We Imperialists: Notes on Ernest Seillière’S Philosophy of Imperialism 9780231899451

Table of contents :
PREFATORY NOTE
CONTENTS
I. EARLY ESSAYS AND FORMATION OF DOCTRINE
II. THE TRIANGLE
III. THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY MYSTICISM
IV. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM
V. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM. ( Continued.)
VI. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM. ( Concluded.)
VII. TENDENCIES OF THE TIMES.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX

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WE IMPERIALISTS

cette âme mystique de la conquête Louis B E R T K A N D de l'Acadimit P r t n c ù K

i

BOOKS BY CARGILL SPRIETSMA

Columbia Verse, 1897-1924. (An Anthology.) With a Preface by John Erskine. New York, Columbia University Press, 1924. Aloysius Bertrand, 1807-1841. (A Biography.) Paris, Champion, 1926. La Volupté. (The unpublished works of the author of Gaspard de la Nuit.) Paris, Champion, 1926. The Sitting Scribe's Letters, by Pius Servien. (A Translation.) Paris, Edward W. Titus, 1929. Romanticism, by Ernest Seillière. Preface and translation by Cargill Sprietsma. New York, Columbia University Press, 1929.

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IMPERIALISTS NOTES ON ERNEST SEILLIÈRE'S

PHILOSOPHY OF IMPERIALISM

BY

CARGILL SPRIETSMA

Niw Y o u COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 195t

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1931 ALL

RIGHTS

RESERVED

PRINTED IN FRANCE

iv

PREFATORY NOTE The object of these notes is to summarize a doctrine contained in some forty or fifty volumes of criticism published by Baron Ernest Seillikre between 1897 and 1930. It was impossible here and there not to protest at the idea of reducing all life to a discussion of imperialism and all mysticism to rational control. There is a minority who seek to avoid the world of imperialists, content to live in their Thebaid. It will be useful to keep in mind such interpretations of men and events as those of Professors Myers, Freeman, Edwin F. A. Seligman and others. History is past ethics; it is economic development; it is an account of intellectual progress ; it is religious evolution ; it is past politics. "To the student of the ethical phase of history all social reformers from the old Hebrew prophets down to Karl Marx and Henry George are primarily moralists pleading for social justice, equity, and righteousnesswrites Professor Philip Van Ness Myers, in History as Past Ethics. To Ernest Seilliire these men are no less imperialistic than Cecil Rhodes ; the difference consists in the objects to be attained.

PREFATORY NOTE

Ernest Seilliire's system contains sound working principles for those practical souls who know how to use them; that its propositions are everywhere confirmed by events and the analysis of modern political doctrines, it would seem difficult for an impartial observer honestly to deny. Bullets kill, and we are making them every day. Why put our heads in the sand ? A freer use of such frankness as is arrived at in the Philosophy of Imperialism may do more for a limitation of their use than sentimental cries of Peace, Peace, when there is no peace. C . S. Paris, July 18 ; Belle-Ile-en-Mer,

August 20, 1930.

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CONTENTS PREFATORY NOTE

v

CHAPTER I. EARLY ESSAYS AND FORMATION OF DOCTRINE II. THE TRIANGLE IMPERIALISM—MYSTICISM—REASON

III. ORIGINS OF MYSTICISM 1. 2.

i 12

.

CONTEMPORARY

23

FROM PLATO TO JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EXAMPLE OF IRRATIONAL MYSTICISM, MADAME GUYON AND F^NELON ROUSSEAU THE MYSTIC

32 47

IV. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM

61

3.

PASSIONAL MYSTICISM

23

61

V. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM (Continued) 83 ESTHETIC MYSTICISM

83

VI. MYSTIC SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM (Concluded) 94 NATIONAL, RACE AND CLASS MYSTICISM.

94

VII. TENDENCIES OF THE TIMES. . .

128

1. 2.

ROMANTICISM IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE IMPERIALISM AND THE MORAL CRISIS IN AMERICA

128 134

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

147

INDEX

151 vii

We Imperialists CHAPTER EARLY

ESSAYS

AND

I

FORMATION

OF

DOCTRINE.

Baron Ernest Seillière was born in Paris, January i , 1866. T h e Seillières were long established in a region well known to those Americans who remember Saint Mihiel, and which has given to France Barrés and Poincaré. His maternal grandfather was the Marquis de Laborde, former Senator and like Baron Seillière, Membre de l'Institut. A f t e r completing his humanities, Ernest Seillière entered the Ecole Polytechnique, but instead of following a military career, upon graduation, he went to Heidelberg, majoring for two years in history and philosophy. His excellent knowledge of the language and the country permitted him to write in German, in 1903, a study of Peter Rosegger. Previous to this he had already published An Excursion to Ithaca (1892) and a translation of a Swedish poem, Nadescha (1893) by Runeberg ; in his essays on the founder of the German socialist party, Ferdinand Lassalle, published in volume four years later (1897), we

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have the first treatment of those problems which are to occupy him henceforth.

Ferdinand Lassalle is written after the same plan as most of his later works, that is, it is a biography in which the author follows the chronological order. It differs greatly from them, however, in two essentials, of which the first is the general, not total, absence of lively moral commentaries, and the second, the use of the ordinary moralist and philosophic vocabulary instead of that later chosen and constantly employed. A few passages will illustrate these differences and the author's style, and introduce us to his doctrine. A n example. A commentary of Lassalle's " L o n g live the R e p u b l i c ! " Lassalle at that period of his life said, "If I were born a prince, I would be an aristocrat ; as I am a merchant's son, I shall be a democrat." T h e future historian of imperialism suggests that Lassalle hoped the republic's triumph would satisfy both his aristocratic tastes and his democratic opinions. T o d a y , Ernest Seilliére would no doubt say that Lassalle hoped his imperialism would find satisfaction in a position commensurate with his ideas of the importance of his own celestial mission.

F O R M A T I O N OF DOCTRINE

3

T h e r e are other instances. In the early pages of Lassalle's Journal, quoted by his biographer, there are numerous cases of what Ernest Seilliere would today signal as "mysticism," but the word does not appear, nor does that of "imperialism." (') T o illustrate. Lassalle is determined to fight for such ideals as liberty and justice. His father tries to dissuade him. "Why y o u ? " he asks his son, who replies, "Because God's voice calls me to fight." ( 2 ) Another passage Ernest Seilliere would not let pass today without a commentary is that in which Lassalle holds that the people and radical parties always see more clearly than do the sages in times of trouble, that their superiority imposes itself, as is just, and carries them to power in difficult situations. ( 3 ) Would he fail to point out here the romantic fallacy, as he did later in Rousseau and George Sand, that is, the illusion of the natural superiority of the masses ? # * *

Auguste Comte affirms that humanity is composed of more dead than living. Perhaps each act of these dead has its influence upon the living. ( l ) Ferdinand Lassalle, pages 1 to 24, and passim. (*) Id., p. 23. (») Id., p. 94.

