The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  The individual; that, at bottom, is Locke’s main concern. No public schools. A good tutor, who should take the father’s place and devote himself entirely to his pupil. No corporal punishment, for that degrades and humiliates. As little restraint as possible, except in the very earliest years. As the child grows older, he should be allowed more and more freedom. Endless precautions should be taken to protect the growing plant, and every explanation ingenuity can suggest should be employed to justify the lessons it is desired to inculcate upon him. In this system of education, which fancies itself so simple, and is in fact so complicated and so commanding, sometimes stoical to the point of harshness, but more often swayed by the dictates of the heart; which talks of realities and feeds on dreams, which is at once the pupil’s syllabus and the master’s romance, wherein are written his revolts, his regrets, his longings, his desires—in all this we catch a glimpse of the man who, seventy years later, will be openly proclaiming his admiration for Locke; and the name of that man is Jean Jacques Rousseau.

  THE AESTHETICS OF SENTIMENT

  “This philosophical spirit, which transforms men into such reasonable, such logical beings, bids fair to turn a large part of Europe into what the Goths and Vandals made of it in days gone by. I see the essential arts neglected; customs that contributed most usefully to the preservation of society done away with, and speculative reasoning taking the place of practical work. We order our lives without any regard to the dictates of experience, the best teacher the human race can possibly have. Solicitude for posterity is completely set aside. All the energies our forefathers expended on buildings and their furniture, would be lost to us, we should find no wood in the forests to build with, or even to light a fire to keep out the cold, if they had been as ‘reasonable’ as we are today.” He who spoke those bold words was the Abbé Dubos. His Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, which appeared in 1719, was the result of prolonged and careful excogitation.

  There were two opposing camps: to begin with, there was the school that aimed at subjecting art itself to the rules of logic. What is Beauty? What is Good Taste? How are we to recognize the beautiful when we see it? What do we mean by the Sublime? Difficult questions, these. There were the philosophers, and not only the philosophers, but all who, quite apart from philosophy, but because they were used to it, or because it pleased them, or because it was the fashion, relied solely on geometry to supply the answer. They said—we have already heard them saying it— that beauty was truth, or at all events what looked like truth; that, being truth, it played its part in morals, in virtue; that good taste was based on settled principles, on recognized models, and that consequently it could pronounce infallible judgments, infallible because they were in accordance with firmly established rules.

  Transpose this theory of art into the practical sphere, give practical effect to this theorizing, and you get the idea of an Academy: the imitation of the Classics; the acquisition of a technique to which every individual talent must be made to conform; the study of Nature, yes; but also the control and regimentation of Nature, for, in matters of detail, Nature is given to indulging in plenty of whims and fancies. Le Brun, the famous painter of Louis XIV’s day, who, rendered august by success, by Time, and by royal decree, became, like Boileau in another sphere, a sort of public institution—this same Le Brun, whose name calls up a whole procession of stiff and solemn portraits in great gilt frames, gave his disciples a number of instructions as to how to portray various different expressions—wrath, surprise, terror, or what was harder still, esteem, admiration, veneration. “In rising from esteem to admiration, there is little or no change in any particular feature; if there is a change, it is in the elevation of the eyebrows, but both sides will be level, the eye being a little wider open than usual. The pupils will be equidistant between the two lids; they will be motionless, fixed on the object that has excited the admiration; the lips should be slightly parted, but neither here, nor in any other part of the face, should anything be noticeably altered . . .” and so on and so forth. Everything is regulated, prescribed, classified, all according to rule. Beauty is Reason neatly dispensed in little recipes.

  The other group is not so numerous; it consists of artists who had got tired of Le Brun; of sculptors who were ceasing to be influenced by Bernini and his school, aiming rather at grace and elegance than at the noble and imposing; of architects who, instead of building churches like the Gesu, or palaces like Versailles, went in for designing attractive-looking residences, where gentlemen of lax morality could carry on their clandestine love-affairs; then there were the young folk, the rising generation, who had small regard for their elders, or for the authorities in general; yet again, there were the non-professionals, the amateurs, who weren’t going to be talked to by a parcel of professors, who snapped their fingers at academies and academicians, declaring that they had a perfect right to like the things that pleased them, men like Roger de Piles who preferred Rembrandt, and especially Rubens, to any artists of the Bologna school, and was not afraid to say so. He was not exactly a revolutionary in the sense of one who is systematically opposed to the whole established order of things; he was a man who was merely determined to be himself, and that, according to circumstances, may mean a little less, or a great deal more, than a revolutionary. His very independence of party ties lent a sort of racy, devil-may-care note of freedom to anything he happened to say. Take this, for example: “Genius is the first thing we must require in a painter, and genius is a thing that no amount of study or hard work can supply”. “Lawlessness is so essential that you find it in every branch of art. Such licences are against the rules taken according to the letter, but, judged according to the spirit, they, too, become rules when circumstances render them appropriate.”[3]

