The Ancient Regime Part 19

II. Its Original Deficiency.

Its original deficiency.--Signs of this in the 17th century.--It grows with time and success.--Proofs of this growth in the 18th century.--Serious poetry, the drama, history and romances.--Short-sighted views of man and of human existence.

This excess indicates a deficiency. In the two operations which the human mind performs, the cla.s.sicist is more successful in the second than in the first. The second, indeed, stands in the way of the first, the obligation of always speaking correctly makes him refrain from saying all that ought to be said. With him the form is more important than abundant contents, the firsthand observations which serve as a living source losing, in the regulated channels to which they are confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[3227] Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,[3228] pouring out his heart to relieve himself. When a creation of characters is imperative, as in dramatic poetry, the cla.s.sic mold fashions but one kind, that which through education, birth, or impersonation, always speak correctly, in other words, like so many people of high society. No others are portrayed on the stage or elsewhere, from Corneille and Racine to Marivaux and Beaumarchais. So strong is the habit that it imposes itself even on La Fontaine's animals, on the servants of Moliere, on Montesquieu's Persians, and on the Babylonians, the Indians and the Micromegas of Voltaire.--It must be stated, furthermore, that these characters are only partly real. In real persons two kinds of characteristics may be noted; the first, few in number, which he or she shares with others of their kind and which any reader readily may identify; and the other kind, of which there are a great many, describing only one particular person and these are much more difficult to discover. Cla.s.sic art concerns itself only with the former; it purposely effaces, neglects or subordinates the latter. It does not build individual persons but generalized characters, a king, a queen, a young prince, a confidant, a high-priest, a captain of the guards, seized by some pa.s.sion, habit or inclination, such as love, ambition, fidelity or perfidy, a despotic or a yielding temper, some species of wickedness or of native goodness. As to the circ.u.mstances of time and place, which, amongst others, exercise a most powerful influence in shaping and diversifying man, it hardly notes them, even setting them aside. In a tragedy the scene is set everywhere and any time, the contrary, that the action takes place nowhere in no specific epoch, is equally valid. It may take place in any palace or in any temple,[3229]

in which, to get rid of all historic or personal impressions, habits and costumes are introduced conventionally, being neither French nor foreign, nor ancient, nor modern. In this abstract world the address is always "you"(as opposed to the familiar thou),[3230] "Seigneur" and "Madame," the n.o.ble style always clothing the most different characters in the same dress. When Corneille and Racine, through the stateliness and elegance of their verse, afford us a glimpse of contemporary figures they do it unconsciously, imagining that they are portraying man in himself; and, if we of the present time recognize in their pieces either the gentleman, the duelists, the bullies, the politicians or the heroines of the Fronde, or the courtiers, princes and bishops, the ladies and gentlemen in waiting of the regular monarchy, it is because they have inadvertently dipped their brush in their own experience, some of its color having fallen accidentally on the bare ideal outline which they wished to trace. We have simply a contour, a general sketch, filled up with the harmonious gray tone of correct diction.--Even in comedy, necessarily employing current habits, even with Moliere, so frank and so bold, the model is unfinished, all individual peculiarities being suppressed, the face becoming for a moment a theatrical mask, and the personage, especially when talking in verse, sometimes losing its animation in becoming the mouth-piece for a monologue or a dissertation.[3231] The stamp of rank, condition or fortune, whether gentleman or bourgeois, provincial or Parisian, is frequently overlooked.[3232] We are rarely made to appreciate physical externals, as in Shakespeare, the temperament, the state of the nervous system, the bluff or drawling tone, the impulsive or restrained action, the emaciation or obesity of a character.[3233] Frequently no trouble is taken to find a suitable name, this being either Chrysale, Orgon, Damis, Dorante, or Valere. The name designates only a simple quality, that of a father, a youth, a valet, a grumbler, a gallant, and, like an ordinary cloak, fitting indifferently all forms alike, as it pa.s.ses from the wardrobe of Moliere to that of Regnard, Destouche, Lesage or Marivaux.[3234] The character lacks the personal badge, the unique, authentic appellation serving as the primary stamp of an individual. All these details and circ.u.mstances, all these aids and accompaniments of a man, remain outside of the cla.s.sic theory. To secure the admission of some of them required the genius of Moliere, the fullness of his conception, the wealth of his observation, the extreme freedom of his pen. It is equally true again that he often omits them, and that, in other cases, he introduces only a small number of them, because he avoids giving to these general characters a richness and complexity that might interfere with the story. The simpler the theme the clearer its development, the first duty of the author throughout this literature being to clearly develop the restricted theme of which he makes a selection.

