William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor.

William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing.

 

Shakespeare’s only English comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor is also the purest of his comedies—the merriest, the most thoroughly funny of them, a bedroom farce in which almost no one gets into a bedroom. Set in continental Europe, Much Ado About Nothing threatens to veer into tragedy at any moment.

At Windsor, the English knight, Sir John Falstaff, scion of erstwhile warrior-aristocrats, has turned not merely to commerce but to the lowest commerce, the kind that has no respect for property upon which commerce depends, trafficking in swindles, more generally to speculating on what is not legitimately his own, with his schemes of adultery. He illustrates the self-contradiction of the commercial spirit, which, taken in its purest form, undermines itself.The only other ‘sir’ in the play is another figure of fun, a Welsh parson, in a regime where foreigners are funny. In commercial England, the most serious characters are bourgeois gentlemen and gentlewomen—the former a bit too serious, the latter witty but never dangerous avengers.

Not so on the continent. There, peaceful commerce has yet to replace war. There, the aristocrats are lords and ladies, rulers of states. They make war as well as love, alliances as well as money. Foreigners could be marriageable friends or deadly enemies. Much Ado About Nothing isn’t. It’s a comedy because it ends happily, but nearly does not. 

Likely performed first at the Garter Feast on St. George’s Day, in Greenwich, following the election of the new knights, preceding their installation at Windsor, The Merry Wives of Windsor has gentlewomen outsmarting one knight while teaching their husbands a lesson. As in so many Shakespearean comedies, the women are wittier than the men and act as the real rulers of society, but here their wit instructs the knights-elect in the audience, who are brought to witness the hazards of being laughable. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth, who had delighted in Sir John Falstaff as the most memorable comic figure in the English History Plays, wanted to see him in love. Since Falstaff is by nature incapable of being ‘in love,’ loving only food and drink, sex and money, Shakespeare entangles him in not one but two love triangles, which are really sex triangles as far as the rotund and covetous knight is concerned.

An English comedy might well turn on comic twists of the English language. This one does, throughout, with word-benders foreign and domestic hacking their way into the weeds of self-deception. At the outset, Justice of the Peace Robert Shallow complains of abuses of English law he’s suffered at the hands of Sir John. His cousin, Slender, reverses the meanings of “successors” and “ancestors”—deranging time, that course upon which legitimacy in both law courts (with their respect for precedent) and marriages (with their need for heirs) both run. Meanwhile, the Welsh parson, Hugh Evans, mixes up “luces,” a species of fish, with “louses,” a species of insect; the parson verbally deranges not time but nature. As a churchman he stands ready to reconcile legalist Justice Shallow and lawless Sir John, but the judge would rather keep things out of the divine realm and take the case to the Star Chamber. Parson Evans then falls back on the attempt to deflect the men’s attention toward a plot to marry Slender to Anne Page, a young lady of substantial dowry. If the churchman can’t overcome Shallow’s natural anger with divinely blessed peacemaking, he might do it with natural love.

They knock on the door of the father of Miss Page, but Falstaff is there, reviving Justice Shallow’s animosity. “He hath wrong’d me, Master Page” (I.i.91). He has beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge. Indeed I have, Falstaff replies in his own defense, but the Council will laugh at your charges. In the mind of Sir John, property claims in men, beasts, and buildings made by commoners will amount to very little among his fellow aristocrats. Slender has his own charges against Falstaff’s companion, Pistol, whom he alleges to have picked his pocket. Slender draws a sober lesson from the experience: “I’ll ne’er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company, for this trick. If I be drunk, I’ll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.” (I.i.162-66). In Slender, Pastor Evans has found a pious soul indeed, hoping to be Spirit-filled when next spirits-filled.

“The question is concerning your marriage,” Pastor Evans declares (I.i.197-98), getting things back on track. Imitating the court-language he would have picked up from his cousin on ‘the reasonable man,’ Slender allows that “I will marry her upon any reasonable demands” (I.i.102-03)—specifically, the command of the justice of the peace, whom Slender purposes to obey as if he were his father. But the pastor wants dimwitted Slender to love, not to reason: “Let us command to know that of your mouth or of your lips; for divers philosophers hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth” (I.i.204-07). For the first “mouth” he means “mind”; as for the second “mouth,” he is right literally—the lips can be considered part of the mouth—while contradicting his first assertion, which distinguishes merely verbal assurances from the true intent of the mind. In his Welshman’s mangling of English, he continues to garble nature. He defines love agapically—”can you carry your goot will to the maid? (I.i.207-08)—while Justice Shallow defines it more naturally, more mundanely—”can you love her?” (I.i.209). Slender remains the man of reason who cannot think for himself: “I hope, sir, I will do as it shall become one that would reason,” a human being, a rational animal (I.i.210-11). At further prompting, Slender avers to his cousin with malaproprian determination, “I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance” (I.i.220-22); of that “I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely” (I.i.225-26). “I think my cousin meant well,” Justice Shallow construes (I.i.229).

The audience first sees Falstaff at The Garter Inn, his natural habitat, where he drinks in the presence of the inn’s Host, along with Sir John’s four sometime partners in crime. He plots the seduction of Mrs. Ford, the wife of a substantial Windsor citizen; “she gives the leer of invitation” to me (I.iii.41)—a supposition his confederate Pistol takes to be wishful. “He hath studied her well, and translated her will out of honesty into English” (I.iii.45-46). In his own way truly English, Sir John’s motive isn’t so much erotic as economic; the lady “has all the rule of her husband’s purse” (I.iii.49-50). As if to illustrate how dishonest English can be, Falstaff reads a love letter he has composed both to Mrs. Ford and the equally rich Mrs. Page, its language a parody of the English one reads in a medieval romance or a poem by Dante. In Falstaff, chivalry is dead, money’s what counts and what one counts, aristocracy has reached its comedic nadir.

Unfortunately for Sir John, there really is no honor among thieves. Pistol will tattle on Falstaff, doubtless angling for a material reward for himself.

The audience next meets the other rival suitors for the hand of Miss Page. They are Dr. Caius, a French physician, and Fenton, a young gentleman. Dr. Caius mistakes Pastor Evans as his rival; the pastor has sent a message to the doctor’s acquaintance, Mistress Quickly, asking her to intervene with Miss Page on behalf of Slender’s suit, and the doctor assumes he must be angling for himself. For her part, mischievous Mistress Quickly separately assures both Caius and Fenton that Miss Page loves him and him alone, although she dismisses Fenton’s chances: “I know Anne’s mind as well as another does” (I.iv.147-48).

Falstaff’s identical letters meet with the indignation of both respectable married ladies. They plot revenge upon him. But in one respect they differ. Mrs. Ford’s husband is a jealous man; Mrs. Page’s husband is not, and his disposition is not improved when Falstaff’s false pals inform him of Falstaff’s intentions toward his wife and her alleged attraction to him. Therefore, the wives’ counterplot against Falstaff’s scheming must not only punish Falstaff but correct Ford. Eventually, they will need to run three counterplots, one after the other, as Sir John persists in his lechery and avarice, and Ford remains adamant in his jealousy.

Letters are composed of words, which are composed of letters, all capable of being rearranged for comic effect, usually by provoking anger, whether the indignation is righteous, foolish, or both at the same time. When Falstaff describes Mr. Ford as a peasant, cuckold, and knave to Ford disguised as another man, Ford sputters with fury at the imagined infidelity of his wife and the verbal affronts to his honor. When the French doctor challenges the Welsh parson to a duel over Anne Page, Justice Shallow asks, mockingly, “What, the sword and the word! Do you study them both, Master Parson?” (III.i.40-41). The Host arrives at the dueling site and plays the real peacemaker: “Disarm them, and let them question; let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English” (III.i.70-71). Let there be peace between “soul-curer and body-curer” (III.i.89). “Am I politic? am I subtle? am I a Machiavel? Shall I lose my doctor? No; he gives me the potions and the motions. Shall I lose my parson, my priest, my Sir Hugh? No; he gives me the pro-verbs and no-verbs,” the ‘dos’ and the ‘don’ts’ (III.i.91-95). Since verbs are words of action and actions speak louder than words, Gentlemen, do nothing injurious to one another. The Host gets at the essence of comedy, if not the Word of God.

In the first of the ladies’ counterplots against Falstaff, they lure him to Ford’s house. He woos Mrs. Ford but she proves the more adroit manipulator of words: “Well, heaven knows how I love you,” she accurately replies to his suit; “and you shall one day find it,” she rightly predicts (III.iii.69-70). “Keep in that mind; I’ll deserve it,” Falstaff returns, condemning himself unknowingly. When on cue Mrs. Page approaches, announcing the imminent arrival of Mr. Ford, they hide Falstaff in a laundry basket and have him carted away, with instructions to the servants to dump him in the Thames. This reprises the scene in Aristophanes’ The Clouds in which Socrates is hoisted up toward the heavens in a basket; the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is Socrates as Aristophanes portrays him, a ridiculously false claimant to wisdom. His baptism in good English waters won’t cleanse his soul.

For his second go at Mrs. Ford (urged upon him by the duplicitous Mistress Quickly), Falstaff again shows up at the Ford house. He falls for the same routine, as Mrs. Page arrives to warn of Mr. Ford’s approach. This time they disguise him as a woman for, as Mrs. Page tells her friend, “We cannot misuse him enough. / We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do, / Wives may be merry and yet honest too” (IV.ii.88-91). That is, the proof of wit and honor won’t be in ever-elusive, ever-manipulable words, the things to which Mr. Ford gives too much credence, but in irrefutable actions. When the self-beleaguered Ford does arrive, he’s told that the disguised Falstaff is his wife maid’s aunt, a witch, a fortune-teller, a spell-caster—that is, an abuser of words who exploits the witless. Out-witted and gulled once again by words, Ford beats ‘her’ out of his house, thus expediting the escape of the man he expected to capture in flagrante. 

Finally told of his own folly, Ford reforms, acknowledging his wife’s honor and chastising himself with such vigor that Mr. Page intervenes to tell him to “be not as extreme in submission as in offense” (IV.iv.11). But bruised, humiliated Falstaff still won’t give up. As water and blows haven’t worked, the ladies turn to spiritual terror and a suggestion of hellfire. Mrs. Page recalls a legend of Windsor Forest, an old wives’ tale about Herne the Hunter, the late gamekeeper, whose spirit returns every winter, decked with “great ragg’d horns,” changing the milk in cows to blood and frightening all those who see him (IV.iv.30). She proposes that they tell Falstaff to rendezvous with them in the forest, disguised as Herne. They will arrange for local children disguised as urchins, elves, and fairies to encircle him, dance, pinch him and burn him with candles. After “the unclean knight” has been so tormented, “we’ll all present ourselves; dis-horn the spirit, / And mock him home to Windsor” (IV.iv.56, 63-64). Pastor Evans pronounces this a set of “fery honest knaveries” (IV.iv.79-80).

Meanwhile, Sir John is concealing his most recent humiliation, defending his remaining illusions of aristocratic honor with lying verbiage. The Host of the Garter Inn hears that a fat old woman has gone up to Falstaff’s room. Falstaff claims that yes, there was a woman, but she is gone now, after having “taught me more wit than ever I learned before in my life, and I paid nothing for it neither, but was paid for my learning” (IV.v.54-56). This is another parody of the life of Socrates, who tells the tale of Diotima, his teacher in the philosophy of love. Socratic eros begins with love of beautiful bodies, ascends to love of beautiful souls, and culminates in the love of “beauty as a whole,” of philo-sophia, the love of wisdom. Falstaff indeed would do well to begin his ascent on this ladder of love, but he will need a hard-earned lesson in modest practical wisdom before he can aspire to the heights.

He isn’t the only erotic schemer in Windsor. All of Anne Page’s suitors know she will participate in the Falstaff-tormenting fairy dance. Each plans to spirit her away. Mr. Page tells Slender that his daughter will appear in white; Mrs. Page tells Dr. Caius that she’ll be dressed in green. Anne has feigned to consent to both parents, but she’s written to her favorite, Fenton, saying that others will be dressed in those costumes and that she will elope with him. 

All goes according to the lovers’ plan, as inscribed within Anne’s parents’ plan. Slender makes off with the figure in white, Caius with the figure in green, Anne and Fenton with one another to a waiting vicar. Falstaff receives his just reward, after Anne, as the Fairy Queen, intones, “Evil be to him that evil thinks” (V.v.67). Here at last the right words fit the right deeds, as the children, singing “Lust is but a bloody fire,” singe the old bounder with candles. Duly mocked, Falstaff admits to having been an ass, while Ford vows never to distrust his wife again. When Pastor Evans mocks Falstaff in his heavy Welsh accent, Falstaff exclaims, “Have I liv’d to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?” (V.v.136-37). He has, indeed, and as Anne Page as the Fairy Queen has suggested, it’s the thought that makes language and action good or bad. Mr. Page promises him forgiveness at the price of further ridicule at dinner.

But what of the deceived suitors? Slender reports first, complaining that the fairy he ran off with was “a great lubberly boy” and, compounding the indignity, the son of a postmaster (V.v.176). Slender resolutely attempts to salvage a shred of dignity by averring, “If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had him” (V.v.182-83). Deceived by words and apparel, he can at least uphold the natural standard. Dr. Caius wasn’t so lucky. The French physician didn’t identify the nature of his ‘bride’ until the ceremony had finished. “I’ll raise all Windsor,” he declaims, a move that may not improve his reputation in the town (V.v.197).

As Mr. Ford understates it, “This is strange” (V.v.200). “Who hath got the right Anne?” (V.v.200). The young lady herself stops by, husband by her side, asking her parents’ pardon for her disobedience. Fenton offers the apologia for love according to the principles of nature fake-Socratic Falstaff could never learn from his fake Diotima—that is, from himself. “You would have married her most shamefully, / Where there was no proportion held in love” (V.v.208-09). In love reciprocity is the natural way, as indeed the merrily indignant wives and the jealous husband had understood, when thinking of themselves and the rogue knight. Not only nature but God is on the true lovers’ side: “Th’ offense is holy that she hath committed; / And this deceit loses the name of craft, / Of disobedience, or unduteous title, / Since therein she doth evitate and shun / A thousand irreligious cursed hours, / Which forced marriage would have brought upon her” (V.v.212-17). Even Falstaff sees this, saying to the Pages, “I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanc’d” (V.v.221-22). Both Fenton and Falstaff have spoken in better English than any Slender or Caius could have offered, and the Pages, defeated at their own game of wit against each other and against their daughter’s good, concede defeat with grace and good humor. Mr. Ford is satisfied that he will sleep tonight with Mrs. Ford.

Shakespeare’s English comedy defends the right use of the English language, the right use of convention in the service of just love, love in proportion, the reciprocal love that animates the reciprocal rule of a husband and a wife over their household. The Falstaff of the comedy differs from the Falstaff of the history plays; he is ‘lower,’ less clever, because in the histories he operates in the presence of warring kings, whom he cannot underestimate, while here he finds himself in the presence of mere gentrymen and women, whom he can and does underestimate. Commercial, no longer aristocratic, English civil society lends itself to comedy in its denizens’ readiness to make sharp deals by hawking falsely advertised merchandise. In this kind of society, where there are no lions but plenty of foxes, nature as seen in love must live by the wits of true lovers. They can triumph, achieve comedy’s happy ending, but only if their prudence in plotting counter-deceptions equals their ardor.

The Continental regimes enjoy no peace. They are always warring or preparing for war. The aristocrats are noble or, in one instance, evil, not figures of fun. The witticisms have sharper points. Love and marriage unite ruling families, not merely prosperous ones, and a failed courtship might ruin an alliance, incite a war. Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy without merriment. It ends happily, but only just. The fathers here are rulers, not merchants, and there are no mothers; the women are witty and good (more precisely, one is more witty than good, the other more good than witty), but they are daughters and nieces, and do not rule the action.

Leonato is the governor of Messina in the Kingdom of Sicily. Don Pedro is a prince of Aragon, under which kingdom Sicily thrived as a subordinate but largely self-governing regime. Aragon itself had merged with Castile in 1479, forming the nucleus of modern Spain, Tudor England’s great rival. The Spanish Armada had sailed only ten years before Shakespeare wrote the play. 

Don Pedro arrives in Messina in triumph, having won a battle as it were comically, happily, his troops having suffered few casualties. “A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers” (I.i.7-8), Leonato tells his daughter, Hero, and his niece, Beatrice—eligible young ladies who themselves might well be ‘doubled’ or married to eligible suitors. They hear that a young Florentine named Claudio has acquitted himself well in the fight, “doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion” (I.i.12). He will prove a fitting hero for Hero. As for Beatrice, she inquires about a “Signor Mountanto,” by whom she means Signor Benedick of Padua, a man she denigrates as a trencherman and lover-boy (both his name and his nickname suggests as much), leaving the audience wondering why a lady of her stature would inquire after such a nullity. But he is no nullity, the messenger from Don Pedro insists; he is a man of virtue, a brave soldier. Ah, but “You must not, sir, mistake my niece; there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them” (I.i.53-54). Beatrice immediately claims near-total victory in their last war of words, after which “four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man govern’d with one,” leaving him at best human-all-too-human, “a reasonable creature” but little more (I.i.58-59, 62-63). Serves him right, too, as he “wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block” (I.i.66-67). 

Claudio loves Hero, openly. Benedick exchanges verbal arrows with Beatrice, concluding, “I will live a bachelor” (I.i.213). Don Pedro wisely doubts it. But Claudio has no inclination to camouflage his feelings: Having looked upon Hero “with a soldier’s eye” before the war, having “had a rougher task in hand / Than to drive liking to the name of love,” upon returning, with “war-thoughts… left in their places vacant, in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is, / Saying I lik’d her ere I went to wars” (I.i.261-67). Don Pedro promises to intervene with Leonato and Hero on his friend’s behalf.

