Since we have spoken somewhat extensively of painting, would it not be unjust to pass in silence over engraving, its daughter, or its sister? Certainly it is not an art of ordinary importance; we have excelled in it; we have above all carried it to its perfection in portraits. Let us be equitable to ourselves. What school—and we are not unmindful of those of Marc' Antonio, Albert Durer, and Rembrandt—can present such a succession of artists of this kind? Thomas de Leu and Léonard Gautier makein some sort the passage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Then come a crowd of men of the most diverse talents,—Mellan, Michel Lasne, Morin, Daret, Huret, Masson, Nanteuil, Drevet, Van Schupen, the Poillys, the Edelincks, and the Audrans. Gérard Edelinck and Nanteuil alone have a popular renown, and they merit it by the delicacy, splendor, and charm of their graver. But the connoisseurs of elevated taste find at least their rivals in engravers now less admired, because they do not flatter the eye so much, but have, perhaps, more truth and vigor. It must also be said, that the portraits of these two masters have not the historic importance of those of their predecessors. TheCondéof Nanteuil is justly admired; but if we wish to know the great Condé, the conqueror of Rocroy and Lens, we must not demand him from Nanteuil, but from Huret, Michel Lasne, and Daret,[160]who designed and engraved him in all his force and heroic beauty. Edelinck and Nanteuil himself scarcely knew and retraced the seventeenth century, except at the approach of its decline.[161]Morin and Mellan were able to see it, and transmit it in its glorious youth. Morin is the Champagne of engraving: he does not engrave, he paints. It is he who represents and transmits to posterity the illustrious men of the first half of the great century—Henry IV., Louis XIII., the de Thous, Bérulle, Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, Marillac, Bentivoglio, Richelieu, Mazarin,still young, and Retz, when he was only a coadjutor.[162]Mellan had the same advantage. He is the first in date of all the engravers of the seventeenth century, and perhaps is also the most expressive. With a single line, it seems that from his hands only shades can spring; he does not strike at first sight; but the more we regard him, the more he seizes, penetrates, and touches, like Lesueur.[163]
Christianity, that is to say, the reign of the spirit, is favorable to painting, is particularly expressive. Sculpture seems to be a pagan art; for, if it must also contain moral expression, it is always under the imperative condition of beauty of form. This is the reason why sculpture is as it were natural to antiquity, and appeared there with an incomparable splendor, before which painting somewhat paled,[164]whilst among the moderns it has been eclipsed by painting, and has remained very inferior to it, by reason of the extreme difficulty of bringing stone and marble to express Christian sentiment, without which, material beauty suffers; so that our sculpture is too insignificant to be beautiful, too mannered to be expressive. Since antiquity, there have scarcely been two schools of sculpture:[165]—one at Florence, before Michael Angelo, and especially with Michael Angelo; the otherin France, at theRenaissance, with Jean Cousin, Goujon, Germain Pilon. We may say that these three artists have, as it were, shared among themselves grandeur and grace: to the first belong nobility and force, with profound knowledge;[166]to the other two, an elegance full of charm. Sculpture changes its character in the seventeenth century as well as every thing else: it no longer has the same attraction, but it finds moral and religious inspiration, which the skilful masters of theRenaissancetoo much lacked. Jean Cousin excepted, is there one of them that is superior to Jacques Sarazin? That great artist, now almost forgotten, is at once a disciple of the French school and the Italian school, and to the qualities that he borrows from his predecessors, he adds a moral expression, touching and elevated, which he owes to the spirit of the new school. He is, in sculpture, the worthy contemporary of Lesueur and Poussin, of Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal. He belongs entirely to the reign of Louis XIII., Richelieu, and Mazarin; he did not even see that of Louis XIV.[167]Called into France by Richelieu, who had also called there Poussin and Champagne, Jacques Sarazin in a few years produced a multitude of works of rare elegance and great character. What has become of them? The eighteenth century passed over them without regarding them. The barbarians that destroyed or scattered them, were arrested before the paintings of Lesueur and Poussin, protected by a remnant of admiration: while breaking the master-pieces of the French chisel, they had no suspicion of the sacrilege they were committing against art as well as their country. I was at least able to see, some years ago, at the Museum of French Monuments, collected by the piety of a friend of the arts, beautiful parts of a superb mausoleum erected to the memory of Henri de Bourbon, second of the name, Prince of Condé, father of the great Condé, the worthy support, the skilful fellow-laborer of Richelieu and Mazarin. This monument was supported by four figures of natural grandeur,—Faith, Prudence, Justice, Charity. There were four bas-reliefs in bronze, representing theTriumphs of Renown, Time, Death, andEternity. In theTriumph of Death, the artist had represented a certain number of illustrious moderns, among whom he had placed himself by the side of Michael Angelo.