Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete
obtained. But you cannot, as a practical legislator, place your country
under a melon-frame: it must grow of its own accord."
I do not say whether or not De Montaigne was wrong! but Maltravers saw
at least that he was faithful to his theories; that all his motives were
sincere, all his practice pure. He could not but allow, too, that in
his occupations and labours, De Montaigne appeared to feel a sublime
enjoyment; that, in linking all the powers of his mind to active and
useful objects, De Montaigne was infinitely happier than the Philosophy
of Indifference, the scorn of ambition, had made Maltravers. The
influence exercised by the large-souled and practical Frenchman over the
fate and the history of Maltravers was very peculiar.
De Montaigne had not, apparently and directly, operated upon his
friend's outward destinies; but he had done so indirectly, by operating
on his mind. Perhaps it was he who had consolidated the first wavering
and uncertain impulses of Maltravers towards literary exertion; it was
he who had consoled him for the mortifications at the earlier part of
his career; and now, perhaps he might serve, in the full vigour of his
intellect, permanently to reconcile the Englishman to the claims of
life.
There were, indeed, certain conversations which Maltravers held with
De Montaigne, the germ and pith of which it is necessary that I should
place before the reader,--for I write the inner as well as the outer
history of a man; and the great incidents of life are not brought about
only by the dramatic agencies of others, but also by our own reasonings
and habits of thought. What I am now about to set down may be wearisome,
but it is not episodical; and I promise that it shall be the last
didactic conversation in the work.
One day Maltravers was relating to De Montaigne all that he had been
planning at Burleigh for the improvement of his peasantry, and all his
theories respecting Labour-Schools and Poor-rates, when De Montaigne
abruptly turned round, and said,--
"You have, then, really found that in your own little village your
exertions--exertions not very arduous, not demanding a tenth part of
your time--have done practical good?"
"Certainly I think so," replied Maltravers, in some surprise.
"And yet it was but yesterday that you declared that all the labours of
Philosophy and Legislation were labours vain; their benefits equivocal
and uncertain; that as the sea, where it loses in one place, gains in
another, so civilization only partially profits us, stealing away one
virtue while it yields another, and leaving the large proportions of
good and evil eternally the same."
"True; but I never said that man might not relieve individuals by
individual exertion: though he cannot by abstract theories--nay, even by
practical action in the wide circle--benefit the mass."
"Do you not employ on behalf of individuals the same moral agencies that
wise legislation or sound philosophy would adopt towards the multitude?
For example, you find that the children of your village are happier,
more orderly, more obedient, promise to be wiser and better men in their
own station of life, from the new, and, I grant, excellent system of
school discipline and teaching that you have established. What you have
done in one village, why should not legislation do throughout a kingdom?
Again, you find that, by simply holding out hope and emulation to
industry, by making stern distinctions between the energetic and the
idle, the independent exertion and the pauper-mendicancy, you have found
a lever by which you have literally moved and shifted the little world
around you. But what is the difference here between the rules of a
village lord and the laws of a wise legislature? The moral feelings
you have appealed to exist universally, the moral remedies you have
practised are as open to legislation as to the individual proprietor."
"Yes; but when you apply to a nation the same principles which
regenerate a village, new counterbalancing principles arise. If I give
education to my peasants, I send them into the world with advantages
_superior_ to their fellows,--advantages which, not being common to
their class, enable them to _outstrip_ their fellows. But if this
education were universal to the whole tribe, no man would have an
advantage superior to the others; the knowledge they would have acquired
being shared by all, would leave all as they now are, hewers of wood and
drawers of water: the principle of individual hope, which springs
from knowledge, would soon be baffled by the vast competition that
_universal_ knowledge would produce. Thus by the universal improvement
would be engendered a universal discontent.
"Take a broader view of the subject. Advantages given to the _few_
around me--superior wages, lighter toils, a greater sense of the
dignity of man--are not productive of any change in society. Give these
advantages to the _whole mass_ of the labouring classes, and what in
the small orbit is the desire of the _individual_ to rise becomes in
the large circumference the desire of the _class_ to rise; hence
social restlessness, social change, revolution, and its hazards. For
revolutions are produced but by the aspirations of one order, and the
resistance of the other. Consequently, legislative improvement differs
widely from individual amelioration; the same principle, the same
agency, that purifies the small body, becomes destructive when applied
to the large one. Apply the flame to the log on the hearth, or apply it
to the forest, is there no distinction in the result? The breeze that
freshens the fountain passes to the ocean, current impels current, wave
urges wave, and the breeze becomes the storm."
"Were there truth in this train of argument," replied De Montaigne, "had
we ever abstained from communicating to the Multitude the enjoyments and
advantages of the Few, had we shrunk from the good, because the good is
a parent of the change and its partial ills, what now would be society?
Is there no difference in collective happiness and virtue between the
painted Picts and the Druid worship, and the glorious harmony, light,
and order of the great English nation?"
