Part 18

The rivalry between the schools of Rousseau and Voltaire represents the deadlock to which social thought had come; a deadlock of which the catastrophe of the Revolution was both expression and result. At the time of Voltaire's death there was not a single institution in France with force enough to be worth a month's purchase. The monarchy was decrepit; the aristocracy was as feeble and impotent as it was arrogant; the _bourgeoisie_ was not without aspiration, but it lacked courage and it possessed no tradition; and the Church was demoralized, first by the direct attack of Voltaire and the not less powerful indirect attack of the _Encyclopædia_, and second by the memory of its own cruelty and selfishness in the generation just closing. But Voltaire's theory, so far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had transformed thought and prepared the way for a _régime_ of enlightenment and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had gradually thrown off the demoralizing burden of superstition. But then the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were practically extinct, and consequently such an attack as Rousseau's was inevitable, and was at the same time and for the same reasons irresistible. To overthrow the power of the Church only was to do nothing in a society perishing from material decay and political emasculation. Yet to regenerate such a society without the aid of moral and spiritual forces, with whose activity the existence of a dominant ecclesiastical power was absolutely incompatible, was one of the wildest feats that ever passionate sophist attempted.

GEORGE W. KITCHIN

Two sayings which characterize the two speakers are recorded of this time. The one is that of Louis XV, who with all his odious vices, his laziness, and unkingly seclusion, was not devoid of intelligence. "All this," he said, "will last as long as I shall," and his forecast was justified: the "deluge" came long after he had gone to his account; and the phrase stands against him as an expression of his base selfishness, which saw the coming troubles without caring about them, because he believed that they would not come in his day. The other saying is that of Voltaire, who, in 1762, exclaimed in an ecstasy of hope and prophecy, "Happy the young men, for they shall see many things." And yet those youths were mostly gray-headed when the "many things" began, and not a few of them lost those gray heads, instead of looking on as interested spectators of a new order of things.

The writers of this time, whatever their faults, form the true aristocracy of France: the rest of the nation, sinking lower and lower, left their superiority all the more marked and uncontested. The series of great writers of the age may be said to begin with Montesquieu, though Voltaire had published his _OEdipus_ in 1718, and the _Lettres Persanes_ did not appear till 1721. Montesquieu, a man of noble birth, was brought up as a lawyer. We trace in him accordingly an aristocratic and legal tone of mind, which naturally took pleasure in England and the law-abiding conservatism of her constitution, as it appeared to him in the middle of the eighteenth century. Like so many of his fellows, Montesquieu chafed under the influence of a corrupt clergy, and declared against them, with the philosophers. This was almost the only point he had in common with Voltaire, whom he heartily disliked. We may say that he represents the aristocratic and constitutional resistance to the state of things in France, while Voltaire is champion of liberty of thought and tolerance. Montesquieu resists the Jesuit influences of his day on conservative grounds alone; Voltaire resists them by resting on the enlightened despotism of his time, and appealing to it, rather than to the laws or constitution of his country. Lastly, at a later day, Rousseau, sworn foe to society, from which he had suffered much, the sentimentalist, enemy of aristocracy and monarchy, instinctively antagonistic to the legal temperament, speaks directly to the people, even as Montesquieu had spoken to the educated and the well-to-do, and Voltaire to kings; and they, stirred to the heart by his appeals, elected him the prophet of their cause, believed in him, and at his bidding subverted the whole fabric of society.

Montesquieu's great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, which followed his _Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Fall of the Romans_ (1734), and appeared in 1748, forms an epoch in French prose style. He and Voltaire are the two parents of modern French prose literature. The _Esprit des Lois_ was far more greedily read in England than in France. Society there had little taste for so solid a work; they vastly preferred the lively sparkle of the _Persian Letters_; the book was perhaps too clearly influenced by an admiration for the Constitution of England, and by a love for liberty, face to face with the weak arbitrary despotism which was dragging France to a catastrophe.

If Montesquieu is the advocate of political freedom, Voltaire is the champion of tolerance and freedom of conscience; and that, in his day and with his surroundings, meant that he was the deadly foe of the established faith, as he saw it in its acts in France. When we regard this apostle of toleration, and watch his pettinesses and vanity, note him at kings' courts, see him glorifying Louis XIV, that great antagonist of all tolerance, whether religious or political or social, we are inclined to think that the most difficult of all toleration is that of having to endure its champion and to try to do him justice.