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H o w t h e n , asks Ernest Seilliere, in law, should their wills not bind ours ? T h e people whose w i s d o m has given them success in their struggle for w o r l d empire, the English, for instance, have long instinctively understood this. W e Know with what prudence they touch the precious inheritance of past customs and decisions. (') T h i s proposition remains part of Ernest Seilliere's doctrine, but today he speaks of England as a splendid example of rational imperialism. A little further on there is another case where he w o u l d not have failed to employ his later vocabulary in a commentary on Lassalle. In 1862 Lassalle had felt for some time his lack of action as a b u r d e n . Science no longer sufficed to drug the desire for activity w h i c h tormented his ardent nature. T h e high opinion he had of himself made him feel each day more and more the lack of real influence of a mind he j u d g e d made to g o v e r n m e n . T h i s w o u l d serve the philosopher of imperialism today as an excellent example of an obstructed will to p o w e r . ( 2 ) Ernest Seilliere's criticism of Rousseau is already b e g u n in his study of Ferdinand Lassalle. A f t e r a n a l y z i n g the G e r m a n socialist's Journal, full of confessions little to Lassalle's credit, Ernest Seilliere remarks that the reader will probably be surprised at his finding his hero (l) (•)

I J.. p. ¡48. Cf. Lassalle. p. 160.

FORMATION OF DOCTRINE

5

sympathetic, and explains that it is because, in spite of his vanity, his violence, his unscrupulousness, he is very sincere with himself. "That Rousseau press such sincerity to very cynicism," he writes, "his merit seems less to us. His confession extended to his youthful transgressions. His life, which he judges beautiful and well filled, is there to excuse him and justify him in his own sight. Frankness is more meritorious and more interesting when it traces day by day the faults whose consequences are yet to come and to be feared and which take exaggerated proportions in the guilty young person. ( 1 )" Often, no doubt, we may add, after Baron Seilliere's fashion, but not always, age and position making confession harder and often exaggerating even more the consequences. Elsewhere we find the significant statement of what remains his attitude in regard to socialism, when he points with alarm to the advance of Marxist ideas, to the radical party's parliamentary tactics, and when he calls for a careful and impartial examination of the origins of socialist and communist doctrines. Difficult social problems which preoccupy him at the outset, as they do today, can receive no solution without the agreement of the different classes which compose society. An understand(*) Ferdinand Lassalle. p. 13.

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ing is reached only by reciprocal concessions, and nothing so facilitates an agreement as the knowledge of the adverse party's demands, their origins, their evolution, and the mentality of those who formulated them. These are the reasons which led Ernest Seillière to study German socialism in its founder, Ferdinand Lassalle. Let us recall that the young author was the son of an important Lorraine family, graduated in high standing from the Ecole Polytechnique, and had before him the choice of a successful military, industrial or political career. He chose to be a scholar, not to "go proletarian" as many of the Russian nobles and bourgeois did before the Revolution, nor to become a fanatic propagandist of conservatism, but to expose with as much disinterestedness as possible that doctrine his experience and education have taught him to be the most susceptible of permitting each individual and each group to live and grow to a maximum without encroaching upon his neighbor's right to do likewise. L a w , order and traditional morality seem to him most conducive to this end, which will probably always be the basis of the doctrine of society's "favorite sons." Such an attitude prompts his commentary in 1897 of Lassalle when the socialist writes, "If the past is independent of the present, this, in its turn, should be autonomous." T h i s is false reasoning, points out his biographer, for logic

FORMATION OF DOCTRINE

7

demands the following proposition : If the past is independent of the present, the present, in turn, is independent of the future. But, in reality, he continues, the three are linked, whether they will it or not, and in the present, both attachments must be remembered. And he gives an example. A son cannot renounce his father's debts, in the normal course of events, if we leave aside the extreme case where he would renounce the paternal inheritance. But a people never renounces its inheritance,—improvement of the soil, transportation lines, artistic treasures and moral traditions. It never repudiates the responsibilities^ 1 ) There are examples of men trying to repudiate the past, as Russia, and there are many who would willingly renounce the inheritance of those inventions which characterize modern civilization. But it is no doubt impossible to do so. The Studies of Ferdinand Lassalle show the author's early familiarity with Taine, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, all of whom will often be the subject of his commentaries later on. Throughout he inspires the reader's confidence by his sincerity and good faith, by his generosity towards others when they merit it, by his open disagreement when an opinion seems to him unfounded. Ernest Seilliere has remained frank and generous, (l)

Ferdinand Lassalle, p. 145.

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his ideas have become more organized and he, more critical of innovations. But never does he c o n d e m n without stating, as in his early studies, his reasons, and offering a constructive p r o g r a m in its place. T h e portrait he seeks to draw of F e r d i n a n d Lassalle is moral, and the problems he would resolve are social. T h a t he will answer t h e m as a psychologist and historian with an effort "to suppose nothing, to propose nothing, to simply e x p o s e " w o u l d be the whole truth w e r e Ernest Seilliére not already interested in the conservation of social institutions through a slow evolution based upon the accumulated experience of several centuries of political and social history. He supposes and proposes from the very outset of his studies, as a moderate conservative. #

#

#

T h e Lassalle studies were soon followed, by a v o l u m e on the Literature and Morals of the German socialists (1898) and their author became a regular contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes and to the Journal des De'bats to w h i c h he remains f a i t h f u l . His contributions to the analysis of romanticism are constant, and little by little he has arrived at a more concise rendering of his doctrine of imperialism which received its first extensive treatment in four large volumes with

FORMATION OF DOCTRINE

the general title of (1903-1908) ; here a demonstration slightly modified, trine.

9

The Philosophy of Imperialism he formulated and furnished of the propositions which, remain the basis of his doc-

T h e propositions and doctrine as first outlined by Ernest Seilliere in his Philosophy of Imperialism may be summarized. At the source of human action lies man's desire for aggrandizement. That is, man is essentially imperialistic. Most of us are at the same time mystics in this sense, that we readily call upon a god to aid us attain our imperialistic ends. When our mystic enthusiasm is unchecked by reason defined as the laws deduced from accumulated human experience, our imperialism becomes irrational and a source of danger to the individual as well as to the group practising it. As long as it is rational, observes the laws of experience, it is useful. T h e description of the different forms of mysticism and their relation to rational and irrational imperialism furnishes us fairly precise ideas of those terms the author has chosen as the bones and muscles for the body of his doctrine.

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Thus moral romanticism is that contemporary mysticism freed from Christian conceptions and ecclesiastical discipline which is based upon the optimistic idea of natural human perfection and goodness. Among its components are four forms of mysticism, that of race, artist, sex, and social group. Race mysticism is that doctrine which is expressed about as follows : "The man of my blood, or of my national group, is God's ally ; as a result, he is naturally good, and rightfully demands to rule less divinely favored groups." Esthetic mysticism is the religion of beauty ; it affirms in about the same terms that the artist is God's prophet. Passional mysticism deifies the sexual impulse. Social mysticism says : "The uncultured, uncivilized man is God's privileged ally, hence, naturally good. He is infallible in matters concerning his interests." "It will be noticed," writes Ernest Seilliere, "that the four forms of romantic mysticism, race, esthetic, passional, social, responding to the pride of the group ; to individual pride of physical or intellectual perfection ; to sexual appetite, finally to the appetite for expansion or conquest, make an appeal to a divine alliance in all the principal domains of human activity. The second and third forms, more individual, the first and fourth basing themselves upon

FORMATION OF DOCTRINE

II

social collaboration, are more easily associated." (*) T h e elaboration of these propositions was not interrupted after the publication of his Philosophy of Imperialism, nor by his election to the Institut in 1914. Time has brought the author to insist upon the idea that whereas he is pessimistic in regard to man's original nature, he is optimistic in regard to his moral possibilities. Another point which has taken a large place in his later work is this, that although imperialism and mysticism have often caused much evil, controlled by reason, defined as man's accumulated experience, may be, and often has been, a source of good. In the following chapters we shall examine his voluminous contributions to the study of romanticism and its sources, sometimes using his method by commenting as we go along, in an effort to simplify and to arrive at a clear expression of the essentials.

