France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 4

the things, it decomposes its
impression, and classifies, distributes, and expresses more or less
skilfully the ideas that it draws from that impression. In the second of
these processes the classic is superior.' Classicism is only the organ of a
certain reason, the raison raisonnante; that which insists upon thinking
with as little preparation and as much ease as possible; which is
contented with what it has acquired, and takes no thought about
augmenting or renewing it; which either cannot or will not embrace the
plenitude and the complexity of things as they are.
As an analysis of the classic spirit in French literature, nothing can be
more ingenious and happy than these pages (p. 241, etc.) But, after all,
classic is only the literary form preferred by a certain turn of
intelligence; and we shall do well to call that turn of intelligence by a
general name, that shall comprehend not only its literary form but its
operations in every other field. And accordingly at the end of this very
chapter we find M. Taine driven straightway to change classic for
mathematic in describing the method of the new learning. And the
latter description is much better, for it goes beneath the surface of
literary expression, important as that is, down to the methods of
reasoning. It leads us to the root of the matter, to the deductive habits of

the French thinkers. The mischief of the later speculation of the
eighteenth century in France was that men argued about the complex,
conditional, and relative propositions of society, as if they had been
theorems and problems of Euclid. And M. Taine himself is, as we say,
compelled to change his term when he comes to the actual facts and
personages of the revolutionary epoch. It was the geometric, rather than
the classic, quality of political reasoning, which introduced so much
that we now know to have been untrue and mischievous.
Even in literary history it is surely nearer the truth to say of the latter
half of the century that the revolutionary movement began with the
break-up of classic form and the gradual dissolution of the classic spirit.
Indeed this is such a commonplace of criticism, that we can only treat
M. Taine's inversion of it as a not very happy paradox. It was in
literature that this genius of innovation, which afterwards extended
over the whole social structure, showed itself first of all. Rousseau, not
merely in the judgment of a foreigner like myself, but in that of the
very highest of all native authorities, Sainte Beuve, effected the greatest
revolution that the French tongue had undergone since Pascal. And this
revolution was more remarkable for nothing than for its repudiation of
nearly all the notes of classicism that are enumerated by M. Taine.
Diderot, again, in every page of his work, whether he is discussing
painting, manners, science, the drama, poetry, or philosophy, abounds
and overabounds in those details, particularities, and special marks of
the individual, which are, as M. Taine rightly says, alien to the classic
genius. Both Rousseau and Diderot, considered as men of letters, were
conscious literary revolutionists, before they were used as
half-conscious social revolutionists. They deliberately put away from
them the entire classic tradition as to the dignity of personage proper to
art, and the symmetry and fixed method proper to artistic style. This
was why Voltaire, who was a son of the seventeenth century before he
was the patriarchal sire of the eighteenth, could never thoroughly
understand the author of the New Heloisa, or the author of the Père de
Famille and Jacques le Fataliste. Such work was to him for the most
part a detestable compound of vulgarity and rodomontade. 'There is
nothing living in the eighteenth century,' M. Taine says, 'but the little
sketches that are stitched in by the way and as if they were contraband,

by Voltaire, and five or six portraits like Turcaret, Gil Blas, Marianne,
Manon Lescaut, Rameau's Nephew, Figaro, two or three hasty sketches
of Crebillon the younger and Collé' (p. 258). Nothing living but this!
But this is much and very much. We do not pretend to compare the
authors of these admirable delineations with Molière and La Bruyère in
profundity of insight or in grasp and ethical mastery, but they are
certainly altogether in a new vein even from those two great writers,
when we speak of the familiar, the real, and the particular, as
distinguished from old classic generality. And, we may add in passing,
that the social life of France from the death of Lewis XIV. downwards
was emancipated all round from the formality and precision of the
classic time. As M. Taine himself shows in many amusing pages, life
was singularly gay, free, sociable, and varied. The literature of the time