Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre would have been immensely astonished if he had been told that he was labouring to prepare generations of pessimists by attributing to Providence the cares and solicitude of a nurse in its relations with men. Nothing was further from his thoughts, and yet nothing is more certain from the moment that his works became a success with the public, and exerted an influence over men's minds. Man once convinced that his happiness is the concern of God, considers it the duty of the Divinity to secure it. In misfortune he has no patience to bear his troubles, because he looks upon himself as injured by Providence. The horror of the injustice done to him redoubles his suffering, and he curses the Heaven which does not respect his rights. It would be doing too much honour to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre if we were to make him answerable for the gloomy and bitter turn of mind of our contemporaries, but he certainly helped it on, since for a thoughtful mind his philosophy has a fatal tendency to demonstrate the fallibility of Providence.

He perceived the difficulty quite well, and felt that it is not sufficient to keep repeating over and over again the axiom: "All is for the best in the best of worlds." When one has finished repeating it, the evil is not ended nor explained. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was only too glad to fall back upon his own century, on which he had turned his back during his religious exaltation, and to explain by reasons taken from Diderot and Jean-Jacques the sufferings of humanity in a world created perfect. So he wrote: "Man is born good; it is society that makes bad people, and your education which prepares them." Man is born good; take the savages, who alone upon the earth still possess "real virtue." A good man continues happy so long as he does not turn aside from "the law of nature." Take the savages again—their happiness is perfect, according to the missionaries, so long as they have no intercourse with civilised nations. Society "makes bad people" by its stupid and brutal laws, which ignore and defy those of nature and precipitate us into abysses of evil. Our education prepares our young people to be in their turn wicked, because it is founded upon the false idea with which our whole civilisation is impregnated: it develops the intelligence instead of developing the heart. Nature "does not wish man to be skilful and vainglorious; she wishes him to be happy and good." We are going against her intentions when we undertake to invent scientific systems which "deprave the heart," instead of cultivating sweet and tender sentiments amongst our children. In doing so we commit a criminal error every day of our lives, the fatal consequences of which are quite apparent. Consider what man has become under the influence of this civilisation of which we are so proud.

"Nature, which intended him to be loving, did not furnish him with arms, and so he forged them himself to fight his fellows with. She provides food and shelter for all her children; and the roads leading to our towns are only distinguishable from afar by their gibbets! The history of nature presents only benefits, that of man nothing but wrath and rapine." And further on: "There are many lands which have never been cultivated; but there are none known to Europeans which have not been stained with human blood. Even the lonely wastes of the sea swallow up in their depths shiploads of men sent to the bottom by their fellows. In the towns, flourishing as they seem with their arts and monuments, pride and cunning, superstition and impiety, violence and treachery wage their eternal strife and fill with trouble the lot of the unfortunate inhabitants. The more civilised the society there, the more cruel are its evils and the more they increase in number."

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had his Rousseau beside him, when he thus launched his anathemas against civilisation and the sciences. He occasionally makes use of expressions which closely recall the Discours sur les lettres, les sciences et les arts, and the Discours sur l'inegalité parmi les hommes. Unhappily for his thesis, his eloquent rage against our social state rings false. We feel that it is a rhetorical artifice to help him out of the difficulty of his theory of final causes, and to open out a way for him to bring at last his character of legislator before the public. The occasion was unique for showing to France what she had lost through the incapacity of her ministers, who allowed the memorials of M. de Saint-Pierre to moulder in their portfolios. We thus return to Robinson Crusoe, the ideal colony, and those famous laws of nature which it is our mission to contrast with the laws made by man.

The laws of nature are "moral" and "sentimental" laws; they comprise in the first place all the good and noble sentiments which God has placed in our hearts. Just as reason is a miserable and inferior faculty, so sentiment is the glory and strength of mankind; man owes to it everything great and splendid which he has ever accomplished. "Reason has produced many men of mind in the so-called civilised ages, and sentiment men of genius in the so-called barbarous ages. Reason varies from age to age, sentiment is always the same. Errors of reason are local and transitory, the truths of sentiment are unchanging and universal. By reason the ego is made Greek, English, Turkish; by sentiment it becomes human, divine.... In truth, reason gives us some pleasures; but if it reveals some portion of the order of the universe, it shows us at the same time our own destruction, which is involved in the laws of its preservation. It shows us at once past ills and those that are to come.... The wider it explores it brings back to us the evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our anxieties by its researches, it often only increases them by its knowledge. On the contrary sentiment, blind in its desires, surveys the relics of all countries and all times; it trusts in the midst of ruins, of battles, even of death, in some vague, eternal existence; in all its yearnings it strives after the attributes of the Divinity—infinity, scope, duration, power, greatness, and glory; it adds ardent desire to all our passions, gives to them a sublime impulse, and in subjugating our reason, becomes itself the noblest and best instinct of human life." We must correct Descartes and say: "I feel, therefore I exist."

