Chapter XIII: Part 13

His writings are forceful, eloquent, and lucid in style, with a Websterian massiveness that does not detract from their charm. They fill twenty volumes, divided into groups of essays on Civilization, Controversy, Religion, Philosophy, Scientific Theories, and Popular Literature, which cover a great and fascinating variety of topics in detail. Brownson was an intense and patriotic American, and his national quality comes out strongly in his extended treatise 'The American Republic' (1865). The best known of his other works is a candid, vigorous, and engaging autobiography entitled 'The Convert' (1853).

SAINT-SIMONISM

From 'The Convert'

If I drew my doctrine of Union in part from the eclecticism of Cousin, I drew my views of the Church and of the reorganization of the race from the Saint-Simonians,--a philo-sophico-religious or a politico-philosophical sect that sprung up in France under the Restoration, and figured largely for a year or two under the monarchy of July. Their founder was Claude Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, a descendant of the Due de Saint-Simon, well known as the author of the 'Memoirs.' He was born in 1760, entered the army at the age of seventeen, and the year after came to this country, where he served with distinction in our Revolutionary War under Bouillié. After the peace of 1783 he devoted two years to the study of our people and institutions, and then returned to France. Hardly had he returned before he found himself in the midst of the French Revolution, which he regarded as the practical application of the principles or theories adopted by the reformers of the sixteenth century and popularized by the philosophers of the eighteenth. He looked upon that revolution, we are told, as having only a destructive mission--necessary, important, but inadequate to the wants of humanity; and instead of being carried away by it as were most of the young men of his age and his principles, he set himself at work to amass materials for the erection of a new social edifice on the ruins of the old, which should stand and improve in solidity, strength, grandeur, and beauty forever.

The way he seems to have taken to amass these materials was to engage with a partner in some grand speculations for the accumulation of wealth,--and speculations too, it is said, not of the most honorable or even the most honest character. His plans succeeded for a time, and he became very rich, as did many others in those troublous times; but he finally met with reverses, and lost all but the wrecks of his fortune. He then for a number of years plunged into all manner of vice, and indulged to excess in every species of dissipation; not, we are told, from love of vice, any inordinate desire, or any impure affection, but for the holy purpose of preparing himself by his experience for the great work of redeeming man and securing for him a Paradise on earth. Having gained all that experience could give him in the department of vice, he then proceeded to consult the learned professors of L'École Polytechnique for seven or ten years, to make himself master of science, literature, and the fine arts in all their departments, and to place himself at the level of the last attainments of the race. Thus qualified to be the founder of a new social organization, he wrote several books, in which he deposited the germs of his ideas, or rather the germs of the future; most of which have hitherto remained unpublished.

But now that he was so well qualified for his work he found himself a beggar, and had as yet made only a single disciple. He was reduced to despair and attempted to take his own life; but failed, the ball only grazing his sacred forehead. His faithful disciple was near him, saved him, and aroused him into life and hope. When he recovered he found that he had fallen into a gross error. He had been a materialist, an atheist, and had discarded all religious ideas as long since outgrown by the human race. He had proposed to organize the human race with materials furnished by the senses alone, and by the aid of positive science. He owns his fault, and conceives and brings forth a new Christianity, consigned to a small pamphlet entitled 'Nouveau Christianisme,' which was immediately published. This done, his mission was ended, and he died May 19th, 1825, and I suppose was buried.

Saint-Simon, the preacher of a new Christianity, very soon attracted disciples, chiefly from the pupils of the Polytechnic School; ardent and lively young men, full of enthusiasm, brought up without faith in the gospel and yet unable to live without religion of some sort. Among the active members of the sect were at one time Pierre Leroux, Jules and Michel Chevalier, Lerminier, [and] my personal friend Dr. Poyen, who initiated me and so many others in New England into the mysteries of animal magnetism. Dr. Poyen was, I believe, a native of the island of Guadeloupe: a man of more ability than he usually had credit for, of solid learning, genuine science, and honest intentions. I knew him well and esteemed him highly. When I knew him his attachment to the new religion was much weakened, and he often talked to me of the old Church, and assured me that he felt at times that he must return to her bosom. I owe him many hints which turned my thoughts toward Catholic principles, and which, with God's grace, were of much service to me. These and many others were in the sect; whose chiefs, after the death of its founder, were--Bazard, a Liberal and a practical man, who killed himself; and Enfantin, who after the dissolution of the sect sought employment in the service of the Viceroy of Egypt, and occupies now some important post in connection with the French railways.

