Part 18

Barante's standpoint is a suggestive, and was in those days an uncommon one. He hears it constantly asserted that the authors of the eighteenth century were responsible for the revolution which at the close of that century shook France to its very foundations, and this assertion he considers a baseless one. It contains an injustice to those authors, from the fact that it attributes too much significance to them. If the building had not been ready to fall, that literary puff of wind would not have sufficed to blow it over. Contemporaneously with Nodier and Mme. de Staël, he formulates and interprets the proposition: Literature is the expression of the state of society, not its cause. In his opinion, the Seven Years' War had a great deal more to do with the weakening of authority in France than had the Encyclopedia, and the profanity which prevailed at the court of old Louis XIV., at the time when he was cruelly persecuting both the Protestants and the Jansenists, did more to undermine reverence for religion than the attacks and jeers of the philosophers. He is very far from ascribing any particular merit to the literature of the preceding century, but he regards it as merely "a symptom of the general disease." With historical penetration he searches for the omens of the collapse of monarchy, and finds them much further back, in the results of the conflict between Mazarin and the Fronde. Held down by the iron hand of Richelieu, princes, nobles, and officials, all the great in turn, had made a bid for popular support, and by so doing had lost in dignity and consideration. The power of royalty alone remained totally unaffected. The waves of opposition rolled to the steps of the throne, but stopped there; during the first half of Louis XIV.'s reign the throne stood in more solitary elevation than ever over the general level. Richelieu's work was accomplished; every power in the land, except that of the throne, was destroyed. If this one remaining authority were undermined, then all the powers of society would stand bereft of the veneration which had constituted their strength; and this was very sufficiently done during Louis XIV.'s miserable old age, the insolent rule of the Regency, and the wanton, foolish rule of Louis XV.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century, then, according to Barante, was not the conscious work of any individual or individuals, but represented the general bent of the mind of the people; it was written, so to speak, at their dictation. This did not add to its value; to his thinking, all that this philosophy accomplished was to overturn an immoral and inequitable government in an immoral and inequitable manner. But what thus happened, happened of necessity. The soul of Barante's book is the firmest faith in historical laws. "The human mind," he says, "seems as irrevocably appointed to run a prescribed course as are the stars." He knows that there is at all times a necessary connection between literature and the condition of society; but whereas this connection is at times indistinct, requiring penetration to detect it, and careful demonstration to prove it plainly, in the period under consideration it seems to him so plain that no nice observation is required to discover it.

The first reason for this he finds in the relation of the writers to their readers. In earlier times the number of the former had been very small; thinly scattered over the whole of Europe, they had written in a dead language. In those days there was no social life, and conversation had not become a power. Authors did not write for society but for each other, and society in return looked upon them as uninteresting pedants. In time culture and enlightenment spread among the higher classes, and writers entered into relation with them; they wrote for princes and courtiers, for the little class which did not need to work. In the days of Louis XIV. authors tried to please this class, and were flattered by its approbation. But by degrees civilisation spread until a real reading public came into existence, a public which made the author independent of the great. Frederick the Second of Prussia, who, to shed lustre upon his reign, called Voltaire to his court, did not treat him with the condescension shown by Louis XIV. to Molière, but seemed to place him by his side as an equal. The greatest political and the greatest intellectual powers of the age stood for a moment upon an equal footing, without any one discerning that the time was approaching when these two powers were to declare war upon each other. And in the last half of the century there was unintermitted reciprocity between men of letters and society in general.

In the olden times a philosopher had been a severe, systematic thinker, who, careless of approbation, developed a connected system. The word had changed its meaning now; the philosopher was no longer a solitary thinker, but a man of the world, who conversed more than he wrote or taught, who invariably sought to please society and win its approbation, and who did this by making himself its organ. Barante sees an evidence of the powerful influence exercised by the spirit of the times upon individual writers in the circumstance that authors, such, for instance, as the Abbé de Mably, who had the strongest antipathy to the philosophers of the fashionable school, nevertheless resembled the very men they opposed, and arrived at the same results by different means. And he finds in the unpatriotic classical education of the upper classes the explanation of the fact that the public forestalled the men of letters in neglecting and slighting their own historical traditions and national memories for the sake of laboriously appropriated exotic ideals. At school the child learned to spell the names of Epaminondas and Leonidas long before he heard of Bayard or Du Guesclin; he was encouraged to take a deep interest in the Trojan wars, but no one dreamt of interesting him in the Crusades. Roman law, the principles of which are the outcome of autocratic rule, had gradually superseded those Germanic laws, which were the outcome of the life of a free people. What wonder then, that when authors turned to antiquity for their subject-matter, and grew enthusiastic on the subject of Greece and Rome, they found a ready audience in French society! What wonder that in literature also, national tradition was slighted and broken!