"The question is popular," said Maltravers, with a smile; "and were
you my opponent in an election, would be cheered on any hustings in the
kingdom. But I have lived among savage tribes,--savage, perhaps, as the
race that resisted Caesar; and their happiness seems to me, not perhaps
the same as that of the few whose sources of enjoyment are numerous,
refined, and, save by their own passions, unalloyed; but equal to
that of the mass of men in States the most civilized and advanced. The
artisans, crowded together in the fetid air of factories, with physical
ills gnawing at the core of the constitution, from the cradle to the
grave; drudging on from dawn to sunset and flying for recreation to
the dread excitement of the dram-shop, or the wild and vain hopes of
political fanaticism,--are not in my eyes happier than the wild Indians
with hardy frames and calm tempers, seasoned to the privations for which
you pity them, and uncursed with desires of that better state never to
be theirs. The Arab in his desert has seen all the luxuries of the pasha
in his harem; but he envies them not. He is contented with his barb, his
tent, his desolate sands, and his spring of refreshing water.
"Are we not daily told, do not our priests preach it from their pulpits,
that the cottage shelters happiness equal to that within the palace? Yet
what the distinction between the peasant and the prince, differing from
that between the peasant and the savage? There are more enjoyments and
more privations in the one than in the other; but if, in the latter
case, the enjoyments, though fewer, be more keenly felt,--if the
privations, though apparently sharper, fall upon duller sensibilities
and hardier frames,--your gauge of proportion loses all its value. Nay,
in civilization there is for the multitude an evil that exists not
in the savage state. The poor man sees daily and hourly all the vast
disparities produced by civilized society; and reversing the divine
parable, it is Lazarus who from afar, and from the despondent pit,
looks upon Dives in the lap of Paradise: therefore, his privations,
his sufferings, are made more keen by comparison with the luxuries
of others. Not so in the desert and the forest. There but small
distinctions, and those softened by immemorial and hereditary
usage--that has in it the sanctity of religion--separate the savage
from his chief. The fact is, that in civilization we behold a splendid
aggregate,--literature and science, wealth and luxury, commerce and
glory; but we see not the million victims crushed beneath the wheels
of the machine,--the health sacrificed, the board breadless, the jails
filled, the hospitals reeking, the human life poisoned in every spring,
and poured forth like water! Neither do we remember all the steps,
marked by desolation, crime, and bloodshed, by which this barren summit
has been reached. Take the history of any civilized state,--England,
France, Spain before she rotted back into second childhood, the Italian
Republics, the Greek Commonwealths, the Empress of the Seven Hills--what
struggles, what persecutions, what crimes, what massacres! Where, in
the page of history, shall we look back and say, 'Here improvement has
diminished the sum of evil'? Extend, too, your scope beyond the State
itself: each State has won its acquisitions by the woes of others. Spain
springs above the Old World on the blood-stained ruins of the New; and
the groans and the gold of Mexico produce the splendours of the Fifth
Charles!
"Behold England, the wise, the liberal, the free England--through what
struggles she has passed; and is she yet contented? The sullen oligarchy
of the Normans; our own criminal invasions of Scotland and France; the
plundered people, the butchered kings; the persecutions of the Lollards;
the wars of Lancaster and York; the new dynasty of the Tudors, that at
once put back Liberty, and put forward Civilization! the Reformation,
cradled in the lap of a hideous despot, and nursed by violence and
rapine; the stakes and fires of Mary, and the craftier cruelties of
Elizabeth,--England, strengthened by the desolation of Ireland, the
Civil Wars, the reign of hypocrisy, followed by the reign of naked
vice; the nation that beheaded the graceful Charles gaping idly on the
scaffold of the lofty Sidney; the vain Revolution of 1688, which, if a
jubilee in England, was a massacre in Ireland; the bootless glories of
Marlborough; the organized corruption of Walpole, the frantic war with
our own American sons, the exhausting struggles with Napoleon!
"Well, we close the page; we say, Lo! a thousand years of incessant
struggles and afflictions! millions have perished, but Art has
survived; our boors wear stockings, our women drink tea, our poets read
Shakspeare, and our astronomers improve on Newton! Are we now contented?
No! more restless than ever. New classes are called into power; new
forms of government insisted on. Still the same catchwords,--Liberty
here, Religion there; Order with one faction, Amelioration with the
other. Where is the goal, and what have we gained? Books are written,
silks are woven, palaces are built,--mighty acquisitions for the
few--but the peasant is a peasant still! The crowd are yet at the bottom
of the wheel; better off, you say. No, for they are not more contented!
The artisan is as anxious for change as ever the serf was; and the
steam-engine has its victims as well as the sword.
"Talk of legislation: all isolated laws pave the way to wholesale
changes in the form of government! Emancipate Catholics, and you open
the door to democratic principle, that Opinion should be free. If free