Landmarks in French Literature

Voltaire's philosophical views were curious. While he entirely discarded the miraculous from his system, he nevertheless believed in a Deity—a supreme First Cause of all the phenomena of the universe. Yet, when he looked round upon the world as it was, the evil and the misery in it were what seized his attention and appalled his mind. The optimism of so many of his contemporaries appeared to him a shallow crude doctrine unrelated to the facts of existence, and it was to give expression to this view that he composed the most famous of all his works—Candide. This book, outwardly a romance of the most flippant kind, contains in reality the essence of Voltaire's maturest reflections upon human life. It is a singular fact that a book which must often have been read simply for the sake of its wit and its impropriety should nevertheless be one of the bitterest and most melancholy that was ever written. But it is a safe rule to make, that Voltaire's meaning is deep in proportion to the lightness of his writing—that it is when he is most in earnest that he grins most. And, in Candide, the brilliance and the seriousness alike reach their climax. The book is a catalogue of all the woes, all the misfortunes, all the degradations, and all the horrors that can afflict humanity; and throughout it Voltaire's grin is never for a moment relaxed. As catastrophe follows catastrophe, and disaster succeeds disaster, not only does he laugh himself consumedly, but he makes his reader laugh no less; and it is only when the book is finished that the true meaning of it is borne in upon the mind. Then it is that the scintillating pages begin to exercise their grim unforgettable effect; and the pettiness and misery of man seem to borrow a new intensity from the relentless laughter of Voltaire.

But perhaps the most wonderful thing about Candide is that it contains, after all, something more than mere pessimism—it contains a positive doctrine as well. Voltaire's common sense withers the Ideal; but it remains common sense. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is his final word—one of the very few pieces of practical wisdom ever uttered by a philosopher.

Voltaire's style reaches the summit of its perfection in Candide; but it is perfect in all that he wrote. His prose is the final embodiment of the most characteristic qualities of the French genius. If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement would have survived. His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in his Lettres Provinciales: clarity, simplicity and wit—these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree. But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also their disadvantages. Voltaire's style is narrow; it is like a rapier—all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping blade of Pascal has become an impossibility. Compared to the measured march of Bossuet's sentences, Voltaire's sprightly periods remind one almost of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire's—executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction was bound to follow—and a salutary reaction. Signs of it were already visible in the colour and passion of Diderot's writing; but it was not until the nineteenth century that the great change came.

Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire's style more conspicuous than in his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his work. A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never lived. The number of his published letters exceeds ten thousand; how many more he may actually have written one hardly ventures to imagine, for the great majority of those that have survived date only from the last thirty years of his long life. The collection is invaluable alike for the light which it throws upon Voltaire's career and character, and for the extent to which it reflects the manners, sentiments, and thought of the age. For Voltaire corresponded with all Europe. His reputation, already vast before he settled at Ferney, rose after that date to a well-nigh incredible height. No man had wielded such an influence since the days when Bernard of Clairvaux dictated the conduct of popes and princes from his monastic cell. But, since then, the wheel had indeed come full circle! The very antithesis of the Middle Ages was personified in the strange old creature who in his lordly retreat by the Lake of Geneva alternately coquetted with empresses, received the homage of statesmen and philosophers, domineered over literature in all its branches, and laughed Mother Church to scorn. As the years advanced, Voltaire's industry, which had always been astonishing, continually increased. As if his intellectual interests were not enough to occupy him, he took to commercial enterprise, developed the resources of his estates, and started a successful colony of watchmakers at Ferney. Every day he worked for long hours at his desk, spinning his ceaseless web of tracts, letters, tragedies, and farces. In the evening he would discharge the functions of a munificent host, entertain the whole neighbourhood with balls and suppers, and take part in one of his own tragedies on the stage of his private theatre. Then a veritable frenzy would seize upon him; shutting himself up in his room for days together, he would devote every particle of his terrific energies to the concoction of some devastating dialogue, or some insidious piece of profanation for his Dictionnaire Philosophique. At length his fragile form would sink exhausted—he would be dying—he would be dead; and next morning he would be up again as brisk as ever, directing the cutting of the crops.