[168]We can still contemplate in the court of the Louvre, in the pavilion of the Horloge, those caryatides of Sarazin at once so majestic and so graceful, which are detached with admirable relief and lightness. Have Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon done any thing more elegant and lifelike? Those females breathe, and are about to move. Take the pains to go a short distance[169]to visit the humble chapel that now occupies the place of that magnificent church of the Carmelites, once filled with the paintings of Champagne, Stella, Lahire, and Lebrun; where the voice of Bossuet was heard, where Mlle. de Lavallière and Mme. de Longueville were so often seen prostrated, their long hair shorn, and their faces bathed in tears. Among the relics that are preserved of the past splendor of the holy monastery, consider the noble statue of the kneeling Cardinal de Bérulle. On those meditative and penetrating features, in those eyes raised to heaven, breathes the soul of that great servant of God, who died at the altar like a warrior on the field of honor. He prays God for his dearCarmelites. That head is perfectly natural, as Champagne might have painted it, and has a severe grace that reminds one of Lesueur and Poussin.[170]
Below Sarazin, the Anguiers are still artists that Italy would admire, and to whom there is wanting, since the great century, nothing but judges worthy of them. These two brothers covered Paris and France with the most precious monuments. Look at the tomb of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, by François Anguier: the face of the great historian is reflective and melancholy, like that of a man weary of the spectacle of human things; and nothing is more amiable than the statues of his two wives, Marie Barbançon de Cany, and Gasparde de la Châtre.[171]The mausoleum of Henri de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse in 1632, which is still seen at Moulins, in the church of the ancient convent of the daughters of Sainte-Marie, is an important work of the same artist, in which force is manifest, with a little heaviness.[172]To Michel Anguier are attributed the statues of the duke and duchess of Tresmes, and that of their illustrious son, Potier, Marquis of Gêvres.[173]Behold in him the intrepid companion of Condé,arrested in his course at thirty-two years of age before Thionville, after the battle of Rocroy, already lieutenant-general, and when Condé was demanding for him the bâton of a marshal of France, deposited on his tomb; behold him young, beautiful, brave, like his comrades cut down also in the flower of life, Laval, Châtillon, La Moussaye. One of the best works of Michel Anguier is the monument of Henri de Chabot, that other companion, that faithful friend of Condé, who by the splendor of his valor, especially by the graces of his person, knew how to gain the heart, the fortune, and the name of the beautiful Marguerite, the daughter of the great Duke of Rohan. The new duke died, still young, in 1655, at thirty-nine years of age. He is represented lying down, the head inclined and supported by an angel; another angel is at his feet. The whole is striking, and the details are exquisite. The face of Chabot has every beauty, as if to answer to its reputation, but the beauty is that of one dying. The body has already the languor of death,longuescit moriens, with I know not what antique grace. This morsel, if the drawing were more severe, would rival theDying Gladiator, of which it reminds one, which it perhaps even imitates.[174]
In truth, I wonder that men now dare speak so lightly of Puget and Girardon. To Puget qualities of the first order cannot be refused. He has the fire, the enthusiasm, the fecundity of genius. The caryatides of the Hôtel de Ville of Toulon, which have been brought to the Museum of Paris, attest a powerful chisel. TheMilonreminds one of the manner of Michael Angelo; it is a little overstrained, but it cannot be denied that the effect is striking.Do you want a talent more natural, and still having force and elevation? Take the trouble to search in the Tuileries, in the gardens of Versailles, in several churches of Paris, for the scattered works of Girardon, here for the mausoleum of the Gondis,[175]there for that of the Castellans,[176]that of Louvois,[177]etc.; especially go to see in the church of the Sorbonne the mausoleum of Richelieu. The formidable minister is there represented in his last moments, sustained by religion and wept by his country. The whole person is of a perfect nobility, and the figure has the fineness, the severity, the superior distinction given to it by the pencil of Champagne, and the gravers of Morin, Michel Lasne, and Mellan.
