Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 65, No. 400, February, 1849
We fear we are losing sight of the "Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art," and gladly turn from the thought of what is to be, to those beautiful personified ideas of the past, whether fabulous or historical, in which we are ready to take Mrs Jameson as our willing and sure guide. The four virgin patronesses and the female martyrs are favourite subjects, which she enters into with more than her usual spirit and feeling. These two have chiefly engaged and fascinated the genius of the painters of the best period, and will ever interest the world of taste by their sentiment, as well as by their grace of form and beauty, and why not say improved them too? The really beautiful is always true. It is not amiss that we should be continually reminded, or, as Mrs Jameson better expresses it – "It is not a thing to be set aside or forgotten, that generous men and meek women, strong in the strength, and elevated by the sacrifice of a Redeemer, did suffer, did endure, did triumph for the truth's sake; did leave us an example which ought to make our hearts glow within us." The memory of Christian heroism should never be lost sight of in a Christian country, and we earnestly recommend this part of Mrs Jameson's volumes to the attention of our painters: they will find not unfrequent instances of fine subjects yet untouched, which may sanctify art, and dignify the profession by making it the teacher of a purer taste – not that true genius will ever lack materials, for materials are but suggestive to an innate inventive power. It is curious that the authoress should not yet have satisfied our expectation with regard to the legends of the Virgin. Whatever the motive of her forbearance, we hope this subject will take the lead in the promised third volume, which is to treat of the legends of the monastic orders, considered, as she cautiously observes, "merely in their connexion with the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries."
The numerous pictures in Italy which represent parts of the legends of the Virgin render this work incomplete without a full development of the subject. If her forbearance arises from a fear that at this particular time, when mariolatry is dreaded by a large portion of the religious world, we would remind her that the Virgin Mother is still "the blessed" of our own church.
It is a question if the list of sainted martyrs in repute has not been left to the arbitrament of the painters; for we find many deposed, and the adopted favourites of art not found in the early list, as represented in their processions. We find a Saint Reparata, after having been the patroness saint of Florence for six hundred years, deposed, and the city placed under the tutelage of the Virgin and St John the Baptist.
Yet these were early times for the influence of art; but, at a period when pictures were thought to have a kind of miraculous power, it is not improbable that some potent work of art representing the Virgin and St John may have caused the new devotional dedication – as was the case in modern times, when the imaged Madonna de los Dolores was appointed general-in-chief of the Carlist army. Painters were what the poets had been —Vates sacri. Events and the memory of saints may have perished, Carent quia vate sacro. We wish our own painters were more fully sensible of the power of art to perpetuate, and that it is its province to teach. With us it has been too long disconnected with our religion. It will be a glorious day for art, and for the people that shall witness the reunion.
In taking leave of these two fascinating volumes, we do so with the less regret, knowing that they will be often in our hands, as most valuable for instant reference. No one who wishes to know the subjects and feel the sentiment of the finest works in the world, will think of going abroad without Mrs Jameson's book. We must again thank her for the beautiful woodcuts and etchings; the latter, in particular, are lightly and gracefully executed, we presume mostly (to speak technically) in dry point. Mrs Jameson writes as an enthusiast, her feeling flows from her pen. Her style is fascinating to a degree, forcible and graceful; but there is no mistaking its character – feminine. We know no other hand that could so happily have set forth the Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art.
AMERICAN THOUGHTS ON EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS
Boston, December 1848.
The Year of Constitutions is drawing to its end, to be succeeded, I doubt not, by the Year of Substitutions. I am sorry, my Basil, that you do not quite agree with me as to the issue of all this in France; but I am sure you will not dispute my opinion that this year's work is good for nothing, so far as it has attempted construction, instead of fulfilling its mission by overthrow. Its great folly has been the constitution-fever, which has amounted to a pestilence. When mushrooms grow to be oaks, then shall such constitutions as this year has bred, stand a chance of outliving their authors. Will men learn nothing from the past? How can they act over such rotten farces, – make themselves such fools!
