The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  If Italy retained her vitality, she also evinced a suppleness, an adaptability, which enabled her to change the character of her exports and to seek in other domains, and particularly in the domain of Science, the renown which literature denied her. Abroad, in the world at large, her predominant asset was Rome, the prestige attaching to the Roman name. Never throughout her history did she cease to invoke it; it was the foundation of all her aspirations. Then again there was her language, so melodious, so soft, the very idiom of love. There were her singers, her dancers, her librettists, her musicians, her opera which was the delight of all civilized peoples. It was to the East rather than to the West that her influence spread, to the shores of Dalmatia, to Austria and Poland. Well; when all was said and done, these gains were not to be despised. But the time had now come when there was a call for ideas, and of these she had none to offer. Her sun was setting. Still, even now, what hosts of travellers came crowding to her shores. To name a few of the best known, Gilbert Burnet; Misson, a Huguenot refugee who acted as companion to a young nobleman making his grand tour; William Bromley; Montfaucon and Dom Briois his confrère; Addison. From what we read of their travel notes, their letters, their stories, one thing constantly emerges and that is an unfading admiration for the Past and an ever-increasing disdain for the Present; that, and the decadence—political, moral and intellectual—of an Italy which, beneath their very eyes, was relapsing into a land of orange groves and ancient ruins, a land of shadows, a land of the dead.

  Now it was France’s turn. For forty years or more she had played a predominant rôle in European affairs. Friends and foes alike agreed on what Horace Walpole was later to describe as the astounding progress her power made from the Treaty of Munster in 1648 down to the Revolution in England and the first beginnings of the Grand Alliance in 1689. This expansion, this vigour, this glory are the signs of an intense vitality. France is an entity, a person, a moral whole. Her will to unity, her will to expand, follow one another like the steps in a logical process growing increasingly aware of itself. By unity, her ardours are not damped down but directed into a fitting channel. She was ready and eager to deploy outside her own frontiers a force which for a long time to come was not to be turned aside. Her king favoured an active policy, a policy of expansion. He was to be its luminary, its sun. He would create a solar system with Versailles as its centre and of which the countries of Europe should be the satellites. He was the originator of a systematic attempt to produce the pleasing spectacle of an intellectual order in the world.[1]

  France is richly populated; richly studded with towns and villages; versed in the arts of war; teeming with an aristocracy always ready to take up arms. Her people are vivacious, witty, adaptable, and full of charm. They are active, skilful, endowed with qualities which ensure success in the most diverse undertakings, particularly in those which call for intuition rather than for prolonged and patient application; on the other hand, they are fickle, volatile and rather apt to brag about their breaches of the moral law; so much so, in fact, that sometimes they boast of misdeeds they have never committed . . . Such is the stereotyped portrait; some of the traits are true enough and have stood the test of time. But now the idea of gaining a signal success, of establishing a prodigious supremacy arose, and endowed these characteristics with a fresh éclat. France is par excellence the home of polished manners, good breeding, intellectual refinement, of the art of living, of courtesy, culture, and all the social graces. France is the recognized rendezvous for foreigners of distinction who come from all parts of Europe to seek knowledge and culture from the various Academies, or to acquire ease and grace of bearing at the Court. Fascinated by French urbanity, these foreigners put themselves to school, the school of refinement, of the art of living gracefully. Paris, as being the centre of this concourse, took precedence over all other cities. Her charm derived from the freedom and ease which characterized her mode of life. In Paris no one calls on you to give an account of your behaviour. If you want to change your habits, you have but to change your neighbourhood. If someone takes it into his head to appear one day resplendent with gold adornments and the next day clad in homely fustian, what concern is that of anyone? In Paris you can get what you want, and you can get it for the asking. No sooner does some new invention designed to facilitate the conditions of life come into existence, than it is immediately adopted there. Time was when Rome towered above all the cities of the world; now it is Paris.