The sect began in 1826 by addressing the working classes; but their success was small. In 1829 they came out of their narrow circle, assumed a bolder tone, addressed themselves to the general public, and became in less than eighteen months a Parisian _mode_. In 1831 they purchased the Globe newspaper, made it their organ, and distributed gratuitously five thousand copies daily. In 1832 they had established a central propagandism in Paris, and had their missionaries in most of the departments of France. They attacked the hereditary peerage, and it fell; they seemed to be numerous and strong, and I believed for a moment in their complete success. They called their doctrine a religion, their ministers priests, and their organization a church; and as such they claimed to be recognized by the State, and to receive from it a subvention as other religious denominations [did]. But the courts decided that Saint-Simonism was not a religion and its ministers were not religious teachers. This decision struck them with death. Their prestige vanished. They scattered, dissolved in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would say, into endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all shams and unrealities.

Saint-Simon himself, who as presented to us by his disciples is a half-mythic personage, seems, so far as I can judge by those of his writings that I have seen, to have been a man of large ability and laudable intentions; but I have not been able to find any new or original thoughts of which he was the indisputable father. His whole system, if system he had, is summed up in the two maxims "Eden is before us, not behind us" (or the Golden Age of the poets is in the future, not in the past), and "Society ought to be so organized as to tend in the most rapid manner possible to the continuous moral, intellectual, and physical amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes." He simply adopts the doctrine of progress set forth with so much flash eloquence by Condorcet, and the philanthropic doctrine with regard to the laboring classes, or the people, defended by Barbeuf and a large section of the French Revolutionists. His religion was not so much as the Theophilanthropy attempted to be introduced by some members of the French Directory: it admitted God in name, and in name did not deny Jesus Christ, but it rejected all mysteries, and reduced religion to mere socialism. It conceded that Catholicity had been the true Church down to the pontificate of Leo X., because down to that time its ministers had taken the lead in directing the intelligence and labors of mankind, had aided the progress of civilization, and promoted the well-being of the poorer and more numerous classes. But since Leo X., who made of the Papacy a secular principality, it had neglected its mission, had ceased to labor for the poorer and more numerous classes, had leagued itself with the ruling orders, and lent all its influence to uphold tyrants and tyranny. A new church was needed; a church which should realize the ideal of Jesus Christ, and tend directly and constantly to the moral, physical, and social amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes,--in other words, the greatest happiness in this life of the greatest number, the principle of Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarian school.

His disciples enlarged upon the hints of the master, and attributed to him ideas which he never entertained. They endeavored to reduce his hints to a complete system of religion, philosophy, and social organization. Their chiefs, I have said, were Amand Bazard and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin....

Bazard took the lead in what related to the external, political, and economical organization, and Enfantin in what regarded doctrine and worship. The philosophy or theology of the sect or school was derived principally from Hegel, and was a refined Pantheism. Its Christology was the unity, not union, of the divine and human; and the Incarnation symbolized the unity of God and man, or the Divinity manifesting himself in humanity, and making humanity substantially divine,--the very doctrine in reality which I myself had embraced even before I had heard of the Saint-Simonians, if not before they had published it. The religious organization was founded on the doctrine of the progressive nature of man, and the maxim that all institutions should tend in the most speedy and direct manner possible to the constant amelioration of the moral, intellectual, and physical condition of the poorer and more numerous classes. Socially men were to be divided into three classes,--artists, _savans_, and industrials or working men, corresponding to the psychological division of the human faculties. The soul has three powers or faculties,--to love, to know, and to act. Those in whom the love-faculty is predominant belong to the class of artists, those in whom the knowledge-faculty is predominant belong to the class of _savans_, the scientific and the learned, and in fine, those in whom the act-faculty predominates belong to the industrial class. This classification places every man in the social category for which he is fitted, and to which he is attracted by his nature. These several classes are to be hierarchically organized under chiefs or priests, who are respectively priests of the artists, of the scientific, and of the industrials, and are, priests and all, to be subjected to a supreme Father, _Père Supréme_, and a Supreme Mother, _Mère Supréme_.

The economical organization is to be based on the maxims, "To each one according to his capacity," and "To each capacity according to its work." Private property is to be retained, but its transmission by inheritance or testamentary disposition must be abolished. The property is to be held by a tenure resembling that of gavel-kind. It belongs to the community, and the priests, chiefs, or brehons, as the Celtic tribes call them, to distribute it for life to individuals, and to each individual according to his capacity. It was supposed that in this way the advantages of both common and individual property might be secured. Something of this prevailed originally in most nations, and a reminiscence of it still exists in the village system among the Slavonic tribes of Russia and Poland; and nearly all jurists maintain that the testamentary right by which a man disposes of his goods after his natural death, as well as that by which a child inherits from the parent, is a municipal, not a natural right.

