The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Vessels come gliding in to discharge their cargoes in the very heart of the city. People speak truly when they describe the city as one vast port. There is no lack of fine buildings—the Bourse, the Bank, the headquarters of the India Company; there are substantial-looking houses along the waterside; the people as busy as bees, and just as methodical; a general air of well-being and comfort; no poverty, no beggars; prosperous business men, well-to-do burgesses. That was how Amsterdam struck a foreigner. Holland, for the foreigner, was a haven of delight.

  Je vois régner sur ces rivages

  L’innocence et la liberté.

  Que d’objets dans ce paysage,

  Malgré leur contrariété

  M’étonnent par leur assemblage

  Abondance et frugalité,

  Autorité sans esclavage,

  Richesses sans libertinage,

  Noblesse, charges, sans fierté:

  Mon choix est fait . . .[14]

  Holland was prosperous, and Holland was powerful. If, in the commercial field, she had a rival in England; if, after 1688, she began to look rather like a dinghy alongside a big ship; if she gradually lost that fighting, adventurous spirit that had made her a great maritime and colonial power, it must not be supposed that she was impoverished by her altered circumstances. She was wealthy, and she was tasting the sweets of wealth. She had, moreover, another means of filling her coffers with gold and silver; and that was banking. She offers the first example of the capitalist State, and she throve on her financial activities.

  In view of this process of taking in and paying out, this give-and-take of wealth, it was of course natural that she should aim at maintaining her neutrality, for she needed a stable and peace-loving Europe. Thus, too, it was that she willingly offered asylum to all manner of different religions. A man who tries his best to convert a Jew is doubtless a good Christian; but he is a poor man of business. Holland stood for freedom of conscience, because long and bitter experience had taught her what it was to be persecuted for one’s religious belief. Her whole history, in fact, is the record of an heroic struggle for religious liberty. That was one consideration. Another was that you cannot carry on a banking, or any other business, if you have to start by asking your customer to produce his certificate of baptism. And so, alongside the Protestant conventicle, the Catholic may build his church and the Jew his synagogue. But this toleration of hers has its limits. The pastors quarrel among themselves, and then Authority has to intervene, and nowhere in the world does Authority show a more uncompromising front against principles calculated to undermine her. Nevertheless, relative though it was, the liberty that Holland offered was a rare and gracious thing.

  Then, too, Holland exerted an influence for peace through her universities. From North and South, from East and West, students came in crowds, came to profit by the teaching, not of Dutch scholars only, but of French and German, too. In Holland, you could come in contact with the people, the books and the ideas of all sorts of countries and this intellectual give-and-take was, at least in those days, unmatched in any other part of the world. All through the seventeenth century, and through most of the eighteenth, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scots, Danes, Swedes, Poles, Hungarians, and a still larger number of lieges of the Empire came to pursue their studies at Leyden, Franeker, Groningen and Utrecht. . . .[15]

  The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes found Holland well prepared. Long since, that tolerant and benevolent land had been accustomed to see exiles from England coming to seek the hospitality of her shores, Royalists in Cromwell’s time, Republicans in Charles II’s. All through those troublous times, whenever an Englishman of mark deemed that his safety was in jeopardy at home, he made for Holland, were he a Shaftesbury, or a Locke, or a Collins, and there he could dwell in security until the evil days were over. It was round about the year 1685 that the French Huguenots came to beg admittance at the gates of her cities, and she welcomed them, as she always did, with a compassionate heart, regardless of their numbers. She did everything her ingenuity could devise to find them posts of some sort, in her workshops, her army, her schools. She took them to her bosom because she herself was Protestant, because she detested the policy of Louis XIV, and because she had a human heart.

