Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

In Art he could not disabuse his mind of the mania for moral effect; he does not even spare the landscape. "If one wishes to find a great deal of interest in a smiling and agreeable landscape, one must be able to see it through a great triumphal arch, ruined by time. On the contrary, a town full of Etruscan and Egyptian monuments looks much more antique when one sees it from under a green and flowery bower."

He is, however, much more realistic, and consequently more modern, than his description of his Elysium would lead one to suppose. He deserves to be pardoned his philosophical landscapes, because he was the first to say that there is nothing ugly in nature, one only needs to know how to look at it. Man disfigures it by his works, but that which he has not touched always retains its beauty. "The ugliest objects are agreeable when they are in the place where Nature put them." A crab or a monkey which appears to you hideous in a natural history collection, ceases to be so when you see it on the shore or in a virgin forest; they then form an integral part of the general beauty of the landscape.

The same with people. A fig for conventional types and mythological costumes! copy nature. Make real shoe-blacks with their blacking-boxes; real nuns with their mob-caps; real kitchens with the real milk-jug and saucepan. Make your great men look like other people, instead of representing them "like angel trumpeters at the day of judgment, hair flying, eyes wild, the muscles of the face convulsed, and their draperies floating about in the wind." "Those are," say the painters and sculptors, "expressions of genius. But men of genius and great men are not fools.... The coins of Virgil, Plato, Scipio, Epaminondas, and even of Alexander, represent them with a calm, tranquil air." Show us a real Cleopatra, not "an academical face without expression, a Sabine in stature, looking robust and full of health, her large eyes cast up to heaven, wearing around her big and massive arms a serpent coiled about them like a bracelet. No, make her as Plutarch shows her to us: 'Small, vivacious, sprightly, running about the streets of Alexandria at night disguised as a market-woman, and, concealed amongst some goods, being carried on Apollodore's shoulders to go and see Julius Cæsar.'"

In ethics Bernardin de Saint-Pierre warmly combats the theory of the influence of climate, race, soil, temperament and food upon the vicious or virtuous tendencies of men. It seemed to him absurd to say, like Montesquieu, that the mountain is republican, and the plain monarchic; that cold makes us conquerors, and heat slaves. That is only "a philosophical opinion ... refuted by all historical evidence."

He attacked with the same ardour the theory of heredity which has become so widespread in our day. "I myself ask where one has ever seen inclination to vice or virtue communicated through the blood?" History proves that that too is only "a philosophical opinion," and it is a good thing that it is so, for man would no longer be at liberty to choose between good and evil if these different doctrines were true.

It is curious to see the partisans of free-will preoccupying themselves, more than a hundred years ago, with the theory of heredity. It is a proof that ideas float about a long time in the air in the germ-stage before they come to maturity and are adopted into the general advance of thought. It would be as absurd to pretend that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had actually conceived the physiological law, whose consequences make him so indignant as to attribute the discoveries of Darwin to his grandfather Erasmus. It is none the less true that his generation had glimmering ideas of a number of questions which have become common-places in the second half of the nineteenth century.

With a little good will we find even in the Études de la Nature a kind of embryo of Hegel's theory of Contradictions. Contraries produce agreement, said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. "I look upon this great truth as the key to the whole of philosophy. It has been as fruitful in discoveries as this other maxim: 'Nothing has been made in vain.'" He adds: "Every truth, except the truths of fact, is the result of two contrary ideas.... If men paid attention to this law, it would put an end to most of their mistakes and their disputes; for one may say that everything being compensated by contraries, every man who affirms a simple proposition is only half right, because the contrary proposition exists equally in nature."

We have already said that he had not been happy in the field of science. It would be doing him a service to pass over in silence this part of his work, but his shade would not forgive us. He attached an enormous importance to it, and only attributed to the spirit of routine and professional jealousy the obstinacy of the learned men in taking no notice of his two chief discoveries—the origin of tides, and the elongation of the poles. We will explain them briefly. It is picturesque science if ever anything was.

The poles, says Saint-Pierre, are covered with an immense cupola of ice, "according to the experience of sailors, and also of common sense. The cupola of the north pole is about two thousand leagues in diameter, and twenty-five in height. It is covered with icicles, which are about ten leagues high. The cupola of the south pole is larger still. Each one melts alternately during half the year, according as each hemisphere is in summer or winter. The two poles are thus 'the sources of the sea, as the snow mountains are the sources of the principal rivers.' From the sides of the poles escape currents which produce the great movements of the ocean. This granted, the flow of these currents takes its course to the middle channel of the Atlantic ocean, drawn towards the line by the diminution of waters which the sun evaporates there continually. Two contrary currents or collateral eddies are thus produced, which are in fact the tides."

Now imagine the terrestrial globe capped at the two poles with these formidable glaciers, beside which Mont Blanc is only a mole-hill. The globe is necessarily oval in form. "In truth some celebrated academicians have laid down as a principle that the earth is flattened at the poles."[22] According to them "the curve of the earth is more sudden towards the equator in the sense north and south, because the degrees are there smaller; and the earth, on the contrary, is flatter towards the poles because the degrees are larger there."