The most striking feature in the Saint-Simonian scheme was the rank and position it assigned to woman. It asserted the absolute equality of the sexes, and maintained that either sex is incomplete without the other. Man is an incomplete individual without woman. Hence a religion, a doctrine, a social institution founded by one sex alone is incomplete, and can never be adequate to the wants of the race or a definite order. This idea was also entertained by Frances Wright, and appears to be entertained by all our Women's Rights folk of either sex. The old civilization was masculine, not male and female as God made man. Hence its condemnation. The Saint-Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of their hierarchy a sovereign Mother. The man to be sovereign Father they found; but a woman to be sovereign Mother, _Mère Suprême_, they found not. This caused great embarrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin. Bazard was about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage under the protection of the existing French laws. Enfantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful compliance with the prejudices of the world. The Saint-Simonian society, he maintained, was a State, a kingdom within itself, and should be governed by its own laws and its own chiefs without any recognition of those without. Bazard persisted, and had the marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal manner, and for aught I know, according to the rites of the Church. A great scandal followed. Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject. Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed Christian marriage; that in enacting the existing law on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he could not recognize it as law till woman had given her consent to it. As yet the society was only provisionally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet found the _Mère Suprême_. The law on marriage must emanate conjointly from the Supreme Father and the Supreme Mother, and it would be irregular and a usurpation for the Supreme Father to undertake alone to legislate on the subject. Bazard would not submit, and went out and shot himself. Most of the politicians abandoned the association; and Père Enfantin, almost in despair, dispatched twelve apostles to Constantinople to find in the Turkish harems the Supreme Mother. After a year they returned and reported that they were unable to find her; and the society, condemned by the French courts as immoral, broke up, and broke up because no woman could be found to be its mother. And so they ended, having risen, flourished, and decayed in less than a single decade.

The points in the Saint-Simonian movement that arrested my attention and commanded my belief were what it will seem strange to my readers could ever have been doubted,--its assertion of a religious future for the human race, and that religion, in the future as well as in the past, must have an organization, and a hierarchical organization. Its classification of men according to the predominant psychological faculty in each, into artists, savans, and industrials, struck me as very well; and the maxims "To each according to his capacity," and "To each capacity according to its works," as evidently just, and desirable if practicable. The doctrine of the Divinity in Humanity, of progress, of no essential antagonism between the spiritual and the material, and of the duty of shaping all institutions for the speediest and continuous moral, intellectual, and physical amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes, I already held. I was rather pleased than otherwise with the doctrine with regard to property, and thought it a decided improvement on that of a community of goods. The doctrine with regard to the relation of the sexes I rather acquiesced in than approved. I was disposed to maintain, as the Indian said, that "woman is the weaker canoe," and to assert my marital prerogatives; but the equality of the sexes was asserted by nearly all my friends, and I remained generally silent on the subject, till some of the admirers of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Fuller began to scorn equality and to claim for woman superiority. Then I became roused, and ventured to assert my masculine dignity.

It is remarkable that most reformers find fault with the Christian law of marriage, and propose to alter the relations which God has established both in nature and the gospel between the sexes; and this is generally the rock on which they split. Women do not usually admire men who cast off their manhood or are unconscious of the rights and prerogatives of the stronger sex; and they admire just as little those "strong-minded women" who strive to excel only in the masculine virtues. I have never been persuaded that it argues well for a people when its women are men and its men women. Yet I trust I have always honored and always shall honor woman. I raise no question as to woman's equality or inequality with man, for comparisons cannot be made between things not of the same kind. Woman's sphere and office in life are as high, as holy, as important as man's, but different; and the glory of both man and woman is for each to act well the part assigned to each by Almighty God.

The Saint-Simonian writings made me familiar with the idea of a hierarchy, and removed from my mind the prejudices against the Papacy generally entertained by my countrymen. Their proposed organization, I saw, might be good and desirable if their priests, their Supreme Father and Mother, could really be the wisest, the best,--not merely the nominal but the real chiefs of society. Yet what security have I that they will be? Their power was to have no limit save their own wisdom and love, but who would answer for it that these would always be an effectual limit? How were these priests or chiefs to be designated and installed in their office? By popular election? But popular election often passes over the proper man and takes the improper. Then as to the assignment to each man of a capital proportioned to his capacity to begin life with, what certainty is there that the rules of strict right will be followed? that wrong will not often be done, both voluntarily and involuntarily? Are your chiefs to be infallible and impeccable? Still the movement interested me, and many of its principles took firm hold of me and held me for years in a species of mental thraldom; insomuch that I found it difficult, if not impossible, either to refute them or to harmonize them with other principles which I also held, or rather which held me, and in which I detected no unsoundness. Yet I imbibed no errors from the Saint-Simonians; and I can say of them as of the Unitarians,--they did me no harm, but were in my fallen state the occasion of much good to me.

FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE

(1849-)

BY ADOLPHE COHN

Ferdinand Brunetière, the celebrated French literary critic, was born in Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-port of France, in the year 1849. His studies were begun in the college of his native city and continued in Paris, in the Lycée Louis le Grand, where in the class of philosophy he came under Professor Émile Charles, by whose original and profound though decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully influenced. His own ambition then was to become a teacher in the University of France, an ambition which seemed unlikely to be ever realized, as he failed to secure admission to the celebrated École Normale Supérieure, in the competitive examination which leads up to that school. Strangely enough, about fifteen years later he was, though not in possession of any very high University degree, appointed to the Professorship of French Literature in the school which he had been unable to enter as a scholar, and his appointment received the hearty indorsement of all the leading educational authorities in France.

For several years after leaving the Lycée Louis le Grand, while completing his literary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading, Ferdinand Brunetière lived on stray orders for work for publishers. He seldom succeeded in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom filled. Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer, Baillière and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was and to all appearances never will be written. The event which determined the direction of his career was the acceptance by the Revue des Deux Mondes, in 1875, of an article upon contemporary French novelists. François Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be Sainte-Beuve's successor; and François Buloz was a man who seldom made mistakes.

French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb. Sainte-Beuve had been dead about five years; his own contemporaries, Edmond Schérer for instance, were getting old and discouraged; the new generation seemed to be turning unanimously, in consequence of the disasters of the Franco-German war and of the Revolution of September, 1870, to military or political activity. The only form of literature which had power to attract young writers was the novel, which they could fill with the description of all the passions then agitating the public mind. That a man of real intellectual strength should then give his undivided attention to pure literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all had to acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand Brunetière had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes.

Fortunately the new critic did not undertake to walk in the footsteps of Sainte-Beuve. In the art of presenting to the reader the marrow of a writer's work, of making the writer himself known by the description of his surroundings, the narrative of his life, the study of the forces by which he was influenced, the illustrious author of the 'Causeries du Lundi' remains to this day without a rival or a continuator. Ferdinand Brunetière had a different conception of the duties of a literary critic. The one fault with which thoughtful readers were apt to charge Sainte-Beuve was, that he failed to pass judgment upon the works and writers; and this failure was often, and not altogether unjustly, ascribed to a certain weakness in his grasp of principles, a certain faint-heartedness whenever it became necessary to take sides. Any one who studies Brunetière can easily see that from the start his chief concern was to make it impossible for any one to charge him with the same fault. He came in with a set of principles which he has since upheld with remarkable steadfastness and courage. In an age when nearly every one was turning to the future and advocating the doctrine and the necessity of progress, when the chief fear of most men was that they should appear too much afraid of change, Brunetière proclaimed time and again that there was no safety for any nation or set of men except in a staunch adherence to tradition. He bade his readers turn their minds away from the current literature of the day, and take hold of the exemplars of excellence handed down to us by the great men of the past. Together with tradition he upheld authority, and therefore preferred to all others the period in which French literature and society had most willingly submitted to authority, that is, the seventeenth century and the reign of Louis XIV. When compelled to speak of the literature of the day, he did it in no uncertain tones. His book 'The Naturalistic Novel' consists of a series of articles in which he studies Zola and his school, upholding the old doctrine that there are things in life which must be kept out of the domain of art and cannot be therein introduced without lowering the ideal of man. Between the naturalistic and the idealistic novel he unhesitatingly declares for the latter, and places George Sand far above the author of 'L'Assommoir.'

But the great success of his labors cannot be said to have been due solely or even mainly to the principles he advocated. Other critics have appeared since--Messrs. Jules Lemaître and Anatole France, for instance,--who antagonize almost everything that he defends and defend almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose success has hardly been inferior to his. Neither is it due to any charm in his style. Brunetière's sentences are compact,--indeed, strongly knit together,--but decidedly heavy and at times even clumsy. What he has to say he always says strongly, but not gracefully. He has a remarkable appreciation of the value of the words of the French language, but his arrangement of them is seldom free from mannerisms. What, then, has made him the foremost literary critic of the present day? The answer is, knowledge and sincerity. No writer of the present day, save perhaps Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon literary history. Every argument he brings forward is supported by an array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles the figures of a check list. And all this comes forward in Brunetière's articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual way. The fact takes its place unheralded in the reasoning. It is there because it has to be there, not because the writer wishes to make a display of his wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens that Ferdinand Brunetière's literary articles are perhaps the most instructive ones ever written in the French language. They are moreover admirably trustworthy. It would never come to this author's mind to hide a fact that goes against any of his theories. He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always willing to give his opponents all that they can possibly claim.

Of late years, moreover, it must be acknowledged that Brunetière's mind has given signs of remarkable broadening. Under the influence of the doctrine of evolution, he has undertaken to class all literary facts as the great naturalists of the day have classed the facts of physiology, and to show that literary forms spring from each other by way of transformation in the same way as do the forms of animal or vegetable life. Already three works have been produced by him since he entered upon this new line of development: a history of literary criticism in France, which forms the first and hitherto only published volume of a large work, (The Evolution of Literary Forms); a work on the French drama, (The Periods of the French Theatre); and a treatise on modern French poetry, (The Evolution of French Lyric Poetry during the Nineteenth Century.) The second and last of these were first delivered by their author from the professor's chair or the lecturer's platform, where he has managed to display some of the greatest gifts of the public speaker. Most of M. Brunetière's literary articles have been collected in book form under the following titles:--(Questions of Criticism) (2 vols.), (History and Criticism) (3 vols.), (Critical Studies on the History of French Literature) (6 vols.), (The Naturalistic Novel) (1 vol.).