Finally, I do not regard as a vulgar sculptor Coysevox, who, under the influence of Lebrun, unfortunately begins the theatrical style, who still has the facility, movement, and elegance of Lebrun himself. He reared worthy monuments to Mazarin, Colbert, and Lebrun,[178]and thus to speak, sowed busts of the illustrious men of his time. For, remark it well, artists then took scarcely any arbitrary and fanciful subjects. They worked upon contemporaneous subjects, which, while giving them proper liberty, inspired and guided them, and communicated a public interest to their works. The French sculpture of the seventeenth century, like that of antiquity, is profoundly natural. The churches and the monasteries were filled with the statues of those who loved them during life, and wished to rest in them after death. Each church of Paris was a popular museum. The sumptuous residences of the aristocracy—for at that period, there was one in France, likethat of England at the present time—possessed their secular tombs, statues, busts, and portraits of eminent men whose glory belonged to the country as well as their own family. On its side, the state did not encourage the arts in detail, and, thus to speak, in a small way; it gave them a powerful impulse by demanding of them important works, by confiding to them vast enterprises. All great things were thus mingled together, reciprocally inspired and sustained each other.
One man alone in Europe has left a name in the beautiful art that surrounds a chateau or a palace with graceful gardens or magnificent parks,—that man is a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, is Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre may be reproached with a regularity that is perhaps excessive, and a little mannerism in details; but he has two qualities that compensate for many defects, grandeur and sentiment. He who designed the park of Versailles, who to the proper arrangement of parterres, to the movement of fountains, to the harmonious sound of waterfalls, to the mysterious shades of groves, has known how to add the magic of infinite perspective by means of that spacious walk where the view is extended over an immense sheet of water to be lost in the limitless distances,—he is a landscape-painter worthy of having a place by the side of Poussin and Lorrain.
We had in the middle age our Gothic architecture, like all the nations of northern Europe. In the sixteenth century what architects were Pierre Lescot, Jean Bullant, and Philibert Delorme! What charming palaces, what graceful edifices, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville of Paris, Chambord, and Ecouen! The seventeenth century also had its original architecture, different from that of the middle age and that of theRenaissance, simple, austere, noble, like the poetry of Corneille and the prose of Descartes. Study without scholastic prejudice the Luxembourg of de Brosses,[179]theportal of Saint-Gervais, and the great hall of the Palais de Justice, by the same architect; the Palais Cardinal and the Sorbonne of Lemercier;[180]the cupola of Val-de-Grâce by Lemuet;[181]the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis by François Blondel; Versailles, and especially the Invalides, of Mansart.[182]Consider with attention the last edifice, let it make its impression on your mind and soul, and you will easily succeed in recognizing in it a particular beauty. It is not a Gothic monument, neither is it an almost Pagan monument of the sixteenth century,—it is modern, and also Christian; it is vast with measure, elegant with gravity. Contemplate at sunset that cupola reflecting the last rays of day, elevating itself gently towards the heavens in a slight and graceful curve; cross that imposing esplanade, enter that court admirably lighted in spite of its covered galleries, bow beneath the dome of that church where Vauban and Turenne sleep,—you will not be able to guard yourself from an emotion at once religious and military; you will say to yourself that this is indeed the asylum of warriors who have reached the evening of life and are prepared for eternity!
Since then, what has French architecture become? Once having left tradition and national character, it wanders from imitation to imitation, and without comprehending the genius of antiquity, it unskilfully reproduces its forms. This bastard architecture, at once heavy and mannered, is, little by little, substituted for the beautiful architecture of the preceding century, and everywhereeffaces the vestiges of the French spirit. Do you wish a striking example of it? In Paris, near the Luxembourg, the Condés had theirhôtel,[183]magnificent and severe, with a military aspect, as it was fitting for the dwelling-place of a family of warriors, and within of almost royal splendor. Beneath those lofty ceilings had been some time suspended the Spanish flags taken at Rocroy. In those vast saloons had been assembled theéliteof the grandest society that ever existed. In those beautiful gardens had been seen promenading Corneille and Madame de Sévigné, Molière, Bossuet, Boileau, Racine, in the company of the great Condé. The oratory had been painted by the hand of Lesueur.[184]It had been easy to repair and preserve the noble habitation. At the end of the eighteenth century, a descendant of the Condés sold it to a dismal company to build that palace without character and taste which is called the Palais-Bourbon. Almost at the same epoch there was a movement made to construct a church to the patroness of Paris, to that Geneviève, whose legend is so touching and so popular. Was there ever a better chance for a national and Christian monument? It was possible to return to the Gothic style and even to the Byzantine style. Instead of that there was made for us an immense Roman basilica of the Decline. What a dwelling for the modest and holy virgin, so dear to the fields that bordered upon Lutèce, whose name is still venerated by the poor people who inhabit these quarters! Behold the church which has been placed by the side of that of Saint-Etienne du Mont, as if to make felt all the differences between Christianity and Paganism! For here, in spite of amixture of the most different styles, it is evident that the Pagan style predominates. Christian worship cannot be naturalized in this profane edifice, which has so many times changed its destination. It is in vain to call it anew Saint-Geneviève,—the revolutionary name of Pantheon will stick to it.[185]The eighteenth century treated the Madeleine no better than Saint-Geneviève. In vain the beautiful sinner wished to renounce the joys of the world and attach herself to the poverty of Jesus Christ. She has been brought back to the pomp and luxury that she repudiated; she has been put in a rich palace, all shining with gold, which might very well be a temple of Venus, for certainly it has not the severe grace of the Pantheon, of which it is the most vulgar copy. How far we are from the Invalides, from Val-de-Grâce, and the Sorbonne, so admirably appropriated to their object, wherein appears so well the hand of the century and the country which reared them!
