ART. VI.-Œuvres Complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville. Tomes VII. et VIII. Correspondance, Mélanges, Fragments Historiques et Notes sur l'Ancien Régime la Révolution et l'Empire, Voyages, Pensées, entièrement inédits. Paris:

1865.

THE

HE critics, who, in common with ourselves, had occasion to review four years ago the Memoir and the Correspondence of M. de Tocqueville (which have since been translated into English by an able hand), ventured to remark that, in spite of the zeal and the fidelity with which M. Gustave de Beaumont had portrayed the life and edited the papers of his illustrious friend, his task was still incomplete. Indeed, he himself informed us that much still remained in the shape of unfinished fragments and unpublished letters which might one day form part of a more extended publication. We urged him to give a larger selection of these documents to the world; for although they may not have received that exquisite finish which M. de Tocqueville himself loved to impart to all he published, yet the scattered thoughts of so powerful a mind are sometimes even more forcible and impressive than his mature compositions, and the charm of his tender and meditative letters to his family and his private friends is inexhaustible. M. de Beaumont has given ear to these observations. Encouraged by the prodigious interest which was excited in France and throughout Europe by his former volumes, he has now enlarged the plan of them. A complete edition of the works of Tocqueville has been prepared for the press, which contains, in addition to the writings already well known to all readers, a volume of the speeches and reports prepared for the Chamber of Deputies, a volume of fragments principally relating to the masterly analysis of the French Revolution on which the author was engaged at the time of his death, and an additional volume of Correspondence. These publications are entirely new, and they are of the very highest interest and value. In the selection of the volume of letters previously published, M. de Beaumont was restrained by motives of delicacy from laying before the world the confidential effusions of intimate friendship, and by motives of prudence from calling attention to the political opinions of Tocqueville, especially with reference to the present Government of France. Already time, death, and the progress of events have removed some of the obstacles to publication which existed three years ago. The result is, that the letters now produced have a deeper meaning and a more

decided tone than those which had formerly appeared-indeed, it was for this reason that they were then withheld from the public; and many of them have a direct bearing on political affairs, even at the present time, to an extent which the admirers and adherents of the present Government of France will probably consider indiscreet and inconvenient. We rejoice, on the contrary, that M. de Beaumont has had the courage to produce these most remarkable papers. They contain the thoughts of a man, great as a writer, but greater still by his undaunted independence and by his undying love of freedom; and we are not sure that Tocqueville, in the full enjoyment of life and intellect, ever wrote anything more likely to rouse the slumbering spirit of his country, or to guide her back from servitude to liberty, than these posthumous leaves, penned many years ago in the solitude of his Norman home and in the confidence of private friendship. There is in these volumes the same profound insight which pervades all the works of the author into the causes of the French Revolution, and those vices of democratic society, which, under the first and the second Empire, have twice thrown back the French nation from the ardent enjoyment of freedom into a submissive obedience to absolute power. And if it be true that after a vigil of seventeen years, some streaks of dawning light are again visible on the horizon,-if some indications are again felt that this slumber is not to be perpetual-then it is in this language that Tocqueville, and those who like him have watched through the night in despondency, but not in despair, would address the awakened sleeper. To these passages of his correspondence we shall presently direct a more particular attention.

After long hesitation as to the choice of a subject to employ his mind on a great work, when the collapse of the Republic and the coup d'état of 1851 had terminated his political career, Tocqueville resolved to enter upon a philosophical investigation of the phenomena of the great Revolution, which had for sixty years swayed to and fro the destinies of his country. But with characteristic originality, he sought for the earliest indications of these phenomena in the preceding age, and he exhumed the administrative records of the old monarchy from beneath the lava of the great eruption. Probably no living Frenchman had acquired so accurate a knowledge of the state of France before the Revolution, and he said in one of his letters, If anybody wants to found a professorship of the old adminis'trative law of the country, I believe I could fill it.' The result of these inquiries was the book on the State of France

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'before the Revolution,' which is in every one's hands. But this was only the prelude of his task. His intention was to approach the Revolution itself; to pass lightly over the course of events, although he had mastered them with inconceivable labour and precision; and to deduce from them certain general principles which acute reflection and enlarged experience enabled him to trace throughout this protracted convulsion. For it was one of his fixed convictions that, however perplexing, unexpected, and contradictory the course of events may be, they are rigorously governed by laws of human nature as determinate as the laws of the physical world; and that these laws can be traced by a sufficient power of observation and analysis even into the regions of metaphysical abstraction, although the people and even its leaders and teachers may be totally unconscious of the influence by which their movements are directed. Above all, it was his design to arrive, through the Revolution, at the character of Napoleon Bonaparte, and at the institutions established by him in France, not only because these are subjects of extraordinary interest in themselves, but because the name of that remarkable man and the fabric of his power are at this moment the ruling forces of the second Empire, and the key to the last form which the Revolution has assumed. And here we are arrested by a page or two of such eloquence and insight, that although we cannot hope to render the purity of the author's style in another tongue, and we cannot afford to dwell much longer on this portion of the volumes before us, we lay it before our readers. The fragment was written at Sorrento in 1858:

'What I would seek to portray is not so much the events themselves, however surprising and however great they may be, as the spirit of those events-less the different acts of the life of Napoleon, than Napoleon himself that singular, incomplete, but marvellous being, whom it is impossible attentively to consider, without contemplating one of the most strange and curious spectacles in the universe. I should desire to show what part in his prodigious enterprise was really derived from his own genius, and what was supplied to him by the state of the country and the spirit of the times-to explain how and why this indocile nation rushed at that moment of its own accord into servitude, and with what incomparable art he discovered in the working of a most democratical revolution all that was apt for despotism, and brought out of it those natural consequences.

