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

by Georg Brandes

At the bottom of all this narrow-mindedness and injustice of Barante's, lay what lay at the root of much that was false and perverted in other Liberal writers during the two following decades, namely, that spiritualistic philosophy which was now making its way into France, and which, after encountering much resistance, became dominant; nay, was actually, under Cousin and his school, elevated to the rank of State philosophy. Had this philosophy been content to develop its principles and ideas as clearly and convincingly as possible, it would have been a philosophy like any other, would have roused opposition, but never enmity and detestation. But its champions, from the very beginning, and in almost every country into which it found its way, displayed unscientific and ill-omened tendencies. They were less anxious to prove their theories than to vindicate the moral and religious tendency of these theories. They were far less bent upon refuting their opponents than upon denying them feeling for what is noble, high enthusiasms, sense of duty, and ardour.

Mme. de Staël's dread of sensationalism was not a dread of the philosophy in itself, but of its consequences. The noble-hearted woman, who, with all her love of truth, was never anything but a dilettante in philosophy, was possessed by a naïve fear that sensationalistic psychology would lead men to submit unresistingly to the tyranny of Napoleon; so, out of love for liberty, she took up arms against it. Barante, as a man, has not her excuse. To him also, however, Descartes and Leibnitz are not only great thinkers, but represent the principle of good in metaphysics; as if there were any place for moral principles in metaphysics. "Possibly," he observes, "they at times lost themselves in misty regions, but at least they pursued an upward direction; their teaching harmonises with the thoughts which move us when we reflect profoundly on ourselves; and this path necessarily led to the noblest of sciences, to religion and morality." He goes on to describe how men grew weary of following them, and turned to follow in the path of Locke and Hume, whose doctrine he describes, not as a contradictory though equally justifiable one-sidedness, but as a degradation of human nature, a prostitution of science. He thinks it natural that Spinoza (whom he couples with Hobbes) should be opposed not only with reasons, but "with indignation."[2]

He confronts the empiricists with Kant's famous doctrine that the pure notions of the understanding have their sources in the nature of the soul, and that an innate fundamental conception of religion is to be found at all times and in all races. Always and everywhere, he says, there is to be found the belief in a life after death, reverence for the dead, burial of the dead in the certainty that life has not ended for them, and, finally, the belief that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. These are to him, much as they were to Benjamin Constant, the spiritual elements which constitute the firm foundation of religion. He does not realise that they may be resolved into still simpler elements, which are to be found unconnected with religious feeling. For he does not investigate freely, independently, but esteems it an honour to succeed to what he calls "le glorieux héritage de la haute philosophie."

In a precisely similar manner he inveighs against attempts to place morality upon an empirical basis. "Instead," he says, "of starting from the feeling of justice and sympathy which dwells in the hearts of all men, people have tried to base morality upon the instinct of self-preservation and utility." He clearly has no comprehension whatever of the profound philosophic instinct which has led the thinkers of the opposite school to resolve the idea of justice into its first elements, and show how it originates and takes shape. He merely writes bombastically and indignantly of the impossibility of arriving by such processes at revealed religion, "the divine proofs of which unbelief had rejected."[3] The same man who praises Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, and approves of that author's qualification of religion as a secondary matter, is, with the half-heartedness of the period, horrified by the attempt of the empirical philosophers to discover the elements which go to the construction of the idea of justice. Hence it is that we find in Barante the beginnings of that foolish play upon the double meaning of the word sensualism, which was to be throughout the century a weapon in the hands of hypocrisy and baseness—the word being used at one time as the appellation of the particular philosophy sometimes known by that name, at another as the equivalent for sensuality, or yet again for the doctrine that sensual pleasures are the aim of life. Barante, like Cousin, defends the superficial and unscientific spiritualism which flourished in France in the first decades of this century as a philosophy which encouraged virtue and morality.

Mme. de Staël wrote a notice of Barante's book for one of the newspapers of the day, the Mercure de France. The censor forbade it to be printed at the time, but it was published later, without alterations. It is only three pages long, but a critic needs no further evidence to convince him of the genius of the writer. She begins with some warm words of admiration for the maturity and rare moderation of the young author, only regretting that he does not more frequently abandon himself to his impressions, and reminding him that restraint does not always imply strength. Then, as if in a flash, she perceives beneath the incidental and personal merits and defects of the book the intellectual character of the new century. The consideration of this work seems to have suddenly and forcibly revealed to her to what an extent she herself, with her cheerful, reformatory energy, was a product of the preceding century with its firm faith in progress. Barante's book is to her an intimation that the period of transition is at an end; she is amazed by the despondent resignation to circumstances, the fatalism, the reverence for the accomplished fact, which meet her in its pages. She divines that this despondent resignation to the pressure of circumstance will be one of the features of the new period; she has the presentiment that its philosophy will to a great extent consist of demonstrations that the real is the rational; and she seems, with the far-sightedness of genius, to discern how ambiguous that word "the real" will prove to be, and how much irreflective acquiescence in the existing the maxim will entail. She closes her review with these words of prophetic wisdom:—

"The eighteenth century proclaimed principles in a too unconditional manner; possibly the nineteenth century will explain facts in a spirit of too great resignation to them. The eighteenth believed in the nature of things, the nineteenth will only believe in the force of circumstances. The eighteenth desired to control the future, the nineteenth confines itself to the attempt to understand mankind. The author of this book is perhaps the first who is very distinctly tinged with the colour of the new century."

The style and the matter of this utterance are equally striking. Of all the notable men with whom Mme. de Staël was acquainted, not one had so distinctly separated himself from the preceding century as this youngest among them, Barante. The others, one after the other, had left the sinking ship of the eighteenth century, and gone on board the ship of the nineteenth, loading it by degrees with all the goods and seed-corn that it was to carry; but it still lay side by side with the wreck, made fast to it. It was Barante who cut the cables and sent the vessel out into the wide ocean.

[1] Alors on pourra distinguer, comment la religion, respectée par Montesquieu, était pourtant jugée par lui, tandis que Domat l'avait seulement adorée, et en avait fait tout découler au lieu de la considérer comme accessoire.

[2] On arriva bientôt à tout nier; déjà l'incrédulité avait rejeté les preuves divines de la révélation et avait abjuré les devoirs et les souvenirs chrétiens.

[3] De la Litt. Française, p. 213.