BENJAMIN CONSTANT
"I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die before He finished His work, if the world is not an opus posthumum? He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died. Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we, in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have an aim.'—Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same predicament."
In another place he writes: "Oh, how generous, how magnanimous are our princes! They have again issued a pardon from which none are excluded save those who have rebelled against them. It reminds me of a psalm in praise of the exploits of the Hebrew God. He has slain this one and that, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has drowned Pharaoh and all his hosts, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has smitten the first-born of Egypt with death, for His mercy endureth for ever, &c. &c."
"You do not appear to be democratic. Like you, I believe fraud and frenzy to be at the bottom of the Revolutionist's heart. But I prefer the fraud and frenzy which pulls down prisons, abolishes titles and such like imbecilities, and places all religious day-dreams upon the same footing, to the fraud and madness which would maintain and consecrate that monstrosity produced by grafting the barbaric stupidity of the Hebrew upon the barbaric ignorance of the Vandal."
"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder, nor the artist, nor the figures in this Laterna Magica of which I have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated."
Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the book On Religion, planned at the close of the century to effect the same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in France, had originally a very different character from that which it finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and the general indecision of its principles.
The main idea is as follows: All the earlier conceptions of the nature of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe that mankind can attain to absolute truth—that truth, therefore, is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing's Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts; but he is more in sympathy with his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion" unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal power; but he imagines that in his sentiment religieux he has discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e. diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.—Few books have more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and indecision of the period in which it was written.
In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play, Der Bürgergeneral; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement. In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself jestingly assumed Sola inconstantia constans as his motto. He married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife. In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object in his life.