One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years. His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that the world has ever seen. For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe. The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Théâtre Français, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him. His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race. But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year. An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.

French literature during the latter half of the eighteenth century was rich in striking personalities. It might have been expected that an age which had produced both Diderot and Voltaire would hardly be able to boast of yet another star of equal magnitude. But, in JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, there appeared a man in some ways even more remarkable than either of his great contemporaries. The peculiar distinction of Rousseau was his originality. Neither Voltaire nor Diderot possessed this quality in a supreme degree. Voltaire, indeed, can only claim to be original by virtue of his overwhelming common sense, which enabled him to see clearly what others could only see confusedly, to strike without fear where others were only willing to wound; but the whole bulk of his thought really rested on the same foundation as that which supported the ordinary conceptions of the average man of the day. Diderot was a far bolder, a far more speculative thinker; but yet, though he led the very van of the age, he was always in it; his originality was never more than a development—though it was often an extreme development—of the ideas that lay around him. Rousseau's originality went infinitely further than this. He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it. His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary. In his eyes, the reforms which his contemporaries were so busy introducing into society were worse than useless—the mere patching of an edifice which would never be fit to live in. He believed that it was necessary to start altogether afresh. And what makes him so singularly interesting a figure is that, in more than one sense, he was right. It was necessary to start afresh; and the new world which was to spring from the old one was to embody, in a multitude of ways, the visions of Rousseau. He was a prophet, with the strange inspiration of a prophet—and the dishonour in his own country.

But inspiration and dishonour are not the only characteristics of prophets: as a rule, they are also highly confused in the delivery of their prophecies; and Rousseau was no exception. In his writings, the true gist of his meaning seems to be only partially revealed; and it is clear that he himself was never really aware of the fundamental notions that lay at the back of his thought. Hence nothing can be easier than to pull his work to pieces, and to demonstrate beyond a doubt that it is full of fallacies, inconsistencies, and absurdities. It is very easy to point out that the Control Social is a miserable piece of logic-chopping, to pour scorn on the stilted sentiment and distorted morality of La Nouvelle Héloïse, and finally to draw a cutting comparison between Rousseau's preaching and his practice, as it stands revealed in the Confessions—the lover of independence who never earned his own living, the apostle of equality who was a snob, and the educationist who left his children in the Foundling Hospital. All this has often been done, and no doubt will often be done again; but it is futile. Rousseau lives, and will live, a vast and penetrating influence, in spite of all his critics. There is something in him that eludes their foot-rules. It is so difficult to take the measure of a soul!

Difficult, indeed; for, if we examine the doctrine that seems to be Rousseau's fundamental one—that, at least, on which he himself lays most stress—here, too, we shall find a mass of error. Rousseau was perpetually advocating the return to Nature. All the great evils from which humanity suffers are, he declared, the outcome of civilization; the ideal man is the primitive man—the untutored Indian, innocent, chaste, brave, who adores the Creator of the universe in simplicity, and passes his life in virtuous harmony with the purposes of Nature. If we cannot hope to reach quite that height of excellence, let us at least try to get as near it as we can. So far from pressing on the work of civilization, with the Philosophes, let us try to forget that we are civilized and be natural instead. This was the burden of Rousseau's teaching, and it was founded on a complete misconception of the facts. The noble Indian was a myth. The more we find out about primitive man, the more certain it becomes that, so far from being the ideal creature of Rousseau's imagination, he was in reality a savage whose whole life was dominated, on the one hand by the mere brute necessities of existence, and on the other by a complicated and revolting system of superstitions. Nature is neither simple nor good; and all history shows that the necessary condition for the production of any of the really valuable things of life is the control of Nature by man—in fact, civilization. So far, therefore, the Philosophes were right; if the Golden Age was to have any place at all in the story of humanity, it must be, not at the beginning, but the end.

