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Updated: June 11, 2025
Your remarks on de Maistre have interested me in the book. Mr. I am under the impression that you preserved portions of the "Valley," and intended to recall and write out the remainder at your leisure. Now, don't attempt this, because Mr. Emerson's "Nature"? If you have not, let me send you a copy. It is a divine poem on the External.
At Monsieur's left, and facing me, sat Colonel Escott, very red and cheerful; then a young man who called the Colonel Cornel, and came from Dublin, proclaiming himself a barr'ster, and giving his name as Flarty, though on his card it was written Flaherty; and then Sir Richard Maistre.
God governs the nation by the nation itself, through its own reason and free-will. De Maistre is right only as to the constitution the nation starts with, and as to the control which that constitution necessarily exerts over the constitutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.
Joseph de Maistre used to preach that, all social order depending on the authority of beliefs as well as on the authority of behavior, no man who denied the supremacy of the Pope would permanently admit the sovereignty of the state. Napoleon furnished a standing refutation of this thesis.
To add to the heavy burden of sorrow that afflicted him, Alphonse de Maistre had to sacrifice, that which contributed most towards making his present home endurable, his eye-sight. It had been failing rapidly for years, and finally became totally extinguished after the death of his faithful, broken-hearted wife.
And, pointing to the horrible carpet-bag: "I have also placed in it a host which a bad priest gave to me, the works of Monsieur de Maistre, shirts, and several other things:" Madame Martin lifted her eyebrows, a little ill at ease. But the good Madame Marmet retained her habitual placidity.
Let their minds but once turn to resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later, de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow.
The agility and bounds of the evening were insured only at a price like this. Progress, however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step. De Maistre says that "to know HOW TO WAIT is the great secret of success."
There was another great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was aroused into a protest against the revolutionary spirit as vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of the most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers. De Maistre wrote a book on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.
M. de Bonald was, like M. de Maistre, a prophet of the past, one of those men whose ideas were of bygone days, and to whom we bow with veneration, as we see them seated on the threshold of futurity; they will not pass onward, but tarry to listen to the sublime lament of all that dies in the human mind.
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