Í1)

Les Mystiques

du Néoromanlisme,

Avant-propos.

CHAPTER II THE

TRIANGLE.

IMPERIALISM—MYSTICISM—REASON.

Henri Bergson has pointed out that it is often impossible for the philosopher to begin by defining the new meaning he would give to old terms ; this being the object of his whole demonstration, the definition is but the synthesis. It is asking a good deal of any reader to go through some fifty substantial volumes to arrive at a definition. We would prefer that the author, especially if he is a philosopher, if he must write several thousand pages before knowing what he wants to say, begin publishing afterwards. Fortunately for us Ernest Seillière has from almost the first defined his terms, so we can summarize without too much damage. However, his method of monographs has not rendered the task any easier. Thus his biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his Madame Guyon and Fe'nelon are as important as some of the more theoretical works. We cannot presume, and it is not our object, to analyze all his biographies ; with their aid and such volumes as Le péril mystique dans les démocraties contemporaines ; Vers le socialisme

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rationnel ; Romantisme, (*) we shall arrive at a description, perhaps a concise definition of those terms he constantly employs. As the principal words used by Ernest Seillière throughout his work are Imperialism, Mysticism and Reason, let us first see how he would have us understand them.

IMPERIALISM.

T h e individual, as well as the group, seems principally motivated by the passion which Christian theology called the libido dominandi ; the Jansenist Saint Cyran called it the esprit de principauté ; Thomas Hobbes speaks of love of power, and Nietzsche calls it der Wille zur Macht. Imperialism is the word chosen by Ernest Seillière ; it has the advantage and disadvantage of having characterized for more than fifty years the most ample manifestations of this passion among our most highly civilized societies. "Thus have I spoken of imperialism essential in a living organism. And it is in this sense, and in this sense only that I built up a 'Philosophy of Imperialism'." T o demonstrate this psychological viewpoint Ernest Seillière has scattered commentaries C1) English translation by Cargill S p r i e t s m a , 1929. Press.

Columbia

University

WE IMPERIALISTS

H

throughout most of his studies. Sometimes it is an illustration as when he points to the avidious imperialism of Balzac's personality and work. (») Sometimes he cites as an example a passage in which we discover an expression of the imperialistic attitude, as when Zola wrote, in his early work, "Misfortune to the weak. T h o s e who fall are wrong to do so, and so much the worse for them if they are crushed. Victory belongs to solid kidneys, and that is just, for talent should be strong above all", which, as we shall see, Ernest Seilliere would call excessive, as forgetting the less harsh conditions of the struggle for life resulting from eighteen centuries of rational Christianity. But Zola probably did not think so, for later, in 1866, he writes "I don't care about beauty or perfection ; the great centuries leave me indifferent. I care only about life, battle and fever. ( a ) " A young Burgundy law student, later to become famous as a Dominican preacher, Lacordaire, was of the same temperament, expressing himself to a friend, Foisset, "Battle, that's what I like". But he did care about beauty, which was what he wanted to fight for. Hobbes has said we cannot very well assure the power of living as we do without acquiring more than we now possess, and Ernest Seilliere has

(')

Zo/u, p. 39.

(»)

Zola, p. 43.

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5

called man an affame de pouvoir. (') This vital imperialism is then a corollary of the instinct of self-preservation, and we soon become aware that every acquisition of power over others or over nature, augments our own chances of survival. ( a ) It is then the tendency of each and every being to grow and dominate not only, but also, to simply preserve itself in its being. T o be, is to fight, and to continue to live, or simply to live, is to conquer. Man and society have not always been so blunt about it. Sometimes as an encouragement, sometimes as an excuse, they have spoken as Helvetius' savage. "Force is a divine gift," he pointed out to his adversary. "By arming me with these brawny arms the heavens have declared their will. Quit this spot, give in, or fight." Here is force proclaiming God its ally. ( 3 ) Which leads to the second part of the problem, which is that of Mysticism.

MYSTICISM.

Marco Polo tells us that when the Pope sent several friars to Jenghiz Khan to persuade them to become Christians, a grandson of Jenghiz t1) (a) (8)

Guyon el Fénelon, p. 181. H. S. Chamberlain, Intro. Philosophie de l'Impérialisme, Vol. II, p. 126.

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replied : " T h e series of your letters contained advice that we ought to be baptized and to become Christians ; we briefly reply that we do not understand why we ought to do so. You inhabitants of the West believe that you only are Christians, and despise others ; but how do you know on whom God may choose to bestow his favors. We adore God, and, in his strength, will overwhelm the whole earth from the East to the West. But if we were not men strengthened by God, what could we do ? i 1 ) " Similar situations and speeches could be multiplied almost at will and more than one heathen has had himself baptized because he thought Christ stronger than he looked. We see here the close alliance supposed between a conquerer and a divine being. This is, in general, what Ernest Seilliere means by mysticism. He contends that our will to power was at first almost exclusively mystic, that is, sought its support in a divine ally. Man soon distinguished between such good forces as the sun, and such evil forces as periodically devastated his crops ; he tried to keep on good terms with both, and to utilize them against his mortal enemies. This habit of treating with the gods has become so instinctive that, after centuries of contracts made and broken, we still go on, and it seems any (')

Marco Polo, p. XIV, Boni and Liveright, 1926.

THE TRIANGLE

sudden break in the practise would risk weakening our health. It must be used temperately, but is indispensable as a bracer to our imperialistic activity. "That is why mysticism," writes Ernest Seilliére, "conceived as a tendency to seek an ally in the struggle for life in a suprasensible world, in the metaphysical sphere, is the second support of my theoretical structure, in my effort to better understand the present aspect of human will to power. ( 1 )" Races, nations, classes, individuals, all have their idols, all are mystico-imperialistic, I suppose we should say, for in this matter the two words meet and leave us slightly confused as to where the gods begin. Thus the Twelve Tribes called upon and believed in Jehovah ; the Twelve Apostles believed in Christ and, at the hands of St. Peter, the Church has become His Bride ; England relies upon God and her right, whilst God alone is good enough for America ; Russia was Holy under the Czar and no doubt still is ; God was with Germany, but was obliged to divide his attention; Italy, as ancient Rome, has again become Eternal, and as for the French, they were God's right arm until the late Eighteenth Century made them the protectors of the Rights of Man. Backed by these gods, men have sought their aggrandizement ; when the gods have failed them, Í1)