There is, accordingly, a radical defect in the cla.s.sic spirit, the defect of its qualities, and which, at first kept within proper bounds, contributes towards the production of its purest master-pieces, but which, in accordance with the universal law, goes on increasing and turns into a vice through the natural effect of age, use, and success.

Contracted at the start, it is to become yet more so. In the eighteenth century the description of real life, of a specific person, just as he is in nature and in history, that is to say, an undefined unit, a rich plexus, a complete organism of peculiarities and traits, superposed, entangled and co-ordinated, is improper. The capacity to receive and contain all these is wanting. Whatever can be discarded is cast aside, and to such an extent that nothing is left at last but a condensed extract, an evaporated residuum, an almost empty name, in short, what is called a hollow abstraction. The only characters in the eighteenth century exhibiting any life are the off-hand sketches, made in pa.s.sing and as if contraband, by Voltaire, Baron de Thundertentronk and Milord Watthen, the lesser figures in his stories, and five or six portraits of secondary rank, Turcaret, Gil Blas, Marianne, Manon Lescaut, Rameau, and Figaro, two or three of the rough sketches of Crebillon the younger and of Colle, all so many works in which sap flows through a familiar knowledge of things, comparable with those of the minor masters in painting, Watteau, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, Lancret, Pater, and Beaudouin, and which, accepted with difficulty, or as a surprise, by the official drawing room are still to subsist after the grander and soberer canvases shall have become moldy through their wearisome exhalations.

Everywhere else the sap dries up, and, instead of blooming plants, we encounter only flowers of painted paper. What are all the serious poems, from the "la Henriade" of Voltaire to the "Mois" by Roucher or the "l'Imagination" by Delille, but so many pieces of rhetoric garnished with rhymes? Examine the innumerable tragedies and comedies of which Grimm and Colle gives us mortuary extracts, even the meritorious works of Voltaire and Crebillon, and later, those of authors of repute, Du Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and Marie Chenier? Eloquence, art, situations, correct verse, all exist in these except human nature; the personages are simply well-taught puppets, and generally mere mouthpieces by which the author makes his declamation public; Greeks, Romans, Medieval knights, Turks, Arabs, Peruvians, Giaours, or Byzantines, they have all the same declamatory mechanisms. The public, meanwhile, betrays no surprise. It is not aware of history. It a.s.sumes that humanity is everywhere the same. It establishes the success alike of the "Incas" by Marmontel, and of "Gonsalve" and the "Nouvelles" by Florian; also of the peasants, mechanics, Negroes, Brazilians, Pa.r.s.ees, and Malabarites that appear before it churning out their exaggerations. Man is simply regarded as a reasoning being, alike in all ages and alike in all places; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre endows his pariah with this habit, like Diderot, in his Tahitians. The one recognized principle is that every human being must think and talk like a book.--And how inadequate their historical background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, belonging to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France, in the researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the "Louis XI"

