II. Its Original Deficiency.

     Its original deficiency.—Signs of this in the 17th
     century.—It grows with time and success.—Proofs of this
     growth in the 18th century.—Serious poetry, the drama,
     history and romances.—Short-sighted views of man and of
     human existence.

This excess indicates a deficiency. In the two operations which the human mind performs, the classicist is more successful in the second than in the first. The second, indeed, stands in the way of the first, the obligation of always speaking correctly makes him refrain from saying all that ought to be said. With him the form is more important than abundant contents, the firsthand observations which serve as a living source losing, in the regulated channels to which they are confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.3227 Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,3228 pouring out his heart to relieve himself. When a creation of characters is imperative, as in dramatic poetry, the classic mold fashions but one kind, that which through education, birth, or impersonation, always speak correctly, in other words, like so many people of high society. No others are portrayed on the stage or elsewhere, from Corneille and Racine to Marivaux and Beaumarchais. So strong is the habit that it imposes itself even on La Fontaine's animals, on the servants of Molière, on Montesquieu's Persians, and on the Babylonians, the Indians and the Micromégas of Voltaire.—It must be stated, furthermore, that these characters are only partly real. In real persons two kinds of characteristics may be noted; the first, few in number, which he or she shares with others of their kind and which any reader readily may identify; and the other kind, of which there are a great many, describing only one particular person and these are much more difficult to discover. Classic art concerns itself only with the former; it purposely effaces, neglects or subordinates the latter. It does not build individual persons but generalized characters, a king, a queen, a young prince, a confidant, a high-priest, a captain of the guards, seized by some passion, habit or inclination, such as love, ambition, fidelity or perfidy, a despotic or a yielding temper, some species of wickedness or of native goodness. As to the circumstances of time and place, which, amongst others, exercise a most powerful influence in shaping and diversifying man, it hardly notes them, even setting them aside. In a tragedy the scene is set everywhere and any time, the contrary, that the action takes place nowhere in no specific epoch, is equally valid. It may take place in any palace or in any temple,3229 in which, to get rid of all historic or personal impressions, habits and costumes are introduced conventionally, being neither French nor foreign, nor ancient, nor modern. In this abstract world the address is always "you"(as opposed to the familiar thou),3230 "Seigneur" and "Madame," the noble style always clothing the most different characters in the same dress. When Corneille and Racine, through the stateliness and elegance of their verse, afford us a glimpse of contemporary figures they do it unconsciously, imagining that they are portraying man in himself; and, if we of the present time recognize in their pieces either the gentleman, the duelists, the bullies, the politicians or the heroines of the Fronde, or the courtiers, princes and bishops, the ladies and gentlemen in waiting of the regular monarchy, it is because they have inadvertently dipped their brush in their own experience, some of its color having fallen accidentally on the bare ideal outline which they wished to trace. We have simply a contour, a general sketch, filled up with the harmonious gray tone of correct diction.—Even in comedy, necessarily employing current habits, even with Molière, so frank and so bold, the model is unfinished, all individual peculiarities being suppressed, the face becoming for a moment a theatrical mask, and the personage, especially when talking in verse, sometimes losing its animation in becoming the mouth-piece for a monologue or a dissertation.3231 The stamp of rank, condition or fortune, whether gentleman or bourgeois, provincial or Parisian, is frequently overlooked.3232 We are rarely made to appreciate physical externals, as in Shakespeare, the temperament, the state of the nervous system, the bluff or drawling tone, the impulsive or restrained action, the emaciation or obesity of a character.3233 Frequently no trouble is taken to find a suitable name, this being either Chrysale, Orgon, Damis, Dorante, or Valère. The name designates only a simple quality, that of a father, a youth, a valet, a grumbler, a gallant, and, like an ordinary cloak, fitting indifferently all forms alike, as it passes from the wardrobe of Molière to that of Regnard, Destouche, Lesage or Marivaux.3234 The character lacks the personal badge, the unique, authentic appellation serving as the primary stamp of an individual. All these details and circumstances, all these aids and accompaniments of a man, remain outside of the classic theory. To secure the admission of some of them required the genius of Molière, the fullness of his conception, the wealth of his observation, the extreme freedom of his pen. It is equally true again that he often omits them, and that, in other cases, he introduces only a small number of them, because he avoids giving to these general characters a richness and complexity that might interfere with the story. The simpler the theme the clearer its development, the first duty of the author throughout this literature being to clearly develop the restricted theme of which he makes a selection.

