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Four Years in France. Beste Henry Digby
Читать онлайн.Название Four Years in France
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Автор произведения Beste Henry Digby
Жанр Книги о Путешествиях
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True liberal principles cannot be disgraced; like religion, they may be the pretext, but are not the cause of excesses and of crimes; but the conduct of the revolution has retarded their spread and influence, by making every wise and prudent man afraid to trust to the professors of them. After the perpetration of horrors, on which the human mind cannot bear to look fixedly, a military despotism is quietly submitted to, as if nothing but, "res novæ," new wealth, new power, had been sought for.
– "Ubi nunc facundus Ulysses?"
The leaders of the revolution and of the republic did not recognise the true limit of civil authority: it has nothing to do but to defend the state against foreign enemies, and the citizens against each other: whatever government attempts to do more, only supplies means of vexation to subordinate agents. They tyrannised over the religious and political conscience of the people by the civil constitution of the clergy, who, when their property was taken away, ought to have been let alone; by persecutions which belied the tolerance of philosophy; by oaths of hatred of royalty, which kept up the memory of the cowardly murder of the king, – that aping of the English under circumstances totally different. War, after the promulgation of perpetual peace, seemed interminable; and the offer to assist all nations in the recovery of liberty, was seen to be a scheme for domineering in all nations by means of civil dissension.
These things prepared the way for Napoleon Bonaparte, whose elevation was, at first, by no means unpopular in Europe. He must be admired by the present age, and by posterity, as a great man: he offered himself as pacificator, and in a few years subjected a hundred millions of Europeans: such a force as this, – the arts, the knowledge, and by consequence, the power of those whom he commanded taken into the account, – no man ever yet had wielded. "He gave not God the glory: " in this he was not alone; such was, such is, the spirit of the age: his fall was caused by the coming on of the snow and frost in Russia a week or fortnight sooner than usual. History records nothing equal to his elevation and his fall. That fall must be dated at the retreat from Moscow; the rest was but the struggle of the dying lion. The French revolution seems like a bloody tragedy, after the representation of which, the actors put on their every-day clothes, and resume their ordinary occupations: it has disappointed the hopes of the philanthropist, and delayed the effect of the moral revolution, prepared long before, and working in the minds of enlightened men. This sort of revolution is the only one that can be permanent or beneficial to mankind. Christianity itself is, in its influence on civil society, a revolution of this sort, and, in respect to this life only, has done incalculable good.
The great results of the French revolution are to be looked for beyond the Atlantic. Owing to the distracted state of Europe, a continent, more abounding than the old world in the means of prosperity and power, is become independent: the slaves of Hayti have broken their chains, and may carry civilization and freedom to the country of their origin. Yet another century, and Europe itself may sink into comparative insignificance. But let the wise and virtuous unite in opinion; and Europe, though no longer the proprietor, may still be the teacher of the new world, and in the old may aid suffering humanity.
CHAP. II
On the 23d of April, which the English now know to be the feast of St. George, though, before the accession of King George IV. who observes that day as his birth-day, few of them knew the name of their patron or the day of his feast; "such honour have the saints" in England; – on that day, in the year 1818, I arrived with my two sons at Southampton, on the shore of that sea, which on the morrow was to separate me from my native country.
The son of the captain (for by courtesy he is called captain,) of the Chesterfield packet came to us at the Dolphin Inn, and informed us that the tide would serve at two o'clock the next afternoon. We had hastened through rain and darkness, during the last stage, with a grumbling postilion; for, though we knew the day, we knew not the hour of embarkation. The time we had to spare we might have passed more agreeably at Winchester. Southampton, a very pretty town, is so regularly built, that we had time more than enough to see it, and not enough to go to enjoy the beautiful view from the heights which command the bay, the channel between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and the isle itself. All this, however, we saw from the deck of our vessel, more advantageously than in what is called a bird's-eye view, which is only useful when necessary for peeping into the inside of amphitheatres, and the hollows of ravines and craters.
Our travelling trunks were sent to the custom-house. A year before, owing to a discussion concerning cotton yarn, which Mr. Brougham may perhaps remember, an old lady, of seventy years of age, had been despoiled of a pound of cotton thread which she was taking with her to amuse herself with knitting: the stockings or garters thus fabricated she would have brought back to England, without the least injury to its manufacturing interests. But, on such important occasions, how can discretionary powers be entrusted to custom-house officers? We, being not knitters of stockings, on this occasion, had the good fortune to excite very little of their curiosity. They did not even wish us a good voyage.
A boat conveyed us to the packet: we set sail, if setting sail it might be called, when there was hardly wind to swell the canvass. The air was sultry, the sky was cloudy; and when we had cleared the Isle of Wight, and night was coming on, there was every appearance of an approaching storm: Captain Wood even allowed that there might be "a puff." I admired the self-possession he maintained, notwithstanding the troublesome questions put to him, and expressions of fear and anxiety from the passengers: answering every one with the greatest civility, he yet never turned aside from the conduct of the vessel. "It is silly in us, captain, to disturb you thus: we might trust to you." – "Sir, my son and I are on board: the vessel cost me three thousand pounds." I drew the inference desired, and left him.
With every inclination, after the event, to begin my book with a description of a storm at sea, as Virgil begins his Æneid, I forego this attempt at amusing my reader, for two reasons: without the machinery of Juno, Æolus, and Neptune, the storm even of Virgil would hardly be raised in dignity above a common occurrence; and next, because my storm was really a very moderate one, hardly sufficient to excite that degree of terror in me, and of pity in others, which is necessary to sublimity. In sober guise then, I have to relate that it rained, lightened, and thundered; but thunder at sea, I remarked, is not so loud as thunder heard on land, re-echoed by houses and buildings: and lightning in that vast space does not seem so directly aimed at one, as when flashed into one's face through the narrow boundary of a window. The rolling of the sea was not very violent; but the wind drove us out of our course, and we found ourselves, in the morning, to the eastward of Fécamp. We could with the greatest ease have entered the port of Dieppe: I proposed to the captain to do so; but his affairs and his port papers, which this little stress of weather was not a sufficient excuse for contravening, recalled him to Havre. The other passengers also were desirous of landing at Dieppe; but rules and regulations, – a phrase which I translated into English for the benefit of a certain provincial book club, which had thus entitled its by-laws, rules, and rulations, – at every step vexatiously and uselessly embarrass the intercourse of mankind.
In the present case we had to employ sixteen hours in working our way back again towards Havre. The voyage was, however, pleasant. We were, all the while, almost within a stone's throw of the French coast: we talked with several fishermen: we seemed to be all but landed. The clouds, which had so thickly covered the sky, and poured down so much rain the preceding night, had passed away to the eastward. In the afternoon, a brilliant rainbow was stretched across the channel, and seemed to unite, by an aërial arch, the countries of France and England. Our impatience was put to the proof by a calm, which arrested our progress for two hours: the elements seemed to have conspired to treat us with a specimen of every sort of weather that can be experienced at sea. At last a breeze sprung up; slowly we crept along towards the mouth of the Seine; and a quarter of an hour before midnight entered the port of Havre, after a voyage of thirty-two hours, the latter half of which was useless to my purpose of coming to France, and would have been dangerous had the storm come on again, as we were close on the rocks, and had very little sea-room.
The passage by Dover takes the traveller from London to Paris about