by Antal Szerb
But the fact that the same sort of audience went to the Academy as did to the theatre shows that the great institution had lost none of its prestige during these years, and was by no means isolated from the literary life of the day. Earlier, in the middle of the century, far from being a conservative, traditionalist body, it had been a meeting place for revolutionary spirits, entirely under the control of the philosophes, the collaborators on the great Encyclopédie, at war with the Church and the Sorbonne. Since all the Encyclopedists were also members of the salons, the world of women followed the Academy’s elections and proceedings with the greatest of interest. It was genuinely part of the monde, of aristocratic society, as were the Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne.
By the end of the century the Academy had lost none of its relevance, but the original group of philosophes were no longer in the vanguard. As with all sects, persecution (imprisonment, the burning of their books and banishment) had simply made them stronger. But although official harassment continued until the end of the century, it had by then become something of a game, final proof of the saying that “the monarchy forbade everything and could prevent nothing”. For example, Brissot would be forewarned by the official responsible that his current pamphlet was to be confiscated; the copies would then be seized and sold on the black market by the same official’s wife. The Abbé Morelle, imprisoned in the Bastille for his writings, was comforted by his supporters with the thought that he should regard it as a welcome form of publicity. Morelle thought so too, and the calculation proved correct. Even the Church could no longer stand up to the philosophes in the decisive way it once had done. Fashionable preachers such as the Academician the Abbé Boismont did not try to refute their teachings—they merely insisted that the God of the Christian religion was rather more likely to inspire benevolent feelings in the human heart than the cold and distant Supreme Being of the philosophes. When the Spanish translation of the Encyclopédie appeared, its first purchaser was Don Bertram, the Archbishop of Salamanca and Head of the Inquisition.
The Marquis de Condorcet, the man chosen to succeed D’Alembert as leader of the philosophes, made his speech of acceptance into the Academy in January 1782. He began: “The eighteenth century has so thoroughly perfected the system of human knowledge that there is no means whereby the new enlightenment could be extinguished, unless some universal catastrophe covered the human race once again in darkness.” The philosophes had won.
But, year by year, the great generation of the French Enlightenment were dying out. Voltaire went in 1778, after his triumphal return to the Paris from which he had been exiled for so many years. Two months later, his great adversary Rousseau died. In 1780 it was Condillac, in 1784 Diderot. In 1783 it was the leader of the philosophes, the director of the Encyclopédie and the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, D’Alembert himself.
It happens very rarely in literary history that one great generation is followed by another. The void left by the death of the great Encyclopedists could not be filled by their heirs. D’Alembert’s successor at the Academy was the hardworking, many-sided and inconsequential Marmontel, the literary populariser of the philosophes’ ideas. Its greatest lyric poet was considered to be the Abbé Delille—perhaps because he behaved as a poet was expected to, was permanently distracted and dreamy and “was forever letting himself go at the feet of some pretty girl”, as we might colloquially but faithfully translate Grimm’s phrase, so expressive as it is of the times. His great rival, as we have mentioned, was the leading critic of the age, La Harpe. La Harpe was a timid conservative who extolled everything from the past and pronounced everything that was antiquated in classical French literature to be ‘correct’. He was an outstanding example of the French literary pedant, a proponent of that schoolmasterly deference to the bookish ‘rules’ that foreigners always find so surprising. La Harpe had been a French tutor to Grand Prince Paul Petrovics, the son of Catherine the Great. When the Grand Prince was in Paris, La Harpe would pay his respects every time the Grand Prince showed an inclination to receive him. Finally La Harpe announced:
“I have discussed the art of ruling with him on two separate occasions, and I can assure you that I found him most satisfactory.” (There were a great many reasons why this could not have been true: Paul I, as he became, was the stupidest and most timid of all the stupid and timid Russian Tsars.)
