The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  This mania of his for attacking and demolishing! First of all he falls out with the Catholics; but he is also at odds with the Lutherans, the Calvinists, indeed with enthusiasts of every kidney. You can never be sure whether, when he has done soothing and caressing, he won’t suddenly begin to bite. He flies into tempestuous passions, he rages at this, he rages at that, he insults, he reviles. The man is a sort of Aristophanes gone mad. And those everlasting allegories, and irony, there’s no end to it. And, oh, those appalling jokes! “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how it altered her person for the worse.”

  How many an Englishman, while freely admitting the value of classical rule, and even endeavouring to conform to it, nourished in his heart a secret longing for his vanished freedom! Think how many of them deemed that Aristotle, and Horace, were quite enough for them to be guided by, and that there was really no reason why they should submit to that inflexible French discipline. “It is as if, to make excellent honey, you should cut off the wings of your bees, confine them to their hive or their stands, and lay flowers before them, such as you think the sweetest, and like to yield the finest extraction; you had as good pull out their stings, and make arrant drones of them. They must range through fields, as well as gardens, choose such flowers as they please.”[2]

  The resistance is more pronounced, it displays more tenacity, more violence even, when, instead of letters, it is manners and customs that are in question, when, that is to say, it comes to defending something that is more inbred, more instinctive, like a people’s own particular way of life. When we read the novels or the comedies of an age which, after all, did accept, more or less, the French mode of living, the French ideas of social behaviour, we cannot help being struck by the vigour of the national reaction. France is represented as a shameless creature that sends over to London her dancing masters, her rascally lacqueys, her disreputable serving wenches, her fashion-merchants, her adventuresses, her coxcomb marquises, her fops and popinjays, who go about showing off their fine manners and are but a pack of rogues and runagates. What a contrast to the straightforward Englishman, simple of heart and bluff of speech, whose very lack of polish is accounted a virtue. Better keep his bluntness of speech, his uncouth manners and his native vigour, than be softened and spoiled by foreign ways that would turn a man into a tailor’s dummy, a hypocrite, a strutting coxcomb. There are plenty of plays in which French men and French women are brought on in this way, merely to serve as foils, to tickle the ears of the groundlings, but also to serve the additional purpose of bringing the virtues, the indomitable virtues, of the British national character into stronger relief.

  Italy’s complaint was that she was France’s slave; and, to a certain extent, she was in a fair way to becoming so. But here again we must beware of rash generalizations. For not only were there poets beyond the Alps who kept the idea of Roman unity very much alive, the idea that Gaul was after all one of the latecomers to civilization, and looked forward to the day when Italy, the rightful sovereign, should resume the sceptre, but, since classical ideas were the order of the day, the champions of Italy declared that there had been a classical school in Italy long before there had been one in France, and that the Italian model was not only the original, but the only genuinely authentic one. They kept harping doggedly on the Renaissance, their Renaissance they were pleased to call it; who would dare to dispute their title? While the poets do their best to copy Corneille and Racine, with the object, openly avowed, of outdoing their masters, they keep repeating, over and over again, that they are, and intend to remain, faithful to the spirit and letter of Greek Tragedy, which is the only form that counts, and which is theirs in a special sense, for it was they who first discovered it and made it bear fruit. What, after all, had the French done? Tragedy, the antique model, they had converted into an effeminate, pretty-pretty thing, a love-story with protestations of inordinate prolixity on the theme of love. Sophocles was the great master of tragedy, and to the Sophoclean model they must return.

  Every country wanted to prove that it had a longer pedigree than any of its rivals, and delved back as far as it could into the past to see what titles to nobility it could unearth. Each boasted that it had a language, a poetry, a prose tradition, a civilization older than any of the rest, and each haughtily declared that its neighbours were nothing but pretentious upstarts.

  In this connection, no country displayed a bolder front than Germany. Crushed and humbled to the dust as she was, swept and swayed by every wind that blew, she wielded no influence of her own, and was to all outward seeming a moral force completely spent. Howbeit, she was struggling manfully all the while to keep alive her inward spirit, and on every front she was striving to hold her own. There was the question of her unity. She would soon recover that if she could but put her house in order; so said Pufendorf, so said Leibniz. And law? Was there not a Germanic law, an older, and a better, than Roman law, than Canon law. Roman law and Canon law—none but these were taught in the universities. That was all wrong. The time had come to restore the national, autochthonous law to its rightful place. And then there was the language question. Why, the German language was as ancient, ay, and as beautiful as the Latin, or the Greek, or as any other language that could be named. The German tongue went back to the beginning of the world. And literature—what of that? The answer was that German literature was second to none. That was clearly established by the learned Morhofius in 1682. How he threw himself into his task! What mountains of evidence he brought together! How his love of the fatherland shines through every page of his turgid and ponderous work! He asserted that Germany had had some glorious, but unjustly forgotten, poets, like Hans Sachs, and others older still, whom Olaus Rudbeck had claimed for Scandinavia. His zeal prompted him to advance a strange argument indeed. He insisted that Germany had had poets who had left no trace behind them, but that the fact that they had left no trace did not prove that they had never existed. On the contrary, they must have existed, because in every nation poetry is in the primitive form of literary expression. Therefore they had existed, albeit they were now unknown and undiscoverable.

