The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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

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When the talent of a writer thus accords with public inclinations
it is a matter of little import whether he deviates or fails since he
is following the universal tendency. He may wander off or besmirch
himself in vain, for his audience is only the more pleased, his
defects serving him as advantageously as his good qualities. After
the first generation of healthy minds the second one comes on, the
intellectual balance here being equally inexact. "Diderot," says
Voltaire, "is too hot an oven, everything that is baked in it getting
burnt." Or rather, he is an eruptive volcano which, for forty years,
discharges ideas of every order and species, boiling and fused
together, precious metals, coarse scorioe and fetid mud; the steady
stream overflows at will according to the roughness of the ground, but
always displaying the ruddy light and acrid fumes of glowing lava. He
is not master of his ideas, but his ideas master him; he is under
submission to them; he has not that firm foundation of common
practical sense which controls their impetuosity and ravages, that
inner dyke of social caution which, with Montesquieu and Voltaire,
bars the way to outbursts. Everything with him rushes out of the
surcharged crater, never picking its way, through the first fissure or
crevice it finds, according to his haphazard reading, a letter, a
conversation, an improvisation, and not in frequent small jets as with
Voltaire, but in broad currents tumbling blindly down the most
precipitous declivities of the century. Not only does he descend thus
to the very depths of anti-religious and anti-social doctrines, with
logical and paradoxical rigidity, more impetuously and more
obstreperously than d'Holbach himself; but again he falls into and
sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and
into the beaten track of declamation. In his leading novels he dwells
a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness.
Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by
elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like
the younger Crébillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is
a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner,
a powerful reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist,
introduced, through the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable
livers. He engrosses the conversation, directs the orgy, or in the
contagion or on a wager, says more filthy things, more "gueulées,"
than all the guests put together[29]. In like manner, in his dramas,
in his "Essays on Claudius and Nero," in his "Commentary on Seneca,"
in his additions to the "Philosophical History" of Raynal, he forces
the tone of things. This tone, which then prevails by virtue of the
classic spirit and of the new fashion, is that of sentimental
rhetoric. Diderot carries it to extremes in the exaggeration of tears
or of rage, in exclamations, in apostrophes, in tenderness of feeling,
in violences, indignation, in enthusiasms, in full-orchestra tirades,
in which the fire of his brains finds employment and an outlet. -
On the other hand, among so many superior writers, he is the only
genuine artist, the creator of souls, within his mind objects, events
and personages are born and become organized of themselves, through
their own forces, by virtue of natural affinities, involuntarily,
without foreign intervention, in such a way as to live for and in
themselves, safe from the author's intentions, and outside of his
combinations. The composer of the "Salons," the "Petits Romans," the
"Entretien," the "Paradoxe du Comédien," and especially the "Rêve de
d'Alembert" and the" Neveu de Rameau "is a man of an unique species in
his time. However alert and brilliant Voltaire's personages may be,
they are always puppets; their action is derivative; always behind
them you catch a glimpse of the author pulling the strings. With
Diderot, the strings are severed; he is not speaking through the lips
of his characters; they are not his comical loud-speakers or puppets,
but independent and detached persons, with an action of their own, a
personal accent, with their own temperament, passions, ideas,
philosophy, style and spirit, and occasionally, as in the "Neveu de
Rameau," a spirit so original, complex and complete, so alive and so
deformed that, in the natural history of man, it becomes an
incomparable monster and an immortal document. He has expressed
everything concerning nature,[30] art morality and life[31] in two
small treatises of which twenty successive readings exhaust neither
the charm nor the sense. Find elsewhere, if you can, a similar stroke
of power and a greater masterpiece, "anything more absurd and more
profound!"[32] - Such is the advantage of men of genius possessing
no control over themselves. They lack discernment but they have
inspiration. Among twenty works, either soiled, rough or nasty, they
produce a creation, and still better, an animated being, able to live
by itself, before which others, fabricated by merely intellectual
people, resemble simply well-dressed puppets. - Hence it is that
Diderot is so great a narrator, a master of dialogue, the equal in
this respect of Voltaire, and, through a quite opposite talent,
believing all he says at the moment of saying it; forgetful of his
very self, carried away by his own recital, listening to inward
voices, surprised with the responses which come to him unexpectedly,
borne along, as if on an unknown river, by the current of action, by
the sinuosities of the conversation inwardly and unconsciously
developed, aroused by the flow of ideas and the leap of the moment to
the most unexpected imagery, extreme in burlesque or extreme in
magnificence, now lyrical even to providing Musset with an entire
stanza,[33] now comic and droll with outbursts unheard of since the
days of Rabelais, always in good faith, always at the mercy of his
subject, of his inventions, of his emotions; the most natural of
writers in an age of artificial literature, resembling a foreign tree
which, transplanted to a parterre of the epoch, swells out and decays
on one side of its stem, but of which five or six branches, thrust out
into full light, surpass the neighboring underwood in the freshness of
their sap and in the vigor of their growth.

