getting one." A government in touch with the realities of the nation's life, that is what poor Bernis feels the want of. It is the hopeless frivolity of the present government that puzzles and sickens, and indeed seriously threatens to send him off his head. "We live like children," he moans; "the wills of children control the governing principle." The king, "nullement inquiet de nos inquiétudes ni embarrassé de nos embarras," has distractions of his own into which it is well not to pry too closely. The Court is the Court still. Its gaiety suffers no eclipse. Rather the contrary, for defeats are always something to talk about and the loss of an army is almost sure to inspire a good joke or two. In vain poor Bernis tears his hair. "Il n'y a pas d'exemple qu'on fait si gros jeu avec la même indifférence qu'on jouerait une partie de quadrille." At last he can stand it no longer. The jokes and gibbering laughter round him break down his nerves. He begs and implores to be dismissed from office, and, having with infinite trouble achieved his own disgrace, creeps away to his exile at Vicsur-Aisne, glad at any price to be quit of the nightmare existence he had of late been leading.

All these symptoms, it will be seen, are of a piece, and all may be referred to the same cause. The purposeless, unmeaning quarrel, the unclothed and unfed armies, the court-favorite generals, the languid operations in the field, the utter indifference of the nation to the whole business, the idiot laughter of the courtiers at their own reverses, the frenzy and lamentations of poor Bernis-what are all these signs but a testimony to the one root-fact that the French Court has got altogether out of touch with the realities of life? Granting that, all the rest follows. In conception and execution the campaign is a consistent and perfectly frank avowal that in the governing body fri

volity has passed into that phase when it assumes control of life. From that final and terrible phase there is no return possible. The rout of armies, the loss of colonies, the starvation and misery of the people are events which will be dealt with by this frivolity in accordance with the laws of its own nature. You may cut these people in pieces, but you will get nothing real or serious out of them. They will pay their visits of ceremony and talk trifles and gallantry in the Bastille, and reserve, in all good faith, their most polished witticism for the scaffold.

And if these great events and the policy adopted by the country bear witness to the dying out of the sense of reality in the Court party, not less clearly does this also appear when we turn to the intellectual movement of the age. In France, more distinctly than elsewhere, the idea leads the way and the great outburst of the Revolution was preceded forty years earlier by an intellectual revolt of corresponding energy and daring. It was during the decade from 1750 to 1760 that this revolt declared itself. The appearance of the Encyclopædia may be likened to that movement in a general action when to the scattered shots of scouts and advance guards succeeds the roar of heavy guns in position. The effect of the publication in affording a rallying-point for independent thinkers was decisive. The persecution of the Court and the Jesuits broke in vain upon the movement. D'Alembert might be choked off, but the indomitable Diderot gathered round him a body of associates of unflinching tenacity. The crisis has in it something of the excitement of an actual conflict. It differs from most philosophic enterprises in this, that the theories and definitions of the Encyclopædists are not abstract theories and definitions, but are designed for immediate use. They are not shot off into the air, but are aimed

at a mark. The appearance of the first instalment of the Encyclopædia marks the formal declaration of the mind of France for the nation and the people, and against the Court and the privileged class; and the agitation which ensued is, as Mr. Morley in his life of Diderot points out, not a speculative and philosophical agitation, but a political and social one.

"Political ideas have been grasped as instruments; philosophy has become patriotism," are phrases in which Mr. Morley defines the character of this great mental awakening. In article after article of the Encyclopædia the evils of the age are hinted at or criticized. That more than a quarter of all the land of France was lying unbroken or abandoned; that arbitrary imposts resulted in the flight of the population to the large towns; that large tracts of land are turned into wildernesses by the abuse of the game-preserving system; that an equal distribution of profits is preferable to an unequal one, since the latter results in the division of the people into two classes, "one gorged with riches, the other perishing in misery"; these are the kind of points raised, and these, it will be observed, are thrusts dealt in earnest. The Society of Jesus, whose misfortune it has ever been to find itself opposed to the cause of freedom and the people, clamors for the suppression of the publication. The King wavers betwixt a snarl and a whimper. It is suppressed, and Diderot is imprisoned. It is continued, and Diderot is released. Meantime the movement all over the country gathers head. In every province and country town the pens are going. Ideas, with that wicked sparkle in them which marks them as missiles, are hurled from all sides against king and courtiers and priests alike. closeness of the act behind the thought is indicated by the public excitement, and outrageous placards, pamphlets,

The

and satires of ever-increasing bitterness and directness give that excitement vent.

