A generous Frenchman has summarised in the July number of the "Fortnightly Review" the effects of the "influence of English thought on the French mind." Had an Englishman written this shining tribute to the distinctive genius of his countrymen, he might have been accused of national vanity, but coming as it does from the pen of M. Yves Guyot, the acknowledgment carries at once high literary authority and the stamp of impartiality. Few students of political philosophy have failed to observe the unbroken chain connecting the "Social Contract" of Rousseau with the doctrines promulgated by John Locke, who was in a sense the academic father of the French Revolution. The theory that society is a contract between the individuals composing it, and the sovereignty of the people, was first put forward by Locke, and it was upon this and the contrasting study of rational absolutism contained in the writings of Hobbes that Rousseau based his epoch making work, so that, strangely enough, the famous principles enunciated in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence may be distinctly traced by a circuitous route to that very England against which the American standard was raised. The Byronic cult in France and other Continental countries is also a commonplace of literary history, but it remained for M. Guyot to reveal the wide extent and remarkable dominance of the literature of England upon the mind of its gayer and more severely classical neighbour. The adherence of the French school to the dramatic unities upon the stage, to the syllogistic method in the investigations of science and the speculations of philosophy are often supposed to have been accompanied by a somewhat supercilious contempt for the more irregular style of Englishmen in literature and their patient exploration and reverential regard for facts in the domain of research. How Voltaire described Shakespeare as "a drunken barbarian," and how the French playwrights feared to stage "Hamlet" with the ghost lest the audience should laugh at the solemn scenes, are ancient gibes which the English have quoted unceasingly against themselves.
M. Yves Guyot, tells another story. The British reader begins to suspect that he has hitherto suffered from the complaint of modesty in a more acute form than it generally appears in insular races. Voltaire's laugh at Shakespeare was, it appears, but the other and witty French side of a genuine admiration—so genuine that it took the sincere form of imitation. For it seems that the great Frenchman's Brutus was taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Zaire from Othello, two scenes; of Mahomet from Macbeth, and the spectres of Eliphile and Semiramis from Hamlet. This is not mere literary speculation, but is confirmed by Voltaire's personal acknowledgement. He described Shakespeare as a "genius full of strength and fecundity," and after his stay in England wrote:—"We have gained from the English their sinking funds, the building and working of vessels, power of attraction, differential calculus, the seven primary colours, inoculation, we shall insensibly take their noble freedom of thought and their profound disdain for all scholastic twaddle." But the admiration of English methods neither began nor ended with Voltaire. French Huguenot refugees before his time had contrived to circulate translations of English writers among their countrymen and the Abbe Prevost, Desmarzeaux, Rapin de Thoyras, Beat de Muralt, with others, sang the praises, made known the ideas, and told France the wonderful history of the English nation. In economics and political philosophy the British influence was at first strongest. J. B. Say embodied in his French works on economy the doctrines of Adam Smith, and to this day the academic economists promulgate the principles which Smith and his successors laid down, although it may be correctly stated in the words of M. Guyot that "economic science was the result of collaboration between French and English." Montesquieu has given French clarity to the constitutional divisions of power traced through the development of English Parliamentarism, and the study of Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, and others modified the Gallic habit of following blindly the sophistic style of reasoning inherited from the Greeks. Bacon, as is well-known, was the originator of inductive reasoning, so that from his method springs the scientific achievement of the last two centuries. And all along, as M. Guyot emphasises, the influence of Englishmen has been pre-eminent in scientific inquiry. "They transformed our methods," says M. Guyot, "in natural science." Newton, Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, these in succession are the finger-posts along the road of discovery, and they have been noted and followed by Frenchmen as often and as systematically as by Englishmen.
In the field of pure literature the English influence has been especially powerful. In the eighteenth century the splendid realism of Defoe and Swift stamped itself on the French mind; and the nineteenth century novelists of Britain have been the stimulation of the French school. Henri Heine at the Salon of 1831, counted no fewer than thirty pictures representing episodes of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. "Alfred de Vigny," says M. Guyot, "borrowed Cinq Mars from him Merrimee borrowed the Chronique de Charles IX., Victor Hugo Notre Dame de Paris. Balzac les Chouans, and, as for Alexandre Dumas, he drew all his theatrical pieces and novels therefrom." But the Wizard of the North was not the only British inspirer of French fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot have had their influence especially in teaching the art of representing homely scenes and manners, the peculiar genius of the English in literature as it is of the Dutch in painting. In the drama Shakespeare's influence has been great since 1827, although the ideas derived from him have been recast in a French mould. From the beginning of literary intercourse between France and England Frenchmen seem to have outdone us in generous tributes to the national character. The Abbe Prevost, early in the eighteenth century, declared that "there is no country where one finds so much straightforwardness; so much humane feeling, such just standards of honour, wisdom, happiness, as among the English." Beat de Muralt, a Bernese, in a series of letters written in 1694 and 1695, declared :—"Among the English there are persons who think more strongly and who have those strong thoughts in greater number than intellectual men of other nations." And M. Yves Guyot himself, in summing up the results of his study upon the subject submits the following propositions:—
1. The chief intellectual influence, is liberty; England has freed French thought, French science, from the "authority" argument; Shakespeare freed our theatre from the Aristotelian rules ; Locke and English institutions taught the rest of the world the true conditions of political liberty.
2. The second form, which is a consequence of the first, is the scientific form. It is Bacon against Plato, Newton against Descartes, Lyell against Cuvier.... . It is reality opposed to the assertions and subtleties, which we inherited from the Greek sophists.
And after tracing the purely literary influence he concludes:—
In short, the intellectual influence of the English over the French taught the latter to subordinate their subjective conceptions to objective method, and to learn the character and utility of the competition in politics, in economics, and in biology.
What M. Yves Guyot has shown is, after all, one side of the interaction of character upon character. There is in the English mind a certain love of substance, of plainness, and of seeking out the roots of things. Despite all their hypocrisy, as Meredith has observed, there is a genuine fibre of moral integrity running through the nation. This it is, perhaps, which impels Englishmen to discard mere forms as useless surplusage, or to disregard the character of the form so that the body it envelops, be sound. "No matter how the head lie so that the heart be right," jested a great Englishman when upon the scaffold. And this is a truth which penetrates to the marrow of the nation's bones. But while it is pardonable to believe these things of ourselves, especially when they are said by a foreigner, there is another side to be revealed. It is the influence of French thought upon the English mind. Locke studied in France, and what have we not learned from French wit, French chivalry, French clarity of vision and augustness and directness of expression ? When we come to modern times did not the French Revolution react upon England and upon the world, and was it not really the thunder of Democracy that shook the Bastille? Have not Rabelais and Balzac, Montaigne, and Voltaire, Taine, and St. Beuve, Hugo, and even Zola influenced our literature? Are not Laplace and, Pasteur intellectual brethren of Newton and Darwin? What do not chemistry and biology, astronomy, and engineering owe to Frenchmen? In the republic of letters language is the only barrier to that freedom of intercourse which strengthens and enriches thought, while in the region of pure science achievement speaks all tongues.
West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954), Saturday 1 August 1908, page 10
No comments:
Post a Comment