Paragraph one: a single sentence, fairly short, broken in the middle by a comma, roughly the way the “caesura” or traditional pause breaks up a classic French verse line or alexandrine. The one-sentence paragraph conveys, as alexandrines so easily do, a tone of serene lucidity.
Paragraph two: a single sentence broken in the middle, this time by a colon, which makes for an even sharper caesura—a very short one-sentence paragraph, briefer even than its predecessor, yet, because of the severity of the colon, with a sound that lingers slightly longer in the ear.
Paragraph three: a single sentence, this time absolutely longer, with four main components instead of two—a sentence-paragraph that has begun to shake off the constrictions of simple structures and tranquil rhythms.
Paragraph four: a single sentence, this time longer yet, and knottier—a sentence of several clauses, broken up with a semicolon.
The growing length and complexity of these four one-sentence paragraphs build an energetic tension, and the tension, having mounted step by step to its high point, overflows at last into the fifth and final paragraph, which is altogether different. The fifth paragraph consists of five sentences of varied complexity, containing two colons and three semicolons—a paragraph of rich tones, with a conversational ease instead of the attention-attracting qualities of the one-sentence paragraphs that have come before.
Next comes a paragraph of three sentences, announcing a change of topic—a paragraph that serves as a transitional bridge to the chapter’s second strophe. The second strophe turns out to be instantly recognizable—a recapitulation of the general shape of the opening strophe. There are a series of short one-sentence paragraphs (or, in the case of the second paragraph, a very short two-sentence paragraph, corresponding to the second, colon-broken, one-sentence paragraph of the first strophe). The one-sentence paragraphs grow in length, in complexity, and in tension. And the tension resolves by overflowing at last into a full-length paragraph of multiple sentences and complicated rhythms.
You would have to be poetically deaf not to notice the repeated form of those opening strophes. Then Tocqueville moves to a third section, which has none of the simple shape and motion of the opening sections, a new style altogether—thereby creating a progression that amounts to A, A, B. The bulk of the chapter consists of sundry combinations of conventional paragraphs and one-sentence paragraphs, laid out with striking variations, such that, in some instances, the one-sentence paragraphs convey a tranquil tone reminiscent of a proper alexandrine, and, in other instances, convey a declarative and emphatic tone, something forceful. A sample one-sentence paragraph of the declarative and emphatic sort: “The jury teaches each man not to falter in taking responsibility for his own actions—a virile disposition, without which there is no political virtue.” Emphatic declarations of this kind follow one upon the other, then yield to the relaxed conversational tone of his conventional multi-sentence paragraphs.
The tone rises, swells, pounds, subsides. At the end, in order to bring his chapter to a proper and shapely conclusion, Tocqueville reverts to the form of his opening strophes, which is repeated exactly, except in reverse. He begins with a full-sized paragraph containing a period, a semicolon, and a colon, plus five commas, not to mention a footnote asterisk. And then, in ever-shrinking versions, one-sentence paragraphs follow one after another—four one-sentence paragraphs that grow ever simpler. The very last paragraph turns out to be a straightforwardly brief and classically constructed sentence. It begins with a three word introduction, “Thus the jury...,” and is neatly broken in the center by a comma serving as a caesura—a one-sentence paragraph at the conclusion of the chapter recapitulating the shape and style of the one-sentence paragraph at the very start. Even the size of those opening and closing one-sentence paragraphs are pretty much the same: a sentence of twenty-seven words or fifty-one syllables (in the original French) at the end, balancing the sentence of twenty-six words or fifty-three syllables at the start. You don’t have to count feet or syllables or notice the line breaks to experience the effect that Tocqueville intends you to feel at the end. Your own ear and eye automatically register the shape of his lines, and, if you allow your own aesthetic sense to respond, you will feel a pleasurable click of satisfaction at the symmetry and perfection.