  Then it was that she began to play her great part among the nations. Europe, seeking to give utterance to the ideas that were stirring within her, could not do so because she lacked the means, there being available no organs of a truly European character. But now, in exchange for the freedom and the hospitality she had so generously lavished on them, the Huguenots bestowed on Holland a splendid recompense. Many efforts had been made to supply the deficiency, but, for a variety of reasons, they had proved abortive. That venerable publication, the Journal des Savants, despite repeated attempts to make contact with foreign ideas, was still too exclusively French in tone to answer the purpose; the Philosophical Transactions were occupied much more with science than with philosophy; the Giornale dei Letterati had little life in it, and its scope was far too limited. The Acta Eruditorum, a Leipzig journal, was ponderous in the extreme. In short, there was a vacuum, and it was clamouring to be filled. Now, then, it was that those long looked for periodicals made their appearance, and they made it in Holland. In March, 1684, came the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, Pierre Bayle’s review; this was followed in January, 1686, by Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque universelle et historique; then, in September, 1687, there appeared Basnage de Beauval’s Histoire des ouvrages des savants. Here, then, were three periodicals which, though printed in French, were hopefully on the look out for a European clientèle. Nor was it long before they got what they wanted. The writing fraternity were deeply stirred at the prospect of a journal undertaking to allot, wherever it deemed it due, that fame which overleaps frontiers, which disdains to distinguish between nation and nation, and whose writ is current throughout the civilized world. What writer would not aspire to be judged by such a tribunal? What writer would not voice his gratitude if he deemed he had been praised according to his merits? What writer would not be loud in his resentment, if he deemed he had been treated with injustice? “I have reason, Sir, to complain of the unhandsome manner in which you refer to me in the supplement to the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres for July”. . . . “Do not transgress the law of human rights”. . . . “You should have some regard for fair play in your Nouvelles”. “Don’t forget the dictates of Christian charity.”[16] Or, in a different tone, “Everybody is asking for my work since the preliminary reference to it in your December issue. Our scholars are already highly prepossessed in its favour, convinced that there was never anyone better able than you to get at the heart of a book, or to form a just estimate of its value.”[17] “Ever since I have had the advantage of reading your publications I have looked on them as ranking among the most hallowed shrines of enduring fame, where only works which are the twofold outcome of conscientious toil and conspicuous talent are worthy to be admitted.”[18] But most moving of all was the appeal which Vico once sent to Jean Le Clerc from Naples. At Naples he was not getting his deserts; yet Jean Le Clerc had but to say the word, and the name of Vico would resound throughout the whole of Europe.[19]

  So now it is from the North that we discern the light. But Eastwards, too, some changes of significance are under way. Poland, weary after her protracted struggle, after all the heroism she had so freely displayed, and on the morrow of that gesture of Sobieski’s which had fired the admiration of Europe, was now wholly engrossed with internal dissensions. For a long time, and with great thoroughness, she had been imprinting on Russia the stamp of European civilization, seeking to mould her uncouth neighbour by her literature, her fine arts, her science and her political philosophy. Now Russia was on the look-out for other models. Meanwhile, the power of Sweden was crumbling, and the star of Charles XII was soon to be extinguished for ever at Pultowa. Thus, while some of the great actors in the political drama were withdrawing from the footlights, others were moving forward to tak
e their place. The news reached Paris (without, however, causing any great sensation, at all events at first) that, on the 18th January, 1701, the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III, had assumed the royal crown, under the style and title of Frederick I, King of Prussia. Meanwhile, what was afoot in the land of the Muscovites? One of those grand-dukes whom in their language they call czars designed to transform this great Asiatic mass into a civilized power, and he looked to Germany, to Hungary, to Holland, to England and to France to tell him how to set about it. The result was that year by year, the transformation continued and on an ever-increasing scale. Manners and customs of all sorts, from hairdressing to the cut of their clothes, all began to change. A Dutch traveller, Cornelis Van Bruyn, was so struck by these innovations, and the rapidity of them, that he made haste to sketch the costumes of the people about him so as to preserve a record of them: “As these changes will sooner or later do away with these distinctive national costumes, so that none will remember what they looked like, I have recorded on canvas the sort of dresses the young women wore. . . .” The older nations were amazed, and looked with wonder at the colossal stature which Peter the Great, the Emperor of all the Russias, was beginning to assume.

  But the emergence of these two great powers was not a matter of present concern. It was not until later on that we shall find Prussia and Russia playing their full parts in the intellectual arena. In the meantime, what we have to emphasize, the point we have to bear in mind, is this: intellectual hegemony is no longer the exclusive prerogative of the Latin races. England insists on her share of power. She knows her worth, and freely proclaims her own greatness. For those Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, and French, for the whole Latin horde, she entertains a contempt which she is at no pains to dissemble. They are slaves, all of them. “As for us Britons, thank Heaven, we have a better sense of government delivered to us from our ancestors. We have the notion of a public, and a constitution: how a legislative, and how an executive is modelled. The maxims we draw from hence are as evident as those in mathematics. Our increasing knowledge shows us every day, more and more, what common sense is in politics; and this must of necessity lead us to understand a like sense in morals; which is the foundation.”[20] And Addison, comparing England with Italy, extols her sense of the value of Freedom. O, Italy, how beautiful thou art. . . .

  How has kind Heaven adorned the happy land,

  And scattered blessings with a wasteful hand!

  But what avails her unexhausted stores,

  Her blooming mountains and her sunny shores,

  With all the gifts that heaven and earth impart,

  The smiles of nature and the charms of art,

  While proud oppression in her valleys reigns,

  And tyranny usurps her happy plains?

  The poor inhabitant beholds in vain

  The reddening orange and the swelling grain;

  Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,

  And in the myrtle’s fragrant shade repines:

  Starves, in the midst of nature’s bounty curst,

  And in the loaden vineyard dies for thirst.

  O Liberty, thou goddess heavenly bright,

  Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!

  Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,

  And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train;

  Eased of her load, subjection grows more light,

  And poverty looks cheerful in thy sight;

  Thou mak’st the gloomy face of nature gay,

  Giv’st beauty to the sun, and pleasure to the day.

  Thee, goddess, thee, Britannia’s isle adores;

  How has she oft exhausted all her stores,

  How oft in fields of death thy presence sought,

  Nor thinks the mighty prize too dearly bought!

  ’Tis liberty that crowns Britannia’s isle,

  And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.

  Others with towering piles may please the sight,

  And in their proud aspiring domes delight;

  A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give,

  Or teach their animated rocks to live:

  ’Tis Britain’s care to watch o’er Europe’s fate,

  And hold in balance each contending State,

  To threaten bold, presumptuous kings with war,

  And answer her afflicted neighbours’ prayer . . .[21]

  “The more I see of the English, the more I admire them; generally speaking, they surpass us in everything.”[22] Well; at any rate they were a force to reckon with; they represented a new spirit, a new outlook. But what was it? What did it portend?

  [1]Salvador de Madariaga, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards. London, 1928. Spanish edition, 1929. French edition, 1931.

  [2]We shall see later on, in Part IV, chapter II, what reservations should be made, according to the different countries, regarding the effects of this influence.

  [3]Nouvelles de la République des lettres, Nov. 1685, Art. 5.

  [4]Cf Giulio Natali, Il Settecento, Milan, 1929, p. 68 et seq.

  [5]Christian Thomasius, Von Nachahmung der Franzosen, Nach den Ausgaben von 1687 und 1701. Stuttgart, 1894.

  [6]Nouvelles de la République des lettres, Août 1684, Article 7.

  [7]The grand-dad is a braggart, the son an imbecile, the grandson is a mighty coward, oh! what a lovely family. How I pity you, you French, to be under such a rule. Take my tip and do as the English have done.

  [8]The English think deeply; in that their mind is one with their character; delving deeply into things, and rich in experience they extend far and wide the empire of the sciences. La Fontaine, Fables, Book 12 (1694), The Fox and the Grapes.

  [9]John Rawlet, An account of my life in the North in Poetick Miscellanies, London, 1687.

  [10]Abel Boyer, Preface to the translation of Addison’s Cato, 1713.

  [11]From Ricotier’s Foreword to his translation of S. Clarke’s The Being and Attributes of God, Amsterdam, 1717.

  [12]D’Argens, Lettres morales, 1. XXIII.

  [13]Pierre Coste, Foreword to his translation of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Amsterdam, 1700.

  [14]Innocence and liberty I see prevailing along these shores. What a crowded prospect. What a number of various things I see—all different yet harmonised in a way that makes me marvel: Abundance mated with frugality, Discipline but no servility, Wealth, but no undue indulgence, Authority without arrogance. That is the place for me. Attributed to J. B. Rousseau and included in œuvres de œbaulieu, 1774, vol. II, p. 304.

  [15]J. Huizinga, The Netherlands as intermediary between Western and Central Europe. European branch of the Carnegie Trust, Bulletin No. 7, 1933.

  [16]From the Abbé de Ville to Pierre Bayle, Chambéry, 31 August, 1686. Selections from Bayle’s unpublished correspondence, published by Émile Gigas, Copenhagen, 1890.

  [17]François Bernier to Pierre Bayle, Paris, 28 February, 1686.

  [18]Denis Papin to Pierre Bayle, 26 June, 1685.

  [19]E. Nicolini, Due lettre inedite di G. B. Vico à Giovanni Le Clerc. (Rev. de litt. comparée, Vol. IX, 1929, p. 737.

  [20]Shaftesbury, Freedom of wit and humour (1707), I, 3.

  [21]Addison, A letter from Italy, to the Right Honourable Charles Lord Halifax, in the year 1701.

  [22]Daniel Laroque to Pierre Bayle, 12 July, 1686.

  IV

  HETERODOXY

  It was the year 1678. Bossuet had agreed to contend in debate with the Pastor Claude. Mme de Duras, still hesitating between Protestantism, which she was about to quit, and Catholicism on which her heart was set, had asked that this debate might be held, and the two apologists now confronting each other were fighting desperately for a woman’s soul, for the truth as they saw it, for the faith that was in them. When they came to discuss the rights of the individual conscience, Bossuet pressed his antagonist with some vigour. What, he invited Claude to tell him, what was this liberty to which these gentlemen of the Reformed Church laid clai
m? How far did it go? Were there no limits to it? No limits at all? Did they mean to say, that anybody, no matter who, any man, or woman, an ignoramus, anyone, was free to believe, nay, ought to believe that he might have a clearer understanding of the Word of God than a whole Council, though its members were recruited from the four corners of the earth and from the centre thereof, clearer than all the rest of the Church put together? And Claude made answer saying, “Yes, it is even so.”[1]