Although the most severe of critics, La Harpe could not bear to be criticised himself. After the press had savaged his play Les brames, he petitioned the Keeper of the Seal to ban the newspapers from commenting on his new plays before a certain number of performances had taken place, to stop the audiences from staying away—a playwright’s dream that has never yet come to pass.
La Harpe was not a great poet, but he was one of the most representative people of his time. There was only one great poet alive in France in this period, and he was certainly not typical of his age, nor had anyone heard of him. This was André Chénier, who was to die young on the revolutionary scaffold. In Chénier the chrysea phormix Apolonos was heard again: the golden lute of Apollo, the glory of Ancient Greece. The oldest voice is always the newest, and Chénier is much more modern to our ears than any other poet of his century. We feel instantly at home in his verses. They are the lyre that will sound again in the work of Baudelaire and Verlaine. We cannot refrain from quoting a few lines to show how very fine his voice is, and how little dated. The extract is from an allegorical poem about a queen—perhaps he was thinking of Marie-Antoinette, so the passage is not unconnected with our theme:
Sur la frivolité
Mère du vain caprice et du léger prestige,
La Fantasie ailée autour d’elle voltige …
La déesse jamais ne connut d’autre guide.
Les rêves transparents, troupe vaine et fluide,
D’un vol étincelant caressent ses lambris …
La reine, en cette cour, qu’anime la Folie,
Va, vient, chant, se tait, regarde, écoute, oublie.
Et dans mille cristaux, qui portent son palais,
Rit de voir mille fois étinceler ses traits.
Frivolity—mother of shallow Caprice and empty Prestige, with winged Fantasy flitting around her, the only guide this goddess has ever known … In this court, so animated by Folly, transparent dreams, fluid and insubstantial, flicker caressingly over the marble panels as the Queen comes and goes, breaks into song, falls silent, stares, listens, forgets … then, seeing her face reflected a thousand times in the thousand mirrors that hang in the palace, erupts into laughter.
While French literature was moving into decline at home, the cult of French wit was reaching its zenith abroad. Count Haga was not an isolated phenomenon—the whole of Europe was just a larger version of him. To be a cultured person was to be like the French. Their language was as much a world language as Latin had once been. The Berlin Academy launched a competition under the heading “The Universality of the French Language”. It was won by the youthful, mad and faux-mad (for so he proclaimed himself) ‘Count’ Rivarol. The motto of his winning entry was: Tu regere eloquio populus, o Galle, memento—Remember, Gaul, that your calling is to rule all Europe by your eloquence.
But at the same time, given its sense of growing internal weakness, and the increasingly ossified nature of its classicism, the country was more receptive to literature from abroad than it had ever been before or has been since. In particular, there was an outpouring across the Channel of English pre-romantic cloud, storm and blackest night. The plaintive, sepulchral tone came strongly into fashion in France. Young’s tearful dirges, and the gently mournful departing souls of Ossian, haunted everyone. The Comédie Italienne staged a play called Le public vengé, in which the allegoric figure of the National Genius laments:
“Since I was exiled, I have travelled in many lands; there is not one country that does not love my style; everywhere I am sought after—but now I am come home, and behold, I find that everything is given a friendly welcome here
except me; here I am the only stranger.”
The French had truly broken through the Chinese wall of the neo-classical past, and made the foreign Muses welcome—but those Muses paid a high price in return. They were required to dress up in the formal garb of the French Court.
Bienséance, the rules of decorum instilled by the ‘Great’ seventeenth century, still held sway, sacrosanct and not to be transgressed. The idea that lay behind them, and the myriad ways in which it was expressed, harmless enough as they might seem to a foreigner, continued to weigh on the delicate sensibility of the French.
Just what this bienséance entailed is shown in this graphic example from Taine. A young noblewoman, having arranged a pension for her tutor, the famous dancing master Marcel, ran to him in delight to show him the document. He dashed it to the floor and cried:
“Mademoiselle, is that what you learnt from me? To proffer a mere object in such a way?”