  Among this crowd of defiers of the law, the Abbé Dubos stands out in conspicuous relief. He does so because he unites in his person some rare qualities seldom found in combination, being at once a man of the world, and a man of learning. He was as much at home studying ancient coins in a museum as he was in the wings at the Opera; his intellectual powers were as subtle as they were vigorous; he was French to the backbone, yet a thorough citizen of the world; a man of action, and a man of ideas. Then, again, his association with Locke (he came to know him in London, where he had come to check Coste’s translation with the original) led him towards that well-spring of sensibility which the great Englishman had revealed; and Dubos realized that it might well appease the strange heart-hunger of his contemporaries. From the heart comes the sense of the Beautiful, the Sublime, nay, Art itself. That it was so, he took it upon him to prove to mankind at large.

  The Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture is packed full of ideas. The Abbé Dubos was so rich in experience, he had seen so many pictures, had witnessed so many comedies, tragedies and operas; he took such delight in conversation—not idle chatter, but thought-inspiring talk—his cleverness is so dazzling that, even when he falls short of the truth, his book still gives us the impression of being an inexhaustible treasure house. With a view to proceeding on methodical lines, he divides his work into sections; some of them short, some of them long. Some of his expositions stop short of the mark, some extend inordinately beyond it; he will start a theme, and drop it abruptly, or return to it again and again. There is nothing of the grand classical composition about this book. It comes much nearer the lines of the Esprit des lois, only it is not so brilliant. The sensibility which emerges, not without a struggle, from the analytical mind, does so through the medium of a lively understanding that gives chapter and verse to support its conclusions.

  How profound is the effect of the pathetic on the human heart! Is it not strange to note that poems and paintings never afford us deeper pleasure than when they succeed in moving us to tears? In a room where the furnishings are designed to minister to our pleasure, a picture portraying the ghastly sacrifice of Jeptha’s daughter detains us longer, and fascinates us more completely, than pictures of a specif
ically cheerful character. A poem describing the tragic death of an ill-fated princess may be included without incongruity in the programme of some festive entertainment, and charm the minds of people gathered together for the sole purpose of enjoying themselves. “I make so bold as to undertake the elucidation of this paradox and to explain the origin of the pleasure we derive from poetry and pictures. . . .”

  The truth is that man’s greatest enemy is ennui. People endeavour to escape from it by way either of the senses or of the intellect. The first-named is the more potent; the force of the passions is overwhelming. So great is the tumult they excite in us, that any other state of mind seems pale and languid in comparison. Only the real, genuine passions are fraught with perilous consequences, as we know to our cost. Well, that being so, we imitate things which, had they been real, would have excited our passions in good earnest. Such is the office of Art. “Pictures and poetry excite factitious passions in us by representing things which, when real, do arouse them in very truth.”

  Henceforth, the generally accepted formula, “Art means Reason” was no longer valid. Now, it was “Art means Passion”. But it was passion at once sublimated and intensified. The degree of intensification determines the relative status of the several genres of poetry; tragedy, for example, moves us more deeply than comedy. “Any given kind of poetry affects us more or less deeply, according as the theme which it is its province to portray and imitate has greater or less power to excite our emotions. This is why the elegiac and bucolic forms are more attractive to us than the dramatic.” So the upshot was that everybody, critics and creators alike, had to readjust their attitude. The great thing now was the portrayal of the passions, to portray them effectively, and to be able to say whether that aim had been success fully accomplished. The Abbé Dubos sets out to discover the secret of Art, and, probing down to the very depths of our being, finally arrives at the substratum, at sensation, the most potent factor of all. Things apprehended through the medium of the understanding seem pale, insipid, artificial in comparison with those apprehended by the senses. “I think”, he says, “that pictures affect people more deeply than poetry, and I think so for two reasons. To begin with, a picture acts upon us directly, through the organ of sight; secondly, the painter does not employ artificial signs to convey his effect, but natural ones. It is by nature’s means that painting achieves its imitations. The pleasure we derive from style is a physical pleasure; physical, too, is the pleasure we get from the music of poetry. Genius, so far from being something that may be increased and fortified by practice, is a natural endowment, an innate force, which nothing can arrest; a power which transcends all rules and conventions. It is, we may safely assume, a power of a physical nature. Genius is a divine rage, an enthusiasm which without doubt arises from physical causes, some peculiar state or quality of the blood, combined with a propitious organic constitution.” We shall be told more about this sort of thing later on, when these physical explanations, for the moment inchoate and tentative, have established themselves more securely. But even now, with the limited knowledge at our command, we may well ask whether physical causes do not play some part in the astonishing progress in literature and the arts; whether sun, air, climate do not influence the productiveness of painters and poets, nay, whether these climatic conditions do not affect the human mechanism as a whole. Our intellectual outlook, no less than our tastes and inclinations, are dependent in large measure on the quality of our bloodstream, and that, in turn, is determined by the air we breathe, particularly in our earlier and formative years. This no doubt explains how it is that people living in different climates vary so widely in their tastes and tone of mind.

