[In the following essay, Doran examines both Chateaubriand's and Tocqueville's depiction of American forests as more than descriptions, but as images of human experience. Doran contrasts Chateaubriand's more positive depictions of the wilderness—as an expansive space reflecting one's personal power and God's presence—with the depersonalized and isolated environments portrayed by Tocqueville.]

In his scholarly study, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America,¹ George Pierson evaluates the materials pertaining to Tocqueville's American journey (notes, journals, letters) specifically from the point of view of their importance as commentaries on American life, and of their critical relevance to the development of Tocqueville's political and social thought. Yet in certain passages of Tocqueville's American journal one can detect also the expression of an intensely personal mood and an immediate, imaginative response to natural surroundings; these offer a marked contrast to the more typically Tocquevillean style of precise yet perceptive observation, and detached, though insightful, reflection. In fact, the contrast between the instinctive and the intellectual dispositions of his travelling companion—and life-long friend—is pointedly noted by Beaumont himself, who writes, commenting on Tocqueville's American journey:

Ce serait une grande erreur de croire qu'Alexis de Tocqueville qu'on voit dans des voyages poursuivant surtout des idées, demeurât impassible et froid en présence des grands spectacles de la nature. Nul au contraire n'y était plus sensible que lui et n'en éprouvait plus l'attrait. En même temps que toutes les facultés de son esprit le portaient à la méditation intellectuelle, une autre pente de son âme l'inclinait à la rêverie, et ce n'était jamais que par un effort de sa volonté sur lui-même qu'il sortait du domaine des impressions pour rentrer dans celui des idées. Sa raison seule le ramenait à celle-ci, car la rêverie, dont il avait l'instinct, était pour lui pleine de mélancolie; et par ce motif il la fuyait. Le mouvement de l'esprit était alors pour lui comme un asile où il se réfugiait pour échapper aux agitations et aux tristesses de l'âme.²

This instinctive romantic penchant of “rêverie”, normally held in check by the sustained effort of a disciplined will, is especially evident in Tocqueville's descriptions of the great American forests as recorded in an excerpt of his “Relation de Voyage”, which appeared in the first edition of his Œuvres Complètes under the title “Quinze jours au désert.”³ It was Tocqueville's famous kinsman, Chateaubriand, who had first revealed to his countrymen the savage grandeur of the virgin forests of the New World; thus, when young Alexis had set out with Beaumont to explore these same primeval landscapes, his mind was full, as he himself relates, of the splendid imagery of Atala and Les Natchez; this poetic conditioning, so to speak, being further enhanced by the memory of Cooper's stirring tales, wherein civilized man seemed to attain anew, in the adventure and challenge of the wilderness, a heroic dimension of being, an epic scope of existence.⁴ It was therefore perhaps inevitable that Sainte-Beuve's literary “causerie” on the newly published “Relation de Voyage” should propose a comparison and contrast between Tocqueville's descriptive style and “la poésie chateaubrianesque du désert.”⁵ Sainte-Beuve writes:

On y rencontre à chaque page un esprit ferme, exact, sensé, fin, moral, ami des considérations, qui raisonne à l'occasion de chaque incident, mais qui raisonne bien, d'une manière solide et élevée et qui, quand il décrit, nous rend en fort bonne prose ce dont Chateaubriand le premier nous a donné la poésie en traits hasardeux et sublimes.⁶

It would seem that Sainte-Beuve's usual perspicacity somewhat failed him in the above critical appraisal; the contrast between Tocqueville's and Chateaubriand's description of the forest scenes of the New World is not adequately explained in terms of a difference of style and temperament. This contrast itself or rather, its special quality, is apprehended through the fact that the forest descriptions of Tocqueville's American journal and those of the Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique⁷ are structured by a common essential element: each writer perceives the forest not as scene or site, but as image or sign. For the twenty year old Chateaubriand in 1791, for the twenty five year old Tocqueville in 1831, the forest signifies, in itself, more than itself; the interplay, juxtaposition, contrast or clash of its several elements trace, in their totality, a correlation and correspondence between the energies, forms and forces of nature, and other energies, forms, forces operative—both actually and ideally—in the sphere of human existence. Conversely, the consideration of, or reflection on, certain aspects of human existence, evokes in the mind, by an instinctive, intuitive association, the image and the impact of the great forest wildernesses of America. What we have here then is metaphor, the dynamic, shifting reflection of metaphor, not as play of language or figure of speech, but as mode of experience and perception. From this point of view, the critical pertinence, for the texts under consideration, of such distinguishing categories as “reasoned prose” and “inspired poetry” seems somewhat dubious. However “exact”, “fin”, “sensé”, Tocqueville's appraisal of the human panorama he encountered in his American travels, the pages of his wilderness journal are more “poetic” than Sainte-Beuve allows (or later critics seem to suspect),⁸ for in them one finds expressed, even as in Chateaubriand's “Journal sans date”, an ideal response to the world of nature, and an imaginative response to the world of ideas. Henri Amiel's famous definition of a landscape as an “état d'âme” appears to hold true here: Tocqueville and Chateaubriand's differing impressions of the wilderness seem to express precisely two contrasting “états d'âme”, corresponding to two essential though profoundly different aspects—or moments—of the Romantic Weltanschauung.

