History of Civilization in England, Vol. 2 of 3. Henry Buckley
by the court, had degenerated into a fawning and hypocritical race, who, to meet the wishes of their masters, opposed all improvement, and exerted themselves in support of every old abuse. The end of all this was, a corruption, a servility, and a loss of power more complete than has ever been witnessed in any of the great countries of Europe. There was no popular liberty; there were no great men; there was no science; there was no literature; there were no arts. Within, there was a discontented people, a rapacious government, and a beggared exchequer. Without, there were foreign armies, which pressed upon all the frontiers, and which nothing but their mutual jealousies, and a change in the English cabinet, prevented from dismembering the monarchy of France.516
Such was the forlorn position of that noble country towards the close of the reign of Louis XIV.517 The misfortunes which embittered the declining years of the king were, indeed, so serious, that they could not fail to excite our sympathy, if we did not know that they were the result of his own turbulent ambition, of his insufferable arrogance, but, above all, of a grasping and restless vanity, which, making him eager to concentrate on his single person all the glory of France, gave rise to that insidious policy, which, with gifts, with honours, and with honied words, began by gaining the admiration of the intellectual classes, then made them courtly and time-serving, and ended by destroying all their boldness, stifling every effort of original thought, and thus postponing for an indefinite period the progress of national civilization.
CHAPTER V
DEATH OF LOUIS XIV. REACTION AGAINST THE PROTECTIVE SPIRIT, AND PREPARATIONS FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
At length Louis XIV. died. When it was positively known that the old king had ceased to breathe, the people went almost mad with joy.518 The tyranny which had weighed them down was removed; and there at once followed a reaction which, for sudden violence, has no parallel in modern history.519 The great majority indemnified themselves for their forced hypocrisy by indulging in the grossest licentiousness. But among the generation then forming, there were some high-spirited youths, who had far higher views, and whose notions of liberty were not confined to the license of the gaming-house and the brothel. Devoted to the great idea of restoring to France that freedom of utterance which it had lost, they naturally turned their eyes towards the only country where the freedom was practised. Their determination to search for liberty in the place where alone it could be found, gave rise to that junction of the French and English intellects, which, looking at the immense chain of its effects, is by far the most important fact in the history of the eighteenth century.
During the reign of Louis XIV., the French, puffed up by national vanity, despised the barbarism of a people who were so uncivilized as to be always turning on their rulers, and who, within the space of forty years, had executed one king, and deposed another.520 They could not believe that such a restless horde possessed anything worthy the attention of enlightened men. Our laws, our literature, and our manners, were perfectly unknown to them; and I doubt if at the end of the seventeenth century there were, either in literature or in science, five persons in France acquainted with the English language.521 But a long experience of the reign of Louis XIV. induced the French to reconsider many of their opinions. It induced them to suspect that despotism may have its disadvantages, and that a government composed of princes and bishops is not necessarily the best for a civilized country. They began to look, first with complacency, and then with respect, upon that strange and outlandish people, who, though only separated from themselves by a narrow sea, appeared to be of an altogether different kind; and who, having punished their oppressors, had carried their liberties and their prosperity to a height of which the world had seen no example. These feelings, which before the Revolution broke out, were entertained by the whole of the educated classes in France, were in the beginning, confined to those men whose intellects placed them at the head of their age. During the two generations which elapsed between the death of Louis XIV. and the outbreak of the Revolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence who did not either visit England or learn English; while many of them did both. Buffon, Brissot, Broussonnet, Condamine, Delisle, Elie de Beaumont, Gournay, Helvétius, Jussieu, Lalande, Lafayette, Larcher, L'Héritier, Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Morellet, Mirabeau, Nollet, Raynal, the celebrated Roland, and his still more celebrated wife, Rousseau, Ségur, Suard, Voltaire – all these remarkable persons flocked to London, as also did others of inferior ability, but of considerable influence, such as Brequiny, Bordes, Calonne, Coyer, Cormatin, Dufay, Dumarest, Dezallier, Favier, Girod, Grosley, Godin, D'Hancarville, Hunauld, Jars, Le Blanc, Ledru, Lescallier, Linguet, Lesuire, Lemonnier, Levesque de Pouilly, Montgolfier, Morand, Patu, Poissonier, Reveillon, Septchènes, Silhouette, Siret, Soulavie, Soulès, and Valmont de Brienne.