But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, their intellect and their culture, arose from a profounder cause than a false historical theory, or a defective logical system, or a mean personal jealousy and morbid pride. All these elements, no doubt, entered into his feeling—for Rousseau was a very far from perfect human being; but the ultimate source was beyond and below them—in his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul. It was in this perception that Rousseau's great originality lay. His revolt was a spiritual revolt. In the Middle Ages the immense significance of the human spirit had been realized, but it had been inextricably involved in a mass of theological superstition. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, had achieved the great conception of a secular system of society; but, in doing so, it had left out of account the spiritual nature of man, who was regarded simply as a rational animal in an organized social group. Rousseau was the first to unite the two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe—half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction—that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a deep effect upon the development of the Revolution. But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be most clearly seen.

It is often lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an unemotional age. What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry of Pope? Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire? But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they are so ready to condemn. It is certainly true that at first sight Pope's couplets appear to be cold and mechanical; but if we look more closely we shall soon find that these apparently monotonous verses have been made the vehicle for some of the most passionate feelings of disgust and animosity that ever agitated a human breast. As for Voltaire, we have already seen that to infer lack of feeling from his epigrams and laughter would be as foolish as to infer that a white-hot bar of molten steel lacked heat because it was not red. The accusation is untenable; the age that produced—to consider French literature alone—a Voltaire, a Diderot, and a Saint-Simon cannot be called an age without emotion. Yet it is clear that, in the matter of emotion, a distinction of some sort does exist between that age and this. The distinction lies not so much in the emotion itself as in the attitude towards emotion, adopted by the men of those days and by ourselves. In the eighteenth century men were passionate—intensely passionate; but they were passionate almost unconsciously, in a direct unreflective way. If anyone had asked Voltaire to analyse his feelings accurately, he would have replied that he had other things to think about; the notion of paying careful attention to mere feelings would have seemed to him ridiculous. And, when Saint-Simon sat down to write his Memoirs, it never occurred to him for a moment to give any real account of what, in all the highly personal transactions that he describes, he intimately felt. He tells us nothing of his private life; he mentions his wife once, and almost apologizes for doing so; really, could a gentleman—a duke—dwell upon such matters, and preserve his self-respect? But, to us, it is precisely such matters that form the pivot of a personality—the index of a soul. A man's feelings are his very self, and it is around them that all that is noblest and profoundest in our literature seems naturally to centre. A great novelist is one who can penetrate and describe the feelings of others; a great poet is one who can invest his own with beauty and proclaim them to the world. We have come to set a value upon introspection which was quite unknown in the eighteenth century—unknown, that is, until Rousseau, in the most valuable and characteristic of his works—his Confessions—started the vast current in literature and in sentiment which is still flowing to-day. The Confessions is the detailed, intimate, complete history of a soul. It describes Rousseau's life, from its beginning until its maturity, from the most personal point of view, with no disguises or reticences of any kind. It is written with great art. Rousseau's style, like his matter, foreshadows the future; his periods are cast in a looser, larger, more oratorical mould than those of his contemporaries; his sentences are less fiery and excitable; though he can be witty when he wishes, he is never frivolous; and a tone of earnest intimate passion lingers in his faultless rhythms. With his great powers of expression he combined a wonderful aptitude for the perception of the subtlest shades of feeling and of mood. He was sensitive to an extraordinary degree—with the sensitiveness of a proud, shy nature, unhardened by the commerce of the world. There is, indeed, an unpleasant side to his Confessions. Rousseau, like most explorers, became obsessed by his own discoveries; he pushed the introspective method to its farthest limits; the sanctity of the individual seemed to him not only to dignify the slightest idiosyncrasies of temperament and character, but also, in some sort of way, to justify what was positively bad. Thus his book contains the germs of that Byronic egotism which later became the fashion all over Europe. It is also, in parts, a morbid book. Rousseau was not content to extenuate nothing; his failings got upon his nerves; and, while he was ready to dilate upon them himself with an infinite wealth of detail, the slightest hint of a reflection on his conduct from any other person filled him with an agony and a rage which, at the end of his life, developed into madness. To strict moralists, therefore, and to purists in good taste, the Confessions will always be unpalatable. More indulgent readers will find in those pages the traces of a spirit which, with all its faults, its errors, its diseases, deserves something more than pity—deserves almost love. At any rate, it is a spirit singularly akin to our own. Out of the far-off, sharp, eager, unpoetical, unpsychological eighteenth century, it speaks to us in the familiar accents of inward contemplation, of brooding reminiscence, of subtly-shifting temperament, of quiet melancholy, of visionary joy. Rousseau, one feels, was the only man of his age who ever wanted to be alone. He understood that luxury: understood the fascination of silence, and the loveliness of dreams. He understood, too, the exquisite suggestions of Nature, and he never wrote more beautifully than when he was describing the gentle process of her influences on the solitary human soul. He understood simplicity: the charm of little happinesses, the sweetness of ordinary affections, the beauty of a country face. The paradox is strange; how was it that it should have been left to the morbid, tortured, half-crazy egoist of the Confessions to lead the way to such spiritual delicacies, such innocent delights?

