The eighteenth century in France began with Louis XIV and ended with the Revolution. It is the period which bridges the gulf between autocracy and self-government, between Roman Catholicism and toleration, between the classical spirit and the spirit of the Romantic Revival. It is thus of immense importance in the history not only of France, but of the civilized world. And from the point of view of literature it is also peculiarly interesting. The vast political and social changes which it inaugurated were the result of a corresponding movement in the current of ideas; and this movement was begun, developed, and brought to a triumphant conclusion by a series of great French writers, who deliberately put their literary abilities to the service of the causes which they had at heart. Thus the literature of the epoch offers a singular contrast to that of the preceding one. While the masterpieces of theGrand Siècleserved no ulterior purpose, coming into being and into immortality simply as works of beauty and art, those of the eighteenth century were works of propaganda, appealing with a practical purpose to the age in which they were written—works whose value does not depend solely upon artistic considerations. The former were static, the latter dynamic. As the century progressed, the tendency deepened; and the literature of the age, taken as a whole, presents a spectacle of thrilling dramatic interest, in which the forces of change, at first insignificant, gradually gather in volume, and at last, accumulated into overwhelmingpower, carry all before them. In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
The movement had already begun before the death of Louis. The evils at which La Bruyère had shuddered had filled the attention of more practical minds. Among these the most remarkable was FÉNELON, Archbishop of Cambray, who combined great boldness of political thought with the graces of a charming and pellucid style. In several writings, among which was the famousTélémaque—a book written for the edification of the young Duc de Bourgogne, the heir to the French throne—Fénelon gave expression to the growing reaction against the rigid autocracy of the government, and enunciated the revolutionary doctrine that a monarch existed for no other purpose than the good of his people. The Duc de Bourgogne was converted to the mild, beneficent, and open-minded views of his tutor; and it is possible that if he had lived a series of judicious reforms might have prevented the cataclysm at the close of the century. But in one important respect the mind of Fénelon was not in accord with the lines on which French thought was to develop for the next eighty years. Though he was among the first to advocate religious toleration, he was an ardent, even a mystical, Roman Catholic. Now one of the chief characteristics of the coming age was its scepticism—its elevation of the secular as opposed to the religious elements in society, and its utter lack of sympathy with all forms of mystical devotion. Signs of this spirit also had appeared before the end of Louis's reign. As early as 1687—within a year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—FONTENELLE, thenephew of Corneille, in hisHistoire des Oracles, attacked the miraculous basis of Christianity under the pretence of exposing the religious credulity of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In its mingling of the sprightly and the erudite, and in the subdued irony of its apparent submission to orthodoxy, this little book forestalled a method of controversy which came into great vogue at a later date. But a more important work, published at the very end of the seventeenth century, was theDictionaryof BAYLE, in which, amid an enormous mass of learning poured out over a multitude of heterogeneous subjects, the most absolute religious scepticism is expressed with unmistakable emphasis and unceasing reiteration. The book is an extremely unwieldy one—very large and very discursive, and quite devoid of style; but its influence was immense; and during the long combat of the eighteenth century it was used as a kind of armoury, supplying many of their sharpest weapons to the writers of the time.
It was not, however, until a few years after the death of the great king that a volume appeared which contained a complete expression of the new spirit, in all its aspects. In theLettres Persanesof MONTESQUIEU (published 1721) may be discerned the germs of the whole thought of the eighteenth century in France. The scheme of this charming and remarkable book was not original: some Eastern travellers were supposed to arrive in Paris, and to describe, in a correspondence with their countrymen in Persia, the principal features of life in the French capital. But the uses to which Montesquieu put this borrowed plot were all his own. He made it the base for a searching attack on the wholesystem of the government of Louis XIV. The corruption of the Court, the privileges of the nobles, the maladministration of the finances, the stupidities and barbarisms of the old autocratic régime—these are the topics to which he is perpetually drawing his reader's attention. But he does more than this: his criticism is not merely particular, it is general; he points out the necessarily fatal effects of all despotisms, and he indicates his own conception of what a good constitution should be. All these discussions are animated by a purely secular spirit. He views religion from an outside standpoint; he regards it rather as one of the functions of administration than as an inner spiritual force. As for all the varieties of fanaticism and intolerance, he abhors them utterly.
It might be supposed that a book containing such original and far-reaching theories was a solid substantial volume, hard to master and laborious to read. The precise opposite is the case. Montesquieu has dished up his serious doctrines into a spicy story, full of epigrams and light topical allusions, and romantic adventures, and fancy visions of the East. Montesquieu was a magistrate; yet he ventured to indulge here and there in reflections of dubious propriety, and to throw over the whole of his book an airy veil of voluptuous intrigue. All this is highly typical of the literature of the age which was now beginning. The serious, formal tone of the classical writers was abandoned, and was replaced by a gay, unemphatic, pithy manner, in which some grains of light-hearted licentiousness usually gave a flavour to the wit. The change was partly due to the shifting of the centre of society from the elaborate and spectacular world of Versailles to the more intimate atmosphere of thedrawing-rooms of Paris. With the death of the old king the ceremonial life of the Court fell into the background; and the spirits of the time flew off into frivolity with a sense of freedom and relief. But there was another influence at work. Paradoxical as it may sound, it was the very seriousness of the new writers which was the real cause of their lack of decorum. Their great object was to be read—and by the largest possible number of readers; the old select circle of literary connoisseurs no longer satisfied them; they were eager to preach their doctrines to a wider public—to the brilliant, inquisitive, and increasingly powerful public of the capital. And with this public no book had a chance of success unless it was of the kind that could be run through rapidly, pleasantly, on a sofa, between dinner and the opera, and would furnish the material for spicy anecdotes and good talk. Like the jesters of the Middle Ages, the philosophers of the eighteenth century found in the use of pranks and buffoonery the best way of telling the truth.
Until about the middle of the century, Montesquieu was the dominating figure in French thought. His second book—Considérations sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains—is an exceedingly able work, in which a series of interesting and occasionally profound historical reflections are expressed in a style of great brilliance and incisiveness. Here Montesquieu definitely freed history from the medieval fetters which it had worn even in the days of Bossuet, and considered the development of events from a purely secular point of view, as the result of natural causes. But his greatest work, over which he spent the greater part of his life, and on which his reputation must finally rest, wasL'Esprit des Lois(published in 1748). The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame du Deffand said that its title should have beenDe l'Esprit sur les Loisshe put her finger on its weak spot. Montesquieu's generalizations are always bold, always original, always fine; unfortunately, they are too often unsound into the bargain. The fluid elusive facts slip through his neat sentences like water in a sieve. His treatment of the English constitution affords an illustration of this. One of the first foreigners to recognize the importance and to study the nature of English institutions, Montesquieu nevertheless failed to give an accurate account of them. He believed that he had found in them a signal instance of his favourite theory of the beneficial effects produced by the separation of the three powers of government—the judicial, the legislative, and the executive; but he was wrong. In England, as a matter of fact, the powers of the legislative and the executive were intertwined. This particular error has had a curious history. Montesquieu's great reputation led to his view of the constitution of England being widely accepted as the true one; as such it was adopted by the American leaders after the War of Independence; and its influence is plainly visible in the present constitution of the United States. Such is the strange power of good writing over the affairs of men!