Voltaire was no deep thinker: he had amazing cleverness, was very susceptible of the influence of thought, and unrivalled in expression. We shall expect to find him taking color from what was round him, nor shall we be astonished if that color is dazzling and brilliant. Five successive influences marked his earlier life. First, his education under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system; secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the fashionable _abbes_ of the day, which showed him another side of the official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the Abbé de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ambitious subjects, and led him to write the _Henriade_, and probably also to begin projecting his _Siècle de Louis XIV_; fourthly, the enforced leisure of the Bastille, whither he went a second time in 1726 for having resented an insult put on him by a coarse nobleman, one of the Rohans; lastly--thanks to the order for his exile--his sojourn in England after release from the Bastille, and his friendship for the chief writers and thinkers of this country. Hitherto he had been a purely literary man; henceforth he was fired with an ambition to be a philosopher and a liberator. Certainly France was unfortunate in the education she gave this brilliant and wayward child of her genius.

There was hardly a Frenchman of eminence in this period who did not either visit England or learn the English language, many doing both. And one so bright and receptive as Voltaire could not fail to notice many things. He could see how free thought was: he could make a contrast between the respect paid to letters in London, and their degradation under Louis XIV and later; he saw Newton and Locke in places of honor, Prior and Gay acting as ambassadors, Addison as secretary of state; he reached England in time to see the national funeral given to the remains of Newton. Bolingbroke took him in hand; he was astonished to find a learned and literary _noblesse_; Locke was his true teacher.

He went back to France another man, after three years' absence: above all, he carried with him the then popular English way of thinking as to the supernatural, and became a somewhat cold, common-sense deist, opposed to the atheism of some and the dull bigotry of the established creed in the hands of others. God was to him conscious creator of the world, and only faintly, if at all, its ruler; he recognized the need of a deity as a starting-point for his system, though he did not feel the need of his care and presence in life; not God our Father, only God our Creator.

He brought over with him a great ripening of humane feelings: this is his noblest quality and parent of his best acts. When we see him as a champion of oppressed Huguenots, combating wrong and ill-doing with all the vehemence of his fiery soul, we find a common ground, which is lost sight of as we contemplate his equally hot attacks on Christianity, or his dwelling in kings' courts, or his panegyrics on great sovereigns who had so fiercely crushed down that liberty of thought of which he was the life-long defender.

In his _OEdipus_ he had assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his _Henriade_ (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England we have his _Brutus_ (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his _Zaïre_ (1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if sometimes rather disingenuous, strife with a superior power. Throughout, the poet and man of taste struggles against the philosophic freethinker: he loves the surface impressions, perhaps the reflective illusions; "his sentiments are worth more than his ideas." The _English Letters_ of 1735, written some years before, and now issued with much hesitation, created a great storm: they boldly attacked the royal power, the clergy, the faith; they were burned by the hangman; and Voltaire had to go into voluntary exile for a while. There his literary activity was unwearied: many of his works were written, or at least sketched, during the next five years. Strange problem of the human mind. While he here composed his _Mahomet_ and other serious works, he also wrote his scandalous _Pucelle_; as if he could not rest without destroying all nobility of sentiment and faith in heroism. While Jeanne d'Arc is the helpless victim of his shameless attack, he is also busy with his _Siècle de Louis XIV_, a hero apparently more to his taste than the great Maid of Orléans.

The influence of Voltaire on opinion grew slowly but steadily through these years: no one more sedulously undermined the established faiths. It was in these years that he enjoyed a passing favor at the French court, whence his febrile energy, his roughnesses, his want of the true gloss of courtiership, soon lost him the good-will of his old friend Madame de Pompadour. He then tried Berlin, finding it equally untenable ground; eventually he withdrew to Ferney in the territory of Geneva, whence he kept up incessant war against all the injustices which touched his heart. His defence of Calas, of Servin, of the luckless Lally, all date from this time. In these days he animated the Encyclopædists with his spirit, encouraging them in their gigantic undertaking, the "Carroccio of the battle of the eighteenth century." It was a huge dictionary of human knowledge, written in direct antagonism to all belief in spiritual powers or religion. It sold incredibly, and the effect of it on society was immense. This great edifice, "built half of marble, half of mud," as Voltaire himself said, had as its chief architects Diderot and D'Alembert. Nothing contributed more to undermine the foundations on which all institutions, and not least royalty, were built.