  Whereas her rivals seemed to be suffering from a barrenness bred of exhaustion, France, as by a miracle, poured forth a continuous stream of masterpieces, of works of genius, not the kind of masterpiece adjudged to be so by this or that nation, desirous of administering a little flattering unction to its own pride, but masterpieces acknowledged to be such by the world at large. In the wake of Descartes and Corneille, came Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Bossuet, and that generation had not passed away when Massillon, Regnard, Lesage come to take up the tale. This exuberant fertility continues for three-quarters of a century. While the tragedies, comedies, fables, sermons of writers promptly crowned as classics are constantly being reprinted, yet other works appear which, added to the existing mass, augment its power and accelerate its momentum. How could Europe fail to be enriched by this massive cultural contribution? Thus, the tradition of supremacy was maintained, and waxed stronger and stronger every day. Imagine what the propaganda value of the very greatest authors must have been; add thereto the effect of those of lesser calibre who followed in the wake of their illustrious leaders; lastly, take into account the third- or even the fourth-raters, the small fry of talent, long since forgotten, but who, in their day, spread abroad and percolated everywhere, people like Bouhours, Rapin, Fleury, and a host of others; taking them all in all, we shall get some faint idea of the extent, the depth, and the infinite variety of France’s contribution, and of its influence.[2]

  For the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, translations were now to a large extent superfluous, and French looked like becoming the universal language. Such, at any rate, was the view of Guy Miège, a Genevan who had settled in London. He brought out a French-English and English-French dictionary, because, he said, “French, in some respects, bids fair to become the universal language”. Gregorio Leti, who, when in Amsterdam, published a French version of his Life of Cromwell, was of the same opinion. He did so because “French has become in this present century of ours, the most widely spoken language in Europe. That is either because the political power of France has brought about the spread of the French tongue, just as in ancient days the might of Rome carried the Latin speech into all the countries of the known world; or else it is that the French language, highly refined as it is, possesses a charm peculiar to itself in the precision, the delicacy and naturalness for which it is so widely celebrated”. Such tributes were common, and it would be easy to multiply them; however, the most significant of them all is, without doubt, this utterance of Bayle’s: “The French language”, he said, “is the rallying point for all the countries of Europe. It is a language which we might truly call transcendental, for the same reason that philosophers bestow that epithet on natures which spread far and wide, and freely manifest themselves in every clime and country.”[3]

  Books, language, manners, to say nothing of the material apparatus of life! Here is a country mansion, designed to look like Versailles, and here is the French tutor, whose business it is to direct the studies of the young nobleman, its future lord. Clothes, gowns, wigs—all are à la française. To whom should we go for dancing lessons, if not to one of those past-masters of the airs and graces, the French maître à danser, who has managed to beat the Italians at their own game. Now go down to the culinary regions. What do we find there? French chefs and master-cooks, butlers uncorking and decanting French wines. “It looks as if you couldn’t give a dinner or a supper-party of any consequence unless you produced imported wines served from thick glass flagons, which we have to call bouteilles, forsooth, since even the containe
rs must have a French name.” “And we Italians”, says Muratori, “stupid ninnies that we are, hurry, as if there wasn’t a moment to lose, to do whatever the French do, slavishly to copy their fashions, as if they had been imposed upon us by order of great Jove himself.”[4]

  “If some of our ancestors were to come back to earth”, said the German Thomasius in his Discourse on imitating the French (1687), “they simply wouldn’t know us, degenerate hybrids that we are. Nowadays, everything about us has got to be French—clothes, cookery, language, all French. French are our manners, and French our vices”.[5]

  Not only Italian and Spanish, but also Latin, Latin which had been one of the corner-stones of European solidarity, had to surrender to French. Everybody had to speak French; it was looked upon as a mark of good breeding: “People wonder why everyone is so mad on French; but mad they are, and what is more they don’t look like getting over it. There are some towns where, for one school that teaches Latin, there are ten or a dozen that teach French. Translations of the classics are coming out all over the place, and classical scholars are beginning to fear that Latin will be dispossessed of its ancient sovereignty.”[6]