You admit the difference, which I endeavoured to show you, between the American constitution and that of any conceivable constitution which may be cooked up for an old European state. I am glad if I have directed your attention, accordingly, to the great mistake of France. She supposes that a feeble, and debauched old gentleman can boil himself in the revolutionary kettle, and emerge in all the tender and enviable freshness of the babe just severed from the maternal mould. Politicians have committed a blunder in not allowing the natural, and hence legitimate, origin of the American constitution in that of its British parent. They have thus favoured the theory that a tolerably permanent constitution can be drafted a priori, and imposed upon a state. This is the absurdity that makes revolutions. If the silly French, instead of reading De Tocqueville, would study each for himself the history of our constitution, and see how gradually it grew to be our constitution, before pen was put to paper to draft it, they might perhaps stop their abortive nonsense in time, to save what they can of their national character from the eternal contempt of mankind.
But you cannot think the French will find so fair a destiny as a Restoration! Tell me, in what French party, at present existing, there is any inherent strength, save in that of the legitimists? Other parties are mere factions; but the legitimists have got a seminal principle among them, which dies very hard, and of which the nature is to sprout and make roots, and then show itself. I am no admirer of the Bourbons: their intrigues with Jesuitism have been their curse, and are the worst obstacle to their regaining a hold on the sympathies of freemen. The reactionary party have in vain endeavoured to overcome it for fifty years. Yet there is such tenacity of life in legitimacy, that it seems to me destined to outlive all opposition, and to succeed by necessity. The rapid developments of this memorable year strengthen the probability of my prediction. Revolutionism is spasmodic, but not so long in dying as it used to be. I cannot but think this year has done more for a permanent restoration of the Bourbons than any year since Louis XVI. ascended the scaffold. In this respect the Barricades of 1848 may tell more impressively on history than the Allies of 1814, or even the carnage of Waterloo.
Why should I be ashamed of my theory, when everything, so far, has gone as I supposed it would, only a hundred times more rapidly than any body could have thought possible? What must be the residue of a series which thus far has tended but one way? – what say you of the Bartholomew-butchery in June? – what of Lamartine's fall? – what of the dictatorship of Cavaignac? If things have gone as seems probable, Louis Napoleon is president of the republic. If so, what is the instinct which has thus called him into power? The hereditary principle is abolished on paper, and instantly recognised by the first popular act done under the new constitution! But, for all we can tell in America, things may have taken another turn. Is Cavaignac elected? Then a military master is put over the republic, who can Cromwellise the Assembly, and Monk the state, as soon as he chooses. The republic has given itself the form of a dictatorship, and demonstrated that it does not exist, except on paper. Has there been an insurrection? Then the republic is dead already. But I shall assume that Louis has succeeded: then it is virtually an hereditary empire. To be sure, instinct has for once failed to know "the true prince," – has accorded, to the mere shadow of a usurper, what, in a more substantial form, is due to the heir of France; but long-suspended animation must make a mistake or two in coming to life again. The events of the year have been all favourable to a restoration, because they have crushed a thousand other plans and plottings for the sovereignty, and because they must have forced upon at least as many theorists the grand practical conclusion, that there is to be no rational liberty in France until she returns to first principles, and finds the repose which old nations can only know under their legitimate kings.
I am ashamed of you for more than hinting that legitimacy must be given up, as far as kings are concerned. Alas! Diogenes must light his lantern, and hunt through England for a Tory! You are bewhigged, indeed, if you give it up that George III. was a legitimate king, and that his grand-daughter is to you what no other person alive can possibly be, – your true and hereditary sovereign lady! Must I, a republican, say this to an English monarchist, who votes himself a conservative, and who is the son of a sturdy old English Tory? Is there no virtue extant, that even you allow yourself to be flippant about "the divinity that hedges kings," and to trifle with suggestions which your immortal ancestor, who fell at Prestonpans, would have drummed out of doors with poker and tongs? Why, even I, who have a right to be whatever I choose, by way of amateur allegiance, and who have always found myself a Jacobite whenever the talk has been against the White Rose – even I, in sober earnest, yield the point, that George I. was a legitimate sovereign, and that Charlie was a bit of a rebel. Those stupid Dutchmen! it makes me mad to say as much for them; but I love Old England too well to own that she bore with such sovereigns on any lower grounds than that of their right to reign.