At various times remarkable addresses have been delivered by him on public occasions, in which he has often represented the French Academy since his election to that illustrious body. Unfortunately his productive literary activity has slackened of late. In 1895 he was called to the editorship of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and since his assumption of this responsible editorial position he has published only two or three articles, bearing upon moral and educational questions.

To pass final judgment upon a man whose development is far from completed is an almost impossible task. Still it may be said that with the exception of Sainte-Beuve's (Causeries du Lundi) and (Nouveaux Lundis,) nothing exists that can teach the reader so much about the history of French literature as Brunetière's works. The doctrinal side, to which the author himself undoubtedly attaches the greatest importance, will strike the reader as often very questionable. Too often Brunetière seems in his judgments to be quite unconsciously actuated by a dislike of the accepted opinion of the present day. His love of the past bears a look of defiance of the present, not calculated to win the reader's assent. But even this does not go without its good side. It gives to Brunetière's judgments a unity which is seldom if ever found in the works of those whose chief labors have been spent in the often ungrateful task of making a hurried public acquainted with the uninterrupted stream of literary production.

TAINE AND PRINCE NAPOLEON

For the last five or six months, since it has been known that a prince, nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings formerly very powerful, had proposed to answer the libel, as he calls it, written by M. Taine about Napoleon, we have been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a curiosity which were equally justified,--although for very different reasons,--by M. Taine's reputation, by the glorious name of his antagonist, by the greatness, and finally the national interest of the subject.

The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flattery that it has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose existence we had not suspected, it is because we must at once add that neither in its manner nor in its matter is the book itself what it might have been. Prince Napoleon did not wish to write a 'Life of Napoleon,' and nobody expected that of him,--for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had he wished it he could not have done it. But to M. Taine's Napoleon, since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since he declared him to be as much against nature as against history, he could, and we expected that he would, have opposed his own Napoleon. By the side of the "inventions of a writer whose judgment had been misled and whose conscience had been obscured by passion,"--these are his own words,--he could have restored, as he promised in his 'Introduction,' "the man and his work in their living reality." And in our imaginations, on which M. Taine's harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the features of a modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, _he_ could at last substitute for them, as the inheritor of the name and the dynastic claims, the image of the founder of contemporary France, of the god of war. Unfortunately, instead of doing so, it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical method, it is the witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that Prince Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and moreover with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expression which on any occasion I should venture to pronounce decidedly insulting.

For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor of discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a reserve, a courtesy greater even than our own. It will therefore be unanimously thought that it ill became Prince Napoleon to address M. Taine in a tone which M. Taine would decline to use in his answer, out of respect for the very name which he is accused of _slandering_. It will be thought also that it ill became him, when speaking of Miot de Melito, for instance, or of many other servants of the imperial government, to seem to ignore that princes also are under an obligation to those who have served them well. Perhaps even it may be thought that it poorly became him, when discussing or contradicting the 'Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat,' to forget under what auspices the remains of his uncle, the Emperor, were years ago carried in his city of Paris. But what will be thought especially is, that he had something else to do than to split hairs in discussion of evidences; that he had something far better to say, more peremptory and to the point, and more literary besides, than to call M. Taine names, to hurl at him the epithets of "Entomologist, Materialist, Pessimist, Destroyer of Reputations, Iconoclast," and to class him as a "déboulonneur" among those who, in 1871, pulled down the Colonne Vendôme.

Not, undoubtedly, that M. Taine--and we said so ourselves more than once with perfect freedom--if spending much patience and conscientiousness in his search for documents, has always displayed as much critical spirit and discrimination in the use he made of them. We cannot understand why in his 'Napoleon' he accepted the testimony of Bourrienne, for instance, any more than recently, in his 'Revolution,' that of George Duval, or again, in his 'Ancien Régime,' that of the notorious Soulavic. M. Taine's documents as a rule are not used by him as a foundation for his argument; no, he first takes his position, and then he consults his library, or he goes to the original records, with the hope of finding those documents that will support his reasoning. But granting that, we must own that though different from M. Taine's, Prince Napoleon's historical method is not much better; that though in a different manner and in a different direction, it is neither less partial nor less passionate: and here is a proof of it.