Rousseau also is an artisan, a man of the people, ill-adapted to
elegant and refined society, out of his element in a drawing room and,
moreover, of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and
precocious experience, highly and offensively sensual, morbid in mind
and in body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, possessing
no tact, and carrying the contamination of his imagination,
temperament and past life into his austere morality and into his
purest idylls;[34] besides this he has no fervor, and in this he is
the opposite of Diderot, avowing himself" that his ideas arrange
themselves in his head with the utmost difficulty, that certain
sentences are turned over and over again in his brain for five or six
nights before putting them on paper, and that a letter on the most
trifling subject costs him hours of fatigue," that he cannot fall into
an easy and agreeable tone, nor succeed otherwise than "in works which
demand application."[35] As an offset to this, style, in this ardent
brain, under the influence of intense, prolonged meditation,
incessantly hammered and rehammered, becomes more concise and of
higher temper than is elsewhere found. Since La Bruyère we have seen
no more ample, virile phrases, in which anger, admiration,
indignation, studied and concentrated passion, appear with more
rigorous precision and more powerful relief. He is almost the equal
of La Bruyère in the arrangement of skillful effects, in the aptness
and ingenuity of developments, in the terseness of impressive
summaries, in the overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, in
the multiplicity of literary achievements, in the execution of those
passages of bravura, portraits, descriptions, comparisons, creations,
wherein, as in a musical crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series
of yet more animated expressions, attains to or surpasses, at the last
note, all that is possible of energy and of brilliancy. Finally, he
has that which is wanting in La Bruyère; his passages are linked
together; he is not a writer of pages but of books; no logician is
more condensed. His demonstration is knitted together, mesh by mesh,
for one, two and three volumes like a great net without an opening in
which, willingly or not, we remain caught. He is a systematizer who,
absorbed with himself; and with his eyes stubbornly fixed on his own
reverie or his own principle, buries himself deeper in it every day,
weaving its consequences off one by one, and always holding fast to
the various ends. Do not go near him. Like a solitary, enraged
spider he weaves this out of his own substance, out of the most
cherished convictions of his brain and the deepest emotions of his
heart. He trembles at the slightest touch; ever on the defensive, he
is terrible,[36] beside himself;[37] even venomous through suppressed
exasperation and wounded sensibility, furious against an adversary,
whom he stifles with the multiplied and tenacious threads of his web,
but still more redoubtable to himself than to his enemies, soon caught
in his own meshes,[38] believing that France and the universe conspire
against him, deducing with wonderful subtlety the proofs of this
chimerical conspiracy, made desperate, at last, by his over-plausible
romance, and strangling in the cunning toils which, by dint of his own
logic and imagination, he has fashioned for himself.

