The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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II. ITS ORIGINAL DEFICIENCY.

Its original deficiency. - Signs of this in the 17th century. - It
grows with time and success. - Proofs of this growth in the 18th
century. - Serious poetry, the drama, history and romances. - Short-
sighted views of man and of human existence.

This excess indicates a deficiency. In the two operations which the
human mind performs, the classicist is more successful in the second
than in the first. The second, indeed, stands in the way of the first,
the obligation of always speaking correctly makes him refrain from
saying all that ought to be said. With him the form is more important
than abundant contents, the firsthand observations which serve as a
living source losing, in the regulated channels to which they are
confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to
convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry
proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[27] Nothing sprouts on
these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with
music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense
torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,[28] pouring out
his heart to relieve himself. When a creation of characters is
imperative, as in dramatic poetry, the classic mold fashions but one
kind, that which through education, birth, or impersonation, always
speak correctly, in other words, like so many people of high society.
No others are portrayed on the stage or elsewhere, from Corneille and
Racine to Marivaux and Beaumarchais. So strong is the habit that it
imposes itself even on La Fontaine's animals, on the servants of
Molière, on Montesquieu's Persians, and on the Babylonians, the
Indians and the Micromégas of Voltaire. - It must be stated,
furthermore, that these characters are only partly real. In real
persons two kinds of characteristics may be noted; the first, few in
number, which he or she shares with others of their kind and which any
reader readily may identify; and the other kind, of which there are a
great many, describing only one particular person and these are much
more difficult to discover. Classic art concerns itself only with the
former; it purposely effaces, neglects or subordinates the latter. It
does not build individual persons but generalized characters, a king,
a queen, a young prince, a confidant, a high-priest, a captain of the
guards, seized by some passion, habit or inclination, such as love,
ambition, fidelity or perfidy, a despotic or a yielding temper, some
species of wickedness or of native goodness. As to the circumstances
of time and place, which, amongst others, exercise a most powerful
influence in shaping and diversifying man, it hardly notes them, even
setting them aside. In a tragedy the scene is set everywhere and any
time, the contrary, that the action takes place nowhere in no specific
epoch, is equally valid. It may take place in any palace or in any
temple,[29] in which, to get rid of all historic or personal impressions,
habits and costumes are introduced conventionally, being neither French
nor foreign, nor ancient, nor modern. In this abstract world the
address is always "you"(as opposed to the familiar thou),[30]
"Seigneur" and "Madame," the noble style always clothing the most
different characters in the same dress. When Corneille and Racine,
through the stateliness and elegance of their verse, afford us a
glimpse of contemporary figures they do it unconsciously, imagining
that they are portraying man in himself; and, if we of the present
time recognize in their pieces either the gentleman, the duelists, the
bullies, the politicians or the heroines of the Fronde, or the
courtiers, princes and bishops, the ladies and gentlemen in waiting of
the regular monarchy, it is because they have inadvertently dipped
their brush in their own experience, some of its color having fallen
accidentally on the bare ideal outline which they wished to trace. We
have simply a contour, a general sketch, filled up with the harmonious
gray tone of correct diction. - Even in comedy, necessarily employing
current habits, even with Molière, so frank and so bold, the model is
unfinished, all individual peculiarities being suppressed, the face
becoming for a moment a theatrical mask, and the personage, especially
when talking in verse, sometimes losing its animation in becoming the
mouth-piece for a monologue or a dissertation.[31] The stamp of rank,
condition or fortune, whether gentleman or bourgeois, provincial or
Parisian, is frequently overlooked.[32] We are rarely made to
appreciate physical externals, as in Shakespeare, the temperament, the
state of the nervous system, the bluff or drawling tone, the impulsive
or restrained action, the emaciation or obesity of a character.[33]
Frequently no trouble is taken to find a suitable name, this being
either Chrysale, Orgon, Damis, Dorante, or Valère. The name designates
only a simple quality, that of a father, a youth, a valet, a grumbler,
a gallant, and, like an ordinary cloak, fitting indifferently all
forms alike, as it passes from the wardrobe of Molière to that of
Regnard, Destouche, Lesage or Marivaux.[34] The character lacks the
personal badge, the unique, authentic appellation serving as the
primary stamp of an individual. All these details and circumstances,
all these aids and accompaniments of a man, remain outside of the
classic theory. To secure the admission of some of them required the
genius of Molière, the fullness of his conception, the wealth of his
observation, the extreme freedom of his pen. It is equally true again
that he often omits them, and that, in other cases, he introduces only
a small number of them, because he avoids giving to these general
characters a richness and complexity that might interfere with the
story. The simpler the theme the clearer its development, the first
duty of the author throughout this literature being to clearly develop
the restricted theme of which he makes a selection.

