Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

The work on France in the eighteenth century with which, at the age of twenty-seven, Barante made his début in literature, reveals a maturity and moderation surprising in so young an author, but which may be explained, partly by a certain lack of warmth in his nature, partly by his official position. In all the books which we have just glanced at, there lay an implicit judgment of the eighteenth century; in this we have the first connected survey and estimate of it. The survey is a brief but excellent one; the general conception of the period is philosophically based; the presentment is clear and passionless; but the estimate is very faulty, on every side conditioned and hampered by those limits beyond which the authors of the Emigrant Literature were incapable of seeing. This settlement with the past century, in which the new generation renounces all connection with the old, is not a final settlement, and is far from being as unprejudiced as it is passionless. Barante has the honest desire to judge impartially, and emphasises the fact that he is the better qualified to do so since he does not belong to the generation which took immediate part in the Revolution as destroyers or defenders of the old social order; but his intellect is not as unbiassed as his will; his whole development is, though he does not know it, conditioned by the reaction against that century the character of which he, as observer and thinker, undertakes to explain.

Barante's standpoint is a suggestive, and was in those days an uncommon one. He hears it constantly asserted that the authors of the eighteenth century were responsible for the revolution which at the close of that century shook France to its very foundations, and this assertion he considers a baseless one. It contains an injustice to those authors, from the fact that it attributes too much significance to them. If the building had not been ready to fall, that literary puff of wind would not have sufficed to blow it over. Contemporaneously with Nodier and Mme. de Staël, he formulates and interprets the proposition: Literature is the expression of the state of society, not its cause. In his opinion, the Seven Years' War had a great deal more to do with the weakening of authority in France than had the Encyclopedia, and the profanity which prevailed at the court of old Louis XIV., at the time when he was cruelly persecuting both the Protestants and the Jansenists, did more to undermine reverence for religion than the attacks and jeers of the philosophers. He is very far from ascribing any particular merit to the literature of the preceding century, but he regards it as merely "a symptom of the general disease." With historical penetration he searches for the omens of the collapse of monarchy, and finds them much further back, in the results of the conflict between Mazarin and the Fronde. Held down by the iron hand of Richelieu, princes, nobles, and officials, all the great in turn, had made a bid for popular support, and by so doing had lost in dignity and consideration. The power of royalty alone remained totally unaffected. The waves of opposition rolled to the steps of the throne, but stopped there; during the first half of Louis XIV.'s reign the throne stood in more solitary elevation than ever over the general level. Richelieu's work was accomplished; every power in the land, except that of the throne, was destroyed. If this one remaining authority were undermined, then all the powers of society would stand bereft of the veneration which had constituted their strength; and this was very sufficiently done during Louis XIV.'s miserable old age, the insolent rule of the Regency, and the wanton, foolish rule of Louis XV.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century, then, according to Barante, was not the conscious work of any individual or individuals, but represented the general bent of the mind of the people; it was written, so to speak, at their dictation. This did not add to its value; to his thinking, all that this philosophy accomplished was to overturn an immoral and inequitable government in an immoral and inequitable manner. But what thus happened, happened of necessity. The soul of Barante's book is the firmest faith in historical laws. "The human mind," he says, "seems as irrevocably appointed to run a prescribed course as are the stars." He knows that there is at all times a necessary connection between literature and the condition of society; but whereas this connection is at times indistinct, requiring penetration to detect it, and careful demonstration to prove it plainly, in the period under consideration it seems to him so plain that no nice observation is required to discover it.

The first reason for this he finds in the relation of the writers to their readers. In earlier times the number of the former had been very small; thinly scattered over the whole of Europe, they had written in a dead language. In those days there was no social life, and conversation had not become a power. Authors did not write for society but for each other, and society in return looked upon them as uninteresting pedants. In time culture and enlightenment spread among the higher classes, and writers entered into relation with them; they wrote for princes and courtiers, for the little class which did not need to work. In the days of Louis XIV. authors tried to please this class, and were flattered by its approbation. But by degrees civilisation spread until a real reading public came into existence, a public which made the author independent of the great. Frederick the Second of Prussia, who, to shed lustre upon his reign, called Voltaire to his court, did not treat him with the condescension shown by Louis XIV. to Molière, but seemed to place him by his side as an equal. The greatest political and the greatest intellectual powers of the age stood for a moment upon an equal footing, without any one discerning that the time was approaching when these two powers were to declare war upon each other. And in the last half of the century there was unintermitted reciprocity between men of letters and society in general.

In the olden times a philosopher had been a severe, systematic thinker, who, careless of approbation, developed a connected system. The word had changed its meaning now; the philosopher was no longer a solitary thinker, but a man of the world, who conversed more than he wrote or taught, who invariably sought to please society and win its approbation, and who did this by making himself its organ. Barante sees an evidence of the powerful influence exercised by the spirit of the times upon individual writers in the circumstance that authors, such, for instance, as the Abbé de Mably, who had the strongest antipathy to the philosophers of the fashionable school, nevertheless resembled the very men they opposed, and arrived at the same results by different means. And he finds in the unpatriotic classical education of the upper classes the explanation of the fact that the public forestalled the men of letters in neglecting and slighting their own historical traditions and national memories for the sake of laboriously appropriated exotic ideals. At school the child learned to spell the names of Epaminondas and Leonidas long before he heard of Bayard or Du Guesclin; he was encouraged to take a deep interest in the Trojan wars, but no one dreamt of interesting him in the Crusades. Roman law, the principles of which are the outcome of autocratic rule, had gradually superseded those Germanic laws, which were the outcome of the life of a free people. What wonder then, that when authors turned to antiquity for their subject-matter, and grew enthusiastic on the subject of Greece and Rome, they found a ready audience in French society! What wonder that in literature also, national tradition was slighted and broken!

Having thus in advance laid the blame on society of all the mistakes made by literature in the eighteenth century (and its achievements appear to him to be one and all mistakes), Barante has provided himself with the basis for a calm appraisement of the individual eminent writers. In his appreciations we have the views scattered throughout the Emigrant Literature concentrated and, as it were, brought to a focus.

Voltaire, whose reputation had, since his death, been made the subject of as much hot dispute as the body of Patroclus, he criticises coldly, but without animosity. He admires his natural gifts, the easily stirred, impetuous feeling that produced his pathos, the irresistible fascination of his eloquence and his wit, and the charm that lies in his genial facility in shaping and expressing thoughts. But he sees the use Voltaire made of his talents, sees how he allowed himself to be led by the opinions of the time, by the desire to succeed, to please. He laments the tendency to shameless, irreverent mockery, which characterised Voltaire even as an old man. And this is all. For what was just, for what was great in Voltaire's life-warfare he has no eyes, no word. He professes to criticise Voltaire impartially, and yet he, as it were, juggles away the indignation that was in his soul, that which was the very breath of life in him; he calls the persecutions of Voltaire stupid, but never once wicked; he excuses, not the blots on Voltaire's greatness, but, as it were, the greatness itself—and it is evident that he really desires to be impartial, since he excuses.

Of all the great authors of the past century, Montesquieu is the only one for whom Barante expresses any really warm admiration. This is natural enough, for in him he recognised some of his own qualities. Montesquieu was not the ordinary author who could let his pen run away with him; he was, like Barante himself, an official, a high official, a famous lawyer, who was obliged to consider the dignity of his position and the effect of his example. "President Montesquieu," says Barante, "was not in that position of independence which men of letters prize so highly, and which is possibly injurious both to their talents and their characters." One is sensible of the cautious attempt at selfvindication made in this ingenious paradox by the imperial official who was at enmity with the Emperor. But whatever the cause, Barante made no mistake in rating Montesquieu very highly. Other authors of his period had more genius, but Montesquieu's accurate knowledge of practical life, of administration and government, gave him an insight which the others lacked, and a moderation on which high value was set at the beginning of this century. In Montesquieu Barante approves of things which he censures bitterly in others. He invites the reader to compare Montesquieu's work, De l'Esprit des Lois, with an older work by Domat on the same subject, in order to see the progress in philosophy made by Montesquieu, who, treating religion with all due reverence, nevertheless regards it as a subordinate matter.[1]

Diderot is the author against whom Barante is most biassed; in judging him he shows himself extremely narrow-minded; he allows Diderot's precipitancy and violence to blind him to his genius. A genius whose recklessness ever and again reminds one of the recklessness of an elemental force, was as little comprehensible to Barante as to the rest of the alarmed, disillusioned generation to which he belongs. Diderot was better calculated to please the Germans, who were unprejudiced in intellectual matters, than his own over-sensitive countrymen of this period. Goethe himself translated Le Neveu de Rameau, and Hegel treated of it exhaustively in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. But Barante, passionately condemning Diderot's incessant and unbridled attacks upon religion, sums him up in these words: "His inner man was ardent and disorderly, his mind was a fire without fuel, and the talent of which he showed some gleams was never put to any systematic use." It was but natural that the eighteenth-century writer who had the profoundest understanding of nature, should be held in lowest esteem by the young idealists.

Rousseau, the last of the writers of the eighteenth century cited before the bar of the nineteenth, had characteristics which necessarily appealed to Barante. He was the only sentimentalist among these writers, and the new century had begun sentimentally. He was the most solitary of them, and the new century appreciated the isolated personality. He stood quite apart from the philosophers and Encyclopedists; his character had been formed by a strange and unhappy life; he was uninfluenced by society or public opinion. Without family, friends, position, or country, he had wandered about the world, and, on his first appearance as an author, he had condemned society instead of flattering it; instead of giving in to public opinion, he tried to alter it; his attempt was successful, and where others pleased, he roused enthusiasm. All this was certain to appeal to Barante. But one has only to compare Barante's pronouncement on Rousseau with that published twenty years earlier by his friend Mme. de Staël, to see what progress the reaction against the spirit of the previous century has made. That he dwells at length on the impurity of Rousseau's life and the bad points in his character is in itself quite justifiable, and in this matter his criticism only presents the natural contrast to Mme. de Staël's warm apologetics. His severe judgment of Rousseau's political doctrines is the result of more critical, mature reflection than Mme. de Staël's woman-like attempt to vindicate them up to a certain point. But in his appreciation of Rousseau's attempts at religious reform, he is far from reaching her level. His principal objection to the famous Confession of Faith, to the so-called natural religion, is that it is a religion without public worship. "Nor can we wonder at this," he says, "for to a morality without deeds, like Rousseau's, a religion without worship is the inevitable corollary." His bias towards inference-drawing in favour of the existing, actually led this free-thinking critic to defend the traditional usages of the Church against Rousseau.