Alexis de Tocqueville himself undertook to explain, in a letter of 1851, the nature of the difference between his account of the wilds of America, and Chateaubriand's lyrical description of the great forests:

Les hommes ont la rage de vouloir orner le vrai au lieu de le peindre. Les plus grands écrivains ont donné quelquefois dans ce travers-là. Monsieur de Chateaubriand luimême a peint le véritable désert, celui du moins que je connais, avec des couleurs fausses. Il semble avoir, en Amérique, traversé sans la voir, cette forêt éternelle, humide, froide, morne, sombre et muette, qui vous suit sur le haut des montagnes, descend avec vous au fond de la vallée, et qui donne, plus que l'Océan lui-même, l'idée de l'immensité de la nature et de la petitesse ridicule de l'homme.⁹

As Tocqueville would have it, Chateaubriand's description of the American forests differs from his own not by reason of a difference of vision but through an absence of vision, a perceptual blindness, so to speak, induced by an unwillingness to accept the nature of things—and the things of nature—in their objective presentation: Chateaubriand has not really seen the forest. It follows of course, though Tocqueville does not explicitly assert it, that Tocqueville's forest is the “real” forest, factually observed and straightforwardly described, without benefit of poetic maquillage.

Certainly Chateaubriand's description of the forest primeval does not convey in the least the notion that a sober and sombre consideration of the vulnerability and absurdity of the human condition is the inevitable corollary and/or response to the contemplation of the great spectacles of nature. Quite on the contrary, the pages of his “Journal sans date”¹⁰ of 1791 compose, as Sainte-Beuve aptly says “l'hymne triomphal de l'indépendance naturelle et le chant d'ivresse de la solitude.”¹¹ In the “Journal sans date” Chateaubriand presents the forest in a luminous evocation:

Qui dira le sentiment qu'on éprouve en entrant dans ces forêts aussi vieilles que le monde, et qui seules donnent une idée de la création telle qu'elle sortit des mains de Dieu? Le jour, tombant d'en haut à travers un voile de feuillage, répand dans la profondeur du bois une demi-lumière changeante et mobile, qui donne aux objets une grandeur fantastique. Partout il faut franchir des arbres abattus, sur lesquels s'élèvent d'autres générations d'arbres. Je cherche en vain une issue dans ces solitudes; trompé par un jour plus vif, j'avance à travers les herbes, les orties, les lianes et l'épais humus composé des débris des végétaux, mais je n'arrive qu'à une clairière formée par quelques pins tombés. Bientôt la forêt redevient plus sombre; l'oeil n'aperçoit que les troncs de chênes et de noyers qui se succèdent les uns les autres [sic], et qui semblent se serrer en s'éloignant: l'idée de l'infini se présente à moi.¹²

And here is, in Tocqueville's journal of his American travels, his perception of this same primeval landscape:

Lorsqu'au milieu du jour le soleil darde ses rayons sur la forèt, on entend souvent retentir dans ses profondeurs comme un long gémissement, un cri plaintif qui se prolonge au loin. C'est le dernier effort du vent qui expire; tout rentre alors autour de vous dans un silence si profond, une immobilité si complète, que l'âme se sent pénétrée d'une sorte de terreur religieuse; le voyageur s'arrête, il regarde. […] Pressés les uns contre les autres, entrelacés dans leur rameaux, les abres de la forêt semblent ne former qu'un seul tout, un édifice immense et indestructible, sous les voûtes duquel règne une obscurité éternelle. De quelque côté qu'il porte ses regards, il n'aperçoit qu'une scène de violence et de destruction, des arbres rompus, des troncs déchirés; tout annonce que les éléments se font perpétuellement la guerre; mais la lutte est interrompue. On dirait que sur l'ordre d'un pouvoir surnaturel, le mouvement s'est subitement arrêté. Ces branches à moitié brisées semblent tenir encore par quelque liens secrets au tronc qui ne leur offre plus d'appui; des arbres déjà déracinés n'ont pas eu le temps d'arriver jusqu'à terre et sont restés suspendus dans les airs.

Il écoute, il retient sa respiration avec crainte pour mieux saisir le moindre retentissement de l'existence; aucun son, aucun murmure ne parviennent jusqu'à lui …

Ici, non seulement l'homme manque, mais la voix même des animaux ne se fait pas entendre. Immobile, tout dans les bois est silencieux sous leur feuillage; on dirait que le Créateur a pour un moment détourné sa face et que les forces de le nature sont paralysées.

Ce n'est pas au reste dans ce seul cas que nous avons remarqué la singulière analogie qui existe entre la vue de l'Océan et l'aspect d'une forêt sauvage. Dans l'un comme dans l'autre spectacle l'idée de l'immensité vous assiège.¹³

Did Chateaubriand, in the pages of his “Journal,” indeed yield to the temptation to improve upon nature? Or did he describe (and see) nature in terms of his own sensibility and imagination? “Monsieur de Chateaubriand,” remarks Sainte-Beuve of Chateaubriand's descriptive style, “peint les objets comme il les voit et il les voit comme il les aime.”¹⁴ It must be noted that Tocqueville's and Chateaubriand's descriptions of the American wilderness are markedly similar in many physical details. In both the juxtaposition of fallen trunks and soaring trees proclaims the intimate correlation of generation and destruction; in both, time's passage in its cyclical rhythm is realized through the simultaneous materialization and presence of its successive moments. And in both descriptions, the vast undifferentiated sameness of the forest scene, which gives rise to the sensation of endlessness, is expressed by an almost identically phrased restrictive construction: l'œil n'aperçoit que; il n'aperçoit que. The difference is not in the physical scene, but in the relation and response to it of the viewer. For Chateaubriand, the wilderness is an expansive infinity; for infinity reflects itself in a self-consciousness to whom infinity appears as a supreme act and image of self-revelation: “l'idée de l'infini se présente à moi.” Tocqueville's wilderness, on the contrary, is experienced in the powerlessness of a depersonalized subject: “l'idée de l'immensité vous assiège”.¹⁵ The similar phrasing of the expressions which define and resume this perceptual contrast also render it more vivid. And it must be noted that the expression “to see things in a different light” is here both subjectively and objectively true: the physical illumination of these two forest scenes is radically different.

