A History of French Literature Part 13

In Voltaire's myriad-minded correspondence the whole man may be found--his fire, his sense, his universal curiosity, his wit, his malignity, his goodness, his Protean versatility, his ruling ideas; and one may say that the whole of eighteenth-century Europe presses into the pages. He is not only the man of letters, the student of science, the philosopher; he is equally interested in politics, in social reform, in industry, in agriculture, in political economy, in philology, and, together with these, in the thousand incidents of private life.

CHAPTER III DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPaeDIA--PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS, CRITICS--BUFFON

I

"When I recall Diderot," wrote his friend Meister, "the immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to conceive her--rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort ...

without any dominating principle, without a master, and without a G.o.d." No image more suitable could be found; and his works resemble the man, in their richness, their fertility, their variety, and their disorder. A great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left no body of coherent thought, no piece of finished art; but he was the greatest of literary improvisators.

DENIS DIDEROT, son of a worthy cutler of Langres, was born in 1713.

Educated by the Jesuits, he turned away from the regular professions, and supported himself and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for the Paris booksellers--translations, philosophical essays directed against revealed religion, stories written to suit the appet.i.te for garbage. From deism he advanced to atheism. Arguing in favour of the relativity of human knowledge in his _Lettre sur les Aveugles_ (1749), he puts his plea for atheism into the lips of an English man of science, but the device did not save him from an imprisonment of three months.

In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of the English "Cyclopaedia" of Chambers, applied to Diderot for a.s.sistance. He readily undertook the task, but could not be satisfied with a mere translation. In a Prospectus (1750) he indicated the design of the "Encyclopaedia" as he conceived it: the order and connection of the various branches of knowledge should be set forth, and in dictionary form the several sciences, liberal arts, and mechanical arts should be dealt with by experts. The homage which he rendered to science expressed the mind of his time; in the honour paid to mechanical toil and industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called an organiser of modern democracy. At his request JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT (1717-83) undertook the direction of the mathematical articles, and wrote the _Discours Preliminaire_, which cla.s.sified the departments of human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's conceptions, and gave a survey of intellectual progress. It was welcomed with warm applause.

The aid of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and a host of less ill.u.s.trious writers was secured; but the vast enterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical party; the Jesuits were active in rivalry and opposition; Rousseau deserted and became an enemy; D'Alembert, timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew.

In 1759 the privilege of publication was revoked, but the Government did not enforce its own decree. Through all difficulties and dangers Diderot held his ground. One day he wrote a fragment of the history of philosophy; the next he was in a workshop examining the construction of some machine: nothing was too great or too small for his audacity or his patience. To achieve the work, tact was needed as well as courage; at times he condescended to disguise his real opinions, striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765 his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, though the last plates of the _Encyclopedie_ were not issued until 1772. When all was finished, the scientific movement of the century was methodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of the past was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths and all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained its _Summa_.

But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, and in many directions, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardent haste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance; a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after his death. His novel _La Religieuse_--influenced to some extent by Richardson, whom he superst.i.tiously admired--is a repulsive exposure of conventual life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder.

_Jacques le Fataliste_, in which the manner is coa.r.s.ely imitated from Sterne, a book ill-composed and often malodorous, contains, among its heterogeneous tales, one celebrated narrative, the _Histoire de Mme. de la Pommeraye_, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless lover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a masterpiece, it is certainly _Le Neveu de Rameau_, a satire and a character-study of the parasite, thrown into the form of dialogue, which he handled with brilliant success; it remained unknown until the appearance of a German version (1805), made by Goethe from a ma.n.u.script copy.

In his _Salons_, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criticism of the pictorial art in France. His eye for colour and for contour was admirable; but it is less the technique of paintings that he studies than the subjects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such criticism may be condemned as literary rather than artistic; it was, however, new and instructive, and did much to quicken the public taste.

Diderot pleaded for a return to nature in the theatre; for a bourgeois drama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched with pathos, studied from real life, and inspired by a moral purpose; for the presentation on the stage of "conditions" rather than individual types--that is, of character as modified by social environments and the habits which they produce. He maintained that the actor should rather possess than be possessed by his theme, should be the master rather than the slave of his sensibility.

The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in his own plays, the _Pere de Famille_ and the _Fils Naturel_, are poor affectations of a style supposed to be natural, and are patently doctrinaire in their design, laboured developments of a moral thesis. One piece in which he paints himself, _Est-il bon? Est-il mechant?_ and this alone, falls little short of being admirable, and yet it fails of true success.

