The Ancient Regime Part 25

I. The Propagating Organ, Eloquence.

Causes of this difference.--This art of writing in France.-- Its superiority at this epoch.--It serves as the vehicle of new ideas.--Books are written for people of the world.-- This accounts for philosophy descending to the drawing room.

This organ is the "talent of speech, eloquence applied to the gravest subjects, the talent for making things clear." [4105]"The great writers of this nation," says their adversary, "express themselves better than those of any other nation. Their books give but little information to true savants," but "through the art of expression they influence men"

and "the ma.s.s of men, constantly repelled from the sanctuary of the sciences by the dry style and bad taste of (other) scientific writers, cannot resist the seductions of the French style and method." Thus the cla.s.sic spirit that furnishes the ideas likewise furnishes the means of conveying them, the theories of the eighteenth century being like those seeds provided with wings which float and distribute themselves on all soils. There is no book of that day not written for people of the high society, and even for women of this cla.s.s. In Fontenelle's dialogues on the Plurality of worlds the princ.i.p.al person age is a marchioness.

Voltaire composes his "Metaphysique" and his "Essai sur les Moeurs"

for Madame du Chatelet, and Rousseau his "Emile" for Madame d'Epinay.

Condillac wrote the "Traite des Sensations" from suggestions of Mademoiselle Ferrand, and he sets forth instructions to young ladies how to read his "Logique." Baudeau dedicates and explains to a lady his "Tableau Economique." Diderot's most profound work is a conversation between Mademoiselle de l'Espina.s.se and d'Alembert and Bordeu[4106].

Montesquieu had placed an invocation to the muses in the middle of the "Esprit des Lois." Almost every work is a product of the drawing-room, and it is always one that, before the public, has been presented with its beginnings. In this respect the habit is so strong as to last up to the end of 1789; the harangues about to be made in the National a.s.sembly are also pa.s.sages of bravura previously rehea.r.s.ed before ladies at an evening entertainment. The American Amba.s.sador, a practical man, explains to Washington with sober irony the fine academic and literary parade preceding the political tournament in public[4107].

"The speeches are made beforehand in a small society of young men and women, among them generally the fair friend of the speaker is one, or else the fair whom he means to make his friend,; and the society very politely give their approbation, unless the lady who gives the tone to that circle chances to reprehend something, which is of course altered, if not amended."

It is not surprising, with customs of this kind, that professional philosophers should become men of society. At no time or in any place have they been so to the same extent, nor so habitually. The great delight of a man of genius or of learning here, says an English traveler, is to reign over a brilliant a.s.sembly of people of fashion[4108]. Whilst in England they bury themselves morosely in their books, living amongst themselves and appearing in society only on condition of "doing some political drudgery," that of journalist or pamphleteer in the service of a party, in France they dine out every evening, and const.i.tute the ornaments and amus.e.m.e.nt of the drawing-rooms to which they resort to converse[4109]. There is not a house in which dinners are given that has not its t.i.tular philosopher, and, later on, its economist and man of science. In the various memoirs, and in the collections of correspondence, we track them from one drawing room to another, from one chateau to another, Voltaire to Cirey at Madame du Chatelet's, and then home, at Ferney where he has a theater and entertains all Europe; Rousseau to Madame d'Epinay's, and M. de Luxembourg's; the Abbe Barthelemy to the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul's; Thomas, Marmontel and Gibbon to Madame Necker's; the encyclopedists to d'Holbach's ample dinners, to the plain and discreet table of Madame Geoffrin, and to the little drawing room of Mademoiselle de L'Espina.s.se, all belonging to the great central state drawing-room, that is to say, to the French Academy, where each newly elected member appears to parade his style and obtain from a polished body his commission of master in the art of discourse. Such a public imposes on an author the obligation of being more a writer than a philosopher. The thinker is expected to concern himself with his sentences as much as with his ideas. He is not allowed to be a mere scholar in his closet, a simple erudite, diving into folios in German fashion, a metaphysician absorbed with his own meditations, having an audience of pupils who take notes, and, as readers, men devoted to study and willing to give themselves trouble, a Kant, who forms for himself a special language, who waits for a public to comprehend him and who leaves the room in which he labors only for the lecture-room in which he delivers his lectures. Here, on the contrary, in the matter of expression, all are experts and even professional. The mathematician d'Alembert publishes a small treatise on elocution; Buffon, the naturalist p.r.o.nounces a discourse on Style; the legist Montesquieu composes an essay on Taste; the psychologist Condillac writes a volume on the art of writing. In this consists their greatest glory; philosophy owes its entry into society to them. They withdrew it from the study, the closed-society and the school, to introduce it into company and into conversation.

II. Its Method.

Owing to this method it becomes popular.