While architecture thus strays, it is natural that painting should seek above every thing color and brilliancy, that sculpture should apply itself to become Pagan again, that poetry itself, receding for two centuries, should abjure the worship of thought for that of fancy, that it should everywhere go borrowing images from Spain, Italy, and Germany, that it should run after subaltern and foreign qualities which it will not attain, and abandon the grand qualities of the French genius.
It will be said that the Christian sentiment which animated Lesueur and the artists of the seventeenth century is wanting to those of ours; it is extinguished, and cannot be rekindled. In the first place, is that very certain? Native faith is dead, but cannot reflective faith take its place? Christianity is exhaustless; it has infinite resources, and admirable flexibility; there are athousand ways of arriving at it and returning to it, because it has itself a thousand phases that answer to the most different dispositions, to all the wants, to all the mobility of the heart. What it loses on one side, it gains on another; and as it has produced our civilization, it is called to follow it in all its vicissitudes. Either every religion will perish in this world, or Christianity will endure, for it is not in the power of thought to conceive a more perfect religion. Artists of the nineteenth century, do not despair of God and yourselves. A superficial philosophy has thrown you far from Christianity considered in a strict sense; another philosophy can bring you near it again by making you see it with another eye. And then, if the religious sentiment is weakened, are there not other sentiments that can make the heart of man beat, and fecundate genius? Plato has said, that beauty is always old and always new. It is superior to all its forms, it belongs to all countries and all times; it belongs to all beliefs, provided these beliefs be serious and profound, and the need be felt of expressing and spreading them. If, then, we have not arrived at the boundary assigned to the grandeur of France, if we are not beginning to descend into the shade of death, if we still truly live, if there remain to us convictions, of whatever kind they may be, thereby even remains to us, or at least may remain to us, what made the glory of our fathers, what they did not carry with them to the tomb, what had already survived all revolutions, Greece, Rome, the Middle Age, what does not belong to any temporary or ephemeral accident, what subsists and is continually found in the focus of consciousness—I mean moral inspiration, immortal as the soul.
Let us terminate here, and sum up this defence of the national art. There are in arts, as well as in letters and philosophy, two contrary schools. One tends to the ideal in all things,—it seeks, it tries to make appear the spirit concealed under the form, at once manifested and veiled by nature; it does not so much wish to please the senses and flatter the imagination as to enlarge the intellect and move the soul. The other, enamored of nature,stops there and devotes itself to imitation,—its principal object is to reproduce reality, movement, life, which are for it the supreme beauty. The France of the seventeenth century, the France of Descartes, Corneille, and Bossuet, highly spiritual in philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, was also highly spiritual in the arts. The artists of that great epoch participate in its general character, and represent it in their way. It is not true that they lacked imagination, more than Pascal and Bossuet lacked it. But inasmuch as they do not suffer imagination to usurp the dominion that does not belong to it, inasmuch as they subject its order, even its impetuosity, to the reign of reason and the inspirations of the heart, it seems that it is not so strong when it is only disciplined and regulated. As we have said, they excel in composition, especially in expression. They always have a thought, and a moral and elevated thought. For this reason they are dear to us, their cause interests us, is in some sort our own cause, and so this homage rendered to their misunderstood glory naturally crowns these lectures devoted to true beauty, that is to say, moral beauty.
May these lectures be able to make it known, and, above all, loved! May they be able also to inspire some one of you with the idea of devoting himself to studies so beautiful, of devoting to them his life, and attaching to them his name! The sweetest recompense of a professor who is not too unworthy of that title, is to see rapidly following in his footsteps young and noble spirits who easily pass him and leave him far behind them.[186]
Extent of the question of the good.—Position of the question according to the psychological method: What is, in regard to the good, the natural belief of mankind?—The natural beliefs of humanity must not be sought in a pretended state of nature.—Study of the sentiments and ideas of men in languages, in life, in consciousness.—Disinterestedness and devotedness.—Liberty.—Esteem and contempt.—Respect.—Admiration and indignation.—Dignity.—Empire of opinion.—Ridicule.—Regret and repentance.—Natural and necessary foundations of all justice.—Distinction between fact and right.—Common sense, true and false philosophy.