A little later than Voltaire came Rousseau, "the valet who did not become a cardinal." His influences are also later, and touched society far more widely. Voltaire had spoken to society; Rousseau spoke to the heart of the people. He was above all things a sentimentalist, this son of a Genevan clockmaker. Society treated him harshly; and he avenged himself by making fierce war on society. The savage state is the best--society being revolting in its falseness and shallow varnish: all men are naturally equal and free; society is nothing but an artificial contract, an arrangement by which, in the end, the strong domineer over the weak; the state of nature is divine: there is a Garden of Eden for those who will cast society behind them. Sciences and arts, civilization and literature, Encyclopædists included, are hateful as corrupters of mankind; all progress has been backward, if one may venture to say so--downward, certainly. Rousseau embroidered these paradoxes with a thousand sweet sentiments: he shut his eyes to history, to facts, to the real savage, the very disagreeable "primitive man," as he may yet sometimes be seen. "Follow nature" was his one great precept: then you will scourge away the false and conventional, and life will grow pure and simple; there will be no rank, no cunning law devised to keep men from their rights, no struggle for life, no competition. All France panted and groaned to emulate the "noble savage"--with what success, we know.

These were the chief literary luminaries of this time: and they all helped to pull down the fabric of the old society. That society, however, little understood the tendency of things; to a large extent it became the fashion to be philosophic, to be free-minded, to attack religion: with pride in their rank, and cold scorn for their humbler brethren, and high-bred contempt for their clergy, and ruinous vices sometimes made amusing by their brightness and their vivacious vanity, the French upper classes thought it great sport to pull merrily at the old walls of their country's institutions, never dreaming that they could be so ill-ordered as to fall down and crush them in their ruin.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Vauban and Boisguillebert are both to be found in _Les Economiste Financiers du XVIIIième Siècle_, published by Guillaumin, 1851.

[32] _Confessions_, pt. i. liv. v. Date of 1736.

[33] _OEuvres_, lxxv. 182.

[34] Corr. 1762. _OEuvres_, lxxv. 188.

[35] _OEuvres_, lxvii. 432.

[36] Condorcet, 170.

BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT

A.D. 1755

WINTHROP SARGENT GEORGE WASHINGTON

CAPTAIN DE CONTRECOEUR

The repeated wars between France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had involved also their colonies in America and India. In America the Indians had been employed as allies upon both sides, and thus encouraged in their hideous deeds of massacre and torture. Hence there had grown an ever-increasing bitterness between the French in Canada and the English colonists along the Atlantic coasts, and this finally led to the momentous French and Indian war, which, contrary to the course of the earlier contests, originated in America and spread thence to Europe.

Its immediate cause was the disputed possession of the interior of the continent, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. These had been first explored by the French, and when English pioneers began to penetrate thither the French built a chain of forts to resist them. An expedition of Virginians under the command of their youthful leader, Major George Washington, had a sharp encounter with the enemy in 1754; and then the English government determined to assert its authority by an overwhelming force. No war was declared against France, nor even against Canada; but a distinguished English general, Braddock, was sent over with three thousand regular troops to seize the French forts in the Ohio Valley, especially Fort Duquesne, on the site of the modern city of Pittsburg.

Braddock's expedition thus started the war which ended in the expulsion of France from the North American continent. It did more than that: it sowed the seeds of lasting dissension between the American colonial troops and the British regulars. The British despised their uninformed allies, and the latter soon learned in their turn to despise the regulars.

The English general liked the young Virginian major, Washington, and invited him, as one who knew the ground, to accompany the projected expedition and give advice--which Braddock never took. Its caution seemed to him to savor too much of cowardice, and he persisted in marching through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne as though his forces had been upon parade, with drums beating and colors flying. The French were very near to being frightened into flight, but determined on making one effort at resistance. Its results are here told by the standard Pennsylvania historian, Sargent, and also in briefer form by Washington himself in a letter to the Virginian Governor, and by the French commander of Fort Duquesne in his official report.

