The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-11-26 00:00:00

OUR PORTFOLIO.—No. X

If it is seldom that your reviewer peruies the entire of the
work which he undertakes to criticise, it is still more rare to
find him making a candid acknowledgment of the fact. We
wish to place ourselves out of the number of those to whom
this remark :is applicable, and in order effectually to do so,
we shall begin by saying, that we have never even handled
more than one of the four volumes of the work of which we
are about to say something. Reader, have you ever had to
do with odd volumes? If you have, you may probably agree
with us, that there is a great deal to be collected from an
odd volume. For our part we profess to be something of a
connoiseur in this odu branch of literature, having long in-
dulged in the secret luxury of a collector. A clever writer
will make himself known, even in a fragment of his work,
and if we can obtain no more of him than a few disjecta
membra—if like the lost books of Livy, or some other anci-

cut classic, all else that bore the impre'ss of his master hand,
has periahed—the value of what remains is doubly enhanced,
and our " odd volume" becomes a treasure of inestimable
price. On the other hand, if the author be tedious in his
manner, and tasteless in his dissertations, we shall have quite
enough of him in a single volume, or any fractional portion
of his labours ; we may be content to form our opinion of
this Hercules, not by his foot, but by his toe, and instead of
desiring to wrap ourselves all round in a wet blanket, we may
be happy to divest ourselves even of the small end that has
fallen in our way. Thus far then we would justify expound-
ing from an odd volume; and now to the work, to the notice
of which we have made this prelusion—Alexis de Torque-
Title's Democracy its America. One volume of this, then,
is all that we have looked into ; but it has been enough for
us. M. de Tocqueville is a member of the Chamber of De-
puties, a member of the Institute of France, &c. &c., and
we make no doubt a very clever personage; but shall we on
this account waste our time in sifting a whole bushel of chaff
for the sake of three grains of wheat? Your Frenchmen
too often deem themselves profound when they are only
muddy ;—philosophical when they are only frivolous; and it
is not merely a matter of taste, but an affair of sound judg-
ment and superior discrimination, when Englishmen put
from them such inanities as quite unworthy of men who de-
light chiefly in what is solid and important. It is not that
M. de Tocqueville does not favour us occasionally with very
excellent observations ; it would be scarcely possible for one
man to write so much, and not sometimes hit upon some-
thing striking or novel ; but we say that his eternal specu-
lation and systematising upon any trifling accident—his in-
cessant elaboration to reduce every fact, however insignifi-
cant, to some principle—his evident passion for what he
calls " general ideas,"—a passion which, he tells us, is indi-
genous to his country; all this, we say, renders him as a
writer most uncongenial to our English taste. He furnishes
the key to our dislike in a passage in which the character of
the English and American mind is contrasted, and that of
both countries with the national genius of the French : we
shall transcribe it :

" The Americans are much more addicted to the use of
general ideas than the English, and entertain a much greater
relish for them. This contrast becomes much more striking
still, if we fix our eyes on our own part of the world, and
compare together the two most enlightened nations which
inhabit it. It would seem as if the mind of the English
could only tear itself reluctantly and painfully away from the
observation of particular facts, to rise from them to their
causes ; and that it only generalises in spite of itself. A-
mongst the French, on the contrary, the taste for general
ideas would seem to have grown to so ardent a passion, that
it must be satisfied on every occasion. lam informed, every
morning when I awake, that some general and eternal law
has just been discovered, which I never mentioned before.
There is not a mediocre scribbler who does not by his hand,
at discovering truths, applicable to a great kingdom, and who
is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in
compressing the human race into the compass of an article."
Just so, M. de Tocqueville ; and though we are far from
counting you as a " mediocre scribbler", yet you partake of
the passion of your countrymen; you too are a hunter after
" general ideas", and if you do not seek to compress the
" human race into an article", yet you lead us into inter-
minable discussions with no other view, that we can perceive,
than to convert Brother Jonathan, not into a military com-
mander, but a yeneralproposition—and to make " Democracy
in America" the subject of a number of propositions or ge-
neralities, which it costs much time to make out, which when
we clutch we are not sure that we hold by any firm tenure,
and which, when held by the best, are not worth the chase !
To such "general ideas", you say, truly, that we English-
men are but little addicted ; and we pique ourselves upon the
fact. Sentiment, or generality, is unquestionably not the
characteristic of tine English mind—speaking with reference
to the great mass of the people ; it may probably arise from
coldness of temperament : but we do not count the absence
of it a defect. By not being actuated by this passion we
escape a number of errors, and are more easily induced to
mind, each of us, our own business. We do not chatter so
fast as Frenchmen—

While others toil with philosophic force,
Their nimble nonsense takes a shorter course ;
Flings at your head conviction in the lump,
And gains remote conclusions at a jump.
We are in the habit of doing whatever we undertake with a
respectable measure of success. We are eminently practical
people ; but yet there are a few tolerable thinkers, poets, and
philosophers amongst us, enough at all events to make a
decent show upon an emergency.
Sufficient, however, on this point. We have said enough
to show why one volume of " Democracy in America" suf-
ficed us. When we take up a book which professes to be
about a people, we confess that we are so intensely Bull-ish
that we prefer a few facts to an author's fancies, and feel
more desire to see a few leading propositions carefully
wrought out and rigidly demonstrated, than to be conducted,

,
through a multitude of conjectures, to some meagre gene-
rality not worth a farthing, if we could even believe it to be
true—and, after we have closed the book, to have nothing
remaining in our mind but a certain dim and indefinite phan-
tastnagaria of M. Alexis de Tocqueville and his theories.
Here and there, as we have admitted, there are some good
thoughts and lively descriptions. Let us take a specimen

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I.- IV.

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