede all passengers, but ease none—yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriant, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well wooded inclosures.’
This
Allow me to add
to these lines written in
There would perhaps have been some interest in the future in noting the meeting of two leaders of the new English and French schools, possessing the same fund of ideas, and destiny, though without much similarity in morals: one a peer of England, the other a peer of France, both travellers in the East, quite often not far apart, yet never meeting: only the life of the English poet was involved with less profound events than mine.
Lord Byron visited the
ruins of
In Les Martyrs, Eudore leaves Messenia to return to Rome: ‘Our voyage was a long one,’ he says ‘…we saw all those promontories marked by temples or tombs…My young companions had never heard tell of the metamorphoses of Jupiter, and they understood nothing of the remains before their eyes; I had already sat, like the prophet, among the ruins of desolate cities, and Babylon told me of Corinth.’
The English poet, as the French prose writer, follows the letter from Sulpicius to Cicero; - so perfect an agreement is singularly glorious for me, since I anticipated the immortal bard on that shore of which we have similar memories, and where we commemorated the same ruins.
I have the honour of
also being in tune with Lord Byron in our descriptions of
Lord Byron’s first
translators, commentators and admirers were careful not to comment on the fact
that several pages from my works may have stayed for a moment in the memory of
the creator of Childe Harold; they
would have considered that it took something from his genius. Now that the
enthusiasm has abated a little, they are less prone to deny me that honour. Our
immortal singer, in the last volume of
his Chansons, has said: ‘In one of
the verses preceding this, I spoke of the lyricists
that
In an excellent article on Lord Byron, Monsieur Villemain repeated Monsieur de Béranger’s remark: ‘Several incomparable pages of René,’ he said, ‘have, in truth, fully exploited this poetic character. I do not know if Byron imitated them or recreated them out of his genius.’
What I may chance to say of the affinities of imagination and destiny between the chronicler of René and the poet of Childe Harold plucks not a single hair from the head of the immortal bard. What could my Muse, pedestrian and without a lute, take from the Muse of the Dee, with wings and lyre? Lord Byron will live, regardless of whether as a child of his age like me, he has, like me and like Goethe before us, expressed its passion and tragedy; or whether my journey and the lantern of my French barque revealed a course to the English vessel through uncharted waters.
Moreover, two spirits analogous in nature may very easily conceive of like things, without bearing the reproach of having followed the same path in a servile manner. It is permissible to profit from ideas and images expressed in a foreign language, to enrich one’s own: that has been observed in all ages and all times. I am the first to admit that in early youth, Ossian, Werther, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaires, and Les Études de la nature, may well have contained ideas similar to mine; but I have hidden nothing, concealed nothing of the pleasure the works I delighted in gave me.
If it were true that René counted for something in the composition of unique characters presented under various names in Childe Harold, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred, and The Giaour; or if, by chance, Lord Byron had nourished my life with his, would he have been so weak as never to mention me? Was I then one of those contemporaries one disowns on achieving power? Could Lord Byron have been totally ignorant of me, he who cites almost all the French authors who were his contemporaries? Had he never heard tell of me, when the English journals, as the French ones, have echoed twenty years after his death with controversy over my work, when the New Times has drawn a parallel between the author of Le Génie du Christianisme and the author of Childe Harold?
There is no mind, however blessed, that fails to possess its sensitivities, its mistrust: one guards the sceptre, one fears to share it, one is irritated by comparison. So, another superior talent omitted my name in her work De la littèrature. Thank goodness that, valuing myself at my true worth, I have never pretended to an empire; since I only believe in religious truth of which freedom is an aspect, I have no more faith in myself than in anything else below. But I have never felt the need to be silent about what I admire; that is why I proclaim my enthusiasm for Madame de Staël and Lord Byron. What is sweeter than admiration? It derives from heavenly love, from tenderness elevated towards worship; one feels oneself penetrated by gratitude for the divinity that extends the roots of our faculties, opens new vistas to the soul, grants us a happiness that is great, and pure, without fear or envy.
In addition, the little
quibble I make in these Memoirs, over the greatest poet
Lord Byron has founded a deplorable school: I presume that he has been as sorry for giving birth to those Childe Harolds, as I am of the Renés who daydream around me.