  The German language, which possesses the rotundity of the Greek, the majesty of the Latin, the flexibility of the French, the graces of the Italian, the richness of the English, the dignity of the Flemish—this age-old tongue would bring forth, its zealous champions hoped, masterpieces that should compel a jealous Europe to acknowledge its worth. So when, in 1689, Caspers von Lohenstein’s Arminius und Thusnelda appeared, what a shout of triumph rent the air! At last a great writer, patriae amantissimus, had sought and found a subject worthy of the German race; had sung the praise of that Arminius who had confronted Rome, not in her early, puny days, but in the fullness of her might, and given back to Germany the crown of oak and laurel. Hence these huzzahs of joy, these shouts of triumph.

  The appeal of the Sehnsucht, what more generally recognized feature is there in the psychology of the eternal Germany? It was not lacking in an age when knowledge was claiming to dispel all the darkness of the soul and to cast a light even on the subconscious. Christian Weise, poet and pedagogue, who, in all his work betrayed a moving desire for the simple and the natural, wrote a play every year for the school theatre. This was highly diverting for the pupils, turned actors for the nonce, and something to make the parents feel proud of their offspring. All the torment of a yearning but unrequited spirit was made manifest in one of these plays called Die unvergnugte Seele, which was produced in the year 1688. Vertumnus, a young man of good family, well disposed, should, logically speaking, have been happy, but he is not; he is unhappy. He feels unable to enjoy the worldly blessings that are his, yet he cannot even put in words what it is he lacks. He does his best to fill up the void in his being by female society, by joining in the carousals of his boon companions, by the pursuit of worldly honours, by frequenting the society of the Parnassians—all in vain. He falls into a state of utter despair; he is on the point of putting an end to his l
ife. Is there, then, no peace anywhere but in the grave? At this point the play takes on a moralizing tone and loses its psychological interest. There happen to pass by a couple of peasants, Contento and Quiete. They have had their misfortunes, and pretty cruel ones, but they have not lost their zest for life, of which they ask no more than it can give. Such is the lesson they give Vertumnus; he takes it to heart, and turns over a new leaf.

  So far, the yearning soul is, as we see, timid and modest. It is not puffed up; it does not look on itself as something apart; it does not despair of a cure. But we know that Vertumnus will have successors who will carry their despair beyond all reasonable limits, who will call the world, and God Himself, to witness to their misfortunes, and that no Contento, no Quiete will come to save them when they resolve to quit a world that is unworthy of them.

  Little did they dream, the critics who admired Arminius und Thusnelda and the numerous poetical effusions of Christian Weise, little did they dream that Germany had already produced one of the finest romances in which the idea of the collective spirit ever found expression, the Simplicissimus of Grimmelshausen. Picaresque, if you will, considering the number of adventures which befall the hero, but savouring so richly of its native soil that it defied translation, and for some countries, France included, defies it still. A tale composed of memories of the Thirty Years War, of crops laid waste, villages plundered, peasants put to the sword, fire and slaughter on every hand; a tale of a simple, upright soul flung into the midst of a corrupt civilization, tempted and impaired thereby, who rises above it at last and proves its conqueror in the end. It is the tale of a creed which girdles the earth like a forest of symbols, which, while conscious that it is living in the midst of a host of transient illusions, never ceases to reach out towards the eternal verities; the tale of a Christian who, struggling heavenward through many tribulations, through ignorance, sin, remorse, clings to the hope that promises eternal joy, and attains his goal at last. These various themes develop, interlace, coalesce, separate anew, following one upon another with unexampled richness and splendour, sounding the glories of a race which their neighbours deemed on the point of extinction, but which manifested, notwithstanding, its invincible resolution to survive.