In Tocqueville's high noon description, light is materialized, so to speak, as both an object and a force of nature, dominant, exterior, visualized in terms of position and power: “lorsqu' au milieu du jour, le soleil darde ses rayons sur la forêt.”

But in Chateaubriand's forest scene, the afternoon sun (it is 3 p.m.) is not directly visible. Its presence is inferred (for the viewer and for the reader) by its light-effect, the “demi-lumière” that “le jour, tombant d'en haut à travers un voile de feuillage, répand dans la profondeur du bois.” Light is thus both a mediating and a mediated element (à travers un voile); it is, moreover, perceived in an interior and intimate, not an exterior and dominant, relation to the forest elements. In this encounter and interpenetration of clarity and density, of radiance and darkness, the afternoon light acquires a crepuscular quality, the forest becomes truly a twilight zone (twilight being the cherished hour of the Romantic imagination). Le jour, tombant in fact suggests, by virtue of a perceptual and conceptual movement across the intervening comma, le jour tombant (and within this context, the word “jour” evokes also its associated meanings of opening and appearance). It is this “demi-lumière changeante et mobile” that makes the difference, altering the shapes and appearance of things, creating diversity and generating movement within the vast compact of the great forest. The reader's perspective of the forest space shifts with the traveller's progression through it (il faut franchir, j'avance à travers), a progression which is sensed through contrasts of shades and textures: the yielding softness of grass, the airiness of lianas, the thickness of the humus, which define space in relation to (à travers) the advancing subject, as the place of his passage.¹⁶ But the traveller's movements, in turn, respond to the illusion of a beyond, an elsewhere, created by the play of light and shadow (“trompé par un jour plus vif”); thus movement, quest, adventure, becoming (“la forêt redevient plus sombre”) are revealed as affects and effects of a purely phenomenic reality. Yet, even as the traveller takes note of each échec: “je cherche en vain une issue”; “l'œil n'aperçoit que”; “je n'arrive que”, there is no sense of hopelessness or helplessness. Rather one feels that the traveller enters willingly into this interplay of appearance and reality, he does not truly seek to issue from the enchanted space and moment of illusion where everything seems fluid, indefinite, indeterminate. Hence even the solidity of massed trees is offset by a final effect of movement and distance as they “semblent se serrer en s'éloignant.”

The sense of endlessness evoked by Tocqueville's forest is unrelieved, however, by any suggestion or illusion of movement. Thus the “profondeurs” of Tocqueville's forest do not suggest the indefinite prolongation of space beckoning the mind to transcend the immediate range and limits of vision; rather the term in its given context, evokes, through the long resonance of a dying moan, the secret and abysmal depths of the dungeon. The wind, the natural element whose imaginative correspondent is the restless and freely roving spirit, here appears as a captive creature vainly expending its last energies to escape its bonds. And Tocqueville's traveller is also immobile, a fixed body: the forest is not the context and occasion of his motions and actions, challenging him with the endless suggestion of spaces beyond spaces; it confronts him rather, in an external relationship, as limiting totality, sheer mass, unyielding force, “un édifice immense et indestructible.” There is no movement in this primeval structure, but a stillness so complete that it suggests not only total solitude but total absence, the absence of man, the absence of life itself. Rather than peace in this solitude there is everywhere the evidence of conflict and destruction. The quiet itself suggests an abnormal and arbitrary state, a fixed violence, a paralysis.

We encounter also in a further passage of Chateaubriand's “Journal sans date” (marking the progression from twilight to darkness) a moment of total quiet, absolute silence and overwhelming solitude.

Minuit.

Le feu commence à s'éteindre, le cercle de sa lumière s'éteint. J'écoute: un calme formidable pèse sur ces forêts: on dirait que des silences se succèdent á des silences. Je cherche vainement à entendre dans un tombeau universal quelque bruit qui décèle la vie. D'où vient ce soupir? d'un de mes compagnons; il se plaint bien qu'il sommeille. Tu vis, donc tu souffres: voilà l'homme.¹⁷

Here, too, as in Tocqueville's description, the traveller strains every faculty in a supreme effort to grasp the slightest evidence of life: But here a human presence does answer the traveller's questioning tension, confirming him in the sense and presence of his own humanity, it is truly a self-answering presence; thus the narrator's monologic discourse articulates itself in the question/response of dialogue. The small circle of light and the soft sigh make the essential difference, the human difference in the great still darkness. And the universal silence is perceived nonetheless in a plural determination, as a multiple substance: des silences, engendering thereby, out of total absence, difference and distance, movement and time. Again, as in the “twilight” passage quoted before, the monolithic sense of mass (formidable … pèse) is imaginatively animated by motion (on dirait que … se succèdent à).

The same responsive articulation of silence and stillness into dialogue and movement returns in the next passage where, as in Tocqueville's forest scene, the vast range of the wilderness space is intuited through the long reverberation and prolongation of sound. But the wind's “long gémissement” described by Tocqueville is a solitary sound, a monody awakening no responsive echo and dying in indifference. In Chateaubriand's journal, the break of a tree breaks the silence, the forest takes note, in a mighty choral response, of the solitary event, sound engenders sound in propagation and increase.