Having thus in advance laid the blame on society of all the mistakes made by literature in the eighteenth century (and its achievements appear to him to be one and all mistakes), Barante has provided himself with the basis for a calm appraisement of the individual eminent writers. In his appreciations we have the views scattered throughout the Emigrant Literature concentrated and, as it were, brought to a focus.

Voltaire, whose reputation had, since his death, been made the subject of as much hot dispute as the body of Patroclus, he criticises coldly, but without animosity. He admires his natural gifts, the easily stirred, impetuous feeling that produced his pathos, the irresistible fascination of his eloquence and his wit, and the charm that lies in his genial facility in shaping and expressing thoughts. But he sees the use Voltaire made of his talents, sees how he allowed himself to be led by the opinions of the time, by the desire to succeed, to please. He laments the tendency to shameless, irreverent mockery, which characterised Voltaire even as an old man. And this is all. For what was just, for what was great in Voltaire's life-warfare he has no eyes, no word. He professes to criticise Voltaire impartially, and yet he, as it were, juggles away the indignation that was in his soul, that which was the very breath of life in him; he calls the persecutions of Voltaire stupid, but never once wicked; he excuses, not the blots on Voltaire's greatness, but, as it were, the greatness itself--and it is evident that he really desires to be impartial, since he excuses.

Of all the great authors of the past century, Montesquieu is the only one for whom Barante expresses any really warm admiration. This is natural enough, for in him he recognised some of his own qualities. Montesquieu was not the ordinary author who could let his pen run away with him; he was, like Barante himself, an official, a high official, a famous lawyer, who was obliged to consider the dignity of his position and the effect of his example. "President Montesquieu," says Barante, "was not in that position of independence which men of letters prize so highly, and which is possibly injurious both to their talents and their characters." One is sensible of the cautious attempt at selfvindication made in this ingenious paradox by the imperial official who was at enmity with the Emperor. But whatever the cause, Barante made no mistake in rating Montesquieu very highly. Other authors of his period had more genius, but Montesquieu's accurate knowledge of practical life, of administration and government, gave him an insight which the others lacked, and a moderation on which high value was set at the beginning of this century. In Montesquieu Barante approves of things which he censures bitterly in others. He invites the reader to compare Montesquieu's work, _De l'Esprit des Lois_, with an older work by Domat on the same subject, in order to see the progress in philosophy made by Montesquieu, who, treating religion with all due reverence, nevertheless regards it as a subordinate matter.[1]

Diderot is the author against whom Barante is most biassed; in judging him he shows himself extremely narrow-minded; he allows Diderot's precipitancy and violence to blind him to his genius. A genius whose recklessness ever and again reminds one of the recklessness of an elemental force, was as little comprehensible to Barante as to the rest of the alarmed, disillusioned generation to which he belongs. Diderot was better calculated to please the Germans, who were unprejudiced in intellectual matters, than his own over-sensitive countrymen of this period. Goethe himself translated _Le Neveu de Rameau_, and Hegel treated of it exhaustively in his _Phänomenologie des Geistes_. But Barante, passionately condemning Diderot's incessant and unbridled attacks upon religion, sums him up in these words: "His inner man was ardent and disorderly, his mind was a fire without fuel, and the talent of which he showed _some gleams_ was never put to any systematic use." It was but natural that the eighteenth-century writer who had the profoundest understanding of nature, should be held in lowest esteem by the young idealists.

Rousseau, the last of the writers of the eighteenth century cited before the bar of the nineteenth, had characteristics which necessarily appealed to Barante. He was the only sentimentalist among these writers, and the new century had begun sentimentally. He was the most solitary of them, and the new century appreciated the isolated personality. He stood quite apart from the philosophers and Encyclopedists; his character had been formed by a strange and unhappy life; he was uninfluenced by society or public opinion. Without family, friends, position, or country, he had wandered about the world, and, on his first appearance as an author, he had condemned society instead of flattering it; instead of giving in to public opinion, he tried to alter it; his attempt was successful, and where others pleased, he roused enthusiasm. All this was certain to appeal to Barante. But one has only to compare Barante's pronouncement on Rousseau with that published twenty years earlier by his friend Mme. de Staël, to see what progress the reaction against the spirit of the previous century has made. That he dwells at length on the impurity of Rousseau's life and the bad points in his character is in itself quite justifiable, and in this matter his criticism only presents the natural contrast to Mme. de Staël's warm apologetics. His severe judgment of Rousseau's political doctrines is the result of more critical, mature reflection than Mme. de Staël's woman-like attempt to vindicate them up to a certain point. But in his appreciation of Rousseau's attempts at religious reform, he is far from reaching her level. His principal objection to the famous Confession of Faith, to the so-called natural religion, is that it is a religion without public worship. "Nor can we wonder at this," he says, "for to a morality without deeds, like Rousseau's, a religion without worship is the inevitable corollary." His bias towards inference-drawing in favour of the existing, actually led this free-thinking critic to defend the traditional usages of the Church against Rousseau.

At the bottom of all this narrow-mindedness and injustice of Barante's, lay what lay at the root of much that was false and perverted in other Liberal writers during the two following decades, namely, that spiritualistic philosophy which was now making its way into France, and which, after encountering much resistance, became dominant; nay, was actually, under Cousin and his school, elevated to the rank of State philosophy. Had this philosophy been content to develop its principles and ideas as clearly and convincingly as possible, it would have been a philosophy like any other, would have roused opposition, but never enmity and detestation. But its champions, from the very beginning, and in almost every country into which it found its way, displayed unscientific and ill-omened tendencies. They were less anxious to prove their theories than to vindicate the moral and religious tendency of these theories. They were far less bent upon refuting their opponents than upon denying them feeling for what is noble, high enthusiasms, sense of duty, and ardour.

Mme. de Staël's dread of sensationalism was not a dread of the philosophy in itself, but of its consequences. The noble-hearted woman, who, with all her love of truth, was never anything but a dilettante in philosophy, was possessed by a naïve fear that sensationalistic psychology would lead men to submit unresistingly to the tyranny of Napoleon; so, out of love for liberty, she took up arms against it. Barante, as a man, has not her excuse. To him also, however, Descartes and Leibnitz are not only great thinkers, but represent the principle of good in metaphysics; as if there were any place for moral principles in metaphysics. "Possibly," he observes, "they at times lost themselves in misty regions, but at least they pursued an upward direction; their teaching harmonises with the thoughts which move us when we reflect profoundly on ourselves; and this path necessarily led to the noblest of sciences, to religion and morality." He goes on to describe how men grew weary of following them, and turned to follow in the path of Locke and Hume, whose doctrine he describes, not as a contradictory though equally justifiable one-sidedness, but as a degradation of human nature, a prostitution of science. He thinks it natural that Spinoza (whom he couples with Hobbes) should be opposed not only with reasons, but "with indignation."[2]

He confronts the empiricists with Kant's famous doctrine that the pure notions of the understanding have their sources in the nature of the soul, and that an innate fundamental conception of religion is to be found at all times and in all races. Always and everywhere, he says, there is to be found the belief in a life after death, reverence for the dead, burial of the dead in the certainty that life has not ended for them, and, finally, the belief that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. These are to him, much as they were to Benjamin Constant, the spiritual elements which constitute the firm foundation of religion. He does not realise that they may be resolved into still simpler elements, which are to be found unconnected with religious feeling. For he does not investigate freely, independently, but esteems it an honour to succeed to what he calls "le glorieux héritage de la haute philosophie."

In a precisely similar manner he inveighs against attempts to place morality upon an empirical basis. "Instead," he says, "of starting from the feeling of justice and sympathy which dwells in the hearts of all men, people have tried to base morality upon the instinct of self-preservation and utility." He clearly has no comprehension whatever of the profound philosophic instinct which has led the thinkers of the opposite school to resolve the idea of justice into its first elements, and show how it originates and takes shape. He merely writes bombastically and indignantly of the impossibility of arriving by such processes at revealed religion, "the divine proofs of which unbelief had rejected."[3] The same man who praises Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_, and approves of that author's qualification of religion as a secondary matter, is, with the half-heartedness of the period, horrified by the attempt of the empirical philosophers to discover the elements which go to the construction of the idea of justice. Hence it is that we find in Barante the beginnings of that foolish play upon the double meaning of the word sensualism, which was to be throughout the century a weapon in the hands of hypocrisy and baseness--the word being used at one time as the appellation of the particular philosophy sometimes known by that name, at another as the equivalent for sensuality, or yet again for the doctrine that sensual pleasures are the aim of life. Barante, like Cousin, defends the superficial and unscientific spiritualism which flourished in France in the first decades of this century as a philosophy which encouraged virtue and morality.