  To the various reasons adduced to account for this phenomenon, all of them sound enough, such as the intrinsic merits of the language itself, the high standard of its literature, the care bestowed on it by a nation to whom such things as grammar and the choice of words are matters of first-rate importance, and who are the only people in the world to boast of a Department of State specially appointed to safeguard its purity, namely, the Académie,—to all these reasons, profound, subtle, and opposite as they are, one other may be added, the needs of a Europe that was about to enter upon a Vita Nuova. Latin smacked of the schools; of theology: it had a savour of the past. Little by little, it had lost touch with the present. Excellent as it was as an instrument of mental training, a man wanted something more than Latin when the days of his schooling were over. French, on the other hand, made it seem as if civilization had renewed its youth. The virtue that was in Latin was present in French, too; but it was a virtue brought up to date, as it were. It was clear, it was definite, it was firm, and, above all, it was alive. Science, which was seeking to explain the world otherwise than by direct causation, needed a different medium of expression from that which had done duty in the Middle Ages. So, too, in 1714, when the Peace of Rastadt came to be signed, the diplomats required a medium more roomy, more flexible, less rigid, than that which had satisfied the needs of the Chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire. Even that engaging, happy-go-lucky way of theirs, for which many were wont to blame them, told in their favour: they were like people who had been relieved from the burden of a tyrannical past. They came in for some strictures from the moralists of other countries, who blamed them for being effeminate and worldly-minded. The moralists might have saved their breath. France and things French were all the rage. The same francophil spirit made its way into Italy towards the close of the seventeenth century; about this time, dolls dressed in the latest Paris fashions began to make their appearance in shop windows and showcases. The English did not lag behind. Ladies wore their hair à la mode; booksellers recommended “the à la mode secretary”; Thomas Brown in the Stage Beaux tossed in a Blanket makes fun of Hypocrisy à la mode; Farquhar in the Constant Couple compares à la mode London with à la mode France; Steele puts on The Funeral, or Grief à la mode; and Addison, in his prologue to that comedy, lets us into the secret of the infatuation:

  Our author . . . .

  Two ladies errant has exposed to view:

  The first a damsel, travelled in romance;

  The other more refined: she comes from France . . .

  A particular instance of a general tendency; a matter of supply and demand. This explains how it was that France established her dominion, not by coercion, for force would have been powerless to found an enduring sovereignty in the domain of the spirit, but by the gentle and unforced accord of all parties, everywhere. Yes, everywhere: in Spain, and in the Spanish colonies, even in Lima where, in the year 1710, an adaptation of Rodogune was performed in the theatre, as well as a play founded on les Femmes Savantes; in Holland, too, where the national genius tried, through Antonides van der Goes, and tried in vain, to keep French influence at bay; likewise in Poland, where the star of France grew brighter as the star of Italy declined. Everywhere you hear the sound of the French tongue, everywhere French plays are acted, French books are read; everywhere the genius of France leaves its imprint on the mind of man.

  Nevertheless, not long after France had thus established her pre-eminence, a rival appears on the scene; and this rival, strange to relate, hails from the North.

  England it was that first ran counter to the political ambitions of France. Neither on the high-seas, nor on the Continent was she disposed to let France have everything her own way. She not only contested her hegemony, but impugned the very principle of authority on which the power of the French king was conceived to be founded.

  And so a duel begins between Louis XIV on the one side and William of Orange on the other. The two champions stand forth and confront each other, each symbolizing a principle, an idea. When, in the year 1688, William drove James II from the English throne, and undertook to rule in his stead as a constitutional monarch under parliamentary control, Louis took the royal fugitive under his own personal protection, installed him in palatial quarters at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and, in thus protecting the person of the fallen monarch, flattered himself that he was upholding the divine right of kings. But when, after a protracted struggle, France was at last compelled to yield to the forces of the Coalition, and when the treaty of peace was signed at Ryswick, how the pride of the Grand Monarque must have been humbled! He was forced to admit that his adversary was too strong for him, he also had to recognize in that same adversary a lawful ruler; and that meant the betrayal of the cause of his cousin, and most Christian brother, James II of England.

  What manner of people were these English who thus imposed their will on Europe, and, at a single stroke, inflicted on France a more crushing blow to her pride than she had suffered these fifty years or more? A wave of indignation swept through the length and breadth of the country, from court to commonalty; so at least it would appear, if there is any truth in the allegation that Athalie was really nothing more nor less than the English Revolution tricked out in an elaborate stage-disguise. Moreover, we come across this sort of thing, a song that was sung at Dijon in the year 1709:

  Le grand-père est un fanfaron,

  Le fils un imbécile,

  Le petit-fils un grand poltron

  Ah! la belle famille!

  Que je vous plains, peuples français,

  Soumis à cet empire,

  Faites ce qu’ont fait les Anglais,

  C’est assez vous le dire . . . .[7]

  In the earlier stages of their revival, the English, though energetic and tenacious, did not exhibit any very definite aptitude for letters. When Louis XIV asked his ambassador in London to give him some particulars about the artists and literary folk in England, the ambassador replied that literature and science have a way of forsaking one country in order to go and honour another with their presence, and that, for the time being at any rate, they had taken up their abode in France. He added that if any traces of such things survived in England, they lingered on in the traditions that men like Bacon and Buchanan had left behind them. He made mention also of one Miltonius, and declared that he had covered himself with deeper infamy by his dangerous writings than the regicides had incurred by murdering their king.