At about the same time as the publication of theLettres Persanes, there appeared upon the scene in Paris a young man whose reputation was eventually destined far to outshine that of Montesquieu himself. This young man was François Arouet, known to the world as VOLTAIRE. Curiously enough, however, the work upon which Voltaire's reputation was originally built up has now sunk into almost complete oblivion. It was as a poet, and particularly as a tragic poet, that he won his fame; and it was primarily as a poet that he continued to be known to his contemporaries during the first sixty years of his life (1694-1754). But to-day his poetry—the serious part of it, at least,—is never read, and his tragedies—except for an occasional revival—are never acted. As a dramatist Voltaire is negligible for the very reasons that made him so successful in his own day. It was not his object to write great drama, but to please his audience: he did please them; and, naturally enough, he has not pleased posterity. His plays are melodramas—the melodramas of a very clever man with a great command of language, an acute eye for stage-effect, and a consummate knowledge of the situations and sentiments which would go down with his Parisian public. They are especially remarkable for their wretched psychology. It seems well-nigh incredible that Voltaire's pasteboard imitations of humanity should ever have held a place side by side with the profound presentments of Racine; yet so it was, and Voltaire was acclaimed as the equal—or possibly the triumphant rival—of his predecessor. All through the eighteenth century this singular absence of psychological insight may be observed.
The verse of the plays is hardly better than the character-drawing. It is sometimes good rhetoric; itis never poetry. The same may be said ofLa Henriade, the National Epic which placed Voltaire, in the eyes of his admiring countrymen, far above Milton and Dante, and, at least, on a level with Virgil and Homer. The true gifts displayed in this unreadable work were not poetical at all, but historical. The notes and dissertations appended to it showed that Voltaire possessed a real grasp of the principles of historical method—principles which he put to a better use a few years later in his brilliant narrative, based on original research, of the life of Charles XII.
During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying—half unconsciously, perhaps—to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius. What was that quality? Was he first and foremost a dramatist, or an epic poet, or a writer of light verse, or an historian, or even perhaps a novelist? In all these directions he was working successfully—yet without absolute success. For, in fact, at bottom, he was none of these things: the true nature of his spirit was not revealed in them. When the revelation did come, it came as the result of an accident. At the age of thirty he was obliged, owing to a quarrel with a powerful nobleman, to leave France and take up his residence in England. The three years that he passed there had an immense effect upon his life. In those days England was very little known to Frenchmen; the barrier which had arisen during the long war between the two peoples was only just beginning to be broken down; and when Voltaire arrived, it was almost in the spirit of a discoverer. What he found filled him with astonishment and admiration. Here, in every department of life, were to be seen all the blessings so conspicuously absent inFrance. Here were wealth, prosperity, a contented people, a cultivated nobility, a mild and just administration, and a bursting energy which manifested itself in a multitude of ways—in literature, in commerce, in politics, in scientific thought. And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed the power of the monarchy, done away with priestcraft, established the liberty of the Press, set its face against every kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and, through the means of free institutions, taken up the task of governing itself. The inference was obvious: in France also, like causes would lead to like results. When he was allowed to return to his own country, Voltaire published the outcome of his observations and reflections in hisLettres Philosophiques, where for the first time his genius displayed itself in its essential form. The book contains an account of England as Voltaire saw it, from the social rather than from the political point of view. English life is described in its actuality, detailed, vivid, and various; we are shown Quakers and members of Parliament, merchants and philosophers; we come in for the burial of Sir Isaac Newton; we go to a performance ofJulius Caesar; inoculation is explained to us; we are given elaborate discussions of English literature and English science, of the speculations of Bolingbroke and the theories of Locke. The Letters may still be read with pleasure and instruction; they are written in a delightful style, running over with humour and wit, revealing here and there remarkable powers of narrative, and impregnated through and through with a wonderful mingling of gaiety, irony, and common sense. They are journalism of genius; but they are something more besides. They are informed with a high purpose, and a genuine love of humanityand the truth. The French authorities soon recognized this; they perceived that every page contained a cutting indictment of their system of government; and they adopted their usual method in such a case. The sale of the book was absolutely prohibited throughout France, and a copy of it solemnly burnt by the common hangman.
It was only gradually that the new views, of which Montesquieu and Voltaire were the principal exponents, spread their way among the public; and during the first half of the century many writers remained quite unaffected by them. Two of these—resembling each other in this fact alone, that they stood altogether outside the movement of contemporary thought—deserve our special attention.
The mantle of Racine was generally supposed to have fallen on to the shoulders of Voltaire—it had not: if it had fallen on to anyone's shoulders it was on to those of MARIVAUX. No doubt it had become diminished in the transit. Marivaux was not a great tragic writer; he was not a poet; he worked on a much smaller scale, and with far less significant material. But he was a true dramatist, a subtle psychologist, and an artist pure and simple. His comedies, too, move according to the same laws as the tragedies of Racine; they preserve the same finished symmetry of design, and leave upon the mind the same sense of unity and grace. But they are slight, etherealized, fantastic; they are Racine, as it were, by moonlight. All Marivaux's dramas pass in a world of his own invention—a world curiously compounded of imagination and reality. At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of conventional fantasy, playing charminglyround impossible situations and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood. But if Marivaux had been simply fantastic and nothing more, his achievement would have been insignificant; his great merit lies in his exquisite instinct for psychological truth. His plays are like Watteau's pictures, which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality—the distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are miraculously one; in their conversations the subtleties of metaphysicians are blended with the airy clarities of birds.Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasardis perhaps the most perfect example of his work. Here the lady changes places with her waiting-maid, while the lover changes places with his valet, and, in this impossible framework of symmetrical complications, the whole action spins itself out. The beauty of the little piece depends upon the infinitely delicate art which depicts each charmingly absurd, minute transition in the process of delusion, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and explanation, with all the varieties of their interactions and shimmering personal shades. It would be difficult to find a more exquisite example of tender and discriminating fidelity to the loveliest qualities in human nature than the scene in which Silvia realizes at last that she is in love—and with whom. 'Ah! je vois clair dans mon coeur!' she exclaims at the suprememoment; and the words might stand as the epitome of the art of Marivaux. Through all the superfine convolutions of his fancies and his coquetries he never loses sight for a moment of the clear truth of the heart.