Minuit et demi. Le repos continue. Mais l'arbre décrépit se rompt, il tombe. Les forêts mugissent, mille voix s'élèvent. Bientôt les bruits s'affoiblissent, ils meurent dans des lointains presque imaginaires: le silence envahit de nouveau le désert.¹⁸

It must be noted that the fall, rise, fall of sound disrupting the silence, also institutes an alternating rhythm, an ebb and flow with it and within it: repose and movement are given as “moments” of a vital duration. Not only this, but the modulation, variation and alternation of sound and silence engenders the imaginative visualization of space through the dynamic contrast of horizontality and verticality, the former represented in the continuity of repose, the progressive decrease and distant death of sound, the returning tide of silence; the latter, in the sudden fall of the tree and the instant surge of the great forest chorus. Here too the absolute of absence—ils meurent—resolves itself into a phenomenic plurality of distance luring the mind's eye towards the vanishing point where reality and fantasy meet: des lointains presque imaginaires.

Twilight, firelight: these uncertain illuminations allow and invite the indefinite play of the imagination. But Tocqueville's forest landscape is seen, as noted, under the harsh glare of high noon: “lorsqu'au milieu du jour le soleil darde ses rayons sur la forêt.” The choice of verbs is significant of the mood: l'immensité assiège, le soleil darde; these are warlike terms, suggesting a hostility of the elements. The light has not only a hostile, it has a negative quality: the forest, under the pitiless noontime glare, remains plunged in its “obscurité éternelle.” In this harsh absurd landscape the solitary wanderer becomes aware of a more terrible absence: “on dirait que le Créateur a pour un moment détourné sa face.” Man seems utterly forsaken, utterly alone, in a world without order or meaning; for the forest, at this moment of absence and silence, appears as the dark domain of brute matter, inarticulate, inanimate, the eteron tou ontos, eternally beyond the reach and redemption of light.

Chateaubriand, by contrast, finds in the forest wilderness a magnificent testimonial of God's presence and providence. Every aspect of this primitive nature, he says, gives “une idée de la création telle qu'elle sortit des mains de Dieu,” and within this congenial context the human mind thrills to the consciousness of its own freedom and power:

Liberté primitive je te retrouve enfin! Je passe comme cet oiseau qui vole devant moi, qui se dirige au hasard et n'est embarrassé que du choix des ombrages. Me voilà tel que le Tout-Puissant m'a créé, souverain de la nature, porté triomphant sur les eaux tandis que les habitants des fleuves accompagnent mes courses, que les peuples de l'air me chantent leurs hymnes, que les bêtes de la terre me saluent, que les forêts courbent leurs cimes sur mon passage.¹⁹

Chateaubriand's wilderness is no alien, hostile solitude. It is his personal domain. His sentences ring with an exuberant sense of possession. Let social man, he declares, surrender his inner freedom to the subtle slavery of conformity. As for himself: “Moi, j'irai errant dans mes solitudes; pas un seul battement de mon cœur ne sera comprimé, pas une seule de mes pensées ne sera enchaînée, je serai libre comme la nature.”²⁰

“Mes solitudes”: the possessive is both apt and revealing. Solitude was no moral burden for Chateaubriand, it was rather his special and cherished state. Sainte-Beuve has described Chateaubriand as “une grande nature primitive qui reprend le dessus et qui se donne espace; (…) une imagination étrange, mélancolique et radieuse qui monte puissamment et se déploie dans les solitudes du ciel comme le condor.”²¹

Tocqueville's forest wilderness conveys no such surging sense of vitality and power. The mood evoked by his description is the anguish of Pascal's roseau pensant, man “caught in the conflict between his sense of values and the knowledge that nature is indifferent.”²² But the young man of twenty-five, who in the pages of his Journal of 1831 noted the “terreur religieuse” inspired in him by the American wilderness, did not fail to record also its more serene and more benevolent aspects:

Le désert était là tel qu'il s'offrit il y a six mille ans aux regards de nos pères. Une solitude fieurie, délicieuse, embaumée, magnifique demeure, palais vivant, bâtie pour l'homme, mais où le maître n'avait pas encore pénétré. Le canot glissait sans bruit. Il régnait autour de nous une sérénité, une quiétude universelle.

Qui peindra jamais avec fidélité ces moments si rares dans la vie, où le bien-être physique vous prépare à la tranquillité morale et où il s'établit devant vos yeux comme un équilibre parfait dans l'univers; alors que l'âme, à moitié endormie, se balance entre le présent et l'avenir, entre le réel et le possible.²³

Here is indeed (with strong overtones of Jean-Jacques) “la poèsie chateaubrianesque du désert.” But what follows introduces a sudden jarring note:

Un coup de fusil qui retentit tout à coup dans les bois nous tira de notre rêverie. Le bruit sembla d'abord rouler avec fracas sur les deux rives du fleuve; puis il s'éloigna en grondant jusqu'à ce qu'il fût entièrement perdu dans la profondeur des forêts environnantes. On eût dit un long et formidable cri de guerre que poussait la civilisation dans sa marche.²⁴

The contrast and the parallel between this description and Tocqueville's previous one is extremely significant. In the former, the absence of man made the solitude menacing. In the present scene, man's presence announces itself as a menace, and it is the wilderness which is threatened. We have therefore at this moment a total reversal of the active vs. passive dynamics which expressed the emotional quality of the traveller's response to the forest's vastness and silence. There is also an interesting correspondence (one might venture to suppose it to be an unconscious, but not a casual one) between the sounds that interrupt the stillness of both the dark forest and the green Eden. In the former: “on entend souvent retentir dans ses profondeurs comme un long gémissement, un cri plaintif qui se prolonge au loin. C'est le dernier effort du vent qui expire ….” In the latter, the shot, rebounding along the river banks “s'éloigna en grondant jusqu'à ce qu'il fût entièrement perdu dans les forêts environnantes. On eût dit un long et formidable cri de guerre que poussait la civilisation dans sa marche.” The spatial definitions of these two auditory phenomena are also significant. The wind's long plaintive cry arises from, and dies within, the forest depths, the weight of silence crushes the solitary sound. But the thundering reverberation of the gun invades the river wilderness from without; here silence is not the manifestation—as absence, non-logos—of an oppressive immensity; it is the peace—now violated—of an harmonious order. This is made more explicit in Tocqueville's thoughts as he reflects on the implications of the gunshot he has just heard:

Dans peu d'années ces forêts impénétrables seront tombées, le bruit de la civilisation et de l'industrie rompra le silence de la Saginaw. Des quais emprisonneront ses rives; ses eaux, qui coulent aujourd'hui ignorées et tranquilles au milieu d'un désert sans nom, seront refoulées dans leurs cours par la proue des vaisseaux. Cinquante lieues séparent encore cette solitude des grands établissements européens; et nous sommes peut-être les derniers voyageurs auxquels il ait été donné de la contempler dans sa primitive splendeur, tant est grande l'impulsion qui entraîne la race blanche vers la conquête entière du Nouveau Monde. C'est cette idée de destruction, cette arrière pensée d'un changement prochain et inévitable qui donne, suivant nous, aux solitudes de l'Amérique, un caractère si original et une si touchante beauté. On les voit avec un plaisir mélancolique. On se hâte en quelque sorte de les admirer. L'idée de cette grandeur naturelle et sauvage qui va finir se mêle aux superbes images que la civilisation fait naître. On se sent fier d'être homme et l'on éprouve en même temps je ne sais quel amer regret d'un pouvoir que Dieu vous a accordé sur la nature. L'âme est agitée par des idées, des sentiments contraires. Mais toutes les impressions qu'elle reçoit sont grandes et laissent une trace profonde.²⁵

Within this “solitude fleurie” on the banks of the Saginaw one finds the same elements of violence, of physical and moral conflict, the sense of impending doom that give such vivid poignancy to the more sombre scenes of the forest wilderness. Thus, “la tranquillité morale”, “l'équilibre parfait” between present and future, the real and ideal, that set the opening mood of the idyllic setting, resolve themselves in the bitterness, the moral conflict and contradictions of the concluding paragraph. Whether nature is perceived under an active or a passive aspect, whether man is considered as victim or aggressor, the relation of man to nature is seen essentially in terms of conflict, of dramatic confrontation which excludes ultimately the idyllic, the contemplative or the lyrical mood. Paradoxically, through a subjective reflection, the serene beauty of the primeval landscape is humanized, so to speak, inasmuch as nature is perceived here in terms of an essential human trait, i.e.: mortality and the consciousness thereof, and of the unique and fragile quality of all vital perfection; man himself, on the contrary, or at least man's distinctive achievement—civilisation—becomes equated with that which has been depicted as essentially alien to man's humanity: the inflexible absolute order of necessity.²⁶ The dynamic of change (projected as inevitable), and the static of trap (experienced as inescapable) meet in a common connotation of menace. The forest, “édifice immense et indestructible”, overwhelming the mind with the sense of a hostile oppressive immensity, and the irresistible march of civilisation threatening the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness, both represent the impersonal indifferent forces that threaten man's inner freedom, that would annihilate the human personality. Tocqueville felt, like others among his more perceptive contemporaries, that society itself might become an oppressive force, robbing man of his moral dignity, restricting him to a rigid pattern that would deprive human life of all true meaning and beauty. In this dehumanized society the sense of a larger, freer dimension of existence would become only a memory. Paradise rediscovered is briefly, but exuberantly and imperially possessed in Chateaubriand's “Journal sans date”; Paradise is rediscovered as already and finally lost in Tocqueville's “Relation de voyage.”

Chateaubriand noted in his own fashion how Tocqueville's American experience differed from his own. In the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, relating one of his visits with the family of the Baron de Tocqueville at Verneuil he writes:

Monsieur de Tocqueville, beau-frère de mon frère et tuteur de mes deux neveux orphelins, habitait le château de Mme de Senozan: c'était partout des héritages d'échafauds. Là je voyais croître mes neveux avec leurs trois cousins de Tocqueville, entre lesquels s'élevait Alexis, auteur de La Démocratic en Amérique. Il était plus gâté à Verneuil que je ne l'avais été à Combourg. Est-ce la dernière renommée que j'aurais vue ignorée dans ses langes? Alexis de Tocqueville a parcouru l'Amérique civilisée, dont j'ai visité les forêts.²⁷

Actually, Alexis de Tocqueville had seen, in America, both her civilization and her wilderness. Both had left, as he says in his travel journal, a deep impression, “une trace profonde” on his mind. This impression was to become, in its intellectual elaboration, an integral part of the inspiration for his major work La Démocratie en Amérique.

Tocqueville wrote, in 1835, in the introduction to the first part of La Démocratie en Amérique:

Le livre entier qu'on va lire a été écrit sous l'impression d'une sorte de terreur religieuse produite dans l'âme de l'auteur par la vue de cette révolution irrésistible qui marche depuis tant de siècles à travers tous les obstacles et qu'on voit encore aujourd'hui avancer au milieu des ruines qu'elle a faites.²⁸

Does not this concept of an irresistible historical revolution, marching inexorably through the centuries, compare strikingly with the earlier image of the inescapable forest “éternelle, froide, sombre et muette, qui vous suit sur les hauts des montagnes, descend avec vous dans les vallées”? The intellectual awareness of a powerful social force, advancing “au milieu des ruines qu'elle a faites”, arouses the same moral emotion, expressed in the very same words, as the spectacle of the forest, where the forces of nature displayed their awesome power for destruction and renewal: “une sorte de terreur religeuse”. The purpose and inspiration of La Démocratie en Amérique reveal therefore not only the intellectual viewpoint of a keen, observing mind, they also express a special moral mood. It can be said that Tocqueville's state of mind evokes and reflects, to a degree, a state of soul. It is this “état d'âme” that reveals, in Tocqueville's temper and thought, a definite relationship with a special aspect of the Romantic mind.