Nearly all of these carefully studied our language, and most of them seized the spirit of our literature. Voltaire, in particular, devoted himself with his usual ardour to the new pursuit, and acquired in England a knowledge of those doctrines, the promulgation of which, afterwards won for him so great a reputation.522 He was the first who popularized in France the philosophy of Newton, where it rapidly superseded that of Descartes.523 He recommended to his countrymen the writings of Locke;524 which soon gained immense popularity, and which supplied materials to Condillac for his system of metaphysics,525 and to Rousseau for his theory of education.526 Besides this, Voltaire was the first Frenchman who studied Shakespeare; to whose works he was greatly indebted, though he afterwards wished to lessen what he considered the exorbitant respect paid to them in France.527 Indeed, so intimate was his knowledge of the English language,528 that we can trace his obligations to Butler,529 one of the most difficult of our poets, and to Tillotson,530 one of the dullest of our theologians. He was acquainted with the speculations of Berkeley,531 the most subtle metaphysician who has ever written in English; and he had read the works, not only of Shaftesbury,532 but even of Chubb,533 Garth,534 Mandeville,535 and Woolston.536 Montesquieu imbibed in our country many of his principles; he studied our language; and he always expressed admiration for England, not only in his writings, but also in his private conversation.537 Buffon learnt English, and his first appearance as an author was as the translator of Newton and of Hales.538 Diderot, following in the same course, was an enthusiastic admirer of the novels of Richardson;539 he took the idea of several of his plays from the English dramatists, particularly from Lillo; he borrowed many of his arguments from Shaftesbury and Collins, and his earliest publication was a translation of Stanyan's History of Greece.540 Helvétius, who visited London, was never weary of praising the people; many of the views in his great work on the Mind are drawn from Mandeville; and he constantly refers to the authority of Locke, whose principles hardly any Frenchman would at an earlier period have dared to recommend.541 The works of Bacon, previously little known, were now translated into French; and his classification of the human faculties was made the basis of that celebrated Encyclopædia, which is justly regarded as one of the greatest productions of the eighteenth century.542 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith, was during thirty-four years translated three different times, by three different French authors.
Oppressed by defeats abroad, and by famine and misery at home, Louis was laid at the mercy of his enemies; and ‘was only saved by a party revolution in the English ministry.’
For evidence of the depression and, indeed, utter exhaustion of France during the latter years of Louis XIV., compare
In regard to the people generally, the French writers supply us with little information, because in that age they were too much occupied with their great king and their showy literature, to pay attention to mere popular interests. But I have collected from other sources some information which I will now put together, and which I recommend to the notice of the next French author who undertakes to compose a history of Louis XIV.
Locke, who was travelling in France in 1676 and 1677, writes in his journal, ‘The rent of land in France fallen one–half in these few years, by reason of the poverty of the people.’
‘L'annonce de la mort du grand roi ne produisit chez le peuple français qu'une explosion de joie.’
‘Kaum hatte er aber die Augen geschlossen, als alles umschlug. Der reprimirte Geist warf sich in eine zügellose Bewegung.’
The shock which these events gave to the delicacy of the French mind was very serious. The learned Saumaise declared that the English are ‘more savage than their own mastiffs.’
I will only give two more illustrations of the wide diffusion of such feelings. In 1679, an attempt was made to bring bark into discredit as a ‘remède anglais’ (
‘Au temps de Boileau, personne en France n'apprenait l'anglais.’
The French, during the reign of Louis XIV., principally knew us from the accounts given by two of their countrymen, Monconys and Sorbière; both of whom published their travels in England, but neither of whom were acquainted with the English language. For proof of this, see
When Prior arrived at the court of Louis XIV. as plenipotentiary, no one in Paris was aware that he had written poetry (
‘Le vrai roi du xviiie siècle, c'est Voltaire; mais Voltaire à son tour est un écolier de l'Angleterre. Avant que Voltaire eût connu l'Angleterre, soit par ses voyages, soit part ses amitiés, il n'était pas Voltaire, et le xviiie siècle se cherchait encore.’
‘J'avais été le premier qui eût osé développer à ma nation les découvertes de Newton, en langage intelligible.’
Which he was never weary of praising; so that, as M. Cousin says (
‘Rousseau tira des ouvrages de Locke une grande partie de ses idées sur la politique et l'éducation; Condillac toute sa philosophie.’
In 1768, Voltaire (
There are extant many English letters written by Voltaire, which, though of course containing several errors, also contain abundant evidence of the spirit with which he seized our idiomatic expressions. In addition to his
Compare
‘Admirateur passionné du romancier anglais.’
This is the arrangement of our knowledge under the heads of Memory, Reason, and Imagination, which D'Alembert took from Bacon. Compare