While Marivaux, to use Voltaire's phrase for him, was 'weighing nothings in scales of gossamer', a writer of a very different calibre was engaged upon one of the most forcible, one of the most actual, and one of the hugest compositions that has ever come from pen of man. The DUC DE SAINT-SIMON had spent his youth and middle life in the thick of the Court during the closing years of Louis XIV and the succeeding period of the Regency; and he occupied his old age with the compilation of hisMémoires. This great book offers so many points of striking contrast with the mass of French literature that it falls into a category of its own; no other work of the same outstanding merit can quite be compared to it; for it was the product of what has always been, in France, an extremely rare phenomenon—an amateur in literature who was also a genius. Saint-Simon was so far from being a professional man of letters that he would have been shocked to hear himself described as a man of letters at all; indeed, it might be said with justice that his only profession was that of a duke. It was as a duke—or, more correctly, as aDuc et Pair—that, in his own eyes at any rate, he lived and moved and had his being. It was round his position as a duke that the whole of his active existence had revolved; it was with the consciousness of his dukedom dominating his mind that he sat down in his retirement to write his memoirs. It might seem that no book produced in such circumstances and by such a man could possiblybe valuable or interesting. But, fortunately for the world, the merit of books does not depend upon the enlightenment of authors. Saint-Simon was a man of small intellect, with medieval ideas as to the structure of society, with an absurd belief in the fundamental importance of the minutest class distinctions, and with an obsession for dukedoms almost amounting to mania: but he had in addition an incredibly passionate temperament combined with an unparalleled power of observation; and these two qualities have made his book immortal.
Besides the intrinsic merits of the work, it has the additional advantage of being concerned with an age which, of enthralling interest on its own account, also happened to be particularly suited to the capacities of the writer. If Saint-Simon had lived at any other time, his memoirs would have been admirable, no doubt, but they would have lacked the crowning excellence which they actually possess. As it was, a happy stroke of fortune placed him in the one position where he could exercise to the full his extraordinary powers: never, before or since, has there been so much to observe; never, before or since, so miraculous an observer. For, at Versailles, in the last years of Louis, Saint-Simon had before him, under his very eyes as a daily and hourly spectacle, the whole accumulated energy of France in all its manifestations; that was what he saw; and that, by the magic of his pen, is what he makes us see. Through the endless succession of his pages the enormous panorama unrolls itself, magnificent, palpitating, alive. What La Bruyère saw with the spiritual gaze of a moralist rushed upon the vision of Saint-Simon in all the colour, the detail, the intensity, the frenzy, of actual fact. He makes nocomments, no reflections—or, if he does, they are ridiculous; he only sees and feels. Thus, though in the profundity of his judgement he falls so infinitely below La Bruyère, in his character-drawing he soars as high above him. His innumerable portraits are unsurpassed in literature. They spring into his pages bursting with life—individual, convincing, complete, and as various as humanity itself. He excels in that most difficult art of presenting the outward characteristics of persons, calling up before the imagination not only the details of their physical appearance, but the more recondite effects of their manner and their bearing, so that, when he has finished, one almost feels that one has met the man. But his excellence does not stop there. It is upon the inward creature that he expends his most lavish care—upon the soul that sits behind the eyelids, upon the purpose and the passion that linger in a gesture or betray themselves in a word. The joy that he takes in such descriptions soon infects the reader, who finds before long that he is being carried away by the ardour of the chase, and that at last he seizes upon the quivering quarry with all the excitement and all the fury of Saint-Simon himself. Though it would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that Saint-Simon was always furious—the wonderful portraits of the Duchesse de Bourgogne and the Prince de Conti are in themselves sufficient to disprove that—yet there can be no doubt that his hatreds exceeded his loves, and that, in his character-drawing, he was, as it were, more at home when he detested. Then the victim is indeed dissected with a loving hand; then the details of incrimination pour out in a multitudinous stream; then the indefatigable brush of the master darkens the deepest shadows and throws the mostglaring deformities into still bolder relief; then disgust, horror, pity, and ridicule finish the work which scorn and indignation had begun. Nor, in spite of the virulence of his method, do his portraits ever sink to the level of caricatures. His most malevolent exaggerations are yet so realistic that they carry conviction. When he had fashioned to his liking his terrific images—his Vendôme, his Noailles, his Pontchartrain, his Duchesse de Berry, and a hundred more—he never forgot, in the extremity of his ferocity, to commit the last insult, and to breathe into their nostrils the fatal breath of life.
And it is not simply in detached portraits that Saint-Simon's descriptive powers show themselves; they are no less remarkable in the evocation of crowded and elaborate scenes. He is a master of movement; he can make great groups of persons flow and dispose themselves and disperse again; he can produce the effect of a multitude under the dominion of some common agitation, the waves of excitement spreading in widening circles, amid the conflicting currents of curiosity and suspicion, fear and hope. He is assiduous in his descriptions of the details of places, and invariably heightens the effect of his emotional climaxes by his dramatic management of the physicaldécor.Thus his readers get to know the Versailles of that age as if they had lived in it; they are familiar with the great rooms and the long gallery; they can tell the way to the king's bedchamber, or wait by the mysterious door of Madame de Maintenon; or remember which prince had rooms opening out on to the Terrace near the Orangery, and which great family had apartments in the new wing. More than this, Saint-Simon has the art of conjuring up—often in a phrase or two—thosecurious intimate visions which seem to reveal the very soul of a place. How much more one knows about the extraordinary palace—how one feels the very pulse of the machine—when Saint-Simon has shown one in a flash a door opening, on a sudden, at dead of night, in an unlighted corridor, and the haughty Duc d'Harcourt stepping out among a blaze of torches, to vanish again, as swiftly as he had come, into the mysterious darkness!—Or when one has seen, amid the cold and snow of a cruel winter, the white faces of the courtiers pressed against the window-panes of the palace, as the messengers ride in from the seat of war with their dreadful catalogues of disasters and deaths!
Saint-Simon's style is the precise counterpart of his matter. It is coloured and vital to the highest degree. It is the style of a writer who does not care how many solecisms he commits—how disordered his sentences may be, how incorrect his grammar, how forced or undignified his expressions—so long as he can put on to paper in black and white the passionate vision that is in his mind. The result is something unique in French literature. If Saint-Simon had tried to write with academic correctness—and even if he had succeeded—he certainly would have spoilt his book. Fortunately, academic correctness did not interest him, while the exact delineament of his observations did. He is not afraid of using colloquialisms which every critic of the time would have shuddered at, and which, by their raciness and flavour, add enormously to his effects. His writing is also extremely metaphorical; technical terms are thrown in helter-skelter whenever the meaning would benefit; and the boldest constructions at every turn are suddenly brought into being.In describing the subtle spiritual sympathy which existed between Fénelon and Madame de Guyon he strikes out the unforgettable phrase—'leur sublime s'amalgama', which in its compression, its singularity, its vividness, reminds one rather of an English Elizabethan than a French writer of the eighteenth century. The vast movement of his sentences is particularly characteristic. Clause follows clause, image is piled upon image, the words hurry out upon one another's heels in clusters, until the construction melts away under the burning pressure of the excitement, to reform as best it may while the agitated period still expands in endless ramifications. His book is like a tropical forest—luxuriant, bewildering, enormous—with the gayest humming-birds among the branches, and the vilest monsters in the entangled grass.