But Don Pedro’s bastard brother, Don John, resents his brother’s patronage. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace” (I.ii.22)—a sentiment anticipating Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. And like Satan, Don John knows himself: “It must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain” (I.ii.25-26), who, “if I had my liberty, I would do my liking” (I.ii.28-29). Don John is an aristocrat who defines liberty like a democrat, as doing whatever he wants. Upon hearing that his brother has negotiated the beginning of a courtship between Claudio and Hero, he vows, “If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way” (I.ii.58). He has no interest in the lovers whose happiness he would ruin, wanting only to injure his gracious brother. To him, the lovers are mere collateral damage. Unlike Falstaff, his vice is unnatural; he is not so much a bad man as an evil one who would ruin both brotherly love and chaste erotic love.

For her part, Beatrice echoes Benedick’s anti-marital vow. “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth” shall she take one as her husband (II.i.51-52). More wittily, “Adam’s sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred” (II.i.55-56)—and there is indeed a touch of brotherly-sisterly raillery in the repartee of the obviously well-matched pair.

Don John’s first plot against his brother has him lie to Claudio, telling him that Don Pedro really woos Hero for himself. When he confides his anger to Benedick, the scheme quickly dissolves, as Benedick tells Don Pedro, who announces the real result of his suit, confirmed by Leonato: “Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes; his Grace hath made the match, and all grace say Amen to it!” (II.i.271-72). So the romance seems to conclude, with joy. Don Pedro then purposes to exercise his matchmaking skills on a harder challenge posed by Benedick and Beatrice, enlisting Claudio and Hero as his allies.

But Don John won’t surrender. I will “cross this marriage” (II.ii.7), thanks to a plan thought up by his follower, Borachio. Borachio’s lover is Margaret, one of Hero’s gentlelady attendants. If Don John can arrange to have Don Pedro and Claudio near her chamber window at night, Borachio will address her as Hero, letting them ‘discover’ Hero’s infidelity. This scheme has the advantage over Don John’s abortive one, as it arranges for its victims to see and hear for themselves. 

At the same time, Don Pedro plots his own much more benevolent deception of Benedick, letting it drop that Beatrice is secretly in love with her verbal fencing partner. Don Pedro deplores the lady’s unwisdom in this, but Leonato, who’s in on the scheme, excuses his niece, saying, “O my lord, wisdom and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one that blood hath the victory” (II.iii.150-51). Claudio chimes in with the claim that Hero has told him that poor Beatrice will surely die if Benedick continues to spurn her. Don Pedro adds, “I love Benedick well; and I could wish he would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy of so good a lady” (II.iii.189-90). This combined appeal to Benedick’s real if unrealized love for Beatrice, his Christian humility combined with his aristocratic pride (sure to make him want to prove that he is indeed worthy of so good a lady), has exactly the intended effect on the young nobleman, who has been ‘secretly’ (so he imagines) listening in to the well-planned conversation. “If I do not take pity of her,” he tells himself, “I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew” (II.iii.239-40). “I will go get her picture,” that is, go see her and fall more fully in love (II.iii.240-41).

And Hero goes to work on Beatrice, with the identical strategy: a conversation with her other attendant, Ursula, fashioned for the ears of her ‘eavesdropping’ friend, whom she describes as too prideful and self-absorbed to respond to Benedick’s love, which she has duly reported. “Nature never fram’d a woman’s heart / Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice. / Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, / Misprising what they look on; and her wit / Values itself so highly that to her / All matter else seems weak.” (III.i.50-54). After they leave, Beatrice steps forward, ashamed of herself and ready to requite Benedick’s love. Later, Hero will see that she’s come down to natural equality with others of their sex, “look[ing] with your eyes as other women do” when they are in love (III.iv.81-82).

At this point, Benedick and Beatrice are well on the way to a comedic finale, but Claudio and Hero have been charted as firmly toward a tragic end as Romeo and Juliet are, by as malignant a villain. Enter, however, a band of English-like clowns who will blunder themselves into saving the day. Constable Dogberry selects a night-watch, charging them to guard Leonato’s door, “for the wedding being there tomorrow,” there must be no disturbance tonight (III.iii.84). From this post, the watchmen hear Borachio tell another of Don John’s followers how well his scheme worked, how Don Pedro and Claudio heard him courting Margaret-as-Hero, with Claudio swearing that he would go to the wedding ceremony and expose her betrayal to all the guests. The watchmen determine to report this, “the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth,” to the good Constable (III.iii.152-53). Initially, however, when Dogberry attempts to tell Leonato of the plot, he is too buffoonish to get to the point, and the governor can only tell him to go back and complete his investigation of the men he’s arrested.

At the church, Claudio accuses Hero (“She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor”); Don Pedro testifies against her (“upon my honor”); Don John condemns her vices as being beyond the “chastity” of language to be uttered in polite company; her father wishes she were dead or better, never born (IV.i.32,87,96). Under the weight of these sudden, false accusations, Hero collapses. Among the nobles, only Benedick doubts the charge; only Beatrice defends her.

But unlike the notoriously foolish, corrupt, ineffectual clergymen elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays, the Friar who was to have performed the marriage ceremony shows perception (“I have marked / A thousand blushing apparitions / To start into her face”), prefers not to exclaim or declaim, and speaks with the authority of both religion and experience without expecting any to defer to him on account of them (IV.i.158-60), while insisting that “there is some strange misprision in the princes” (IV.i.185). This gives Benedick an opening to express suspicion of “John the Bastard, / Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies” (IV.i.189), which in turn makes Leonato doubt his daughter’s accusers: ” If they wrong her honor, / The proudest of them shall well hear of it” (IV.i.191-92). That is, he will chastise even a prince of the kingdom that rules, albeit lightly, over the kingdom in which he governs one region. The same honor that inspires aristocrats to defend their countries and their allies stands in defense of their families, and if family honor is impugned civic honor will be shaken.

Harmless as a dove, but prudent as a serpent, only Friar Francis sees the way to satisfy the requirements of honor and to defend civic peace, a way that exists because human nature is what it is, a way that the Friar sees because he understands human nature and also knows how it may be brought to follow justice. “Pause awhile, / And let my counsel sway you in this case” (IV.i.200-01). Hero has fainted and her accusers have walked out; let them believe her to be dead. This alone will change “slander to remorse” (IV.i.211). Hero will be “lamented, pitied, and excus’d, / Of every hearer; for it so falls out / That we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, / Why, then we rack the value, then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours. So it will fare with Claudio.” (IV.i.216-22). Benedick puts his own honor on the line, telling Leonato that he will find a way to vindicate his daughter.

But first he must deal with his enraged fiancée, who demands that he kill Claudio. This is her love test, set for the man she’d accused of waywardness at the beginning of the play. In her ferocity, she wishes she were a man so that she could “eat his heart in the marketplace”—a use of the marketplace that would not occur to the English at Windsor. Although he tries to calm her, she extracts a vow to challenge the calumniator. Again, tragedy threatens.

Fortunately, the forces of the English common law, remarkably at play in Messina, are still on the case. Constable Dogberry calls his officers to order, inquiring, “Is our whole dissembly appear’d?” (IV.ii.2). Dissembling schemers Borachio and his accomplice, Conrade, are indeed present, and the interrogation of the accused and their accusers wends its way eccentrically toward establishing the facts of the case. They report back to the governor’s house in time to interrupt Benedick, who has duly challenged Claudio, then departed. Borachio confesses. But Leonato continues his own plot, telling Claudio that although innocent Hero is dead, he has a niece who looks just like her, who stands to inherit not only his own estate but the estate of his brother, Antonio. Claudio happily accepts the substitute wife (it is a comedy, after all), and the wedding is set for the morrow.

As for Benedick, he must return to a conversation with a lady who expects him to return with his shield or on it. He returns with it, his shield being his wit.  After telling her that he has indeed challenged Claudio, who will either answer it or be deemed a coward, he distracts her from her anger by reinitiating their badinage, asking her to say “for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?” (V.ii.52-53). Why, “for all of them together; which maintain’d so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them” (V.ii.54-56)—an anticipation of the kind of arguments Publius will unfold in Federalist 51. This will be a marriage of separate and balanced powers.

“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” Benedick remarks (V.ii.63). Hardly so on your side, the maid replies, since the wise man rarely praises himself by calling himself wise. “An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that liv’d in the time of good neighbors; if a man do not erect in this time his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps” (V.ii.66-69). Benedick is an aristocrat who understands the modern world, where humility no longer wins honor because neighbors no longer know or love you. For once Beatrice can bring no ready counter-witticism to mind. When Ursula interrupts with the news that Hero was falsely accused, Don Pedro and Claudio abused, and that Don John has fled the country, they hurry to the governor’s house.

There, Hero unmasks herself, as Leonato explains, “she died…but whiles her slander lived” (V.iii.66); her slander now dead, her honor vindicated thanks to the Friar’s wise ruse, she has risen. She will marry Claudio. And after a bit more verbal sparring, which they begin by telling one another that they love one another “no more than reason” (V.iii.75,78), Benedick and Beatrice are kindly exposed by the newlyweds, who produce letters from each confessing love for the other. “A miracle!” Benedick pronounces it. “Here’s our own hands against our hearts” (V.iii.91). He silences any more less-than-beatific chatter by kissing his bride-to-be; the man Beatrice had derided as Signor Mountanto delivers a sermon from the mount in loving action, winning their war of words as surely as he had won the war which preceded the play’s beginning. That makes two miracles, uniting two couples; Much Ado About Nothing is as close to a divine comedy as Shakespeare would ever write. 

When Leonato tries to delay a celebratory dance, Benedick makes bold to countermand his order, telling him to get a wife, as “there is no staff more reverend than one tipp’d with horn,” a merry joke about cuckoldry in the wake of one wedding and in prospect of his own (V.iii.117-19). A messenger then brings word that Don John has been captured and will return to Messina tomorrow, under armed guard. It isn’t Governor Leonato but Benedick who concludes, “Think not on him till tomorrow. I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers.” (V.iii.121-23).

And why not? He and Beatrice were the first among the aristocrats to suspect Don John’s perfidy, Hero’s innocence, and the others’ error. Although decent Claudio and Hero are the heirs to the fortune of the Governor and his brother, Benedick and Beatrice will be the real rulers of the city, as the wittiest and wisest aristocrats in town. A victory is twice itself when the victor brings home full number, Leonato had intoned. He has just been shown how his aphorism might be enacted.

In his English comedy, Shakespeare shows how a decadent aristocracy in a peaceful, commercial society can be well supplanted by the wit of the gentry class or upper ‘bourgeoisie’—crucially, by the wit of women, wives whose virtues can now rule because commerce has supplanted war. But on the continent, wars will continue. In Shakespeare’s continental comedy, the witty woman needs to find her match in an equally witty, or even wittier man. And even they will need the assistance of a wise, politic churchman who knows how to moderate the tempers of still-indispensable warrior-aristocrats while awaiting the ascendance of the better angels of their nature. In commercial England, a tavern host serves as peacemaker, the parson as a good-natured foreign language-bender.

In England, English words prove unreliable in dealings commercial and marital; actions speak louder. On the continent, words might prove unreliable, lying, but also whetstones of wit; actions bespeak love (a kiss to silence a too-contentious mouth) and harmony (a betrothal dance). In England, love requires the wit of deception to defend itself against the low, farcical eroticism commerce encourages. On the continent, love requires the wit of perception to defend itself against malignant scheming and excessive aristocratic spiritedness. In England, wit and prudence defend love against base assaults and surmises; on the continent, they defend love by contriving ‘miracles’.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edmund Spenser: A View of the Present State of Ireland: Discoursed by Way of a Dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenaeus. In William P. Trent, ed.: The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1903.

Edmund Curtis: A History of Ireland. London: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1950 [1936].

 

“Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!”

Eudoxus

 

In his elegant and judicious introduction to Spenser’s works, William P. Trent declares that “no idealist, no sensitive lover of ethereal beauty, no reader endowed with an ear trained to delight in the subtlest melodies and most exquisite harmonies, no dreamer enamored of the stately and romantic past, no willing prober of allegories and symbols, and, above all, no soul in love with essential purity can possibly remain indifferent to the appeal made by the poet and, to a considerable degree, by the man.” For any such reader, “to know Spenser at all thoroughly is to love him deeply” as the author of poems “gentle, pure, and lovely, rather than sublime.”

“But,” Trent continues, “idealists, symbolists, ethereal natures, and readers trained to enjoy the subtlest poetic harmonies are, and always have been, rare. This is a work-a-day world actuated by a rather overpowering sense of the real.” In the modern world, he writes “the great national dramas killed allegory.” Trent wrote those words with the First World War little more than a decade distant. And with still worse to come, the taste for epic poetry along the lines of The Faerie Queene would lie even more deeply buried under the rubble left by tyrannic cruelty and egalitarian vulgarity.

Had Spenser no sense of the real, though? He saw war. In his prose if not his poetry he unhesitatingly urged harsh measures against the enemies of his people, his queen, and his family. So much so, that Spenser’s literary admirers seem not quite to know what to make of his dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which one character recommends the use of famine to break Irish resistance to English imperial rule, citing Machiavelli’s Discourses as an authoritative guide to mastering rebels. Spenser had to gather his wife and four children to flee an advancing Irish army, which burned his County Cork home down to the first floor. If an ‘idealist,’ he felt all the fury of a disillusioned one. Or would a closer reading of his poetry reveal toughness beneath the ethereality?

The Spensers had been living on the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond, in the manor and castle of Kilcolm. How London-raised Edmund Spenser, son of a clothier, scholarship boy at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, found himself living in southern Ireland itself requires a mind-clearing draft of real Irish history, as served by Professor Curtis.

Once a people centered in modern-day Austria but driven off by the Romans, the Celts arrived in Ireland around 350 BC. Spenser would have known the later Celtish claim, dating from medieval times, that they descended from the fierce Scythians, who established a nomadic empire in Central Asia in ancient times. Such claims notwithstanding, the Celts, with their “warlike, aristocratic, and masterful temper,” conquered the existing rulers, whose ancestors themselves had conquered peoples who’d arrived before them. The Gaels, as this branch of the Celts called themselves, practiced Druidism; the Roman authors Spenser would have read claimed that the Druids or priestly class practiced human sacrifice. The Druids shared authority with an aristocratic warrior class (in Caesar, the equites). In addition, the Fili—poet/seers who cast spells—served as “hereditary keepers of the ancestral lore and learning of Ireland as expressed in the Irish language.” Finally, the Gaels developed a set of laws, not written down until the eighth century AD, eventually called the Brehon laws, after the Brehons or judge-arbitrators who presided over cases under it.

Gaelic rule did not go uncontested, as chiefs of non-Gaelic peoples brought Gauls in as military allies. The strategy failed, but many Gauls stayed, settled, and became absorbed into the Irish population. Charles de Gaulle traced some of his ancestors to this population, and later English dealings with Ireland may have added to his list of grievances against perfidious Albion. For although the Romans never ruled Ireland, the Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in Britain in the fifth century AD, would eventually make the attempt.

The Anglo-Saxons may have been brought in as military guardians against the Celts, who were feared raiders in the region, poorly guarded since the end of Roman rule there, in 410. A young Christian born only about twenty years earlier, Patricius, son of Calpurnius, had been seized by Celtic raiders and served as a slave there—tending sheep, David-like, before escaping first to Britain and then to Gaul, where he studied for the priesthood at Auxerre. Dreaming that the voices of the Irish were calling on him to return and save them from Druidism, he received authorization from the Church of Gaul (then a more powerful element of the Roman Catholic Church than Rome itself) to launch an evangelizing mission. Consecrated as a bishop, in 432 the Church sent him on the mission which would indeed begin the end of Druidism and earn him recognition as a saint of the Church.

Culturally, Gaelic Ireland thus became a blend of Fili tradition and Roman-Church learning, and remained so. The Norse conquerors who ruled for nearly two centuries left no lasting political or cultural mark. Eventually called the “Ostmen,” they became “in spirit and habit almost Irish.” Of much more political significance were the Normans, who arrived in 1166, one hundred years after they had conquered Britain and a dozen years since they had lost control of the English throne to the Plantagenets. Perhaps wanting to give this “aggressive baronial race” something to do, and following a precedent set by his Norman maternal grandfather, Henry I, Plantagenet king Henry II had already given them liberty to attack Wales. There they mixed with the native Celts and gained a knowledge of Celtic customs useful in dealing with the Irish. With superior fortifications and military equipage, they quickly established a substantial foothold in eastern and southeastern Ireland.  In October 1171 Henry II landed at Waterford, on Ireland’s southern coast, giving the first charter for Norman-English rule to Dublin, on the east coast. He appointed a viceroy and assumed control of land-titles, per English law. Staying only six months, he left the Norman-English “gentleman buccaneers” in de facto control of the territories they had seized.

This established the fundamental political dynamics that persisted, in one permutation after another, throughout Spenser’s lifetime. The Norman-English, also called the Anglo-Irish and eventually the “Old English,” struggled for control with some of the Celts while intermarrying with others; they also struggled with the English monarchy whenever it attempted to exert greater control over its colonies. The Celts fought with one another, too.

The viceroy or royal Deputy served as supreme judge, political ruler, and commander of the feudal levy in the Dublin government, whose territory was called ‘the Pale,’ a term referring to a fence made of stakes and meaning a boundary. Assisting the viceroy was an exchequer, a chancellor, a treasury, and a judiciary that followed English common law. The Magna Carta was extended to Ireland in 1217. Thus the Anglo-Irish enjoyed English rights. The Crown reserved the power of legislation to itself, consistent with the English understanding of the monarch as the ‘defender of the realm’ and ruler of imperial holdings. Locally, the English section established the shire form of government. But the native Irish there were reduced to the status of feudal villeins—essentially serfs with no rights under the English common law but no protection under the Brehon law, which the common law replaced.