Sainte-Beuve remarks, in his study of Sénancour, that the Romantic generation was haunted by le sens de l'infini [italics in the original] and that this sense of infinity is suggested through two deeply original and contrasting expressions, two forms of a fundamental identity. There was first, says Sainte-Beuve, the sense of infinity as an inspiration of the soul, an outward movement of the moi, that found its special expression in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, in the works of Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand. These two writers proclaimed the magnificent and assertive powers of the individual imagination. They were, says Sainte-Beuve, “nobles et vagues puissances, lumineux précurseurs, représentants des idées, des réminiscences illusoires ou des espérances prophétiques.”²⁹

In contrast to this expansive sense of infinity, the Romantic mind also knew another mood, not luminous and expansive, but “grave, obscur, appesanti, de l'infirmité humaine en présence des choses plus grandes et plus fortes, en présence de l'accablante nature ou de la société qui écrase.”³⁰

Chateaubriand's “Journal sans date” may or may not be an account sur place; it may or may not be a factually true description of the forest primeval; but it is certainly ideally true. The form and the content of its passages reflect and express, through the poetic and dynamic interrelationship of nature and the moi, the fluid, undeterminate social and moral landscape of a time when, in the breakdown of old structures, life seemed to offer infinite possibilities of deed and dream: “c'est qu'à l'époque de mon voyage aux Etats-Unis, j'étois plein d'illusions: les troubles de la France commençoient en même temps que commençoit me vie: rien n‘étoit achevé en moi ni dans mon pays.”³¹ Chateaubriand's perception (actual or ideal) of the American wilderness as “mes solitudes” expresses the assertive exuberant mood of the first moment of the Romantic movement,³² when poets and thinkers did not doubt that their generation had been called upon to build a new world out of the social and moral wilderness left by the Revolution (Lamartine and Hugo would still express this more positive attitude throughout most of their work and thought).³³ But many of the later Romantics, disillusioned by the aftermath of 1830, expressed in their art the bitter anguish of the individual pitted against a social structure combining the outward pressures of control and conformity with a moral and intellectual hollowness.

Tocqueville's description of the wilderness seems to reflect precisely this more sombre Romantic theme of the sense of man's helplessness “en présence de l'accablante nature ou de la société qui écrase.”³⁴ This relationship of mood and thoughts, is further evident in a significant passage in the notes he took during his visit to England in 1835, when he recorded his impressions of the terrible slums of Manchester:

Levez la tête, et tout autour de cette place vous verrez s'élever les immenses palais de l'industrie. Vous entendrez le bruit des fourneaux, les sifflements de la vapeur. Ces vastes demeures empêchent l'air et la lumière de pénétrer dans les demeures humaines qu'elles dominent; elles les enveloppent d'un perpétuel brouillard; ici est l'esclave, là le maître; là, les richesses de quelques-uns; ici, la misère du plus grand nombre; là les forces organisées d'une multitude produisent, au profit d'un seul, ce que la société n'avait pas encore su donner; ici, la faiblesse individuelle se montre plus débile et plus dépourvue encore qu'au milieu des déserts.³⁵

Here the spectacle of the industrial city evokes, no less than the intellectual perspective of the historical revolution, the memory of the anguished sense of loneliness in the forest. For the city is, no less than the forest, an oppressive immensity. The “perpétuel brouillard” of the slum recalls the “obscurité éternelle” of the forest and, like the forces of nature, the forces of industry display, under the lurid sky of the metropolis, their brutal power for production and destruction, creating a human wilderness more desolate and terrible than nature's own.

.....

In the grey days of the juste-milieu Chateaubriand, surveying the social and moral landscape of Louis-Philippe's France from the withdrawn eminence of his “cellule” in the Rue d'Enfer, remarked with acerbity that “le temps du désert est revenu.”³⁶ Yet, in the seeming déchéance of his disillusionment and withdrawal from public life he found in fact the distance and detachment his imagination needed to regain “le dessus et se donner espace.” Through his art Chateaubriand ultimately triumphed over “le fait brutal”³⁷, making of his solitude, his disillusionment and estrangement the context and opportunity for creation: “mes solitudes”.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in those same years, committed himself deliberately, through a high sense of duty, to the tensions and challenges of public life; but he found that his moral and intellectual energies were destined to exert themselves in a sort of moral vacuum of indifference, irrelevance, and incomprehension. He came to feel that he lived in a space and time of absence where he sought in vain that confirmation of self that comes from an awareness of shared values and a common outlook. He did not find in his lifetime “les preuves de moi-même dans la pensée des autres”,³⁸ and he possessed no resources of personal memory and poetic imagination by which to escape this daily sense of irrelevance. Indeed, because his imagination was rather a heightened perception of the moral implications of observed facts,³⁹ it made him more keenly aware of the nature and extent of his spiritual solitude. Alien to the temper of the justemilieu times in his essential nature, and beyond his time in his intellectual vision, he was to fulfill in his destiny, quite unwittingly, the Romantic ideal of the unheeded and unhonoured prophet.