Saint-Simon, so far as the influence of his contemporaries was concerned, might have been living in the Middle Ages or the moon. At a time when Voltaire's fame was ringing through Europe, he refers to him incidentally as an insignificant scribbler, and misspells his name. But the combination of such abilities and such aloofness was a singular exception, becoming, indeed, more extraordinary and improbable every day. For now the movement which had begun in the early years of the century was entering upon a new phase. The change came during the decade 1750-60, when, on the one hand, it had become obvious that all the worst features of the old regime were to be perpetuated indefinitely under the incompetent government of Louis XV, and when, on the other hand, the generation which had been brought up under the influence of Montesquieu and Voltairecame to maturity. A host of new writers, eager, positive, and resolute, burst upon the public, determined to expose to the uttermost the evils of the existing system, and, if possible, to end them. Henceforward, until the meeting of the States-General closed the period of discussion and began that of action, the movement towards reform dominated French literature, gathering in intensity as it progressed, and assuming at last the proportions and characteristics of a great organized campaign.
The ideals which animated the new writers—thePhilosophes, as they came to be called—may be summed up in two words: Reason and Humanity. They were the heirs of that splendid spirit which had arisen in Europe at the Renaissance, which had filled Columbus when he sailed for the New World, Copernicus when he discovered the motion of the earth, and Luther when he nailed his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg. They wished to dispel the dark mass of prejudice, superstition, ignorance and folly by the clear rays of knowledge and truth; and to employ the forces of society towards the benefit of all mankind. They found in France an incompetent administration, a financial system at once futile and unjust, a barbarous judicial procedure, a blind spirit of religious intolerance—they found the traces of tyranny, caste-privilege and corruption in every branch of public life; and they found that these enormous evils were the result less of viciousness than of stupidity, less of the deliberate malice of kings or ministers than of a long, ingrained tradition of narrow-mindedness and inhumanity in the principles of government. Their great object, therefore, was to produce, by means of their writings, such an awakening of public opinion as would cause an immense transformation in the whole spirit of national life. With the actual processes of political change, with the practical details of political machinery, very few of them concerned themselves. Some of them—such as the illustrious Turgot—believed that the best way of reaching the desired improvement was through the agency of a benevolent despotism; others—such as Rousseau—had in view an elaborate,a priori, ideal system of government; but these were exceptions, and the majority of thePhilosophesignored politics proper altogether. This was a great misfortune; but it was inevitable. The beneficent changes which had been introduced so effectively and with such comparative ease into the government of England had been brought about by men of affairs; in France the men of affairs were merely the helpless tools of an autocratic machine, and the changes had to owe their origin to men uninstructed in affairs—to men of letters. Reform had to come from the outside, instead of from within; and reform of that kind spells revolution. Yet, even here, there were compensating advantages. The changes in England had been, for the most part, accomplished in a tinkering, unspeculative, hole-and-corner spirit; those in France were the result of the widest appeal to first principles, of an attempt, at any rate, to solve the fundamental problems of society, of a noble and comprehensive conception of the duties and destiny of man. This was the achievement of thePhilosophes. They spread far and wide, not only through France, but through the whole civilized world, a multitude of searching interrogations on the most vital subjects; they propounded vast theories, they awoke new enthusiasms, and uplifted new ideals. In two directions particularly their influence has been enormous. By their insistence on the right of free opinion and on the paramount necessity of free speculation, untrammelled by the fetters of orthodoxy and tradition, they established once for all as the common property of the human race that scientific spirit which has had such an immense effect on modern civilization, and whose full import we are still only just beginning to understand. And, owing mainly to their efforts also, the spirit of humanity has come to be an abiding influence in the world. It was they who, by their relentless exposure of the abuses of the French judicial system—the scandal of arbitrary imprisonment, the futile barbarism of torture, the medieval abominations of the penal code—finally instilled into public opinion a hatred of cruelty and injustice in all their forms; it was they who denounced the horrors of the slave-trade; it was they who unceasingly lamented the awful evils of war. So far as the actual content of their thought was concerned, they were not great originators. The germs of their most fruitful theories they found elsewhere—chiefly among the thinkers of England; and, when they attempted original thinking on their own account, though they were bold and ingenious, they were apt also to be crude. In some sciences—political economy, for instance, and psychology—they led the way, but attained to no lasting achievement. They suffered from the same faults as Montesquieu in hisEsprit des Lois. In their love of pure reason, they relied too often on the swift processes of argument for the solution of difficult problems, and omitted that patient investigation of premises upon which the validity of all argument depends. They were too fond of systems, and those neatly constructed logical theoriesinto which everything may be fitted admirably—except the facts. In addition, the lack of psychological insight which was so common in the eighteenth century tended to narrow their sympathies; and in particular they failed to realize the beauty and significance of religious and mystical states of mind. These defects eventually produced a reaction against their teaching—a reaction during which the true value of their work was for a time obscured. For that value is not to be looked for in the enunciation of certain definite doctrines, but in something much wider and more profound. ThePhilosopheswere important not so much for the answers which they gave as for the questions which they asked; their real originality lay not in their thought, but in their spirit. They were the first great popularizers. Other men before them had thought more accurately and more deeply; they were the first to fling the light of thought wide through the world, to appeal, not to the scholar and the specialist, but to the ordinary man and woman, and to proclaim the glories of civilization as the heritage of all humanity. Above all, they instilled a new spirit into the speculations of men—the spirit of hope. They believed ardently in the fundamental goodness of mankind, and they looked forward into the future with the certain expectation of the ultimate triumph of what was best. Though in some directions their sympathies were limited, their love of humanity was a profound and genuine feeling which moved them to a boundless enthusiasm. Though their faith in creeds was small, their faith in mankind was great. The spirit which filled them was well shown when, during the darkest days of the Terror, the noble Condorcet, in the hiding-place from which he came forth only to die, wrote hishistoricalSketch of the Progress of the Human Mind, with its final chapter foretelling the future triumphs of reason, and asserting the unlimited perfectibility of man.
The energies of thePhilosopheswere given a centre and a rallying-point by the great undertaking of theEncyclopaedia, the publication of which covered a period of thirty years (1751-80). The object of this colossal work, which contained a survey of human activity in all its branches—political, scientific, artistic, philosophical, commercial—was to record in a permanent and concentrated form the advance of civilization. A multitude of writers contributed to it, of varying merit and of various opinions, but all animated by the new belief in reason and humanity. The ponderous volumes are not great literature; their importance lies in the place which they fill in the progress of thought, and in their immense influence in the propagation of the new spirit. In spite of its bulk the book was extremely successful; edition after edition was printed; the desire to know and to think began to permeate through all the grades of society. Nor was it only in France that these effects were visible; the prestige of French literature and French manners carried the teaching of thePhilosophesall over Europe; great princes and ministers—Frederick in Prussia, Catherine in Russia, Pombal in Portugal—eagerly joined the swelling current; enlightenment was abroad in the world.
