The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Worthy of Anna’s arms, of Marlbro’s Fire,

  Does our best Bard united strength require . . .

  Richard Blackmore, who thus exhorted his compatriots, had already set an example. The aim of poetry is to enrich the mind, to regulate morals. Of the various kinds of poetry, the epic is the foremost in dignity, as it is as an instrument of morality. The great characters which it presents for our contemplation teach us religion, virtue, the control of the passions, and wisdom. It is, therefore, to the epic that the poets should direct their efforts. It is true that since the days of Homer and Virgil no one has achieved any success in this department, but this is due not so much to any lack of poets of genius as to ignorance of the necessary rules. To-day, in addition to Aristotle and Horace, we have Rapin, Dacier, Le Bossu and Rymer to guide us. Now we know everything that is necessary to command success. Let us, therefore, make a start.

  And a start he makes. He invokes the Muse, and the Muse inspires him with Prince Arthur, an heroic poem; with King Arthur, an heroic poem; with Eliza, an epic; with The Creation, a philosophical poem; with Alfred, an epic. Of cantos there were dozens and dozens, of lines thousands upon thousands. But Richard Blackmore preached better than he practised. To-day, his epics are quite forgotten.

  And now, what about tragedy? A man of first-rate intellect, a lawyer of renown, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, was to lead the way. He made an intensive study of the various treatises on the subject, the various “poetics”, and, not content with the French classical school and the works of the Renaissance, he betook himself to the true, the earliest source of all, to Greek tragedy. He gripped it firmly, never to relax his hold. In 1712, at Naples, Gravina published a group of five plays. There is a Prologue, and in it Tragedy, in person, speaks these words: “Behold, I come!” she cries. “After lingering on forgotten for so many centuries, I now appear again at last, and in my pristine form. Guided by a man of law, an orator, a philosopher, escorted by poetic Reason and the rules inspired by her, lighted on my way by the torch of criticism, at last I come.” The Muse spoke well; but Gravina’s tragedies are none the less detestable.

  And now a sort of international tragedy-competition was set on foot for Europe as a whole. The several countries set to work to try and win the palm. Everywhere the gentlemen of the buskin were getting busy. Crébillon sets up as a rival to Racine; but he is entirely given up to niggers and people of colour. Other countries enter the lists with France. Ah, if only they could outdo her. At all events they spared themselves neither time nor trouble. The air was thick with tragedies, and still the rivalry went on. An epoch-making day was that—it was the 12th June, 1713—when the Marchese Scipione Maffei put on for the first time at Verona a somewhat fleshless but exceedingly correct Merope, more correct, indeed, than the strictest examples of the French classical school. The applause that greeted it! It spread from province to province, throughout the whole of Italy. What a triumph it was; what delighted admiration greeted those swelling phrases, those bombastic tirades, those lines that ran with the regularity of clockwork! The play achieved a world-wide reputation. It was everywhere translated, everywhere mouthed and discussed. It was talked about by Voltaire and by Lessing and at last it got as far as Goethe. The English, too, had come to the conclusion that their ideas about drama needed overhauling. They would have to do away with the preposterous liberties that Shakespeare and his school indulged in. Tragi-comedy must be kept in its place, and not allowed to intrude into the sphere of tragedy proper. And those battle-scenes, those tumultuous crowds, those processions marching across the stage, those drums and trumpets, those murder-scenes, too ghastly to look upon, at least for anyone with a spark of taste about him. What they aimed at was that marvellously smooth and symmetrical pattern, cunningly made to measure, where horror and pity are administered in scrupulously graduated doses—heroic, but soberly so; sublime, but within reasonable limits. They worked with a will. There is Nathaniel Lee, who produces a Nero, a Sophonisba, a Gloriana, The Rival Queens, a Mithridates, an Oedipus, a Theodosius, a Lucius Junius Brutus, not to mention some others; plays in which his genius, though little conspicuous for order and clarity, studiously avoided having two actions going on at one and the same time. No irrelevant episodes for him; unity of time must be scrupulously observed, so must dignity; his characters must speak in accents of the loftiest grandiloquence. And it must be confessed that, now and again, he all but achieved his aim. Otway’s Venice Preserved, a striking success, had already shown the world that English drama could be both moving and correct. But it was the year 1713 that brought the crowning victory, the year that witnessed the birth of Addison’s Cato, a play judged worthy of being translated straightway into French. London, which already had a second Boileau, now boasted a second Racine. Thus did the noble Cato set forth upon his progress through all the lands of Europe. It was the fruit of well-nigh half a century of effort. It took the English all that time to subdue the uncouth element in their genius and to bring forth the perfect specimen of literary law and order.