Independent of and sharply contrasting with the Pale, northern Ireland was ruled by Gaelic kings who observed the Brehon law. They maintained their sovereignty with the aid of Scottish mercenaries, the formidable ‘galloglasses,” capable of fighting even the warlike Normans. The Anglo-Irish called these kingdoms the “land of war.” In the central and southern areas, a compromise was worked out. There weren’t enough English settlers to rule there, but the king nonetheless claimed sovereignty. He devised an arrangement whereby Irish chieftains would rule by royal grant. Called the “march lands” or the “feudal Liberties,” these areas served as fields of conflict for centuries.

As a result of these political arrangements, the Irish remained incapable of unifying against their conquerors but often could defend themselves locally. The Norman-English settlers also quarreled among themselves while at the same time intermarrying with the Irish and adopting many of the customs of the country—becoming increasingly Anglo-Irish. By the 1330s, Edward III had grown sufficiently alarmed that he abridged Anglo-Irish rights, provoking the formation of the first “Patriot party,” men unified not on the basis of Irish nationalism but by shared antipathy to political control centralized in Westminster. Edward assigned his second son, Lionel of Clarence, to settle the Irish question. Lionel called the Parliament of Kilkenny in 1366; to prevent Anglo-Irish “degeneracy,” he forced through a set of laws requiring the Anglo-Irish to maintain English language, laws, usages, even fashions, instead of adapting those of the “Irish enemies.” To counteract the charm of the Irish Fili, the new laws prohibited the employment of Irish minstrels, poets, and story-tellers as entertainers in English households. Violations of these laws would result in forfeit of lands—controlled, it will be recalled, by the monarch. Irish living within the Pale were excluded from all Anglican cathedrals and abbeys. This legislation succeeded in reinforcing ‘Englishness’ in the Pale, while effectively giving up on efforts to extend it in the other territories. Further, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw England distracted by more urgent matters than the governance of Ireland. Wars in France and the civil War of the Roses, which began in 1455, enabled the Irish to make political gains in some fifty to sixty provincial regions, where Irish barons, bards, and Brehons prevailed.

During the English civil war, the Irish supported the Yorkist challenge to the Lancastrian dynasty. Retreating from England, the Yorkists found in Ireland a springboard for counterattacks. In the provinces west of the Pale, Anglo-Irish lords were ascendant, eventually dominated by Thomas, Earl of Kildare. Gerald, the eighth earl, called Garret More by the Irish, was the most impressive of the line. Edward IV attempted to rein him in by sending Leonard, Lord Grey, to replace him, but Lord Grey failed.

So did the Plantagenets. When the Tudor king Henry VII ascended to the throne in 1485, replacing Richard III and ending the War of the Roses, England had its first genuinely ‘modern’ king—that is, a determined state-builder or ‘centralizer’ of English political authority. But in Ireland, the Earl of Kildare backed the anti-Tudor pretender, Edward VI, sending an expedition of Anglo-Irish and German mercenaries into England in 1487. They were crushed, and Henry had Kildare removed from power in 1494. He appointed Sir Edward Poynings as the new viceroy, tasked with “bridling the Irish Parliament,” as Curtis puts it, and with ending home rule by Yorkist aristocrats in Dublin. In doing so, Poynings secured the Pale. Recalling Poynings in 1496, Henry then reversed course and effectively co-opted Kildare, making him his Deputy in Ireland—a Deputy now unconstrained, but also unaided, by the parliament in Dublin and mindful that Henry could ‘unmake’ him as soon as ‘make’ him. Henry used Kildare this way for the next seventeen years. Dissatisfied with continued Anglo-Irish and Irish recalcitrance, Henry finally ruined the House of Kildare in the 1530s, reappointing Grey as his Lord Deputy. Grey called the “Reformation Parliament” in 1536, which attainted the Kildare family and revived the long-unenforced bans against Anglo-Irish marriage, employment of Irish minstrels and poets by the Anglo-Irish, and Irish styles of dress. To these regime changes to the Anglo-Irish way of life, the centralizing state added structural regime changes: reform of the Irish Church along more strictly Anglican lines; the end of aristocratic Home Rule; suppression of Brehon law; the territorial extension of the Pale. Henry had himself installed as the king of Ireland. Treaties with many of the Irish and Anglo-Irish lords allowed them to keep their lordships at the price of accepting tenure in office under the Crown. Henry’s successor, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, who might have been expected to be more sympathetic to Irish and Anglo-Irish claims, in fact extended Henry’s policy by confiscating lands in the midland section of the island, replacing Irish landlords with English.

This, along with the church reforms, led to a series of rebellions in the next half-century. It had been “hoped on the English side that the great lords and chiefs would gradually introduce and enforce in their own countries the English law, religion, and language.” But by the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1558 it had become clear “what a determined opposition the old Gaelic and Brehon order was capable of, even among the Old English.” The poets and bards had persisted in their role as “the chief inspirers of the native tradition,” maintaining “the haughty pride and warlike spirit of their patrons by their encomiums in verse.” The Brehons and chroniclers “kept up the native law and all its records.” Old-regime loyalists upheld an ethos in which the finest human type was held to be aristocrats who, Curtis writes “still lived in the heroic age, in the atmosphere of battle and foray, and who were expected by their poets, historians, and followers to be warriors rather than statesmen.” With the modernizing young queen on both the English and the Irish thrones, “the old Gaelic world, which had existed for two thousand years, was now to clash with the modern world as represented by the Tudor government.”

The Reformation Parliament in the 1560s imposed the Book of Common Prayer on church services; established the monarch as the head of the Church of Ireland; and confiscated Catholic cathedrals and churches for use by the Church of England. Curtis summarizes the rebels’ motives in the phrase, “religion, land, and local lordship.” In religion, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was now underway, with Jesuits sharpening the issues with their astute use of dialectic and Puritans answering with their astute use of doctrine. This promised international support for the rebels. The land issue centered on the insecurity of land-titles held by Anglo-Irish aristocrats in Leinster and Munster, where they were threatened by the introduction of English-born planters. And the political issue centered on threats to the feudalism introduced by the Normans and to the even older Irish chieftanships. The modern state tolerated neither.

Born in 1552, Spenser saw reports of the first rebellions against Elizabeth. In 1566 she appointed Sir Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland. He enforced Westminster policy vigorously from Dublin. The First Desmond Revolt—named for the Earldom of Desmond, its locus—began in 1569. The Fitzgerald family, which held the Earldom, expected military assistance from Philip II of Spain. Preoccupied with his own rebels in Spanish-ruled Netherlands and with the expenses of ruling his extensive New-World colonies, Philip could offer very little to the Geraldines. Even with his own poorly-disciplined troops carrying the fight, the Earl managed to sustain the rebellion for five years before giving it up.

In 1579, twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Spenser was introduced to the Earl of Leicester by his young friend and fellow-poet, Philip Sidney, son of the now-former Lord Deputy. Spenser became his secretary, but soon found a new patron: Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who was appointed as Lord Deputy the following year, bringing Spenser with him as his aide.

By then the Second Desmond War had erupted. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, commanding forces that included papal troops, this was (as the rebels put it) “a war for the Catholic religion and against a tyrant who refuses to hear Christ speaking by his Vicar”—namely, Pope Pius V, who had excommunicated Elizabeth a decade earlier. Henry Sidney, now on the Privy Council, supported stern repression. Arthur warred against the rebels unmercifully but ineffectively, and was recalled to face criticism in 1582. Among the decisions criticized was his conduct of the siege of Smerwick, a town west of Dingle on the southwestern shore of the island; Spanish and Italian soldiers had surrendered but were nonetheless massacred by Arthur’s troops. Yet Spenser never ceased to admire him, calling him in a set of verses of dedication to The Faerie Queene “Most Noble Lord, the pillar of my life, / And Patron of my Muses pupillage.” Writing his book from the “savage soyle” of Ireland, Spenser defended the Tudor policy of Anglicization in Ireland, and spared no pity on those who resisted it.

The rebellion ended in 1583 with the Crown forces triumphant. Beginning in 1586 English colonists were installed on the Munster Plantation in County Cork. Spenser was among them; his influential friend, Sir Walter Raleigh (who introduced him to the Queen a few years later) amassed some 40,000 acres; Spenser had to be content with a mere 3,000, residing in the confiscated manor and castle of the Earl of Desmond. He also won appointment as the Clerk of the Office of Munster.

Catholic resistance to Anglican rule hardly ended with the Desmond Wars. Most spectacularly, the Spanish Armada was wrecked only two years later; had the expedition succeeded, the lives of the English settlers would have been forfeit. And in 1594 the Tyrone War, also called the Nine-Year War, resulted in the aforementioned destruction of Spenser’s home.

The provinces of Tyrone and Ulster are nowhere near Munster. They are located to the northwest and northeast, respectively, of the Pale. In Ulster the old Gaelic regime had continued, and there “Red” Hugh O’Neill initiated the conflict, soon joined by his brother-in-law, Hugh O’Neill. They won several victories over the English, but with no artillery or siege weapons they failed to take Dublin. Hoping for Spanish aid, they nonetheless intended to prolong the war until the now-elderly Elizabeth died, in the hope of extracting a better settlement from her successor, James VI of Scotland. Enraged by the early defeats, Elizabeth appointed Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy as Royal Deputy. In Curtis’s words, Mountjoy “decided that the war could only be ended by a general famine” brought on by burning crops—a policy Spenser’s patron, Arthur, had already tried. A war of containment and attrition followed. Mountjoy used this induced scarcity as a prelude to buying off many commanders and their vassals. Modest Spanish military assistance did come, but it was ineffective, and Hugh O’Neill surrendered in March 1603, four years after Spenser’s death. When James ascended to the English throne in the same year as James I he inherited a largely pacified Ireland.

Published in 1596, Spenser’s dialogue on Ireland may or may not have had some influence on the militarily successful English policy. It wasn’t published until 1633, but it circulated in manuscript shortly after Spenser completed it. Spenser also prepared a brief report to the Queen, giving her the gist of his argument. What is certain is that it provides arguments in favor of harsh means for achieving the end of regime change in Ireland, whereby it might be more firmly fixed in the Empire.

The interlocutors are Eudoxus, which means ‘Good Opinion,’ and Irenaeus, which means ‘Peace.’ Irenaeus has just returned from Ireland, reporting on its “good and commodious soil.” Eudoxus begins with a statement of wonder: “I wonder that no course is taken for the turning thereof to good uses, and reducing of that savage nation to better government and civility.” Irenaeus says that “good plots” have been devised for doing those things, but “they say”—he never identifies them—that all such plots or plans fail for four reasons, two ‘pagan’ and two Christian. They say the “genius” of the soil interferes with good plots; a “genius” is a presiding spirit, good or evil, determining the character of a person, place, or thing. It is present from the beginning—hence the root it shares with ‘generation—and is ineradicable. “They” also say the influence of the stars interferes; in Renaissance astrology, “genius” itself may be determined by the alignment of the stars at the time of origin. More pious persons say that God has not yet appointed the time of Ireland’s reformation, or that God may be reserving Ireland “in this unquiet state” to use it as a scourge of England.

Mr. Good Opinion knows bad opinions when he hears them. He dismisses them as “vain conceits of simple men” who “judge things by their effects, and not by their causes.” The real causes of failure must be unsound counsels and plans or else “faintness in following and effecting” them. “Through wisdom, [Ireland] may be mastered and subdued,” “since the poet sayeth, ‘The wise man shall rule even over the stars,’ much more over the earth.” [1] Eudoxus’ inclination to wonder, and his desire to get to the real causes of things marks him as more than merely a man of good opinion but as a political philosopher, or a would-be political philosopher, or perhaps a political man who seeks practical wisdom. He asks Irenaeus to enumerate the evils he’s observed there, as a “wise physician” diagnoses the disease before he treats the patient. This reinforces the impression that Eudoxus guides himself by the light of nature, not revelation ‘ancient’ or ‘modern.’

Irenaeus deplores “the infinite number” of evils in Ireland, which he likens to Pandora’s box. But the worst, “most ancient and long-grown” of these are the laws, the customs, and the religion.

How can laws, intended for the good of the commonwealth, be a source of evil? Eudoxus asks. Irenaeus replies that it is with laws as it is with a physician’s remedies: a given regimen may be good in itself but bad in the circumstances; or it may have been good in the original circumstance, bad when that circumstance changed. What is more, if medical or legal prescriptions are not consistently followed, evils will result.

By laws, Eudoxus asks, do you mean English common law or statutes enacted by Parliament? Both: the common law, brought over by William the Conqueror, “fitted well with the state of England then being” because the English at that time were a peaceable people tyrannized by their king, eager for change. William and the Norman laws were looked upon as improvements by this law-abiding population. “But with Ireland it is far otherwise, for it is a nation ever acquainted with wars, though but amongst themselves, and in their own kind of military discipline, trained up over their youths.” Indeed, “they scarcely know the name of law,” having “kept their own law,” the Brehon Law, which Irenaeus judges to be scarcely worthy of the name of law at all. Like the English common law, it is unwritten and traditional, but unlike the common law it is “in many things repugning quite both to God and man’s law.” For example, in criminal cases the Brehon does not so much judge as arbitrate between the parties to determine compensation. Even murder cases are settled with payment. More, the Brehon is appointed and controlled by the local lord, and can be depended upon to “adjudgeth for the most part the better share unto his lord.”

These practices continue despite the Irish acknowledgment of Henry VIII’s sovereignty and of English law. “What boots it to break a colt,” Irenaeus asks, “and to let him straight run loose at random?” The current generation disavows any agreement made by their fathers, since they Irish are not bound by oaths sworn by any previous generation. And indeed they are not so bound, under their own laws of succession, which are based not on inheritance but on tanistry: In Ireland, after a lord or captain dies his people elect a new ruler, usually a brother or cousin of the deceased, not one of his children. What they do respect and adhere to are “all the former ancient customs of the country.” This includes the rule that property not be ceded to strangers, “especially the English.” Tanistry ensures that they will have adult rulers, better defenders of the land than boy-kings or girl-queens dominated by their regents.

Eudoxus asks, how can this be remedied? Mr. Peace invokes Cicero: “all is the conqueror’s as Tully to Brutus saith.” Henry VIII did not sufficiently force the recognition of the right of conquest on the Irish, although the Irish parliament gave lip service to obedience. But perhaps, Eudoxus suggests, “it seemed better under that noble King to bring them by their own accord unto his obedience, and to plant a peaceable government among them, than by such violent means to keep them under.” And surely his daughter Elizabeth can rectify matters.

Irenaeus doesn’t think regime change comes so readily. “It is no so easy now that things have grown into a habit and have their certain course, to change the channel, and turn the stream another way, for they now have a colorable pretense to withstand such Innovations, having accepted other laws and rules already.” Ireland is no blank slate. Further, the William the Conqueror stayed “in person to overlook the Magistrates, and to overawe the subjects with the terror of his sword and the countenance of his Majesty,” whereas in Ireland neither the Plantagenet Henries nor the Tudor Henries did any such thing for a sustained period. Further, and crucially, “laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and customs of the people, to whom they are meant, and not to be imposed unto them according to the simple rule of right; for else… instead of good they may work ill, and pervert Justice into extreme Injustice. For he who would transfer the laws of the Lacedaemonians to the people of Athens should find a great absurdity and inconvenience.” The Lacedaemonians were a military people, like the Irish, although better disciplined.

When the Irish grow weary of war “they sue for grace, til they have gotten new breath and recovered their strength again.” For this reason, “it is vain to speak of planting laws, and plotting of policies, til they are altogether subdued.” But were they not subdued by Henry II? Yes, but the Irish then retreated “into the deserts and mountains,” beyond the reach of the laws, as the English could not do in 1066. The Anglo-Norman settlers stayed under the law and enjoyed its benefits among themselves, but when the Irish returned, desperate for food and shelter, they were placed under vassalage by the foreign aristocrats, “who scarcely vouchsafed to impart unto them, the benefit of those laws, under which themselves lived, but every one made his will and commandment a law unto his own vassal.” The law of England “was never properly applied unto the Irish nation, as by a purposed plot of government”; the aristocrats evaded it. Then, when the War of the Roses began, the Anglo-Irish left to fight. The Irish, seeing the countryside “so dispeopled and weakened,” repossessed many of their former lands. And so Ireland has gone ever since—sporadic English attempts to rule interspersed with Irish rebellions in times of English weakness or distraction.

Satisfied with this account of the efficient causes of disorder in Ireland, Eudoxus requests an analysis of the problems of adapting English common law to the circumstances there. Irenaeus sets down as a first principle that laws must “take their first beginning” from “the manners of the people and the abuses of the country” for which they are “invented.” The aim of the laws should be justice, by which he means the prevention of “evils” and the safety of the commonwealth. So, for example, under ordinary circumstances it is wrong to punish thoughts—only words or acts—except when “devis[ing] or purpos[ing] the death of the king.” Regicide threatens the safety of the commonwealth itself, and must be punished capitally even if detected at the planning stage. “So that jus politicum, though it be not of itself just, yet by application, or rather necessity, it is made just; and this only respect maketh all laws just.” English common law, though invented in Normandy, fit the character of the English people; it does not fit the Irish people.