TheEncyclopaediawould never have come into existence without the genius, the energy, and the enthusiasm of one man—DIDEROT. In him the spirit of the age found its most typical expression. He was indeedthe Philosophe—more completely than all therest universal, brilliant, inquisitive, sceptical, generous, hopeful, and humane. It was he who originated theEncyclopaedia, who, in company with Dalembert, undertook its editorship, and who, eventually alone, accomplished the herculean task of bringing the great production, in spite of obstacle after obstacle—in spite of government prohibitions, lack of funds, desertions, treacheries, and the mischances of thirty years—to a triumphant conclusion. This was the work of his life; and it was work which, by its very nature, could leave—except for that long row of neglected volumes—no lasting memorial. But the superabundant spirit of Diderot was not content with that: in the intervals of this stupendous labour, which would have exhausted to their last fibre the energies of a lesser man, he found time not only to pour out a constant flow of writing in a multitude of miscellaneous forms—in dramas, in art criticism, in philosophical essays, and in a voluminous correspondence—but also to create on the sly as it were, and without a thought of publication, two or three finished masterpieces which can never be forgotten. Of these, the most important isLe Neveu de Rameau, where Diderot's whole soul gushes out in one clear, strong, sparkling jet of incomparable prose. In the sheer enchantment of its vitality this wonderful little book has certainly never been surpassed. It enthrals the reader as completely as the most exciting romance, or the talk of some irresistibly brilliantraconteur. Indeed, the writing, with its ease, its vigour, its colour, and its rapidity, might almost be taken for what, in fact, it purports to be—conversation put into print, were it not for the magical perfection of its form. Never did a style combine more absolutely the movement of life with the serenity of art. Everysentence is exciting, and every sentence is beautiful. The book must have been composed quickly, without effort, almost off-hand; but the mind that composed it was the mind of a master, who, even as he revelled in the joyous manifestation of his genius, preserved, with an instinctive power, the master's control. In truth, beneath the gay galaxies of scintillating thoughts that strew the pages, one can discern the firm, warm, broad substance of Diderot's very self, underlying and supporting all. That is the real subject of a book which seems to have taken all subjects for its province—from the origin of music to the purpose of the universe; and the central figure—the queer, delightful, Bohemian Rameau, evoked for us with such a marvellous distinctness—is in fact no more than the reed with many stops through which Diderot is blowing. Of all his countrymen, he comes nearest, in spirit and in manner, to the great Curé of Meudon. The rich, exuberant, intoxicating tones of Rabelais vibrate in his voice. He has—not all, for no son of man will ever again have that; but he hassomeof Rabelais' stupendous breadth, and he has yet more of Rabelais' enormous optimism. His complete materialism—his disbelief in any Providence or any immortality—instead of depressing him, seems rather to have given fresh buoyancy to his spirit; if this life on earth were all, that only served, in his eyes, to redouble the intensity of its value. And his enthusiasm inspired him with a philanthropy unknown to Rabelais—an active benevolence that never tired. For indeed he was, above all else, a man of his own age: a man who could think subtly and work nobly as well as write splendidly; who could weep as well as laugh. He is, perhaps, a smaller figure than Rabelais; but he is much nearer to ourselves. And, when wehave come to the end of his generous pages, the final impression that is left with us is of a man whom we cannot choose but love.
Besides Diderot, the band of thePhilosophesincluded many famous names. There was the brilliant and witty mathematician, Dalembert; there was the grave and noble statesman, Turgot; there was the psychologist, Condillac; there was the light, good-humoured Marmontel; there was the penetrating and ill-fated Condorcet. Helvétius and D'Holbach plunged boldly into ethics and metaphysics; while, a little apart, in learned repose, Buffon advanced the purest interests of science by his researches in Natural History. As every year passed there were new accessions to this great array of writers, who waged their war against ignorance and prejudice with an ever-increasing fury. A war indeed it was. On one side were all the forces of intellect; on the other was all the mass of entrenched and powerful dullness. In reply to the brisk fire of thePhilosophes—argument, derision, learning, wit—the authorities in State and Church opposed the more serious artillery of censorships, suppressions, imprisonments, and exiles. There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille. It was only natural, therefore, that the struggle should have become a highly embittered one, and that at times, in the heat of it, the party whose watchword was a hatred of fanaticism should have grown itself fanatical. But it was clear that the powers of reaction were steadily losing ground; they could only assert themselves spasmodically; their hold upon public opinion was slipping away. Thus the efforts of the band ofwriters in Paris seemed about to be crowned with success. But this result had not been achieved by their efforts alone. In the midst of the conflict they had received the aid of a powerful auxiliary, who had thrown himself with the utmost vigour into the struggle, and, far as he was from the centre of operations, had assumed supreme command.
It was Voltaire. This great man had now entered upon the final, and by far the most important, period of his astonishing career. It is a curious fact that if Voltaire had died at the age of sixty he would now only be remembered as a writer of talent and versatility, who had given conspicuous evidence, in one or two works, of a liberal and brilliant intelligence, but who had enjoyed a reputation in his own age, as a poet and dramatist, infinitely beyond his deserts. He entered upon the really significant period of his activity at an age when most men have already sought repose. Nor was this all; for, by a singular stroke of fortune, his existence was prolonged far beyond the common span; so that, in spite of the late hour of its beginning, the most fruitful and important epoch of his life extended over a quarter of a century (1754-78). That he ever entered upon this last period of his career seems in itself to have depended as much on accident as his fateful residence in England. After the publication of theLettres Philosophiques, he had done very little to fulfil the promise of that work. He had retired to the country house of Madame du Châtelet, where he had devoted himself to science, play-writing, and the preparation of a universal history. His reputation had increased; for it was in these years that he produced his most popular tragedies—Zaïre, Mérope, Alzire, andMahomet—while a correspondence carriedon in the most affectionate terms with Frederick the Great yet further added to his prestige; but his essential genius still remained quiescent. Then at last Madame du Châtelet died and Voltaire took the great step of his life. At the invitation of Frederick he left France, and went to live as a pensioner of the Prussian king in the palace at Potsdam. But his stay there did not last long. It seemed as if the two most remarkable men in Europe liked each other so well that they could not remain apart—and so ill that they could not remain together. After a year or two, there was the inevitable explosion. Voltaire fled from Prussia, giving to the world before he did so one of the most amusingjeux d'espritever written—the celebratedDiatribe du Docteur Akakia—and, after some hesitation, settled down near the Lake of Geneva. A few years later he moved into thechâteauof Ferney, which became henceforward his permanent abode.
Voltaire was now sixty years of age. His position was an enviable one. His reputation was very great, and he had amassed a considerable fortune, which not only assured him complete independence, but enabled him to live in his domains on the large and lavish scale of a country magnate. His residence at Ferney, just on the border of French territory, put him beyond the reach of government interference, while he was yet not too far distant to be out of touch with the capital. Thus the opportunity had at last come for the full display of his powers. And those powers were indeed extraordinary. His character was composed of a strange amalgam of all the most contradictory elements in human nature, and it would be difficult to name a single virtue or a single vice which he did not possess. He was the most egotistical of mortals,and the most disinterested; he was graspingly avaricious, and profusely generous; he was treacherous, mischievous, frivolous, and mean, yet he was a firm friend and a true benefactor, yet he was profoundly serious and inspired by the noblest enthusiasms. Nature had carried these contradictions even into his physical constitution. His health was so bad that he seemed to pass his whole life on the brink of the grave; nevertheless his vitality has probably never been surpassed in the history of the world. Here, indeed, was the one characteristic which never deserted him: he was always active with an insatiable activity; it was always safe to say of him that, whatever else he was, he was not at rest. His long, gaunt body, frantically gesticulating, his skull-like face, with its mobile features twisted into an eternal grin, its piercing eyes sparkling and darting—all this suggested the appearance of a corpse galvanized into an incredible animation. But in truth it was no dead ghost that inhabited this strange tenement, but the fierce and powerful spirit of an intensely living man.
