BOOKS.
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV.*
THE period covered by the fifth volume of The Cambridge Modern History possesses a unity and a dramatic interest which, if we except the Napoleonic era, are unequalled in the annals of modern Europe. Even more, perhaps, than the age of Napoleon, that of Louis XIV. is remarkable for its wealth of startling incidents and conspicuous personages : such spectacular events as the revolutions in Holland and in England, the flight of the Huguenots, the rise and the humiliation of France; such dominant and boldly contrasted characters as—to mention only a few—William III. and the Grand Pensionary, Milton and Charles II., Marlborough and his Duchess, and the "Roi Soleil " himself,—these must produce upon the minds of all who contemplate this great period an effect of glow and movement and colour akin to that of some vast and splendid decoration by Rubens or Veronese. And, no less than in a masterpiece of art, it is easy to perceive amid the mass of varied detail a single underlying subject which interpenetrates and gives meaning to the whole. The age might be summarised after the manner of an Elizabethan chronicle-play as The Tragedy of Louis the Great ; for it is round the history of Louis that the rest of the action groups itself, and that history possesses all the essential characteristics of tragic development,—the grandeur, the 7rEptffireta, and the final ruin, inevitably following from what had gone before. Nor is the superhuman element • The Cambridge Modern History. Planned by the late Lord Acton LL.D. Edited by A. W. Ward, Litt.D.. G. W. Prothero, Litt.D., Stanley Loathes, ILA. Vol. V The Ago of Louis XIV. Cambridge ; at the University Press. Elea not.) wanting,—the presence of issues more stupendous than any that can be summed up in the life of a man, the death-struggle of irreconcilable ideals and forces immeasurably great. It is difficult to believe that any book constructed out of such materials as these could fail to be interesting; yet it must be confessed that the present volume has achieved this almost impossible feat. By some mysterious process it has converted the excitement and the significance of the seventeenth century into flatness and insipidity. The learned authors remind one of the barbarians of the Dark Ages who used the masterpieces of antique sculpture for the building of common walls. How many priceless facts have gone to the making of one of their commonplace pages? As one looks closer one begins to discern between the lines some mutilated marble torso, or, here and there among the rubble, the fragments of a Juno's face. This failure may doubtless be explained to a great extent by the uninspiring effects of divided authorship ; but perhaps an even more potent cause is the scale upon which the history has been written. The book falls between two stools; it should have been either a great deal longer or a great deal more condensed. As a rule, there are only two kinds of history which can be read with pleasure,—the minutely detailed narrative, such as those of Tacitus and Macaulay, where events may be followed almost from day to day with the same sense of vividness and developing excitement as that which exists in real life; and the broad generalised outline of conditions and tendencies, such as those of Montesquieu and Michela. To combine these styles, and so to produce an effect at once of breadth and of detail, required the consummate art and the immense knowledge of a Gibbon,—qualities which have never come together in the same man either before or since. The volume before us, so far from resembling the Decline and Fall, lacks both virtues; it is not large enough for any real amplitude of narrative, while, on the other hand, it is without the cohesion and certainty of intention which might have been present in a smaller and less ambitious work. The ordinary reader will find those parts of it most profitable which are concerned with special subjects of isolated or general import, such as Mr. Tanner's review of the naval administration of the later Stuarts, and the chapters on the Gallican Church and the development of science by Lord St. Cyres and the late Sir Michael Foster. The contributions in literary history are far less happy. The somewhat irrelevant discussion of English Restoration literature contains nothing that is either illuminating or fresh, and M. Faguet in his article on the contemporary literature of France and its European influence —a subject teeming with interest and of the deepest signifi- cance—has given us merely commonplaces, when he might have given us a glimpse into the true spirit of the grand siècle. Indeed, to obtain this it is wiser to turn at once to Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV., which, incorrect and out of date as it is, yet produces upon the reader some feeling of the swell and movement of a great epoch. The ponderous Cambridge History, with its dry learning and scrupulous exactitude, bears the same relation to Voltaire's delicate little work as that of a full-length photograph to a rapid water-colour sketch by a master hand.