TOCQUEVILLE NEVER doubted that good thinkers must be good writers, attentive to the rules of well-ordered composition. In a private letter on literary style, he specified that good writing can always be defined by what he called, as if shrugging at the simplicity of it all, “good sense.” But Democracy in America is not merely well-written. It is beautiful. The shapely swells and symmetries in the chapter on juries cannot be explained simply by the demands of lucidity and good sense. The final, wonderfully satisfying sentence in that chapter goes beyond the classic construction to establish, by repeating a verb, a strong and stirring dynamic: “Thus the jury, which is the most energetic means of making the people reign, is also the most efficacious way of making them learn to reign.” It is a perfect sentence, which makes a perfect paragraph, which shows democracy itself to contain, through the jury system, a perfect quality: a society that, by means of the jury system, not only achieves its goal (to allow the people to reign) but also guarantees that democratic government will prove to be worthy (by teaching the people to reign with responsibility and virtue). The repetition of the verb conforms to the epigrammatic style of French philosophy; but repetition and rhyme are, above all, poetic devices.
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America during the 1830s, and the young French intellectuals of that decade, the people like Tocqueville himself, who was 25 in 1830, were pretty much obsessed with questions of verse structure, prosodic rhythm, and the relation of poetry to prose—the grand preoccupation of their generation. The single greatest literary event of the decade, in the eyes of the younger writers and artists, was the staging of Victor Hugo’s verse play, Hernani, in 1830, which sparked a famous riot at its opening performance. The riot broke out because, in the very first words of his play, Hugo enjambed the opening sentence from one alexandrine into the next, which constituted an outrageous flouting of the venerable laws of French prosody. Tocqueville as a writer shared none of Hugo’s fascination with emotional extremes—none of Hugo’s attraction to the grotesque, the sublime, and the defiant. Hugo was a theatrical ham, and Tocqueville, a modest barrister. Still, Tocqueville did share one aspect of Hugo’s inspiration, which was the deepest motive of all, the desire that led Hugo to wreak his radical reforms on traditional verse. This was the desire to get away from the tyranny of artifice and falsity—to find the road leading toward truth and sincerity. This, in the end, was the motive that drove Tocqueville to America, and this was the motive that drove him, as well, to seek out poetry-like structures to express his thoughts.
He wanted to find a literary structure that could convey a simplicity of spirit, yet could also convey some more than simple feelings. He wanted to express a pure emotion that was also a passionate emotion; a straightforward emotion that was also a complicated and contradictory emotion; a single emotion that was also a nuanced cluster of several emotions.
AND WHAT was this large, commodious and variable emotion, ultimately—the single emotion, in its profoundest form? The emotion was not really love for America, not exactly (though we American readers, in paroxysms of patriotic narcissism, are always imagining that Tocqueville has painted our portrait, and how handsome we look!). Nor is this single underlying emotion of Tocqueville’s a savvy connoisseur’s recognition of irony and reservation and complication, a sophisticated acceptance of what cannot be avoided (though conservative readers, emphasizing this one aspect, have worked up a cult of Tocqueville as a rueful and conservative aristocrat—a cult for which the evidence, such as it is, can be found precisely in the chapter on juries, in the discussion of judges as a kind of democratic aristocracy). No, the grand emotion that animates Tocqueville throughout the book, the emotion that is announced at the very start of the book and that carries him through to the end, is something else entirely. It is love for democracy itself, in a liberal version. A genuine ardor, and not just a resigned acceptance (though sometimes he did like to sigh, as if in resignation). The love that animates him ought to be obvious to any reader who can recognize and respond to the prosodic energy of the prose—to the carefully ordered rhythms that correspond to the pounding of the man’s heart, and not just to his occasional sighs. And his heart does pound, and Democracy in America ends up symphonically grand and stirring—one of the most moving works of political philosophy ever written.
It is fascinating to glance at Tocqueville’s notebooks on the topic of American juries and their function—his scribbled jottings from his time in the United States investigating this one very narrow and technical theme. He did do his share of serious research. He was trained as a lawyer in France, and he studied the American law books and commentaries, with special attention to studies written in Louisiana, which was the only state in the union whose legal code descended from French instead of English origins—the only state where lawyers were obliged to navigate between the different legal traditions. A footnote in the chapter on juries refers to Louisiana, in order to emphasize his debt. But he also interviewed lawyers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, taking a special interest in anyone who could comment on the differences between French and English jurisprudence. He studied a jury trial in Boston, in which an insurance company was sued for declining to compensate the owners of a shipwrecked vessel, on the claim that the ship had sailed under conditions outside of the contract. The jury sided with the insurance company. The ship owners appealed. And Tocqueville found the entire affair worthy of note.
