HIS PERSONALITY, HIS PHILOSOPHY, AND HIS INFLUENCE[1]
BY ALVAN F. SANBORN
IF the generation now coming to the front in France is healthy and vigorous physically, mentally, and morally, and proud of its health and vigor, if it is confident, expectant, full of energy and will, impatient for action and fit to act, if it dares to be happy, if it will have none of the pessimism of Schopenhauer or of the nihilism of Renan; if it is, in a word, a generation of young young men, whereas the generation that preceded it was a generation of old young men, melancholy, morbid, dilettante, neurasthenic, and proud of its melancholia, morbidness, dilettantism, and neurasthenia,—and such is generally admitted to be the case,—certainly not the least of the numerous and varied influences that have combined to bring about this radical transformation is the inspiriting message of Henri Bergson.
In the early years of the twelfth century, at the base of the Tower of Clovis, on the summit of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève in Paris, a scholar in the habit of a monk, Pierre Abélard, proclaimed under the open sky “the rights of the earth, the right of the reason to reason” in discourses which Michelet characterizes as “the veritable point of departure of the first Renaissance for France and for Europe.” The élite of the then civilized world—two popes, twenty cardinals, fifty bishops, “all the orders,” Romans, Germans, Englishmen, Italians, Spaniards, Flemings—flocked thither to listen to the great innovator. He was silenced by the dogmatists of the period, but he left behind him an idea which “became more and more the fixed idea of the Renaissance, namely, ‘wisdom is not wisdom if it confines itself to logic, if it does not add thereto erudition, all human knowledge.’”
Five hundred years later, on this same Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, René Descartes demolished scholasticism and founded modern psychology. Persecuted by the Sorbonne, as was nearly every other expounder of new doctrines at that time, he nevertheless created a veritable furor among the bluestockings of the magnificent court of Louis XIV. His “vortexes” and “fluted matter,” his “three elements” and his “innate metaphysical ideas,” were the small talk of the précieuses; snobbishness for the most part, of course, but it is one of the redeeming features of snobbishness that it sometimes bestows its plaudits and its patronage upon genuine merit.
At the present time the philosopher Henri Bergson is assailing, in his turn, another scholasticism—the scholasticism of science. At the Collège de France, the consummation and the coronation of the various schools of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, he is creating a flutter in the dove-cotes of bluestockingdom such as no pure philosopher has created there since the time of Descartes. Indeed, Bergson has become so fashionable that soon, as some one facetiously observed regarding Francis of Assisi after the appearance of Sabatier’s fascinating biography of that saint, “they will be wearing him upon bonnets,” another instance of snobbishness adoring actual achievement.
The biggest amphitheater the Collège de France can provide is quite too small for M. Bergson’s would-be auditors. Long before the lecture-hour, the seats and the steps of the aisles, which can be made to serve as seats, are preëmpted by patient waiters of both sexes, of varying ages, sorts, conditions, and all nationalities. The standing-room fills up rapidly also, while about the doors are enacted scenes vaguely reminiscent of those that occur daily at the City Hall terminal of the Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hours, in which the gentle, but not always mannerly, sex does rather more than its share of pushing, tugging, elbowing, and treading upon toes, in virtue, no doubt, of its superior zeal for knowledge.
When the lecture begins, the sitters, and such of the standers as are lucky enough to have their arms free, scribble furiously in their note-books, the hapless strugglers at the doors and in the vestibule crane their necks in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the platform through the rifts in the monstrous feminine headgear now in fashion, and all alike, those who neither see, hear, nor comprehend, as well as those who do, promptly take on the rapt, superior expression of initiates—the expression that used to characterize the audiences at “Pelléas and Mélisande” when Debussyism was in its infancy.
The lecturer is short of stature, spare, an almost perfect ascetic type, somewhat, gray and slightly bald. He has slender hands, tapering fingers, a weasel-shaped head, heavy eyebrows, a close-cropped mustache grayer than the hair, and “liquid and profound eyes that suggest mysterious molten metals in the stars.” He is correctly, even fastidiously, but not foppishly, dressed. He speaks slowly and distinctly, but easily, with engaging indifference to his notes and without any effort at oratory, his nearest approaches to gestures being abruptly arrested semispasmodic workings of the hands, periodical inclinations of the head, and an occasional deepening and darkening of the eyes. It is as though sheer intellect, abstract intellect, were endowed with the power of speech. There is not the slightest trace in M. Bergson’s manner of the overweening vanity that too often mars the public appearances of world celebrities, nor is there a scrap of the unlovely pedantry and arid officialism against the prevalence of which at the Sorbonne a considerable portion of cultivated France recently rose in revolt. On the contrary, he is constantly referred to in university circles as “the lark,” partly perhaps because he offers a certain physical resemblance to that ungarish creature; but mainly because there is a touch of lyricism in all his utterances, even his most trenchant analyses. He presents his views progressively and with a modest tentativeness which makes his auditors feel that they are assisting at the birth of a system rather than listening to the exposition of a perfected one. They seem to see the lecturer suffer and create, as the symbolical pelican of ecclesiastical tradition pierces her flank for the wherewithal to feed her young. Indeed, the regular attendants follow the stages of the creative process as eagerly and impatiently as though they were the instalments of an absorbing novel.
How far Henri Bergson’s extraordinary vogue is due to the substance and how far to the form of his thought is not easy to determine, since either alone amply suffices to account for it. His philosophy is a rehabilitation, to employ untechnical language, of God and the soul. It is a reconciliation “in a harmony felt by the heart of terms irreconcilable, perhaps, by the intellect,” of science and metaphysics with religion, of knowledge with life, of law with conduct, of liberty with authority, of the ideals of the Occident with the ideals of the Orient, of the present with the past and with the future. According to M. Bergson, the universe, which is incessant mobility, perpetual, continuous flux, is acquiring a constantly swelling volume of free creative activity, and the inner life of each and every person in the universe is absolutely original. “Life is really creation. It is not a fabrication determined by the idea of an end to be realized; it is an impetus, an initiative, an effort to make matter produce something which it would not produce of itself.” We know reality by living it. We may act freely, and in so acting we experience creation.