In speaking of his internal government, I shall survey the effort of that almost divine intelligence rudely employed to compress human freedom, by a scientific and ingenious organisation of force such as none but the greatest genius of the most enlightened and the

most civilised age could have conceived; and, beneath the weight of this masterly engine, society stifled to sterility-the movement of the intellect slackened, the human mind enervated, the soul contracted, till men cease to be great; and around the vast and flat horizon, whithersoever you turn, nothing stands erect but the colossal figure of the Emperor.

Turning to his foreign policy and to his conquests, I should seek to follow the furious rush of his fortune over nations and kingdoms, and to relate by what means the strange greatness of his genius was here also abetted by the strange and irregular greatness of his times. How marvellous a picture, by the hand of one who could trace it, of human power and of human weakness, would be that of this impatient and uncertain being doing and undoing his own works, tearing up and changing the boundaries of empires, and driving nations and sovereigns to despair even less by the evils he inflicted upon them than by the eternal uncertainty in which he left them as to that which they had yet to fear.

'I would, lastly, explain by what a series of excesses and errors he himself drove onwards to his fall; and in spite of these excesses and errors, I would mark the gigantic trace he has left behind him in the world, not only as a recollection but as a living and durable influence: what died with him, what remains.

'And to complete this long survey, I would show the purport of the Empire in the French Revolution-the place to be filled by this singular act in the strange drama, the close of which escapes us yet. 'These are great objects glancing before me. But how to reach them?' (Vol. viii. p. 170.)

These designs were not to be completed. But in every fragment of the materials formed and collected by the author for the edifice he had conceived, the reader will trace with melancholy interest the stamp of originality and genius. It is certain that if M. de Tocqueville had lived to complete his Essay on the Revolution,' he would have thrown new light on events which have for upwards of half a century engaged the attention of a host of writers of the highest class; for he would have brought us nearer to its true causes, and would have demonstrated more clearly its effects on the latest generations-effects which cut short his own public life and threw a gloom over the closing years of his existence. Of these truths traces will be found in every page of the eighth volume of M. de Beaumont's collection, and we are indebted to him for the skill with which he has re-set, in a connected form, the precious, but imperfect, remains of his friend's labour. The task was one of extreme difficulty, for these fragments were traced upon unconnected scraps of paper, in a handwriting not easily deciphered, and intended only to assist the memory of the author: but the zeal and intelligence of M. de Beaumont have triumphed over these

obstacles and given to the scattered thoughts of his friend as much connexion as they would admit of.

It is not, however, our intention to dwell upon the theme of the French Revolution, and we can only commend these fragments to the attentive consideration of our readers. We propose rather to turn to the additional volume of the Correspondence, and in that correspondence to follow with some detail those letters which belong to the history of M. de Tocqueville's political life. It may be remembered that on a former occasion we expressed regret that the records of his political opinions and actions had been withheld. To a considerable extent this omission is supplied in the volume now before us, although certain significant gaps at moments of great interest remind us that more yet remains to be said, and that this volume is still published under the Second Empire.

Before we proceed, however, we must linger for a moment over another class of letters with which this volume abounds— we mean those addressed to his nearest relations. They present a charming picture of domestic life, and of those family relations which are nowhere more sacred than in France; for it may, perhaps, surprise some of our readers to be told that in no country upon earth are the filial relations so deferential and the fraternal relations so affectionate. In England the conjugal tie is more close and absorbing; it frequently overpowers the bonds of birth and blood. In France it seldom equals, and still more rarely weakens, the primal sanctity of the affection and respect a man pays to his parents. These virtues of the old French houses were a portion of the very nature of Alexis de Tocqueville; and from the moment when he started on his American voyage to the close of his father's life in 1857, they pervade his correspondence. It is curious to remark, too, from the earlier letters in this collection, descriptive of his American journey, how powerfully that expedition contributed to form his character, his judgment, and even his style. His first communications to his mother are playful and affectionate, but still crude and diffuse. They have in them a certain boyishness, which long remained one of the charms of his character. For though Tocqueville came back from the United States a great philosopher, impregnated with one of the wisest works of modern thought, he was still a philosopher of seven and twenty, alive to every touch of nature and sentiment, and as ready to chase butterflies as to plant acorns. To describe a romantic evening ride to Kenilworth in a letter to the woman he lovedto relate to one of his cousins a droll return to Tocqueville, where he arrived, like Ulysses at Ithaca, driving a couple of