of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthelemy, even in the "Essai sur les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle de Louis XIV" of Voltaire, even in the "Grandeur des Romains," and the "Esprit des Lois" of Montesquieu, what peculiar deficiency! Erudition, criticism, common sense, an almost exact exposition of dogmas and of inst.i.tutions, philosophic views of the relationships between events and on the general run of these, nothing is lacking but the people! On reading these it seems as if the climates, inst.i.tutions and civilizations which so completely modifies the human intellect, are simply so many outworks, so many fortuitous exteriors, which, far from reflecting its depths scarcely penetrate beneath its surface. The vast differences separating the men of two centuries, or of two peoples, escape them entirely.[3235] The ancient Greek, the early Christian, the conquering Teuton, the feudal man, the Arab of Mahomet, the German, the Renaissance Englishman, the puritan, appear in their books as in engravings and frontispieces, with some difference in costume, but the same bodies, the same faces, the same countenances, toned down, obliterated, proper, adapted to the conventionalities of good manners. That sympathetic imagination by which the writer enters into the mind of another, and reproduces in himself a system of habits and feelings so different from his own, is the talent the most absent in the eighteenth century. With the exception of Diderot, who uses it badly and capriciously, it almost entirely disappears in the last half of the century. Consider in turn, during the same period, in France and in England, where it is most extensively used, the romance, a sort of mirror everywhere transportable, the best adapted to reflect all phrases of nature and of life. After reading the series of English novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith down to Miss Burney and Miss Austen, I have become familiar with England in the eighteenth century; I have encountered clergymen, country gentlemen, farmers, innkeepers, sailors, people of every condition in life, high and low; I know the details of fortunes and of careers, how much is earned, how much is expended, how journeys are made and how people eat and drink: I have acc.u.mulated for myself a file of precise biographical events, a complete picture in a thousand scenes of an entire community, the amplest stock of information to guide me should I wish to frame a history of this vanished world. On reading a corresponding list of French novelists, the younger Crebillon, Rousseau, Marmontel, Laclos, Restif de la Breton, Louvet, Madame de Stael, Madame de Genlis and the rest, including Mercier and even Mme. Cottin, I scarcely take any notes; all precise and instructive little facts are left out; I find civilities, polite acts, gallantries, mischief-making, social dissertations and nothing else. They carefully abstain from mentioning money, from giving me figures, from describing a wedding, a trial, the administration of a piece of property; I am ignorant of the situation of a curate, of a rustic n.o.ble, of a resident prior, of a steward, of an intendant. Whatever relates to a province or to the rural districts, to the bourgeoisie or to the shop,[3236] to the army or to a soldier, to the clergy or to convents, to justice or to the police, to business or to housekeeping remains vaguely in my mind or is falsified; to clear up any point I am obliged to recur to that marvelous Voltaire who, on laying aside the great cla.s.sic coat, finds plenty of elbow room and tells all. On the organs of society of vital importance, on the practices and regulations that provoke revolutions, on feudal rights and seigniorial justice, on the mode of recruiting and governing monastic bodies, on the revenue measures of the provinces, of corporations and of trade-unions, on the t.i.thes and the corvees,[3237] literature provides me with scarcely any information. Drawing-rooms and men of letters are apparently its sole material. The rest is null and void. Outside the good society that is able to converse France appears perfectly empty.--On the approach of the Revolution the elimination increases.

Look through the harangues of the clubs and of the tribune, through reports, legislative bills and pamphlets, and through the ma.s.s of writings prompted by pa.s.sing and exciting events; in none of them do we see any sign of the human creature as we see him in the fields and in the street; he is always regarded as a simple robot, a well known mechanism. Among writers he was a moment ago a dispenser of commonplaces, among politicians he is now a pliable voter; touch him in the proper place and he responds in the desired manner. Facts are never apparent; only abstractions, long arrays of sentences on nature, Reason, and the people, on tyrants and liberty, like inflated balloons, uselessly conflicting with each other in s.p.a.ce. Were we not aware that all this would terminate in terrible practical effects then we could regard it as compet.i.tion in logic, as school exercises, academic parades, or ideological compositions. It is, in fact, Ideology, the last product of the century, which will stamp the cla.s.sic spirit with its final formula and last word.

III. The Mathematical Method.

The philosophic method in conformity with the Cla.s.sic Sprit.