With such weapons one might accidentally kill oneself, but one is
strongly armed. Rousseau was well equipped, at least as powerful as
Voltaire; it may be said that the last half of the eighteenth century
belongs to him. A foreigner, a Protestant, original in temperament,
in education, in heart, in mind and in habits, at once misanthropic
and philanthropic, living in an ideal world constructed by himself,
entirely opposed to the world as it is, he finds himself standing in a
new position. No one is so sensitive to the evils and vices of actual
society. No one is so affected by the virtues and happiness of the
society of the future. This accounts for his having two holds on the
public mind, one through satire and the other through the idyll. -
These two holds are undoubtedly slighter at the present day; the
substance of their grasp has disappeared; we are not the auditors to
which it appealed. The famous discourse on the influence of
literature and on the origin of inequality seems to us a collegiate
exaggeration; an effort of the will is required to read the " Nouvelle
Héloïse." The author is repulsive in the persistency of his
spitefulness or in the exaggeration of his enthusiasm. He is always
in extremes, now moody and with knit brows, and now streaming with
tears and with arms outstretched to Heaven. Hyperbole, prosopopaeia,
and other literary machinery are too often and too deliberately used
by him. We are tempted to regard him now as a sophist making the best
use of his arts, now as a rhetorician cudgeling his brains for a
purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited, that is to say, an actor
ever maintaining a thesis, striking an attitude and aiming at effects.
Finally, with the exception of the "Confessions" his style soon
wearies us; it is too studied, and too constantly overstrained. The
author is always the author, and he communicates the defect to his
personages. His Julie argues and descants for twenty successive pages
on dueling, on love, on duty, with a logical completeness, a talent
and phrases that would do honor to an academical moralist.
Commonplace exists everywhere, general themes, a raking fire of
abstractions and arguments, that is to say, truths more or less empty
and paradoxes more or less hollow. The smallest detail of fact, an
anecdote, a trait of habit, would suit us much better, and hence we of
to day prefer the precise eloquence of objects to the lax eloquence of
words. In the eighteenth century it was otherwise; to every writer
this oratorical style was the prescribed ceremonial costume, the
dress-coat he had to put on for admission into the company of select
people. That which seems to us affectation was then only proper; in a
classic epoch the perfect period and the sustained development
constitute decorum, and are therefore to be observed. - It must be
noted, moreover, that this literary drapery which, with us of the
present day, conceals truth did not conceal it to his contemporaries;
they saw under it the exact feature, the perceptible detail no longer
detected by us. Every abuse, every vice, every excess of refinement
and of culture, all that social and moral disease which Rousseau
scourged with an author's emphasis, existed before them under their
own eyes, in their own breasts, visible and daily manifested in
thousands of domestic incidents. In applying satire they had only to
observe or to remember. Their experience completed the book, and,
through the co-operation of his readers, the author possessed power
which he is now deprived of. If we were to put ourselves in their
place we should recover their impressions. His denunciations and
sarcasms, the harsh things of all sorts he says of the great, of
fashionable people and of women, his rude and cutting tone, provoke
and irritate, but are not displeasing. On the contrary, after so many
compliments, insipidities and petty versification all this quickens
the blunted taste; it is the sensation of strong common wine after
long indulgence in orgeat and preserved citron. Accordingly, his
first discourse against art and literature "lifts one at once above
the clouds." But his idyllic writings touch the heart more powerfully
than his satires. If men listen to the moralist that scolds them they
throng in the footsteps of the magician that charms them; especially
do women and the young adhere to one who shows them the promised land.
All accumulated dissatisfactions, weariness of the world, ennui, vague
disgust, a multitude of suppressed desires gush forth, like
subterranean waters, under the sounding line that for the first time
brings them to light. Rousseau with his soundings struck deep and
true through his own trials and through genius. In a wholly
artificial society where people are drawing room puppets, and where
life consists in a graceful parade according to a recognized model, he
preaches a return to nature, independence, earnestness, passion, and
effusion, a manly, active, ardent and happy existence in the open air
and in sunshine. What an opening for restrained faculties, for the
broad and luxurious fountain ever bubbling in man's breast, and for
which their nice society provides no issue! - woman of the court is
familiar with love as then practiced, simply a preference, often only
a pastime, mere gallantry of which the exquisite polish poorly
conceals the shallowness, coldness and, occasionally, wickedness; in
short, adventures, amusements and personages as described by
Crébillion jr. One evening, about to go out to the opera ball, she
finds the "Nouvelle Heloïse" on her toilet-table; it is not surprising
that she keeps her horses and footmen waiting from hour to hour, and
that at four o'clock in the morning she orders the horses to be
unharnessed, and then passes the rest of the night in reading, and
that she is stifled with her tears; for the first time in her life she
finds a man that loves[39]. In like manner if you would comprehend
the success of "Emile," call to mind the children we have described,
the embroidered, gilded, dressed-up, powdered little gentlemen, decked
with sword and sash, carrying the chapeau under the arm, bowing,
presenting the hand, rehearsing fine attitudes before a mirror,
repeating prepared compliments, pretty little puppets in which
everything is the work of the tailor, the hairdresser, the preceptor
and the dancing-master; alongside of these, little ladies of six
years, still more artificial, bound up in whalebone, harnessed in a
heavy skirt composed of hair and a girdle of iron, supporting a head-
dress two feet in height, so many veritable dolls to which rouge is
applied, and with which a mother amuses herself each morning for an
hour and then consigns them to her maids for the rest of the day[40].
This mother reads "Emile." It is not surprising that she immediately
strips the poor little thing, and determines to nurse her next child
herself. - It is through these contrasts that Rousseau is strong.
He revealed the dawn to people who never got up until noon, the
landscape to eyes that had thus far rested only on palaces and
drawing-rooms, a natural garden to men who had never promenaded
outside of clipped shrubs and rectilinear borders, the country, the
family, the people, simple and endearing pleasures, to townsmen made
weary by social avidity, by the excesses and complications of luxury,
by the uniform comedy which, in the glare of hundreds of lighted
candles, they played night after night in their own and in the homes
of others[41]. An audience thus disposed makes no clear distinction
between pomp and sincerity, between sentiment and sentimentality.
They follow their author as one who makes a revelation, as a prophet,
even to the end of his ideal world, much more through his
exaggerations than through his discoveries, as far on the road to
error as on the pathway of truth.