"Madame la Marechale," says one of Diderot's personages,[4110]. "I must consider things from a somewhat higher point of view."--"As high as you please so long as I understand you."--"If you do not understand me it will be my fault."--"You are very polite, but you must know that I have studied nothing but my prayer book."--That makes no difference; the pretty woman, ably led on, begins to philosophize without knowing it, arriving without effort at the distinction between good and evil, comprehending and deciding on the highest doctrines of morality and religion.--Such is the art of the eighteenth century, and the art of writing. People are addressed who are perfectly familiar with life, but who are commonly ignorant of orthography, who are curious in all directions, but ill prepared for any; the object is to bring truth down to their level[4111]. Scientific or too abstract terms are inadmissible; they tolerate only those used to ordinary conversation. And this is no obstacle; it is easier to talk philosophy in this language than to use it for discussing precedence and clothes. For, in every abstract question there is some leading and simple conception on which the rest depends, those of unity, proportion, ma.s.s and motion in mathematics; those of organ, function and being in physiology; those of sensation, pain, pleasure and desire in psychology; those of utility, contract and law in politics and morality; those of capital, production, value, exchange in political economy, and the same in the other sciences, all of these being conceptions derived from pa.s.sing experience; from which it follows that, in appealing to common experience by means of a few familiar circ.u.mstances, such as short stories, anecdotes, agreeable tales, and the like, these conceptions are fashioned anew and rendered precise. This being accomplished, almost everything is accomplished; for nothing then remains but to lead the listener along step by step, flight by flight, to the remotest consequences.

"Will Madame la Marechale have the kindness to recall my definition?"--"I remember it well-do you call that a definition?"--"Yes."--"That, then, is philosophy!"--"Admirable!"--"And I have been philosophical?"--"As you read prose, without being aware of it."

The rest is simply a matter of reasoning, that is to say, of leading on, of putting questions in the right order, and of a.n.a.lysis. With the conception thus renewed and rectified the truth nearest at hand is brought out, then out of this, a second truth related to the first one, and so on to the end, no other obligation being involved in this method but that of carefully advancing step by step, and of omitting no intermediary step.--With this method one is able to explain all, to make everything understood, even by women, and even by women of society. In the eighteenth century it forms the substance of all talents, the warp of all masterpieces, the lucidity, popularity and authority of philosophy. The "Eloges" of Fontenelle, the "Philosophe ignorant et le principe d'action" by Voltaire, the "Lettre a M. de Beaumont," and the "Vicaire Savoyard" by Rousseau, the "Traite de l'homme" and the "epoques de la Nature" by Buffon, the "Dialogues sur les bles" by Galiani, the "Considerations" by d'Alembert, on mathematics, the "Langue des Calculs"

and the "Logique" by Condillac, and, a little later, the "Exposition du systeme du Monde" by Laplace, and "Discours generaux" by Bichat and Cuvier; all are based on this method[4112]. Finally, this is the method which Condillac erects into a theory under the name of ideology, soon acquiring the ascendancy of a dogma, and which then seems to sum up all methods. At the very least it sums up the process by which the philosophers of the century obtained their audience, propagated their doctrine and achieved their success.

III. Its Popularity.

Owing to style it becomes pleasing.--Two stimulants peculiar to the 18th century, coa.r.s.e humor and irony.

Thanks to this method one can be understood; but, to be read, something more is necessary. I compare the eighteenth century to a company of people around a table; it is not sufficient that the food before them be well prepared, well served, within reach and easy to digest, but it is important that it should be some choice dish or, better still, some dainty. The intellect is Epicurean; let us supply it with savory, delicate viands adapted to its taste; it will eat so much the more owing to its appet.i.te being sharpened by sensuality. Two special condiments enter into the cuisine of this century, and, according to the hand that makes use of them, they furnish all literary dishes with a coa.r.s.e or delicate seasoning. In an Epicurean society, to which a return to nature and the rights of instinct are preached, voluptuous images and ideas present themselves involuntarily; this is the appetizing, exciting spice-box. Each guest at the table uses or abuses it; many empty its entire contents on their plate. And I do not allude merely to the literature read in secret, to the extraordinary books Madame d'Audlan, governess to the French royal children, peruses, and which stray off into the hands of the daughters of Louis XV,[4113] nor to other books, still more extraordinary,[4114] in which philosophical arguments appear as an interlude between filth and the ill.u.s.trations, and which are kept by the ladies of the court on their toilet-tables, under the t.i.tle of "Heures de Paris." I refer here to the great men, to the masters of the public intellect. With the exception of Buffon, all put pimento into their sauces, that is to say, loose talk or coa.r.s.eness of expression. We find this even in the" Esprit des Lois;" there is an enormous amount of it, open and covered up, in the "Lettres Persanes." Diderot, in his two great novels, puts it in by handfuls, as if during an orgy. The teeth crunch on it like so many grains of pepper, on every page of Voltaire.

We find it, not only piquant, but strong and of burning intensity, in the "Nouvelle Helose," scores of times in "Emile," and, in the "Confessions," from one end to the other. It was the taste of the day.

M. de Malesherbes, so upright and so grave, committed "La Pucelle" to memory and recited it. We have from the pen of Saint-Just, the gloomiest of the "Mountain," a poem as lascivious as that of Voltaire, while Madame Roland, the n.o.blest of the Girondins, has left us confessions as venturesome and specific as those of Rousseau[4115].--On the other hand there is a second box, that containing the old Gallic salt, that is to say, humor and raillery. Its mouth is wide open in the hands of a philosophy proclaiming the sovereignty of reason. Whatever is contrary to Reason is to it absurd and therefore open to ridicule. The moment the solemn hereditary mask covering up an abuse is brusquely and adroitly torn aside, we feel a curious spasm, the corners of our mouth stretching apart and our breast heaving violently, as at a kind of sudden relief, an unexpected deliverance, experiencing a sense of our recovered superiority, of our revenge being gratified and of an act of justice having been performed. But it depends on the mode in which the mask is struck off whether the laugh shall be in turn light or loud, suppressed or unbridled, now amiable and cheerful, or now bitter and sardonic.