  The Germans still lagged behind. But patience! They would come along in their own good time. It pained Gottsched to see the German stage in such a state of chaos. He sets to work, masters Aristotle’s Poetics, studies the commentators thereon, and the classical drama, the French poets, not forgetting their prefaces. It opened his eyes to discover that dramatic art is governed by laws so firmly based on reason, laws so absolute, so urgently compelling, that clearly Germany would never emerge from barbarism so long as she refused to observe them. So Gottsched set to work to master the secrets of the art, and, at last, in 1732, came out triumphantly with his Dying Cato. He might almost have been satisfied with just translating Addison’s Cato into German. But somehow even that play fell short of perfect regularity, it still needed lopping and pruning. There were still some irrelevant episodes, some redundant ornaments that marred the architecture of the whole. But, the gods and his own craftmanship be praised! all the scenes of the German Cato take place in one room in the castle at Utica, and the action “extends from somewhere about noon until close on sunset”.

  It is a strange thing that even such a man as Voltaire, when he came to write a tragedy or an ode, adopted a manner completely foreign to his genius, though neither he nor his contemporaries suspected it. His idea was to imitate Corneille, and Racine, and Boileau, and do what they had done over again. Before the coming of the neo-classical period, which took longer to develop than did any other school of modern times, before all that, it is a melancholy sight that is offered to our contemplation, all this rubble-heap of fables without the bloom on them, tragedies without truth and verses without poetry; a dead-weight of lifeless lumber. Such was the price of the benefits which the classical spirit conferred upon the world. Because the writers of the French classical school attained a degree of lofty perfection which so dazzled their obscurer descendants as to make them think there was nothing to be done save copy them; because second-rate writers, taking the line of least resistance, preferred to do over again what their predecessors had succeeded in doing before them; because the mathematical spirit involved the suppression of all non-rigid forms, of all living hues; because the tyrant Reason would not tolerate flowers that were content to be just flowers and nothing more, the power of song withered away and the springs of Helicon ran dry.

  [1][Limajon de Saint-Didier], Le Voyage au Parnasse, 1716, p. 258: “All at once a loud noise was heard. A hundred poets suddenly lifted up their voices to Apollo, beseeching him to give ear to their Odes. O God of might, cried one, I have written an ode about the motion of the globe; I, shouted another, have composed an ode to algebra. . . .”—For England, see Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l’opinion française au XVIIe siècle, 1930, Tome II, p. 119.

  [2]My grandsire is the Father and Ruler of the Gods. Heaven, the whole Universe, is thronged with my ancestors. Where can I hide me? Let me flee to the darkness of the underworld. But what am I saying? My father holds there the fatal urn. Fate, th
ey say, placed it in his stern hands. Minos, in the realms below, sits in judgment on every pallid human ghost. Ah, what a thrill of anguish would pass through his horror-stricken shade when he saw his daughter brought before his sight constrained to confess to countless different crimes, crimes perchance unheard of in the World below. What wilt thou say, my Sire, at a sight so terrible?

  [3]Fontenelle, Sur la poésie en général, Œuvres diverses, VIII, 1751.

  [4]Abbé Trublet, Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale, 1735.

  [5]Jean Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, 1699. Début.

  [6]Apropos de l’Ode sur la naissance du duc de Bretagne, 1707.

  [7]Bacco in Toscana, 1685.

  He who carries to his lips pale and melancholy beer dies soon, or seldom attains to babbling old age. Let him drink the cider of England whoso wants to go quickly underground, whoso wishes for a quick death, let him drink the beverages of the North. . . .

  Let him purify himself, let him immerse, nay, submerge himself in a golden cup filled to overflowing with the vine so benign that flames at Sansovino.