"The system of absolute government, which Louis steadily carried on during more than half a century," was, as the editors observe in their preface, "characteristic of the whole age." But to say that Louis's government was absolute is not to say very much; the government of Frederick the Great was absolute, and so is that of the British in India; yet it would be preposterous to put the rule of Louis in the same class as these. His peculiar form of absolutism was distinguished by being intensely personal and supremely static, and it had its embodiment in the chateau of Versailles. The Gamin idge History, characteristically enough, only refers to Versailles once or twice, incidentally, as if it had been nothing more than an ordinary place of residence for the King ; whereas a complete chapter of minute description would not have been too much to have given up to it, for in reality it was the pivot upon which the whole epoch turned. Versailles, with its interminable ceremonial, its colossal splendours, its superhuman waterworks, its trans- planted forests, its heaped-up concentration of wealth and beauty, was the real problem of the age. Was Versailles to be the type and summit of European civilisation, or was it not ? That, ultimately, was the question which brought
William of Orange to the throne of England, and ranged the battalions at Blenheim. It was the spirit of "Versailles— arrogant, brilliant, and conventional—which gave its glory to the reign of Louis, and guided the most fatal and sinister of his acts,—the invasion of Holland and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. And at,the crisis of the reign; when Louie had to decide whether he would accept for his grandson the heritage of the Spanish Empire, or renounce it and keep to his engagements, the same spirit, to use Shakespeare's phrase, "suggested" him still. Professor Wolfgang. Michael in his. account of the affair, which follows very closely indeed that given in M. Legrelle's monumental bat uninspired work, brushes aside the stories told by Saint-Simon and Voltaire of the momentous Council meetings held in Madame de Mainte- non's sitting-room, and concludes that Louis was actuated throughout merely by reasons of State. But when we read Pro- fessor Michael's complacent assertion—" Such were the motives that induced. King Louis to accept the will and to break the Treaty "—it is difficult not to feel that he has forgotten Versailles. Does not Voltaire's story, heightened though it may have been, represent the profound truth that Louis was unable from the whole bent of his character to resist the pressure of his own dynastic ambitions, of the flattery of a Court, and the cajolery of a superstitious woman? Can Professor Michael seriously affirm that no thoughts or feelings save those of policy were present in the mind of Louis when, as Saint-Simon tells us, he surveyed with all the
• pride of majesty his assembled courtiers and exclaimed, pointing to his grandson: "Voilii. le Roi d'Espagne " ?
If Versailles. was the local habitation of the spirit which animated Louis, it is hardly fanciful to imagine that the spirit which opposed, and finally triumphed over, his dwelt somewhere among the grimy streets of the City of London, where the Mint was being reorganised and the Bank of England was beginning to exist. It was with Somers and with Montagu, with Newton and with Locke—the apostles of science and toleration—that the future lay. Though, as in most tragedies, the actual dinailment came through an accident—the genius of Marlborough—the splendid, obscurantism of Louis, with its territorial ambitions and financial incompetence, was doomed from the first moment that• it came into, contact with freedom of thought combined with the command of the sea. Such a combination was boand to triumph, and the fact that the triumph was so complete is apt to blind our eyes to the true nature of the ideals which received their deathblow at Blenheim. To us, who are the heirs of the glorious Revolu- tion, Versailles and all that it involved means primarily some- thing superficial, oppressive, and base ; but, after all, it meant more than that to a generation of noble and gifted men. It meant a great ideal,—an ideal of decoration and of pride, of perfections more than human and of majesty that deemed itself almost divine. Its immortal part lives still for us in the poetry of Racine and in the prose of Bossuet and La Breyer& Not far from Paris its mortal remains are to be found. The empty illimitable palace amid its deserted gardens and its fountains that play no more has been preserved to us, cold and rigid in Time's strata, like the fossil of some' vast and mysterious monster of an abolished world.
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