Vers le Socialiimc, p. 7. 2

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they have as readily scrapped them as any other useless ally. Burn what you have adored, adore what you have burned said Clotilda's husband long ago, and he seems to have had the proper spirit, for we are often advised to adapt our opinions to our interests. It is not strange that where so many gods have had their day, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity ; the Fourteen Points, and the Proletariat should have theirs, but we cannot deny those who might adore them an examination of their parchments before laying out too much on new temples. Thus to make synonyms of imperialism and mysticism, making them at least inseparable, does not go without objections. If they are synonymous, why not abandon mysticism ? But they are not that. T o say that mysticism is that force which makes men seek an advantageous alliance in the Beyond, and only that, is too exclusive : after all there have been men who have sought holy alliances for no worldly conquest, and even the Jansenist who abandoned the world to better master it is hardly imperialist in a way that need give empire builders any cause for worry. René Gillouin, a critic approved by Ernest Seillière himself, says frankly Ernest Seillière has nowhere defined mysticism, but simply considered it as a sort of corollary of imperialism. Such a conception, he insists, leaves out that important group of mystic phe-

THE TRIANGLE

nomena which have their principle and source in the message of Jesus Christ. And yet most Christians would possess, if they could, the Kingdom of Heaven.(') Having sinned by leaving out one element,7 we then see that he sins bv •/ including such diverse phenomena as Stendhalian impulsivism and those of illusionism, whose classification as mystic, insists M. Gillouin, is arbitrary, as is that, perhaps, of an alliance, be it with the devil, if it is in view of conquest. Imperfect as the definition is as it stands, it expresses the truth for a vast number of observations the analyses of which may lead to a more honest discussion of human relations. Let us now see what Ernest Seilliere means by reason. REASON.

Among the definitions Webster gives is this : To exercise the faculty of reason ; to deduce inferences justly from premises. Brutes do not reason ; children reason perfectly. This is one explanation Ernest Seilliere would reject, the one about children. In certain histories of philosophy we find the following statement : "Youth is rationalistic in its views ; it believes in thoughts and their J1) Cf. La Patsce d'Ernest Scilliirc, p. 97.

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power of transfiguring reality : all revolutions have been inaugurated by young men. ( 1 )" This kind of appeal to something entirely abstract, ideological, Ernest Seillière would call the very opposite of reason, as mystic, and, uncontrolled by experience, as irrationally mystic. Those accustomed to the former use of the word will probably recognize Ernest Seillière 's "rationalism" in what they think of as "historical." There would be nothing better than Eighteenth Century rationalism, says Ernest Seillière, if this doctrine had been completed, and if reason, guided by history, had become critical, capable of understanding her rival, that is, the tradition she was replacing, for then, instead of seeing in tradition a usurper to be expelled, she would have recognized in her an elder sister to whom a share should be reserved. (*)" ( l ) Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 206. S e c o n d American edition. W e also find these statements where reason a p p e a r s as mystic, as defined by E. Seillière : Rationalism asserts that ell real or scientific knowledge is derived f r o m reason ; it is the result of the i m m a n e n t evolution of consequences f r o m a priori certain principles which d o not arise f r o m experience. (Id., p. 341). Realistic Rationalism asserts that we know things as they are, not by t h e senses, b u t by reason. T h i s view is c o m m o n to the great metaphysical systems. Plato, S p i n o z a , and Hegel all claim that an adequate knowledge of reality is reached by reason. Idealistic Rationalism asserts t h a t we can k n o w reality a priori by p u r e reason ; however, not as it is in itself, b u t only as it a p p e a r s t o us, a n d only as to its forms. T h i s is Kant's view. (Id., p. 342). E . Seillière's "certain principles" would be d e d u c e d f r o m experience ; they would not be a priori. A n d yet they d e p e n d u p o n a n a priori conception. H i s criticism results f r o m a comparison of things as he finds them, with things as he believes they should be. In the final analysis, he is a rationalist in t h e traditional sense ; his system h o l d s for those who accept the axioms at its basis. (*) Philosophic dt [Impérialisme, Vol. IV, p. LXi.

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Reason, then, is a logical system based upon human experience ; it is a set of conclusions for which history furnishes the material, more Pascalian than Cartesian, exceedingly utilitarian. Is it scientific ; can the experiences be repeated ? Ernest Seilliere believes so, and demonstrates in what way by conducting them for us throughout his vast investigation, on Rousseau, on Fenelon, on Hugo, on the pan-Germanists, on Fourier, Zola, Balzac and their contemporaries. The result has been a pessimistic view of human nature, and this is the basis of his reasoning. He is thus at once opposed to Rousseau and in harmony with traditional Christianity, of whose rationalism he is a firm admirer, because "the rational aspect of Christian ecclesiastical discipline has maintained so many mystics within the limits of a useful social activity. ( J )" An example of what is irrational : the Musselmans were fighting the French ; one of the leaders, convinced Allah was on their side, persuaded his troops French bullets were harmless ; they believed him and advanced in the face of fire only to be mowed down. Their mysticism was valuable while it encouraged them to resist with enthusiasm as long as there was a chance of success ; but when the odds were against them, it was irrational to play the ostrich. (l)

Cuyon et Fénelon, p. 85.

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Pre-war pan-Germanism is an example of irrational imperialism. Other examples of irrational mysticism and imperialism are the excesses of the French and Russian revolutions in principles and in methods ; the errors of Mme Guyon and Fenelon, of Rousseau, as having overstepped reason defined by Ernest Seilliere as the synthesized social experience of humanity. There are certainly those who believe the ground debatable. And here we are back again to what Ernest Seilliere condemned, a personal interpretation of events, and the tendency of erecting human reason into a faith, that is, becoming mystics in our turn. This Ernest Seilliere admits, moreover, when he writes : "After all, what are we, we partisans of logical methods and of motivated previsions, if not mystics of Reason, who place in brief and narrow human experience our confidence in the present and our hope for the future. Yes, we too are mystics, but our mysticism seems the least dangerous of all for us and our kind ; that is why we are firmly attached to it. ( ' ) " With these preliminary notions of his doctrine of imperialism, with its corollaries, mysticism and reason, we can follow him in his exposition of its origins, growth and present aspect.

(*)

Cf. Lichtenberger, Pcnsec, p. 46.

CHAPTER THE I.

ORIGINS

OF

III

CONTEMPORARY

MYSTICISM.

FROM PLATO TO JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.

Plato is the source of contemporary European mysticism ; the substance of his doctrine is the theory that love is a moralizing agent. (*) But original Platonic love bore an aspect of friendship, a martial character, where the elder instructed the younger in the service of the social group. For the courtly lovers of the Middle Ages, Plato's Venus will become a more popular Venus, whom he disdained. The doctrine, become effeminate with Alexandrian neo-Platonism, loses its almost ascetic character. The Greek romance, born in this atmosphere and which will combine with the roman de chevalerie during the Renaissance to give birth to the modern novel, would have greatly shocked the characters of the Dialogues, for the neo-Platonic conception of love which is at the foundation of these works is specifically erotic ; ( l ) Cf. Origines, p. 44, and passim. It is recalled that these are résumés of Baron Seilliire's theories ; they do not imply agreement or disagreement on the part of the present author whose views will be found in the preface and in occasional commentaries of these theories.

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for example, the meeting of the lovers in the Ethiopica. Christianity, religion of a God who died for love of sinful humanity, inherited this already effeminate Platonism, along with Roman Stoicism. T h e Church Fathers borrowed from Plotinus, Jamblicus and Proclus. During the Renaissance, Christianity again received a Platonic influence, preparing the modern mystic heresies of which Rousseauism is still alive. As to Renan's thesis that romantic love was introduced into medieval literature by the Celts, Ernest Seilliere calls the article which proposed it fallacious and the thesis purely arbitrary ; to refute Renan, and Gaston Paris, he cites Arbois de Jubainville, and Cledat who holds that the courtly epic, first form of the romances of chivalry, properly speaking, was not an importation for France, and that the romances called Breton or Arthurian, are no more Breton than Hernani is Spanish. Even in Tristan, the most Breton of these romances, the love of Tristan and Iseult is not Celtic, but represents the first flowering of that "courtly" love which grew up in France. Explanation ? French poets adapted to the taste of the nobles the songs they had got from the popular traveling Celtic bards. This is moreover the explanation generally accepted today. In another manner he refutes the thesis which traces these origins to the Moors.

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Ernest Seilliere attributes this love to Christian and mystic origins. "To us it is an echo of an attenuated and effeminate Platonism, professed by the neo-Platonicians, then the Church Fathers, the Pseudo-Areopagite, and finally by the Meridional clerks who were the first to make original use of the classic and Christian suggestions of this nature furnished them by their studies or professional readings."

Courtly love was thus created by clerks and knights ; the Church having favored chivalry, the nobility kept some respect for Christian moral discipline, but added a profane element of their own, which soon became preponderant. The protection of the weak replaced the defense of the faith, and the protection of the lady superseded all others. This courtly conception of love was born towards the end of the Xlth century in Limousin and Poitou. It developed on the border of the two upper classes of society—the poor nobles and the rich bourgeois, both of whom courted women above their ranks. "They looked upon the great ladies with a kind of respectful adoration which was to arouse in them remembrances of Christian piety. Then they cultivated that adoration, and showed it following the norms of

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religious mysticism considered as the legitimate expression of the love a creature offers in homage and to implore his C r e a t o r . " In this code of chivalry, love, as in Plato's Dialogues, is proclaimed the principle of all bravery and virtue, and is soon declared incompatible with marriage, for, whereas in love all must be freely given by the lady, in marriage she has nothing to refuse. T h u s , should two lovers marry, they would cease to be lovers. If a married lady was supposed to give "favors" to her lover, such as a ring, or a jewel, she might give something more ; but this was pure merci. W e may believe that there were not many belles dames sans merci. T h u s Platonic love takes on a more "human," a more earthly aspect, and it was convenient to practise adultery under the cover of moralizing love. So established did the practises become among the members of the upper classes, that the judgments of the love courts worked their principles into a love code which, after remaining the possession of a small circle, was vulgarized by such writers as Chrestien de Troyes, and in such romances as those of the Round T a b l e . In the Chevalier a la Charette we have an excellent example of the code, and when Queen Guinevere finally accords the last favor to Lancelot, "we are informed as to the manner in which

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the Knights of the Round Table conceived of loyalty to their incomparable king. ( ' ) " This knight, loyal above all others, will never think of reproaching himself for his treason. Love rules his heart despotically, it is the mainspring of his most valorous and purest acts, as it is of his lowest. Guinevere readily consents to adultery ; when she thinks her lover dead, she resolves to die of love ; on the other hand, she shows herself severe when she learns her lover hesitated a moment before risking shame for her. These apparent caprices, these passing severities have as an object, to render the lover better, stronger : tests to confirm his love, to render him more intrepid. In other words, Lancelot and Guinevere are the prototypes of passionate romantics, who, from the time of Chrestien de Troyes, have never ceased to incarnate the European erotic ideal. Lancelot is moreover, the type of the amoureux transí, ahuri, the swooning, transported, "gone" lover ; every time he hears the Queen's voice, he lowers his head and forgets himself to the point of weeping ; he stutters ; to her welcome, he answers in melancholic monosyllables. And when he is in an embarrassing situation, he almost faints ! Dante shows himself as a veritable inheritor (») Id.,

p. 74.

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of the courtly conception of life ; the Divine Comedy is the epic expression of the same state of mind as that of which the Vita is the lyric expression; it is inspired by that romance passion, a conviction that love, the source of all poetic inspiration, can also be the principle of all virtue, that we become better by means of the lady we elect to serve. T h e Imitation of Christ is often an admirable moral utilization of courtly ideas, restrained by the most solid experience of the direction of souls. As to the Petit Jehan de Saintre, it is a monument of the persistant influence of the chivalrous, courtly conception of life ; it has been called the Télémaque of the XVth century... although it ends in a much less edifying manner. Francis First and his sister Marguerite d'AngouIéme were brought up on these romances. Marguerite herself in such a nouvelle as Les Amants en religion, little modifies the Platonic idea that a man will never perfectly love his creator who has not loved someone here below. But it is in Amadour et Floride that we find the most perfect expression of the courtly conception of love : marriage is one thing, love is another. T h u s the hero, Amadour, marries Floride's friend in order to facilitate his becoming Floride's lover. For Amadour replies to Floride's hesitations insidiously, "Does my long service warrant such a cruelty ; now that you are married, your honour is safe...

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He who now possesses your body is unworthy of your heart. You must know that your heart belongs to me alone. And if you hesitate because of your conscience, remember that when love forces the body and the heart, sin is never implied." Here is a rapid deviation from that Platonic love which seeks to attain the Absolute through service to Virtue and Beauty, towards an insidious passional mysticism. Poor Amadour dies without his lady's favors, which most of Marguerite's court thinks a pity. Now the relations between the methods and principles of profane love and theoretical mysticism being intimate, courtly love or romantic Platonism soon influenced Christian mysticism. Like the monk in Dagoucin's tale ( Nouvelle XXIV) the profane principles of courtly love have led the queen to a more religious mysticism ; we may say the process is reversed, as is shown by A. Lefranc in les Idées religieuses de la Reine de Navarre. Another writer who readily placed this Platonism in the service of seduction is François de Belleforest, author of Histoires d'amour tragiques, much read during the second half of the XVIth century. His XXXIXth Histoire contains the plan used by Saint Preux in his first love campaign. There are four or five steps : 1 ) Lover : "I burn

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for you, and will be consumed." 2) Reply : "You are very bold ; men's faith is little sure ; I beg you will not speak to me of this again." 3) Lover, who is not so stupid as to take the conventional rebuff seriously : "Could you be without compassion, in spite of your great goodness, for your loyal servant ?" 4) Reply : "Well then, let us be lovers, but within bounds, and with a love generator of precious virtues. You are surely too loyal to overstep these bounds." 5) The end, ....which is not always tragic. The erotic morality of these tales can be retraced in Christian mysticism which frequently borrowed from the romances of the time not only the form but the context, that is, their speculation in regard to the divine alliance made and kept by those in love. Thus Italian romance leads to Campanella and Molinos, as well as to Catherine Fieschi ; the Spanish, to Theresa of Avila and to Jean de la Croix, as well as to the Alumbrados and Maria d'Agreda ; the French, to Saint François de Sales and to Olier, as well as to Saint Sorlin, Mme Guyon and de Seurre, some of whom Ernest Seillière has treated elsewhere, as in Madame Guyon and Fénelon. Romance was vulgarized first by such pastorals as the Arcadia of Sannazaro (1502), translated into French by Jean Martin in 1544 ; the Diana of George de Montemayor (1542) soon translated

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into all languages ; Tasso's Aminta (1573), and Sydney's Arcadia. But of them all, the tale which was to exercise the greatest influence was d'Urfe's Astre'e, a kind of romance encyclopedia, summing up the entire history of chivalry, courtly love, Platonism, and European eroticism, whilst announcing for the future the new steps through which the theories of love were going to pass during the XVIIth century to complete woman's deification. It was, also, the precursor of the XVIIIth century by the large diffusion it gave to the Utopian pastoral of romance character and by the sympathetic echo it was to awaken in the founder of contemporary religion, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Then, after a period of sixty years, during which the novel becomes more Stoic than Platonic, as in La Calprenede's Cassandre, which is not, however, without erotic pages, the romance tradition reappears and is transmitted in Gomberville's Polexandre, in Scudery's Artamene, until in Mme de La Fayette's Princesse de Cleves, and in Mademoiselle de Montpensier, adultery reappears as the theme of the new fiction. Finally, with d'Aulnoy, Murat, La Force, there is a return to the liberties taken by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To this must be added the eighteenth century naturists, immediate fore-runners of Jean Jacques, who portrayed the savage as good and religious. The

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precise influences of these different elements on Rousseau we shall presently see.

2.

A SEVENTEENTH OF

IRRATIONAL

CENTURY

EXAMPLE

MYSTICISM.

Madame Guy on and Fene Ion. Ernest Seilliere's principal object in Madame Guyon and Fénelon is to establish the filiation between those heretical feminine mysticisms which charmed the Eighteenth Century and those later "laicised" mysticisms whose triumph the Eighteenth Century prepared, that is, to trace the Christian origins of the doctrines popularized by Rousseau. (') He does so by commenting whilst reviewing the quarrel between Bossuet and Fénelon over Mme Guyon's heresies. Madame Guyon and Pére Lacombe. The relations between Mme Guyon and Lacombe serve to explain the cause of the differences between the Archbishop of Cambrai and the Bishop of Meaux ; the latter knew Mme Guyon only through her early writings, the former knew her principally from conversations which Í1)

Guyon ct Fénelon, p. 275, 367, and passim.

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served to clarify her correspondence. But these relations serve also to illustrate the use of mysticism to dominate an individual ; it is the weapon by which Mme Guyon's "imperialism" tries to overcome that of Lacombe, for Mme Guyon appears to Baron Seillière as a clever, intelligent woman seeking power. Lacombe becomes for Mme Guyon a means to this end. Père Lacombe was born in Savoy ; he belonged to the diocese of Annecy. He was a pious and learned priest who had taught theology at Rome where he is supposed by some to have met Molinos. After his return from Rome he one day carried a letter from a brother Barnabite to Mme Guyon. She has told how she spoke to him on that occasion, opening to him the voie de l'intérieur, which made another man of him. (') From this time on Mme Guyon seeks to direct Lacombe's thought and action. From the day she met Lacombe, Mme Guyon feels God has chosen her to direct the Barnabite's steps from the illumined path to that of "naked faith." But Lacombe resists. Thereupon Mme Guyon exclaims : "Our Lord tried me to the death and gave me no peace until I had declared to him my pain and my thought, so that I suffered a martyrdom in this matter which surpasses (*)

Guyon el Fénelon, p. 14. 3

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everything that can be said, and which was very l o n g . " She usually suffered when others refused to submit. In less mystic terms, M m e G u y o n suffered subconscious uneasiness in her desire for power when the man whose submission she passionately desired seemed to slip from her influence. M m e G u y o n ' s correspondence with Lacombe thus makes a valuable document for the study of the secret springs of human activity and historical events, for it permits us to measure the refinements which the experience of social life has slowly introduced into the acts of an original "imperialism" at the disposition of a creature capable of reason. M m e G u y o n appears as an example of fine penetration when domination is in question ; of subtle intellectual jealousy and of exasperated will to power ; she simply puts into terms of mystic favors, of a constant and imperturbable alliance with G o d , the smallest incidents which seem to her to menace her spiritual authority over the simple, naive man she has succeeded in enchaining. T h i s same period gives an example of her inverse moral progress by the invasion of mystic pride. She arrives at no longer being able to believe in the possibility of her errors, until, by a feint, she completely subdues L a c o m b e , and she cries out, "Don't talk any more of humility to me. T h e ordinary ideas of virtue no longer apply to m e ! "

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This is the supreme expression of that mystic pride which was the source of her difficulties with Lacombe. Certain early impressions of moral solitude already lend themselves to a comparison with the author of the Dialogues. And as to this Guyonism, it resembles Rousseauism in that it unchains human affectivity without having first sufficiently disciplined it. (') The director directed. When Mme Guyon lost Lacombe, Our Lord "gave" her Fénelon as the fruit of her work and imprisonment. Fénelon is "seduced" when the devotee vaguely predicts his preceptorate. But Fénelon, âme secrètement et presque inconsciemment avide de pouvoir, although ordained at twenty-four, retains enough of the training he received at Saint Sulpice not to accept Mme Guyon without reservations. And yet he is sufficiently mystic to defend the devotee to the end. In his analysis of Fénelon, Baron Seillière explains him as an affiné de la culture and un affaibli du système nerveux, who nevertheless had an ample will to power, that is to say, he was a choice client for feminine Christian mysticism. (!)

Id.. page. 27-38.

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T h i s mysticism is for him a tonic, it strengthens him in his "imperialistic" designs ; in his case, in his hope of attaining political power. But he constantly submits the mysticism which united him and M m e Guyon to reason. This is a trait which characterizes Fenelonism as a Guyonism wisely, largely rationalized. T h e Archbishop of Cambrai is often called "the director directed", but he is more M m e Guyon's director than might be supposed. He gradually rationalizes his penitent's thought, or at least her language, bringing her slowly back to a saner attitude. M m e Guyon's conquest of Fenelon often seems a thing accomplished, writes Baron Seilliere, but Fenelon, whilst often repeating the devotee's lessons, reacts. T h i s way of looking at the Guyon-Fenelon alliance leads to an explanation of the controversy between the Archbishop of Cambrai and the Bishop of Meaux as due to a misunderstanding : Fenelon was talking about the only M m e Guyon he knew, of the post-1688 period when she was readier to submit her language to discipline ; Bossuet judged her from theories previous to this date. ( ' ) The

quarrel.

Had Baron Seilliere been a contemporary of i 1 ) Id., pages 67-95.

