BOOKS.

THE MARQUIS D'ARGENSON.*

IT is time that there should be a sincere effort to improve English criticism, and treat that branch of literature, which might be an important factor in education, as it is made by French writers, whose critical verdicts are of real value to students. We do not know if Mr. Ogle has himself chosen his subject, or if the Marquis d'Argenson of whom he writes was imposed on him. If he deliberately selected that unlucky diplomatist and inconsequent politician, we think that he might have done better to choose almost any other of the notorious personages of his epoch. The second Marquis d'Argenson, son of the Minister who had done so well as head of the police during the reign of Louis XIV., is one of the few authorities on what is a somewhat confused period in French politics. At different times after his death, fragments of his writings were given to the public, and a complete edition of his journal was supplied by the Historical Society of France in 1864. Mr. Ogle has collected all the information to be had in praise of his hero, which is chiefly to be found in the Marquis d'Argenson's own writ- ings. It is perhaps just that he should be remembered as an acute observer of the chaotic anarchy of his time, of which we know less than of the beginning and end of the century. His extreme bitterness and personal chagrin, however, detract from his usefulness, and the fact remains that he was never associated with any public arrest of the evils that were sweeping the French nation to the abysses of 1793. He had foresight of the deluge. He had some paper plans for an ark, but they were never tested. Lamentations such as his were in the months of many, even before Louis XIV. had • The Marquis d'Argenson: a Study in Criticism. Being the Stanhope Essay. Oxford, 1r95. By Arthur Ogle, Exhibitioner of Magdalen College. London: T. Fisher Unwise.

brought the "Epic of Royalty " to a plausible end. The Regency, the Ministries of the Duo de Bourbon and of Cardinal Fleury, were all confessions of a dead Monarchy and of an unshepherded people. Mr. Ogle truly observes that d'Argenson pitied the peasants, but so bad La Brnyere pitied them fifty years before. He made plans for their relief, but so had done Fenelon and Vauban. It was not probably in d'Argen- son's blood to feel, as those great men had done, the corruption and cruelty of the provincial satraps. Much deferring to knowledge accumulated by the zeal of youth, we confess that we cannot judge Mr. Ogle's hero without consciousness of his Regence doings, his financial profits under Law's " system ; " his detestation, not only of his wife in particular, but of the insti- tution of marriage in general. if we hear little of his private morals, a large part of his memoirs are devoted to Royal and Court scandals. He dwells on the corruption and infamy of others, with a spitefulness which does not exclude the thought that, when useful to his career, he willingly condoned the licentiousness of his society.

Still, he remains an important personage, about whom, per- haps, " every schoolboy ought to know," or, at least, ought to have known, when more interest was taken in the treaties of the Pyrenees and of Aix-la-Chapelle, than can be felt since the revolutions of 1848 and the capitulation of Sedan. Rene, the son of Marc Rene, was born in 1694, and quickly attained recognition as a rake, if not an agreeable one, and as one of the rabble of officials who governed the State, for be was given a seat in the Council at twenty-one, and the Intendency of Hainault when he was twenty-six. Partly from paternal snubbing, and still more from shy vanity, Rene was awkward socially; he was distinguished from his more agreeable younger brother, Marc Pierre, as the "stupid" d'Argenson. Indeed, Rene owed much to his brother's popularity until the brothers quarrelled. Marc Pierre was for fifteen years Minister of War, and he was in office when Fontenoy broke the monotony of French disaster. To him the celebrated Encyclop6die was dedicated. From Fontenoy his brother Rene gained another sort of credit. A letter he wrote to Voltaire showed humanity in its description of the battlefield and of the soldiers' sufferings, when disgust and pity compelled him to use his flask ! Voltaire gave the letter publicity, and it has been perhaps d'Argenson's best title to be considered, on somewhat the same terms as the Marquis de Mirabeau, " l'ami des hommes." But his efforts by books that were more or less mean and spiteful, and by crooks anything but Arcadian, to get a footing at Court and in the Ministry, are little to the philanthropist's credit. Without exactly endorsing the hard things said of him by the critic Scherer, we may say that disagreeable boorishness wrecked the Marquis d'Argenson, notwithstanding his undoubted knowledge of politics and careful studies. He had no facilities for the " nice conduct " of his superior wits, and he was readier to use them in general quarrelling than ha adapting them to new phenomena, of which there were many in the France of his day. He was useful to Voltaire, who called him his " agent with the literary police of Paris," and who flattered him accordingly. But d'Argenson had few friends. He was wanting in the important gift of tact. He was not the more sincere for his caustic temper, or the better writer because he used coarse and vulgar phrases in an age which boasted a Montesquieu and a Vauvenargues. Yet d'Argen- son's works have still their special value. He is the best diarist of the middle period of Louis XV. It was a. dreary age, and has of itself little interest, except as it shows the rapid decay of a great Monarchy foundering in a gulf of Atheism and vice, of inhumanity and bad government. With all d'Argenson's faults, he could not, particularly when he had retired from public life, treat life and politics—the agony of the poor and the failure of justice—as a jest. He was not of the genus Maurepas, and he would not join in the dances of those poisonous flies over the decay of France. D'Argenson had possibly more heart than conscience. " From the heart come all great thoughts," it has been well said ; but there were stony places in his heart, and his politics, whether at home or abroad, were Utopian.