In literature, bienséance required a strict avoidance of words not current in aristocratic society, thus excluding all scholarly and other specialist terms, as well as diction favoured by the hoi-polloi and the more effusive poets, and, to maintain a lordly generality, nothing was to be described in excessive detail.
Hence Voltaire decided that, for the famous extended simile from the Song of Songs: “His eyes are like doves beside springs of water, bathed in milk”, the correspondingly bienséant version would read: “un feu pur est dans ses yeux”—a pure flame is in his eyes. The example shows how bloodless was the poetry that truly conformed to classical taste. Ducis, who adapted Shakespeare’s plays for the French theatre, expunged the fateful handkerchief in Othello on the grounds that an object into which, horribile dictu, a man blows his nose (the French ‘mouchoir’ directly mimics this function), could have no place on the national stage, and Desdemona dropped a bit of ribbon instead—which was considered much more elegant.
Let us stay awhile with Ducis. He led Shakespeare to triumph on the French stage, but what he made of him in the process! The plot of Hamlet in his revised version (‘imitée de l’anglais’) runs as follows:
Claudius, is no longer the King but merely the Premier Prince du Sang (the King’s oldest brother, analogous to the Duc de Provence). He tells his confidant, Polonius, that he wants to step into his late sibling’s shoes, but the widow, Gertrude, will not consent to marry him, however politely he asks. Gertrude tells her confidant, Elvire, that, despite having long had an affair with Claudius, her main reason for refusing to marry him is that he incited her to give the poisoned cup to her husband, and she now feels remorse and fears the terrible revenge of her son Hamlet. So she sends for Hamlet’s confidant, Norceste, to come and cheer the prince up a little.
But this will not be easy. Hamlet is in a really bad mood. When we first encounter him, we only hear his voice behind the stage. Something is happening to him that only Voltaire among French playwrights could permit himself to show directly—he is seeing a ghost.
“Avaunt, hideous spectre,” he calls out from behind a backcloth. “What? Do you not see it? It hovers over my head, it dogs my footsteps—it is killing me.”
The ghost behind the backcloth disappears. Hamlet steps out and tells his confidant Norceste that he is in the difficult situation familiar to heroes of all French classical dramas since Corneille—he is torn between love and duty. On the one hand, there is his filial duty to kill the wicked Claudius; on the other, he loves Claudius’ daughter Ophelia, who would take it rather badly if he butchered her father.
Earlier, Claudius has explained the cunning political manoeuvres which have won him prestige and the approval of the people; now he informs us that, as a lunatic, Hamlet could forfeit his claim to the throne. Ophelia tells Hamlet that the time has come for him to make her truly his wife, something not previously possible since his father had forbidden it. Hamlet’s reply is initially evasive, but he eventually tells her that he cannot marry her because he has to kill her father. Ophelia is not pleased to learn that his passion for revenge is stronger than his love for her. She really had not expected that, and she rebukes him in the following terms:
Ah! tu m’as fait frémir. Va, tigre impitoyable,
Conserve, si tu peux ta fureur implacable!
Mon devoir désormais m’est dicté par le tien—
Tu cours venger ton père, et moi, sauver le mien.
Ah! you make me shudder. Go, implacable tiger,
Maintain, if you can, your implacable fury!
My duty henceforth is dictated by yours:
You fly to avenge your father, I to save mine.
Thus the full formula of classical French drama is set in motion: on the one hand Hamlet’s struggle between love and duty, and on the other, the identical conflict inside Ophelia. Now indeed the shades of Corneille could come to terms with the fact that Shakespeare was being performed on the French stage.
Next, Hamlet produces the urn containing his father’s ashes, whereupon his mother confesses all (this is all that is left of their great scene). But, rather than kill her, Hamlet sends her away, since “In my present mood I am capable of anything”. Claudius bursts into the palace with his followers, but Hamlet stabs him with a dagger, and Gertrude kills herself, whereupon Hamlet remarks that she “was a human being, and she was royal”, and tells us he has to live on in the interests of the people, however difficult things might prove.