  [8]L’Italia alla Francia, 1700.

  You take up arms, O France? You grasp your naked sword—against me who can but oppose your blows with arms of glass? Against me, whom neither the glory of my ancient sceptre, nor my former greatness can protect?

  [9]Matthew Prior, Down Hall, a Ballad; first published 1723.

  [10]Letter to A. Pope from Adrianople, April, 1717.

  [11]Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, XXIV. Sur Les Académies.

  [12]Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and ascertaining the English Tongue, London, 1712.

  II

  PICTURES, STRANGE OR BEAUTIFUL

  SINCE these fields of artificial flowers have no charm for us, let us seek elsewhere. . . .

  Mr. Spectator, holding forth to his readers on the need for wisdom and moderation, interrupts his moralizing to extol the delights of the imagination, affirming that the pleasures we derive from the faculty of sight are in no way inferior to those we owe to the mind; he even permits himself to belaud the noble exuberances of Shakespeare: Juvat integros accedere fontes. The Italian theorizers insisted on obedience to rule, yet, contrary to rule, they admitted that a creative fancy of some kind had its rights and its merits. Thus it was that they came to enjoy the flattering, the rather too flattering, reputation of being the forerunners of the Romantics. These alluring contradictions! Look at the French; they would be submitting everything to rule and compass, if only the Fairies didn’t come and play the dickens with their geometrical designs. The end of the century was marked by gloom and austerity, conscious as it was of a great falling-off. In the wake of the majestic creations of the masters, came the works of the critics, but now, all of a sudden, what is this that the latest twist of fashion demands? What books are these that are making so brave a show in the booksellers’ windows? Fairy tales!

  The contemporaries of the now rapidly ageing Louis XIV, and of the devout and sober-minded Mme. de Maintenon beguile themselves with the stories that Old Mother Goose used to tell the little ones. Admittedly, Descartes was not discarded holusbolus. When a golden pumpkin was turned into a coach, the coach was a golden one; when lizards were turned into footmen, the footmen were attired in gaudy liveries, whiskered rats were metamorphosed into mustachioed coachmen, and in this way the logical connexions, so dear to our race, were, in a measure, preserved. But what a mass of improbabilities, too, there were! Gorgeous palaces spring up out of nothing, all built of gold and rubies; the gate is studded with carbuncles, and, to gain admittance, you pull at a deer’s foot attached to a chain made wholly of diamonds. Animals talk; the roe that grazes in the wood, the female cat that lives in its lair, are really women that have been bewitched. Every Blue Bird is a Prince Charming. Marvels, marvels everywhere, everywhere flowers, jewels, all the adornments of fairyland. A strip of linen four hundred ells in length is contained in a single millet seed, and when unwound goes through the eye of a needle. All living things, on earth, in the sea and in the air are depicted on it, together with the sun and the stars. You may ride on wooden steeds that race like the wind, and jump more nimbly than the horses in a riding-school; you may drive in a cabriolet drawn by a fat sheep that always knows the road, or in a little sleigh smartly painted and gilded and drawn by a pair of stags prodigiously fleet of foot; or in a flying chaise drawn by winged frogs; in chariots of fire which dragons sweep athwart the sky. The world has no longer any recognizable laws; the powers of fairyland bemock them as they will. No more do solid things have weight; dreams come true; virtue is rewarded, vice punished. When at last you lay aside these tales of wonder, how grey and bleak the world appears, and life how great a burden!

  It was the women who were the first to revive these tales that come down to us from the distant past, so distant as to be beyond all human ken; stirrings, promptings of the primeval spirit that saw in all things, in the whispering of the wind, in the darkness of the night, in blossoming time, in winter, only the works of the fairies—women, more instinctive, more alive to the past than men; women, the guardians of the imagination. And then Charles Perrault arrived upon the scene; and behold, this ex-superintendent of the royal palaces, taking a few butterflies’ wings, a few threads of gossamer, a few beams of moonlight, wove for us his tales of fairyland, masterpieces fragile but immortal. Beauty lay sleeping in the wood; all things, even dreams, were stayed in their course; goblins played their pranks no more, and fairies ceased their frolics. Over Versailles, over the Court, over the city, brooded the sadness that comes of a task that is done, of a tale that is told. Then, on a sudden, the enchanter waves his wand, and lo! everything awakes. The kitchen-knaves begin to stir their stumps, the lacqueys dance a jig, the horses neigh, the birds of the forest call to one another from their branches, the Princess opens her eyes and smiles, and tells the Prince he has been long away, that she has long awaited his arrival.