Extent of the question of the good.—Position of the question according to the psychological method: What is, in regard to the good, the natural belief of mankind?—The natural beliefs of humanity must not be sought in a pretended state of nature.—Study of the sentiments and ideas of men in languages, in life, in consciousness.—Disinterestedness and devotedness.—Liberty.—Esteem and contempt.—Respect.—Admiration and indignation.—Dignity.—Empire of opinion.—Ridicule.—Regret and repentance.—Natural and necessary foundations of all justice.—Distinction between fact and right.—Common sense, true and false philosophy.
The idea of the true in its developments, comprises psychology, logic, and metaphysics. The idea of the beautiful begets what is called æsthetics. The idea of the good is the whole of ethics.
It would be forming a false and narrow idea of ethics to confine them within the inclosure of individual consciousness. There are public ethics, as well as private ethics, and public ethics embrace, with the relations of men among themselves, so far as men, their relations as citizens and as members of a state. Ethics extend wherever is found in any decree the idea of the good. Now, where does this idea manifest itself more, and where do justice and injustice, virtue and crime, heroism and weakness appear more openly, than on the theatre of civil life? Moreover, is there any thing that has a more decisive influence over manners, even of individuals, than the institutions of peoples and the constitutions of states? If the idea of the good goesthus far, it must be followed thither, as recently the idea of the beautiful has introduced us into the domain of art.
Philosophy usurps no foreign power; but it is not disposed to relinquish its right of examination over all the great manifestations of human nature. All philosophy that does not terminate in ethics, is hardly worthy of the name, and all ethics that do not terminate at least in general views on society and government, are powerless ethics, that have neither counsels nor rules to give humanity in its most difficult trials.
It seems that at the point where we have arrived, the metaphysics and æsthetics that we have taught evidently involve such a doctrine of morality and not such another, that, accordingly, the question of the good, that question so fertile and so vast, is for us wholly solved, and that we can deduce, by way of reasoning, the moral theory that is derived from our theory of the beautiful and our theory of the true. We might do this, perhaps, but we will not. This would be abandoning the method that we have hitherto followed, that method that proceeds by observation, and not by deduction, and makes consulting experience a law to itself. We do not grow weary of experience. Let us attach ourselves faithfully to the psychological method; it has its delays; it condemns us to more than one repetition, but it places us in the beginning, and a long time retains us at the source of all reality, and all light.
The first maxim of the psychological method is this: True philosophy invents nothing, it establishes and describes what is. Now here, what is, is the natural and permanent belief of the being that we are studying, to wit, man. What is, then, in relation to the good, the natural and permanent belief of the human race? Such is, in our eyes, the first question.
With us, in fact, the human race does not take one side, and philosophy the other. Philosophy is the interpreter of the human race. What the human race thinks and believes, often unconsciously, philosophy re-collects, explains, establishes. It is the faithful and complete expression of human nature, and humannature is entire in each of us philosophers, and in every other man. Among us, it is attained by consciousness; among other men, it manifests itself in their words and actions. Let us, then, interrogate the latter and the former; let us especially interrogate our own consciousness; let us clearly recognize what the human race thinks; we shall then see what should be the office of philosophy.
Is there a human language known to us that has not different expressions for good and evil, for just and unjust? Is there any language, in which, by the side of the words pleasure, interest, utility, happiness, are not also found the words sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotedness, virtue? Do not all languages, as well as all nations, speak of liberty, duty, and right?
