The Parisians — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (beautiful books to read TXT) 📖

freedom; each mingled enough of sternness with ambitious will to stain with bloodshed the commencement of his power,—but it would be an absurd injustice to fix the same degree of condemnation on the coup d’etat as humanity fixes on the earlier cruelties of Augustus; each, once firm in his seat, became mild and clement,—Augustus perhaps from policy, Napoleon III. from a native kindliness of disposition which no fair critic of character can fail to acknowledge. Enough of similitudes; now for one salient difference. Observe how earnestly Augustus strove, and how completely he succeeded in the task, to rally round him all the leading intellects in every grade and of every party,—the followers of Antony, the friends of Brutus; every great captain, every great statesman, every great writer, every mail who could lend a ray of mind to his own Julian constellation, and make the age of Augustus an era in the annals of human intellect and genius. But this has not been the good fortune of your Emperor. The result of his system has been the suppression of intellect in every department. He has rallied round him not one great statesman; his praises are hymned by not one great poet. The celebrates of a former day stand aloof; or, preferring exile to constrained allegiance, assail him with unremitting missiles from their asylum in foreign shores. His reign is sterile of new celebrites. The few that arise enlist themselves against him. Whenever he shall venture to give full freedom to the press and to the legislature, the intellect thus suppressed or thus hostile will burst forth in collected volume. His partisans have not been trained and disciplined to meet such assailants. They will be as weak as no doubt they will be violent. And the worst is, that the intellect thus rising in mass against him will be warped and distorted, like captives who, being kept in chains, exercise their limbs on escaping in vehement jumps without definite object. The directors of emancipated opinion may thus be terrible enemies to the Imperial Government, but they will be very unsafe councillors to France. Concurrently with this divorce between the Imperial system and the national intellect,—a divorce so complete that even your salons have lost their wit, and even your caricatures their point,—a corruption of manners which the Empire, I own, did not originate, but inherit, has become so common that every one owns and nobody blames it. The gorgeous ostentation of the Court has perverted the habits of the people. The intelligence abstracted from other vents betakes itself to speculating for a fortune; and the greed of gain and the passion for show are sapping the noblest elements of the old French manhood. Public opinion stamps with no opprobrium a minister or favourite who profits by a job; and I fear you will find that jobbing pervades all your administrative departments.”

“All very true,” said De Breze, with a shrug of the shoulders and in a tone of levity that seemed to ridicule the assertion he volunteered; “Virtue and Honour banished from courts and salons and the cabinet of authors ascend to fairer heights in the attics of ouvriers.”

“The ouvriers, ouvriers of Paris!” cried this terrible German.

“Ay, Monsieur le Comte, what can you say against our ouvriers? A German count cannot condescend to learn anything about ces petites gens.”

“Monsieur,” replied the German, “in the eyes of a statesman there are no petites gens, and in those of a philosopher no petites choses. We in Germany have too many difficult problems affecting our working classes to solve, not to have induced me to glean all the information I can as to the ouvriers of Paris. They have among them men of aspirations as noble as can animate the souls of philosophers and poets, perhaps not the less noble because common-sense and experience cannot follow their flight; but as a body the ouvriers of Paris have not been elevated in political morality by the benevolent aim of the Emperor to find them ample work and good wages independent of the natural laws that regulate the markets of labour. Accustomed thus to consider the State bound to maintain them, the moment the State fails in that impossible task, they will accommodate their honesty to a rush upon property under the name of social reform.

“Have you not noticed how largely increased within the last few years is the number of those who cry out, ‘La Propriete, cest le vol’? Have you considered the rapid growth of the International Association? I do not say that for all these evils—the Empire is exclusively responsible. To a certain degree they are found in all rich communities, especially where democracy is more or less in the ascendant. To a certain extent they exist in the large towns of Germany; they are conspicuously increasing in England; they are acknowledged to be dangerous in the United States of America; they are, I am told on good authority, making themselves visible with the spread of civilization in Russia. But under the French Empire they have become glaringly rampant, and I venture to predict that the day is not far off when the rot at work throughout all layers and strata of French society will insure a fall of the fabric at the sound of which the world will ring.

“There is many a fair and stately tree which continues to throw out its leaves and rear its crest till suddenly the wind smites it, and then, and not till then, the trunk which seems so solid is found to be but the rind to a mass of crumbled powder.”

“Monsieur le Comte,” said the Vicomte, “you are a severe critic and a lugubrious prophet; but a German is so safe from revolution that he takes alarm at the stir of movement which is the normal state of the French esprit.”

“French esprit may soon evaporate into Parisian betise. As to Germany being safe from revolution, allow me to repeat a saying of Goethe’s-but has Monsieur le Vicomte ever heard of Goethe?”

“Goethe, of course,—tres joli ecrivain.”

“Goethe said to some one who was making much the same remark as yourself, ‘We Germans are in a state of revolution now, but we do things so slowly that it will be a hundred years before we Germans shall find it out; but when completed, it will be the greatest revolution society has yet seen, and will last like the other revolutions that, beginning, scarce noticed, in Germany, have transformed the world.’”

“Diable, Monsieur le Comte! Germans transformed the world! What revolutions do you speak of?”

“The invention of gunpowder, the invention of printing, and the expansion of a monk’s quarrel with his Pope into the Lutheran revolution.”

Here the German paused, and asked the Vicomte to introduce him to Vane, which De Breze did by the title of Count von Rudesheim. On hearing Vane’s name, the Count inquired if he were related to the orator and statesman, George Graham Vane, whose opinions, uttered in Parliament, were still authoritative among German thinkers. This compliment to his deceased father immensely gratified but at the same time considerably surprised the Englishman. His father, no doubt, had been a man of much influence in the British House of Commons,—a very weighty speaker, and, while in office, a first-rate administrator; but Englishmen know what a House of Commons reputation is,—how fugitive, how little cosmopolitan; and that a German count should ever have heard of his father delighted but amazed him. In stating himself to be the son of George Graham Vane, he intimated not only the delight but the amaze, with the frank savoir vivre which was one of his salient characteristics.

“Sir,” replied the German, speaking in very correct English, but still with his national accent, “every German reared to political service studies England as the school for