Since he was four years old—whether you believe this or not, dear reader—the present writer’s single greatest interest has been in history. And yet I have always deeply distrusted the subject as a scholarly discipline. If we could travel in time as we do in space, we would surely have some devilish surprises. When you arrive in a new country for the first time there is usually one outstanding feature that really strikes you, which no one has ever told you about—in France, for example, on every wall you see written in large letters the words ‘Défense d’ uriner’, followed by the precise date on which the relevant law was promulgated. Surely the same sort of thing would apply if we were to return to the past. And if we did find ourselves back in 1784, perhaps the greatest surprise of all would be that everyone spoke with a lisp. Of course we would not dare assert this as a fact, having no other evidence than a note to the effect by Mercier, who remarks that sooner or later even stage actors will be starting to affect the mannerism in order to please their audiences. So it is at least a possibility, along with a thousand other oddities which contemporaries never mention since they found them entirely natural.
This matter of lisping makes me think that perhaps the biggest of all surprises awaiting our traveller to 1784 would be the phenomena associated with the cult of sensibility—the sentimental emotionalism one sees paraded, for example, in a painting of a pretty lace-maker, with its ostentatious display of good-heartedness and generosity towards the subject, expressed through the colours used for her physical form, her dress and facial expression. A brief glance at some of the pictures of the period will make this immediately clear.
The work of Greuz is not now thought of as being of the first rank. But he was the most popular painter of his time, and even the Academy deferred to this general opinion against their own better judgement. There is just one emotion conjured up in his well-known paintings: this same fashionable good-heartedness. It is not the good-heartedness we find in real life, but in the theatre; and behind it lurks a deep sensuality. To quote the Goncourts’ comparison, Greuze portrays his innocent maidens as one might parade a fresh young whore before an old man hoping for rejuvenation.
But the engravings are even more typical. I have two examples before me. One is entitled The Abolition of Serfdom, done by Née in 1786. In it, an obvious landowner, his arms held out in a gesture of giving, is hurrying out of the pillared entrance to his mansion towards the distant crowd standing below, whose predominant figure is a man, clearly a peasant, making the same open-handed gesture to the master—not as an offer to take his hand, but to indicate deep gratitude, and to embrace not hi
m (that would be going too far) but the figure of Goodness hovering nearby. His face is ecstatic, raised upwards with a gentle happiness, while the arms of the women kneeling around are held aloft in corresponding gestures. The landlord too is accompanied by a train of followers (in those days no one ever went about alone)—an audience who contemplate the edifying scene with sweet emotion.
The title of the second picture is rather difficult to translate: L’agriculture considerée—perhaps The Two Sides of Agriculture? It depicts an interior, with a bowl of sugar placed on a table. Once again the landlord greets the simple land-worker with a proffered embrace that seems like an allegorical gesture, while the labourer, who, unlike him, has no wig, makes the same gesture of the hands towards him. The audience here can be found sitting around the table: two ladies wearing enormous hats, and two men in wigs, with somewhat impassive faces—the same figures and gestures of the arms, sentimental and awkward, embracing and not embracing, expressing some mysterious, undefined but overwhelming love. We can be confident that gestures such as these would present themselves on every side to the occupant of our time machine.
The wave of sentimental passion for nature promoted by Rousseau sought out everything that was moving, good and profoundly human in nature. The nobility built themselves village-style houses—ermitages—to escape from the noise and bustle of the world, shedding the burdens of convention to spend their time in proximity to solid, upright village folk. We have already seen Marie-Antoinette’s little hameau. Such cottages were also a response to the mood of the times. In 1782 Grimm noted the same topics recurring, with titles such as The Land, Gardens, The French Georgics, Nature, Fields, and, once again, Nature. Among the most popular of these poems is the piece by the Abbé Delille on gardens. In it he speaks with scorn of the coldly geometric gardens of the previous age, which were so barely ‘natural’: