The innocence of this unsuspecting public has been wantonly abused. The Parisian folk, like the Pnyxian people in the "Knights" of Aristophanes, are poor fools who allow themselves to be misled and duped by evil counsels.
If we diligently make all possible inquiries, we shall also find, on the left bank of the Seine, a number of saloons, in which are gathered every evening a company of worthy souls, who lament, with the truest sincerity, over the corruption of our manners. Hearing them, we might suspect that fire from heaven must fall upon us sooner or later; our wretched country is in a worse pass than even Sodom and Gomorrah; the French Revolution has fatally corrupted the very core of our hearts; and whom have we to thank for this accursed revolution? The Encyclopedists, M. Turgot and his reforms, the publication of M. Necker's Compte-Rendu, the—who knows what? perhaps the substitution of waistcoats for vests, and the introduction of cabs!
The two arguments are equally forcible. To throw fire and flames at the corruption of manners, and to raise loud cries about the decay of taste, to attribute it either to this or that event, to accuse these or those writers—one is, in truth, worth about as much as the other; the justice, good sense, and discernment are equal in either case.
May we not, in fact, say that the general sentiments of the masses, their habitual dispositions, and the ideas which rule them, are things which attach themselves to nothing, and which totter when they are but touched with the finger's end? May we not say that these are at the mercy of any fortuitous circumstances—things to be disposed of at pleasure by any half dozen volumes?
The influence of great men is, indeed, vast; we can not forget it—we would thank Heaven that it is so. And this influence is especially striking at epochs in which any important change is accomplished in government, laws, manners, or national taste; nothing, assuredly, is more natural than this—nothing can be more just and salutary. But whence do great men derive this unquestionable ascendency?
They belong to their time—in this fact is the mystery explained; they respond to its instincts, they anticipate its tendencies; the appeal which is addressed to all indiscriminately, they are the first to hear. That which to others is as yet only an indistinct longing, has disclosed its secret to them. Superior as they are, they march at the head, unfolding their wings to every breeze that rises, clearing the path, removing obstacles, and revealing to the astonished masses the luminous truths and the eternal laws which occasion their confused desires and their latest fancies. Herein, and herein only, resides all their power: this is the condition of their success.
The philosophers of the last century, then, were not the efficient causes of the great and glorious movement of 1789: such honor is not theirs. The general causes which, during a long course of years, prepared for 1789, these same causes in their early infancy gave birth to the philosophers of the last century.
And neither are the great writers of the present day the men who have transformed the taste of the public; we would rather say that the general causes, which were destined to produce this metamorphosis, excited and inspired, when the proper moment arrived, the great writers of our time.