A coherent system of thought cannot be found in Diderot's writings, but they are pregnant with ideas. He is deist, pantheist, atheist; he is a materialist--one, however, who conceives matter not as inert, but quick with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality; and presently his morals become the doctrines of an anarchical licence.

All the ideas of his age struggle within him, and are never reduced to unity or harmony; light is never separate in his nature from heat, and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts which are sometimes the antic.i.p.ations of scientific genius; he almost leaps forward to some of the conclusions of Darwin. His great powers and his incessant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity. Diderot was never rich. The Empress Catherine of Russia magnificently purchased his library, and entrusted him with the books, as her librarian, providing a salary which to him was wealth. He travelled to St. Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous and delicate gift. But her imperial generosity was not greater than his own; he was always ready to lavish the treasures of his knowledge and thought in the service of others; no small fragment of his work was a free gift to his friends, and pa.s.sed under their name; Holbach and Raynal were among his debtors.

His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man and of the group of philosophers to which he belonged; the letters addressed to Mlle.

Volland, to whom he was devotedly attached during many years, are frank betrayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened his last days, but the days of sorrow were few. In July 1784, Diderot died. His reputation and influence were from time to time enhanced by posthumous publications. Other writers of his century impressed their own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon society; no other writer mingled his genius so completely with external things, or responded so fully and variously to the stimulus of the spirit of his age.

II

The French philosophical movement--the "Illumination"--of the eighteenth century, proceeds in part from the empiricism of Locke, in part from the remarkable development of physical and natural science; it incorporated the conclusions of English deism, and advanced from deism to atheism. An intellectual centre for the movement was provided by the _Encyclopedie_; a social centre was found in Parisian _salons_. It was sustained and invigorated by the pa.s.sion for freedom and for justice a.s.serting itself against the despotism and abuses of government and against the oppressions and abuses of the Church. The opposing forces were feeble, incompetent, disorganised. The methods of government were, in truth, indefensible; religion had surrendered dogma, and lost the austerity of morals; within the citadel of the Church were many professed and many secret allies of the philosophers.

While in England an apologetic literature arose, profound in thought and adequate in learning, in France no sustained resistance was offered to the inroad of free thought. Episcopal fulminations rolled like stage thunder; the Bastille and Vincennes were holiday retreats for fatigued combatants; imprisonment was tempered with cajoleries; the censors of the press connived with their victims. The Chancellor D'AGUESSEAU (1668-1751), an estimable magistrate, a dignified orator, maintained the old seriousness of life and morals, and received the reward of exile. The good ROLLIN (1661-1741) dictated lessons to youth drawn from antiquity and Christianity, narrated ancient history, and discoursed admirably on a plan of studies with a view to form the heart and mind; an amiable Christian Nestor, he was not a man-at-arms.

The Abbe Guenee replied to Voltaire with judgment, wit, and erudition, in his _Lettres de quelques Juifs_ (1769), but it was a single victory in a campaign of many battles. The satire of Gilbert, _Le Dix-huitieme Siecle_, is rudely vigorous; but Gilbert was only an angry youth, disappointed of his fame. Freron, the "Wasp" (_frelon_) of Voltaire's _L'ecossaise_, might sting in his _Annee Litteraire_, but there were sharper stings in satire and epigram which he must endure. Palissot might amuse the theatrical spectators of 1760 with his ridiculous philosophers; the _Philosophes_ was taken smilingly by Voltaire, and was sufficiently answered by Morellet's pamphlet and the _bouts-rimes_ of Marmontel or Piron. The _Voltairomanie_ of Desfontaines is only the outbreak of resentment of the accomplished and disreputable Abbe against a benefactor whose offence was to have saved him from the galleys.

The sensationalist philosophy is inaugurated by JULIEN OFFRAY DE LA METTRIE (1709-51) rather than by Condillac. A physician, making observations on his own case during an attack of fever, he arrived at the conclusion that thought is but a result of the mechanism of the body. Man is a machine more ingeniously organised than the brute.

All ideas have their origin in sensation. As for morals, they are not absolute, but relative to society and the State. As for G.o.d, perhaps He exists, but why should we wors.h.i.+p this existence more than any other? The law of our being is to seek happiness; the law of society is that we should not interfere with the happiness of others. The pleasure of the senses is not the only pleasure, but it has the distinction of being universal to our species.

