THE NATIONAL REVIEW.

APRIL 1861.

ART. I.-M. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Euvres et Correspondance inédites d'Alexis de Tocqueville, précédées d'une Notice par Gustave de Beaumont. 2 vols. Paris, 1861. Ir is a very difficult question to decide at what distance of time after a great man's death his biography should be given to the world. If it is put forth at once, as interest and affection would naturally dictate, while the world is yet ringing with his fame, and his friends yet grieving for his loss, when every one is eager to know more of a man of whom they had heard so much, the sentiments it excites will be more vivid, and the treatment it receives will be more gentle; it will be read more widely, and handled more tenderly; enmity will be silenced and criticism softened by the recency and the sadness of the severance. But, on the other hand, much must be sacrificed for the sake of those advantages. If the deceased has been a statesman, considerations of political propriety compel silence, or only half disclosures, in reference to transactions which perhaps more than most others would throw light upon his character; his reasons for what he did himself, and his judgments of what was done by others, have often to be suppressed out of generous discretion, or from obligations of promised secrecy: and thus only a mutilated and fragmentary account of his thoughts and deeds can be laid before the public. Or if, without being a politician, he has mixed largely with his fellows, as most great men must have done, if he has lived intimately with the celebrated and the powerful, and poured out in unreserved correspondence with his friends his estimates of the characters and actions of those whom he has known and watched,-and if his abilities and opNo. XXIV. APRIL 1861.

portunities rendered these estimates of singular interest and value, we are doomed to a still severer disappointment. For these, which are precisely the things we most desire to learn, and for which we should most treasure his biography, are precisely the things which must be withheld. His contemporaries and associates, the objects of his free criticism, and it may be of his severe judicial condemnation, are still living; their characters must be spared, and their feelings must be respected; the work must be garbled and impoverished by asterisks and omissions, and all the richest and most piquant portions of it must be postponed to a more distant day. If, in order to avoid these inconvenient and enforced discretions, the publication of the life be delayed till the generation to which it belonged has passed away, the necessity for suppression will be escaped, but half the interest in the subject will have died out. The man, unless he belonged to the very first order of great men, will have become one of the ordinary figures of history; his memory may still be cherished by many, but his name will no longer be in every mouth. The delineation of his character may be incomparably more complete and perfect than it could have been at an earlier period, but comparatively few will care to read it; it may be infinitely more instructive, but it can never be half as interesting, for those who would especially have drawn interest and instruction from its pages are gone where all biography is needless. If the subject of the narrative were a public man, his life may still furnish valuable materials for the history of his times; if he were a great thinker, or philosopher, or discoverer, the details of his mental formation and operations may throw much interesting light upon psychology and morals; but if he were only, or mainly, a good man or a social celebrity, it is often hard to see why after so many years any account of him should be given to the world at all.

But these are not the only doubtful questions which those who contemplate biography have to consider. It is not easy to decide who would be the fittest person to undertake the delineation of the character and the narration of the career—a widow, a son, or a brother, or a bosom friend-or an unconnected literary man, capable of full appreciation, but not disturbed by too vivid sympathies. The family of the deceased may of course be expected to know him more thoroughly than any mere acquaintance could do; they have watched him more closely and more continuously; they alone have seen him in his most unbent and therefore most natural, though not perhaps his best, moments; they, more than others, can tell what he was in those private relations of life which, usually but not always, afford the clearest insight into the inner nature of the man.

But, on the other hand, they will seldom have known him in his younger days-his widow rarely, his son never; they will generally be withheld by reverence from any keen critical judgment of his attributes or actions; or, if not, their criticism will carry with it a semblance of unseemliness, and they will scarcely be able to estimate rightly the real space which he filled in the world's eye, the particular points which the world will wish to hear, and the degree and kind of detail which it will bear. They will be apt to fall both into indiscriminate and excessive eulogy, and into voluminous and wearisome minuteness. A very intimate and attached friend, especially if he be not also a man of the world, will be exposed to many of the same dangers, though in a less degree. On the other hand, if the materials are put into the hands of a professional writer, well chosen, and really competent by comprehension and just appreciation to treat the subject, the probability is that he will give the public what it wants to know, and will bestow that righteous and measured admiration which the general judgment can ratify; but it is certain that he will never satisfy the family, who will be pretty sure to condemn him as unsympathising, critical, and cold.