Some signs had already appeared of the form which his activity was now about to take. During his residence in Prussia he had completed his historicalEssai sur les Moeurs, which passed over in rapid review the whole development of humanity, and closed with a brilliant sketch of the age of Louis XIV. This work was highly original in many ways. It was the first history which attempted to describe the march of civilization in its broadest aspects, which included a consideration of the great Eastern peoples, which dealt rather with the progress of the arts and the sciences than with the details of politics and wars. But its chief importance lay in the fact that it wasin reality, under its historical trappings, a work of propaganda. It was a counterblast to Bossuet'sHistoire Universelle. That book had shown the world's history as a part of the providential order—a grand unfolding of design. Voltaire's view was very different. To him, as to Montesquieu, natural causes alone were operative in history; but this was not all; in his eyes there was one influence which, from the earliest ages, had continually retarded the progress of humanity, and that influence was religious belief. Thus his book, though far more brilliant and far more modern than that of Bossuet, was nevertheless almost equally biased. It was history with a thesis, and the gibe of Montesquieu was justifiable. 'Voltaire,' he said, 'writes history to glorify his own convent, like any Benedictine monk.' Voltaire's 'convent' was the philosophical school in Paris; and his desire to glorify it was soon to appear in other directions.
TheEssai sur les Moeursis an exceedingly amusing narrative, but it is a long and learned work filling several volumes, and the fruit of many years of research. Voltaire was determined henceforward to distil its spirit into more compendious and popular forms. He had no more time for elaborate dissertations; he must reach the public by quicker and surer ways. Accordingly there now began to pour into Paris a flood of short light booklets—essays, plays, poems, romances, letters, tracts—a multitude of writings infinitely varied in form and scope, but all equally irresistible and all equally bearing the unmistakable signs of their origin at Ferney. Voltaire's inimitable style had at last found a medium in which it could display itself in all its charm and all its brilliance. The pointed, cutting, mocking sentences laugh and dance through his pageslike light-toed, prick-eared elves. Once seen, and there is no help for it—one must follow, into whatever dangerous and unknown regions those magic imps may lead. The pamphlets were of course forbidden, but without effect; they were sold in thousands, and new cargoes, somehow or other, were always slipping across the frontier from Holland or Geneva. Whenever a particularly outrageous one appeared, Voltaire wrote off to all his friends to assure them that he knew nothing whatever of the production, that it was probably a translation from the work of an English clergyman, and that, in short, everyone would immediately see from the style alone that it was—nothis. An endless series of absurd pseudonyms intensified the farce. Oh no! Voltaire was certainly not the author of this scandalous book. How could he be? Did not the title-page plainly show that it was the work of Frère Cucufin, or the uncle of Abbé Bazin, or the Comte de Boulainvilliers, or the Emperor of China? And so the game proceeded; and so all France laughed; and so all France read.
Two forms of this light literature Voltaire made especially his own. He brought the Dialogue to perfection; for the form suited him exactly, with its opportunities for the rapid exposition of contrary doctrines, for the humorous stultification of opponents, and for witty repartee. Into this mould he has poured some of his finest materials; and in such pieces asLe Dîner du Comte de BoulainvilliersandFrère Rigolet et l'Empereur de la Chineone finds the concentrated essence of his whole work. Equally effective and equally characteristic is theDictionnaire Philosophique, which contains a great number of very short miscellaneous articles arranged in alphabetical order.This plan gave Voltaire complete freedom both in the choice of subjects and in their manipulation; as the spirit seized him he could fly out into a page of sarcasm or speculation or criticism or buffoonery, and such liberty was precisely to his taste; so that the book which had first appeared as a pocket dictionary—'ce diable de portatif', he calls it in a letter proving quite conclusively thathe, at any rate, was not responsible for the wretched thing—were there not Hebrew quotations in it? and who could accuse him of knowing Hebrew?—had swollen to six volumes before he died.
The subjects of these writings were very various. Ostensibly, at least, they were by no means limited to matters of controversy. Some were successful tragedies, others were pieces of criticism, others were historical essays, others were frivolous short stories, orvers de société. But, in all of them, somewhere or other, the cloven hoof was bound to show itself at last. Whatever disguises he might assume, Voltaire in reality was always writing for his 'convent'; he was pressing forward, at every possible opportunity, the great movement against the old régime. His attack covers a wide ground. The abuses of the financial system, the defects in the administration of justice, the futility of the restraints upon trade—upon these and a hundred similar subjects he poured out an incessant torrent of gay, penetrating, frivolous and remorseless words. But there was one theme to which he was perpetually recurring, which forms the subject for his bitterest jests, and which, in fact, dominates the whole of his work, 'Écrasez l'infame!' was his constant exclamation; and the 'infamous thing' which he wished to see stamped underfoot was nothing less thanreligion. The extraordinary fury of his attack on religion has, in the eyes of many, imprinted an indelible stigma upon his name; but the true nature of his position in this matter has often been misunderstood, and deserves some examination.
Voltaire was a profoundly irreligious man. In this he resembled the majority of his contemporaries; but he carried the quality perhaps to a further pitch than any man of his age. For, with him, it was not merely the purely religious and mystical feelings that were absent; he lacked all sympathy with those vague, brooding, emotional states of mind which go to create the highest forms of poetry, music, and art, and which are called forth into such a moving intensity by the beauties of Nature. These things Voltaire did not understand; he did not even perceive them; for him, in fact, they did not exist; and the notion that men could be influenced by them, genuinely and deeply, he considered to be so absurd as hardly to need discussion. This was certainly a great weakness in him—a great limitation of spirit. It has vitiated a large part of his writings; and it has done more than that—it has obscured, to many of his readers, the real nature and the real value of his work. For, combined with this inability to comprehend some of the noblest parts of man's nature, Voltaire possessed other qualities of high importance which went far to compensate for his defects. If he was blind to some truths, he perceived others with wonderful clearness; if his sympathies in some directions were atrophied, in others they were sensitive to an extraordinary degree. In the light of these considerations his attitude towards religion becomes easier to understand. All the highest elements of religion—the ardent devotion, the individualecstasy, the sense of communion with the divine—these things he simply ignored. But, unfortunately, in his day there was a side of religion which, with his piercing clear-sightedness, he could not ignore. The spirit of fanaticism was still lingering in France; it was the spirit which had burst out on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, and had dictated the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In every branch of life its influence was active, infusing prejudice, bitterness, and strife; but its effects were especially terrible in the administration of justice. It so happened that while Voltaire was at Ferney some glaring instances of this dreadful fact came to light. A young Protestant named Calas committed suicide in Toulouse, and, owing to the blind zealotry of the magistrates of the town, his father, completely innocent, was found guilty of his murder and broken on the wheel. Shortly afterwards, another Protestant, Sirven, was condemned in similar circumstances, but escaped to Ferney. A few years later, two youths of seventeen were convicted at Abbeville for making some profane jokes. Both were condemned to have their tongues torn out and to be decapitated; one managed to escape, the other was executed. That such things could happen in eighteenth-century France seems incredible; but happen they did, and who knows how many more of a like atrocity? The fact that these three came to light at all was owing to Voltaire himself. But for his penetration, his courage, and his skill, the terrible murder of Calas would to this day have remained unknown, and the dreadful affair of Abbeville would have been forgotten in a month. Different men respond most readily to different stimuli: the spectacle of cruelty and injustice bit like a lash intothe nerves of Voltaire, and plunged him into an agony of horror. He resolved never to rest until he had not only obtained reparation for these particular acts of injustice, but had rooted out for ever from men's minds the superstitious bigotry which made them possible. It was to attain this end that he attacked with such persistence and such violence all religion and all priestcraft in general, and, in particular, the orthodox dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. It became the great object of his life to convince public opinion that those dogmas were both ridiculous and contemptible in themselves, and abominable in their results. In this we may think him right or we may think him wrong; our judgement will depend upon the nature of our own opinions. But, whatever our opinions, we cannot think him wicked; for we cannot doubt that the one dominating motive in all that he wrote upon the subject of religion was a passionate desire for the welfare of mankind.