Prince Napoleon blames M. Taine for quoting "eight times" 'Bourrienne's Memoirs,' and then, letting his feelings loose, he takes advantage of the occasion and cruelly besmirches Bourrienne's name. Does he tell the truth or not? is he right at the bottom? I do not know anything about it; I do not _wish_ to know anything; I do not need it, since I _know_, from other sources, that 'Bourrienne's Memoirs' are hardly less spurious than, say, the 'Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créqui' or the 'Memoirs of Monsieur d'Artagnan.' But if these so-called 'Memoirs' are really not his, what has Bourrienne himself to do here? and suppose the former secretary of the First Consul to have been, instead of the shameless embezzler whom Prince Napoleon so fully and so uselessly describes to us, the most honest man in the world, would the 'Memoirs' be any more reliable, since it is a fact that _he_ wrote nothing? ...

And now I cannot but wonder at the tone in which those who contradict M. Taine, and especially Prince Napoleon himself, condescend to tell him that he lacks that which would be needed in order to speak of Napoleon or the Revolution. But who is it, then, that _has_ what is needed in order to judge Napoleon? Frederick the Great, or Catherine II., perhaps,--as Napoleon himself desired, "his peers"; or in other words, those who, born as he was for war and government, can only admire, justify, and glorify themselves in him. And who will judge the Revolution? Danton. we suppose, or Robespierre,--that is, the men who were the Revolution itself. No: the real judge will be the average opinion of men; the force that will create, modify, correct this average opinion, the historians will be; and among the historians of our time, in spite of Prince Napoleon, it will be M. Taine for a large share.

THE LITERATURES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND GERMANY

Twice at least in the course of their long history, it is known that the literature and even the language of France has exerted over the whole of Europe an influence, whose universal character other languages perhaps more harmonious,--Italian for instance,--and other literatures more original in certain respects, like English literature, have never possessed. It is in a purely French form that our mediæval poems, our 'Chansons de Geste,' our 'Romances of the Round Table,' our _fabliaux_ themselves, whencesoever they came,--Germany or Tuscany, England or Brittany, Asia or Greece,--conquered, fascinated, charmed, from one end of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The amorous languor and the subtlety of our "courteous poetry" are breathed no less by the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch's sonnets; and after such a long lapse of time we still discover something that comes from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in 'Parsifal' or in 'Tristan and Isolde.' A long time later, in a Europe belonging entirely to classicism, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, during one hundred and fifty years or even longer, French literature possessed a real sovereignty in Italy, in Spain, in England, and in Germany. Do not the names of Algarotti, Bettinelli, Beccaria, Filengieri, almost belong to France? What shall I say of the famous Gottschedt? Shall I recall the fact that in his victorious struggle against Voltaire, Lessing had to call in Diderot's assistance? And who ignores that if Rivarol wrote his 'Discourse upon the Universality of the French Language,' it can be charged neither to his vanity nor to our national vanity, since he was himself half Italian, and the subject had been proposed by the Academy of Berlin?

All sorts of reasons have been given for this universality of French literature: some were statistical, if I may say so, some geographical, political, linguistic. But the true one, the good one, is different: it must be found in the supremely sociable character of the literature itself. If at that time our great writers were understood and appreciated by everybody, it is because they were addressing everybody, or better, because they were speaking to all concerning the interests of all. They were attracted neither by exceptions nor by peculiarities: they cared to treat only of man in general, or as is also said, of the universal man, restrained by the ties of human society; and their very success shows that below all that distinguishes, say, an Italian from a German, this universal man whose reality has so often been discussed, persists and lives, and though constantly changing never loses his own likeness....

In comparison with the literature of France, thus defined and characterized by its sociable spirit, the literature of England is an individualistic literature. Let us put aside, as should be done, the generation of Congreve and Wycherley, perhaps also the generation of Pope and Addison,--to which, however, we ought not to forget that Swift also belonged;--it seems that an Englishman never writes except in order to give to himself the external sensation of his own personality. Thence his _humor_, which may be defined as the expression of the pleasure he feels in thinking like nobody else. Thence, in England, the plenteousness, the wealth, the amplitude of the lyric vein; it being granted that _individualism_ is the very spring of lyric poetry, and that an ode or an elegy is, as it were, the involuntary surging, the outflowing of what is most intimate, most secret, most peculiar in the poet's soul. Thence also the _eccentricity_ of all the great English writers when compared with the rest of the nation, as though they became conscious of themselves only by distinguishing themselves from those who claim to differ from them least. But is it not possible to otherwise characterize the literature of England? It will be easily conceived that I dare not assert such a thing; all I say here is, that I cannot better express the differences which distinguish that literature from our own.

That is also all I claim, in stating that the essential character of the literature of Germany is, that it is _philosophical_. The philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the reasons of the inferiority of the German drama? It is surely the reason of the depth and scope of Germanic poetry. Even in the masterpieces of German literature it seems that there is mixed something indistinct, or rather mysterious, _suggestive_ in the extreme, which leads us to thought by the channel of the dream. But who has not been struck by what, under a barbarous terminology, there is of attractive, and as such of eminently poetical, of realistic and at the same time idealistic, in the great systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer? Assuredly nothing is further removed from the character of our French literature. We can here understand what the Germans mean when they charge us with a lack of depth. Let them forgive us if _we_ do not blame their literature for not being the same as ours.

