Chapter IV

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SECOND MIGRATION OF THE FRENCH SPIRIT. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU AND MADAME DE STAËL

I. How it was that in the eighteenth century cosmopolitanism was nothing more than an ill-defined aspiration-Reaction of the classical spirit, due to Voltaire and his school; inadequacy and inferiority of classical criticism— Revival of antiquity at the approach of the Revolution.

II. The Revolution brings back the worship of antiquity-Intellectual rupture with the Teutonic nations-Decrease of the literary influence of Rousseau -But the springs which the Revolution had exhausted were rendered afresh accessible to the French mind by the emigration.

III. Publication of De la Littérature (1800)—It was the expression at once of the cosmopolitan spirit and of the influence of Rousseau-Its origin mainly traceable to English influence-It was the last production of eighteenth century criticism-The author's judgment upon the classical spirit-Her substitute for it-Cosmopolitanism becomes a literary theory-Triumph of the influence of Rousseau and of the northern literatures.

"THERE exist, it seems to me, two entirely distinct literatures, that which springs from the South and that which springs from the North, one which finds its primal source in Homer, another which had its origin in Ossian. The Greeks, the Latins, the Italians, the Spaniards, and the French of the age of Louis XIV., belong to that branch of literature which I shall call the literature of the South. The work of the English and the Germans, and a few writings by Danes and Swedes, must be ranked as belonging to the literature of the North." In these lines Mme. de Staël expressed with remarkable clearness the very principle of cosmopolitanism in literature as she herself conceived it. A few years later she gave her idea still greater precision in the following words: "On every occasion during our own times when the French habit of strict conformity to rule has been supplemented by a little fresh life and spirit from abroad, the

1 De la littérature, i. 11.

French have been enthusiastic in their applause: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, etc., are all, in one or other of their works, though they may not be aware of it themselves, members of the Germanic school." 1

Thus the course of French literature has been successively directed, according to the period we consider, either towards antiquity or towards Germanic Europe, towards humanism or towards cosmopolitanism, and the most important agent in the transformation has been Rousseau. The eighteenth century had an obscure perception of Mme. de Staël's theory, but did not formulate it in a clear and definite manner. Previously to the publication, in 1800, of De la Littérature, cosmopolitanism had been rather an undefined aspiration than a theory properly so called. It took some time for Rousseau's influence, personified in Mme. de Staël, to develop its extreme results. It was long before the opposition between cosmopolitanism and humanism became as distinct as was to be desired.

I

The reason is, in the first place, that if the twenty years which preceded the Revolution witnessed an incipient renovation and broadening of taste, they witnessed also the dawn of a genuine classical reaction. With the spread of anglomania, the admirers of the great French writers felt the need for a sturdier defence of a cause which was ever more and more threatened. "When we had once tasted of the springs of English literature," says a critic, "a revolution quickly took place in our own: the Frenchman, who readily becomes an ardent partisan, no longer welcomed or valued anything that had not something of an English flavour about it. . . . Our genius deteriorated from its unnatural fusion with a genius foreign to its character." It was against this perversion of the national genius that the classical party, headed by Voltaire, 1 De l'Allemagne, ii. 1.

2 Dorat, Idée de la poésie allemande (1768), p. 43.

rose in revolt. The cause was good; what a pity it was that it should have been so badly defended!

Herein, in truth, lay the danger of the cosmopolitan spirit. Briefly, the question at issue was, whether or not the French mind would remain faithful to the ideal of universality and humanity which for two or three hundred years had been the strength of French literature, and had been inherited by it from the literatures of antiquity. The ideal of the classical writers of France had been to portray man by means of all the most general and least accidental qualities of his nature-not indeed in abstracto, for that would have been to deprive him of all reality -but in so far, at any rate, as he resembles that "ideal of humanity" which everyone bears within himself. "I acknowledge," said Voltaire in reference to Shakespeare, "that we ought not to condemn an artist who has understood the taste of his countrymen; but we may pity him for having pleased no other nation." From this principle Voltaire never departed, and therefore always obstinately refused to admit that the object of literary criticism is to make us admire what is most national in the genius of each people. In his youth he felt a curiosity with regard to the geniuses of the different nations, but simply because they struck him as singular. He could understand that one could write a comparative history of customs and laws; but he never fully recognised, though he sometimes advocated, the comparative and disinterested criticism of literatures; and therein he remained truly French and truly classical. "We have long taken upon ourselves to utter generalities for the edification of the universe. We are manufacturers of good rough furniture for general purposes and of the fashionable article as well." This neat phrase of Doudan's1 is one which Voltaire might have acknowledged. He claimed the manufacture of "furniture for general purposes" as an honour to the French intellect.