Here, perhaps, some disciple of Condillac and Helvetius will ask us whether, in this regard, we possess authentic dictionaries of the language of savage tribes found by voyagers in the isles of the ocean? No; but we have not made our philosophic religion out of the superstitions and prejudices of a certain school. We absolutely deny that it is necessary to study human nature in the famous savage of Aveyron, or in the like of him of the isles of the ocean, or the American continent. The savage state offers us humanity in swaddling-clothes, thus to speak, the germ of humanity, but not humanity entire. The true man is the perfect man of his kind; true human nature is human nature arrived at its development, as true society is also perfected society. We do not think it worth the while to ask a savage his opinion on the Apollo Belvidere, neither will we ask him for the principles that constitute the moral nature of man, because in him this moral nature is only sketched and not completed. Our great philosophy of the seventeenth century was sometimes a little too much pleased with hypotheses in which God plays the principal part, and crushes human liberty.[187]The philosophy of the eighteenth century threw itself into the opposite extreme; it had recourse to hypotheses of a totally different character, among others, to a pretended natural state, whence it undertook, with infinite pains, to draw society and man as we now see them. Rousseau plunged into the forests, in order to find there the model of liberty and equality. That is the commencement of his politics. But wait a little, and soon you will see the apostle of the natural state, driven, by a necessary inconsequence, from one excess to an opposite excess, instead of the sweets of savage liberty, proposing to us theContrat Social and Lacédémone. Condillac[188]studies the human mind in a statue whose senses enter into exercise under the magic wand of a systematic analysis, and are developed in the measure and progress that are convenient to him. The statue successively acquires our five senses, but there is one thing that it does not acquire, that is, a mind like the human mind, and a soul like ours. And this was what was then called the experimental method! Let us leave there all those hypotheses. In order to understand reality, let us study it, and not imagine it. Let us take humanity as it is incontestably shown to us in its actual characters, and not as it may have been in a primitive, purely hypothetical state, in those unformed lineaments or that degradation which is called the savage state. In that, without doubt, may be found signs orsouvenirsof humanity, and, if this were the plea, we might, in our turn, examine the recitals of voyages, and find, even in that darkness of infancy or decrepitude, admirable flashes of light, noble instincts, which already appear, or still subsist, presaging or recalling humanity. But, for the sake of exactness of method and true analysis, we turn our eyes from infancy and the savage state, in order to direct them towards the being who is the sole object of our studies, the actual man, the real and completed man.
Do you know a language, a people, which does not possess the word disinterested virtue? Who is especially called an honest man? Is it the skilful calculator, devoting himself to making his own affairs the best possible, or he who, under all circumstances, is disposed to observe justice against his apparent or real interest? Take away the idea that an honest man is capable, to a certain degree, of resisting the attractions of personal interest, and of making some sacrifices for opinion, for propriety, for that which is or appears honest, and you take away the foundation of that title of honest man, even in the most ordinary sense. That disposition to prefer what is good to our pleasure, to our personal utility, in a word, to interest—that disposition more or less strong, more or less constant, more or less tested, measures the different degrees of virtue. A man who carries disinterestedness as far as devotion, is called a hero, let him be concealed in the humblest condition, or placed on a public stage. There is devotedness in obscure as well as in exalted stations. There are heroes of probity, of honor, of loyalty, in the relations of ordinary life, as well as heroes of courage and patriotism in the counsels of peoples and at the head of armies. All these names, with their meaning well recognized, are in all languages, and constitute a certain and universal fact. We may explain this fact, but on one imperative condition, that in explaining we do not destroy it. Now, is the idea and the word disinterestedness explained to us by reducing disinterestedness to interest? This is what common sense invincibly repels.
Poets have no system,—they address themselves to men as they really are, in order to produce in them certain effects. Is it skilful selfishness or disinterested virtue that poets celebrate? Do they demand our applause for the success of fortunate address, or for the voluntary sacrifices of virtue? The poet knows that there is at the foundation of the human soul I know not what marvellous power of disinterestedness and devotedness. In addressing himself to this instinct of the heart, he is sure of awakening a sublime echo, of opening every source of the pathetic.
Consult the annals of the human race, and you will find inthem man everywhere, and more and more, claiming his liberty. This word liberty is as old as man himself. What then! Men wish to be free, and man himself should not be free! The word nevertheless exists with the most determined signification. It signifies that man believes himself a free being, not only animated and sensible, but endowed with will, a will that belongs to him, that consequently cannot admit over itself the tyranny of another will which would make, in regard to him, the office of fatality, even were it that of the most beneficent fatality. Do you suppose that the word liberty could ever have been formed, if the thing itself did not exist? None but a free being could possess the idea of liberty. Will it be said that the liberty of man is only an illusion? The wishes of the human race are then the most inexplicable extravagance. In denying the essential distinction between liberty and fatality, we contradict all languages and all received notions; we have, it is true, the advantage of absolving tyrants, but we degrade heroes. They have, then, fought and died for a chimera!
All languages contain the words esteem and contempt. To esteem, to despise,—these are universal expressions, certain phenomena, from which an impartial analysis can draw the highest notions. Can we despise a being who, in his acts, should not be free, a being who should not know the good, and should not feel himself obligated to fulfil it? Suppose that the good is not essentially different from the evil, suppose that there is in the world only interest more or less well understood, that there is no real duty, and that man is not essentially a free being,—it is impossible to explain rationally the word contempt. It is the same with the word esteem.