La Mettrie, while opposing the spiritualism of Descartes, is more closely connected with that great thinker, through his doctrine that brutes are but machines, than with Locke. It is from Locke--though from Locke mutilated--that eTIENNE BONNOT DE CONDILLAC (1715-80) proceeds. All ideas are sensations, but sensations transformed.

Imagine a marble statue endowed successively with the several human senses; it will be seen how perceptions, consciousness, memory, ideas, comparison, judgment, a.s.sociation, abstraction, pleasure, desire are developed. The _ego_ is but the bundle of sensations experienced or transformed and held in recollection. Yet the unity of the _ego_ seems to argue that it is not composed of material particles.

Condillac's doctrine is sensationalist, but not materialistic.

Condillac's disciple, the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), proceeded to investigate the nature of sensibility itself, and to develop the physiological method of psychology. The unnecessary soul which Condillac preserved was suppressed by Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836); his ideology was no more than a province of zoology.

The morals of the sensationalist school were expressed by CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVeTIUS (1715-71), a worthy and benevolent farmer-general. The motive of all our actions is self-love, that tendency which leads us to seek for pleasure and avoid pain; but, by education and legislation, self-love can be guided and trained so that it shall harmonise with the public good. It remained for a German acclimatised to Paris to compile the full manifesto of atheistic materialism. At Holbach's hospitable table the philosophers met, and the air was charged with ideas. To condense these into a system was Holbach's task. Diderot, Lagrange, Naigeon may have lent their a.s.sistance, but PAUL-HENRY THIRY, BARON D'HOLBACH (1723-89) must be regarded as substantially the author of the _Systeme de la Nature_ (1770), which the t.i.tle-page prudently attributed to the deceased Mirabaud. What do we desire but that men should be happy, just, benevolent? That they may become so, it is necessary to deliver them from those errors on which political and spiritual despotism is founded, from the chains of tyrants and the chimeras of priests, and to lead them back from illusions to nature, of which man is a part. We find everywhere matter and motion, a chain of material causes and effects, nor can we find aught beside these. An ever-circulating system of motions connects inorganic and organic nature, fire and air and plant and animal; free-will is as much excluded as G.o.d and His miraculous providence. The soul is nothing but the brain receiving and transmitting motions; morals form a department of physiology.

Religions and governments, as they exist, are based on error, and drive men into crime. But though Holbach "accommodated atheism," as Grimm puts it, "to chambermaids and hairdressers," he would not hurry forward a revolution. All will come in good time; in some happier day Nature and her daughters Virtue, Reason, and Truth will alone receive the adoration of mankind.[1]

[Footnote 1: The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-93) endeavoured to reconcile his sensationalism with a religious faith and a private interpretation of Christianity.]

Among the friends of Holbach and Helvetius was C.-F. de Cha.s.seboeuf, Count de VOLNEY (1757-1820), who modified and developed the ethics of Helvetius. An Orientalist by his studies, he travelled in Egypt and Syria, desiring to investigate the origins of ancient religions, and reported what he had seen in colourless but exact description.

In _Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires_, he recalls the past like "an Arab Ossian," monotonous and grandiose, and expounds the history of humanity with cold and superficial a.n.a.lysis clothed in a pomp of words. His faith in human progress, founded on nature, reason, and justice, sustained Volney during the rise and fall of the Girondin party.

A higher and n.o.bler spirit, who perished in the Revolution, but ceased not till his last moment to hope and labour for the good of men, was J.-A.-N. de Caritat, Marquis de CONDORCET (1743-94). Ill.u.s.trious in mathematical science, he was interested by Turgot in political economy, and took a part in the polemics of theology. While lying concealed from the emissaries of Robespierre he wrote his _Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_. It is a philosophy of the past, and almost a hymn in honour of human perfectibility. The man-statue of Condillac, receiving, retaining, distinguis.h.i.+ng, and combining sensations, has gradually developed, through nine successive epochs, from that of the hunter and fisher to the citizen of 1789, who comprehends the physical universe with Newton, human nature with Locke and Condillac, and society with Turgot and Rousseau. In the vision of the future, with its progress in knowledge and in morals, its individual and social improvement, its lessening inequalities between nations and cla.s.ses, the philosopher finds his consolation for all the calamities of the present age.

Condorcet died in prison, poisoned, it is believed, by his own hand.