There is, accordingly, a radical defect in the classic spirit, the
defect of its qualities, and which, at first kept within proper
bounds, contributes towards the production of its purest master-
pieces, but which, in accordance with the universal law, goes on
increasing and turns into a vice through the natural effect of age,
use, and success. Contracted at the start, it is to become yet more
so. In the eighteenth century the description of real life, of a
specific person, just as he is in nature and in history, that is to
say, an undefined unit, a rich plexus, a complete organism of
peculiarities and traits, superposed, entangled and co-ordinated, is
improper. The capacity to receive and contain all these is wanting.
Whatever can be discarded is cast aside, and to such an extent that
nothing is left at last but a condensed extract, an evaporated
residuum, an almost empty name, in short, what is called a hollow
abstraction. The only characters in the eighteenth century exhibiting
any life are the off-hand sketches, made in passing and as if
contraband, by Voltaire, Baron de Thundertentronk and Milord Watthen,
the lesser figures in his stories, and five or six portraits of
secondary rank, Turcaret, Gil Blas, Marianne, Manon Lescaut, Rameau,
and Figaro, two or three of the rough sketches of Crébillon the
younger and of Collé, all so many works in which sap flows through a
familiar knowledge of things, comparable with those of the minor
masters in painting, Watteau, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, Lancret,
Pater, and Beaudouin, and which, accepted with difficulty, or as a
surprise, by the official drawing room are still to subsist after the
grander and soberer canvases shall have become moldy through their
wearisome exhalations. Everywhere else the sap dries up, and, instead
of blooming plants, we encounter only flowers of painted paper. What
are all the serious poems, from the "la Henriade" of Voltaire to the
"Mois" by Roucher or the "l'Imagination" by Delille, but so many
pieces of rhetoric garnished with rhymes? Examine the innumerable
tragedies and comedies of which Grimm and Collé gives us mortuary
extracts, even the meritorious works of Voltaire and Crébillon, and
later, those of authors of repute, Du Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and
Marie Chénier? Eloquence, art, situations, correct verse, all exist in
these except human nature; the personages are simply well-taught
puppets, and generally mere mouthpieces by which the author makes his
declamation public; Greeks, Romans, Medieval knights, Turks, Arabs,
Peruvians, Giaours, or Byzantines, they have all the same declamatory
mechanisms. The public, meanwhile, betrays no surprise. It is not
aware of history. It assumes that humanity is everywhere the same. It
establishes the success alike of the "Incas" by Marmontel, and of
"Gonsalve" and the "Nouvelles" by Florian; also of the peasants,
mechanics, Negroes, Brazilians, Parsees, and Malabarites that appear
before it churning out their exaggerations. Man is simply regarded as
a reasoning being, alike in all ages and alike in all places;
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre endows his pariah with this habit, like
Diderot, in his Tahitians. The one recognized principle is that every
human being must think and talk like a book. - And how inadequate
their historical background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a
contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows
fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where
are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson,
belonging to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France,
in the researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the
"Louis XI" of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthélemy, even in the
"Essai sur les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle de Louis XIV" of Voltaire,
even in the "Grandeur des Romains," and the "Esprit des Lois" of
Montesquieu, what peculiar deficiency! Erudition, criticism, common
sense, an almost exact exposition of dogmas and of institutions,
philosophic views of the relationships between events and on the
general run of these, nothing is lacking but the people! On reading
these it seems as if the climates, institutions and civilizations
which so completely modifies the human intellect, are simply so many
outworks, so many fortuitous exteriors, which, far from reflecting its
depths scarcely penetrate beneath its surface. The vast differences