--Ideology.--Abuse of the mathematical process.--Condillac, Rousseau, Mably, Condorcet, Volney, Sieyes, Cabanis, and de Tracy.--Excesses of simplification and boldness of organization.

The natural process of the cla.s.sic spirit is to pursue in every research, with the utmost confidence, without either reserve or precaution, the mathematical method: to derive, limit and isolate a few of the simplest generalized notions and then, setting experience aside, comparing them, combining them, and, from the artificial compound thus obtained, by pure reasoning, deduce all the consequences they involve.

It is so deeply implanted as to be equally encountered in both centuries, as well with Descartes, Malebranche[3238] and the partisans of innate ideas as with the partisans of sensation, of physical needs and of primary instinct, Condillac, Rousseau, Helvetius, and later, Condorcet, Volney, Sieyes, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy. In vain do the latter a.s.sert that they are the followers of Bacon and reject (the theory of) innate ideas; with another starting point than the Cartesians they pursue the same path, and, as with the Cartesians, after borrowing a little, they leave experience behind them. In this vast moral and social world, they only remove the superficial bark from the human tree with its innumerable roots and branches; they are unable to penetrate to or grasp at anything beyond it; their hands cannot contain more. They have no suspicion of anything outside of it; the cla.s.sic spirit, with limited comprehension, is not far-reaching. To them the bark is the entire tree, and, the operation once completed, they retire, bearing along with them the dry, dead epidermis, never returning to the trunk itself. Through intellectual incapacity and literary pride they omit the characteristic detail, the animating fact, the specific circ.u.mstance, the significant, convincing and complete example. Scarcely one of these is found in the "Logique" and in the "Traite des Sensations" by Condillac, in the "Ideologie" by Destutt de Tracy, or in the "Rapports du Physique et du Morale" by Cabanis.[3239] Never, with them, are we on the solid and visible ground of personal observation and narration, but always in the air, in the empty s.p.a.ce of pure generalities. Condillac declares that the arithmetical method is adapted to psychology and that the elements of our ideas can be defined by a process a.n.a.logous "to the rule of three." Sieyes holds history in profound contempt, and believes that he had "perfected the science of politics"[3240] at one stroke, through an effort of the brain, in the style of Descartes, who thus discovers a.n.a.lytic geometry. Destutt de Tracy, in undertaking to comment on Montesquieu, finds that the great historian has too servilely confined himself to history, and attempts to do the work over again by organizing society as it should be, instead of studying society as it is.--Never were such systematic and superficial inst.i.tutions built up with such a moderate extract of human nature.[3241] Condillac, employing sensation, animates a statue, and then, by a process of pure reasoning, following up its effects, as he supposes, on smell, taste, hearing, sight and touch, fashions a complete human soul. Rousseau, by means of a contract, founds political a.s.sociation, and, with this given idea, pulls down the const.i.tution, government and laws of every balanced social system. In a book which serves as the philosophical testament of the century,[3242] Condorcet declares that this method is the "final step of philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier between humanity and its ancient infantile errors." "By applying it to morals, politics and political economy the moral sciences have progressed nearly as much as the natural sciences. With its help we have been able to discover the rights of man." As in mathematics, they have been deduced from one primordial statement only, which statement, similar to a first principle in mathematics, becomes a fact of daily experience, seen by all and therefore self-evident.--This school of thought is to endure throughout the Revolution, the Empire and even into the Restoration,[3243] together with the tragedy of which it is the sister, with the cla.s.sic spirit their common parent, a primordial, sovereign power, as dangerous as it is useful, as destructive as it is creative, as capable of propagating error as truth, as astonishing in the rigidity of its code, the narrow-mindedness of its yoke and in the uniformity of its works as in the duration of its reign and the universality of its ascendancy.[3244]

NOTES:

[Footnote 3201: Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," see the articles on Language.