  The actual travellers did not bring back with them all the things we expect from them to-day; those subjective developments were to come later, and gradually. They did not project their ego into the far off beyond, if haply they might learn what would befall it there, or feel their spirit mysteriously stirred at the breath of winds from the unknown. Yet, have we said all that is to be said about them when we have spoken merely of their intellectual impressions? Were they just intellect, and nothing more? Were not their eyes beginning to take in something of the picturesque wonders of the world? Did not these travellers unfold to an age that was steeped in intellectualism, pictures and scenes that laid a magic spell upon it?

  Even as fresh islands strangely uprising from some familiar sea, so, in this old Europe, did lands of marvel begin to heave in sight. Such a land was Lapland, which, little by little, was beginning to emerge from its Cimmerian darkness. Queer folk, as François Bernier the explorer noted, “those Laplanders, squat, dumpy, with fat legs, broad shoulders, bull-necks, faces like fiddles, ugly as sin, somewhat resembling bears, and disgustingly addicted to fish-oil”. And a strange country too, where, in summer, the sun never sets, and, in winter, never rises; where reindeer take the place of horses, where men slide along on the snow on wooden lathes buckled to their feet; where wizards go off into a trance at a mere word. So strange is it all, that the travellers seemed “to be bringing back accounts of another planet rather than of somewhere on this old continent of ours”.

  Of barbarous lands, there came a constant stream of amazing narratives; thrilling adventures by sea, travellers made captive, escapes and rescues, lovers sundered and reunited, tales of martyrs and renegades; glimpses of pashas and janissaries, of beautiful women bathed in tears, unwilling inmates of the seraglio; of infidels moved to compassion by their weeping, of prison-warders, and galley-slaves bending over their oars, of missionaries striving heroically to collect enormous ransoms in Spanish doubloons or French écus. Repeated over and over again, constantly embellished, such stories never lost their popularity. There
was the theatre—comedies with elaborate plots, tales where the course of true love was anything but smooth, fiction which was strange enough, and truth which was still stranger.

  From Jerusalem, from the Holy Sepulchre, there arose, at least once, a cry of melodious lamentation. O Jerusalem! O hapless city! O city of tombs! The skeletons, the bones, scattered and broken, which are to be seen in the cemeteries, fill one with sombre reflections, and the poet breathes them forth in verses he entitles Contemplation:

  Is this, alas! our boasted mortal State?

  Is it for this, we covet to be great?

  What Happiness from envied Grandeur springs,

  When these poor Reliques once were mighty kings?

  O frail uncertainty of human Power,

  While Graves can Majesty itself devour!

  Who is he that voices this lament? Not Young in his Night Thoughts, not Hervey in his Meditations among the Tombs; no, it is Aaron Hill the romantic, Aaron Hill the traveller in the Holy Land.

  If Louis XIV read the letters which Père de Prémare sent home from Canton to Père de La Chaise, he must have realized that there were stranger beings in the world than ever a Dutch painter committed to canvas. Canton! What an amazing place! Whole tribes of mortals swarming in the narrow streets. Porters going about with nothing on their feet, wearing extraordinary-looking straw headgear proof alike against sun and rain. No wheeled carriages; only chairs. Père Prémare goes about in a huge one, lavishly gilded, borne on the shoulders of six or eight men. Then the military processions. The Tsong-Tou, that is to say the Governor of two provinces, never goes abroad without an escort at least a hundred strong. “I imagine that what I have told you will conjure up a city very different from anything Paris has to show. Take the houses for example. Imagine whole streets without a single window, all shops, poor ones too for the most part, often with nothing but a bamboo hurdle to do duty for a door.”[1] And the pagodas, served by bonzes, as the Buddhist priests are called; the street gates closed at evening; on the river, a floating city, each boat housing a complete family; paddy fields stretching far and wide in the country round about.