For example, English common law provides for jury trials, with juries “chosen out of the honestest and most substantial freeholders.” But a jury of Irish freeholders will always decide in favor of the Irishman against the Englishman, even against the Queen herself. In the latter cases, the Crown loses revenues. In their dealings with the English generally, the Irish “are most willfully bent,” never hesitating to perjure themselves or to cheat, a “cautelous and wily-headed” people, especially when armed with a smattering of legal knowledge. And if (as Eudoxus) suggests, English magistrates appoint English juries, then the Irishman will “complain he hath no justice.” And if, per impossibile, this could be done without stoking further resentment, witnesses called from “the base Irish people will be as deceitful as the verdicts” of Irish juries—”so little feeling have they of God, or of their own souls’ good.”

Would “heavy laws and penalties” against perverse jurors reform the courts? No, Irenaeus answers: “When a people are inclined to any vice, or have no touch of conscience, nor sense of their evil doings, it is bootless to think to restrain them by any penalties or fear of punishment; but either the occasion is to be taken away, or a more understanding of the right, and shame of the fault is to be imprinted.” For if the lawgiver had prohibited theft among the Lacedemonians or drunkenness among the Flemish, “there should have been few Lacedemonians then left, and fewer Flemings.” Other Irish acts of exploitation, abuse, and evasion of the common law include clever ways of dodging responsibility for the receipt of stolen property. Even outright rebels can avoid confiscation of their lands by the Crown if they convey those lands into a trust, prior to rebelling. They can enjoy their profits from the comfort of exile in some country ruled by “her Majesty’s professed enemies.” Generally, in Ireland and indeed in England, the great lords have too much power and can too readily defy the authority of the monarchy in their struggles to shift the regime toward de facto aristocracy.

In addition to being antiquated, many statute laws, too, are misapplied because the judges have too much leeway in their interpretation. “It is dangerous to leave the sense of the law unto the reason or will of the judges, who are men and may be miscarried by affections, and many other means. But the laws ought to be like unto stony tables, plain steadfast, and immovable.” In Ireland the rule of law is a hard principle to maintain, as when a lord is charged with treason he is required to “bring forth” his kindred in order to be “justified”; he thus assembles a small army of men who serve under the accused traitor, “who may lead them to what he will.” Eudoxus shudders, “In very deed, Irenaeus, it is very dangerous, especially seeing the disposition of all these people is not always inclinable to the best.”

At Eudoxus’ request, Irenaeus turns to a consideration of Irish customs, the Irish way of life, which underlies Irish law. Three peoples have contributed their customs to the Gaelic people: Scythians, Gauls, and English. This comes as no surprise, as “no nation now in Christendom, nor much farther, but is mingled and compounded with others.” Ethnic purity is a myth. And this is a good thing because God in His providence brought northern European nations to the south, where they encountered Christianity.

The interlocutors discuss the difficulty of tracing specific influences by consulting tradition. There can be no “certain hold of any antiquity which is received by tradition, since all men be liars, and may lie when they will.” For example, it is well-established that a people arrived in Ireland from Spain, but they might have been Gauls, Spaniards, Goths, or Moors. Of these peoples, however, the Gauls were the ones who had an alphabet, so he considers them the likely immigrants.

Such mingling can be good or bad, depending on the various sets of customs and the way they mix. The English colonizers have now “degenerated and grown almost Irish.” Eudoxus wonders, again: “What hear I? And is it possible that an Englishman, brought up naturally in such sweet civility as England affords, can find such liking in that barbarous rudeness, that he should forget his own nature, and forgo his own nation?” Yes, as a matter of fact, thanks to “the first evil ordinance of that Commonwealth,” by which Irenaeus evidently means Ireland, not England. But before going any further on that theme, he analyzes the evil traits which now characterize the Irish nation.

Scythians contributed seven. Like their Scythian ancestors, the Irish live in waste spaces, pasturing cattle, which leads to licentiousness, a life beyond the reach of the law. They wear mantles, allowing an outlaw “to cover himself from the wrath of heaven, from the offense of the earth and from the sight of men.” The mantle serves rebels and thieves alike, concealing weapons and booty. Prostitutes disguise themselves and swaddle their bastard children in the mantle, and even housewives can “lie and sleep in it, or… lowse themselves in the sunshine,” evading work. They wear their hair long, enabling themselves to mask their identities. “Uncivil and Scythian-like,” they howl in battle and indulge in “immoderate wailings” at funerals; this “Irish hubbabowe” gives vent to their savage passions. In their battle they go forth in a “confused order of march, in heaps, without any order or array.” Their barbaric religious customs include swearing by their swords and drinking bowls of blood to solemnize their warrior-bonds before battle. And the Irish, like the Scythians, claim that they turn into wolves once a year. The fact that they make such a claim bespeaks a longing for subhuman ferocity in predation.

The Goths contributed the customs of revering and supporting bards and drinking the blood of enemies. As for the English, their decent customs have been perverted by “liberty and ill example.” Making “private wars against each other,” English lords recruit allies among the Irish themselves; this corrupts the English and emboldens the Irish. The English “are now grown to be almost as lewd as the Irish,” except for the ones who live in the Pale. And this is no wonder, as “proud hearts do oftentimes (like wanton colts) kick at their mothers,” including their mother-country. Alliance often entails intermarriage, too. “Great houses there be of the old English of Ireland, which through licentious conversing with the Irish, or marrying, or fostering them, or lack of good nurture, or other such unhappy occasions, have degenerated from their ancient dignity, and are now grown as Irish as Ohanlan’s breech,” which is very Irish indeed.

Eudoxus can only gasp, “Where the lords and chief men wax so barbarous and bastardlike, what shall be hoped of the peasants, and base people?” Irenaeus brings him back to a more sober view. “It is but even the other day since England grew to be civil.” In Henry II’s day, English customs themselves were “very rude and barbarous.” That is to say that the English colonies in Ireland were themselves ill-founded.

For example, the English in Ireland abused their own language by speaking “Irish.” Eudoxus finds this strange, inasmuch as “it hath been ever the use of the conquerors to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his,” as the Romans did. [2] Irenaeus explains this by recalling the English habit of intermarrying with the Irish and/or giving their children to Irish nurses. “The child that sucketh the milk of the nurse, must of necessity learn his first speech of her, the which being the first that is enured to his tongue, is ever after most pleasing to him,” even if he learns English later on. And not only speech: Anglo-Irish children also learn Irish “manners and conditions,” for “small children be like apes, which will affect and imitate what they see done afore them, especially of their nurses whom they love so well, they moreover draw unto themselves, together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses; for the mind followeth much the temperature of the body; and also the words are the image of the mind, so as, they proceeding from the mind, the mind must needs be affected with the words.” An Irish heart will come from Irish speech, “for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaketh.” The most intimate of infant experiences proves the path to a different regime.

So does the most intimate of adult experiences. Intermarriage with a foreign people is “a dangerous thing in all commonwealths,” as “the simplest sense” perceives. “How can such matching” of English with the Irish “but bring forth and evil race, seeing that commonly the child taketh most of his nature of the mother.” By mothers children “are first framed and fashioned,” and what they learn at her knee will be “hardly ever after forgot.”

Mr. Peace leaves no doubt regarding what habits of heart will be learned from the Irish. They are the habits of warriors. Although Eudoxus thinks that Irenaeus’ description of Irish garb, which reflects Irish spiritedness, takes them away from their discussion of customs, it is not so. If Irish customs underlie all Irish law, warfare underlies all Irish customs. They are Scythians and Goths first, civilized English only superficially if at all.

Thanks to the Goths, they have bards to urge them on. Irenaeus distinguishes bards from poets. They share with poets the task of “set[ting] forth praises and dispraises of men in their poems and rhymes.” “None dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through their offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.” They mold public opinion. Mr. Good Opinion asks how they differ from poets. They differ, not in their art but in their use of their art. Poets “do labor to better the manners of men, and through the sweet bait of their numbers, to steal into young spirit a desire of honor and virtue.” Poets “are worthy of great respect.” Not so “these Irish bards.” “Far from instructing young men in moral discipline,” it is “they themselves [who] do more deserve to be sharply disciplined.” They praise not “the doings of good men for the ornaments of their poems, but whom soever they find to be the most licentious of life, most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedience an rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rhymes, him they praise to the people, and to young men make an example to follow.” They excoriate the English and encourage the “lewd liberty” of the Irish. “Evil things are decked out and suborned with the gay attire of goodly words, may easily deceive and carry away the affection of a young mind,” leading it to honor its own passions. As a result, Irish youth are “brought up without awe of parent, without precepts of masters, without fear of offense, not being directed, or employed in any course of life, which may carry them to virtue.” With bardic encouragement, a boy “waxeth most insolent and half mad with the love of himself, and his own lewd deeds; for such a youth, “his music was not the harp, or the lays of love, but the cries of people, and clashing of arms.”

Irish political customs also conduce to disorder. The Irish hold popular assemblies on hills, where disputes between townships are settled. This practice originated not among Scythians or Goths but among the Saxons, but in Ireland it is abused by “the scum of base people,” who “confer of what they list,” inflaming those desires as they do so. As a result, Englishmen who have ventured to attend such meetings have been murdered. Local democracy practiced by “a people so evil-minded” must be restrained. Eudoxus, who harbors republican sentiments, regrets the proposal but Irenaeus firmly insists that the meetings be abolished. The Irish are not ready for self-government; they need a stronger hand, and one not their own. Their very militancy makes them ungovernable: In this “country of war” with armies “scatter[red] around the country,” soldiers routinely requisition food and lodging from civilians. This provokes “great detestation of soldiers” among the common folk, which issues “into hatred of the very government, which draweth upon them such evils.” If soldiers are not seen as protectors but as plunderers, government itself will be distrusted, whoever attempts to govern. This too feeds licentiousness.

The last custom Irenaeus describes is economic. Landlords and freeholders rent farms to tenants on a year-to-year basis, or even during pleasure. Nor will tenants take land for longer periods. As a result, tenants fear landlords’ peremptory demands for both horses and humans, not knowing when their landlord will requisition either or both. The landlord, expecting the departure of his tenant at any time, “hover[s] in expectation of new worlds”—new tenants, new relations. With this unstable combination of liberty and arbitrary rule, tenants never invest in the land, which for them is here today, gone tomorrow. Their homes are “rather swine-steads than houses.” This here today, gone tomorrow attitude toward property injures not only local economies but the commonwealth as a whole.

On religion, his third set of Irish evils, Irenaeus will have “little to say.” The Irish profess Catholicism, but they are “so blindly and brutally informed (for the most part) as that you would rather think them Atheists or Infidels.” The problem stems from “the first institution and planting of religion” in Ireland. By then, religion had been “generally corrupted by [the] popish trumpery” of the priests. “What other could they learn from them, than such trash as was taught them and drink of that cup of fornication with which the purple harlot had then made all nations drunken?” Irenaeus asks, a touch rhetorically. Priests, pope, and people “have all erred and gone out of the way together.” So far, no reform has been possible, again because Ireland has been continually at war. “Instructions in religion needeth quiet times, and ere we seek to settle a sound discipline in the clergy, we must purchase peace unto the laity; for it is an ill time to preach amongst swords.” That is, civil or regime reform and stability must precede ecclesiastical reform.

It isn’t that Irenaeus lauds the Church of England. Simony, greed, “fleshly incontinence,” and sloth infect that church, too. It’s simply that the Roman Church is even worse. Merely replacing English with Irish clergy won’t help, as Irish prejudice against the English will prevent any real reform.

Given these legal, conventional, and religious evils, what is to be done? Irenaeus first highlights actions that haven’t worked. Certain military captains will not prosecute war vigorously, worrying that if they win they will be out of work. Some of the Crown’s appointed governors also do little, hoping to prolong their appointments. Other governors will conceal problems, passing them on to their successor. “The governors usually are envious one of another’s greater glory.” As a result, there is no peace. “The longer that government thus continueth, in the worse course will that realm be; for it is all in vain that they now strive and endeavor by fair means and peaceable plots to redress the same, without first removing all those inconveniences and new framing (as it were in the forge) all that is worn out of fashion.” The Irish will continue to resist, and resist successfully, any reform because they fear expropriation of their property, as happened when the Norman English first occupied their island, so long as dilatory half-measures prevail.

“Therefore, the reformation must now be the strength of a greater power,” for “it is vain to prescribe laws, where no man cares to keep them, nor fears the danger of breaking them.” The sword must come first. “All these evils must first be cut away with a strong hand, before any good can be planted,” as a tree must be pruned in order to “bring forth any good fruit.” Mr. Peace does not shrink from the task: “Where no other remedy may be found, nor no hope of recovery had, there must needs this violent means be used.”

He hastens to say that he does not recommend what we now call genocide. “Far be it from me that I should ever think so desperately, or wish so uncharitably.” It is “not the people which are evil.” And those among them who are evil “by good ordinances and government may be made good; but the evil that is of itself evil will never become good.”

Irenaeus then offers a detailed and comprehensive plan for regime change. First, England must send an army adequate to put down the ongoing rebellion. This means a force of 10,000 foot soldiers and 1,000 cavalry. It will take them about eighteen months to do it. These men must be well provisioned (as they are not now), so that they won’t need to requisition supplies from civilians. Military efforts should focus on the strongest rebel force, the one led by the Earl of Tyrone. Because the Irish are guerrilla fighters, it is useless to pursue them. Instead, set up four encampments in Ulster. From these encampments, gather intelligence on the enemy’s movements and drive him from one English stronghold to another. Do it in winter, when there will be less cover, more hardship. Offer amnesty to all those who surrender in twenty days from the beginning of the campaign.

After this, the remaining rebels will be the hardened and incorrigible ones, men upon whom no compassion need be wasted. Above all, lay waste to their food supply—cattle and grain. This worked in Munster (where Spenser had served), and Irenaeus doesn’t spare Eudoxus a picture of the result. After eighteen months, the rebels there “brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; the spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they if they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insofar as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” “In all that war, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought”—presumably by their refusal to surrender sooner. Eudoxus can only say, “It is a wonder that you tell and more to be wondered how it should so shortly come to pass.”

No need to wonder, Irenaeus rejoins. The battle-ready Irish have no secure property. Accustomed to live off the land, they readily take from one another, up to and including devouring one another. As for the English destruction of livestock and crops, “this is very necessary to be done for the soon finishing of the war.”

Eudoxus sees a problem. When Arthur, Lord Grey imposed exactly this policy, the Queen’s compassion was aroused and those around her claimed that “he regarded not the life of her subjects no more than dogs.” Irenaeus agrees that “the Good Lord [was] blotted with the name of a bloody man,” when he was in fact a “gentle, affable, loving, and temperate” man acting under “necessity.” At Smerwick he made no promises to the Spaniards, who were not “lawful enemies”—having admitted to being adventurers, sent by neither the Spanish king nor the pope—and therefore not protected by the law of nations. As for his dealings with the rebellious lords, “he spared not the heads and principals of any mischievous practice or rebellion, but showed sharp judgment on them, chiefly for example’s sake, and that all the meaner sort, which also then were generally affected with that evil, might be terror thereof be reclaimed and saved, if it might be possible.” [3]

Irenaeus insists that before this harsh course of action be initiated, “it must be foreseen and assured, that after once entering into this course of reformation, there be afterwards no remorse or drawing back for the sigh of any such rueful objects as must thereupon follow, nor for compassion of their calamities, seeing that by no other means it is possible to recure them, and that these are not of will, but of very urgent necessity.” The property of those executed for their crimes should go to their heirs, not to the Queen. In this Irenaeus takes a thought from Machiavelli, he observes that men feel the sting of losing their patrimony more sharply than that of losing their father. Perhaps to strengthen Elizabeth’s resolution, Irenaeus recalls that she had raised up the chief rebel, the Earl of Tyrone, who now takes advantage of her kindness. And if any might question the right of England to rule Ireland in the first place, Ireland belongs to England by right of conquest, a feature of the law of nations—the right the Anglo-Irish themselves invoke against the Crown, when they resist its authority. [4] Lands owned by rebels who are not executed will be confiscated and added to Crown lands.

Very well then, Irenaeus, once the war is over, what do you propose to do with the victorious troops? Will they not be dangerous if they return to England, or hire themselves out as mercenaries for foreign powers? Irenaeus would maintain 6000 of the troops in garrisons on Irish soil; the remainder should be given farms there. Some will be assigned duty in Munster, the likely point of any Spanish attack. Few if any will return to England.

The enemy must be disarmed and all but the leaders should be given land to farm. Other Irish commoners can be made tenant farmers on English-owned plantations, so that they can be watched, with the garrisons on call if any serious trouble arises. The plantation owners will pay for the soldiers’ upkeep, needing them for protection; this will relieve the Queen of any burden.  Indeed, such a standing army will prove less expensive than sending troops over to Ireland every seven years or so, to quell the latest rebellion. This simply reprises the Roman policies when they conquered England. The lack of such policies explain why Henry II’s conquest didn’t issue in civil peace.

Further, each garrison would have a town associated with it, a commercial town populated by additional English settlers. With civil peace assured, increased prosperity for Ireland, and increased revenues for the Crown will surely follow.

Irenaeus disapproves of locating the Lord Deputy’s office in Dublin, within the Pale, on the western shore. He should rule from Athy, “the main-mast of the ship,” located in the Earldom of Kildare along the River Barrow.  Kildare is the section directly west of the Pale, and therefore a strategic borderland where Irish and Anglo-Irish influences meet—an inflection point, as it were, and also the place where the rebel Fitzgeralds live. From there, the Lord Deputy should act on the general guidelines established by the Queen’s council of ministers, but he should be supervised, and subject to review by a new officer, the Lord President, a man trusted by the Queen for his justice and equity. However, within that framework of safeguards, he should be given much greater discretion to act with energy and rapidity as a genuine executive of the laws, not needing to consult with his superiors before making a move. In recurring to this point near the end of the dialogue, Irenaeus will add, that “this (I remember) is worthily observed by Machiavel in his discourses upon Livy, where he commendeth the manner of the Roman government, in giving absolute power to all their Consuls and Governors, which if they abused, they should afterwards dearly answer it: and the contrary thereof he reprehendeth in the States of Venice, and Florence, and many other principalities of Italy who used to limit their chief officers so straightly, as that thereby oftentimes they have lost such happy occasions as they would never come into again.”