In one of the best passages of his book, Mr. Ogle himself says of his hero that he possessed-

" A peculiarly complex nature; and its complexity is the more puzzling from the fact that the sterling ore of character is com-

blued with traits not of wickedness, but of weakness. He pos- sesses in abundance those qualities which men love and admire ; and yet we scarcely become intimately acquainted with him upon

any single occasion without being tempted to laughter Occasionally amusement deepens to an even less pleasant feeling; for he held, and he had a right to hold, strong opinions upon men and things ; and he sometimes records them in terms so un- measured as to awaken sympathy with his unheard opponents and to arouse suspicion as regards himself."

No doubt there are heart-throbs of pity in his writings for the peasants, and for the artisans, who however, thanks to their guilds and corporations, never suffered as did the agricultural population. He had remarkable flashes of insight in foretelling the future drift of the nation, which must in time break the threefold, but weakening, chain of the Monarchy, the Church, and the Jansenist Parliament.

The struggle between the three powers inspires him to write :—" If the result were that it became necessary to summon the States-General of the realm, they would find occasion to regulate the finances and the demands of money for the future. Those Estates would not assemble in vain. Let the men in power have a care ; they would be very much in earnest." Meantime, the only remedy suggested by d'Ar- genson was a yet stricter autocracy, in which Government should be conducted "as in the government of God," without interference by those governed. His historical heroes were Henri IV. and Sully, but the actual King was Louis XV. and his Minister, Maurepas ! We cannot but wonder at the strange inconsequences of D'Argenson's career. His diplomatic labours, when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs, from 1744 to 1747, were signal failures. He persevered in the time-worn policy of Richelieu. He had no foresight of the Northern power that Frederick of Prussia was building up. In his com- binations against the Hapsburgs he was ridiculously tricked by one after another of the lesser Powers, and ridiculously betrayed in his own Court. In short, he never knew his world as Foreign Minister, and Mr. Ogle dwells with almost too much

detail on the futile marching and countermarching of the Powers on the diplomatic board. The Duo de Broglie has availed himself of all new sources of information, and has dealt with the labyrinth of European politics, in his Secret du Boi and his Marie Therese, as no partial chronicler in the Mar- quis d'Argenson's position could do, for not on any occasion did

the French Minister "fill the stage" on which Marie Tlaer6se and Frederick pursued, and were pursued by, one another,

through Flanders, Silesia, and North Italy with sud den alarums and excursions, alliances and quarrels, that d'Argenson had not the wit to track. If he had remained in office, we should have heard little of him but his blunders; yet he awakens modern sympathy more than a Noailles or even a Maurice de Saxe by his consideration for poor folk cruelly treated. In an epoch of surpassing levity he could feel for the slaves of the corvee,

and even for their horses, so thin and weak that it took ten to do the work of two. Among his diplomatic dreams, he had one of a united Italy, bound together by federation. He hated England and the English,—and perhaps not without -cause, for from England blew an infectious breath of free -institutions and corresponding welfare. In his diaries the curious will find much about the exiled Stuarts, the in- trigues which led Prince Henry to take orders, the means of pressure employed by the Hanoverian Court to procure the arrest of Charles Edward, and the strange suggestion that he should be shelved as King of the two Navarres, under the joint protection of Spain and France.

D'Argenson's gossiping diaries are perhaps the best mirror of the times which we possess, and coupled with Lomenie's memoirs of the Mirabeau family, they help us partly to realise the urgent need of root-and-branch reform, yet of the dangerous methods by which it was proposed to effect it. Taine has quoted largely from the Marquis D'Argenson, and all who are interested in the breakdown of the Ancien Regime

owe much to the directness of his testimony. He does not ascribe so much mischief as do some writers to Louis XV., who is perhaps too much blamed for his inertia and weakness in face of changes that had been prepared a hundred years before he attained manhood. It was not for D'Argenson to find inexorable fault with moral laxity, or with the evils of centrali- sation and absolute monarchy; but:he saw plainly enough that the flesh and blood of the starving people would assert itself when authority vanished in a continuous jest, and the hope of a better life was taken away by their teachers. Though he be- longed to the political club of l'Entresol, of which Bolingbroke was a member in his younger days, d'Argenson gave little heed to philosophies. He was a typical Gaul of Touraine, the country of Rabelais. But whatever his heterodoxies about marriage and other ordinary social institutions, work of some value was done in the little but on wheels in which he sat in his study It was just large enough for a comfortable sofa. His candle could warm it, he was safe from draughts, and could grumble with all the freedom of Diogenes in his tub. Some of his complaints are not perhaps obsolete in any society which is undergoing rapid changes; his remarks on the levity that re- placed faith and honour and family affection deserves special attention. " There is a terrible feature of our time. Love is dying out. No one loves with his heart. Beauty appeals to the senses. Debauch, that false ape of love, is more in the ascendant than ever, but vice forms ties that have no reality. I do not see that any one uses his heart, and least of all among our youth. There are no friends and few lovers; only hard- ness of heart and dissimulation everywhere. If you banish Love (Eros) the world will return to chaos."

As a critic, Mr. Ogle is not sufficiently impartial; but he has taken great pains, perhaps too much pains, to make his essay what modern students call "readable." For a historic subject, his style is somewhat " spasmodic." He must not risk familiarities of expression in his endeavour to be picturesque. In a critic so promising as he is, such liberties must not be encouraged. We cannot commend his system of reference to what ought to be foot-notes, but which are printed at the end of the volume; but the text of his work is much above average contemporary criticism, and in some passages it attains excellence.