Lord Byron’s life is the subject of many analyses and slanders: young men have taken his magical words too seriously; women have felt disposed to allow themselves to be seduced, fearfully, by that monster, in order to solace this solitary and unfortunate Satan. Who knows? Perhaps he has not met the woman he sought, a woman beautiful enough, a heart as vast as his own. Byron, according to fantastical opinion, is the ancient serpent, a seducer and a corrupter, since he sees the corruption of the human species; he is a fatal and suffering genius, situated between the mysteries of mind and matter, who sees no point in speaking of the enigma of the universe, who regards life as a dreadful irony without cause, like a perverse evil smile; he is the child of despair, who scorns and renounces, who bearing within himself an incurable wound, revenges himself by leading all whom he meets, through pleasure, to grief. He is a man who has never passed through an age of innocence, who has never had the advantage of being rejected and cursed by God; a man who, emerging as an outcast from nature’s breast, is condemned to nothingness.
Such is the Byron of the fevered imagination: it bears no relation it seems to me to the reality.
As with most men, two different men are united in Lord Byron: the natural man and the social man. The poet, recognising the role which the public wished him to play, accepted it and set himself to curse the world that at first he had merely daydreamed about: that progress is perceptible in the chronological order of his works.
As for his genius, far from having extended what was attributed to him, he has grown much narrower; his poetic thought is no more than a moan, a complaint, an imprecation; in that vein, however, it is admirable: one ought not to ask of his lyricism what it thinks, only what it sings.
As for his wit, he is sarcastic and various, but in a manner that perturbs and with a disastrous influence: the writer has read Voltaire deeply, and he imitates him.
Lord Byron, endowed with all the advantages, has little to complain of concerning his origins; the same accident of birth that made him wretched, and which saddled his superior powers with human infirmity, ought not to have tormented him, since it has not prevented him being loved. The immortal poet knows for himself the truth of Zeno’s maxim: ‘The voice is the flower of beauty.’
One deplorable thing is
the speed with which reputations flee these days. After a few years, what say I,
after a few months, the craze vanishes; the denigration follows. Lord Byron’s
fame is already fading; his genius is better understood among us; the altars to
him will burn longer in
While I was writing, in
1822, during my
London, April to September 1822.
Now, after having spoken to you of English writers at the time when England served as my refuge, it only remains for me to say something of England itself at that period, its appearance, famous places, stately homes, and its private and political manners.
All of
Below London, lies industrial and commercial England, with its docks, warehouses, customs houses, arsenals, breweries, factories, foundries, and ships; the latter, at each tide, sail up the Thames in three groups, the smallest first, the middle-sized next, and lastly, the large vessels which shave with their sails the columns of the Royal Hospital and the windows of the tavern where visitors dine.
Above London, is
agricultural and pastoral England with meadows, herds, country houses, and
parks, whose lawns and shrubs the waters of the Thames, driven back by the rising
tide, bathe twice a day. Between these two opposite points of
I spent part of the
summer of 1799 at
There Edward III died in 1377, that famous king robbed by Alice Perrers, his mistress, no longer the Alice or Catherine of Salisbury of the early days of the victor of Crécy’s life: do not love except at an age when you can be loved. Henry VII and Elizabeth also died at Richmond: where can one not die? Henry VIII enjoyed it as a place of residence. English historians are deeply embarrassed by this abominable human being; on the one hand they cannot hide his tyranny and Parliament’s subservience; on the other, if they speak out too much against the leader of the Reformation, they condemn themselves in condemning him:
‘The viler the oppressor, the more the slave is vile.’
In
In a deserted
Now, as I was walking quietly one evening on the lawns of Twickenham, Peltier appeared, holding his handkerchief to his mouth: ‘What an eternal cloud of fog!’ he cried as soon as he was capable of speaking. ‘How the devil can you stay here? I have made a list: Stowe, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Oxford; with your dreamy way of going on, you will be here with John Bull in vitam aeternam, and see nothing.’