There is, accordingly, a radical defect in the classic spirit, the defect of its qualities, and which, at first kept within proper bounds, contributes towards the production of its purest master-pieces, but which, in accordance with the universal law, goes on increasing and turns into a vice through the natural effect of age, use, and success. Contracted at the start, it is to become yet more so. In the eighteenth century the description of real life, of a specific person, just as he is in nature and in history, that is to say, an undefined unit, a rich plexus, a complete organism of peculiarities and traits, superposed, entangled and co-ordinated, is improper. The capacity to receive and contain all these is wanting. Whatever can be discarded is cast aside, and to such an extent that nothing is left at last but a condensed extract, an evaporated residuum, an almost empty name, in short, what is called a hollow abstraction. The only characters in the eighteenth century exhibiting any life are the off-hand sketches, made in passing and as if contraband, by Voltaire, Baron de Thundertentronk and Milord Watthen, the lesser figures in his stories, and five or six portraits of secondary rank, Turcaret, Gil Blas, Marianne, Manon Lescaut, Rameau, and Figaro, two or three of the rough sketches of Crébillon the younger and of Collé, all so many works in which sap flows through a familiar knowledge of things, comparable with those of the minor masters in painting, Watteau, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, Lancret, Pater, and Beaudouin, and which, accepted with difficulty, or as a surprise, by the official drawing room are still to subsist after the grander and soberer canvases shall have become moldy through their wearisome exhalations. Everywhere else the sap dries up, and, instead of blooming plants, we encounter only flowers of painted paper. What are all the serious poems, from the "la Henriade" of Voltaire to the "Mois" by Roucher or the "l'Imagination" by Delille, but so many pieces of rhetoric garnished with rhymes? Examine the innumerable tragedies and comedies of which Grimm and Collé gives us mortuary extracts, even the meritorious works of Voltaire and Crébillon, and later, those of authors of repute, Du Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and Marie Chénier? Eloquence, art, situations, correct verse, all exist in these except human nature; the personages are simply well-taught puppets, and generally mere mouthpieces by which the author makes his declamation public; Greeks, Romans, Medieval knights, Turks, Arabs, Peruvians, Giaours, or Byzantines, they have all the same declamatory mechanisms. The public, meanwhile, betrays no surprise. It is not aware of history. It assumes that humanity is everywhere the same. It establishes the success alike of the "Incas" by Marmontel, and of "Gonsalve" and the "Nouvelles" by Florian; also of the peasants, mechanics, Negroes, Brazilians, Parsees, and Malabarites that appear before it churning out their exaggerations. Man is simply regarded as a reasoning being, alike in all ages and alike in all places; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre endows his pariah with this habit, like Diderot, in his Tahitians. The one recognized principle is that every human being must think and talk like a book.—And how inadequate their historical background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, belonging to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France, in the researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the "Louis XI" of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthélemy, even in the "Essai sur les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle de Louis XIV" of Voltaire, even in the "Grandeur des Romains," and the "Esprit des Lois" of Montesquieu, what peculiar deficiency! Erudition, criticism, common sense, an almost exact exposition of dogmas and of institutions, philosophic views of the relationships between events and on the general run of these, nothing is lacking but the people! On reading these it seems as if the climates, institutions and civilizations which so completely modifies the human intellect, are simply so many outworks, so many fortuitous exteriors, which, far from reflecting its depths scarcely penetrate beneath its surface. The vast differences separating the men of two centuries, or of two peoples, escape them entirely.3235 The ancient Greek, the early Christian, the conquering Teuton, the feudal man, the Arab of Mahomet, the German, the Renaissance Englishman, the puritan, appear in their books as in engravings and frontispieces, with some difference in costume, but the same bodies, the same faces, the same countenances, toned down, obliterated, proper, adapted to the conventionalities of good manners. That sympathetic imagination by which the writer enters into the mind of another, and reproduces in himself a system of habits and feelings so different from his own, is the talent the most absent in the eighteenth century. With the exception of Diderot, who uses it badly and capriciously, it almost entirely disappears in the last half of the century. Consider in turn, during the same period, in France and in England, where it is most extensively used, the romance, a sort of mirror everywhere transportable, the best adapted to reflect all phrases of nature and of life. After reading the series of English novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith down to Miss Burney and Miss Austen, I have become familiar with England in the eighteenth century; I have encountered clergymen, country gentlemen, farmers, innkeepers, sailors, people of every condition in life, high and low; I know the details of fortunes and of careers, how much is earned, how much is expended, how journeys are made and how people eat and drink: I have accumulated for myself a file of precise biographical events, a complete picture in a thousand scenes of an entire community, the amplest stock of information to guide me should I wish to frame a history of this vanished world. On reading a corresponding list of French novelists, the younger Crébillon, Rousseau, Marmontel, Laclos, Restif de la Breton, Louvet, Madame de Staël, Madame de Genlis and the rest, including Mercier and even Mme. Cottin, I scarcely take any notes; all precise and instructive little facts are left out; I find civilities, polite acts, gallantries, mischief-making, social dissertations and nothing else. They carefully abstain from mentioning money, from giving me figures, from describing a wedding, a trial, the administration of a piece of property; I am ignorant of the situation of a curate, of a rustic noble, of a resident prior, of a steward, of an intendant. Whatever relates to a province or to the rural districts, to the bourgeoisie or to the shop,3236 to the army or to a soldier, to the clergy or to convents, to justice or to the police, to business or to housekeeping remains vaguely in my mind or is falsified; to clear up any point I am obliged to recur to that marvelous Voltaire who, on laying aside the great classic coat, finds plenty of elbow room and tells all. On the organs of society of vital importance, on the practices and regulations that provoke revolutions, on feudal rights and seigniorial justice, on the mode of recruiting and governing monastic bodies, on the revenue measures of the provinces, of corporations and of trade-unions, on the tithes and the corvées,3237 literature provides me with scarcely any information. Drawing-rooms and men of letters are apparently its sole material. The rest is null and void. Outside the good society that is able to converse France appears perfectly empty.—On the approach of the Revolution the elimination increases. Look through the harangues of the clubs and of the tribune, through reports, legislative bills and pamphlets, and through the mass of writings prompted by passing and exciting events; in none of them do we see any sign of the human creature as we see him in the fields and in the street; he is always regarded as a simple robot, a well known mechanism. Among writers he was a moment ago a dispenser of commonplaces, among politicians he is now a pliable voter; touch him in the proper place and he responds in the desired manner. Facts are never apparent; only abstractions, long arrays of sentences on nature, Reason, and the people, on tyrants and liberty, like inflated balloons, uselessly conflicting with each other in space. Were we not aware that all this would terminate in terrible practical effects then we could regard it as competition in logic, as school exercises, academic parades, or ideological compositions. It is, in fact, Ideology, the last product of the century, which will stamp the classic spirit with its final formula and last word.