I am sorry you give in to the silly cant of revolutionists, and confess yourself posed with their challenge. What if they do insist upon a definition? Are you bound to keep your heart from beating till you can tell why it throbs over a page of Shakspeare's Richard II., and bounces, in precisely an opposite manner, over Carlyle's Cromwell? Am I going to let a Whig choke me with a dictionary, because it contains no explanation of my good old-fashioned word? Let him, with his "Useful Knowledge Society" information, give me an explanation of the magnetic needle, or tell me why it turns to the pole, and not to the antipodes? The fellow will recollect some twopenny picture of the compass, and retail me half a column of the Penny Magazine about the mysteries of nature. And what if I talk as sensibly from nature in my own heart, and tell the stereotype philosopher that I am conscious of an ennobling affection, which honest men never lack, and which God Almighty has made a faculty of the human soul to dignify subordination; and that loyalty has no lode-star but legitimacy? At least, my dear Whigo-Tory, you must allow, I should succeed in answering a fool according to his folly. But I claim more: I have defined legitimacy when I say it is the home of loyalty.
I have amused myself during the summer with some study of the history of reaction in France, and flatter myself that I have discovered the secret of its failure, and the great distinction between its spirit and that of English Conservatism. But this by the way; for I was going to say that I have found, in the writings of one of the chief of the reactionary party, some very sensible hints upon the subject I am discussing with you. Though in many respects a dangerous teacher, and, I fear, a little jesuitical in practice as well as in theory, I have been surprised to find the Count de Maistre willing "to be as his master" on this point, and to rest legitimacy very nearly on the sober principles of Burke. He is far from the extravagances of Sir Robert Filmer, though he often expresses, in a startling form, the temperate views of English Anti-Jacobins. Thus he says, with evident relish of its smart severity, the people will always accept their masters, and will never choose them. Strongly and unpalatably put, but most coincident with history, and not to be disputed by any admirer of the glorious Revolution of 1688! I suspect the Frenchman made his aphorism without stopping to ask whether it suited any other case. But Burke has virtually said the same thing in his reply to the Old Jewry doctrine of 1789, in which he so forcibly urges the fact, that the settlement of the crown upon William and the Georges "was not properly a choice, … but an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken." Mary and the Hanoverians, then, were acknowledged by the nation, in spite of itself, as legitimate sovereigns; and even William was smuggled into the acknowledgment as quasi-legitimate. It is the clear, reasonable, and truly English doctrine of Burke, that the constitution of a country makes its legitimate kings; and that the princes of the House of Brunswick, coming to the crown according to constitutional law, at the date of their respective accessions, were as legitimate as King James before he broke his coronation oaths, and abdicated, ipso facto, his crown and hereditary rights. But De Maistre talks more like the schoolmen, though he comes to the same practical results. Constitutions, the native growth of their respective countries, he would argue, are the ordinance of God; and kings, though not the subjects of their people, are bound to do homage to them, as, in a sense, divine. Legitimacy, therefore, is the resultant of hereditary majesty and constitutional designation; it being always understood that constitutional laws are never written till after they become such by national necessities, which are divine providences. Apply this to 1688. The Bill of Rights was an unwritten part of the constitution even when James was crowned; and so was the principle, that the king must not be a Papist, at least in the government of his realms. Such, if I may so speak, was the Salic law of England, by which his public and political Popery stripped him of his right to the throne. It was the same principle that invested the House of Brunswick with a legitimacy which the heart of the nation did not hesitate to recognise, in spite of unfeigned disgust with the prince in whom the succession was established. To throw the proposition into the abstract – there can be no legitimacy without hereditary majesty, but that member of a royal line is the legitimate king in whom concur all the elements of constitutional designation. If the phrase be new, the idea is as old as empire. I mean that constitutional power which, without reference to national choice or personal popularity, selects the true heir of the throne, among the descendants of its ancient possessors, on fixed principles of national law. Thus, in Portugal, the constitution sets aside an idiot heir-apparent for a cadet of the same family, or, if need be, for a collateral relative; while, in France, it proclaims the line of a king extinct in his female heir, and ascends, perhaps, to a remote ancestor for a trace of his rightful successor. It is a principle essentially the same which, in England, pronounces a Popish prince as devoid of hereditary right to the crown, as a bastard, or the child of a private marriage; and by which the hereditary blood, shut off from its natural course, immediately opens some auxiliary channel, and widens it into the main artery of succession, with all the precision of similar resources in physical nature. With such an argument, if I understand him, the Count de Maistre would put you to the blush for sneering sub rosâ at the legitimacy of your Sovereign. I wish his principles were always as capable of being put to the proof, without any absurdity in the reduction. Hereditary majesty is the only material of which constitutions make sovereigns; and that, too, deserves a word in the light which this sage Piedmontese Mentor of France has endeavoured to throw on the subject. It is interesting in the present dilemma of France, which stands like the ass between two haystacks – rejecting one dynasty, but not yet choosing another. I am a republican, you know, holding that my loyalty is due to the constitution of my own country; and yet I subscribe to the doctrine that this idea of majesty is a reality, and that, confess it or not, even republicans feel its reality. The king's name is a tower of strength; and inspiration has said to sovereign princes, with a pregnant and monitory meaning —ye are gods. This is not the fawning of courts, but the admonition of Him who invests them with His sword of avenging justice, and gives them, age after age, the natural homage of their fellow-men. Not that I would flatter monarchs: I see that they die like men, and, what is worse, live, very often, like fools, if not like beasts. Yet I am sure that they have something about them which is personally theirs, and cannot be given to others, and which is as real a thing as any other possession. God has endowed them with history, and they are the living links which connect nations with their origin, and the men of the passing age with bygone generations. Reason about it as we may, it is impossible not to look with natural reverence on the breathing monuments of venerable antiquity. For a Guelph, indeed, I cannot get up any false or romantic enthusiasm; and yet I find it quite as impossible not to feel that the house of Guelph entitles its royal members to a degree of consideration which is the ordinance of Heaven. For how many ages has that house been a great reality, casting its shadow over Europe, and stretching it over the world, and as absolutely affecting the destinies of men as the geographical barriers and highways of nations! The Alps and the Oceans are morally, as well as naturally, majestic; and a moral majesty like theirs attaches to a line of princes which has stood the storms of centuries like them, and like them has been always a bulwark or a bond between races and generations. Like the solemnity of mountains is the hereditary majesty of a family, of which the origin is veiled in the twilight of history, but which is always seen above the surface of cotemporary events, a crowned and sceptred thing that never dies, but perpetuates, from generation to generation, a still increasing emotion of sublimity and awe, which all men feel, and none can fully understand. There are many women in England who, for personal qualities and graces, would as well become the throne as she whom you so loyally entitle "Our Sovereign Lady." Why is it that no election, nor any imaginable possession of her place, could commend the proudest or the best of them to the homage of the nation's heart? Such a one might wear the robes, and glitter like a star, outshining the regalia, and might walk like Juno; but not a voice would cry God save her!– while there is a glory, not to be mistaken, which invests the daughter of ancient sovereigns, even when she is recognised, against her will, in the costume of travel, or when she shows herself among her people, and treads the heather in a trim little bonnet and a Highland plaid. Why is it that ten thousand feel a thrill when her figure is seen descending from the wooden walls of her empire, and alighting upon some long unvisited portion of its soil? It is not the same emotion which would be inspired by the landing of Wellington. Then the roaring of cannon and the waving of ensigns would appear to be a tribute rendered to the hero by a grateful country; but when her Majesty touches the shore, she seems herself to wake the thunders and to bow the banners which announce her coming. The pomp is all her own, and differs from the tributary pageant, as the nod of Jove is different from the acclamation of Stentor. Even I, who "owe her no subscription," can well conceive what a true Briton cannot help but feel, when, with an ennobling loyalty, he beholds in her the concentrated blood of famous kings, and the propagated soul of mighty monarchs; and when he calls to mind, at the same moment, the thousand strange events and glorious histories which have their august and venerable issue in Victoria, his queen.
But you will bring me back to my main business, by asking – who, then, was the legitimate king of France at the beginning of this year? The King of the Barricades was not lacking in hereditary majesty, and you will make out a case of constitutional designation, by a parallel between England in 1688, and France in 1830. If you do so, you will greatly wrong your country. The loyalty of England settled in the house of Brunswick, and would have been even less tried if there had been a continuance of the house of Orange; but no French loyalist could ever be reconciled to the dynasty of Orleans. And why? It was not the natural constitution of France, but the mere blunder of a mob, that selected Louis Philippe as the king of the French. It was an election, as the accession of William and Mary was not: it was a choice, and not a necessity – the mere caprice of the hour, and in no sense the rational designation of law. Did ever his Barricade Majesty himself, in all his dreams of a dynasty, pretend that any unalterable principle, or fundamental law of France, had turned the tide of succession from the heir-presumptive of Charles X., and forced heralds upon the backward trail of genealogy, till they could again descend, and so find the hereditary king of the French in the son of Egalité? Louis Philippe was not legitimate, in any reasonable sense of the word; and, could he have made such men as Chateaubriand regard him as other than a usurper, he would not be at Claremont now. That splendid Frenchman uttered the voice of a smothered, but not extinguished, constitution, when he closed his political life in 1830, by saying to the Duchess de Berry – "Madame, votre fils est mon roi." He lived to see the secret heart of thousands of his countrymen repeating his memorable words, and died not till Providence itself had overturned the rival throne, and directed every eye in hope, or in alarm, to the only prince in Europe who could claim to be their king.
I care very little what may be the personal qualifications of Henry of Bordeaux; it seems to me that he is destined to reign upon the throne of his ancestors – and God grant he may do it in such wise as shall make amends for all that France has suffered, by reason of his ancestors, since France had a Henry for her king before! The prestige of sovereignty is his; and while he lives, no republic can be lasting; no government, save his, can insure the peace which the state of Europe so imperatively demands. If "experience has taught England that in no other course or method than that of an hereditary crown her liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred,"12– why should not an experience, a thousandfold severer, teach France the same lesson? It has already been taught them by a genius which France cannot despise, and to whose oracular voice she is now forced to listen, because it issues from his fresh grave! "Legitimacy is the very life of France. Invent, calculate, combine all sorts of illegitimate governments, you will find nothing else possible as the result, nothing which gives any promise of duration, of tolerable existence during a course of years, or even through several months. Legitimacy is, in Europe, the sanctuary in which alone reposes that sovereignty by which states subsist." So I endeavour to render the eloquent sentence of Chateaubriand;13 and though, since he wrote it, a score of years have passed, it is stronger now than ever – for what was then his prophecy is already the deplorable history of his country. Had ever a country such a history, without learning more in a year than France has gained from a miserable half-century?