Voltaire's philosophical views were curious. While he entirely discarded the miraculous from his system, he nevertheless believed in a Deity—a supreme First Cause of all the phenomena of the universe. Yet, when he looked round upon the world as it was, the evil and the misery in it were what seized his attention and appalled his mind. The optimism of so many of his contemporaries appeared to him a shallow crude doctrine unrelated to the facts of existence, and it was to give expression to this view that he composed the most famous of all his works—Candide. This book, outwardly a romance of the most flippant kind, contains in reality the essence of Voltaire's maturest reflections upon human life. It is a singular fact that a book which must often have been read simply forthe sake of its wit and its impropriety should nevertheless be one of the bitterest and most melancholy that was ever written. But it is a safe rule to make, that Voltaire's meaning is deep in proportion to the lightness of his writing—that it is when he is most in earnest that he grins most. And, inCandide, the brilliance and the seriousness alike reach their climax. The book is a catalogue of all the woes, all the misfortunes, all the degradations, and all the horrors that can afflict humanity; and throughout it Voltaire's grin is never for a moment relaxed. As catastrophe follows catastrophe, and disaster succeeds disaster, not only does he laugh himself consumedly, but he makes his reader laugh no less; and it is only when the book is finished that the true meaning of it is borne in upon the mind. Then it is that the scintillating pages begin to exercise their grim unforgettable effect; and the pettiness and misery of man seem to borrow a new intensity from the relentless laughter of Voltaire.
But perhaps the most wonderful thing aboutCandideis that it contains, after all, something more than mere pessimism—it contains a positive doctrine as well. Voltaire's common sense withers the Ideal; but it remains common sense. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is his final word—one of the very few pieces of practical wisdom ever uttered by a philosopher.
Voltaire's style reaches the summit of its perfection inCandide; but it is perfect in all that he wrote. His prose is the final embodiment of the most characteristic qualities of the French genius. If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement would have survived.His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in hisLettres Provinciales: clarity, simplicity and wit—these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree. But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also their disadvantages. Voltaire's style is narrow; it is like a rapier—all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping blade of Pascal has become an impossibility. Compared to the measured march of Bossuet's sentences, Voltaire's sprightly periods remind one almost of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire's—executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction was bound to follow—and a salutary reaction. Signs of it were already visible in the colour and passion of Diderot's writing; but it was not until the nineteenth century that the great change came.
Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire's style more conspicuous than in his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his work. A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never lived. The number of his published letters exceeds ten thousand; how many more he may actually have written one hardly ventures to imagine, for the great majority of those that have survived date only from the last thirty years of his long life. The collection is invaluable alike for the light which it throws upon Voltaire's career and character, and for the extent to which it reflects the manners, sentiments, and thought of the age. For Voltaire corresponded with all Europe. His reputation, already vast before he settled at Ferney, rose after that date to a well-nigh incredible height. No man had wielded such an influence sincethe days when Bernard of Clairvaux dictated the conduct of popes and princes from his monastic cell. But, since then, the wheel had indeed come full circle! The very antithesis of the Middle Ages was personified in the strange old creature who in his lordly retreat by the Lake of Geneva alternately coquetted with empresses, received the homage of statesmen and philosophers, domineered over literature in all its branches, and laughed Mother Church to scorn. As the years advanced, Voltaire's industry, which had always been astonishing, continually increased. As if his intellectual interests were not enough to occupy him, he took to commercial enterprise, developed the resources of his estates, and started a successful colony of watchmakers at Ferney. Every day he worked for long hours at his desk, spinning his ceaseless web of tracts, letters, tragedies, and farces. In the evening he would discharge the functions of a munificent host, entertain the whole neighbourhood with balls and suppers, and take part in one of his own tragedies on the stage of his private theatre. Then a veritable frenzy would seize upon him; shutting himself up in his room for days together, he would devote every particle of his terrific energies to the concoction of some devastating dialogue, or some insidious piece of profanation for hisDictionnaire Philosophique. At length his fragile form would sink exhausted—he would be dying—he would be dead; and next morning he would be up again as brisk as ever, directing the cutting of the crops.
One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years. His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that the world has everseen. For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe. The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Théâtre Français, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him. His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race. But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year. An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.
French literature during the latter half of the eighteenth century was rich in striking personalities. It might have been expected that an age which had produced both Diderot and Voltaire would hardly be able to boast of yet another star of equal magnitude. But, in JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, there appeared a man in some ways even more remarkable than either of his great contemporaries. The peculiar distinction of Rousseau was his originality. Neither Voltaire nor Diderot possessed this quality in a supreme degree. Voltaire, indeed, can only claim to be original by virtue of his overwhelming common sense, which enabled him to see clearly what others could only see confusedly, to strike without fear where others were only willing to wound; but the whole bulk of his thought really rested on the same foundation as that which supported the ordinary conceptions of the average man of the day. Diderot was a far bolder, a far more speculative thinker; but yet, though he ledthe very van of the age, he was always in it; his originality was never more than a development—though it was often an extreme development—of the ideas that lay around him. Rousseau's originality went infinitely further than this. He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it. His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary. In his eyes, the reforms which his contemporaries were so busy introducing into society were worse than useless—the mere patching of an edifice which would never be fit to live in. He believed that it was necessary to start altogether afresh. And what makes him so singularly interesting a figure is that, in more than one sense, he was right. Itwasnecessary to start afresh; and the new world which was to spring from the old one was to embody, in a multitude of ways, the visions of Rousseau. He was a prophet, with the strange inspiration of a prophet—and the dishonour in his own country.
