CHAPTER I.
OF THE VIOLENT AND UNDEFINED AGITATION OF THE HUMAN MIND AT THE MOMENT WHEN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BROKE OUT.
What I have previously said of France is applicable to the whole Continent. In the ten or fifteen years preceding the French Revolution, the human mind was abandoned, throughout Europe, to strange, incoherent, and irregular impulses, symptoms of a new and extraordinary disease, which would have singularly alarmed the world if the world had understood them.
A conception of the greatness of man in general, and of the omnipotence of his reason and the boundless range of his intelligence, had penetrated and pervaded the spirit of the age; yet this lofty conception of mankind in general was commingled with a boundless contempt for the age in which men were living and the society to which they belonged. Never was so much humility united to so much pride—the pride of humanity was inflated to madness; the estimate each man formed of his age and country was singularly low.
All over the Continent that instinctive attachment and involuntary respect which the men of all ages and all countries are wont in general to feel for their own peculiar institutions, for their traditional customs, and for the wisdom or the virtues of their forefathers, had almost ceased to exist among the educated classes. Nothing was spoken of but the decrepitude and incoherence of existing institutions, the vices and corruption of existing society.
Traces of this state of mind may be discovered throughout the literature of Germany. The philosophy, the history, the poetry, even the novels of the time, are full of it. Every product of the intellect was so stamped by it, that the books of that epoch bear a mark that distinguishes them from the works of every other age. All the memoirs of that day, which gave birth to a profusion of memoirs—all the correspondence of the time which has been published—attest a state of mind so different from the present, that nothing short of this concurrence of certain and abundant evidence could convince us of the fact.
Every page of Schlosser’s ‘History of the Eighteenth Century’ reveals this general presentiment, that a great change was about to take place in the condition of mankind.
George Forster, one of the companions of Captain Cook, to whose expedition he had been attached with his father as a naturalist, writes to Jacobi in 1779: ‘Things cannot remain as they are: this is announced by every symptom in the world of science, in the world of theology, and in that of politics. Much as my heart has hitherto desired peace, not less do I desire to see the arrival of this crisis on which such mighty hopes are founded.’[85] ‘Europe,’ he writes again in 1782, ‘seems to me on the brink of a horrible revolution; in truth the mass is so corrupt that bleeding may well be necessary.’[86] ‘The present state of society,’ said Jacobi, ‘presents to me nothing but the aspect of a dead and stagnant sea: that is why I could desire an inundation, be it what it may, even of barbarians, to sweep away this reeking marsh and lay bare a fresh soil.’[87] ‘We are living in the midst of shattered institutions and forms’—a monstrous chaos which everywhere reflects an image of dismay[88] and of death.’ These things were written in a pretty country house, by wealthy people, surrounded by their literary friends, who passed their time in endless philosophical discussions which affected, excited, and inflamed them till they shed torrents of daily tears—in imagination.
It was not the princes, the ministers, the rulers, or those, in short, who, in different capacities, were directing the march of affairs, who perceived that some great change was at hand. The idea that government could become quite different from what government then was,—that all which had lasted so long might be destroyed and superseded by that which as yet only existed in the brain of a few men of letters—the thought that the existing order of things might be overthrown to establish a new order in the midst of disorder and ruin, would have appeared to them an absurd illusion and a fantastic dream. The gradual improvement of society seemed to them the limit of the possible.