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Louis X I V , it is rather certain his sympathies would have been unequally divided between M . de Cambrai and M . de Meaux. In the Quarrel, Bossuet seems to him on the side of reason, although he does not excuse him for having used against Mme Guyon the documents she had confided him under the seal of confession. (*) T o what extent would he have condemned Fenelon, the charm of whose talent we feel wins the Baron through the very condemnation he often gives him ? T o explain his liking for Fenelon he feels obliged to assure us he was a mystic very sufficiently rational in matters which concerned himself. Fenelon's attitude after his condemnation by Rome seems to Ernest Seilliere little diplomatic, and his refusal to write anything which would justify his adversaries or belittle himself, or render it impossible for him to raise himself up again, is a "singularly imperialistic formula" for a man who has made the destruction of self the very center of his metaphysics. It was only gradually, when he saw the Duke of Burgundy become Dauphin and his chances for power increased, that he could look coolly upon the Querelle of 1695-1699, and thereafter his declining health kept him in this Christian disposition of submission to Rome. ( J ) (») Id., pages 189-192. (») I J., page« 157-266.

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It is in his judgment of Mme Guyon that we see most clearly the Baron's rationalism. It is a painful situation to be in, he agrees, that of having one's pretended alliance with God submitted to public suspicion and examination, but we may suggest, if this be matter for condemnation, it must be the very death of Christianity itself, for what fervent Christian does not pretend being allied to God ? Mme Guyon, "cette précieuse de province, qui porterait si volontiers dans l'au-delà la carte du pays de Tendre" (*) shows how little she worried about truth when she writes that she never pretended faith removes reason. She did so a hundred times, remarks Baron Seillière. Elsewhere he accuses her of bavardages de commères et ragots de sacristie, and says she dogmatized without vocation, science or laws, as Noailles, Bishop of Châlons, wrote. When she refuses to yield to Bossuet he calls her an âme obstinée. This obstinate soul's letter to Bossuet, Noailles and Tronson is "the most impertinent and the most out-of-place letter one could read." Why ? Because "in it she denounces three ecclesiastics whom she pretends bent upon her destruction" ; ecclesiastics highly placed, we may remark, have been known to be jealous. What Baron Seillière really thinks of Mme ( l ) Id., p. 83.

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Guyon may be seen from his comparison of her with George Sand. During her trial Mme Guyon lodged for a time at Meaux ; she showed herself a ready repentent for any wrong she might have done. "So much suppleness and docility," writes E. Seillière, "soon made her looked upon by her judges with a certain kindness ; she had, moreover, won the affection of the nuns at Meaux, who lodged her during the trying winter of 1694-1695, for the superior of the convent, Mother L e Picart, and the other nuns, afterwards gave her a certificate, signed collectively, which does her honor. Bossuet, after all, signed an attestation, to her benefit, of obedience and good will, of which she afterwards tried to abuse. "When George Sand also had to contend with the judgment of public opinion for having too much practised passional mysticism, issued from Quietism and Rousseau, she retired to La Châtre, under the roof of an esteemed family and set herself to the task of making people forget the legend of her independence and singularness which, in her province of Berry, her youthful excentricities had gained her. She succeeded and soon after won her case against her husband ; but meanwhile she wrote Mme d'Agoult, heroine of a similar scandal, 'Four thousand animals (the inhabitants of the small town) believe me on my knees in hair-cloth and ashes, weeping

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over my sins like a Mary Magdalene. The awakening will be terrible. T h e day after my victory (the court's decision) off go the crutches ; fast as my horse can carry me I shall make for town. If you hear it said that I am converted to reason, to public morality, don't be surprised at anything !' And to Mme de Saint-Aignan, 'You would laugh if you could see with what an air patelin I cross the squares full of idle... I am obliged to lead a very regular life in the eyes of the imbeciles in whose midst I am living !' Well, with less désinvolture in her hypocrisy, Mme Guy on must have thought about the same thing during her stay at Meaux. (»)" As regards Fénelon's position in the Quarrel, E. Seillière believes, as did a certain Cardinal, that Fénelon esteemed Mme Guyon, whom he believed pious and really spiritual ; that Fénelon saw she had badly explained herself in several passages in her books and that, for this, they might be censured ; but, nevertheless, believing her maxims good in themselves as explained to him in conversation, he wished to expose this same doctrine and these same maxims in more correct, that is to say, more rational terms. These rationalizations of her former doctrine were themselves due to Fénelon's influence. (') (>) Id., p. 185. (•) Id., p. 256.

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Commentary of Mme Guyon's doctrines. Mme Guyon's doctrines varied. There was the pre-Lacombian period. Of this Baron Seillière finds Fénelon's ironic summary a perfect statement of the truth : "Mme Guyon wrote but to destroy, as an imperfection, the explicit faith of divine persons, the mysteries of Jesus Christ and of His humanity, (')" Later came Lacombe and Fénelon. For Mme Guyon, the essence of religion is prayer and the essence of prayer is silence, "that state of the heart in which it is united to God in faith and love... a silence of the soul (*)." The devotee's attitude towards God dictates her "marriage-contract" ; pledged as she is to be His, she accepts as her marriage portion "the temptations and sorrows, the crosses and the contempt which fell to Him." Hence the principle of abandonment "by which we resign, abandon, as consecrated, ourselves entirely to God Such a soul is resigned in all things, whether for time or eternity." When we have abandoned ourselves to God and have had faith that God does now and that He ever will receive us and make us one with Himself, then God becomes one with the soul and all which is not He gradually disolves and passes away... When (») Id.. (')

p. 193. Mme Guyon, Moyen Court.

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the soul has reached this degree of experience it is disposed to practise the Prayer of Silence, so called not merely because it excludes the voice, but because it has so simplified its petitions that it has hardly anything to say, except to break forth in unspoken desire : Thy will be done ! "This tendency,"writes E.Seilliere,"to substitute the notion of a Heavenly trial for a Satanic temptation simply permitted or tolerated by God to confound human pride, leads to the elimination of the Tempter, to the negation of concupiscence, inherited from Adam's sin, to the rehabilitation of instinct in all its affective forms, finally, to the proclamation of natural goodness which would have been preserved by man after as before the original fall. (•)" This leads to the danger for social institutions which proceeds from an indifference to salvation (which Mme Guyon indicated as the highest proof of pure love) from the self-confidence which relies upon direct inspiration of God, and disdains the experience of the ages and the laws of tradition whereby the lives of others are controlled. Baron Seilliere calls it the "democratization of the highest degrees of Christian perfection, for Mme Guyon pretends her 'interior' devotion capable of restoring, at small cost, and in a facile i1) Id. (*) Guyon el Finelon, p. 244.

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manner, in all Adam's children, their natural goodness lost through their first father's fault." This is the mystic principle, E. Seilliere points out, that will furnish the basis of the laicized mysticisms of the eighteenth century. (') But the results, as Fenelon recognized might be the case, were not what the devotee desired. The effort to destroy the "I" failed when Fenelon was faced with loss of power. "The subconscious 'I' to which both he and Mme Guyon, in good faith, wished to give first place in their vital activity is more proud, less rationally imperialistic than the conscious 'I', moulded by the most recent experiences of the human race." He concludes again then, that religion, when it becomes wholly mystic, is a social evil; society needs a religion rationalized by a conscious moral code. (®) Fenelonism. Fenelonism, says Ernest Seilliere, is a stage of advanced rationalization of a system which was too purely affective, a rationalization which brought it slowly back towards traditional Christianity. "But it is true", he concludes, "that this rationalization, still unachieved under Fenelon's pen, was able to furnish its point de depart (l) Id., p. 204. (*) id., p. 200.