separating the men of two centuries, or of two peoples, escape them
entirely.[35] The ancient Greek, the early Christian, the conquering
Teuton, the feudal man, the Arab of Mahomet, the German, the
Renaissance Englishman, the puritan, appear in their books as in
engravings and frontispieces, with some difference in costume, but the
same bodies, the same faces, the same countenances, toned down,
obliterated, proper, adapted to the conventionalities of good manners.
That sympathetic imagination by which the writer enters into the mind
of another, and reproduces in himself a system of habits and feelings
so different from his own, is the talent the most absent in the
eighteenth century. With the exception of Diderot, who uses it badly
and capriciously, it almost entirely disappears in the last half of
the century. Consider in turn, during the same period, in France and
in England, where it is most extensively used, the romance, a sort of
mirror everywhere transportable, the best adapted to reflect all
phrases of nature and of life. After reading the series of English
novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and
Goldsmith down to Miss Burney and Miss Austen, I have become familiar
with England in the eighteenth century; I have encountered clergymen,
country gentlemen, farmers, innkeepers, sailors, people of every
condition in life, high and low; I know the details of fortunes and of
careers, how much is earned, how much is expended, how journeys are
made and how people eat and drink: I have accumulated for myself a
file of precise biographical events, a complete picture in a thousand
scenes of an entire community, the amplest stock of information to
guide me should I wish to frame a history of this vanished world. On
reading a corresponding list of French novelists, the younger
Crébillon, Rousseau, Marmontel, Laclos, Restif de la Breton, Louvet,
Madame de Staël, Madame de Genlis and the rest, including Mercier and
even Mme. Cottin, I scarcely take any notes; all precise and
instructive little facts are left out; I find civilities, polite acts,
gallantries, mischief-making, social dissertations and nothing else.
They carefully abstain from mentioning money, from giving me figures,
from describing a wedding, a trial, the administration of a piece of
property; I am ignorant of the situation of a curate, of a rustic
noble, of a resident prior, of a steward, of an intendant. Whatever
relates to a province or to the rural districts, to the bourgeoisie or
to the shop,[36] to the army or to a soldier, to the clergy or to
convents, to justice or to the police, to business or to housekeeping
remains vaguely in my mind or is falsified; to clear up any point I am
obliged to recur to that marvelous Voltaire who, on laying aside the
great classic coat, finds plenty of elbow room and tells all. On the
organs of society of vital importance, on the practices and
regulations that provoke revolutions, on feudal rights and seigniorial
justice, on the mode of recruiting and governing monastic bodies, on
the revenue measures of the provinces, of corporations and of trade-
unions, on the tithes and the corvées,[37] literature provides me with
scarcely any information. Drawing-rooms and men of letters are
apparently its sole material. The rest is null and void. Outside the
good society that is able to converse France appears perfectly empty.
- On the approach of the Revolution the elimination increases. Look
through the harangues of the clubs and of the tribune, through
reports, legislative bills and pamphlets, and through the mass of
writings prompted by passing and exciting events; in none of them do
we see any sign of the human creature as we see him in the fields and
in the street; he is always regarded as a simple robot, a well known
mechanism. Among writers he was a moment ago a dispenser of
commonplaces, among politicians he is now a pliable voter ; touch him
in the proper place and he responds in the desired manner. Facts are
never apparent; only abstractions, long arrays of sentences on nature,
Reason, and the people, on tyrants and liberty, like inflated
balloons, uselessly conflicting with each other in space. Were we not
aware that all this would terminate in terrible practical effects then
we could regard it as competition in logic, as school exercises,
academic parades, or ideological compositions. It is, in fact,
Ideology, the last product of the century, which will stamp the
classic spirit with its final formula and last word.