Again: how, and on what principle, is the biographer to hold a fair balance between what is due to his readers and what is due to his hero? The real value of a biography consists in its fidelity, fullness, and graphic truth;-in displaying the character in all its weaknesses as in all its strength; in glossing over nothing, and painting nothing in false colours; in concealing nothing and distorting nothing which can render the picture genuine as an honest delineation, or useful as a moral lesson, or instructive as a mental study. If, out of regard to the fame of the deceased, or the feelings of his family, events or materials are suppressed by which admirers are deceived as to their estimate, or psychologists misled in their philosophical inferences, integrity has been violated, and mischief has been done. The very facts concealed may be precisely those which would have explained the origin of perplexing anomalies in the character, and have thrown a luminous clearness on the dark places of metaphysic science. A "Life" that is not scrupulously faithful is a narrative only-not a Biography, and fails of its highest purpose as well as of its implied promise. An analogous moral question relates to the discretion which the biographer is called upon to exercise as to the literary reputation of his friend. Here, as in the points first referred to, he has to discharge tacit engagements to two parties, whose respective claims he must reconcile. In determining what remains he shall give to the public, is he to consider first and mainly what will elucidate the

writer's character, or what will enhance or confirm the writer's fame, or what will be interesting and useful to the world? Is he to withhold what is eminently distinctive, and what would be eminently impressive and instructive, because it had not received the last perfection which the author, had he lived, would have been careful to bestow upon it, and because in comparison with his other writings it would have seemed unfinished and undressed, pleading that his friend set special store on the polish and form of his productions? In a word, is he to be guided by the principles which would have actuated the writer himself while upon earth, or by those purer and more unselfish considerations which may be presumed to animate him now?

These various questions M. de Beaumont, in his Life and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, has had to deal with and decide; and, with the exception of the last, we think he has solved them rightly. A close and loving intimacy with his friend for more than thirty years; association with him both in literary labours and in public life; position which enabled him to know thoroughly what Tocqueville was in domestic intercourse, and what he was thought to be in the world; a superiority of mind which qualified him fully to comprehend and analyse that rich nature, combined with a tried and proved affection which made it easy for him to criticise and judge without incurring the faintest suspicion of a cold or depreciating temper-rendered him unquestionably the fittest person that could have been selected for the task he has performed so well. The "Notice" which he has prefixed to the correspondence and unpublished remains has few faults except its brevity. It is simple, succinct, and clear; it gives a sufficient outline of the principal events in Tocqueville's somewhat uneventful life, with the exception of his political career, of which it would perhaps be difficult at present to speak fully and boldly, and of which it certainly would not answer to speak timidly or obscurely; and it thoroughly displays, and makes intelligible, a character of unusual beauty, subtlety, and delicacy. In this, which appears to have been the biographer's single and steadfast aim, we think he has perfectly succeeded. It is impossible to lay down the "Life" without feeling that you know the man.

The only ground on which we feel disposed to join issue with M. de Beaumont has reference to the literary remains which he has withheld. We fully admit that the gallery of portraits of the public men with whom Tocqueville acted or whom he closely watched, and which we are delighted to hear is in a sufficiently completed state for eventual publication, could not, without indecorum and unkindness, be given to the world during the lifetime of his more notable contemporaries. It

was, moreover, his own special injunction that the publication of these "Souvenirs" should be delayed till the passing generation should, like himself, have gone to rest. We can even understand and respect, though inclined to regret, the motives which are assigned for the biographer's entire silence as to Tocqueville's speeches and proceedings during the ten years previous to 1848, when he was an active Member of the Chamber, though some of those speeches were singularly interesting, and all those proceedings did honour to the actor. But he usually opposed, and often with earnestness and severity, those ministers who, as leaders of the old Constitutional party, are now, along with his own more immediate friends, involved in one common proscription; and the circumstances were inopportune for what would have looked like a posthumous attack. It may even have been right to suppress the memoir which Tocqueville had prepared on the Indian Empire, though it must have been full of interest and suggestive value; since the author had himself appended a note to the Ms. to the effect that the work would only be worth publishing in the event of his being able to resume and terminate the needful researches. But we cannot acknowledge the validity of the reasoning which has decided M. de Beaumont to withhold from us those portions of the second volume of L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, which he himself describes as nearly, if not quite, finished. He tells us that the volume was within a few months of its completion; that the order of the chapters and the sequence of the ideas was arranged from first to last; that some chapters were not only entirely written, but had received the last touch of the master's hand; and that, by collating those materials, and adding here and there a page or two, here and there only a word or two, a volume might have been legitimately given to the public. He tells us further that the notes and documents which were to furnish Tocqueville's materials, all written by his own hand, are "an immense arsenal of ideas;" that from some of these notes alone other authors might draw the substance for whole volumes; and that some of the preparatory "studies"such as those on Turgot, on the States-General, on England, and on some German publicists-sont autant d'ouvrages tout faits. Yet he has decided, irrevocably he says, that all this vast intellectual wealth, all this knowledge which the prolonged and patient industry of his friend had brought together, all this treasure-chamber of political sagacity, shall be sealed to the public now and for ever!

The reasons given for this decision may be satisfactory to a Frenchman, but scarcely to an Englishman. We take leave to doubt whether they would have appeared satisfactory to