For it is good that it be thus, and for five or six hundred years this it is that has made the greatness not only of European literature, but of Western civilization itself; I mean that which all the great nations, after slowly elaborating it, as it were, in their national isolation, have afterwards deposited in the common treasury of the human race. Thus, to this one we owe the sense of mystery, and we might say the revelation of what is beautiful, in that which remains obscure and cannot be grasped. To another we owe the sense of art, and what may be called the appreciation of the power of form. A third one has handed to us what was most heroic in the conception of chivalrous honor. And to another, finally, we owe it that we know what is both most ferocious and noblest, most wholesome and most to be feared, in human pride. The share that belongs to us Frenchmen was, in the meanwhile, to bind, to fuse together, and as it were to unify under the idea of the general society of mankind, the contradictory and even hostile elements that may have existed in all that. No matter whether our inventions and ideas were, by their origin, Latin or Romance, Celtic or Gallic, Germanic even, if you please, the whole of Europe had borrowed them from us in order to adapt them to the genius of its different races. Before re-admitting them in our turn, before adopting them after they had been thus transformed, we asked only that they should be able to serve the progress of reason and of humanity. What was troublous in them we clarified; what was corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what was excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind. Have we not sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered their purity? If Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his own language; and if the Italians have no right to assail Molière for borrowing somewhat from them, the English may well complain that Voltaire failed to understand Shakespeare. But it is true none the less that in disengaging from the particular man of the North or the South this idea of a universal man, for which we have been so often reviled,--if any one of the modern literatures has breathed in its entirety the spirit of the public weal and of civilization, it is the literature of France. And this ideal cannot possibly be as empty as has too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to show, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples, it is its manifestations that foreigners have loved to come across in the masterpieces, or better, in the whole sequence of the history of our literature.

GIORDANO BRUNO

(1548-1600)

Fillippo Bruno, known as Giordano Bruno, was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. This was eight years after the death of Copernicus, whose system he eagerly espoused, and ten years before the birth of Bacon, with whom he associated in England. Of an ardent, poetic temperament, he entered the Dominican order in Naples at the early age of sixteen, doubtless attracted to conventual life by the opportunities of study it offered to an eager intellect. Bruno had been in the monastery nearly thirteen years when he was accused of heresy in attacking some of the dogmas of the Church. He fled first to Rome and then to Northern Italy, where he wandered about for three seasons from city to city, teaching and writing. In 1579 he arrived at Geneva, then the stronghold of the Calvinists. Coming into conflict with the authorities there on account of his religious opinions, he was thrown into prison. He escaped and went to Toulouse, at that time the literary centre of Southern France, where he lectured for a year on Aristotle. His restless spirit, however, drove him on to Paris. Here he was made professor extraordinary at the Sorbonne.

Although his teachings were almost directly opposed to the philosophic tenets of the time, attacking the current dogmas, and Aristotle, the idol of the schoolmen, yet such was the power of Bruno's eloquence and the charm of his manner that crowds flocked to his lecture-room, and he became one of the most popular foreign teachers the university had known. Under pretense of expounding the writings of Thomas Aquinas, he set forth his own philosophy. He also spoke much on the art of memory, amplifying the writings of Raymond Lully; and these principles, formulated by the monk of the thirteenth century and taken up again by the free-thinkers of the sixteenth, are the basis of all the present-day mnemonics.

But Bruno went even further. He attracted the attention of King Henry III. of France, who in 1583 introduced him to the French ambassador to England, Castelnuovo di Manvissière. Going to London, he spent three years in the family of this nobleman, more as friend than dependent. They were the happiest, or at least the most restful years of his stormy life. England was just then entering on the glorious epoch of her Elizabethan literature. Bruno came into the brilliant court circles, meeting even the Queen, who cordially welcomed all men of culture, especially the Italians. The astute monk reciprocated her good-will by paying her the customary tribute of flattery. He won the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated two of his books, and enjoyed the acquaintance of Spenser, Sir Fulke Greville, Dyer, Harvey, Sir William Temple, Bacon, and other wits and poets of the day.