The economists, or, as Dupont de Nemours named them, the physiocrats, formed a not unimportant wing of the philosophic phalanx, now in harmony with the Encyclopaedic party, now in hostility. The sense of the misery of France was present to many minds in the opening of the century, and with the death of Louis XIV. came illusive hopes of amelioration. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), filled with ardent zeal for human happiness, condemned the government of the departed Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual peace; among his dreams arose projects for the improvement of society which were justified by time. Boisguillebert, and Vauban, marshal of France and military engineer, were no visionary spirits; they pleaded for a serious consideration of the general welfare, and especially the welfare of the agricultural cla.s.s, the wealth-producers of the community. To violate economic laws, Boisguillebert declared, is to violate nature; let governments restrain their meddling, and permit natural forces to operate with freedom.

Such was the doctrine of the physiocratic school, of which FRANcOIS QUESNAY (1694-1774) was the chief. Let human inst.i.tutions conform to nature; enlarge the bounds of freedom; give play to the spirit of individualism; diminish the interference of government--"laissez faire, laissez pa.s.ser."[2] Agriculture is productive, let its burdens be alleviated; manufactures are useful but "sterile": honour, therefore, above all, to the tiller of the fields, who hugs nature close, and who enriches humankind! The elder Mirabeau--"ami des hommes"--who had antic.i.p.ated Quesnay in some of his views, and himself had learnt from Cantillon, met Quesnay in 1757, and thenceforth subordinated his own fiery spirit, as far as that was possible, to the spirit of the master. From the physiocrats--Gournay and Quesnay--the n.o.ble-minded and ill.u.s.trious TURGOT (1727-81) derived many of those ideas of reform which he endeavoured to put into action when intendant of Limoges, and later, when Minister of Finance. By his _Reflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses_, Turgot prepared the way for Adam Smith.

[Footnote 2: This phrase had been used by Boisguillebert and by the Marquis d'Argenson before Gournay made it a power. On D'Argenson (1694-1757), whose _Considerations sur le Gouvernement de la France_ were not published until 1764, see the study by Mr. Arthur Ogle (1893).]

In 1770 the Abbe Galiani, as alert of brain as he was diminutive of stature, attacked the physiocratic doctrines in his _Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bles_, which Plato and Moliere--so Voltaire p.r.o.nounced--had combined to write. The refutation of the _Dialogues_ by Morellet was the result of no such brilliant collaboration, and Galiani, proposed that his own unstatuesque person should be honoured by a statue above an inscription, declaring that he had wiped out the economists, who were sending the nation to sleep. The fame of his _Dialogues_ was perhaps in large measure due to the party-spirit of the Encyclopaedists, animated by a vivacious attack upon the physiocrats. The book was applauded, but reached no second edition.

An important body of articles on literature was contributed to the _Encyclopedie_ by JEAN-FRANcOIS MARMONTEL. As early as 1719 a remarkable study in aesthetics had appeared--the _Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie et la Peinture_, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid sensations and emotions apart from the painful consequences which commonly attend these in actual life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats of "physical causes in the progress of art and literature," antic.i.p.ates the views of Montesquieu on the influence of climate, and studies the action of environment on the products of the imagination. In 1746 Charles Batteux, in his treatise _Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme Principe_, defined the end of art as the imitation of nature--not indeed of reality, but of nature in its actual or possible beauty; of nature not as it is, but as it may be. The articles of Marmontel, revised and collected in the six volumes of his _elements de Litterature_ (1787), were full of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in observation, as they often were, if not penetrating or profound. In his earlier _Poetique Francaise_--"a petard," said Mairan, "laid at the doors of the Academy to blow them up if they should not open"--he had shown himself strangely disrespectful towards the fame of Racine, Boileau, and the poet Rousseau.

The friend of Marmontel, Antoine-Leonard Thomas (1732-85), honourably distinguished by the dignity of his character and conduct, a composer of _eloges_ on great men, somewhat marred by strain and oratorical emphasis, put his best work into an _Essai sur les eloges_.

