PAUL LOUIS COURIER. I WAS compelled by the length of my former paper to close the first division of Courier's career with his retirement from the army. We have thus an interlude of six years, devoted almost entirely to literary pursuits, before we come to the Paul Louis best known in France, the keen satirist, and bold defender of liberty of speech and writing under a monarchy and oligarchy, scarcely less tyrannous than the empire which they succeeded.* The impressions which his experience of a soldier's life left upon his mind were, as I have before hinted, of no very pleasant character. And for the work which he had afterwards to do, it was perhaps as well that it should be so. Most of this world's work of reform is done by extreme men, and there could be no fitter assailant of oppression and wickedness in high places than the man who had learnt thus "not to believe in great men." He had seen only the dark side of that which is called history; had seen that the glory of the general implied the misery of the people-that the soldier's laurels could only grow out of a soil fertilised by human blood-and so he writes: "Oui, monsieur, j'ai enfin quitté mon vilain métier, un peu tard, c'est mon regret. Je n'y ai pas pourtant perdu tout mon temps. J'ai vu des choses dont les livres parlent à tort et à travers. Plutarque à présent me fait crever de rire." These views receive their fullest and clearest expression in the "Conversation chez la Comtesse d'Albany," the nearest approach to a Platonic dialogue which I have seen out of * For some account of the character of the "Restoration" government, see an interesting paper on "Armand Carrel" in Mr. J. S. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. VOL. V. F Plato. The interlocutors are la Comtesse, M. Fabre, an Italian artist of some note, and Courier himself. It opens with an incidental remark of Courier's, "que notre siècle valait bien celui de Louis XIV." to which Fabre takes very strong exception. Comparing the two as regards in particular the encouragement given to art and poetry, he contends that the latter has in every way the advantage. Courier suggests that, granting this to be true, there still remain the more important departments of science, politics, and war. As concerns the first, Fabre points out very fairly that to establish the superiority of the present age, it is not enough to prove additions to the stores of knowledge, but that we must be able to show that these additions are greater and more important than were made by the preceding age to the stock with which it began its work. And then we come to the real subject of the dialogue, viz.-Is there an art of war? and which is the greater glory, that of the artist or that of the warrior? "We are less warriors," Fabre says, "than they of the age of Louis XIV." But what is it to be more or less a warrior? Surely it is not to be measured by the scale on which the operations of war are executed, by the numbers left dead on a single field, else this age would undoubtedly bear the palm. Of two players playing against different adversaries one shall gain ten pence, the other as many pounds-the one shall play three hours on end for his pence, the other as many minutes. You would not say at once that the latter was the better player, because his adversary may be a mere ignoramus. So the warrior character is not measured by success. Is it then to be measured by the proficiency of the age in an art of war? But is there an art of war? If there is, then, as in other arts, a man must attain to proficiency in it by patient study and hard work, always progressing towards but never reaching the ideal of perfection. But is this so? A young prince of eighteen comes post haste from court, fights a battle, wins it, and there he is "great captain" for life, in fact the greatest captain in the world. A great genius, you may say, but no prince in the world, with whatever genius heaven may have endowed him, could have painted straight off Raphael's Holy Family, or written Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. You only want an army to make a good It would seem that Courier had at one time intended to write a series of these Conversations, at the request of the Countess. This is numbered 5th Conversation. †The great Condé. general. Take the case of Alexander. There were numbers of artists, poets, painters, sculptors in his time, but only one Alexander, you say. I reply that there were a thousand who only wanted an army-why his very secretary who was not even a soldier, who never carried anything in the field, but his pen and his writing stand, turned out a great general as soon as Providence willed it, and beat your Cassanders and other men of the sword. He thus proceeds naturally enough to a comparison of the glory to which art and war respectively lead, vindicating the first place for the former. But I cannot follow him into this part of his argument. The fallacy into which he has fallen above consists, it seems to me, in ignoring the detailed work of the subordinates in an army, all of which must be regulated by some technic rules. The very postulate "given an army" implies a training according to an art of war. And even if we limit the discussion to the art of generalship, the existence of an art by which an ordinary man may become a respectable general, is no more disproved by such meteor-like apparitions as an Alexander or a Condé, than that of an art of music is impugned by the fact that a Mozart could write a concerto at six or a symphony at twelve years of age. But it is time that we followed Courier into Italy. After the battle of Wagram he went off into Switzerland and spent the autumn on the borders of the lake of Lucerne, at work apparently upon a revision of the text of Plutarch. Then he went, as winter set in, to Milan and Florence. In the Laurentian library at the latter place he had previously noticed a manuscript of the Pastoral of Longus, "Daphnis and Chloe"-and had observed that it contained a passage which was missing in the editions and in the other MSS. He set himself to copy this under the supervision and with the assistance of Signor Furia the librarian, but unfortunately in doing so inserted as a mark a piece of paper which had some ink underneath it, and so blotted out some words of the MS. It was not long before a storm was raised about his ears. He was denounced as a base thief, whose object had been to destroy the MS. of a passage of which he himself possessed the only copy. The blot it was said covered the whole of the newly-found fragment, and the ink with which it was made, was of a peculiar description which defied all the arts of chemists. Courier, * * M. Renouard detached the inked paper from the MS. Courier distinctly insinuates that the spot was made larger after this. |