These are the great literary powers of the century. With inferior
successes, and through various combinations, the elements which
contributed to the formation of the leading talents also form the
secondary talents, like those below Rousseau, - Bernardin de St.
Pierre, Raynal, Thomas, Marmontel, Mably, Florian, Dupaty, Mercier,
Madame de Staël; and below Voltaire, - the lively and piquant
intellects of Duclos, Piron, Galiani, President Des Brosses, Rivarol,
Champfort, and to speak with precision, all other talents. Whenever a
vein of talent, however meager, peers forth above the ground it is for
the propagation and carrying forward of the new doctrine; scarcely can
we find two or three little streams that run in a contrary direction,
like the journal of Freron, a comedy by Palissot, or a satire by
Gilbert. Philosophy winds through and overflows all channels public
and private, through manuals of impiety, like the "Théologies
portatives," and in the lascivious novels circulated secretly, through
epigrams and songs, through daily novelties, through the amusements of
fairs,[42] and the harangues of the Academy, through tragedy and the
opera, from the beginning to the end of the century, from the "OEdipe"
of Voltaire, to the "Tarare" of Beaumarchais. It seems as if there
was nothing else in the world. At least it is found everywhere and it
floods all literary efforts; nobody cares whether it deforms them,
content in making them serve as a conduit. In 1763, in the tragedy of
Manco-Capac[43] the "principal part," writes a contemporary, "is that
of a savage who utters in verse all that we have read, scattered
through ' Emile' and the 'Contrat Social,' concerning kings, liberty,
the rights of man and the inequality of conditions." This virtuous
savage saves a king's son over whom a high-priest raises a poniard,
and then, designating the high-priest and himself by turns, he cries,

"Behold the civilized man; here is the savage man!"

At this line the applause breaks forth, and the success of the
piece is such that it is demanded at Versailles and played before the
court.