After a detailed discussion of specific actions to be taken to pacify the several most rebellious regions, Irenaeus concludes with his recommendations to remedy the three main “evils” he had outlined earlier. Regarding law, at this point “we cannot now apply laws fit for the people, as in the first institution of commonwealths it ought to be,” and as he had wished it had been done by Henry II and his colleagues. With English common law longstanding, “we will apply the people, and it them to the laws.” This can become possible only because many more English will settle in Ireland and participate in the Irish parliament, and because in the aftermath of the war the Irish will be more submissive. Irenaeus also recommends that the Irish upper house be packed with English aristocrats. Since the Irish nobles fomented the rebellion, not the people, they deserve to be shouldered aside, at least to some extent, in the Irish House of Lords.

Irish submissiveness can be prolonged, and civility enhanced, if the Crown divides the country into small, easily policed subsections. This will rid the country of the bandits and will also facilitate a regularized system of tithing. The precedent here is what King Alfred did in England when it resembled Ireland in its lawlessness, with “every corner having its Robin Hood in it.” With officials appointed by the Crown and answerable to it, these English-style shires will ensure that revenues are “withdrawn from [the] lords, and subjected to [the] Prince.” “By this the people are broken into man small parts, like little streams, that they cannot easily come together into one head,” “adhering unto great men.” In all this one readily sees the lineaments of a modern state, wherein a subordinated and co-opted aristocracy finds itself replaced by agents of the central government.

Irenaeus is confident that these new legal and institutional arrangements will foster reform of the Anglo-Irish aristocrats who exploit their tenants, cheat Her Majesty out of her rightful revenues, and become too Irish. The Old English “need a sharper reformation than the very Irish, for they are much more stubborn, and disobedient to law and government than the Irish be, and more malicious to the English that daily are sent over.” This elicits a shudder from sober Eudoxus: “Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” Irenaeus demurs, a bit: “No times have been without bad men…. Neither is it the nature of the country to alter men’s manners, but the bad minds of them, who having been brought up at home under a straight full of duty and obedience, being always restrained by sharp penalties from lewd behavior, so soon as they come thither, where they see laws more slackly tended, and the hard restraint which they were used unto now slacked, they grow more loose and careless of their duty; and as it is the nature of all men to love liberty, so they become flat libertines, and fall to all licentiousness, more boldly daring to disobey the law, through the presumption of favor and friendship, than any Irish dare.” With reformed laws, some of the dangers of English and Irish living together will be diminished, especially if they both must pay the same tithes.

As his final legal stroke, Irenaeus would ban the use of Irish names. New family names should be chosen, a surname description of the man’s trade, or “some quality of his body or mind,” or the name of his dwelling place. No more “Oes and Macks”—O’Brian (for example) meaning the grandson of Brian, McDonald meaning the grandson of Donald. The Irish way of naming was introduced for “the strengthening of the Irish” by recalling family lineages. Prohibiting the practice will help to blend the English and Irish populations rightly, so that each Irishman “shall in short time quite forget his Irish nation.”

As for customs, what Eudoxus calls the “manner of life,” Irenaeus intends to tame Irish warlikeness. Each non-freeholder shall have a trade. All trades are either manual, intellectual, or mixed. First and foremost, Irish commoners should become agriculturists, as agriculture is “the enemy of war,” replacing aggression with patience, contempt for property with respect for it. Husbandry is “the nurse of thrift, and the daughter of industry and labor.” In this it contrasts with herding, which conduces to habits of command, to marshaling masses of the obedient, and to long periods of idle dreaming which stoke ambitions of conquest—all consonant with a warlike people.

For others, a liberal education is indispensable, especially for “the sons of lords.” “That wretched realm of Ireland wanteth the most principal [trade], that is, the intellectual; therefore, in seeking to reform her state, it is especially to be looked into.” Liberal education can teach the arts of “civil conversation”—precisely what glory-loving would-be warrior scions of the Irish aristocracy need, if they are to participate in a civil not military society.

As a last-resort discouragement to the old way of life, and to give teeth to the new one, the Queen should appoint Provost Marshalls to patrol the countryside with a set of deputies. These men will round up stragglers and runaways, “terrify[ing] the idle rogues,” and wielding power of life and death over them.

Eudoxus calls liberal education second only to “the knowledge and fear of God.” Irenaeus has a few thoughts on religion. In noticeable contrast to the civil order, religious orthodoxy “is not sought forcibly to be impressed into [the Irish] with terror and sharp penalties, as now is the manner, but rather delivered and intimated with mildness and gentleness, so as it may not be hated afore it is understood, and [its] Professors despised and rejected.” Nor should Englishmen take the forefront. “Discreet ministers of their own countrymen” should be “sent among” the Irish, so as not further to associate Protestantism with the English. Irenaeus esteems the examples of St. Patrick and St. Columba, who proved that converting the Irish to Christianity was not impossible, even if they left the job woefully incomplete. He criticizes Anglican ministers for lack of energy in their missionary work, unlike their rivals, the Jesuits. He recommends repairing churches, in order to draw the people into them voluntarily.

Returning to matters secular, Irenaeus would build not only churches but better transportation infrastructure—roads and bridges which would support bigger markets and more national unity. He wants to see more market towns, with a ban on black markets supplemented by the branding of livestock, which will discourage both cattle-rustling and livestock smuggling.

He ends by adjuring his countrymen to remove legal corruption respecting public offices. The Lord Deputy must not sell offices “for money,” nor sell pardons, shares of bishoprics, or commercial licenses. The same prohibition goes for cronyism.

Spenser himself succinctly summarized his thoughts for the benefit of the Queen in “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” dated October 1598, a year before he died. First, “there can be no conformity of government where there is no conformity of religion”; second, “there can be no sound agreement between two equal countries” within the same empire; third, “there can be no assurance of peace where the worst sort are stronger.”

Of these precepts, the matter of religious conformity would be more effectively solved by religious toleration, or better, religious rights so long as the practices claimed by the religious do not violate civil order. That is (and to use an anachronism) the liberalism Spenser himself exhibits in his intention to shift the Irish, and especially Irish and Anglo-Irish aristocrats, away from war and toward peaceful civil and commercial ways of life would be supplemented by religious freedom. In this, he is seriously handicapped by his lack of a theory of natural right which might undergird the practice of religious liberty.

The matter of empire would be solved by the end of genuine empires and, in the case of what was soon to become Great Britain, the establishment of the British Commonwealth. As for the claim that peace cannot prevail when the evil predominate, that stands, despite the efforts of Bernard Mandeville and other ultra-Machiavellian political thinkers and practitioners. Like the later liberals, Spenser would dilute the evil influences within all human hearts by carefully-designed political institutions.

In considering regime change, Spenser enjoys the advantage of knowing what a regime is, in all its dimensions. The purposes of a good regime may be seen in the names of his interlocutors, “Peace” and “Good Opinion.” He clearly identifies who will rule in Ireland. He sets down the ruling structures to be established by law. And he understands the importance of custom, the way of life of a people. He sees how all these regime elements relate to each other.

Americans have undertaken regime change for themselves, and for nations they have defeated in war, on several occasions. Like Spenser, they have found that lasting regime change occurs only if the ruled consent to it (as did the Amerindian nations the Washington administration reformed) or, alternatively, if the ruled are first devastated and then supervised by the conqueror (as in Germany and Japan, after the Second World War). Half-measures induced by humanitarian critics prove ineffective and ultimately inhumane.

 

Notes

1. The poet cited is Jeun de Meun in The Romance of the Rose. He is following Thomas Aquinas, in contradistinction to William Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in which not the wise man but the prayerful, pious man rules the stars by the grace of God.
2. Not quite so: one must recall the Trojan-Latin settlement, described in the Aeneid.
3. In his 1598 report to Elizabeth, “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” Spenser took up this matter directly with Her Majesty. “Great force must be the instrument and famine must be the means, for till Ireland be famished it can not be subdued.” (See The Poetical Works, p. 849.)
4. The right of conquest proceeds from the mercy the conqueror has shown the conquered: he has allowed him to live. Obviously, this can apply only if the conqueror fought a just war in the first place. The English likely could have claimed that their war of conquest was just because the Irish had raided English shores repeatedly, for many years.

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.

 

He fascinated three writers I know well: Tocqueville, de Gaulle, and Malraux. Tocqueville was his nephew and junior contemporary; quite apart from Chateaubriand’s stature as France’s literary lion (and sometime cabinet minister), Chateaubriand did impressionistically what Tocqueville would do systematically: consider the transition from the aristocratic civil societies of medieval and early modern Europe to the democratic civil societies that were to replace them. Born in 1768 to an aristocratic family in Brittany, under France’s Old Regime, he supported the republican revolution of 1789 but soon left for the United States, where he might see what a recently established republic looked like, and where he could meet less-than-perfect facsimiles of Rousseau’s “noble savages.” Famously, the young aristocrat Tocqueville would follow some of his uncle’s steps, making his own voyage to America, some fifty years later. De Gaulle read the Memoirs soon after his first retirement from public life in 1946, having already written on the ever-cycling French regimes of Chateaubriand’s lifetime in his France and Her Army. France at Chateaubriand’s birth was ruled by the Bourbon Dynasty, which held on until the founding of the First Republic in 1789. Although the Republic ended formally in 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte had himself named emperor, as Napoleon I, in fact it saw several regime changes: Robespierre’s Reign of Terror in 1793; the triumvirate of rulers constituting the Directory, two years later; and the elevation of Bonaparte to the position of First Consul in 1799. In his solitude at the family home at Colombey-les-Deux Églises, de Gaulle was meditating on how French republicanism might be stabilized; some twelve years later, he would found a republic ballasted by a strong executive—designed not so much for a Bonaparte as for a Washington, whom Chateaubriand claimed to have met.

In the introduction to this translation, historian Anka Muhlstein quotes Chateaubriand as describing himself as “Bourboniste by honor, royalist by reason, and republican by inclination.” The simple facts of his life show why this was so. He left France for America shortly after the Revolution (which he supported, as a man of liberty, by inclination), searching in vain for the Northwest Passage. There was none to be discovered, but he witnessed something more valuable: the young republic under its new constitution. But the execution of Louis XVI brought him back to France, where he fought with the royalist army under the Prince of Condé and was severely wounded during the Royalists’ unsuccessful siege at Thionville. Liberty was one thing, the irrationality of regicide another. After his recovery (which he turned to good account by reading Paradise Lost, that account of civil war), he fled to England, returning during the Consulate regime of 1799-1804. By then, he had returned to the Catholicism of his youth, and his publication of The Genius of Christianity in 1802 not only turned many French intellectuals away from the Enlightenment (whose charms had worn thin) and back to the Church. Already cultivating French Catholics, having signed the Concordat with Pius VII the previous year, Napoleon deemed Chateaubriand useful for the continuation of that strategy. Not for long: After Napoleon more or less caused his cousin, the duc d’Enghien, to be executed for alleged treason, Chateaubriand left France again; having read both the Roman historians and Racine, he had gone so far as to liken Napoleon to Nero, making himself unwelcome. The 1815 Bourbon Restoration regime brought him back to Paris, where his political career reached its highest mark. Louis XVIII made him Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1824, but a rival soon had him fired, and he moved into the opposition. He thus honored the Bourbons in return for the honors the king had bestowed on him. The year 1830 brought the July Revolution and the regime of the Orléanist Monarchy; he retired to private life, having little use for the ‘Citizen King’ whose bourgeois ways grated on Chateaubriand’s unfailingly aristocratic sensibilities. As he lay dying in 1848, the February Revolution brought in Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the short-lived Second Republic, which would end in 1851 with the crowning of Louis as Napoleon III, founder of the Second Empire. All of this would have engaged de Gaulle’s sympathies, intent as he was on founding a French republic that would endure and return to greatness by (among other things) resisting the by then well-established embourgeoisement of the French. (“True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all,” Chateaubriand had written.) De Gaulle too had lived through several ‘lives,’ several ways of life or regimes.

As for Malraux, what is his own ‘anti-memoir,’ The Mirror of Limbo, if not a reprise of Chateaubriand’s kind of autobiography, mixing indisputable fact with invention, wide-ranging travel with a sensibility that is unmistakably French; refusing to concede anything to le quotidien, fleeing ennui (one is tempted to say, at all costs); and searching not for the base in men but for the nobility Chateaubriand saw threatened by murderous rule by terror, Napoleonic tyranny, and bourgeois money-grubbing? Malraux had seen human dignity threatened first by fascist tyranny, then by the Stalinist tyranny which controlled the French Communist Party. He fought the first in Spain, then in France itself, the second at de Gaulle’s side, after the Second World War. Malraux also would have seen in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave a man as obsessed as he with the questions the fact of death poses to life, whether in the hazards of adventure, on the battlefields of revolution and war, or in the unanticipatedly peaceful demise disease imposes. And (no small thing) they shared a love of cats. Chateaubriand told a friend he loved the cat “for his independence and almost ingrate character;” for his solitary way of life, consisting of “obey[ing] when he feels like it”; for “the indifference with which he descends from salons to his native gutters”; for his wise habit of going “to sleep to get a better view.” His wife, the translator tells us, went so far as to nickname him “Le Chat.” As for Malraux, in Les Temps des Limbes cats symbolize the spirit of the farfelu —Malraux’s word for the unaccountable, the whimsical, all that escapes human control or comprehension.

Beyond the grave: Chateaubriand intended his book to be published many years after his death, although his eager publisher saw it into print by 1851. More than that, however, he understood himself to have witnessed the death of himself in life many times, as the aristocratic way of life of his childhood perished, to be followed by the multiple ways of life, imposed by politics and by his own circumstances. Memories from beyond the grave suggest life beyond it; and indeed, “My cradle has something of the grave, my grave something of the cradle.” He accentuates this point by noting not only when and where remembered events occurred, but when and where he wrote about them. So, for example, in recounting his childhood in Saint-Malo and Cambourg, he remarks that he is writing at a country home in La Vallée-aux-Loups or in the town of Dieppe, having been ordered out of Paris by Bonaparte in 1812. As he looks back at a part of his life now interred, he remarks the cradle in which he has currently been laid—not always lovingly, if one restricts one’s view to human intentions.

By the time he made his last revisions to the Memoirs, he had survived many such lives—again the precursor of Malraux, who chose a Buddhist proverb for the frontispiece of his own book: “The elephant is the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives. He remains motionless for long periods of time, meditating thereon.” For his frontispiece Chateaubriand invoked Job, lamenting the necessity of fleeing terrors inflicted by God. These choices also show the differences between the two men: Chateaubriand, fully engaged in the Bible, at times courting the reader’s pity; Malraux, fully engaged in what he called tragic humanism, at times courting the reader’s admiration. Given both Catholic and Rousseauian influences, Chateaubriand writes much on his personal as well as his public life, beginning with his family; he often sits in the Confessional. Malraux, who rejected confessional biography, offers lightly fictionalized accounts of his grandfather and father; one would scarcely know he was married three times and had children. Hence the title of the first volume, Antimémoires, and his rhetorical question, “Why should I care about that which matters only to me?”

Alex Andriesse has translated the first twelve books the Mémoires, with the final twelve reserved for the next volume. This volume brings Chateaubriand to the turn of the nineteenth century. The first three chapters recount his childhood. He writes them from internal exile in The Valley of the Wolves, wondering how it looked in 1694, when Voltaire was born in a village there—”this hillside where, in 1807, the author of The Genius of Christianity would come to reside.” A place which, like the rest of France, now (in 1811), “the man who gives France power over the world today only to trample her underfoot, this man whose genius I admire and whose despotism I abhor,” who “encircles me with his tyranny as with a second solitude,” has left him with the freedom to remember the past: “I remain free in everything that preceded his glory.” “These pages shall be a funerary shrine raised to the light of my memories.” Those great materialists, Voltaire (linked to Chateaubriand by a coincidence of place) and Napoleon (linked to Chateaubriand by a coincidence of time, having been born only twenty days before him) serve as Chateaubriand’s arch-rivals—the one in thought, the other in politics.

“I was born a gentleman,” by which he means one of noble birth, a ‘minor’ aristocrat. “I have retained that very firm love of liberty which belongs principally to the aristocracy whose last hour has struck,” as Tocqueville would acknowledge. “Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the last.” He was born into an aristocratic family which retained marks of the first age, some of the advantages of the second, and not a little of the third. He intends “to give some account of my father’s ruling passion, a passion which formed the core drama of my youth”: “his passion for the family name.” As befitted the condition of European aristocracy in the 1770s, Father’s “usual state of being was a profound sadness that deepened with age and a silence broken only by fits of anger”—haughty with his neighboring peers, “harsh with his vassals in Combourg,” “taciturn, despotic, and menacing at home.” “To see him was to fear him.”

A woman of “great wit and a prodigious imagination,” his mother’s passions for literature and history (Fénelon, Racine, Madame de Sévigné, Xenophon’s Cyrus) complemented her “elegant manners and lively disposition,” in contrast with “my father’s rigidity and calm.” “Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband,” but remained devoted to him “compensat[ing] herself with a sort of noisy sadness interspersed with sighs.” To her “I owe the consolation of my life, since it was through her that I took my faith: I gathered the Christian truths that came from her lips.” “In the realm of devotion, my mother was an angel.”