Humor (la plaisanterie) comports with all aspects, from buffoonery to indignation; no literary seasoning affords such a variety, or so many mixtures, nor one that so well enters into combination with that above-mentioned. The two together, from the middle ages down, form the princ.i.p.al ingredients employed by the French cuisine in the composition of its most agreeable dainties,--fables, tales, witticisms, jovial songs and waggeries, the eternal heritage of a good-humored, mocking people, preserved by La Fontaine athwart the pomp and sobriety of the seventeenth century, and, in the eighteenth, reappearing everywhere at the philosophic banquet. Its charm is great to the brilliant company at this table, so amply provided, whose princ.i.p.al occupation is pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt. It is all the greater because, on this occasion, the pa.s.sing disposition is in harmony with hereditary instinct, and because the taste of the epoch is fortified by the national taste. Add to all this the exquisite art of the cooks, their talent in commingling, in apportioning and in concealing the condiments, in varying and arranging the dishes, the certainty of their hand, the finesse of their palate, their experience in processes, in the traditions and practices which, already for a hundred years, form of French prose the most delicate nourishment of the intellect. It is not strange to find them skilled in regulating human speech, in extracting from it its quintessence and in distilling its full delight.

IV. The Masters.

The art and processes of the masters.--Montesquieu.-- Voltaire.--Diderot.--Rousseau.--"The Marriage of Figaro."

In this respect four among them are superior, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. It seems sufficient to mention their names. Modern Europe has no greater writers. And yet their talent must be closely examined to properly comprehend their power.--In tone and style Montesquieu is the first. No writer is more master of himself, more outwardly calm, more sure of his meaning. His voice is never boisterous; he expresses the most powerful thoughts with moderation. There is no gesticulation; exclamations, the abandonment of impulse, all that is irreconcilable with decorum is repugnant to his tact, his reserve, his dignity. He seems to be always addressing a select circle of people with acute minds, and in such a way as to render them at every moment conscious of their acuteness. No flattery could be more delicate; we feel grateful to him for making us satisfied with our intelligence.

We must possess some intelligence to be able to read him, for he deliberately curtails developments and omits transitions; we are required to supply these and to comprehend his hidden meanings. He is rigorously systematic but the system is concealed, his concise completed sentences succeeding each other separately, like so many precious coffers or caskets, now simple and plain in aspect, now superbly chased and decorated, but always full. Open them and each contains a treasure; here is placed in narrow compa.s.s a rich store of reflections, of emotions, of discoveries, our enjoyment being the more intense because we can easily retain all this for a moment in the palm of our hand.

"That which usually forms a grand conception," he himself says, "is a thought so expressed as to reveal a number of other thoughts, and suddenly disclosing what we could not antic.i.p.ate without patient study."

This, indeed, is his manner; he thinks with summaries; he concentrates the essence of despotism in a chapter of three lines. The summary itself often bears the air of an enigma, of which the charm is twofold; we have the pleasure of comprehension accompanying the satisfaction of divining.

In all subjects he maintains this supreme discretion, this art of indicating without enforcing, these reticences, the smile that never becomes a laugh.

"In my defense of the 'Esprit des Lois,"' he says, "that which gratifies me is not to see venerable theologians crushed to the ground but to see them glide down gently."

He excels in tranquil irony, in polished disdain,[4116] in disguised sarcasm. His Persians judge France as Persians, and we smile at their errors; unfortunately the laugh is not against them but against ourselves, for their error is found to be a verity[4117]. This or that letter, in a sober vein, seems a comedy at their expense without reflecting upon us, full of Muslim prejudices and of oriental conceit;[4118] reflect a moment, and our conceit, in this relation, appears no less. Blows of extraordinary force and reach are given in pa.s.sing, as if thoughtlessly, against existing inst.i.tutions, against the transformed Catholicism which "in the present state of Europe, cannot last five hundred years," against the degenerate monarchy which causes useful citizens to starve to fatten parasite courtiers[4119]. The entire new philosophy blooms out in his hands with an air of innocence, in a pastoral romance, in a simple prayer, in an artless letter[4120]. None of the gifts which serve to arrest and fix the attention are wanting in this style, neither grandeur of imagination nor profound sentiment, vivid characterization, delicate gradations, vigorous precision, a sportive grace, unlooked-for burlesque, nor variety of representation.

But, amidst so many ingenious tricks, apologues, tales, portraits and dialogues, in earnest as well as when masquerading, his deportment throughout is irreproachable and his tone is perfect. If; as an author, he develops a paradox it is with almost English gravity. If he fully exposes indecency it is with decent terms. In the full tide of buffoonery, as well as in the full blast of license, he is ever the well-bred man, born and brought up in the aristocratic circle in which full liberty is allowed but where good-breeding is supreme, where every idea is permitted but where words are weighed, where one has the privilege of saying what he pleases, but on condition that he never forgets himself.

A circle of this kind is a small one, comprising only a select few; to be understood by the mult.i.tude requires another tone of voice.