He possessed, in short, all of the information he needed to come up with a knotty and fact-based description of the jury system and the legal system as a whole—not to mention all the other information that he piled up on sundry aspects of American life, its economy, for instance. But Tocqueville chose to leave the many factual details in his notebooks—much to the disappointment of some of his modern readers, who are always regretting the lack of social-science data or precise descriptions of institutions in his book. Tocqueville left these things out because he wanted to achieve a simplicity of understanding, philosophical more than reportorial. And more: he wanted to describe something beyond what actually existed. He wanted to describe a democratic potential that in America was visible, if at all, only in glimpses, and in surmises. And so, he adopted a style that allowed him to explicate and, at the same time, to sing. Democracy, as he understood it, was more than a novel social and political system. It was an ideal, and, to evoke an ideal, only poetry could do. He said so himself in one of the other chapters in Democracy in America, the chapter called “Some Sources of Poetry Among the Democratic Nations”—though he made no effort to point out even the slightest applicability of this chapter to his own writing.
TOCQUEVILLE WAS of course hardly the only person in his day and age to see in America a proper theme for poetry. In 1855, in the preface to the original edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman outdid everyone else by saying, as no one else had ever thought to say, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”—a non-Tocquevillean remark if ever there was one. Still, don’t be too quick in dismissing a Tocqueville-Whitman comparison. The notion in Tocqueville’s chapter on juries—that democratic institutions are valuable above all for their educational aspect—was shared by other writers in that generation. John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville’s friend, looked on democratic elections as a training method for democracy and not just as a method for selecting leaders; and Whitman was Mill’s admirer, as he made clear in the opening line of Democratic Vistas. Naturally Whitman went further than anyone in heaping cosmic praise on the educational possibilities of democratic institutions. In Whitman’s judgment, democracy’s ultimate purpose was always more than democracy. The ultimate purpose was to achieve an appreciation of the universal soul, or God, and this was the final goal in a democratic education.
It might be supposed that here, on the topic of God and a democratic education, Whitman at last left Tocqueville entirely behind, and Whitman went floating off into space, and poor Tocqueville was left trudging along the lowly sidewalks of mere reality. But that is not entirely the case. In the chapter on “Some Sources of Poetry Among the Democratic Nations,” Tocqueville observes that democracy leads people to notice the similarities instead of the differences in one another, and this discovery leads people to appreciate the existence of a human species and not just separate populations. And, in turn, this appreciation leads to a still larger appreciation of God—“in his full and entire majesty.” About the people in democratic nations, Tocqueville writes: “Perceiving the human race as a single thing, they easily conceive that a single such design presides over their destinies, and, in the actions of each individual, they are pushed to recognize the truth of the general and consistent plan according to which God governs the species.”
It has become fashionable today to argue that theological reforms are a main source of democratic liberty, and that, absent such reforms, democratic liberty can never be achieved. But Tocqueville also argued the opposite. He saw in democratic liberty a source of theological reform—a tendency that was going to lead not to a watered-down view of God but to a grander view than ever before. Whitman entertained the same idea. And, to be sure, in acknowledgment of the poetic nature of this particular thought, Tocqueville went on to say, in a one-sentence paragraph in the chapter on poetry: “This again could be considered as an abundant source of poetry, which emerges through the centuries.”
Do these metaphysical and religious flights of Tocqueville’s fancy carry him into zones wholly removed from his observations on the jury system? Not really. The jury, in his eyes, is a democratic institution that serves to educate the people in democracy; and democracy is the system that, by teaching people to recognize the existence of a human race, teaches them to recognize more fully and directly, without intermediaries, the existence of God. The observation is Whitman-like, and Tocqueville proposed it precisely in his chapter on poetry—in the chapter that unlocks the secret to that other, crucially important, chapter of Democracy in America: the chapter on juries. “The Jury in the United States Considered as Political Institution”: a chapter written according to unmistakable principles of prosody and melodic symmetry. Of all the chapters in Democracy in America, the single most poetic.
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