"Of all the languages in Europe the French is most generally used because it is the best adapted to conversation. Its character is derived from that of the people who speak it. For more than a hundred and fifty years past, the French have been the most familiar with (good) society and the first to avoid all embarra.s.sment. . . It is a better currency than any other, even if it should lack weight."]

[Footnote 3202: HIST: honnete homme means gentleman. (SR.)]

[Footnote 3203: Descartes, ed. Cousin, XI. 333, I. 121,. . . Descartes depreciates "simple knowledge acquired without the aid of reflection, such as languages, history, geography, and, generally, whatever is not based on experience. . . . It is no more the duty of an honest man to know Greek or Latin than to know the Swiss or Breton languages, nor the history of the Romano-Germanic empire any more than of the smallest country in Europe."]

[Footnote 3204: Moliere, "Les Femmes Savantes," and "La Critique de l'ecole des femmes." The parts of Dorante with Lycidas and of c.l.i.tandre with Trissotin.]

[Footnote 3205: The learned Huet, (1630-1721), true to the taste of the sixteenth century, describes this change very well from his point of view. "When I entered the world of letters these were still flourishing; great reputations maintained their supremacy. I have seen letters decline and finally reach an almost entire decay. For I scarcely know a person of the present time that one can truly call a savant." The few Benedictines like Ducange and Mabillon, and later, the academician Freret, the president Bouhier of Dijon, in short, the veritable erudites exercise no influence.]

[Footnote 3206: Nicole, "Oeuvres morales," in the second essay on Charity and Self-love, 142.]

[Footnote 3207: Voltaire, "Dialogues," "L'intendant des menus et l'abbe Grizel," 129.]

[Footnote 3208: Maury adds with his accustomed coa.r.s.eness, "We, in the French Academy, looked upon the members of the Academy of Sciences as our valets."--These valets at that time consisted of Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Lagrange, Laplace, etc. (A narrative by Joseph de Maistre, quote by Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries du lundi," IV. 283.)]

[Footnote 3209: This description makes me think of the contemporary att.i.tudes pejoratively called "politically correctness." Thus the drawings-room audience of the 18th century have today been replaced by the "political correct" elite holding sway in teacher training schools, schools of journalism, the media and hence among the television public.

The same mechanism which moved the upper cla.s.s in the 18th century moves it in the 20th century.. (S.R.)]

[Footnote 3210: Today in 1999 we may speak of the TV mold forced by the measured popularity or "ratings" of the programs. (SR.]

[Footnote 3211: Vaugelas, "Remarques sur la langue francaise:" "It is the mode of speech of the most sensible portion of the court, as well as the mode of writing of the most sensible authors of the day. It is better to consult women and those who have not studied than those who are very learned in Greek and in Latin."]

[Footnote 3212: One of the causes of the fall and discredit of the Marquis d'Argenson in the eighteenth century, was his habit of using these.]

[Footnote 3213: Vaugelas, ibid.. "Although we may have eliminated one-half of his phrases and terms we nevertheless obtain in the other half all the riches of which we boast and of which we make a display."--Compare together a lexicon of two or three writers of the sixteenth century and one of two or three writers of the seventeenth. A brief statement of the results of the comparison is here given. Let any one, with pen in hand, note the differences on a hundred pages of any of these texts, and he will be surprised at it. Take, for examples, two writers of the same category, and of secondary grade, Charron and Nicole.]

[Footnote 3214: For instance, in the article "Ignorance," in the "Dict.

Philosophique."]

[Footnote 3215: La Harpe, "Cours de Litterature," ed. Didot. II. 142.]

[Footnote 3216: A battle-axe used by the Franks.--TR.]

[Footnote 3217: I cite an example haphazard from the "Optimiste" (1788), by Colin d'Harleville. In a certain description, "The scene represents a bosquet filled with odoriferous trees."--The cla.s.sic spirit rebels against stating the species of tree, whether lilacs, lindens or hawthorns.--In paintings of landscapes of this era we have the same thing, the trees being generalized,--of no known species.]