Philosophy demands a writer whose princ.i.p.al occupation is a diffusion of it, who is unable to keep it to himself; who pours it out like a gushing fountain, who offers it to everybody, daily and in every form, in broad streams and in small drops, without exhaustion or weariness, through every crevice and by every channel, in prose, in verse, in imposing and in trifling poems, in the drama, in history, in novels, in pamphlets, in pleadings, in treatises, in essays, in dictionaries, in correspondence, openly and in secret, in order that it may penetrate to all depths and in every soil; such was Voltaire.--"I have accomplished more in my day," he says somewhere, "than either Luther or Calvin," in which he is mistaken. The truth is, however, he has something of their spirit. Like them he is desirous of changing the prevailing religion, he takes the att.i.tude of the founder of a sect, he recruits and binds together proselytes, he writes letters of exhortation, of direction and of predication, he puts watchwords in circulation, he furnishes "the brethren" with a device; his pa.s.sion resembles the zeal of an apostle or of a prophet. Such a spirit is incapable of reserve; it is militant and fiery by nature; it apostrophizes, reviles and improvises; it writes under the dictation of impressions; it allows itself every species of utterance and, if need be, the coa.r.s.est. It thinks by explosions; its emotions are sudden starts, and its images so many sparks; it lets the rein go entirely; it gives itself up to the reader and hence it takes possession of him. Resistance is impossible; the contagion is too overpowering. A creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of other men; none is there whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact. He may be compared to those accurate scales that are affected by a breath, but alongside of which every other measuring apparatus is incorrect and clumsy.--But, in this delicate balance only the lightest weights, the finest specimen must be placed; on this condition only it rigorously weighs all substances; such is Voltaire, involuntarily, through the demands of his intellect, and in his own behalf as much as in that of his readers. An entire philosophy, ten volumes of theology, an abstract science, a special library, an important branch of erudition, of human experience and invention, is thus reduced in his hands to a phrase or to a stanza. From the enormous ma.s.s of riven or compact scorioe he extracts whatever is essential, a grain of gold or of copper as a specimen of the rest, presenting this to us in its most convenient and most manageable form, in a simile, in a metaphor, in an epigram that becomes a proverb.

In this no ancient or modern writer approaches him; in simplification and in popularization he has not his equal in the world. Without departing from the usual conversational tone, and as if in sport, he puts into little portable phrases the greatest discoveries and hypotheses of the human mind, the theories of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Locke and Newton, the diverse religions of antiquity and of modern times, every known system of physics, physiology, geology, morality, natural law, and political economy,[4121] in short, all the generalized conceptions in every order of knowledge to which humanity had attained in the eighteenth century.--Voltaire's inclination is so strong that it carries him too far; he belittles great things by rendering them accessible. Religion, legend, ancient popular poesy, the spontaneous creations of instinct, the vague visions of primitive tunes are not thus to be converted into small current coin; they are not subjects of amusing and lively conversation. A piquant witticism is not an expression of all this, but simply a travesty. But how charming to Frenchmen, and to people of the world! And what reader can abstain from a book containing all human knowledge summed up in piquant witticisms?

For it is really a summary of human knowledge, no important idea, as far as I can see, being wanting to a man whose breviary consisted of the "Dialogues," the "Dictionary," and the "Novels." Read them over and over five or six times, and we then form some idea of their vast contents.

Not only do views of the world and of man abound in them, but again they swarm with positive and even technical details, thousands of little facts scattered throughout, multiplied and precise details on astronomy, physics, geography, physiology, statistics, and on the history of all nations, the innumerable and personal experiences of a man who has himself read the texts, handled the instruments, visited the countries, taken part in the industries, and a.s.sociated with the persons, and who, in the precision of his marvelous memory, in the liveliness of his ever-blazing imagination, revives or sees, as with the eye itself, everything that he states and as he states it. It is a unique talent, the rarest in a cla.s.sic era, the most precious of all, since it consists in the display of actual beings, not through the gray veil of abstractions, but in themselves, as they are in nature and in history, with their visible color and forms, with their accessories and surroundings in time and s.p.a.ce, a peasant at his cart, a Quaker in his meeting-house, a German baron in his castle, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen, in their homes,[4122] a great lady, a designing woman, provincials, soldiers, prost.i.tutes,[4123] and the rest of the human medley, on every step of the social ladder, each an abridgment of his kind and in the pa.s.sing light of a sudden flash.

For, the most striking feature of this style is the prodigious rapidity, the dazzling and bewildering stream of novelties, ideas, images, events, landscapes, narratives, dialogues, brief little pictures, following each other rapidly as if in a magic-lantern, withdrawn almost as soon as presented by the impatient magician who, in the twinkling of an eye, girdles the world and, constantly acc.u.mulating one on top of the other, history, fable, truth and fancy, the present time and times past, frames his work now with a parade as absurd as that of a country fair, and now with a fairy scene more magnificent than all those of the opera. To amuse and be amused, "to diffuse his spirit in every imaginable mode, like a glowing furnace into which all substances are thrown by turns to evolve every species of flame, sparkle and odor," is his first instinct.

"Life," he says again, "is an infant to be rocked until it goes to sleep." Never was a mortal more excited and more exciting, more incapable of silence and more hostile to ennui,[4124] better endowed for conversation, more evidently destined to become the king of a sociable century in which, with six pretty stories, thirty witticisms and some confidence in himself, a man could obtain a social pa.s.sport and the certainty of being everywhere welcome. Never was there a writer possessing to so high a degree and in such abundance every qualification of the conversationalist, the art of animating and of enlivening discourse, the talent for giving pleasure to people of society.