He considered, also, with the pure classicists of his time, that everything had been said, and that form alone was renewed. "There is no more poetry to write," said Fontanes, speaking of Racine. All the books are written, thought the classical school.

1 Lettres, vol. ii., p. 346.

"The imitation of the beauty of nature," wrote d'Alembert, seems confined to certain limits which are reached in a generation or two at most; nothing is left for the succeeding generation to do but to imitate."1 If this is the case, and if poetry is the art of enhancing an old theme with a fresh variation, those who come last are at a great disadvantage, and for us who have to follow the masters it is a high honour to succeed through beauty of form alone. Innovators, on the contrary, admit that in literature there are, as Sébastien Mercier said, "austral lands," where everything still remains to be discovered. They hold that the last has not yet been said concerning man. They believe that literary progress is limited only by the confines of the human intellect itself, and that these have not yet been determined. They extol Dante for his "stupidly extravagant flights of imagination," Milton for descriptions which "sicken every one whose taste is at all delicate," 3 or Ossian, again, because he expresses bombastic platitudes in pompous verse. Voltaire, faithful to the tradition of the grand siècle, was honestly unable to comprehend. "What is it to me," he wrote to an Englishman, who had vaunted Shakespeare to him, "that a tragic author has genius, if none of his pieces can be played in all the countries of the world? Cimabue had genius as an artist, yet his pictures are of no value; Lully had great talent for music, but his airs are never sung beyond the borders of France." . . . And this is his final verdict, not only upon Shakespeare, but also upon Young, Ossian, Milton, Dante, Swift and Rabelais. The mark of genius is universality, and do we not find the Transylvanian, the Hungarian and the Courlander, uniting, as Voltaire observes, with the Spaniard, the Frenchman and the German, in admiration of Vergil and Horace? These, the great masters, belong to every age. Dante belongs merely to the thirteenth century,

1 Discours préliminaire.

...

2 Voltaire to Bettinelli, March 1761: "I think very highly of your courage in daring to say that Dante was a madman and his work monstrous. Dante may find his way into the libraries of the curious, but he will never be read." 3 See Candide, ch. xxv.

Letter published by G. Bengesco, Lettres et billets inédits de Voltaire (1887),

P. 12.

Y

and Milton to the seventeenth; the one is but an Englishman, the other only an Italian.

Nor was Voltaire the only writer to lay himself open to the charge of narrowness. He is simply the mouthpiece of a tradition to which many intelligent people remained faithful. The "literature of the North" irritated them, because it was neither human nor artistic, qualities which are practically identical. For the art of writing is not what Sterne and Young would have it to be the art of giving expression to "one's sensations and impressions," or of recording, as inspiration may dictate, the variations of a "temperament"; it consists in speaking to the understanding in a language that every educated man can understand: "what is accurately conceived is clearly expressed."

Now, the conceptions of Young and Sterne are inaccurate, and their expression of them is obscure; indeed, these writers can scarcely be said to think; they are content to feel, and to abandon themselves to the flow of trivial impressions. Rousseau, speaking of himself, said: "He is largely dependent on his senses.”1 So, in reality, are all these innovators, and they glory in being thus dependent. But if the art of writing consists in arranging correct ideas in a harmonious whole, how then can they be writers? Shakespeare, who knows nothing of orderly arrangement, is no writer, and Letourneur gives us nothing but an "abominable jargon." Hence the transcendent superiority of the great French poets. "In Shakespeare, genius and sublimity gleam forth like flashes of lightning during a long night, but Racine is always Racine." Whence comes this thought? From Voltaire ? No; from Diderot.2 Genius begins where art begins, and cannot get on without it. Such was the opinion of all who had been brought up on tradition, and in whose eyes the reverence for foreign models was responsible for "that antinational taste, the ravages of which were only too obvious"; " and some even of those who spoke of reforming everything could not succeed in shaking off the prejudices they had imbibed

1 Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, second dialogue.

2 Article entitled Génie.

3

8 Discours sur les progrès des lettres en France, by Rigoley de Juvigny (Paris, 1773, 8vo, p. 190).