Les précepteurs du monde à Londres out pris naissance.
C’est d’eux qu’il faut prendre leçon.
Aussi je meurs d’impatience
D’y voyager. De par Newton
Je le verrai, ce pays où l’on pense.
All this of course is farcical; but the author, a member of the French Academy, had a serious purpose. He was attacking an attitude which was expressed in Voltaire’s well-known eulogy,
Le soleil des Anglais, c’est le feu du génie.
Saurin, in his preface, announces his esteem for England and her authors, but declares that the popularity of the ‘cult’ is due to the jealous dislike by Frenchmen of their own authors—a conclusion not quite obvious. In any case, the academician felt that he had a duty to the nation. In 1772 he revised his comedy, and it was again performed.
But Anglomania lived on. English authors were still graciously received in the salons. Madame du Deffand dared to assert that they were completely superior to the French in all matters of reasoning.[18] The English language was increasingly studied, and English novelists and philosophers continued popular. Madame Necker records[19] an anecdote of a lady who went to England ‘pour renouveler ses idées.’ The lady was perhaps fulfilling Montesquieu’s famous advice, to travel in Germany, sojourn in Italy, and think in England.
Anglomania was thus more than a passing fashion; it was but the superficial evidence of a respect for English philosophy of life which Frenchmen had taken more seriously than had the English themselves. It happened, as it has happened more than once, that English literature was more highly esteemed abroad than at home. ‘Nous avons augmenté,’ said Madame Necker to Gibbon,[20] ‘jusque chez vous la célébrité de vos propres auteurs.’ English novels were read in France for the new ideals of life which they were supposed to embody, and much that in England was a mere pastime—Clarissa, for example—became in France a philosophy of conduct. A philosopher like Hume, and a philosophical historian like Gibbon, found that Paris delighted to honour the prophets whom England was too careless to stone.