Perfectly refined when he chose to be, confining himself without inconvenience to strict decorum, of finished politeness, of exquisite gallantry, deferential without being servile, fond without being mawkish,[4125] and always at his ease, it suffices that he should be before the public, to fall naturally into the proper tone, the discreet ways, the winning half-smile of the well-bred man who, introducing his readers into his mind, does them the honors of the place. Are you on familiar terms with him, and of the small private circle in which he freely unbends himself, with closed doors? You never tire of laughing.

With a sure hand and without seeming to touch it, he abruptly tears aside the veil hiding a wrong, a prejudice, a folly, in short, any human idolatry. The real figure, misshapen, odious or dull, suddenly appears in this instantaneous flash; we shrug our shoulders. This is the risibility of an agile, triumphant reason. We have another in that of the gay temperament, of the droll improvisator, of the man keeping youthful, a child, a boy even to the day of his death, and who "gambols on his own tombstone." He is fond of caricature, exaggerating the features of faces, bringing grotesques on the stage,[4126] walking them about in all lights like marionettes, never weary of taking them up and of making them dance in new costumes; in the very midst of his philosophy, of his propaganda and polemics, he sets up his portable theater in full blast, exhibiting oddities, the scholar, the monk, the inquisitor, Maupertuis, Pompignan, Nonotte, Freron, King David, and countless others who appear before us, capering and gesticulating in their harlequin attire.--When a farcical talent is thus moved to tell the truth, humor becomes all-powerful; for it gratifies the profound and universal instincts of human nature: to the malicious curiosity, to the desire to mock and belitte, to the aversion to being in need or under constraint, those sources of bad moods which task convention, etiquette and social obligation with wearing the burdensome cloak of respect and of decency; moments occur in life when the wisest is not sorry to throw this half aside and even cast it off entirely.--On each page, now with the bold stroke of a hardy naturalist, now with the quick turn of a mischievous monkey, Voltaire lets the solemn or serious drapery fall, disclosing man, the poor biped, and in which att.i.tudes![4127] Swift alone dared to present similar pictures. What physiological crudities relating to the origin and end of our most exalted sentiments! What disproportion between such feeble reason and such powerful instincts!

What recesses in the wardrobes of politics and religion concealing their foul linen! We laugh at all this so as not to weep, and yet behind this laughter there are tears; he ends sneeringly, subsiding into a tone of profound sadness, of mournful pity. In this degree, and with such subjects, it is only an effect of habit, or as an expedient, a mania of inspiration, a fixed condition of the nervous machinery rushing headlong over everything, without a break and in full speed. Gaiety, let it not be forgotten, is still a incentive of action, the last that keeps man erect in France, the best in maintaining the tone of his spirit, his strength and his powers of resistance, the most intact in an age when men, and women too, believed it inc.u.mbent on them to die people of good society, with a smile and a jest on their lips[4128].

When the talent of a writer thus accords with public inclinations it is a matter of little import whether he deviates or fails since he is following the universal tendency. He may wander off or besmirch himself in vain, for his audience is only the more pleased, his defects serving him as advantageously as his good qualities. After the first generation of healthy minds the second one comes on, the intellectual balance here being equally inexact. "Diderot," says Voltaire, "is too hot an oven, everything that is baked in it getting burnt." Or rather, he is an eruptive volcano which, for forty years, discharges ideas of every order and species, boiling and fused together, precious metals, coa.r.s.e scorioe and fetid mud; the steady stream overflows at will according to the roughness of the ground, but always displaying the ruddy light and acrid fumes of glowing lava. He is not master of his ideas, but his ideas master him; he is under submission to them; he has not that firm foundation of common practical sense which controls their impetuosity and ravages, that inner d.y.k.e of social caution which, with Montesquieu and Voltaire, bars the way to outbursts. Everything with him rushes out of the surcharged crater, never picking its way, through the first fissure or crevice it finds, according to his haphazard reading, a letter, a conversation, an improvisation, and not in frequent small jets as with Voltaire, but in broad currents tumbling blindly down the most precipitous declivities of the century. Not only does he descend thus to the very depths of anti-religious and anti-social doctrines, with logical and paradoxical rigidity, more impetuously and more obstreperously than d'Holbach himself; but again he falls into and sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and into the beaten track of declamation. In his leading novels he dwells a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness. Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger Crebillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist, introduced, through the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable livers. He engrosses the conversation, directs the orgy, or in the contagion or on a wager, says more filthy things, more "gueulees," than all the guests put together[4129]. In like manner, in his dramas, in his "Essays on Claudius and Nero," in his "Commentary on Seneca," in his additions to the "Philosophical History" of Raynal, he forces the tone of things.