Such a model, too, was his native city of Saint-Malo. “As early as the reign of Henri IV [it] distinguished itself by its devotion and loyalty to France,” surviving English naval bombardments and supporting the Bourbon monarchs throughout their many wars. The loyalty that is patriotism extended as well to religion. A Catholic priest has testified, “The sun has never shone upon a place more steadfast and unwavering in its loyalty to the true faith than Brittany.” But loyalty may not find its just reward. Recalling the mastiffs that once served as the nighttime guardians of the town, only to be incarcerated and killed when they “snap[ped] unthinkingly at the legs of a gentleman,” Chateaubriand thinks of himself and aphorizes: “Dogs, like men, are punished for their loyalty.”

By this family, in this place, “I was abandoned to an idle childhood,” with “the town urchins” as “my closest friends.” Hence his republican inclinations. Many of these boys were sons of Breton sailors, men for whom “religion and danger were continually face to face.” “No sooner was I born than I heard talk of death,” as church bells tolled, calling “Christians to pray for the soul of one of their drowned neighbors.” “Nearly every year a boat sank before my very eyes,” and “I scampered along the beaches [as] the sea rolled the corpses of foreign sailors at my feet.” When once he lamented how these men had died far from their homes, his mother told him, as Monica told Augustine, “Nothing is far from God.”

“My education had been entrusted to Providence, and Providence did not spare me her lessons.” It was an education that owed nothing to ‘Voltaire,’ the Enlightenment; “it was adopted by my parents for no fixed reason and as a natural result of their temperaments,” not their ideas, let alone an rationalist, ideational system which they surely did not have. “What is certain that it made my ideas less similar to those of other men,” that “it imprinted my feelings with a melancholy stamp” born of “habitual suffering [during] the years of weakness, recklessness, and joy.” “The truth is that no system of education is in itself preferable to any other system” because “God does well whatever He does.” He calls his first time at school an “internment.”

The family left Saint-Malo for Combourg a few years later, and Chateaubriand was enrolled at the Collège de Dol, his mother having “never given up her desire that I be given a classical education.” His republican inclination came out on its playing fields, “I made no effort to lead others, but neither would I be led: I was unfit to be a tyrant or a slave, and so I have remained.” Soon an accomplished schoolboy Latinist, he became tormented upon reading an unexpurgated text of Horace’s poetry, “suspecting that there were secrets incomprehensible to a boy my age, an existence different from mine, pleasures beyond my childish games, charms of an unknown nature in a sex that I knew only through my mother and my sisters.” At the same time, Catholicism taught him that such as-yet incomprehensible sins were damnable. Virgil’s Dido and Eucharis only added to his ambivalence. “If I have since depicted, with some veracity, the workings of the human heart commingled with Christian synderesis, I am convinced that I owe my successes to chance, which introduced me to those two inimical dominions at one and the same time.” Add to these perceptions and sentiments the moral virtue of his aristocratic lineage; at school, too, “my sense of honor was born,” that “exaltation of the soul that keeps the heart incorruptible in a world of corruption.”

He sought refuge in Catholicism, solemnized in his first communion, the “religious ceremony [which] among young Christians took the place of the taking of the toga virilis practiced among the Romans.” And after the confession that followed “I no longer looked the same to my teachers and my schoolmates. I walked with a light step, my head held high, my face radiant, in all the triumph of repentance.” This religious spirit merged with honor: “I understood then the courage of the martyrs. At that moment, I could have borne witness to Christ on the rack or in the face of a lion.”

He considered joining the navy, and as he saw a French squadron returning to port, “Nothing has ever given me a loftier idea of the human spirit.” “No doubt I would have enjoyed naval service if my independent spirit had not rendered me unfit for service of any kind,” given “my deep inability to obey.” He returned home to the unexpectedly mild disappointment of his father and to the joy of his mother and his favorite sister, Lucile. He next determined on a life in the Church, attending the Collège de Dinon, where he added Hebrew to Latin and Greek to his collection of languages. But he would eventually decide against taking the cloth.

Sexual passion, guilt, and spiritual exaltation, mixed together in a household ruled by a father tormented by the condition of a dying aristocracy, brought him to a spiritual crisis. “I had no fixed time for either rising or for breakfasting: I was reputed to be studying until noon, but most of the time I did nothing.” His only companion, his sister Lucile, joined him in translating “the saddest and loveliest passages of Job and Lucretius.” “Lucile’s thoughts were indistinguishable from feelings; and they emerged with difficulty from her soul: but once she had succeeded in expressing them, there was nothing more sublime.” “On the moors of Caledonia,” she “would have been one of Walter Scott’s mystic women, gifted with second sight,” but in Combourg “she was merely a recluse favored with beauty, genius, and misfortune.” And she was afflicted “with Rousseau’s mania, though without his pride: she believed that everyone was conspiring against her.”

“I was a mystery to myself.” Unable to approach real women, “I composed myself a woman from all the women I had ever seen” in fact or in fiction. “All-ignorant and all-knowing, simultaneously virgin and lover, innocent Eve and fallen Eve, my enchantress nourished my madness with a mixture of mystery and passion.” “Pygmalion was less in love with his statue” than he with his fantasy, “my sylph,” which he made himself worthy of winning also in fantasy, playing the lyre like Apollo, triumphing in battle like Mars. “On emerging from these dreams and finding myself again a poor dark little Breton, without fame, or beauty, or talents, a young man who would draw nobody’s gaze, who would go unnoticed, whom no woman would ever love, despair took hold of me.” “This delirium lasted two whole years, during which my spiritual faculties reached the highest pitch of exaltation” and then, “struck by my folly… I would wallow in my desolation.” At one point, as “the last glimmer of reason fled from me,” he attempted to shoot himself. The gun didn’t fire.

At last his body gave out. The family doctor “examined me attentively, ordered the appropriate remedies, and declared it absolutely necessary that I be torn away from my current mode of life.” His elder brother could have obtained a church position for him, but his “sense of honor”—which, like Socrates’ daimon, has always given to know “at once what to avoid”—told him that he was too weak to acquire virtues and “too frank” to “conceal my vices.” He proposed “a harebrained scheme”: he would go to Canada to “clear forests,” or perhaps to Asia to serve in the army of an Indian prince. Father’s patience evaporated: “You must renounce your follies” and join the army. “I am old and sick. I am not long for this world. Conduct yourself as a good man should, and never dishonor your name”—which was to say, his name. Father had his own sylph: The dream to see “his name reestablished and the fortune of his house renewed,” which would soon be exposed as “yet another chimera of that time,” destroyed by the Revolution. As for the son, “It was in the woods of Combourg that I became what I am, that I began to feel the first onslaught of that ennui which I have dragged with me through all my days, and that sadness which has been both my torment and my bliss.”

In Books IV and V Chateaubriand recounts his experiences during the first years of the Revolution. He writes these chapters in 1821, in Berlin, where he was serving as Louis XVIII’s ambassador. “Another man has appeared to me”—six years after the final defeat of Napoleon—”a political man: I do not much care for him.” He scoffs at the late Frederick the Great’s philosophic pretensions. “I made a study of the false Julian in his false Athens,” whose esteem for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, with their contempt for religion, registers only “an ostentatious belief in nothingness.” At Frederick’s summer palace, Sans Souci, “only one thing held my attention: the hands of a clock stopped at the minute that Frederick expired.” But in reality “the hours never suspend their flight; it is not man who stops time, but time that stops man.” “Down in the crypt of the Protestant church, immediately beneath the pulpit of the defrocked schismatic,” Martin Luther, “I saw the tomb of the sophist of the crown.” Like Hegel, whose language about ‘the spirit of the epoch’ sometimes gets into the Mémoires (albeit without any of the rationalist dialectic) Chateaubriand evidently judges the Reformation to have prepared the ground for the Enlightenment. Unlike Hegel, he regards this as neither necessary nor proper.

“With my father’s death, the first act of my life came to a close,” almost simultaneously with the Old Regime. “There is a new world, a new era.” “Henceforth I would be masterless and enjoy my own fortune; but such liberty frightened me. What would I do with it?” After the inheritance was divided, his family “disbanded like birds flying from the paternal nest”—a sign of the patriarchic and aristocratic family enfeebled. Now a cavalry captain, still painfully awkward in any social situation, he was alarmed when his brother inveigled an invitation for him to be presented at Court to Louis XVI. “I had to set off for Versailles more dead than alive.” “He has seen nothing who has not seen the pomp of Versailles, even after the dismissal of the King’s old entourage: the spirit of Louis XIV was still there.” “One must remember the former prestige of royalty to understand the importance of a presentation in those days,” as the “debutant” was scrutinized with cautious curiosity: Might he become “a favorite of the King?” “He was respected for the future servitude with which he might be honored.” The fact that this king was “six years from the scaffold,” the irony that his painfully self-conscious guest would someday be present at the exhumation of the remains of both king and queen, leads Chateaubriand not only to the traditional reflection on “the vanity of human destinies” but also to the thought that Louis XVI “might have answered his judges as Christ answered” his own judges: “Many good works I have shown you: for which of these works do you stone me?”

Telling his brother that he intended to return to his regiment in Brittany, “I felt, in a confused way, that I was superior to what I had seen. I came away with an unconquerable disgust for the Court, and this disgust, or rather this contempt, which I have never been able to conceal, will prevent me from succeeding, or it will bring about my downfall at the high point of my career.” It would be interesting to know if this prediction was written in 1821, or when Chateaubriand revised this portion of the manuscript in 1846, when his political career was long finished. But such grasping after facts is the wrong way to read the Memoirs. Chateaubriand has already announced his disdain for Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. He wants to capture the spirit of himself, of his contemporaries, of his many lives and his country’s many ways of life, over time. He has no aspiration to be an annalist.

His own spirit began to change. Despite his contempt for the Court, and “despite my natural tastes, something in me was rebelling against obscurity and imploring me to emerge from the shadows.” “The instinct of genius and beauty were pushing Lucile toward a wider stage,” too. By 1789 he was back in Paris, where he met some of the leading men of letters of those days, whom he sketches in ascending order of talent, descending order of virtue. The first was Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales, a kindly old man, “very cordially mediocre,” who had “amassed a fine library of his own works, which he lent out to strangers and which no one in Paris ever read.” De Sales made an annual intellectual pilgrimage to Germany, where “he would replenish his ideas.” “On the pedestal of his marble bust, he had with his own two hands traced the following inscription, borrowed from a bust of Buffon: GOD, MAN, NATURE, HE HAS EXPLAINED THEM ALL.” Chateaubriand rather doubts that, but “Might it not be that, so long as we live, we are under the sway of an illusion similar to that of Delisle de Sales? I would wager that some author who is reading this sentence believes himself a writer of genius and is in fact nothing but a cretin.” Thus does the Viscount invite us all to self-reflection.

Fellow Breton Pierre-Louis Ginguené was working on a multi-volume history of Italian literature and had already published “a stylish enough piece of verse” titled La Confession de Zulmé, which had garnered him a minor government appointment. “His origins were humble, but the more he attached himself to well-known men, the more arrogant he became.” When the Revolution began, he had “advance knowledge” of a massacre to take place at a Carmelite convent and cynically took no action to prevent it, eying preferment under the new regime—which he in fact received. “Tumbling from mediocrity into importance, from importance into foolishness, and from foolishness to ridiculousness, he ended his days as a distinguished literary critic.”

“But without question, the most bilious man of letters I knew in Paris at that time was Nicolas Chamfort,” ever-resentful of his common birth and keening to see the monarchy’s ruin. “No one can deny that he had wit and talent, but wit and talent of the kind that does not teach posterity.” (In this Chateaubriand’s judgment failed him, as Chamfort remains in the French literary pantheon for his Maximes et pensées.) No armchair revolutionary,
Chamfort numbered among those who stormed the Bastille. During the Terror, “furious to find inequalities of rank persisting in this world of sorrows and tears, condemned to be no more than a vilain in the feudality of the executioners, he tried to kill himself to escape from the magnificos of crime. He failed.” (This isn’t quite right, either; Chamford lingered for some time but did die of complications from his horrific self-inflicted gunshot wounds.) Never one to be tempted by pity for irresponsible men, Chateaubriand prefers to be the one who finishes off Chamfort, garroting him with a mordant Christian aphorism of his own: “Death laughs at those who summon it and confuse it with nothingness.”

“When I reread most of the eighteenth-century writers today, I am puzzled by both the ruckus they raised and by my former admiration of them.” He now finds “something exhausted, passé, pallid, lifeless, and cold in these writers who were the delight of my youth,” even the greatest among them. There was something false in their “mania for Hellenizing and Latinizing our language,” a tendency Rabelais had already seen and mocked. “Our revolutionaries, great Greeks by nature, have obliged our shopkeepers and our peasants to learn hectares, hectoliters, kilometer, millimeters, and decagrams.” The Enlightenment universalized a brittle and spurious classicism; what began in pretension ended led to terror and ended in tyranny.

“In those days, everything was deranged in minds and in morals: it was a symptom of the revolution to come.” (In his sermons one priest “steered clear of the name of Jesus Christ and spoke only of the ‘Christian Legislator'”—indeed an example of Rousseau in the wrong place.) In a passage that de Gaulle might have written had Chateaubriand not gotten there first, the Viscount observes, “The height of fashion was to be American in town, English at Court, and Prussian in the army: to be anything, in other words, except French.” Blunt-spoken and honest, the redoubtable Old-Regime attorney and statesman Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes became one of Chateaubriand’s few confidants in Paris, sharing his assessments of the time and characters there. As fellow liberal monarchists (Malesherbes took his bearings from Fénelon and Montesquieu), “we understood each other’s politics.” Although “his natural virtues were a bit tainted by affectation… as a result of the philosophy that he had mingled with them,” he was “full of knowledge, probity and courage,” if often too “hot-headed and passionate.” (After gallantly defending Louis XVI at his trial by the Robespierre regime, Malesherbes would be guillotined for his trouble, along with several of his family. His line would survive; his great-grandson was Alexis de Tocqueville.)

“The fundamentally generous sentiments” of the early revolutionaries “appealed to my independent character, and the natural antipathy I felt for the Court only strengthened those leanings”—so much so that “The Revolution would have caught me up in its flow if it had not started with crimes. When I saw the first head carried at the end of a pike, I recoiled. In my eyes, murder will never be an object of admiration or an argument for freedom: I know of nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.” With that, Chateaubriand draws a line that would only widen as the subsequent centuries have worn on.

The Revolution proceeded in the provinces, too, and Chateaubriand saw the preparations for it during his visits to Brittany in the years 1787 and 1788. It was then and there when “my political education began.” In fact (Tocqueville would pick up this argument), “the transformations that had been developing for two centuries were coming to term” throughout the country. “France had gone from a feudal monarchy to a monarchy of the Estates-General, from a monarchy of the Estates-General to a parliamentary monarchy, from a parliamentary monarchy to an absolute monarchy, now tending, through the struggle between the magistracy and the royal power, toward representative monarchy.” Centralization and democratization came gradually, with reforms—each of which “seemed to be an isolated accident.” “We could not see these facts together” at the time, but (donning his Hegelian hat) “in all historical periods there is a presiding spirit,” a spirit that militates against efforts to counteract the trend. As both Catholics and Hegelians know, “Every opinion dies powerless or mad if it lacks an assembly to lend it strength and willpower, to give it hands and a tongue. It is and will always be through bodies, legal or illegal, that revolutions arise and continue to arise.” In the French Revolution that set of institutions consisted of the Parisian and provincial parliaments. They “had their own reason for vengeance,” as “absolute monarchy had robbed them of the authority that they had usurped from the Estates-General.” In calling for the restoration of the Estates-General “they didn’t dare admit that they wanted political and legislative power for themselves,” and succeeded in “the resurrection of a body whose inheritance they had reaped, a body that, on returning to life, would instantly reduce them to their own special function: the administration of justice.” Chateaubriand takes this as a lesson in human fallibility. Along with the reformist king, the parliaments “were, without knowing it, instruments of a social revolution.” Further, many of the provincial estates-general were dominated by the Third Estate, the bourgeoisie. Without serious representation of Church or aristocracy, such bodies ensured that “The great kingdom of France, aristocratic in its parties and its provinces, was democratic as a whole.” “There is a whole new history of France to be written about this, or, rather, the history of France remains unwritten.” Tocqueville would write part of it in his The Old Regime and the Revolution. Chateaubriand anticipates the younger man’s critique of centralized bureaucracy: the monarchic Old Regime “bequeathed us centralization, a vigorous type of administration which I look on as an evil, but which was perhaps the only system that could replace the local administrations once these had been destroyed and ignorant anarchy led men around by the nose.”

In Brittany, the meeting of the Estates did see all three social orders represented, but they first met separately—”raging in their three private storms, which turned into a collective hurricane when the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Third Estate convened,” with “talent, vanity, and ambition” all on full display. The problem in Brittany in the years leading up to the Revolution was the unequal burden of the hearth tax, “levied on each commoner’s fire” but not on aristocrats. This injustice became especially onerous in wartime, when the monarchy’s appetite for revenues increased with its expenses. By 1789 the meeting of the Estates was actually put under siege by the people, causing the aristocrats to boycott the proceedings. “Later, they would go in great numbers to join the Army of Princes, to be decimated with Condé or Charette in the Vendée Wars.” But “in these great social transformations, individual resistance, however honorable for those who resist, is powerless against the facts.” “Pass on now, reader: wade the river of blood that separates forever the old world, which you are leaving, from the new world at whose beginning you will die.”