But this, after all, reveals a destructive rather than a constructive purpose, and it is by its constructive purpose that the real character of a movement declares itself. What, then, is the constructive purpose of the Encyclopædists? It may be indicated in two words of Mr. Morley's. They were inspired, he says, by an "earnest enthusiasm for all the purposes, interests, and details of productive industry," and, following this bent, they attached an importance to physical science and the practical arts which marks "the distinct association with pacific labor of honor and a kind of glory, such as had hitherto been reserved for knights and friars." A keen sympathy with, and earnest desire to resuscitate, all that is practical, all that is productive; sympathy with the workshop, the factory, the agriculturist, the artisan, with all forms of useful and fruitful labor, that is what constitutes the attitude of the Encyclopædists towards life. And the desire to revive conditions favorable to this useful and fruitful labor is their constructive purpose. This is what forms the bond of brotherhood between them, and this is what marks the movement as "the definite recognition of the basis of a new society."

And all this may be summed up by saying that the object of this movement was to regain touch with the realities of life. That is the long and short of it. At the very moment when frivolity is entering into undisputed command, and, in all affairs of public pol icy and private life, is busy turning everything into unreality to suit its own nature, the mind of France awakens to the nature of the crisis and declares for poor despised reality. To explode the shams and make-believes which the spirit of frivolity had evolved, and to raise up and re-animate all those down

trodden and oppressed causes and interests which constituted what was real in the national life, became the aim of the French intellect. If ever a nation was saved by ideas, France was so saved in the eighteenth century. This movement it was which in the world of thought and of ideas represented reality. What share had the Court party in such a movement; what welcome did they accord it?

No mental sensation is more curious than the change we are conscious of in passing from the affairs of the world, and the eager argument and exposition which were exciting the interest and curiosity of all minds in France capable of such emotions, to the affairs of the Court. Here all life seems under the power of some spell or enchantment. No sound from without penetrates the magic circle. It has its own ideas, its own standards, its own tastes and engrossing pursuits, all of which are ignored by the world as the affairs of the world are by it ignored. Looking at it from the outside, you would say that life within this circle was some acted charade or pantomime, and that by-andby the actors would relapse into the pursuits and duties of everyday life. Only when we have turned the pages slowly of some of the abounding memoirs of the period do we begin to acquire ourselves some feeble consciousness of the seeming reality and apparent genuineness of this sham existence. Let us quote, as a specimen, the following account of the introduction of the Venetian ambassadress to Court:

Madame de Luynes made a curtsey to the Queen and another to the ladies of the Court and then went to receive Madame Zeno, the wife of the Venetian ambassador, outside the door of the Queen's room. They saluted each other, complimented and kissed each other. Then they came in to the Queen, Madame de Luynes walking in front to the right, then the ambassadress, and after her M. de Sainclot. Madame de VOL. XXXII. 1663

LIVING AGE.

Luynes having taken up her position, Madame Zeno made one curtsey to the Queen as she entered, a second in the middle of the room, a third when she got close to the Queen, and then kissed the hem of her Majesty's robe and made a fourth curtsey, at the same time addressing her a brief compliment. A few minutes afterwards the King arrived by the salon which serves as the Queen's withdrawing-room. Madame Zeno immediately rose, as did all the ladies. She made two or three curtseys during which the King, who had bowed to her as he came in, advanced and kissed her, but only on one side of the face. Madame Zeno then made another curtsey. The King retired the same way he came. The ambassadress then proceeded to repeat the same three curtseys she had made on entering, except that, after the second, she made one to the Court ladies, and reserved the third till she got to the door.

The Duc de Luynes, the husband of the lady who made the first curtsey, was a very favorable specimen of a French aristocrat of his time. He wrote his memoirs in seventeen volumes, and of those seventeen volumes the above quotation is a fair sample. Upright and honorable, not wanting in sense, he was a courtier and shared the limitations of interest of the Court party. If the reader wil immerse himself for an hour or two in those memoirs of the Duc de Luynes, he will. find that as the details of an interminable etiquette are described and dissected the solemn and unquestioning seriousness of the treatment will gradually have its effect upon him. Court ceremony and Court gossip will envelope him. He will find himself accepting as matter of deadly earnest the most petty jealousies and intrigues, scandals and whisperings, sarcasms and effronteries, machinations and plots of mistresses and favorites, and all the thousand trifles which compose the tissue of this effete and bloodless existence. And as the unreal becomes real, the

real will become unreal. He will hear the voices, speaking the thoughts that are soon to be put into terrible actions, die away into an unmeaning murmur. Never is the serenity of this "beautiful Armida-Palace," to use one of Carlyle's phrases, "where the inmates live enchanted lives," broken by any sound from the outer world. A faint and faraway note, with little meaning left in it, occasionally penetrates, and our good duke raises his head to catch the unusual sounds. "On dit que les esprits s'échauffent," he mutters, vaguely troubled, to himself. And again, "Les esprits sont encore bien éloignés de la soumission que le roi demande." And yet again, more puzzied than ever, "la conduite du Parlement devient plus singulière de jour en jour." Then back we go to the serious business of life, to the number of horses Madame de la Tournelle is to be allowed to drive in her carriage, or the varieties of the royal meals and the distinction between pot royal, petit pot royal, and grand pot royal.

