of books became poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.
But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among much else that is great in literature or in event, the three works on "Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."
To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances. Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes. Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in style – cogent, daring, powerful in matter.
The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the practical, the statesman-like are the dominating qualities. We must not look for the artist in Mirabeau as a writer: he is above that: nor, whatever the range of thought we may justly concede him, may we, therefore, expect the sublime; he is below that. With the eloquence of an impassioned imagination, united to the unornamented vigor of a ready, versatile, and comprehensive reason, he reminds one of some colossal engine in forceful, though not always in graceful action.
In Holland, occupied in literature and the society of literary men, and subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel Romilly, and Wilkes – among whom be it said, en passant, he acquired the reputation of an habitual liar – a thousand circumstances must have presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom, seriousness, and activity he saw around him, to prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action for France, in which he is to play a leading part – a faith so early ripened that, in 1782, meeting at Neufchatel certain State Deputies of Geneva, he based on the inevitable meeting of the States General the prediction, or rather the promise, that he would become a deputy, and in that character restore their country to freedom.
Returning to Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable deficit brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance, while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence, willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of the great question of the times.
His ministerial spyship in Prussia, which, subsequently divulged by his own audacious publication of his secret correspondence, won from M. de Montesquieu the remark, that "the infamy of the person might be estimated by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him – I could wish to say honestly – those historic and statistical data which, published in his elaborate work on the Prussian monarchy, countenanced some serious claims to statesmanship.
Misfortune, passion, solitude, suffering, travel, extraordinary adventures, extensive readings, varied studies, innumerable writings thus admirably endowing his mind, so disposed, too, by nature, for the daring and stormy struggles of the revolution, the only resource that could surely be wanting to so enormous a compound of intellectual strength, I mean the power of oratory, he was fated to acquire in his lengthened trials for the recovery of his wife and legal rights.
Opposed by Alps of difficulties, the moral greater than the legal, for the suits ploughed deeply into all the crimes or errors that had dishonored his career, and would necessarily turn up masses of documentary evidence, which on no less authority than that of his father, must carry the tale of his infamy to every eye; yet his audacity dared, as his genius surmounted, every disadvantage, and after fixing the admiration of a province – to him a sufficient compensation – by the ingenuity, the power, and the extraordinary resources of his eloquence in a path so new to him, he succeeded in re-establishing his civil rights, and but failed in the second, and, perhaps, less important suit, by the accident of a technicality.
Passing by his double election as Deputy, at Aix and Marseilles, marked by excitement, insurrection and all the stirring incidents that, in a moment of great public agitation, might be expected to accompany the début of a daring and accomplished demagogue, we are now brought to the greatest epoch of France, and, therefore, of Mirabeau – the meeting of the States General; and the observation is naturally suggested that, if this extraordinary succession of circumstances, marvelous as incidents, but still more marvelous as coincidents, had not specially moulded the man for his work, it might well be doubted that the French revolution could have happened, or at all events, in such gigantic proportions. Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage, as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution. His Saturn of a father had trained him, from his youth upward, into the executionership of his order; and Heaven itself, as if seconding some such inscrutable design, seems to have stooped to lead by the hand this servant of Nemesis, through paths the most devious and unfrequented, but, of all others, the most fitted to form and conduct him to the emergency.
A change, it is true of some kind in French Government, accompanied by more or less confusion and bloodshed, had been long inevitable. Genius, good sense, suffering, luxury, oppression, contumely, unprincipledness, and folly, each boon of nature, each wrong of man, had concurred, after more than a century of struggle, in necessitating a consummation.
In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the Fourteenth. His policy – his achievements – his failures, and, still more, his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power – no prudence of personal deportment – no brilliancy of external achievement, can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and impressionable