Chateaubriand didn’t return to Paris until late in 1789, after the Clergy and Nobility had been incorporated into the Third Estate in the newly-formed National Assembly. There would be no more balanced, mixed regime for France. “The closer we came to the capital, the more disorderly things became,” and in the city itself “the streets were glutted with crowds.” The Queen was still presenting herself and her children in public at Versailles; Chateaubriand saw her there. “Casting her eyes on me with a smile, she made me the same charming curtsy as she had on the day of my presentation. I will never forget those eyes, which were so soon to be extinguished,” nor that smile, the memory of which “allowed me to recognize the jaw of this daughter of kings when the unfortunate woman’s head was discovered in the exhumations of 1815,” a memento mori of the Old Regime,

He also saw the taking of the Bastille. At the time, “everyone admired what he should have condemned”—the rage, the violence—”and no one looked to the future to see what was in store for the people, the changes in manners, ideas, and political power,” a regime change “in which the taking of the Bastille was only the prelude to an era, a sort of bloodstained jubilee.” The monarchy vainly attempted to halt the change with concessions, but “no party ever believes in converting their opponent: neither liberty capitulating nor power abasing itself ever obtains mercy from its enemies.” Louis XVI could not save his head by adorning it with a tricolor ribbon. For himself, when Chateaubriand saw revolutionaries carrying pikes with the heads of two of Louis’ civil servants, “the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind.”

Such “cannibal feasts” notwithstanding, “the greatest blows against the old constitution of the State were struck by gentlemen. Patricians started the Revolution, and plebeians finished it. As the old France once owed the French nobility its glory, so the new France owes it its liberty, if there is any such thing as liberty in France.” From the safety of a well-protected balcony, Chateaubriand had shouted to the ignobly savage pike-bearers, “Is this what you take liberty to be?” He would say that to each of the successive rulers of each succeeding French regime, for the remainder of his life, and to several others, from beyond his grave.

The supreme example of such revolutionary aristocrats was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, compte de Mirabeau. “Mixed up in world events by the chaos and coincidences of his life, in contact with fugitives of justice, rapists, and adventurers, Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the deputy of democracy, had something of Gracchus and Don Juan, of Catiline and Guzmán d’Alfarache, of Cardinal de Richelieu and Cardinal de Retz, of the Regency rake and the Revolutionary savage; he had, moreover, something of ‘Mirabeau,’ an exiled Florentine family that carried with them a memory of those fortified palaces and great factions celebrated by Dante: a naturalized French family in which the Republican spirit of the Italian Middle Ages and the feudal spirit of our Middle Ages were to be united in a succession of extraordinary men.” “Nature seemed to have molded his head either for imperium or for the gallows, chiseled his arms to annul a nation or abduct a woman.” At the rostrum of the National Assembly, “he called to mind Milton’s Chaos, impassive and formless, standing at the center of his own confusion,” a mass of “deep, burning, tempestuous passions.” In this, an aristocratic revolutionary’s soul mirrored, and was mirrored by, the souls of the ‘plebeian’ revolutionaries: “Cynicism of manners, by annihilating the moral sense, brings society back to a kind of barbarism, but these social barbarians, prone to destruction like the Goths, have no power to create like the Goths. The barbarians of old were enormous children of virgin nature; the new ones are the monstrous abortions of nature depraved.”

But quite the charmer: Chateaubriand enjoyed his company, to a point. “Mirabeau talked a great deal, especially about himself,” a habit no memoirist can honestly condemn. “This son of lions was himself a lion with a chimera’s head; this man so practical when it came to facts was all romance, poetry, and enthusiasm when it came to language and imagination.” He even had a lover named Sophie. “Like me, he had been treated severely by his father, who, like mine, had stood by the inflexible tradition of absolute paternal authority.” “Generous, given to friendship, and quick to pardon offenses,” he had an aristocrat’s (that is to say a lion’s) share of lovers; his youth had been packed with scandals and narrow escapes. He wanted to save the monarchy, but to redesign it to make it palatable to the new democratic society. “Loathing” the masses, he seduced them as if they were yet another woman, and won them, as he had so many others. At the same time, “though a traitor to his order,” the aristocracy, “he maintained its sympathy through caste affinities and common interests.” In his attempts to play one side against another (he made contacts with the royal court and, we now know, the court of the Austrian Emperor, as well), “he founded a school”: “By freeing themselves from moral shackles, men dreamed that they were transforming into statesmen. But these imitations produced only perverse dwarfs.” Astonishingly, Mirabeau died not on the gallows but in bed, a victim, perhaps symbolically, of heart failure. After their dinner, Mirabeau “looked me in the face with eyes full of arrogance, depravity, and genius, and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said to me, ‘They will never forgive me my superiority!’ I still feel the impression of that hand, as if Satan had touched me with his fiery claw.”

“Among so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, only three men remain” in the public memory from the Revolution. Each was “attached to one of the great Revolutionary epochs: Mirabeau for aristocracy, Robespierre for democracy, Bonaparte for despotism. The monarchy has nothing: France has paid dearly for those three reputations that Virtue can never acknowledge.” Chateaubriand first noticed Robespierre at the Assembly, “a common-looking deputy” who “read a long and boring report to which no one listened.” By the time Robespierre’s real nature showed itself, Chateaubriand had left the country. But he saw clearly enough the conditions for his rise. In revolutions, “the human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the yoke of the new tyrants, which license breeds.” In passages like this, later readers will feel as if in the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s account of the February Revolution.

Resigning his military commission, Chateaubriand’s plan of leaving France for the United States, which he had begun to discuss with Malesherbes, began to coalesce. “I needed only a practical purpose for my journey,” as so many grant applicants have realized before and since. “I proposed to discover the Northwest Passage,” a plan “not out of keeping with my poetic nature.” Consulting again with Malesherbes, he consulted the older man’s maps and charts, read travelers’ narratives, and discussed “the precautions to be taken against the severe climate, the attacks of wild beasts, and the dwindling of provisions.” “If I were younger,” his friend told him, “I would go with you and spare myself the sight of all the crimes, betrayals, and insanities of Paris. But at my age a man must die wherever he happens to be.” Armed with a letter of introduction to George Washington by the Marquis de la Rouërie, who had fought in the American revolutionary war, he embarked from Saint-Malo, in order to be able to say farewell to his mother. By this time, he’d “gone from being a Christian zealot to a freethinker, which is to say a very vacant thinker indeed. This change in my religious convictions came from the reading of philosophical books,” paradoxically fitting himself better for adventurous action than serious thought. Philosophy, he later concluded, limits the intelligence by making it think “it can see everything because it keeps its eyes open; a superior intelligence consents to close its eyes, for it perceives that everything is within.” He is perhaps thinking more of Enlightenment philosophy than philosophy itself, but at any rate if one’s sets out for adventure it’s better to have open eyes than closed. “Finally, one other thing brought about the change in my thinking, and that was the bottomless despair I carried with me in the depths of my heart.” The sentiment that had induced him to attempt suicide lingered on, and he sensed that, as before, only by tearing himself away from a way of life lived in untenable circumstances could he combat it. He took his family physician’s advice while no longer needing that estimable man to advise him.

Chateaubriand finds a fundamental difference between American and French republicanism. America was still dominated by the pervasive domination of nature, unlike ancient France, with its complex civil society and longstanding literary culture. He writes on America from London in 1822, where he serves as the French ambassador in service of Louis XVIII. Not quite thirty years ago he had also stayed in William Pitt’s London, “an obscure and humble traveler,” “poor, sick, and unknown.” He prefers his former obscurity to his present public life, in the predictable course of which he is the object of flattery. “Do you think you can make me take this masquerade seriously? Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes?” No, rather, “Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude!” His only refuge in the city now is Kensington Gardens; there, “in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace.” Writing about his American journey here, where he disembarked for America as a young man, he can at least recreate his old privacy in the privacy of his mind.

“The flight of birds had guided [Columbus] to America”—nature bringing man to nature. He “must have experienced the kind of feeling that scripture ascribes to the Creator when, having drawn up the earth out of nothingness, he saw that his work was good.” In his own human way, “Columbus also created a world,” at least in the sense that he discovered one that gave men new evidence of the glory of God. And since the arrival of Columbus “this new world had shaken off” the “old monarchical dominion”; Americans having founded “a republic of a hitherto unimaginable type heralding a change in the human spirit.” France had contributed to “these world-altering events,” as “these seas and these shores… owed their independence partly to French blood and to the French flag.” Now, the United States was “sending back to France the Revolution that France had supported with her guns; and my own future, the virgin muse that I had come to give over to the passions of a new nature,” would awaken in America, where he would set his first successful writings, the novellas Atala and René.

The American capital city, and American cities generally, disappointed. “Philadelphia has a monotonous look,” lacking the “great works of architecture” of Europe. Chateaubriand blames the Reformation, the Protestant movement still “young in years,” which “sacrifices nothing to the imagination.” “The eye is saddened to behold such an even level” of “the mass of walls and roofs” in “the Protestant cities of the United States” with their democratic civil society. Nonetheless, “At that time in my life, I greatly admired Republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of world history that we [French] had reached: I understood Liberty as the ancients did, as the daughter of a nascent society’s ways; but I knew nothing of Liberty as the daughter of enlightenment and an old civilization.” But “Liberty of the kind that the representative republic has proved to be a reality,” thanks to Mr. Madison and his colleagues. “God grant that it may be durable!” He very reasonably suspects that only God, and not Americans themselves, can make it so. “Will Americans preserve their form of government? Will the States not sunder?” A Virginia representative “has already argued for the ancient theory of liberty which accepted slavery, and which was the result of paganism, against a representative from Massachusetts who defended the cause of modern liberty without slavery, which Christianity has wrought.” Thus both the regime of the United States at its union have been thrown into question. Moreover, the Western states, “so far from the Atlantic,” might “prefer their own regime.” These things being so, is “the federal bond strong enough to preserve the union and compel each state to stand ranked around it”? And if it were, and if in acting so to preserve the union “the power of the presidency were increased, would despotism not be close behind”?

If the federal union did dissolve, that would leave the existing sovereign states, however many there might be, in a condition of mutual enmity. Even absent foreign alliances and interventions, might this not result in the decline of republicanism itself within those states, or even a new empire in North America, as one state came to dominate all the others? Chateaubriand speculated that Kentucky “would seem destined to be the conquering State,” a far-fetched notion then, and laughable now, but the basic idea wasn’t silly, when he conceived it in 1822.

Geopolitically, the rise of the Latin American republics, “troubled as these democracies are,” might lead to war. “When the United States had nothing near them except the colonies of a transatlantic kingdom, serious warfare was unlikely. But today, isn’t a rivalry to be feared?” If war comes, might this not precipitate the rise of an American Napoleon?

And what if the Union does hold? “I have spoken of the danger of war, but I must also recall the dangers of prolonged peace.” With continued increase of population and wealth, decadence might follow, and with it the inability to resist foreign attack. “China and India, asleep in their muslins, have been constantly subject to foreign domination.” “What best suits the complexion of a free society is a state of peace tempered by war or a state of war tempered by peace.” With their “mercantile spirit” filling their souls, Americans may decline into luxury followed by bankruptcy.

“What’s more, it is difficult to create a homeland from States which have no community rooted in religion or material interests, which have arisen from different sources at different times, and which survive on different soils and under different suns.” What have Frenchmen in Louisiana, Spaniards in Florida, Germans in New York, and Englishmen along the Atlantic seaboard—”all of whom are reputed to be Americans”—really have in common? “How many centuries will it take to render these elements homogeneous!”

Finally, “the enormous imbalance of wealth is a more serious threat to the spirit of equality than any other.” “A chrysogeneous aristocracy, with a passionate love of distinctions and titles, is ready to emerge.” Whether Yankee merchants or Southern planters, “these plebeian nobles aspire to be a caste despite the progress of enlightenment that has made them equal and free.” Secretly, Americans love titles, ancestries, coats-of-arms—some so much that they migrate to Europe. And this happens in reverse: “A cadet from Gascony, landing with no more than a cloak and an umbrella on these republican shores, as long as he remembers to refer to himself by the title of ‘marquis,’ is guaranteed to be well received on every steamboat.” At the same time, the new, American aristocracy lacks the family sentiments of the old, European aristocracy, and so do the middle and lower classes. “Family feeling scarcely exists” in America. “As soon as a child is in a condition to work, he must fly on his own two wings like a fledgling bird,” “emancipated into premature orphanhood” and forming “bands of nomads who clear the lands, dig canals, and exercise their industry everywhere, but without ever attaching themselves to the soil.” Especially in the towns, this results in “a cold hard egotism.”

The American Founders united, and Abraham Lincoln reunited, this huge and heterogeneous country on the moral foundation of natural right, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Although Chateaubriand regards America as the land of nature, in contrast to the highly conventional life of old Europe, he doesn’t have natural right in mind. Rather, he asks, “Could the Americans be suffering, without knowing it, from the law of a climate where vegetable nature seems to have thrived at the expense of sentient beings?” Could the vast forests of North America not have nurtured a cold people, a people lacking in moral sentiments? And as for the doctrine of natural right, “one might wonder whether the American has not become too quickly accustomed to philosophical liberty, as the Russian has become accustomed to civilized despotism.”

In his account of America, Chateaubriand clearly provides the nucleus of Tocqueville’s argument in Democracy in America. He differs from Tocqueville in one crucial respect. Beneath it all, Chateaubriand simply does not accept natural right as a valid claim. He makes this clear in recounting one of his conversations with Malesherbes. His friend justified resistance to the Jacobin regime on the grounds that “a government ceases to exist when, instead of guaranteeing the fundamental laws of society, it transgresses the laws of equality and the rules of justice. It is then licit to defend oneself however one can, by whatever means best serve to overthrow tyranny and reestablish the rights of each and all.” Chateaubriand doubts this. “The principles of natural rights, first put forth by the greatest polemicists, developed so eloquently by such a man as M. de Malesberbes, and supported by so many historical examples, were striking; but I remained unconvinced.” By returning to France and fighting in the royalist army, “in truth, I merely yielded to the impulse of any era, on a point of honor”—on the principle of aristocracy, not on the principles of natural rights. It is, one must remark, unusual to see the likes of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau described as mere polemicists.

“In sum, the United States give the impression of being a colony, not a mother country: they have no past, and their mores are not a result of their laws.” No “permanent society” exists, or is “practicable among them.” “Man is never truly settled when the household gods are wanderers.” Thus “the American seems to have inherited from Columbus the mission to discover new worlds rather than create them.” He admires George Washington (“there is virtue in the gaze of a great man”), but of course Washington was formed within settled, socially hierarchic Virginia when it was part of the British Empire; he doubts that men of Washington’s type can arise under the American regime, now that its civil-social moeurs have democratized, even as society’s actual structure has not. He could not anticipate a new type—a Lincoln, or even a Roosevelt—who might also defend the regime and the Union or, in the case of FDR, transform it from a democratic republic into a mixed regime while still defending it against tyranny.

What Chateaubriand does see clearly is the difference between the two great generals, Washington and Napoleon. First, “Washington does not belong, like Bonaparte, to that race which surpasses ordinary human stature. There is nothing astonishing about him,” he concludes having dined with him (or at least claiming to have dined). The “theater” of his action is not “vast,” ranging from Spain to Russia, Egypt to Vienna. “He overturns no thrones only to rebuild others from their ruins.” Second, he was cautious and responsible, “charged with the liberty of future generations” and fearing “to compromise it.” He was no egoist, preferring to carry “the destiny of his country” not his own. “From this profound humility,” Washington accomplished far more. “Look around the forests where Washington’s sword once gleamed, and what do you find? Tombstones? No: a world! Washington left the United States as a trophy on his battlefield.”

“Bonaparte had nothing in common with this serious American.” With his Europe-wide wars, “the only thing he wants to create is his reputation; he is burdened by nothing but his own lot.” He treats his glory “as if it were his fleeting youth,” in the while “smother[ing] liberty of others and ending by “losing his own liberty on his last battleground.” While Washington won independence for his country, Bonaparte robbed his country of its own. When he died, “what [did] the citizens have to mourn?” “Washington’s Republic survives; Bonaparte’s Empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte both issued from the womb of democracy: they were both children of Liberty; but while the first was faithful, the second betrayed her.” Washington’s glory “is the patrimony of civilization.” Bonaparte “might have enriched the common domain,” acting as he did “on the most intelligent, the most courageous, and the most brilliant nation on earth.” But he lacked Washington’s magnanimity; “men were nothing in his eyes but a means to power,” and “no sympathy linked their happiness with his.” If Washington founded a modern Israel, a light unto the nations, Bonaparte reprised the Egyptian pharaohs, who “placed their funereal pyramids not among the flowering fields” of a Promised Land but “amid the barren sands: Bonaparte built the monument to his fame in their image.”

Pressing on with his journey, Chateaubriand first traveled north to Niagara Falls and Canada, then south through Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River, and into Kentucky. (He turned south after a sensible fur trader explained that if he went much further “I would arrive in icy regions where I would die of cold and hunger.”) His first encounter with American Indians was a comic disappointment, as he stumbled upon a lean-to shack where about twenty of the “savages” were gyrating to the tune of a fiddle played by a French dancing instructor. “Was it not a devastating thing for a disciple of Rousseau, to be introduced to savage life by a forest ball organized for the Iroquois by a former scullion in the army of General Rochambeau? I wanted very much to laugh, but I felt cruelly humiliated.” The Iroquois had once been more serious—”a race that seemed destined to conquer the other Indian races, if outsiders had not come to drain his blood and quash his spirit.” The “last virtue left to the savages in the midst of European civilization” is hospitality; he dined well when with them. “From them, one knows well what hospitality must have been in ancient days, when the hearth was as sacred as the altar.” They maintained the continuity of their families, too, by conferring the oldest name of the family on the newborn, always through the maternal line,” as a sign of honor.” “This connects the two extremities of life, and the beginning and the end of the family; it conveys a kind of immortality to one’s ancestors and supposes that they are present among their descendants.” They bury their dead on tribal lands, which then become sacred ground: “take the bones of their fathers from these savages and you take their history, their laws, and even their gods; you rob these men, and their future generations, of the proof that they ever existed or that they were ever annihilated.” Such customs recall those of the Greeks and Romans described by Chateaubriand’s contemporary, Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City.