The apotheosis of sentiment, "blind in its desires" and indomitable in their pursuit, which "subjugates our reason" and makes us act on impulse, strongly resembles an apotheosis of passion, and in fact has led to it. So George Sand strikes some roots in the insipid sensibility of the last century, but we know already that it was not within the scope of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to calculate the not very remote consequences of his principles. He dreamt, without the very least anxiety, of a world entirely governed by sentiment, and emancipated from that abominable reason. No danger could threaten this regenerated community, because its leader had sorted out the sentiments common to humanity, and only allowed such of them to prevail as pity, innocence, admiration, melancholy, and love. This choice promised to the world a succession of Idylls. As for the bad sentiments, hate, avarice, jealousy, ambition, there was no need to take them into consideration or to fear their usurpation; they would disappear from the face of France so soon as the plan of education placed at the end of the Études de la Nature had been adopted.

There is nothing like coming at the right time. At the beginning of the Revolution these sorts of things were listened to with a contrite spirit, and no one thought of laughing at them. Such sentiments appeared as wise as they were beautiful; no one doubted his own virtue and goodness, and all rejoiced in this picture of the delightful emotions which awaited the new society. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre laboured to draw seductive pictures of it, and his efforts have procured us some analyses of public feeling which their date render most interesting.

His chapter on Melancholy is one of the most interesting. Melancholy had only lately come into fashion, and he exerted himself to inquire into the source of this seductive sentiment, the sweetest and most cherished poison of the soul. He to some extent recognised the danger of it, for the word voluptuous occurs several times under his pen: "I do not know," he wrote, "to what physical law the philosopher may attribute the sensations of melancholy. For my part I think that they are the most voluptuous impressions of the soul." That is very finely expressed and very true. Further on, apropos of people who try by artificial means to give themselves sensations of melancholy, he writes: "Our voluptuaries have artificial ruins erected in their gardens.... The tomb has supplied to the poetry of Young and Gessner pictures full of charm; therefore our voluptuaries have imitation tombs put up in their gardens." He is himself "a voluptuary" when he solaces his woes, by abandoning himself to the melancholy which bad weather creates in him. "It seems to me at such times that nature conforms to my situation like a tender friend. She is, besides, always so interesting under whatever aspect she reveals herself, that when it rains I seem to see a beautiful woman in tears, all the more beautiful the more she is distressed. In order to experience these sentiments, which I dare to call voluptuous, we must have no plans for going out, or paying visits, or hunting, or travelling, which always put us into a bad temper, because we are thwarted; ... to enjoy bad weather it is necessary that our soul should travel, our body stay quiet."

We have in these lines a great science of melancholy, given to us by a refined "voluptuary" who understands how to give to agreeable sensations their maximum of enjoyment. One is quite taken in to find directly after a series of pretentious articles in the manner of the day, in which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre explains the pleasure of the grave by the sentiment of the immortality of the soul, and the pleasure of decay by that of the infinity of time. I notice in it, however, an effort to interest the reader in the real and native gothic ruins, which might be called daring, at that time of mania for filling one's garden with Greek and Roman erections, imitation temples, imitation tombs, imitation columns, and imitation ruins, ornamented with allegorical emblems and sentimental inscriptions. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre did not oppose this classical bric-à-brac which pleased him only too well, but he possessed to a greater extent than his contemporaries the sense of the picturesque, which bore fruit in some romantic scenes like the description of the Château of Lillebonne.

The château is perched on a height commanding a valley. "The high walls which surround it are rounded off at the corners, and so covered with ivy that there are but few points from which one can mark their course. About the middle of their length, where I should think it would not be easy to penetrate, rise high battlemented towers, upon the tops of which grow big trees, having the appearance of a thick head of hair. Here and there through the carpet of ivy which covers their sides, are gothic windows, embrasures and gaps resembling mouths of caverns, through which one can see the stairs. The only birds to be seen flying round this desolate habitation are buzzards, which hover about in silence; and if occasionally the cry of a bird is heard, it is sure to be an owl whose nest is there.... When I remember at sight of this stronghold, that it was formerly inhabited by petty tyrants who from there used to plunder their unlucky vassals and even travellers, I seem to see the carcass of some great beast of prey." This conclusion is from a man who, in default of an historical sense, has at least an historical imagination.