And the young man who stood in awe before the great forests of Michigan would come to know only too well, in later years, that bitter leit motif of the Romantic inspiration, the desolate wilderness of the heart.⁴⁰ In a letter of 1854, seeking to define for a friend the measure and image of his inner sense of absence, Tocqueville wrote:

j'ai des parents, des voisins, des proches: mon esprit n'a plus de famille ni de patrie. Cette espèce d'isolement me donne souvent le sentiment de la solitude d'une façon plus intense que je l'ai ressentie jadis dans les forêts de l'Amérique.⁴¹

Notes

1. New York, Oxford University Press, 1938.

2. Gustave de Beaumont, “Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville”, Œuvres Complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont, Paris, Lévy, 1864-67, V, p. 27-28 (this edition is referred to henceforward as O.C.B.).

3. Ibid. p. 175. This title is accompanied by the notation: “Ecrit sur le steamboat The Superior, août 1831.”

4. “J'étais plein de souvenirs de M. de Chateaubriand et de Cooper.” Tocqueville, “Quinze jours au désert”, O.C.B., V, p. 177. Was Chateaubriand present solely as a literary “souvenir” in the thoughts and determinations of Tocqueville's American venture? Or did he have some part in the intellectual motivations of his young relative's decision to visit America? The text and circumstances of Tocqueville's very first political article (written in 1825, but never published) permit one to raise the latter possibility. Young Tocqueville had been moved to take pen in hand by the “déplorable” spectacle of a “génie égaré dans des fausses voies et faisant servir à la ruine des ses concitoyens et de sa patrie cette haute raison que le ciel lui avait donnée dans un autre but.” This “génie égaré” was Chateaubriand, and young Tocqueville, in the boldness of his twenty years, proposed to refute (and rebuke) an article Chateaubriand had written in the Journal des Débats, on the subject of the American republic. Antoine Redier, who relates this episode (A. Redier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville, Paris, Perrin, 1925, p. 92) does not quote the text of Chateaubriand's article, but its general thought can be inferred from Tocqueville's refutation. Tocqueville argued that the political and social experience of the American democracy was in no way applicable to France, and that to imply otherwise was to do a disservice to one's “concitoyens” by attempting to “nous abuser par une ressemblance mensongère”. It is obvious therefore that Alexis de Tocqueville's American voyage represented the outcome of a long mental elaboration and reflection on the events of the past five years, during which some of the young man's opinions had undergone considerable change. For the course of events since 1825, and their dramatic dénouement in 1830, seemed to justify Chateaubriand's admonition that the American democracy was not a special, localized, phenomenon, but an expression of an ongoing, great process of social and political change: “cette revolution que vous prétendez finie.” (Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, ed. M. Levaillant et G. Mouliner, Paris, Gallimard, 1951, V. II, p. 745) [our italics].

5. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, Paris, Garnier, XV, p. 99.

6. Ibid, p. 98.

7. Œuvres Complètes, Paris, 1826, V. XII; this text will be referred to as Voyage.

8. J. P. Mayer finds in Tocqueville's descriptions of the wilderness “a keenness of observation reminiscent of Alexander von Humboldt's travel papers.” (Tocqueville, Voyage to America, ed. J. P. Mayer, tr. M. M. Bozman and C. Mahn, New York, Viking, 1960, pp. 17-18). “Un romantique contre un classique, enfin” affirms Christian Bazin in his Chateaubriand en Amérique, Paris, Table Ronde, 1969, p. 206.

9. Tocqueville, Correspondance, O.C.B., VI, p. 171.

10. Voyage, pp. 55-60. “Ces description sont complètement transportées dans Atala et dans Les Natchez”; Chateaubriand, Ibid, p. 83. Richard Switzer notes that some questions have been raised as to “l'authenticité de ce journal en tant que document rapporté d'Amérique,” due to the existence of two somewhat differing manuscript versions of the “Journal”. Cf. editor's note, in Richard Switzer's critical edition of Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique, Paris, Didier, 1964, Tome I, p. 132. Readers are referred to this book for a comprehensive historical survey and thoughtful evaluation of the arguments, speculations and research aimed at establishing, disproving or qualifying the authenticity of Chateaubriand's New World itinerary.

11. Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire, Paris, Garnier, 1948, I, p. 104.

12. Chateaubriand, Voyage, p. 59.

13. Tocqueville, O.C.B., V, pp. 225-7.

14. Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire, II, p. 158.

15. Tocqueville's oppressive immensity presents a strong analogy with that manifestation of “false” infinity which Hegel calls the Massloss (the measureless) before the idea of which the mind reels and falters, and thought is overcome; an effect, says Hegel, induced not by the awesome vision of the sublime (to which it is wrongly ascribed) but by the overwhelming boredom of unrelenting repetition and sameness. (Hegel's Science of Logic, transl. A. V. Miller, London, George Allen and Univin Ltd.; Humanities Press, 1969, pp. 228-29). Indeed, we find this Hegelian equivocity of sublime infinity and relentless monotony explicitly stated in a letter in which Tocqueville records for a friend his impressions of the ocean during his Atlantic crossing. This letter (dated: New York, 28 juillet, 1831) assumes a special interest and relevance in the light of the journal passage just quoted, in which the forest mass recalls and reflects the ocean's expanse, this reflection giving rise to the experience and the idea of immensity, through a common effect of oppressive size and oppressive solitude.

    Je ne puis te dire à quel point la solitude du milieu de l'Atlantique est imposante […] Durant les premiers jours un grand nombre d'oiseaux suivent le bâtiment; la mer est pleine de poissons qui jouent à la surface; enfin, il ne se passe pas d'heaure qu'on ne signale une voile à l'horizon. Bientôt tout cela devient plus rare; enfin les oiseaux, les poissons, les vaisseaux disparaissent. Au-dessus, audessous, autour de vous, il règne une solitude profonde et un silence complet. Le vaisseau où vous êtes forme bien réellement alors votre univers. Tu sais que j'aime assez un semblable spectacle; mais renouvelé sans cesse, mais se reproduisant tous les jours, il finit par peser sur l'âme et l'oppresser.