Chateaubriand relates all this with sympathy, but without sentimentality. He knows that the Cherokee and the Iroquois fought each other over hunting grounds in present-day Kentucky for more than two centuries, making it “a land of blood.” He knows that “at the start of the War of American Independence, the savages were still eating their prisoners, or at least the ones who were killed: an English captain, dipping a ladle into an Indian stewpot, once drew out a hand.” And while there was indeed something “great and noble” about the Indian when he was “naked or dressed in skins,” had only other Indians to kill, “in our day, European rags attest to his wretchedness without covering his nakedness: he has become a beggar at the counting-house door and no longer a savage in his forest.” Europeans “have robbed the New World’s flowers only of those treasures that the natives did not know how to use, and they have made use of these treasures only to enrich the soil from which they harvested them”—as John Locke had argued, a century before Chateaubriand arrived there. Indeed, his main regret is that France no longer possesses these lands. “We are now excluded from the new universe, where the human race is starting over again,” “disinherited from the conquests made by our courage and our genius.” “Thinking of Canada and Louisiana, looking over the old maps of the former French colonies in America, I must ask myself how my country’s government could have let go of these colonies”—by his calculation some two-thirds of the continent—”which would today be an inexhaustible source of prosperity.” Without identifying the seller in words, he silently points to Napoleon, whose evanescent conquests were useless, financed in part by his sale of Louisiana to the United States.

Learning that Louis XVI had been arrested and was to be put on trial, he cut short his travels and returned to France to fight with fellow loyalist troops against the forces of the regime of The Terror. But not before he was married to a friend of Lucile, who arranged things to repair the “gaping hole in my inheritance” left by his journey to America. “If the public man in me is unshakable, the private man is at the mercy of whosoever wants to sway him, and in order to avoid the quarrel of an hour, I would sell myself into slavery for a century.” (It wasn’t really that bad. Mme. Chateaubriand never read his books and produced no children, but she supported him loyally. “When the two of us appear before God, it is I who will be condemned.”)

In Paris he visited a couple of his old literary acquaintances, including the poet Ange-François de Sainte-Ange, upon whom he inflicts one of his choicer merciless epigrams: “He made a concerted effort not to be stupid, but he could never quite prevent himself.” He saves his moral indignation for the ruling terrorists: “They sang of nature, peace, pity, beneficence, candor, and domestic virtues, and meanwhile these blessed philanthropists sent their neighbors to have their necks sliced, with extreme sensibility, for the greater happiness of the human race.” The people on the streets “no longer seemed tumultuous, curious, reckless; they were outright menacing,” and Chateaubriand “sensed the approach of a plebeian tyranny,” worse than the tyranny of the Roman emperors. “For the sovereign people are everywhere, and when they become tyrants, tyranny is everywhere; it is the universal presence of a universal Tiberius.”

This might not have happened had the National Assembly survived. But in September of the previous year, 1791, it had had been dissolved, replaced by the Legislative Assembly, which consisted of an entirely different group of delegates. When the king vetoed their decrees against the aristocratic émigrés and the priests, the political fevers mounted; the solons ordered the purchase of guillotines a few months later, while the radical Jacobin and Cordelier parties formed, eager to use the new invention. He recalls Jean-Paul Marat (“the fetus-faced Swiss”), Camille Desmoulins (who “consented to become a Spartan only so long as the recipe for the black broth was left to Méot, the restauranteur”), Georges Jacques Danton (“the face of a gendarme crossed with that of a slippery and ruthless attorney), and Fabre D’Églantine (“a man of remarkable weakness”). It was Danton who spoke the coda for the ideological tyrants of the next two centuries: “None of these priests or nobles is guilty, but they must die because they are out of place: they are impeding the progress of events and waylaying the future.” The French proved themselves superior to the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese, however, as other revolutionaries eventually sent most of these personages to the guillotine, too.

With his brother, Chateaubriand joined royalist forces in Brussels. Among the aristocrats gathered there, some outranked others in the aristocratic pecking order. The “High Emigration,” as he calls them, paraded their newly-purchased uniforms “with all the rigor of their frivolity,” hoping to make a favorable impression on Belgian girls. “These brilliant knights were preparing for success on the battlefield by success in love; just the reverse of the old chivalry.” “They looked down disdainfully on all us little gentlemen from the provinces and poor officers turned soldiers.” He received more respect from Frederick William, the King of Prussia, who saw him on the parade grounds, greeted him, and upon hearing that the young French gentleman had returned from America to fight for his king, told him “Monsieur, one can always recognize the sentiments of the French nobility.” Along with Christian principles, such sentiments are in fact Chateaubriand’s moral framework, not natural right. “People now [as he writes this in 1822] condemn the émigrés and say we were nothing but ‘a pack of tigers who clawed at their mother’s breast’; but in the epoch of which I am speaking, a man held fast to the old examples, and honor counted just as much as country. In 1792, loyalty to oaths was still seen as a duty; today, it has become so rare it is regarded as a virtue.” European aristocrats were just that—European, not only national, respecting one another, fighting against but sometime with one another, intermarrying. And what is more, at least in Chateaubriand’s mind “the true heroes” of the royalist troops were “the plebeian soldiers, who had no personal interests clouding their sacrifice.” They too took their oath to the crown as duty, standing on it and not on rights.

The passing of the aristocratic society has had another effect. “The old men of earlier eras were less miserable and isolated than they are today.” Their friends may have died, “but few other things changed around them.” “Strangers to youth, they were no strangers to society.” In a democratic society, by contrast, an old man sees not only his cohort dying, “he has seen ideas dying.” “Principles, manners, tastes, pleasures, pains, and feelings: nothing anymore resembles what he once knew. He finishes his day among a different species of the human race.” And “you Frenchmen of the Nineteenth Century,” you will not be exempt. “You shall grow old in your turn, and you shall be accused, as we have been accused, of holding to superannuated ideas.” You too will become strangers in your homeland.

Nor will nature console you, in your old age. “The birds, the flowers the beautiful evenings at the end of April, the beautiful nights that begin with the dusk’s first nightingale and end with the dawn’s first swallow, these things that make you need and crave happiness—you snuff them out. You still feel their charm, but they are no longer for you.” They are for the young. “The freshening grace of nature, which reminds you of your past joys, makes your miseries uglier. You are nothing but a stain upon the earth. You spoil nature’s harmony and sweetness with your presence, your words, and even with the feelings that you dare express. You may love, but you can no longer be loved.” For Chateaubriand, nature is no more a source of solace for the old than it is a source of right for mankind.

The royalist troops with whom Chateaubriand fought well, even as he himself doubted that they could win the war. They might have won the siege at Thionville; it was illness that ruined their chances, when dysentery and then smallpox struck the troops. Escaping into the forest, he collapsed, was discovered unconscious by some friendly wagon-drivers, and eventually received medical assistance thanks to his brother, who went looking for him. During his four months of convalescence on the Isle of Jersey (a lovely place, “subject to English dominion since the death of Robert, Duc de Normandie”), Louis XVI was executed. “At least the émigrés then excited general sympathy. Our cause seemed to be the cause of European order; and a misfortune honored, as ours was, is a rare thing.”

Moving to Somerset after his convalescence, and then to London, he held on financially by doing translation work and writing his first substantial work, the Essai historique sur les revolutions, for M. Pelletier, an editor “who made a great deal of money and then ate it all up”; “while not exactly a vicious man,” Pelletier “was gnawed at by a verminous horde of little defects of which he could not be cleansed,” “a libertine and a rogue” who “drank in champagne whatever was paid to him in sugar.” Eventually, he stopped commissioning work for the young émigré, having become “bored by prolonged charity.” “Famous for a moment,” the Essai “was soon forgotten.” It “offers a compendium of my existence, as a poet, a moralist, a polemicist, and a political thinker.”

A kind uncle came to Chateaubriand’s aid, enabling him to settle for a while into London’s small colony of French exiles, “artists in misery seated on the ruins of France.” “I owed the softening of my hard lot at this time to study: Cicero was right to recommend the camaraderie of letters as a balm for the sorrow of life.” He needed it: newspapers reported a day when the same French scaffold claimed the lives of Malesherbes, Malesherbes’ daughter, granddaughter and grandson-in-law, and Chateaubriand’s brother. His wife and his sister Lucile were in prison, “accused of the crime of my emigration.” They, and his mother, were spared the guillotine only when the French regime ousted and executed Robespierre in July 1794, ending the Reign of Terror.

While in England, Chateaubriand, his health still fragile, was taken in by a generous couple with a beautiful young daughter, whom he allowed to fall in love with him. After several months, her mother asked him to marry the girl, and Chateaubriand confessed that he was already married. He left the household the next day, properly ashamed. Writing in London more than two decades later, he asks “What had brought about my latest misfortune? My obstinate silence. To make sense of this, it is necessary to examine my character.”

“At no time has it been possible for me to overcome the spirit of restraint and inward solitude that prevents me from discussing what moves me.” Easily bored himself, he prefers not to bore others by talking about himself. “I am sincere and truthful, but I am lacking in openness of heart. My soul tends constantly to close up,” except when writing; “I have never let on about my whole life except in these Memoirs.” The human mind abhorring a vacuum, “I have become for others a sort of fantastic being with no relation to my reality,” a creature of their imagination. “In my inward and theoretical life, I am the man of dreams; in my outward and practical life, I am the man of realities”—easily understood as a public man, impenetrable at his core. No stranger to arguments in the forum, he detests them in personal relations: “as you wish has always relieved me of the boredom of persuading anyone or of trying to assert a truth” in private conversation. “I do not make a virtue of my invincible and quite involuntary circumspection,” offering it only as an explanation of his conduct. “If I had not been subject to this odious mental oddity, any misunderstanding would have been impossible, and I would not have seemed as though I had intentionally abused the most generous hospitality.” In the end he told the truth, but this “does not excuse me: real harm had been done.”

Since then, the girl, Charlotte Ives, has replaced the imaginary Muse of his youth. “Her image sat before me as I wrote,” “a ray of light to reign over me.” He recalls that she visited him when he served as French ambassador to London in the 1820s, asking him to procure a favor from the British Prime Minister Canning. Now married to British admiral Samuel Sutton, she wished him to intercede on behalf of her eldest son, for whom she sought a post in India. “‘I would be very grateful, and I would love to owe my first child’s happiness to you.’ She lingered on these last words.” Suspicious minds will be relieved to know that the Sutton children were born years after Chateaubriand left the Sutton home; the lady seems only to have meant to suggest what might have been, had he stayed.

Among the London émigrés Chateaubriand found Louis-Marcelin Fontanes, a poet, editor, and monarchist—”the last writer of the classical school in the elder line.” Born after Rousseau, his tastes connected him with Fénelon. “He was unable to reestablish the classical school, which was coming to an end with the language of Racine.” As in many respects the founder of “the so-called Romantic school” in France—the literary revolution that accompanied the social and political one—Chateaubriand might have been disparaged by the older man. “If anything in the world was sure to be antipathetic to M. Fontanes, it was my style of writing.” But not so; Fontanes was better than that. “My friend, instead of being revolted by my barbarity, became its passionate defender.” The “established critical rules” of French classicism simply did not apply to Chateaubriand’s writings, “but he sensed that he was entering a new world; he beheld a new nature; he comprehended a language that he did not speak.” For his own part, Chateaubriand says, “I owe him whatever is correct in my style,” as “he taught me to respect the ear, and he prevented me from falling prey to the extravagant inventions and uneven executions of my disciples.” “We often dined in some solitary tavern in Chelsea, by the Thames, talking for hours about Milton and Shakespeare. They had seen what we were seeing; they had sat like us on the bank of this river: for us a foreign river, for them a native stream.”

In summer of 1798 Chateaubriand received word that his mother had died. The Essai, pervaded with skepticism if not atheism, had given her pain, and his sister, Julie, wrote to him, “If you know how many tears your errant ways have caused our honorable mother to weep, and how deplorable they appear to anyone of a thoughtful mind, to anyone who lays claim, not only to piety, but to reason; if you knew this, it would perhaps persuade you to open your eyes and make you renounce writing altogether.” Chateaubriand writes: “The thought of having poisoned the last days of the woman who carried me in her womb cast me into despair. I flung my copies of the Essai into the fire, for it was the instrument of my crime.” Far from giving up writing, however, “the thought came to me of expiating my first work by composing a religious work,” which would be The Genius of Christianity. By the time his sister’s letter arrived, she had joined their mother in death, having never recovered from the effects of imprisonment. “These two voices issuing from the grave, the dead serving as interpreter of the dead, made a deep impression on me. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to any great supernatural light; my conviction issued from the heart. I wept and I believed.” Chateaubriand came to Christianity the aristocratic way—not directly, through the Monarch-God, but through select human beings he loved.

But with a difference. “The memory of Charlotte,” too, “governed all my thoughts, and, to finish me off, the first desire for fame and glory inflamed my feverish imagination,” a “desire [that] came to me out of filial affection.” That is, his father’s command to bring honor to the family name now animated him, but through the memory of his mother, his sister, and his first beloved—through women. From patriarchy to devotion to the womanly: In a sense, that is the way classicism became Romanticism. And that is why The Genius of Christianity was the right book at the right time; it gave witness to Jesus Christ by way of the sensibilities of its time and place. The old form of the aristocratic spirit was disappearing. “Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, honorable family friendship, your century has passed!” “We are born and we die now one by one”—as “individualists,” Tocqueville would soon say. “The living are in a hurry to cast the dead into Eternity and free themselves from the burden of a corpse.” The “days of religion and tenderness, when the son died in the same house, in the same armchair beside the same hearth where his father and grandfather had died before him, surrounded, as they were, by tearful children and grandchildren gathered to receive one last paternal blessing” are gone and “shall never return.” But the body of Christ, as the Crusaders saw, is no corpse to be cast out or recovered, and His spirit can be renewed in men’s hearts and minds in a way that meets those hearts and minds as they are now.

“My readings correlative to The Genius of Christianity had little by little led me to a more thorough consideration of English literature,” formed as its authors were by Christian ideas and sentiments. “One stumbled across Milton and Shakespeare everywhere,” and for good reason: “The actor who took on the role of the ghost in Hamlet was the great phantom, the shade of the Middle Ages who rose over the world like a star in the night at the very moment when those ages went down among the dead: enormous centuries that Dante opened and that Shakespeare sealed.” But Milton, a man of the modern world, called to him. Literary reputations are built by the inferior writers, but if a Shakespeare is “misunderstood by men, these divinities never misunderstand one another.” “Is there anything more admirable than this society of illustrious equals, revealing themselves to one another by signs, hailing one another, and conversing in a language understood by themselves alone?”

“Shakespeare is one of five or six writers who have everything needed to nourish the mind.” With him, Chateaubriand ranks Homer, Dante, and Rabelais. “These mother-geniuses”—again, the womanly—”have birthed and brought up all the others”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, and Virgil; Petrarch and Tasso; Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Molière; Byron and Scott. “They invented the words and the names that have gone to swell the vocabularies of whole populations; their expressions have become proverbs; their imagined characters have changed into real characters with heirs and lineage.” And “they sow the ideas that yield a thousand others,” furnishing “images, subjects, and styles for every art.” “Sowing” shifts the metaphor to masculinity, and sure enough: The great writers have fathered “four or five races of men” in the “womb” of “the human spirit.” Do not imitate Ham, laughing when he encountered, “naked and asleep, in the shadow of the ark stranded in the mountains of Armenia, the solitary boatman of the abyss. Let us respect this diluvian navigator who began creation anew after heaven’s downpour. Pious children, blessed by our father, let us cover him chastely with our cloak.” Chateaubriand may not rank himself with such men, but he surely thinks of himself as a man who began creation anew after the French revolutionary flood. If he doesn’t expect to be understood by subsequent generations, he does ask for their mercy.

Not that a Shakespeare sets out to be a Shakespeare. “What can fame mean to Shakespeare? Its noise will never rise to his ear.” If he was a Christian, he now has better things to contemplate. So too, if a Deist. And “if an atheist, he sleeps a sleep without breath or reawakening, which is called death.” “Nothing is more vain than glory from the other side of the grave, unless it has given life to friendship, been useful to virtue, lent a hand to the unfortunate—unless it be granted to us to enjoy in heaven the consoling, generous, and liberating idea left by us on earth.” This is Chateaubriand’s apologia, offered to all of France’s spiritual factions.

Offered to the French, because “no one, in a living literature, can be a competent judge except of works written in his own language. It is vain to believe you possess a foreign idiom in all its depths.” The difference between the human spirit and a national spirit is style. “It has been claimed that true beauty is for all time and all countries: yes, if we are speaking of the beauties of feeling and thought, but no, not the beauties of style. Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, sky, and sun of its own.” That is why the English and Germans “do not understand Racine, or La Fontaine, or even most of Molière.” A (perhaps excessively) simple example of what Chateaubriand means may be seen in Macbeth’s famous soliloquy beginning, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow….” Try translating it into French: “Demain, et demain, et demain….” You see the impossibility of reading the same line, expressing the same thought, the same way, with the same resonance, the same intonation. And intonation is a shade of meaning as well as an element of style.

All the more reason to return to France, his native soil. By 1797 Bonaparte was First Consul, “restoring order through despotism.” It had become safe for the exiles to return. His favorite sister, Lucile, had survived the Terror, as had his wife. “I brought back nothing from the land of exile but regrets and dreams.” By the spring of 1800 he was about to experience his first literary success, the beginning of his career as a writer. “I seem to be saying a last goodbye to my father’s house, abandoning the thoughts and illusions of my youth like sisters or sweethearts whom I leave beside the family hearth and shall never see again.” “I landed in France with the century.”