III. THE MATHEMATICAL METHOD.

The philosophic method in conformity with the Classic Sprit. -
Ideology. - Abuse of the mathematical process. - Condillac, Rousseau,
Mably, Condorcet, Volney, Sieyès, Cabanis, and de Tracy. - Excesses of
simplification and boldness of organization.

The natural process of the classic spirit is to pursue in every
research, with the utmost confidence, without either reserve or
precaution, the mathematical method: to derive, limit and isolate a
few of the simplest generalized notions and then, setting experience
aside, comparing them, combining them, and, from the artificial
compound thus obtained, by pure reasoning, deduce all the consequences
they involve. It is so deeply implanted as to be equally encountered
in both centuries, as well with Descartes, Malebranche[38] and the
partisans of innate ideas as with the partisans of sensation, of
physical needs and of primary instinct, Condillac, Rousseau,
Helvétius, and later, Condorcet, Volney, Sieyès, Cabanis and Destutt
de Tracy. In vain do the latter assert that they are the followers of
Bacon and reject (the theory of) innate ideas; with another starting
point than the Cartesians they pursue the same path, and, as with the
Cartesians, after borrowing a little, they leave experience behind
them. In this vast moral and social world, they only remove the
superficial bark from the human tree with its innumerable roots and
branches; they are unable to penetrate to or grasp at anything beyond
it; their hands cannot contain more. They have no suspicion of
anything outside of it; the classic spirit, with limited
comprehension, is not far-reaching. To them the bark is the entire
tree, and, the operation once completed, they retire, bearing along
with them the dry, dead epidermis, never returning to the trunk
itself. Through intellectual incapacity and literary pride they omit
the characteristic detail, the animating fact, the specific
circumstance, the significant, convincing and complete example.
Scarcely one of these is found in the "Logique" and in the "Traité des
Sensations" by Condillac, in the "Idéologie" by Destutt de Tracy, or
in the "Rapports du Physique et du Morale" by Cabanis.[39] Never, with
them, are we on the solid and visible ground of personal observation
and narration, but always in the air, in the empty space of pure
generalities. Condillac declares that the arithmetical method is
adapted to psychology and that the elements of our ideas can be
defined by a process analogous "to the rule of three." Sieyès holds
history in profound contempt, and believes that he had "perfected the
science of politics"[40] at one stroke, through an effort of the
brain, in the style of Descartes, who thus discovers analytic
geometry. Destutt de Tracy, in undertaking to comment on Montesquieu,
finds that the great historian has too servilely confined himself to
history, and attempts to do the work over again by organizing society
as it should be, instead of studying society as it is. - Never were
such systematic and superficial institutions built up with such a
moderate extract of human nature.[41] Condillac, employing sensation,
animates a statue, and then, by a process of pure reasoning, following
up its effects, as he supposes, on smell, taste, hearing, sight and
touch, fashions a complete human soul. Rousseau, by means of a
contract, founds political association, and, with this given idea,
pulls down the constitution, government and laws of every balanced
social system. In a book which serves as the philosophical testament
of the century,[42] Condorcet declares that this method is the "final
step of philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier
between humanity and its ancient infantile errors." "By applying it
to morals, politics and political economy the moral sciences have
progressed nearly as much as the natural sciences. With its help we
have been able to discover the rights of man." As in mathematics, they
have been deduced from one primordial statement only, which statement,
similar to a first principle in mathematics, becomes a fact of daily
experience, seen by all and therefore self-evident. - This school of
thought is to endure throughout the Revolution, the Empire and even
into the Restoration,[43] together with the tragedy of which it is the
sister, with the classic spirit their common parent, a primordial,
sovereign power, as dangerous as it is useful, as destructive as it is
creative, as capable of propagating error as truth, as astonishing in
the rigidity of its code, the narrow-mindedness of its yoke and in the
uniformity of its works as in the duration of its reign and the
universality of its ascendancy.[44]

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Notes:

[1] Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," see the articles on Language. "Of all
the languages in Europe the French is most generally used because it
is the best adapted to conversation. Its character is derived from
that of the people who speak it. For more than a hundred and fifty
years past, the French have been the most familiar with (good) society
and the first to avoid all embarrassment . . . It is a better currency
than any other, even if it should lack weight."

[2] HIST: honnête homme means gentleman. (SR.)

[3] Descartes, ed. Cousin, XI. 333, I. 121, . . . Descartes
depreciates "simple knowledge acquired without the aid of reflection,
such as languages, history, geography, and, generally, whatever is not
based on experience. . . . It is no more the duty of an honest man to
know Greek or Latin than to know the Swiss or Breton languages, nor
the history of the Romano-Germanic empire any more than of the
smallest country in Europe."

