A peasant had been imprisoned for poaching on Helvétius’ grounds, and his gun confiscated. Helvétius went to him, bought back his gun, paid his fine, and had him set free, begging his silence because Minette had warned him to be severe with the man as he deserved. That warning troubled her generous heart. She too went to the culprit, gave him money to pay his fine and repurchase his gun, and vowed him to secrecy. Whether the peasant kept the secrets (as well as the price of two fines and two guns), and husband and wife confessed to each other, history does not relate.
There is, indeed, a reverse side to Helvétius’ character as enlightened landowner. Carlyle, in his ‘Essay on Diderot,’ quotes Diderot’s ‘Voyage à Bourbonne,’ in which the ex-Farmer-General is portrayed as a cruelly strict preserver, living in the midst of peasants who broke his windows, plundered his garden, tore up his palings, and hated him so savagely that he dared not go out shooting save with an armed escort of four-and-twenty keepers. Diderot added that Helvétius had swept away a little village of huts which the poor people had built on the fringe of his preserves; that the good philosopher was a coward, and the unhappiest of men. But it must be remembered that Diderot did not speak from first-hand observation, but drew, and said he drew, all his information from a Madame de Nocé, a neighbour of Helvétius. Now happy, unsociable people like Helvétius and his wife are not likely to be popular in a limited country society, which would expect much from them, and get practically nothing. Saint-Lambert and Marmontel both speak of Helvétius’ liberality, generosity, and unostentatious benevolence. Morellet, who was his closest intimate for many years, adds like testimony, and especially mentions his mercy to poachers. One story illustrating it has been told. Another runs that Helvétius found a man poaching under the very windows of his house, and at first naturally inclined to wrath, curbed himself: ‘If you wanted game, why did you not ask me? I would have given it to you.’
Perhaps the truth of the whole matter lies in that anecdote. The keen sportsman and preserver did sometimes lose his temper and forget his compassion: his better self soon recalled it, and that rare disposition of humility and love for his fellows hastened to make amends.
In 1755, the book to which he had devoted those long, laborious mornings at Voré (by which I must certainly achieve glory, if I am to achieve it at all!) was finished at last. It was to be called ‘De l’Esprit’—not to be translated ‘Wit,’ as Croker translated it, but something much more serious—‘On the Mind.’
It set out to prove a new theory of human action, and a new system of morality. Virtue and vice? There are no such things. Self-interest, rightly understood, is the explanation of the one, and self-interest, misunderstood, of the other. Selfishness and the passions are the sole mainsprings of our deeds. So far from character being destiny, as Novalis is to declare, destiny is in all cases character. Everybody is the creature of his environment and his education. Free Will? What free will to be an honest man has the child of thieves, brought up to thieve in a slum? Change his condition, and you change him. Leave him, and he will steal as certainly as fire burns and the waves beat on the shore. As for the vaunted superiority of the human intelligence over the brutes, ‘an accident of physical organisation’ can account for that. We are as the brutes, only a little better, and the difference is wholly of degree, not of kind.
Put these theories, with their showy falsehood and their substratum of truth, on the library table of any clever man, and get him to do his best to prove them by sophistry and ingenuity, by trick, by subterfuge, by illustration—somehow, anyhow, so that he prove them to the hilt—and the result will be pretty well what Helvétius made it. There was scarcely a good story, or a bad one, he had heard in his early gay life in Paris that he did not bring in, by hook or by crook, to point and enliven his paradox. Madame de Graffigny told Bettinelli that nearly all the notes were the ‘sweepings’ of her salon.
‘On the Mind’ is entertaining or nothing—difficulties presented solely that they may be wittily demolished—easy, inaccurate, trifling; a style ‘insinuating and caressing ... made for light minds, young people and women,’ says Damiron; a book which fashion might skip at its toilette, and then, on the strength of remembering two or three of its dubious anecdotes, claim a complete knowledge of its bizarre philosophy. For it was but a bizarrerie—a jeu d’esprit—and Helvétius knew it. He was merely concerned to see how far his impossible theories could be made plausible, and wrote them to catch the public ear, and turn their author into the lion and darling of the season.
When the thing was ready he took it to Tercier, the censor, who passed it, suggesting only the omission of a few too complimentary references to free-thinking Hume. Helvétius cut them out. Malesherbes, during its printing, observed uneasily that the book contained ‘some very strong things’—insolent remarks, for instance, on that dear, crusted old despotism under which we all live, and certainly a suggestion that any means to overthrow tyranny are permissible. But, all the same, in May 1758 it received its privilege. Majesty was graciously pleased to accept a copy from the author, our maître d’hôtel. It was already in the hands of the philosophers. And everybody began to read.
It would not have been wonderful, if the theories had had a little more vraisemblance, that most people, particularly people who had devoted their lives and their fortunes to others, who had laboured in poverty that other men might be free and rich, should object to see their self-denial set down as self-interest, and to be informed that the highest aspiration of their soul was really nothing but a morbid condition of the body. But, considering their manifest absurdity, it is wonderful that these assertions were taken seriously.
Madame du Deffand, indeed, might naturally say that in making self-interest the mainspring of conduct, Helvétius had revealed everybody’s secret. He had so certainly discovered hers. But Turgot, whose life was to do good, had better have laughed at an absurdity than have risen up to condemn it as ‘philosophy without logic, literature without taste, and morality without goodness.’ A Condorcet, whose long devotion to duty was rewarded only with ruin and death, need not have troubled to loathe it. Rousseau immediately sat down to refute it: some of the most inspired pages of his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ still glow with the hatred with which it inspired him. Grimm wisely only pooh-poohed it. Voltaire grumbled that his pupil had promised a book on the Mind, and presented a treatise on Matter; that he had ‘put friendship among the bad passions,’ and, much worse than all, has actually compared me—ME—to two such feeble, second-rate luminaries as Crébillon and Fontenelle! No wonder that he found the title, ‘De l’Esprit,’ equivocal, the matter unmethodical, all the new things false and all the old ones truisms.