    (O.C.B., V, p. 413)

16. This quality of movement as passage through defines the direction of the light (“le jour tombant d'en haut à travers un voile de feuillage”) as well as that of the traveller. The physical obstacle, the material opacity “veil” nature's mystery, yet suggest its presence, thereby establishing and inviting transcendence.

17. Chateaubriand, Voyage, p. 60.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid. p. 56.

20. Ibid. p. 56-57.

21. Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, I, p. 209

22. Jacques Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern Ego, Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1943, p. 27.

23. Tocqueville, O.C.B., V, pp. 249-50.

24. Ibid., p. 50

25. Ibid.

26. The sense of an antagonist relationship of man and nature, and the negative equation of nature and technological progress find a powerful poetic statement in La Maison du Berger. A striking parallel of ideas and images within the context of Vigny's poem mirrors the essential analogy between the order of nature, following in serene indifference her “route accoutumée / sur l'axe harmonieux des divins balanciers”, and the order of science whose irresistible progress:

    trace autour de la terre un chemin triste et droit
    .....Plus de hasard. Chacun glissera sur sa ligne,
    Immobile au seul rang que le départ assigne,
    Plongé dans le calcul silencieux et froid.

    Thus the poet perceives both nature and science as levelling forces, equally hostile to “la rêverie amoureuse et paisible” and to “les hautes pensées”.

27. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, ed. M. Levaillant et G. Moulnier, Paris, Gallimard, 1951, II, p. 745.

28. Tocqueville, La Démocratie en Amérique, I, Œuvres, papiers et correspondances, ed. J. P. Mayer, Paris, Gallimard, 1951, I, p. 4. (this edition referred to henceforward as O.C.M.).

29. Sainte-Beuve, Les Grands Ecrivains Français, Les Romanciers, Paris, Garnier, 1948, IV, pp. 66-68.

30. Ibid., p. 67.

31. Chateaubriand, Voyage, p. 309.

32. This same appropriation of silence and solitude and limitless space as the natural estate of the self-affirming and creative energies of the mind and the imagination, is expressed in a passage of the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe which presents an evocative description of “les sentiments qu' on éprouve lorsque du bord d' un vaisseau on n'aperçoit plus que la mer et le ciel”. (Voyage, “Introduction”, p. 6). This is the passage which recounts, in the first part of the Mémoires, the inner and outer events of Chateaubriand's sea voyage to America; it is quoted here as having special relevance to the subject of this study, in view of the quality of the analogy which Tocqueville (as noted above) perceived between forest and ocean. By a remarkable coincidence, Tocqueville sailed from France on April 2, 1831, only a week from the day—April 9—in which the young Chevalier de Combourg had set out in 1791 for his New World adventure. Same ocean, viewed, albeit at a distance of some forty years, in the same month and season, in similar circumstances: yet in Tocqueville's letter, it will be recalled, “le vaisseau où vous êtes forme bien réellement alors votre univers”, a fragile citadel within the “solitude imposante” of an alien, unchanging space; whereas the ocean is truly, for Chateaubriand, native element (“rendu à la mer”), and watery realm, extending before his gaze from his lordly retreat high on the crow's nest where “je m'asseyais en dominant les vagues”:

    L'espace tendu d'un double azur avait l'air d'une toile préparée pour recevoir les futures créations d'un grand peintere. La couleur des eaux était pareille à celle du verre liquide. De longues et hautes ondulations ouvraient dans leurs ravines des échappées de vue sur les déserts d l'océan: ces vacillants paysages rendaient sensibles à mes yeux la comparaison que fait l'Ecriture de la terre chancelante devant le Seigneur comme un homme ivre. Quelquefois, on eût dit l'espace étroit et borné, faute d'un point de saillie; mais si une vague venait à lever la tête, uu flot à se courber en imitation d'une côte lointaine, un escadron de chiens de mer à passer à l'horizon, alors se présentait une échelle de mesure. L'étendue se révélait, surtout lorsqu'une brume, rampant à la surface pélagienne, semblait accroître l'immensité même.

    Chateaubriand's seascape differs from Tocqueville's ocean panorama (all due allowance being made for literary vs. informal epistolary style) through precisely the same perceptual elements which determine the striking contrast of their forest descriptions: mobility, diversity, becoming; the suggestion and evocation of transcendence. The indeterminate ocean vastness does not overwhelm the mind with a feeling of oppressive and reductive sameness; it solicits the imagination as a many-splendored mirage of endless possibility, process and promise (espace … double azur … toile … préparée; eaux … couleur … du verre liquide) Mémoires, I, pp. 208-209.

33. Cf, Lamartine, “Des Destinées de la Poésie,” Premières Méditations poétiques. Hugo, “Préface de la première série”, La Légende des siècles, Paris, Hetzel, [n.d.], p. xxxi.

34. Cf. supra., p. O, “la petitesse ridicule de l'homme”.

35. Tocqueville, Voyage en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie, I, O.C.M., V, pp. 350-51.

36. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, II, p. 933.

37. Ibid, p. 611.

38. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, O.C.U., XII, p. 36.

39. Cf., J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville. A Biographical Study in Political Science, New York, Harpers, 1950, p. 17.

40. Quel tombeau que le cœur, et quelle solitude!” Musset, “Lettre à Lamartine”, Premières Poésie, Paris, Charpentier, 1881, p. 87.

41. Tocqueville, Correspondance, O.C.B., VI, pp. 350-51.