At that time--somewhere about 1580--Shakespeare was still serving his apprenticeship as playwright, and had perhaps less claim on the notice of the observant foreigner than his elder contemporaries. London was still a small town, where the news of the day spread rapidly, and where, no doubt, strangers were as eagerly discussed as they are now within narrow town limits. Bruno's daring speculations could not remain the exclusive property of his own coterie. And as Shakespeare had the faculty of absorbing all new ideas afloat in the air, he would hardly have escaped the influence of the teacher who proclaimed in proud self-confidence that he was come to arouse men out of their theological stagnation. His influence on Bacon is more evident, because of their friendly associations. Bruno lectured at Oxford, but the English university found less favor in his eyes than English court life. Pedantry had indeed set its fatal mark on scholarship, not only on the Continent but in England. Aristotle was still the god of the pedants of that age, and dissent from his teaching was heavily punished, for the dry dust of learning blinded the eyes of the scholastics to new truths.

Bruno, the knight-errant of these truths, devoted all his life to scourging pedantry, and dissented _in toto_ from the idol of the schools. No wonder he and Oxford did not agree together. He wittily calls her "the widow of sound learning," and again, "a constellation of pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a clownish incivility that would tax the patience of Job." He lashed the shortcomings of English learning in 'La Cena delle Ceneri' (Ash Wednesday Conversation). But Bruno's roving spirit, and perhaps also his heterodox tendencies, drove him at last from England, and for the next five years he roamed about Germany, leading the life of the wandering scholars of the time, always involved in conflicts and controversies with the authorities, always antagonistic to public opinion. Flying in the face of the most cherished traditions, he underwent the common experience of all prophets: the minds he was bent on awakening refused to be aroused.

Finally he was invited by Zuone Mocenigo of Venice to teach him the higher and secret learning. The Venetian supposed that Bruno, with more than human erudition, possessed the art of conveying knowledge into the heads of dullards. Disappointed in this expectation, he quarreled with his teacher, and in a spirit of revenge picked out of Bruno's writings a mass of testimony sufficient to convict him of heresy. This he turned over to the Inquisitor at Venice, Bruno was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Inquisition in Rome. When called upon there to recant, he replied, "I ought not to recant, and I will not recant." He was accordingly confined in prison for seven years, then sentenced to death. On hearing the warrant he said, "It may be that you fear more to deliver this judgment than I to bear it." On February 17th, 1600, he was burned at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori at Rome. He remained steadfast to the end, saying, "I die a martyr, and willingly." His ashes were cast into the Tiber. Two hundred and fifty-nine years afterwards, his statue was unveiled on the very spot where he suffered; and the Italian government is bringing out (1896) the first complete edition, the 'National Edition,' of his works.

In their substance Bruno's writings belong to philosophy rather than to literature, although they are still interesting both historically and biographically as an index of the character of the man and of the temper of the time. Many of the works have either perished or are hidden away in inaccessible archives. For two hundred years they were tabooed, and as late as 1836 forbidden to be shown in the public library of Dresden. He published twenty-five works in Latin and Italian, and left many others incomplete, for in all his wanderings he was continually writing. The eccentric titles show his desire to attract attention: as 'The Work of the Great Key,' 'The Exploration of the Thirty Seals,' etc. The first extant work is 'Il Candelajo' (The Taper), a comedy which in its license of language and manner vividly reflects the time. In the dedication he discloses his philosophy: 'Time takes away everything and gives everything.' The 'Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante' (Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), the most celebrated of his works, is an attack on the superstitions of the day, a curious medley of learning, imagination, and buffoonery. 'Degl' Eroici Furori' (The Heroic Enthusiasts) is the most interesting to modern readers, and in its majestic exaltation and poetic imagery is a true product of Italian culture.

Bruno was evidently a man of vast intellect and of immense erudition. His philosophic speculations comprehended not only the ancient thought, and that current at his time, but also reached out toward the future and the results of modern science. He perceived some of the facts which were later formulated in the theory of evolution. "The mind of man differs from that of lower animals and of plants not in quality but only in quantity.... Each individual is the resultant of innumerable individuals. Each species is the Starting point for the next.... No individual is the same to-day as yesterday."

Not only in this divination of coming truths is he modern, but also in his methods of investigation. Reason was to him the guide to truth. In a study of him Lewes says:--"Bruno was a true Neapolitan child--as ardent as its soil ... as capricious as its varied climate. There was a restless energy which fitted him to become the preacher of a new crusade--urging him to throw a haughty defiance in the face of every authority in every country,--an energy which closed his wild adventurous career at the stake." He was distinguished also by a rich fancy, a varied humor, and a chivalrous gallantry, which constantly remind us that the intellectual athlete is an Italian, and an Italian of the sixteenth century.

A DISCOURSE OF POETS

From 'The Heroic Enthusiasts'

_Cicada_--Say, what do you mean by those who vaunt themselves of myrtle and laurel?

_Tansillo_--Those may and do boast of the myrtle who sing of love: if they bear themselves nobly, they may wear a crown of that plant consecrated to Venus, of which they know the potency. Those may boast of the laurel who sing worthily of things pertaining to heroes, substituting heroic souls for speculative and moral philosophy, praising them and setting them as mirrors and exemplars for political and civil actions.