[4] Molière, "Les Femmes Savantes," and "La Critique de l'école des
femmes." The parts of Dorante with Lycidas and of Clitandre with
Trissotin.

[5] The learned Huet, (1630-1721), true to the taste of the sixteenth
century, describes this change very well from his point of view. "When
I entered the world of letters these were still flourishing; great
reputations maintained their supremacy. I have seen letters decline
and finally reach an almost entire decay. For I scarcely know a person
of the present time that one can truly call a savant." The few
Benedictines like Ducange and Mabillon, and later, the academician
Fréret, the president Bouhier of Dijon, in short, the veritable
erudites exercise no influence.

[6] Nicole, "Oeuvres morales," in the second essay on Charity and
Self-love, 142.

[7] Voltaire, "Dialogues," "L'intendant des menus et l'abbé Grizel,"
129.

[8] Maury adds with his accustomed coarseness, "We, in the French
Academy, looked upon the members of the Academy of Sciences as our
valets." - These valets at that time consisted of Lavoisier,
Fourcroy, Lagrange, Laplace, etc. (A narrative by Joseph de Maistre,
quote by Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries du lundi," IV. 283.)

[9] This description makes me think of the contemporary attitudes
pejoratively called "politically correctness." Thus the drawings-room
audience of the 18th century have today been replaced by the
"political correct" elite holding sway in teacher training schools,
schools of journalism, the media and hence among the television
public. The same mechanism which moved the upper class in the 18th
century moves it in the 20th century.. (S.R.)

[10] Today in 1999 we may speak of the TV mold forced by the measured
popularity or "ratings"of the programs. (SR.

[11] Vaugelas, "Remarques sur la langue française:" "It is the mode
of speech of the most sensible portion of the court, as well as the
mode of writing of the most sensible authors of the day. It is better
to consult women and those who have not studied than those who are
very learned in Greek and in Latin."

[12] One of the causes of the fall and discredit of the Marquis
d'Argenson in the eighteenth century, was his habit of using these.

[13] Vaugelas, ibid.. "Although we may have eliminated one-half of
his phrases and terms we nevertheless obtain in the other half all the
riches of which we boast and of which we make a display." - Compare
together a lexicon of two or three writers of the sixteenth century
and one of two or three writers of the seventeenth. A brief statement
of the results of the comparison is here given. Let any one, with pen
in hand, note the differences on a hundred pages of any of these
texts, and he will be surprised at it. Take, for examples, two writers
of the same category, and of secondary grade, Charron and Nicole.

[14] For instance, in the article "Ignorance," in the "Dict.
Philosophique."

[15] La Harpe, "Cours de Littérature," ed. Didot. II. 142.

[16] A battle-axe used by the Franks. - TR.

[17] I cite an example haphazard from the "Optimiste" (1788), by
Colin d'Harleville. In a certain description, "The scene represents a
bosquet filled with odoriferous trees." - The classic spirit rebels
against stating the species of tree, whether lilacs, lindens or
hawthorns. - In paintings of landscapes of this era we have the same
thing, the trees being generalized, - of no known species.

[18] This evolution is seen today as well, television having the same
effect upon its actors as the 18th century drawing-room. (SR.)

[19] See in the "Lycée," by la Harpe, after the analysis of each
piece, his remarks on detail in style.

[20] The omission of the pronouns, I, he, we, you, they, the article
the, and of the verb, especially the verb to be.-- Any page of
Rabelais, Amyot or Montaigne, suffices to show how numerous and
various were the transpositions.

[21] Vaugelas, ibid . "No language is more inimical to ambiguities
and every species of obscurity."

[22] See the principal romances of the seventeenth century, the
"Roman Bourgeois," by Furetière, the "Princess de Clèves," by Madame
de Lafayette, the "Clélie," by Mme. de Scudéry, and even Scarron's
"Roman Comique." - See Balzac's letters , and those of Voiture and
their correspondents, the "Récit des grands jours d'Auvergne," by
Fléchier, etc. On the oratorical peculiarities of this style cf.
Sainte-Beuve, "Port-Royal," 2nd ed. I. 515.