[Footnote 3218: This evolution is seen today as well, television having the same effect upon its actors as the 18th century drawing-room. (SR.)]

[Footnote 3219: See in the "Lycee," by la Harpe, after the a.n.a.lysis of each piece, his remarks on detail in style.]

[Footnote 3220: The omission of the p.r.o.nouns, I, he, we, you, they, the article the, and of the verb, especially the verb to be.--Any page of Rabelais, Amyot or Montaigne, suffices to show how numerous and various were the transpositions.]

[Footnote 3221: Vaugelas, ibid. "No language is more inimical to ambiguities and every species of obscurity."]

[Footnote 3222: See the princ.i.p.al romances of the seventeenth century, the "Roman Bourgeois," by Furetiere, the "Princess de Cleves," by Madame de Lafayette, the "Clelie," by Mme. de Scudery, and even Scarron's "Roman Comique."--See Balzac's letters, and those of Voiture and their correspondents, the "Recit des grands jours d'Auvergne," by Flechier, etc. On the oratorical peculiarities of this style cf. Sainte-Beuve, "Port-Royal," 2nd ed. I. 515.]

[Footnote 3223: Voltaire, 'Esay sur le poeme epique', "Our nation, regarded by strangers as superficial is, with the pen in its hand, the wisest of all. Method is the dominant quality of all our writers."]

[Footnote 3224: Milton's works are built up with 8,000. "Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words and the Old Testament says all it has to say with 5,642 words." (Max Muller, "Lectures on the Science of language," I. 309.)--It would be interesting to place alongside of this Racine's restricted vocabulary. That of Mme. de Scudery is extremely limited. In the best romance of the XVIIth century, the "Princesse de Cleves," the number of words is reduced to the minimum. The Dictionary of the old French Academy contains 29,712 words; the Greek Thesaurus, by H. Estienne, contains about 150,000.]

[Footnote 3225: Compare together the translations of the Bible made by de Sacy and Luther; those of Homer by Dacier, Bitaube and Lecomte de Lisle; those of Herodotus, by Larcher and Courrier, the popular tales of Perrault and those by Grimm, etc.]

[Footnote 3226: See the "Discours academique," by Racine, on the reception of Thomas Corneille: "In this chaos of dramatic poetry your ill.u.s.trious brother brought Reason on the stage, but Reason a.s.sociated with all the pomp and the ornamentation our language is capable of."]

[Footnote 3227: Voltaire, "Essay sur le poeme epique," 290. "It must be admitted that a Frenchman has more difficulty in writing an epic poem than anybody else. . . . Dare I confess it? Our own is the least poetic of all polished nations. The works in verse the most highly esteemed in France are those of the drama, which must be written in a familiar style approaching conversation."]

[Footnote 3228: Except in "Pensees," by Pascal, a few notes dotted down by a morbidly exalted Christian, and which certainly, in the perfect work, would not have been allowed to remain as they are.]

[Footnote 3229: See in the Cabinet of Engravings the theatrical costumes of the middle of the XVIIIth century.--Nothing could be more opposed to the spirit of the cla.s.sic drama than the parts of Esther and Brittannicus, as they are played nowadays, in the accurate costumes and with scenery derived from late discoveries at Pompeii or Nineveh.]

[Footnote 3230: The formality which this indicates will be understood by those familiar with the use of the p.r.o.noun thou in France, denoting intimacy and freedom from restraint in contrast with ceremonious and formal intercourse.--Tr.]

[Footnote 3231: See the parts of the moralizers and reasoners like Cleante in "Tartuffe," Ariste in "Les Femmes Savantes," Chrysale in "L'Ecole des Femmes," etc. See the discussion between the two brothers in "Le Festin de Pierre," III. 5; the discourse of Ergaste in "L'Ecole des Maris"; that of Eliante, imitated from Lucretius in the "Misanthrope," II. 5; the portraiture, by Dorine in "Tartuffe," I.