This tone, which then prevails by virtue of the cla.s.sic spirit and of the new fashion, is that of sentimental rhetoric. Diderot carries it to extremes in the exaggeration of tears or of rage, in exclamations, in apostrophes, in tenderness of feeling, in violences, indignation, in enthusiasms, in full-orchestra tirades, in which the fire of his brains finds employment and an outlet.--On the other hand, among so many superior writers, he is the only genuine artist, the creator of souls, within his mind objects, events and personages are born and become organized of themselves, through their own forces, by virtue of natural affinities, involuntarily, without foreign intervention, in such a way as to live for and in themselves, safe from the author's intentions, and outside of his combinations. The composer of the "Salons," the "Pet.i.ts Romans," the "Entretien," the "Paradoxe du Comedien," and especially the "Reve de d'Alembert" and the "Neveu de Rameau "is a man of an unique species in his time. However alert and brilliant Voltaire's personages may be, they are always puppets; their action is derivative; always behind them you catch a glimpse of the author pulling the strings. With Diderot, the strings are severed; he is not speaking through the lips of his characters; they are not his comical loud-speakers or puppets, but independent and detached persons, with an action of their own, a personal accent, with their own temperament, pa.s.sions, ideas, philosophy, style and spirit, and occasionally, as in the "Neveu de Rameau," a spirit so original, complex and complete, so alive and so deformed that, in the natural history of man, it becomes an incomparable monster and an immortal doc.u.ment. He has expressed everything concerning nature,[4130] art morality and life[4131] in two small treatises of which twenty successive readings exhaust neither the charm nor the sense. Find elsewhere, if you can, a similar stroke of power and a greater masterpiece, "anything more absurd and more profound!"[4132]--Such is the advantage of men of genius possessing no control over themselves. They lack discernment but they have inspiration. Among twenty works, either soiled, rough or nasty, they produce a creation, and still better, an animated being, able to live by itself, before which others, fabricated by merely intellectual people, resemble simply well-dressed puppets.--Hence it is that Diderot is so great a narrator, a master of dialogue, the equal in this respect of Voltaire, and, through a quite opposite talent, believing all he says at the moment of saying it; forgetful of his very self, carried away by his own recital, listening to inward voices, surprised with the responses which come to him unexpectedly, borne along, as if on an unknown river, by the current of action, by the sinuosities of the conversation inwardly and unconsciously developed, aroused by the flow of ideas and the leap of the moment to the most unexpected imagery, extreme in burlesque or extreme in magnificence, now lyrical even to providing Musset with an entire stanza,[4133] now comic and droll with outbursts unheard of since the days of Rabelais, always in good faith, always at the mercy of his subject, of his inventions, of his emotions; the most natural of writers in an age of artificial literature, resembling a foreign tree which, transplanted to a parterre of the epoch, swells out and decays on one side of its stem, but of which five or six branches, thrust out into full light, surpa.s.s the neighboring underwood in the freshness of their sap and in the vigor of their growth.

Rousseau also is an artisan, a man of the people, ill-adapted to elegant and refined society, out of his element in a drawing room and, moreover, of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and precocious experience, highly and offensively sensual, morbid in mind and in body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, possessing no tact, and carrying the contamination of his imagination, temperament and past life into his austere morality and into his purest idylls;[4134] besides this he has no fervor, and in this he is the opposite of Diderot, avowing himself" that his ideas arrange themselves in his head with the utmost difficulty, that certain sentences are turned over and over again in his brain for five or six nights before putting them on paper, and that a letter on the most trifling subject costs him hours of fatigue," that he cannot fall into an easy and agreeable tone, nor succeed otherwise than "in works which demand application."[4135] As an offset to this, style, in this ardent brain, under the influence of intense, prolonged meditation, incessantly hammered and rehammered, becomes more concise and of higher temper than is elsewhere found. Since La Bruyere we have seen no more ample, virile phrases, in which anger, admiration, indignation, studied and concentrated pa.s.sion, appear with more rigorous precision and more powerful relief. He is almost the equal of La Bruyere in the arrangement of skillful effects, in the aptness and ingenuity of developments, in the terseness of impressive summaries, in the overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, in the multiplicity of literary achievements, in the execution of those pa.s.sages of bravura, portraits, descriptions, comparisons, creations, wherein, as in a musical crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series of yet more animated expressions, attains to or surpa.s.ses, at the last note, all that is possible of energy and of brilliancy. Finally, he has that which is wanting in La Bruyere; his pa.s.sages are linked together; he is not a writer of pages but of books; no logician is more condensed. His demonstration is knitted together, mesh by mesh, for one, two and three volumes like a great net without an opening in which, willingly or not, we remain caught. He is a systematizer who, absorbed with himself; and with his eyes stubbornly fixed on his own reverie or his own principle, buries himself deeper in it every day, weaving its consequences off one by one, and always holding fast to the various ends. Do not go near him.

Like a solitary, enraged spider he weaves this out of his own substance, out of the most cherished convictions of his brain and the deepest emotions of his heart. He trembles at the slightest touch; ever on the defensive, he is terrible,[4136] beside himself;[4137] even venomous through suppressed exasperation and wounded sensibility, furious against an adversary, whom he stifles with the multiplied and tenacious threads of his web, but still more redoubtable to himself than to his enemies, soon caught in his own meshes,[4138] believing that France and the universe conspire against him, deducing with wonderful subtlety the proofs of this chimerical conspiracy, made desperate, at last, by his over-plausible romance, and strangling in the cunning toils which, by dint of his own logic and imagination, he has fashioned for himself.