Just so long as France has been busy with experiments, in the insane effort to separate her future from her past, just so long have all her labours to lay a new foundation been miserable failures, covering her, in the eyes of the world, with shame and infamy. What has been wanting all the time? I grant that the first want has been a national conscience – a sense of religion and of duty. But I mean, what has been wanting to the successive administrations and governments? Certainly not splendour and personal dignity, for the Imperial government had both; and the King of the Barricades made himself to be acknowledged and feared as one who bore not the sword in vain. But the prestige of legitimacy was wanting; and that want has been the downfall of everything that has been tried. You will ask, what was the downfall of Charles X? The answer is, that it was not a downfall further than concerned himself; for everybody feels that the Bourbon claim survives, while every other has been forced to yield to destiny and retribution. How is it that legitimacy makes itself felt after years of exile and obscurity? Is it not that instinct of loyalty which cannot be duped or diverted, and which detects and detests all shams? Is it not the instinct which constitution-makers have endeavoured to appease by pageants and by names, but which has continually revolted against the emptiness of both? The existence of that instinct has been perpetually exposed by miserable attempts to satisfy its demands with outside show and splendid impositions. The French cannot even go to work, under their present republic, as we do in America. The common-sense of our people teaches them that a republican government is a mere matter of business, which must make no pretences to splendour; and hence, the constitution once settled, the president is elected and sworn-in with no nonsense or parade; and Mr Cincinnatus Polk sits down in the White House, and sends every man about his business. A young country has as yet but the instincts of infancy; there is as yet nothing to satisfy but the craving for nourishment, and the demand for large room. But it is not so where nations are full-grown. Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Can France forget that she had once a court and a throne that dazzled the world? No! says every craftsman of the revolution; and therefore our republic, too, must be splendid and imperial! So, instead of going to work as if their new constitution were a reality, there must be a fète of inauguration. In the same conviction, Napoleon is nominated for the presidency, because he has a name; and he immediately withdraws from vulgar eyes, to keep his "presence like a robe pontifical," against the investiture. Oh, for some Yankee farmer to look on and laugh! It would not take him long to calculate the end of such a republic. Jonathan can understand a queen, and would stare at a coronation in sober earnest, convinced that it had a meaning – at least, in England! But a republic of kettle-drums and trumpets will never do with him; and if he were favoured with an interview with the pompous aspirant to the French presidency, it would probably end in his telling Louis Napoleon the homely truth – that he has nothing to be proud of, and had better eat and drink like other folk, and "define his position" as a candidate, if he don't want to find himself used-up, and sent on a long voyage up Salt River; which, you may not know, my Basil, is a Stygian stream, and the ancients called it Lethe. So much, then, for the ultima ratio of illegitimate governments – the attempt to satisfy the demand for national dignity by pageants and by names, and to drown the outcries of natural discontent by the sounding of brass and the tinkling of cymbals.
In vain did the sage Piedmontese foretell it all, like a Cassandra. "Man is prohibited," said that admirable Mentor, "from giving great names to things of which he is the author, and which he thinks great; but if he has proceeded legitimately, the vulgar names of things will be rendered illustrious, and become grand." How specially does England answer to the latter half of this maxim! and who can read the former without seeing France, in her fool's-cap, before his mental eye? De Maistre himself has instanced the revolutionary follies of Paris, and lashed them with unsparing severity. Whatever is national in England seems to have grown up, like her oaks, from deep and strong roots, and to stand, like them, immovable, They make their own associations, and dignify their own names. Everything is home-born, natural, and real. The Garter, the Wool-sack, Hyde Park, Epsom and Ascot – these things in France would be the Legion of Honour, the Curule-chair, the Elysian fields, the Olympic games! The veritable attempt was made to reinstitute, in the Champ-de-Mars, the sports of antiquity; and they received the pompous name of Les jeux Olympiques. De Maistre ridicules their nothingness, and adds that, when he saw a building erected and called the Odéon, he was sure that music was in its decline, and that the place would shortly be to let. In like manner, he says of the motto of Rousseau, with intense naïvete, "Does any man dare to write under his own portrait, vitam impendere vero? You may wager, without further information, fearlessly, that it is the likeness of a liar." How quick the human heart perceives what is thus put into words by a philosopher! It is in vain for France to think of covering her nakedness with a showy veil. The Empire was a glittering gauze, but how transparent! They saw one called Emperor and a second Charlemagne; and the Pope himself was there to give him a crown. But it was a meagre cheat. Poor Josephine never looked ridiculous before, but then she acted nonsense. The imperial robes were gorgeous, but they meant nothing on the Citizen Buonaparte. Everybody saw behind the scenes. They detected Talma in the strut of Napoleon; they pointed at the wires that moved the hands and eyes of the Pope. All stage-effect, machinery, and pasteboard. The imperial court was all what children call make-believe: it vanished like the sport of children.