The Ancien Régime

And, what is more, men had to punish—to avenge.  Those are fearful words.  But there is, in this God-guided universe, a law of retribution, which will find men out, whether men choose to find it out or not; a law of retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, though not necessarily by just men.  The public executioner was seldom a very estimable personage, at least under the old Régime; and those who have been the scourges of God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace old sins by new.  But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, I must believe—as long as I believe in any God at all—that such men as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain of its leaders was part of the retribution itself.  For the noblesse existed surely to make men better.  It did, by certain classes, the very opposite.  Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had made wicked.  For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs, there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt, and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the Revolution.

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those horrors were of the artist class—by which I signify not merely painters and sculptors—as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to signify, at least in England—but what the French meant by artistes—producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians, and suchlike, down to that “distracted peruke-maker with two fiery torches,” who, at the storm of the Bastile, “was for burning the saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the barrels, and stayed the devouring element.”  The distracted peruke-maker may have had his wrongs—perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the fool, in “Le Roi s’amuse”—and his own sound reasons for blowing down the Bastile, and the system which kept it up.

For these very ministers of luxury—then miscalled art—from the periwig-maker to the play-actor—who like them had seen the frivolity, the baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered, whom they despised while they adored!  Figaro himself may have looked up to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long as the law enabled the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a Comité de Salut Public.  Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d’Herbois; disappointed poets, like Fabre d’Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious.  Why not?  Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke.  They had played the valet: and no man was a hero to them.  They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman.  The nobleman had played the mountebank: why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman?  The nobleman’s God had been his five senses, with (to use Mr. Carlyle’s phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank worship the same God, like Carriére at Nantes, and see what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?

But why so cruel?  Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth sense of vanity.  Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.

Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I mean: what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than two, in France, in Italy, and—I am sorry to have to say it—Germany likewise.  All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil.  I only wonder that they have so much overlooked that item in the causes of the Revolution.  It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in the sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the political and economic wrongs put together.  They might have issued in a change of dynasty or of laws.  That, issued in the blood of the offenders.  Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.’s Petit Trianon, or other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents nursing shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the ill-gotten price of their daughter’s honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were transformed—and who will blame him?—into righteous indignation, and a very sword of God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if education helped him to see, that the maiden’s acquiescence, her pride in her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things in which such a fate was thought an honour and a gain, and not a disgrace and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had learnt to think it more noble to become—that which they became—than the wives of honest men.

If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Régime, whether in France or elsewhere, you will see that my facts are true.  If you have human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground of madness—an hypothesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand what madness is) is no explanation at all.

An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien Régime.  And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own landscapes.  A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with the prince’s game; a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins; and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its French fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood likewise, which the prince has partially paid for, by selling a few hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees.  The river, too, is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was blown up in the Seven Years’ War; and there is but a single lazy barge floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene Highness; the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic beauty of the scene destroyed;—to have steamers puffing up and down the river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old World, in exchange for the wealth of the New—or hurrying, it may be, whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they know for what.  How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists, and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure.  How sad to see the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to the very steeple-top;—a new school at the town-end—a new crucifix by the wayside.  How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the land they till has become their own, and not the prince’s; while their sons are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West.  Very unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety, cleanliness and comfort.  But they possess advantages unknown to the Ancien Régime, which was, if nothing else, picturesque.  Men could paint amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and its places.

Consider that word, “picturesque.”  It, and the notion of art which it expresses, are the children of the Ancien Régime—of the era of decay.  The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the fashion sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century; it lingered on during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from 1815-25.  It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and progressive thought.  An admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like a medieval illumination.  He has learnt to look on that which went by the name of picturesque in his great-grandfather’s time, as an old Greek or a Middle Age monk would have done—as something squalid, ugly, a sign of neglect, disease, death; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it cannot be restored.  At Carcassone, now, M. Viollet-le-Duc, under the auspices of the Emperor of the French, is spending his vast learning, and much money, simply in abolishing the picturesque; in restoring stone for stone, each member of that wonderful museum of Middle Age architecture: Roman, Visigothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English, later French, all is being reproduced exactly as it must have existed centuries since.  No doubt that is not the highest function of art: but it is a preparation for the highest, a step toward some future creative school.  As the early Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the beauty and meaning of old Greek and Roman art; so must the artists of our days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance.  They must learn to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must learn—indeed they have learnt—that decay is ugliness, and the imitation of decay, a making money out of the public shame.

The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can discover, suddenly, during the time of exhaustion and recklessness which followed the great struggles of the sixteenth century.  Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of the earliest professors of picturesque art, have never been since surpassed.  For indeed, they drew from life.  The rags and the ruins, material, and alas! spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay waste.  There was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe; unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes; churches and monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and all the wretchedness which Callot has immortalised—for a warning to evil rulers—in his Misères de la Guerre.  The world was all gone wrong: but as for setting it right again—who could do that?  And so men fell into a sentimental regret for the past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the foreshortening of time; while they wanted strength or faith to reproduce it.  At last they became so accustomed to the rags and ruins, that they looked on them as the normal condition of humanity, as the normal field for painters.

Only now and then, and especially toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, when thought began to revive, and men dreamed of putting the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of an Arcadian ideal.  Country life—the primæval calling of men—how graceful and pure it might be!  How graceful—if not pure—it once had been!  The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe.  And so men took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting them on canvas, and modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions of what they had been once, and always ought to be.  We smile now at Sèvres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in them a certain pathos.  They indicated a craving after something better than boorishness; and the many men and women may have become the gentler and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to themselves: “Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not been for devastations of the Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills of emperors and kings.”