But inspiration and dishonour are not the only characteristics of prophets: as a rule, they are also highly confused in the delivery of their prophecies; and Rousseau was no exception. In his writings, the true gist of his meaning seems to be only partially revealed; and it is clear that he himself was never really aware of the fundamental notions that lay at the back of his thought. Hence nothing can be easier than to pull his work to pieces, and to demonstrate beyond a doubt that it is full of fallacies, inconsistencies, and absurdities. It is very easy to point out that theControl Socialis a miserable piece of logic-chopping, to pour scorn on the stilted sentiment and distorted morality ofLa Nouvelle Héloïse, and finally to draw a cutting comparison between Rousseau's preachingand his practice, as it stands revealed in theConfessions—the lover of independence who never earned his own living, the apostle of equality who was a snob, and the educationist who left his children in the Foundling Hospital. All this has often been done, and no doubt will often be done again; but it is futile. Rousseau lives, and will live, a vast and penetrating influence, in spite of all his critics. There is something in him that eludes their foot-rules. It is so difficult to take the measure of a soul!
Difficult, indeed; for, if we examine the doctrine that seems to be Rousseau's fundamental one—that, at least, on which he himself lays most stress—here, too, we shall find a mass of error. Rousseau was perpetually advocating the return to Nature. All the great evils from which humanity suffers are, he declared, the outcome of civilization; the ideal man is the primitive man—the untutored Indian, innocent, chaste, brave, who adores the Creator of the universe in simplicity, and passes his life in virtuous harmony with the purposes of Nature. If we cannot hope to reach quite that height of excellence, let us at least try to get as near it as we can. So far from pressing on the work of civilization, with thePhilosophes, let us try to forget that we are civilized and be natural instead. This was the burden of Rousseau's teaching, and it was founded on a complete misconception of the facts. The noble Indian was a myth. The more we find out about primitive man, the more certain it becomes that, so far from being the ideal creature of Rousseau's imagination, he was in reality a savage whose whole life was dominated, on the one hand by the mere brute necessities of existence, and on the other by a complicated and revolting system of superstitions. Nature is neither simple nor good; and all history shows that the necessary condition for the production of any of the really valuable things of life is the control of Nature by man—in fact, civilization. So far, therefore, thePhilosopheswere right; if the Golden Age was to have any place at all in the story of humanity, it must be, not at the beginning, but the end.
But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, their intellect and their culture, arose from a profounder cause than a false historical theory, or a defective logical system, or a mean personal jealousy and morbid pride. All these elements, no doubt, entered into his feeling—for Rousseau was a very far from perfect human being; but the ultimate source was beyond and below them—in his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul. It was in this perception that Rousseau's great originality lay. His revolt was a spiritual revolt. In the Middle Ages the immense significance of the human spirit had been realized, but it had been inextricably involved in a mass of theological superstition. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, had achievedthe great conception of a secular system of society; but, in doing so, it had left out of account the spiritual nature of man, who was regarded simply as a rational animal in an organized social group. Rousseau was the first to unite the two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe—half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction—that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.
This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a deep effect upon the development of the Revolution. But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be most clearly seen.
It is often lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an unemotional age. What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry of Pope? Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire? But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they are so ready to condemn. It is certainly true that at first sight Pope's couplets appear to be cold and mechanical; but if we look moreclosely we shall soon find that these apparently monotonous verses have been made the vehicle for some of the most passionate feelings of disgust and animosity that ever agitated a human breast. As for Voltaire, we have already seen that to infer lack of feeling from his epigrams and laughter would be as foolish as to infer that a white-hot bar of molten steel lacked heat because it was not red. The accusation is untenable; the age that produced—to consider French literature alone—a Voltaire, a Diderot, and a Saint-Simon cannot be called an age without emotion. Yet it is clear that, in the matter of emotion, a distinction of some sort does exist between that age and this. The distinction lies not so much in the emotion itself as in theattitude towardsemotion, adopted by the men of those days and by ourselves. In the eighteenth century men were passionate—intensely passionate; but they were passionate almost unconsciously, in a direct unreflective way. If anyone had asked Voltaire to analyse his feelings accurately, he would have replied that he had other things to think about; the notion of paying careful attention to mere feelings would have seemed to him ridiculous. And, when Saint-Simon sat down to write his Memoirs, it never occurred to him for a moment to give any real account of what, in all the highly personal transactions that he describes, he intimately felt. He tells us nothing of his private life; he mentions his wife once, and almost apologizes for doing so; really, could a gentleman—a duke—dwell upon such matters, and preserve his self-respect? But, to us, it is precisely such matters that form the pivot of a personality—the index of a soul. A man's feelings are his very self, and it is around them that all that is noblest and profoundest in our literature seemsnaturally to centre. A great novelist is one who can penetrate and describe the feelings of others; a great poet is one who can invest his own with beauty and proclaim them to the world. We have come to set a value upon introspection which was quite unknown in the eighteenth century—unknown, that is, until Rousseau, in the most valuable and characteristic of his works—hisConfessions—started the vast current in literature and in sentiment which is still flowing to-day. TheConfessionsis the detailed, intimate, complete history of a soul. It describes Rousseau's life, from its beginning until its maturity, from the most personal point of view, with no disguises or reticences of any kind. It is written with great art. Rousseau's style, like his matter, foreshadows the future; his periods are cast in a looser, larger, more oratorical mould than those of his contemporaries; his sentences are less fiery and excitable; though he can be witty when he wishes, he is never frivolous; and a tone of earnest intimate passion lingers in his faultless rhythms. With his great powers of expression he combined a wonderful aptitude for the perception of the subtlest shades of feeling and of mood. He was sensitive to an extraordinary degree—with the sensitiveness of a proud, shy nature, unhardened by the commerce of the world. There is, indeed, an unpleasant side to hisConfessions. Rousseau, like most explorers, became obsessed by his own discoveries; he pushed the introspective method to its farthest limits; the sanctity of the individual seemed to him not only to dignify the slightest idiosyncrasies of temperament and character, but also, in some sort of way, to justify what was positively bad. Thus his book contains the germs of that Byronic egotism which later became the fashion all over Europe.It is also, in parts, a morbid book. Rousseau was not content to extenuate nothing; his failings got upon his nerves; and, while he was ready to dilate upon them himself with an infinite wealth of detail, the slightest hint of a reflection on his conduct from any other person filled him with an agony and a rage which, at the end of his life, developed into madness. To strict moralists, therefore, and to purists in good taste, theConfessionswill always be unpalatable. More indulgent readers will find in those pages the traces of a spirit which, with all its faults, its errors, its diseases, deserves something more than pity—deserves almost love. At any rate, it is a spirit singularly akin to our own. Out of the far-off, sharp, eager, unpoetical, unpsychological eighteenth century, it speaks to us in the familiar accents of inward contemplation, of brooding reminiscence, of subtly-shifting temperament, of quiet melancholy, of visionary joy. Rousseau, one feels, was the only man of his age who ever wanted to be alone. He understood that luxury: understood the fascination of silence, and the loveliness of dreams. He understood, too, the exquisite suggestions of Nature, and he never wrote more beautifully than when he was describing the gentle process of her influences on the solitary human soul. He understood simplicity: the charm of little happinesses, the sweetness of ordinary affections, the beauty of a country face. The paradox is strange; how was it that it should have been left to the morbid, tortured, half-crazy egoist of theConfessionsto lead the way to such spiritual delicacies, such innocent delights?