The paradox was too strange for Rousseau's contemporaries. They could not understand him. His works were highly popular; he was received into the most brilliant circles in Paris; he made friends with the most eminent men of the day; and then ensued misunderstandings, accusations, quarrels, and at last complete disaster. Rousseau vanished from society, driven out, according to his account, by the treacheries of his friends; the victim, according to their account, of his own petty jealousies and morbid suspicions. At every point in the quarrel, his friends, and such great and honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal suspicions. At last he returned to France, to end his life, after years of lingering misery, in obscurity and despair.

Rousseau and Voltaire both died in 1778—hardly more than ten years before the commencement of the Revolution. Into that last decade of the old régime there seemed to be concentrated all the ardour, all the hope, all the excitement, all the brilliance of the preceding century. Had not Reason and Humanity triumphed at last? Triumphed, at any rate, in spirit; for who was not converted? All that remained now was the final, quick, easy turn which would put into action the words of the philosophers and make this earth a paradise. And still new visions kept opening out before the eyes of enthusiasts—strange speculations and wondrous possibilities. The march of mind seemed so rapid that the most advanced thinkers of yesterday were already out of date. 'Voltaire est bigot: il est déiste,' exclaimed one of the wits of Paris, and the sentiment expressed the general feeling of untrammelled mental freedom and swift progression which was seething all over the country. It was at this moment that the production of BEAUMARCHAIS' brilliant comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro, electrified the intellectual public of Versailles and the capital. In that play the old régime was presented, not in the dark colours of satire, but under the sparkling light of frivolity, gaiety, and idleness—a vision of endless intrigue and vapid love-making among the antiquated remains of feudal privileges and social caste. In this fairyland one being alone has reality—Figaro, the restless, fiendishly clever, nondescript valet, sprung from no one knows where, destined to no one knows what, but gradually emerging a strange and sinister profile among the laughter and the flowers. 'What have you done, Monsieur le Comte,' he bursts out at last to his master, 'to deserve all these advantages?—I know. Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître!' In that sentence one can hear—far off, but distinct—the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way. All was roseate, all was charming as the coaches dashed through the narrow streets of Paris, carrying their finely-powdered ladies and gentlemen, in silks and jewels, to the assemblies of the night. Within, the candles sparkled, and the diamonds, and the eyes of the company, sitting round in gilded delicate chairs. And then there was supper, and the Marquise was witty, and the Comte was sententious, while yet newer vistas opened of yet happier worlds, dancing on endlessly through the floods of conversation and champagne.