Esteem is a fact which, faithfully expressed, contains a complete philosophy as solid as generous. Esteem has two certain characters: 1st, It is a disinterested sentiment in the soul of him who feels it; 2d, It is applied only to disinterested acts. We do not esteem at will, and because it is our interest to esteem. Neither do we esteem an action or a person because they havebeen successful. Success, fortunate calculation, may make us envied; it does not bring esteem, which has another price.
Esteem in a certain degree, and under certain circumstances, is respect,—respect, a holy and sacred word which the most subtile or the loosest analysis will never degrade to expressing a sentiment that is related to ourselves, and is applied to actions crowned by fortune.
Take again these two words, these two facts analogous to the first two, admiration and indignation. Esteem and contempt are rather judgments; indignation and admiration are sentiments, but sentiments that pertain to intelligence and envelop a judgment.[189]
Admiration is an essentially disinterested sentiment. See whether there is any interest in the world that has the power to give you admiration for any thing or any person. If you were interested, you might feign admiration, but you would not feel it. A tyrant with death in his hand, may constrain you to appear to admire, but not to admire in reality. Even affection does not determine admiration; whilst a heroic trait, even in an enemy, compels you to admire.
The phenomenon opposed to admiration is indignation. Indignation is no more anger than admiration is desire. Anger is wholly personal. Indignation is never directly related to us; it may have birth in the midst of circumstances wherein we are engaged, but the foundation and the dominant character of the phenomenon in itself is to be disinterested. Indignation is in its nature generous. If I am a victim of an injustice, I may feel at once anger and indignation, anger against him that injures me, indignation towards him who is unjust to one of his fellow-men. We may be indignant towards ourselves; we are indignant towards every thing that wounds the sentiment of justice. Indignation covers a judgment, the judgment that he who commits such or such an action, whether against us, or even for us, doesan action unworthy, contrary to our dignity, to his own dignity, to human dignity. The injury sustained is not the measure of indignation, as the advantage received is not that of admiration. We felicitate ourselves on possessing or having acquired a useful thing; but we never admire, on that account, either ourselves or the thing that we have just acquired. So we repel the stone that wounds us, we do not feel indignant towards it.
Admiration elevates and ennobles the soul. The generous parts of human nature are disengaged and exalted in presence of, and as it were in contact with, the image of the good. This is the reason why admiration is already by itself so beneficent, even should it be deceived in its object. Indignation is the result of these same generous parts of the soul, which, wounded by injustice, are highly roused and protest in the name of offended human dignity.
Look at men in action, and you will see them imposing upon themselves great sacrifices in order to conquer the suffrages of their fellows. The empire of opinion is immense,—vanity alone does not explain it; it doubtless also pertains to vanity, but it has deeper and better roots. We judge that other men are, like us, sensible to good and evil, that they distinguish between virtue and vice, that they are capable of being indignant and admiring, of esteeming and respecting, as well as despising. This power is in us, we have consciousness of it, we know that other men possess it as well as we, and it is this power that frightens us. Opinion is our own consciousness transferred to the public, and there disengaged from all complaisance and armed with an inflexible severity. To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity. We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our fellow-men. There is only one thing that can sustain us against opinion, and even place us above it: it is the firm and sure testimony of our consciousness, because, in fine,the public and the whole human race are compelled to judge us according to appearance, whilst we judge ourselves infallibly and by the most certain of all knowledge.
Ridicule is the fear of opinion in small things. The force of ridicule is wholly in the supposition that there is a common taste, a common type of what is proper, that directs men in their judgments, and even in their pleasantries, which in their way are also judgments. Without this supposition, ridicule falls of itself, and pleasantry loses its sting. But it is immortal, as well as the distinction between good and evil, between the beautiful and the ugly, between what is proper and what is improper.
When we have not succeeded in any measure undertaken for our interest and prosperity, we experience a sentiment of pain that is called regret. But we do not confound regret with that other sentiment that rises in the soul when we are conscious of having done something morally bad. This sentiment is also a pain, but of quite a different nature,—it is remorse, repentance. That we have lost in play, for example, is disagreeable to us; but if, in gaining, we have the consciousness of having deceived our adversary, we experience a very different sentiment.
We might prolong and vary these examples. We have said enough to be entitled to conclude that human language and the sentiments that it expresses are inexplicable, if we do not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, between virtue and crime, crime founded on interest, virtue founded on disinterestedness.
