Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended, and account taken of facts and aspects which their philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.
The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the previous generation could hardly have comprehended.
We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more seriously. Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation to Social Institutions (1801). She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of literature. She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.
A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples," as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her revolution. It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can "enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere." He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."
It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau, "he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart." And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old age.
From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre, and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval institutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that institutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.
In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet's doctrine to assume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the Reformation as a retrograde movement.]
3.
Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver, Germany the recipient. It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael that the tide began to flow the other way. Among the writers of the Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent and intellectual breadth. Her study of the Revolution showed a more dispassionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her contemporaries were capable of forming. But her chef-d'oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French public. Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.
Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on Literature had clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the thesis that there is any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the famous Quarrel) in artistic form. Within the limits of their own thought and emotional experience the ancients achieved perfection of expression, and perfection cannot be surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the sum of ideas increases and society changes, fresh material is supplied to art, there is "a new development of sensibility" which enables literary artists to compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du Christianisme embodied a commentary on her contention, more arresting than any she could herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined hands with the disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in the domain of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further impressive illustration of the thesis that the literature of the modern European nations represents an advance on classical literature, in the sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and Roman masters had not heard, reaches depths which they had not conjectured, unlocks chambers which to them were closed,—as a result of the progressive experiences of the human soul. [Footnote: German literature was indeed already known, in some measure, to readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant had been studied in France long before 1813, the year of the publication of De l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We can see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern literatures that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des idees elles sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On voit que l'ame humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de points a une plus grande profondeur"—and to this very fact he ascribes their comparative imperfection in form.]