  Dubos stops there. But what a distance he has travelled, and how clear is the signal he gives of the coming revolt! It is a dual revolt, an uprising against academic dogmatism on the one hand, and rationalistic theorizing on the other. In the days when the Abbé was committing his ideas to paper, the word aesthetic had not yet been invented. It did not appear till 1735, when it occurred in a thesis which a young German, Alexander Amadeus Baumgarten, composed for his doctorate. Nevertheless, we shall find in the Réflexions critiques an attempt to construct a system of aesthetics based on the feelings. It is in effect a protest in behalf of the world of sounds and colours, of earth and sky and water, of everything we see and hear and touch, of everything that impinges on us through the senses, of all we have in our composition of the emotional, the animal, and I had almost said, the material, against the neglect and disdain they had suffered at the hands of pure reason.

  THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE

  In the philosophy of Leibniz we may discern another claim demanding consideration, that is, a system of metaphysics based on the infinitely little, the imperceptible, the inapprehensible, the obscure; on psychic force; on the existence of simple substances which are as it were the essence of the vital instinct, the essence of the Ego.

  Leibniz found it impossible to admit that geometry could furnish the final and conclusive explanation of things. For Descartes he evinced at once a sincere admiration and a repugnance to which he gave expression in pamphlet after pamphlet, as his manner was. At last, in 1714, two years before he died, he drew up his last philosophical will and testament, his Monadologie. It was not published straightway. Prince Eugène of Savoy directed that it should be preserved in a casket. Only the privileged few were allowed to see the secret treasure. But the day was to come when letters and treatises would emerge from the shades, when the casket would be opened, and when its spiritual contents, at last set free, would begin to work like a leaven.

  It seemed to Leibniz that Descartes tended to simplify things too much, confounding, as he did, extent and substance, motion and vital force. He considered, also, that his way of dividing things into two parts, without regard to the gradations by which we come down to the infinitely minute, of ignoring the hidden, unconscious perceptions of mind, was too rough and ready. To treat perceptions which we cannot apprehend as if they were simply non-existent, was, as he expressly stated in his Monadologie, precisely where the Cartesians made their fundamental error. As he had pointed out ten years earlier, in his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, there are an infinite number of changes taking place within us to which we pay no heed because our impressions are either too faint, or too numerous, or too uniform. Most of us cease to notice the noise of a mill or a waterfall when we have been living near it for a certain time, yet the sound still impinges on our sensorium. When we stand on the sea-shore, we hear the sound of the sea; it follows, then, that we must perceive the sound of every drop and trickle of every wave, yet we are unaware that we perceive them. Those unconscious perceptions, which are the very stuff our psychological life is made of, were not taken into account by Descartes. “It must be confessed that Perception, and all that it implies, does not admit of a purely mechanical explanation, that is to say, one of figures and diagrams. Let us imagine a machine so constructed as to produce thought, feeling, the power of perception; then let us imagine this machine to be so enlarged in all its parts that we are able to get inside it; as we explore its interior, we shall find nothing save the various parts interacting one upon another, but nothing at all that would account for perception. Therefore, it is in the substance itself, and not in the thing made from it, not in the machine, that we must look to find it.”

  This primary substance is the Monad, nature’s true atom. What strikes us, as we note how Leibniz explains the properties of the Monad, which was to transfer the possession of the secret of life from physics to metaphysics, is his care, his anxiety to safeguard the theory of individual psychic force. Whereas Spinoza proceeds from the particular to the general, Leibniz seeks a synthesis which will admit the universal, but, without detriment to the claims of the particular. The Monad cannot be changed or modified in its inner nature by any other created thing; it has no windows affording ingress or egress. Any given Monad has, in comparison with the other Monads around it, specific qualiti
es of its own, since in Nature, no two things are ever identical. The Monad, like every other created thing, is liable to change, but this change takes place within the Monad itself and does not result from any action brought to bear upon it from outside.

  This very marked characteristic of the Monad gives rise to a difficulty. Since it is simple substance and is unaffected by anything outside itself, is it not necessarily doomed to perpetual isolation? It is not so doomed, and that by reason of a pre-established harmony.

  How Leibniz explains the nature of this wonderful harmony is not a matter into which we need enter here. Any history of philosophy will explain it far better than we could possibly do. But we have all we need to make good our case, we have the unconscious. “Every mind being, as it were, a world in itself, sufficient unto itself, independent of every other creature, comprehending the infinite, expressing the universe, is as lasting, as self-subsisting, and as absolute as is the universe of created things itself.” And here is a poetic vision of life multiplied ad infinitum:

  Every portion of matter may be regarded as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every member of the animal, every drop of animal fluid, is likewise such a garden, such a pond.