I asked to be spared, in vain, I had to go. In the carriage, Peltier recounted his hopes to me; he employed relays; one dying under him, he would bestride another, and so on, leg by leg, to the end of his days. One of his hopes, the most solid, led him in the end to Napoleon whom he took by the throat: Napoleon had the foolishness to cross swords with him. Peltier had James Mackintosh as his defence lawyer; condemned by the Court, he made a fresh fortune (which he consumed incontinently) in selling the narrative of his trial.
Blenheim was disagreeable to me: I suffered
all the more over my country’s historic defeat, in that I had been forced to endure
the insult of a recent affront: a boat upstream on the Thames spotted me on the
shore; the rowers aware of a Frenchman began jeering; they had just heard the
news of the naval action at Aboukir Bay:
this foreign victory which might open the gates of France again, was nevertheless
odious to me. Nelson, whom I had seen
several times in
The park at Stowe is famous for its ornamental structures:
I liked its shade more. The guide to the place showed us, in a dark valley, a
copy of a temple whose model I would admire in the gleaming
Hampton Court retained its collection of portraits of Charles II’ mistresses: that’s how this Prince conducted himself after escaping a Revolution that saw his father’s head fall and which was forced to drive out his race.
We arrived at Slough, Herschel and his learned sister, and his great forty-foot telescope; he sought new planets: that made Peltier laugh who held fast to the seven ancient ones.
We stayed for two days
in Oxford. I enjoyed being in that republic
founded by Alfred the Great; it
represented the privileged freedoms and manners of the literary institutions of
the Middle Age. We explored the twenty colleges in depth, the libraries, the
paintings, the museum, the botanical garden. Amongst the manuscript collection
of
‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,’
an imitation of these lines from Dante:
‘… squilla di lontano,
Che paia il giorno pianger che si more.’
Peltier hastened to
publish my translation, to the sound of trumpets, in his journal. At the sight
of
‘Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade,
Ah, fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
Say, Father Thames….
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle’s speed,
Or urge the flying ball?....
Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today.’
Who has not experienced the feelings and regrets expressed here with all the sweetness of the Muse? Who has not been moved at memories of the games, studies, loves of former years? But can one bring them back to life? The delights of youth reproduced in memory are ruins seen by torchlight.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE ENGLISH
Divorced from the Continent by a long war, the English, at the end of
the last century, retained their national character and way of life. They were
still one people, in whose name power was exercised by an aristocratic
government; there were but two great classes friendly towards each other and bound
by a common interest, the patrons and their dependants. That jealous class,
called the bourgeoisie in
The gentleman farmers had not yet sold their patrimony in order to live in London; in the House of Commons they still formed that independent faction which, supporting now the opposition now the government, maintained the ideals of liberty, order and propriety. They hunted foxes and shot pheasants in the autumn, ate fatted geese at Christmas, shouted vivat at roast beef, grumbled about the present, praised the past, cursed Pitt and the war, because it raised the price of port, and went to bed drunk to recommence the same life the next day. They were convinced that the glory of Great Britain would never fade as long as they sang God save the King, rotten boroughs were maintained, the game laws kept in force, and as long as they secretly sent hares and partridges to market under the titles of lions and ostriches.
The Anglican clergy was learned, hospitable and generous; it had welcomed the French clergy with truly Christian charity. Oxford University, at its own expense printed, and distributed freely among the curés, a New Testament according to the Latin Vulgate, with the imprint: in usum cleri gallicani in Anglia exulantis. As for English high society, as a poor exile I only saw it from the outside. When there was a reception at Court or at the Princess of Wales’, ladies went by in sedan chairs sitting sideways; their great hoop-petticoats emerged from the door like altar hangings. They themselves, set on those waist-high altars, looked like madonnas or pagodas. Those fine ladies were the daughters whose mothers the Duc de Guiche and the Duc de Lauzun had once admired; those daughters are, in 1822, the mothers and grandmothers of the little girls who dance at my residence in short frocks to the music of Collinet’s flute, a passing generation of flowers.