At a time when Bossuet was esteemed below his great deserts, Thomas--almost alone--recognised his supremacy in eloquence. As the century advanced, and philosophy developed its attack on religion and governments, the cla.s.sical tradition in literature not only remained unshaken, but seemed to gain in authority. The first lieutenant of Voltaire, his literary "son," LAHARPE (1739-1803) represents the critical temper of the time. In 1786 he began his courses of lectures at the Lycee, before a brilliant audience composed of both s.e.xes. For the first time in France, instruction in literature, not trivial and not erudite, but suited to persons of general culture, was made an intellectual pleasure. For the first time the history of literature was treated, in its sequence from Homer to modern times, as a totality. Laharpe's judgments of his contemporaries were often misled by his bitterness of spirit; his mind was not capacious, his sympathies were not liberal; his knowledge, especially of Greek letters, was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV., and he felt the beauty of its art. No one has written with finer intelligence of Racine than he in his _Lycee, ou Cours de Litterature_.

As the Revolution approached he sympathised with its hopes and fears; the professor donned the _bonnet rouge_. The storm which burst silenced his voice for a time; in 1793 he suffered imprisonment; and when he occupied his chair again, it was a converted Laharpe who declaimed against philosophers, republicans, and atheists, the tyrants of reason, morals, art and letters.

The finest and surest judgment in contemporary literature was that of a gallicised German--MELCHIOR GRIMM (1723-1807). As Laharpe was bound in filial loyalty to Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternal attachment to the least French of eighteenth-century French authors--Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was a measure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his intellect rose clear, light, and sure, with no mists of sentiment about it, and no clouds of fancy. During thirty-seven years, as a kind of private journalist, he furnished princely and royal persons of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Poland, with "Correspondence," which reflected as from a mirror all the lights of Paris to the remote North and East. His own philosophy, his political views, were cheerless and arid; but he could judge the work of others generously as well as severely. No one of his generation so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare; no one more happily interpreted Montaigne. By swift _apercu_, by criticism, by anecdote, by caustic raillery, or serious record, he makes the intellectual world of his day pa.s.s before us and expound its meanings. The Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early, drove him from Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished that he were in his grave.

III

Buffon, whose power of wing was great, and who did not love the heat and dust of combat, soared smoothly above the philosophic strife.

Born in 1707, at Montbard, in Burgundy, GEORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, created Comte de BUFFON by Louis XV., fortunate in the possession of riches, health, and serenity of heart and brain, lived in his domestic circle, apart from the coteries of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinite patience his proper ends. The legend describes him as a pompous Olympian even in his home; in truth, if he was majestic--like a marshal of France, as Hume describes him--he was also natural, genial, and at times gay. His appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the Royal Garden, now the _Jardin des Plantes_, turned his studies from mathematical science to natural history.

The first volumes of his vast _Histoire Naturelle_ appeared in 1749; aided by Daubenton and others, he was occupied with the succeeding volumes during forty years, until death terminated his labours in 1788. The defects of his work are obvious--its want of method, its disdain of cla.s.sification, its abuse of hypotheses, its humanising of the animal world, its pomp of style. But the progress of science, which lowered the reputation of Buffon, has again re-established his fame. Not a few of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have been the divinations of genius; and if he wrote often in the ornate, cla.s.sical manner, he could also write with a grave simplicity.

In his _Discours de Reception_, p.r.o.nounced before the French Academy in 1753, he formulated his doctrine of literary style, insisting that it is, before all else, the manifestation of order in the evolution of ideas; ideas alone form the basis and inward substance of style.

Rejecting merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of natural phenomena, viewing cla.s.sifications as no more than a convenience of the human intellect, refusing to regard final causes as a subject of science, he envisaged nature with a tranquil and comprehensive gaze, and with something of a poet's imagination. He perceived that the globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long series of changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to sound geological study; he expounded the geography of species, and almost divined the theory of their transformation or variability; he recognised in some degree the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; he regarded man as a part of nature, but as its n.o.blest part, capable of an intellectual and moral progress which is not the mere result of physical laws.

Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as a thinker, he enlarged the bounds of literature by annexing the province of natural history as Montesquieu had annexed that of political science. His vision of the universe was unclouded by pa.s.sion, and part of its grandeur is derived from this serenity. He studied and speculated with absolute freedom, prepared to advance from his own ideas to others more in accordance with observed phenomena. "He desired to be," writes a critic, "and almost became, a pure intelligence in presence of eternal things."

How could he concern himself with the strifes and pa.s.sions of a day to whom the centuries were moments in the vast process of evolving change? In Andre Chenier he found a disciple who would fain have been the Lucretius of the new system of nature.

CHAPTER IV ROUSSEAU--BEAUMARCHAIS--BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE--ANDRe CHeNIER

I

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU the man is inseparable from Rousseau the writer; his works proceed directly from his character and his life.