LECTURE III—THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES

In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian era.  It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof.  But I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with my description of the very same era as one of decay and death.  For side by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with the decay there was active growth;—side by side with them, fostered by them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or unconscious.  We must beware, however, of trying to find between that decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really none.  The general decay may have determined the course of many men’s thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Régime produced the new Régime—a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth.  That would be to confess man—what I shall never confess him to be—the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox.  In the first place, the bees were no bees, but flies—unless when some true swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as Samson’s bees did in that of the lion.  But bees or flies, each sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the decay of the Ancien Régime.  There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a “thought of God.”  All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so, like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward toward the brute.

Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of thought, an originality, a resistance to circumstances, an indignant defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind.  Had that latter been the case, the downward progress of the Ancien Régime would have been irremediable.  Each generation, conformed more and more to the element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic struggle for revenge and bread.

There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by circumstances.  Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state; some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain), but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord and Giver of Life.

Such persons seemed—I only say seemed—most numerous in England and in Germany.  But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny of that great nation for awhile—perhaps for ever.

M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which appears at first sight to militate against my belief—a chapter “showing that France was the country in which men had become most alike.”

“The men,” he says, “of that time, especially those belonging to the upper and middle ranks of society, who alone were at all conspicuous, were all exactly alike.”

And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle classes, it must have been still more true of the mass of the lowest population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded—or rather crushed—by their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants of five senses, common to all alike.

But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the circumstances of their political state—to that “government of one man which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all mutually indifferent to their common fate”—we must differ, even from him: for facts prove the impotence of that, or of any other circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in them anything but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance.

For all the while there was, among these very French, here and there a variety of character and purpose, sufficient to burst through that very despotism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, and quite original shapes.  Thus it was proved that the uniformity had been only in their outside crust and shell.  What tore the nation to pieces during the Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the characters which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry?  What else gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the parvenu heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a self-dependent audacity, which made them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of the civilised world?  If there was one doctrine which the French Revolution specially proclaimed—which it caricatured till it brought it into temporary disrepute—it was this: that no man is like another; that in each is a God-given “individuality,” an independent soul, which no government or man has a right to crush, or can crush in the long run: but which ought to have, and must have, a “carrière ouverte aux talents,” freely to do the best for itself in the battle of life.  The French Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to convert the world some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances, the puppet of institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the modern world out of the decay of the mediæval world, the French philosophes and encyclopædists are, of course, the most notorious.  They confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had come from England.  They were, or considered themselves, the disciples of Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.

And first, a few words on these same philosophes.  One may be thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of their sins, moral as well as intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them fairly—which can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any fair judgment of them will, I think, lead to the conclusion that they were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind had as yet held sacred.  Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred thing they reverenced, which men had forgotten more and more since the seventeenth century—common justice and common humanity.  It was this, I believe, which gave them their moral force.  It was this which drew towards them the hearts, not merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on the menu peuple they had no influence, and did not care to have any), but of every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations than those of a mere selfish tyrant—Frederick the Great, Christina of Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine of Russia, with all her sins.  To take the most extreme instance—Voltaire.  We may question his being a philosopher at all.  We may deny that he had even a tincture of formal philosophy.  We may doubt much whether he had any of that human and humorous common sense, which is often a good substitute for the philosophy of the schools.  We may feel against him a just and honest indignation when we remember that he dared to travestie into a foul satire the tale of his country’s purest and noblest heroine; but we must recollect, at the same time, that he did a public service to the morality of his own country, and of all Europe, by his indignation—quite as just and honest as any which we may feel—at the legal murder of Calas.  We must recollect that, if he exposes baseness and foulness with too cynical a license of speech (in which, indeed, he sinned no more than had the average of French writers since the days of Montaigne), he at least never advocates them, as did Le Sage.  We must recollect that, scattered throughout his writings, are words in favour of that which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at times, in favour of that which is pure; which proves that in Voltaire, as in most men, there was a double self—the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and folly which he saw around him—the other, hungering after a nobler life, and possibly exciting that hunger in one and another, here and there, who admired him for other reasons than the educated mob, which cried after him “Vive la Pucelle.”

Rousseau, too.  Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, for the “Confessions” and the “Nouvelle Heloise”—for much, too much, in the man’s own life and character.  One would think the worse of the young Englishman who did not so feel, and express his feelings roundly and roughly.  But all young Englishmen should recollect, that to Rousseau’s “Emile” they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, the degrading brutalities, of the medieval system of school education; that “Emile” awakened throughout civilised Europe a conception of education just, humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded upon facts; that if it had not been written by one writhing under the bitter consequences of mis-education, and feeling their sting and their brand day by day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never have reformed our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public schools.

And so with the rest of the philosophes.  That there were charlatans among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish, self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts?  Among what class of men were there not such in those evil days?  In what class of men are there not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement?  But nothing but the conviction, among the average, that they were in the right—that they were fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if need be to suffer, could have enabled them to defy what was then public opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force.

Their intellectual defects are patent.  No one can deny that their inductions were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition only half believed, or pretended to be believed.  No one can deny that their theories were too general and abstract; but then they were theories as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Régime, which was, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

Theories—principles—by them if men do not live, by them men are, at least, stirred into life, at the sight of something more noble than themselves.  Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as that which Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.