With such weapons one might accidentally kill oneself, but one is strongly armed. Rousseau was well equipped, at least as powerful as Voltaire; it may be said that the last half of the eighteenth century belongs to him. A foreigner, a Protestant, original in temperament, in education, in heart, in mind and in habits, at once misanthropic and philanthropic, living in an ideal world constructed by himself, entirely opposed to the world as it is, he finds himself standing in a new position. No one is so sensitive to the evils and vices of actual society. No one is so affected by the virtues and happiness of the society of the future. This accounts for his having two holds on the public mind, one through satire and the other through the idyll.--These two holds are undoubtedly slighter at the present day; the substance of their grasp has disappeared; we are not the auditors to which it appealed. The famous discourse on the influence of literature and on the origin of inequality seems to us a collegiate exaggeration; an effort of the will is required to read the "Nouvelle Helose." The author is repulsive in the persistency of his spitefulness or in the exaggeration of his enthusiasm. He is always in extremes, now moody and with knit brows, and now streaming with tears and with arms outstretched to Heaven. Hyperbole, prosopopaeia, and other literary machinery are too often and too deliberately used by him. We are tempted to regard him now as a sophist making the best use of his arts, now as a rhetorician cudgeling his brains for a purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited, that is to say, an actor ever maintaining a thesis, striking an att.i.tude and aiming at effects. Finally, with the exception of the "Confessions"

his style soon wearies us; it is too studied, and too constantly overstrained. The author is always the author, and he communicates the defect to his personages. His Julie argues and descants for twenty successive pages on dueling, on love, on duty, with a logical completeness, a talent and phrases that would do honor to an academical moralist. Commonplace exists everywhere, general themes, a raking fire of abstractions and arguments, that is to say, truths more or less empty and paradoxes more or less hollow. The smallest detail of fact, an anecdote, a trait of habit, would suit us much better, and hence we of to day prefer the precise eloquence of objects to the lax eloquence of words. In the eighteenth century it was otherwise; to every writer this oratorical style was the prescribed ceremonial costume, the dress-coat he had to put on for admission into the company of select people. That which seems to us affectation was then only proper; in a cla.s.sic epoch the perfect period and the sustained development const.i.tute decorum, and are therefore to be observed.--It must be noted, moreover, that this literary drapery which, with us of the present day, conceals truth did not conceal it to his contemporaries; they saw under it the exact feature, the perceptible detail no longer detected by us. Every abuse, every vice, every excess of refinement and of culture, all that social and moral disease which Rousseau scourged with an author's emphasis, existed before them under their own eyes, in their own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, visible and daily manifested in thousands of domestic incidents. In applying satire they had only to observe or to remember. Their experience completed the book, and, through the co-operation of his readers, the author possessed power which he is now deprived of. If we were to put ourselves in their place we should recover their impressions. His denunciations and sarcasms, the harsh things of all sorts he says of the great, of fashionable people and of women, his rude and cutting tone, provoke and irritate, but are not displeasing. On the contrary, after so many compliments, insipidities and petty versification all this quickens the blunted taste; it is the sensation of strong common wine after long indulgence in orgeat and preserved citron. Accordingly, his first discourse against art and literature "lifts one at once above the clouds." But his idyllic writings touch the heart more powerfully than his satires. If men listen to the moralist that scolds them they throng in the footsteps of the magician that charms them; especially do women and the young adhere to one who shows them the promised land. All acc.u.mulated dissatisfactions, weariness of the world, ennui, vague disgust, a mult.i.tude of suppressed desires gush forth, like subterranean waters, under the sounding line that for the first time brings them to light. Rousseau with his soundings struck deep and true through his own trials and through genius. In a wholly artificial society where people are drawing room puppets, and where life consists in a graceful parade according to a recognized model, he preaches a return to nature, independence, earnestness, pa.s.sion, and effusion, a manly, active, ardent and happy existence in the open air and in sunshine. What an opening for restrained faculties, for the broad and luxurious fountain ever bubbling in man's breast, and for which their nice society provides no issue!--woman of the court is familiar with love as then practiced, simply a preference, often only a pastime, mere gallantry of which the exquisite polish poorly conceals the shallowness, coldness and, occasionally, wickedness; in short, adventures, amus.e.m.e.nts and personages as described by Crebillion jr. One evening, about to go out to the opera ball, she finds the "Nouvelle Helose" on her toilet-table; it is not surprising that she keeps her horses and footmen waiting from hour to hour, and that at four o'clock in the morning she orders the horses to be unharnessed, and then pa.s.ses the rest of the night in reading, and that she is stifled with her tears; for the first time in her life she finds a man that loves[4139]. In like manner if you would comprehend the success of "Emile," call to mind the children we have described, the embroidered, gilded, dressed-up, powdered little gentlemen, decked with sword and sash, carrying the chapeau under the arm, bowing, presenting the hand, rehearsing fine att.i.tudes before a mirror, repeating prepared compliments, pretty little puppets in which everything is the work of the tailor, the hairdresser, the preceptor and the dancing-master; alongside of these, little ladies of six years, still more artificial, bound up in whalebone, harnessed in a heavy skirt composed of hair and a girdle of iron, supporting a head-dress two feet in height, so many veritable dolls to which rouge is applied, and with which a mother amuses herself each morning for an hour and then consigns them to her maids for the rest of the day[4140]. This mother reads "Emile." It is not surprising that she immediately strips the poor little thing, and determines to nurse her next child herself.--It is through these contrasts that Rousseau is strong. He revealed the dawn to people who never got up until noon, the landscape to eyes that had thus far rested only on palaces and drawing-rooms, a natural garden to men who had never promenaded outside of clipped shrubs and rectilinear borders, the country, the family, the people, simple and endearing pleasures, to townsmen made weary by social avidity, by the excesses and complications of luxury, by the uniform comedy which, in the glare of hundreds of lighted candles, they played night after night in their own and in the homes of others[4141]. An audience thus disposed makes no clear distinction between pomp and sincerity, between sentiment and sentimentality. They follow their author as one who makes a revelation, as a prophet, even to the end of his ideal world, much more through his exaggerations than through his discoveries, as far on the road to error as on the pathway of truth.