  The theory of racial superiority had not yet come to the fore. The profound significance of the expression “native land” had not been fully gauged. No notion had been formed as yet of the dynamic potentialities of the idea of nationality. The feelings awakened in a man’s breast by the thought of his countryside, of his village church, had not as yet been analysed and philosophized upon. But they were no less operative for all that, and no sooner did an Italian of dismembered Italy, a German of disrupted Germany, a Pole of riven Poland, a Spaniard of sleepy Spain, get it into his head that a slight had been offered, not merely to the inner spirit of his country but to the outward symbol of it, than complaints and protests filled the air. Against the nationalistic prejudices of the various peoples, the idea of universal egalitarianism could make no headway.

  Sometimes a song broke forth; not an ode by some accomplished bard, not a madrigal, not a piece of subtle verbal artistry, but a sort of semi-barbaric chant. The story is told how, in the Middle Ages, a certain Scandinavian king, Regner Ladbrog, was bitten by a deadly serpent, and how, before the poison reached his heart, he sang a kind of runic chant;[3] a chant so weird and strange as to cast a spell upon the contemporaries of William of Orange and Louis XIV. And besides things of that kind folk sang snatches of melodious lamentations that came from very far indeed, from the home of those outlandish denizens of the frozen north, the Laplanders, such as the Song of the Moors of Orra:

  Thou rising Sun, whose gladsome ray

  Invites my Fair to rural Play,

  Dispel the Mist, and clear the Skies,

  And bring my Orra to my Eyes.

  Oh! were I sure my Dear to view,

  I’d climb that Pine-Tree’s topmost Bough;

  Aloft in Air that quivering plays,

  And round and round for ever gaze.

  Or, maybe, the Song of the Reindeer:

  Haste, my Rain-Deer, and let us nimbly go

  Our am’rous Journey through this dreary waste,

  Haste, my Rain-Deer, still thou art too slow,

  Impetuous Love demands the Lightning’s Haste.[4]

  No great things, in comparison with poems composed on the grand pattern; their significance would have been slighter still if Addison had not taken it into his head to draw attention to these rude compositions and to protest that there was something in them that strangely took his fancy. There was the old ballad of Chevy Chase, the touching song about the Babes in the Wood. He loved to listen as he travelled about England to songs that had been handed down from father to son, songs that were so dear to the hearts of the country folk.[5] It is true that to justify his taste Addison brought in Homer and Virgil and would have it that these rude rustic measures had qualities in common with the Odyssey and the Aeneid. It is as well that he did not pursue that line, and came back to belauding the artlessness, the spontaneity, of some such outpouring of the spirit as the song of a countryman returning home from his labours in the field. “This is a plain simple copy of Nature, destitute of all the Helps and Ornaments of Art . . . and pleases for no other reason but because it is a copy of Nature.”

  At the very opposite end of the scale there prevailed, or at least showed signs of growing influence, the idea that power rightly belonged to the people and that the powers wielded by a king were his only by delegation. Even in France there were people who recalled that Gaul had been conquered by the Franks; that the Frankish people, assembling on the Campus Martius, used to choose their own leaders; that, in consequence, sovereign power did not derive from God, nor was it connected in any way with any Roman tradition; it was conferred upon one of their number by the whole assembly of fighting men freely exercising their right of election. The people had not yet taken on the shape of a democracy, but the conception of popular power was beginning to emerge, fraught with significance for the future.

  And now, as touching instinct. It cannot be said that as yet it was not looked on askance. Christians regarded it with mingled repulsion and alarm. As for the philosophers, they were unable to make up their minds as to whether it was an unmixed good. They would like to bring it under the controlling influence of reason. However, it can at least be said that it was not excluded from the topics of current speculation. For example, a medical practitioner might take it into his head to say something uncomplimentary about the Faculty and their precepts, explaining how a man can treat himself, that keeping well was a matter of instinct. Or again, some eccentric individual, referring to the idea of poetic inspiration, would declare that it was a sort of maniacal frenzy, an exalted madness, and that it was born of instinct. And, incidentally, there was another awkward customer that, by eluding logical analysis, by refusing all intellectual discipline, caused the rationalists, who wanted to bring it under their jurisdiction, no slight inconvenience. That was the Sublime. It was all very well to say that it was something new and something true embodied in one grand idea, expressed with elegance and precision; all very well to say that if a thing were not true it could not attain to the highest beauty nor reach the altitudes of the Sublime; that was all very sound, but it was felt that there was more in the matter than that. So, with a longing still unsatisfied, the question was put to Longinus, for he had not shrunk from giving a definition of this difficult word, and his was the prestige which attaches to a classic of ancient times. Well then, the Sublime—is it not, when all is said and done, a quality which, at least to some extent, lies outside the domain of Reason?