WINTHROP SARGENT

With a commendable discretion--the utmost, perhaps, that he was capable of--Braddock had concluded his arrangements for passing what he regarded as the only perilous place between his army and the fort, which he designed to reach early on the 10th. Had the proposition, started and abandoned by St. Clair, to push forward that very night a strong detachment to invest it before morning, been actually made to him, it is very probable he would have discountenanced it. As in all human likelihood it would have been crowned with success, it is as well for the general's reputation that the suggestion aborted.

What precautionary steps his education and capacity could suggest were here taken by Braddock. Before three o'clock on the morning of the 9th Gage was sent forth with a chosen band to secure both crossings of the river, and to hold the farther shore of the second ford till the rest of the army should come up. At four, St. Clair, with a working party, followed to make the roads. At 6 A.M. the general set out, and, having advantageously posted about four hundred men upon the adjacent heights, made, with all the wagons and baggage, the first crossing of the Monongahela. Marching thence in order of battle toward the second ford, he received intelligence that Gage had occupied the shore, according to orders, and that the route was clear. The only enemy he had seen was a score of savages, who fled without awaiting his approach. By eleven o'clock the army reached the second ford; but it was not until after one that the declivities of the banks were made ready for the artillery and wagons, when the whole array, by a little before two o'clock, was safely passed over. Not doubting that from some point on the stream the enemy's scouts were observing his operations, Braddock was resolved to strongly impress them with the numbers and condition of his forces; and accordingly the troops were ordered to appear as for a dress-parade. In after-life Washington was accustomed to observe that he had never seen elsewhere so beautiful a sight as was exhibited during this passage of the Monongahela. Every man was attired in his best uniform; the burnished arms shone bright as silver in the glistening rays of the noonday sun, as, with colors waving proudly above their heads, and amid inspiring bursts of martial music, the steady files, with disciplined precision, and glittering in scarlet and gold, advanced to their position. While the rear was yet on the other side, and the van was falling into its ordained course, the bulk of the army was drawn up in battle array on the western shore, hard by the spot where one Frazier, a German blacksmith in the interest of the English, had lately had his home. Two or three hundred yards above the spot where it now stood was the mouth of Turtle Creek--the "Tulpewi Sipu" of the Lenape--which, flowing in a southwestwardly course to the Monongahela, that here has a northwestward direction, embraces, in an obtuse angle of about one hundred twenty-five degrees, the very spot where the brunt of the battle was to be borne.

The scene is familiar to tourists, being, as the crow flies, but eight miles from Pittsburg, and scarce twelve by the course of the river. For three-quarters of a mile below the entrance of the creek the Monongahela was unusually shallow, forming a gentle rapid or "ripple," and easily fordable at almost any point. Its common level is from three to four hundred feet below that of the surrounding country; and along its upper banks, at the second crossing, stretches a fertile bottom of a rich pebbled mould, about a fourth of a mile in width and twenty feet above low-water mark. At this time it was covered by a fair, open walnut-wood, uncumbered with bush or undergrowth.

The ascent from the river, however, is rarely abrupt; but by a succession of gentle alluvial slopes or bottoms the steep hillsides are approached, as though the waters had gradually subsided from their original glory to a narrow bed at the very bottom of the ancient channel. At this particular place the rise of the first bottom does not exceed an angle of three degrees. Above it again rises a second bottom of the same width and about fifty feet higher than the first, and gradually ascending until its farther edge rests upon the bold, rocky face of the mountain line, climbing at once some two hundred feet to the usual level of the region around. A firm clay, overlaid with mould, forms the soil of the second bottom, which was heavily and more densely timbered than the first; and the underwood began to appear more plentifully where the ground was less exposed to the action of the spring floods. In the bosom of the hill several springs unite their sources to give birth to a petty rivulet that hurries down the steep to be lost in the river. Its cradle lies in the bed of a broad ravine, forty or fifty feet deep, that rises in the hill-side, and, crossing the whole of the second bottom, debouches on the first, where the waters whose current it so far guides, trickle oozily down through a swampy bed. Great trees grew within and along this chasm, and the usual smaller growth peculiar to such a situation; and a prodigious copse of wild grape-vines, not yet entirely gone, shrouded its termination upon the first bottom and shadowed the birth of the infant brook.