These are the great literary powers of the century. With inferior successes, and through various combinations, the elements which contributed to the formation of the leading talents also form the secondary talents, like those below Rousseau,--Bernardin de St. Pierre, Raynal, Thomas, Marmontel, Mably, Florian, Dupaty, Mercier, Madame de Stael; and below Voltaire,--the lively and piquant intellects of Duclos, Piron, Galiani, President Des Brosses, Rivarol, Champfort, and to speak with precision, all other talents. Whenever a vein of talent, however meager, peers forth above the ground it is for the propagation and carrying forward of the new doctrine; scarcely can we find two or three little streams that run in a contrary direction, like the journal of Freron, a comedy by Palissot, or a satire by Gilbert. Philosophy winds through and overflows all channels public and private, through manuals of impiety, like the "Theologies portatives," and in the lascivious novels circulated secretly, through epigrams and songs, through daily novelties, through the amus.e.m.e.nts of fairs,[4142] and the harangues of the Academy, through tragedy and the opera, from the beginning to the end of the century, from the "OEdipe" of Voltaire, to the "Tarare" of Beaumarchais. It seems as if there was nothing else in the world. At least it is found everywhere and it floods all literary efforts; n.o.body cares whether it deforms them, content in making them serve as a conduit. In 1763, in the tragedy of Manco-Capac[4143] the "princ.i.p.al part," writes a contemporary, "is that of a savage who utters in verse all that we have read, scattered through 'Emile' and the 'Contrat Social,' concerning kings, liberty, the rights of man and the inequality of conditions." This virtuous savage saves a king's son over whom a high-priest raises a poniard, and then, designating the high-priest and himself by turns, he cries,

"Behold the civilized man; here is the savage man!"

At this line the applause breaks forth, and the success of the piece is such that it is demanded at Versailles and played before the court.

The same ideas have to be expressed with skill, brilliancy, gaiety, energy and scandal, and this is accomplished in "The Marriage of Figaro." Never were the ideals of the age displayed under a more transparent disguise, nor in an attire that rendered them more attractive. Its t.i.tle is the "Folle journee," and indeed it is an evening of folly, an after-supper like those occurring in the fashionable world, a masquerade of Frenchmen in Spanish costumes, with a parade of dresses, changing scenes, couplets, a ballet, a singing and dancing village, a medley of odd characters, gentlemen, servants, duennas, judges, notaries, lawyers, music-masters, gardeners, pastoureaux; in short, a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, for all the senses, the very opposite of the prevailing drama in which three pasteboard characters, seated on cla.s.sic chairs, exchange didactic arguments in an abstract saloon. And still better, it is an imbroglio displaying a superabundance of action, amidst intrigues that cross, interrupt and renew each other, through a pele-mele of travesties, exposures, surprises, mistakes, leaps from windows, quarrels and slaps, and all in sparkling style, each phrase flashing on all sides, where responses seem to be cut out by a lapidary, where the eyes would forget themselves in contemplating the multiplied brilliants of the dialogue if the mind were not carried along by its rapidity and the excitement of the action. But here is another charm, the most welcome of all in a society pa.s.sionately fond of Parny; according to an expression of the Comte d'Artois, which I dare not quote, this appeals to the senses, the arousing of which const.i.tutes the spiciness and savor of the piece.

The fruit that hangs ripening and savory on the branch never falls but always seems on the point of falling; all hands are extended to catch it, its voluptuousness somewhat veiled but so much the more provoking, declaring itself from scene to scene, in the Count's gallantry, in the Countess's agitation, in the simplicity of Fanchette, in the jestings of Figaro, in the liberties of Susanne, and reaching its climax in the precocity of Cherubino. Add to this a continual double sense, the author hidden behind his characters, truth put into the mouth of a clown, malice enveloped in simple utterances, the master duped but saved from being ridiculous by his deportment, the valet rebellious but preserved from acrimony by his gaiety, and you can comprehend how Beaumarchais could have the ancient regime played before its head, put political and social satire on the stage, publicly attach an expression to each wrong so as to become a by-word, and ever making a loud report,[4144] gather up into a few traits the entire polemics of the philosophers against the prisons of the State, against the censorship of literature, against the venality of office, against the privileges of birth, against the arbitrary power of ministers, against the incapacity of people in office, and still better, to sum up in one character every public demand, give the leading part to a commoner, b.a.s.t.a.r.d, bohemian and valet, who, by dint of dexterity, courage and good-humor, keeps himself up, swims with the tide, and shoots ahead in his little skiff, avoiding contact with larger craft and even supplanting his master, accompanying each pull on the oar with a shower of wit cast broadside at all his rivals.

After all, in France at least, the chief power is intellect. Literature in the service of philosophy is all-sufficient. The public opposes but a feeble resistance to their complicity, the mistress finding no trouble in convincing those who have already been won over by the servant

NOTES:

[Footnote 4101: How right Taine was. The 20th century should see a rebirth of violent Jacobinism in Russia, China, Cambodia, Korea, Cuba, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and Albania and of soft and creeping Jacobinism in the entire Western world. (SR.)]

[Footnote 4102: "Who, born within the last forty years, ever read a word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, or of that whole race who called themselves freethinkers?" (Burke, "Reflexions on the French Revolutions," 1790).]