The same ideas have to be expressed with skill, brilliancy, gaiety,
energy and scandal, and this is accomplished in "The Marriage of
Figaro." Never were the ideals of the age displayed under a more
transparent disguise, nor in an attire that rendered them more
attractive. Its title is the " Folle journee," and indeed it is an
evening of folly, an after-supper like those occurring in the
fashionable world, a masquerade of Frenchmen in Spanish costumes, with
a parade of dresses, changing scenes, couplets, a ballet, a singing
and dancing village, a medley of odd characters, gentlemen, servants,
duennas, judges, notaries, lawyers, music-masters, gardeners,
pastoureaux; in short, a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, for all
the senses, the very opposite of the prevailing drama in which three
pasteboard characters, seated on classic chairs, exchange didactic
arguments in an abstract saloon. And still better, it is an imbroglio
displaying a superabundance of action, amidst intrigues that cross,
interrupt and renew each other, through a pêle-mêle of travesties,
exposures, surprises, mistakes, leaps from windows, quarrels and
slaps, and all in sparkling style, each phrase flashing on all sides,
where responses seem to be cut out by a lapidary, where the eyes would
forget themselves in contemplating the multiplied brilliants of the
dialogue if the mind were not carried along by its rapidity and the
excitement of the action. But here is another charm, the most welcome
of all in a society passionately fond of Parny; according to an
expression of the Comte d'Artois, which I dare not quote, this appeals
to the senses, the arousing of which constitutes the spiciness and
savor of the piece. The fruit that hangs ripening and savory on the
branch never falls but always seems on the point of falling; all hands
are extended to catch it, its voluptuousness somewhat veiled but so
much the more provoking, declaring itself from scene to scene, in the
Count's gallantry, in the Countess's agitation, in the simplicity of
Fanchette, in the jestings of Figaro, in the liberties of Susanne, and
reaching its climax in the precocity of Cherubino. Add to this a
continual double sense, the author hidden behind his characters, truth
put into the mouth of a clown, malice enveloped in simple utterances,
the master duped but saved from being ridiculous by his deportment,
the valet rebellious but preserved from acrimony by his gaiety, and
you can comprehend how Beaumarchais could have the ancient regime
played before its head, put political and social satire on the stage,
publicly attach an expression to each wrong so as to become a by-word,
and ever making a loud report,[44] gather up into a few traits the
entire polemics of the philosophers against the prisons of the State,
against the censorship of literature, against the venality of office,
against the privileges of birth, against the arbitrary power of
ministers, against the incapacity of people in office, and still
better, to sum up in one character every public demand, give the
leading part to a commoner, bastard, bohemian and valet, who, by dint
of dexterity, courage and good-humor, keeps himself up, swims with the
tide, and shoots ahead in his little skiff, avoiding contact with
larger craft and even supplanting his master, accompanying each pull
on the oar with a shower of wit cast broadside at all his rivals.

After all, in France at least, the chief power is intellect.
Literature in the service of philosophy is all-sufficient. The public
opposes but a feeble resistance to their complicity, the mistress
finding no trouble in convincing those who have already been won over
by the servant

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Notes:

[1] How right Taine was. The 20th century should see a rebirth of
violent Jacobinism in Russia, China, Cambodia, Korea, Cuba, Germany,
Italy, Yugoslavia and Albania and of soft and creeping Jacobinism in
the entire Western world. (SR.)

[2]. "Who, born within the last forty years, ever read a word of
Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, or of that whole race who called
themselves freethinkers?" (Burke, "Reflexions on the French
Revolutions," 1790).

[3]. The "Oedipe," by Voltaire, belongs to the year 1718, and his
"Lettres sur les Anglais," to the year 1728. The "Lettres Persanes,"
by Montesquieu, published in 1721, contain the germs of all the
leading ideas of the century.

[4]. "Raison" (cult of). Cult proposed by the Hébertists and
aimed at replacing Christianity under the French Revolution. The Cult
of Reason was celebrated in the church of Notre Dame de Paris on the
10th of November 1793. The cult disappeared with the Hébertists
(March 1794) and Robespierre replaced it with the cult of the Superior
Being. (SR.)

[5]. Joseph de Maistre, Oeuvres inédites," pp. 8, 11.

[6]. Diderot's letters on the Blind and on the Deaf and Dumb are
addressed in whole or in part to women.

[7]. "Correspondence of Gouverneur Morris," (in English), II, 89.
(Letter of January 24, 1790)

[8]. John Andrews in "A comparative view," etc. (1785). - Arthur
Young, I. 123. "I should pity the man who expected, without other
advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a
brilliant circle in London, because he was a fellow of the Royal
Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy
of Sciences at Paris, he is sure of a good reception everywhere."