Disturb this distinction, and you disturb human life and entire society. Permit me to take an extreme, tragic, and terrible example. Here is a man that has just been judged. He has been condemned to death, and is about to be executed—to be deprived of life. And why? Place yourself in the system that does not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, and ponder on what is stupidly atrocious in this act of human justice. What has the condemned done? Evidently a thing indifferent in itself. For if there is no other outward distinction than that of pleasureand pain, I defy any one to qualify any human action, whatever it may be, as criminal, without the most absurd inconsequence. But this thing, indifferent in itself, a certain number of men, called legislators, have declared to be a crime. This purely arbitrary declaration has found no echo in the heart of this man. He has not been able to feel the justice of it, since there is nothing in itself just. He has therefore done, without remorse, what this declaration arbitrarily interdicted. The court proceeds to prove to him that he has not succeeded, but not that he has done contrary to justice, for there is no justice. I maintain that every condemnation, be it to death, or to any punishment whatever, imperatively supposes, in order to be any thing else than a repression of violence by violence, the four following points:—1st, That there is an essential distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, and that to this distinction is attached, for every intelligent and free being, the obligation of conforming to good and justice; 2d, That man is an intelligent and free being, capable of comprehending this distinction, and the obligation that accompanies it, and of adhering to it naturally, independently of all convention, and every positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations that bear him towards evil and injustice, and of fulfilling the sacred law of natural justice; 3d, That every act contrary to justice deserves to be repressed by force, and even punished in reparation of the fault committed, and independently too of all law and all convention; 4th, That man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit and demerit of actions, as he recognizes the distinction between the just and the unjust, and knows that every penalty applied to an unjust act is itself most strictly just.
Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use; they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its institutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal laws. The surest power of institutions resides in the respect that these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that participates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them. They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is there any thing but a mass of arbitrary conventions which no one in conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse, which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force, and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other without duties and rights, without any other object than that of procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.
It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and without the spirit of system, is, thank God, less sombre. Without doubt, society and human justice have still many imperfections which time discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are not all,—before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity. Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to individual consciousness, to thehuman race,—is it not true that fact is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps, but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them, either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader. On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact, and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other.
Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs, society and its fundamental institutions. Grammarians have not invented languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs. All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole world,—by the genius of humanity.
Common sense is deposited in its works. All languages, and all human institutions contain the ideas and the sentiments that we have just called to mind and described, and especially the distinction between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between free will and desire, between duty and interest, betweenvirtue and happiness, with the profoundly rooted belief that happiness is a recompense due to virtue, and that crime in itself deserves to be punished, and calls for the reparation of a just suffering.
These things are attested by the words and actions of men. Such are the sincere and impartial, but somewhat confused, somewhat gross notions of common sense.
Here begins the part of philosophy. It has before it two different routes; it can do one of two things: either accept the notions of common sense, elucidate them, thereby develop and increase them, and, by faithfully expressing them, fortify the natural beliefs of humanity; or, preoccupied with such or such a principle, impose it upon the natural data of common sense, admit those that agree with this principle, artificially bend the others to these, or openly deny them; this is what is called making a system.
Philosophic systems are not philosophy; they try to realize the idea of it, as civil institutions try to realize that of justice, as the arts express in their way infinite beauty, as the sciences pursue universal science. Philosophic systems are necessarily very imperfect, otherwise there never would have been two systems in the world. Fortunate are those that go on doing good, that expand in the minds and souls of men, with some innocent errors, the sacred love of the true, the beautiful, and the good! But philosophic systems follow their times much more than they direct them; they receive their spirit from the hands of their age. Transferred to France towards the close of the regency and under the reign of Louis XV., the philosophy of Locke gave birth there to a celebrated school, which for a long time governed and still subsists among us, protected by ancient habits, but in radical opposition to our new institutions and our new wants. Sprung from the bosom of tempests, nourished in the cradle of a revolution, brought up under the bad discipline of the genius of war, the nineteenth century cannot recognize its image and find its instincts in a philosophy born under the influence of the voluptuous refinements of Versailles, admirably fitted for the decrepitude of an arbitrary monarchy, but not for the laborious life of a young liberty surrounded with perils. As for us, after having combated the philosophy of sensation in the metaphysics which it substituted for Cartesianism, and in the deplorable æsthetics, now too accredited, under which succumbed our great national art of the seventeenth century, we do not hesitate to combat it again in the ethics that were its necessary product, the ethics of interest.
The exposition and refutation of these pretended ethics will be the subject of the next lecture.