The severance of a section of society from the mind and purpose of its age is, in the case of France, particularly serious; for it is by her hold on ideas that France supports herself. That the English aristocracy of the Georgian reign was inaccessible to ideas did not greatly matter, since, the English genius being practical, the hold of our aristocracy on the national life has always consisted in the active part played by it in party politics and the government of the country. The French aristocracy had long lost any such hold as that; but another hold, the participation in ideas, still remained possible for it, and constituted its last chance of salvation. It was not taken. The dilletante interest in the new philosophy which titillated the curiosity of French society stopped far short of active participation. The reality of that interest was tested by the Turgot

administration. Himself perhaps the greatest example living of that spirit at once philosophical and practical which animated the thought of the age, Turgot, as a desperate remedy, was made Minister of Finance in 1774, and the only really sincere and heartfelt utterance of the Court on record is the storm of protest with which it met the suggestion that it should abandon the separate and artificial system of life and shoulder the common burden of the economic crisis.

That protesting storm and the dismissal of Turgot which followed it signified the rejection by Versailles of the ideas of the age, and is another remarkable proof of the impossibility of getting a thoroughly artificial class to face reality. For all Taine's receptive industry it is clear that the new philosophy, the philanthropic craze, the return to nature, were never more to the Court party than toys and poses. Into the confines of the enchanted circle the advice and warning of Turgot and the reasoning of Diderot and Voltaire came with the same dull and unmeaning sound as the booming of the Rosbach cannon. The impression left upon one's mind at last is a sense of separation amounting to total severance between Court life and real life. That severance from reality we distinguish as the note of the Versailles section of the community, and we shall surely be not far wrong if we discern in this the necessity and justification of the oncoming Revolution. The law of nature is inevitable that the thing cut off from use is cut off from life. A class whose splendor and show are the decoration on solid services performed may be yet secure. But a class whose splendor and show are their own sole justification and aim in life is heading dead for the guillotine.

Perhaps the reader will smile if, turning from these great affairs of state, once more to the Hertford House gal

yet, for those quick at seizing the character and significance of such things, we doubt if there exists in history, literature, or anything else, any such effective help towards a complete realization of the French Court and society as is provided by an exhibition like the Wallace Collection. Let the student who would really appreciate the causes of the Revolution leave for an afternoon his journals and memoirs, and, instead of building up laboriously an intellectual conception of those causes, lay himself open here to an æsthetic conception of them. Let him note the agreement and unanimity of all that he sees in these rooms and then go on to seek the reason of this unanimity in the common meaning and intention which all these things share. Let him ask if this meaning does not consist in the essentially decorative purpose of every object present, in the fact that they one and all strain after show and splendor, and turn their backs on reality and the uses of everyday life. Is it possible to conceive a better expression of that spirit which the aristocrats of France, shorn of their civic duties and feudal responsibilities, brought to Versailles, with which they inoculated the ruling principle, and which, from that hour on, marks every act, not of society only, but of the government? Henceforth take any transaction you like, private or public, and the spirit animating them will be the same. Always the enthusiasm displayed is for The Edinburgh Review.

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the unrealities at the expense of the realities of life. Children are turned into toys, marriage is broken up by fugitive intrigues, the colonies are abandoned in favor of an Austrian Alliance, endless discourses on Court punctilio occupy men's minds to the exclusion of the burning thoughts that are spurring France on to deeds. all sides and under all circumstances the Court and the Court party, with an infallible instinct, select the unreal and forsake the real. Their genuine preoccupations, those into which they throw their serious effort, are purely frivolous. To eclipse the last mad freak by one still madder, at all costs so to sparkle as to make jaded fashion stare, if only for a moment, these are the things worth living for. In every crisis the test we learnt in the Hertford House galleries, "a decorative rather than a useful purpose," applies to the conduct of society and the government.

These are, it seems to us, considerations which should be borne in mind by lovers of this furniture. They endue it with additional interest. Of its many other attractions there is the less need to speak, since these are nowadays appreciated at even more perhaps than their legitimate value. But its historical interest has been unaccountably neglected, and of the large number of people to whose sympathies it appeals so forcibly and who admire it so enthusiastically, few, if any, see in it a representation of the spirit which for fifty years dominated the French government and the French aristocracy, and led up finally to the catastrophe of 1789.