Mme. de Staël wrote a notice of Barante's book for one of the newspapers of the day, the _Mercure de France_. The censor forbade it to be printed at the time, but it was published later, without alterations. It is only three pages long, but a critic needs no further evidence to convince him of the genius of the writer. She begins with some warm words of admiration for the maturity and rare moderation of the young author, only regretting that he does not more frequently abandon himself to his impressions, and reminding him that restraint does not always imply strength. Then, as if in a flash, she perceives beneath the incidental and personal merits and defects of the book the intellectual character of the new century. The consideration of this work seems to have suddenly and forcibly revealed to her to what an extent she herself, with her cheerful, reformatory energy, was a product of the preceding century with its firm faith in progress. Barante's book is to her an intimation that the period of transition is at an end; she is amazed by the despondent resignation to circumstances, the fatalism, the reverence for the accomplished fact, which meet her in its pages. She divines that this despondent resignation to the pressure of circumstance will be one of the features of the new period; she has the presentiment that its philosophy will to a great extent consist of demonstrations that the real is the rational; and she seems, with the far-sightedness of genius, to discern how ambiguous that word "the real" will prove to be, and how much irreflective acquiescence in the existing the maxim will entail. She closes her review with these words of prophetic wisdom:--

"The eighteenth century proclaimed principles in a too unconditional manner; possibly the nineteenth century will explain facts in a spirit of too great resignation to them. The eighteenth believed in the nature of things, the nineteenth will only believe in the force of circumstances. The eighteenth desired to control the future, the nineteenth confines itself to the attempt to understand mankind. The author of this book is perhaps the first who is very distinctly tinged with the colour of the new century."

The style and the matter of this utterance are equally striking. Of all the notable men with whom Mme. de Staël was acquainted, not one had so distinctly separated himself from the preceding century as this youngest among them, Barante. The others, one after the other, had left the sinking ship of the eighteenth century, and gone on board the ship of the nineteenth, loading it by degrees with all the goods and seed-corn that it was to carry; but it still lay side by side with the wreck, made fast to it. It was Barante who cut the cables and sent the vessel out into the wide ocean.

[1] Alors on pourra distinguer, comment la religion, respectée par Montesquieu, était pourtant jugée par lui, tandis que Domat l'avait seulement adorée, et en avait fait tout découler au lieu de la considérer comme accessoire.

[2] On arriva bientôt à tout nier; déjà l'incrédulité avait rejeté les preuves divines de la révélation et avait abjuré les devoirs et les souvenirs chrétiens.

[3] _De la Litt. Française_, p. 213.

XV

CONCLUSION

The literary group the formation and development of which we have been following, produces the impression of an interwoven whole. Multitudes of threads that cross and recross each other stretch from the one work to the other; this exposition has only made the connection clear; it has not taken separate entities and arbitrarily woven them together. It is to be noted that this collection of writings, this set of writers, form a group, not a school. A group is the result of the natural, unintentional connection between minds and works which have a common tendency; a school is the result of the conscious fellowship of authors who have submitted themselves to the guidance of some more or less distinctly formulated conviction.

The Emigrant Literature, although French, develops beyond the frontiers of France. In order to understand it, we must keep before our minds that short and violently agitated period in which the old order was abolished, the principle of legitimacy was discarded, the ruling classes were humiliated and ruined, and positive religion was set aside by men who had freed themselves from its yoke rather by the help of a pugnacious philosophy than by scientific culture--men whose ruthless and not always honourable mode of warfare had irritated all those who were more or less dimly sensible of injustice in the charges directed against the old order of things, and whose intellectual, moral, and emotional cravings found no satisfaction in the new. The more unreal and impracticable the ideas of the rights and the progress of humanity proved themselves to be, the more certain did it become that an intellectual rebound must be at hand. It came; the reaction began. I have shown how at first it was only a partial reaction, how the ideas of the Revolution were invariably blended with the ideas which inspire the revulsion against Voltaire; we have seen that the intellectual point of departure of all its leaders lay in the eighteenth century, and that they were all liable to be affected by reminiscences, and subject to relapse. They all proceed, so to speak, from Rousseau. Their first step is simply to take his weapons and direct them against his antagonist Voltaire. Only the youngest of them, Barante, can with truth deny kinship with Rousseau.

These men are followed by a second set of authors whose aim is the preservation of society. They also are for the most part émigrés, and they advocate unconditional reaction. Their writings, along with single works of authors like Chateaubriand, who are progressive in art but reactionary in their attitude towards Church and State, and certain youthful reactionary works of future Liberal and even Radical writers like Lamartine and Hugo, form a group characterised by unconditional adherence to the old--the ruling idea in them being the principle of authority. Amongst the leading men of this set are Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.