POLITICAL LIFE
In 1792, Mr Burke split from Mr Fox. The breach concerned the French Revolution which Mr Burke attacked, and Mr Fox supported. Never had the two orators, who until then had been friends, deployed such eloquence. The whole Chamber was moved, and tears filled Mr Fox’s eyes, when Mr Burke ended his reply with these words: ‘The Right Honourable gentleman, in the speech he has made, has treated me in every phrase with uncommon harshness; he has censured my entire life, my conduct and my opinions. Notwithstanding this great and serious attack, unmerited on my part, I will not be intimidated; I do not fear to declare my sentiments in this Chamber nor anywhere else. I say to the whole world that the Constitution is in peril. It is indiscreet at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution place me in such a dilemma, I am ready to risk it, and, as public need and public prudence demand, with, my last words to exclaim: “Fly from the French Constitution!”’
Mr Fox having said that it was not a question of loss of friends, Mr Burke cried: ‘Yes, there is a loss of friends! I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end. I warn the Right Honourable gentlemen, who are the greatest rivals in this Chamber, that they must in future (whether they move in the political hemisphere like two great meteors, or whether they march together like brothers), I warn them that they must cherish and preserve the British Constitution, that they must guard it against innovation and save it from the danger of these new theories.’ A memorable age of the world.
Mr Burke, whom I met at the end of his life, overwhelmed by the death of his only son, founded a school dedicated to the children of impoverished émigrés. I went to see what he called his nursery. He was delighted with the liveliness of this foreign race that passed beneath his paternal genius. Watching the little exiles leaping heedlessly, he said to me: ‘Our boys could not do that’ and his eyes filled with tears: he was thinking of his son who had gone to a longer exile.
Pitt, Fox, Burke are no more, and the English
Constitution has suddenly acquired the influence of those new theories. One has
to have listened to the seriousness of the parliamentary debates of that era,
to have heard those orators whose prophetic voices seemed to announce an
imminent revolution, to gain an idea of the scene that I recall.
Mr Pitt, tall and thin, had a mournful mocking air. His speech was cold, his delivery monotonous, and his gestures lifeless; yet, the lucidity and fluency of his thought, the logic of his reasoning, suddenly illumined by flashes of eloquence, rendered his talents something out of the ordinary.
I saw Mr Pitt quite frequently, as he crossed Saint James’s
Park on foot from his residence to visit the king. George III, for his part, would arrive from
Windsor, having drunk beer from a pewter
pot with the neighbouring farmers; he would cross the ugly courtyards of his ugly
citadel, in a grey carriage followed by several Horse Guards; he was the master
of the kings of
That great financier kept no order at home; no fixed hours for meals or sleep. Crippled with debt, he paid nothing, and could not bear to commit the sum to paper. A valet ran his house. Badly dressed, without pleasures, or passions, only eager for power, he despised honours, and wished to be no more than William Pitt.
Lord Liverpool, in the month of June of
this year 1822, took me to dine at his country house: crossing Putney Heath, he
showed me the little house where the son of Lord Chatham died in debt, the statesman who had had
George III survived Mr Pitt, but lost his
reason and his sight. Each session, at the opening of Parliament, the Ministers
read quietly in their chambers awaiting the bulletin regarding the king’s
health. One day, I went to visit
London, April to September 1822.
I began to turn my eyes
towards my native land. A great Revolution had occurred. Bonaparte, having become First Consul, was
re-establishing order by despotism; many exiles were returning; the noble
émigrés, in particular, were hurrying to gather in the remainder of their
wealth: loyalty faded at the head, while its heart still beat in the breasts of
a few half-clothed provincial gentlemen. Mrs
Lindsay had departed; she wrote to Auguste
and Christian de Lamoignon
telling them to return; she also extended an invitation to Madame d’Aguesseau, their sister, to cross to
Left to myself, I do not
know if I would have had the strength to leave; but I saw my small circle
breaking up; Madame d’Aguesseau offered to take me to
Thus I left
Here, I end this twelfth book, which has brought me to the spring of 1800. Arriving at the end of my first career, the career of a writer opens before me; from a private man I am about to become a public man; I am leaving the silent virginal sanctuary of solitude to enter the noisy, dusty cross-roads of the world; broad daylight will illuminate my life of dreams, light will penetrate the kingdom of shadows. I cast a tender glance over these books which enclose my unremembered hours; I seem to be saying a last goodbye to my paternal home; I take leave of the thoughts and chimeras of my youth as of sisters, as of sweethearts I am leaving by the family hearth, never to see them again.
We took four hours to
cross from
Revised December 1846
End of Book XII