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to a new mystic heresy." This is what happened during the following century, in his opinion, with Rousseau. ( l ) T h u s Fenelon is a source of the religious and political romanticism of our age. From Mme Guyon to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Fenelon had a rationalizing influence upon M m c G u y o n , yet "there is nothing more anti-Socratic, more anti-Stoic than the moral hygiene of Fenelonism," writes E . Seilliere. "In its tonic and consoling effort, it addresses itself to affectivity, not to human reason. ( 2 ) " It is a small step from Mme Guyon's system of purification by humiliation to the perfect quietist purification without humiliation, and this, laicized, is one aspect of Rousseauism : a perfect indulgence of one's passions without humiliation. This restoration of natural goodness by means of interior devotion leads to three results : a Rousseauist philosophy of history ; a mystic political doctrine, and a naive millenarianism, according as it is viewed from the past, the present or the future. Before Adam, man lived in direct communion with God ; Adam's sin did not efface this relation between God and those of his choice. Other (») Id.. pago 250-251. (') Id., p. 322.

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ways of approaching God are human inventions and obstacles, that is, the Church is a human invention and a hindrance. "Here then," writes E. Seillière, "is a philosophy of history at the eve of the Fall, at the origin of the centuries, and presents that intermediary mission between God and man, claimed by the Church, as a decadent institution. ( ' ) " Mme Guyon, "cette caudataire inavouée de la réforme luthérienne," claims this is one of her fundamental theses, that is, the priority, in time, of "interior" metaphysics. Certain passages of her Bible contain the doctrine of the good savage, of natural religion, of natural goodness. Thus "if a pagan who has never known Jesus Christ, nor the means of grace given men by Christ, would simply abandon himself to that instinct given man to return to his origin and be joined to his source, he would henceforth secretly participate in the grace of redemption which the Saviour won for all men and he would be God's through Jesus Christ." Here is that natural religion which will hold such a place in the theology of the XVIIIth century, and we find it already placed exactly on the same level as revealed religion. Once the new mysticism will have spread over the earth, there will be a reign of a thousand years of interior devotion. i 1 ) Id., pages 360-361.

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Here then are the real Christian sources for the more laicized mysticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (') The consequences of Fénelonism. W e know that Rousseau read Fénelon. "L'étude des bons livres auxquels je me livrai tout entier renforça, auprès de Mme de War ens, mes dispositions naturelles aux sentiments affectueux, et me rendit dévot presque à la manière de Fénelon," writes the author of the third Rêverie. This leads E. Seillière to conclude that he probably read the Fénelon-Guyon correspondence or one of the Manuels de piété. N o w "become devout as Fénelon" means "in the manner of M m e G u y o n , " for we know that Fénelon's convictions became quite G u y o n niennes after 1688. Fénelonism acted as the preserver of a heresy which triumphed when, Rousseau's ideas become popular, men turned toward Fénelon in confidence and even the Church looked upon him with indulgence. (') When Baron Seillière finally writes "Chateaubriand will have turned the greater part of the Roman Catholics of his time in a pretty clearly Rousseauist and consequently Fénelonian direction" t1) Id.. pases 363-367. (») Id., p. 272-280.

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he no longer makes any distinction between the friend of Mme Guyon and the friend of Mme de Warens. (') This identity established, the consequences of Fénelonism upon our generation must be those of Rousseauism. For example, the second Rousseauist generation in Maine de Biran and Ballanche were to find in Fénelon's writings their favorite nourishment. Again, there is a curious analogy between Guyonism and Saint Simonism. Mme Guyon and Fénelon became the cher père and the chère mère of the petite église "intérieure" And George Sand was the "petite fille spirituelle (de Fénelon) par /'intermédiaire de Jean-Jacques." Here we are in high Nineteenth Century romanticism. For further commentaries on this influence we shall open those volumes which Baron Seillière has particularly consecrated to George Sand and to Rousseau. 3.

ROUSSEAU THE M Y S T I C .

Among the important early influences at work upon Jean-Jacques were such novels as Cassandre and Cyrus, and no doubt Gomberville's Polexandre with its descriptions of the good savage. These good savages have their temples to a living god ; there justice and innocence are natural, but God, (>) Id., p. 279.

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in his goodness, has refused them sailing vessels in order to keep them from the corruption of European civilization. These romantic and mystic doctrines will later appear in Rousseau^ 1 ) At a very early age, Rousseau shows tendencies to Masochism. While apprenticed as a watch engraver, a series of misbehaviors indicate his revolt against the drudgery of his existence, and his readings encourage this attitude. Hardly sixteen, he leaves Geneva and "sells" his religion and civic rights to Roman Catholicism. Three years of wandering about, Annecy, Turin, at the Countess of Vercellis', at the Solar's, back to Annecy, Lyons, and back to Mme de Warens, furnishes several opportunities for commentaries on Jean-Jacques' romance youth and education. For instance, the author of the Confessions places his Platonic affair with Mme Basile in Turin. In his account of it he says, "Nothing is worth the two minutes I passed at the feet of Mme Basile without even touching the hem of her dress." The whole passage contains the pure courtly love theory, the casuistry of permitted favors, passion as it was sung by the least cynic of the troubadours. (1)

Rousseau,

passim.

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There is certainly humility in Jean-Jacques' confession of his stealing a small piece of ribbon from Mme de Vercellis, but, comments Ernest Seilliere, rational Christians don't prepare this kind of confession before the tribunal of penitence by asserting that there never was a better man in the world than they. "They would greatly surprise the delegate of celestial justice at the examination of their hidden transgressions. If they publicly accused themselves as Jean-Jacques did, it would but furnish those who listened to them the most specious of excuses for acting likewise, circumstances arising, without great scrupules ; it would weaken the moral sense in others as much as possible and falsify the weak voice of conscience, that directing organ slowly acquired under the long influence of social discipline." Another incident which shows us clearly the tenor of his criticism of Rousseau is the passage relating to the picnic at Thones. Rousseau writes of himself that he had a particular weakness for princesses ; dressmakers, servants, small shop keepers are not to his taste. Such "democrats" as Rousseau, adds Ernest Seilliere, like all gifted beings, will never demand equality except by looking above themselves.

Rousseau, after his early romance experience, 4

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passes to a mystic abandon which, influenced by M m e de Warens and Father Hemet, made him, subconsciously, a Quietist. With the sentimental, spiritual and intellectual preparation secured at L e s Charmettes, he arrives in Paris in 1742, after the short and unfortunate preceptorate in L y o n s , which he has recorded in the Confessions, only to leave soon after for Venice, as private secretary to the French ambassador. Ambiguity in his situation brings out in him the revolutionary theorist, "the unmeasured social critic and imprudent reformer." A f t e r Rousseau's third important work, La Lettre a d'Alembert, he becomes an avowed mystic, borrowing from the lessons of Quietism his teachings as well as his personal comforts. #

#

#

T h e first Discours, says Ernest Seilliere, is no more than a high school declamation ; it is essentially an anathema against the immorality of the most corrupt society of the day. Instead of explaining how men pass from their naturally barbarous and ferocious condition to organized groups governed by a certain amount of slowly acquired wisdom, which assures each individual a maximum of security and liberty, and how the arts and refinement make these people the prey of their less cultivated neighbors, he

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fell into the prejudices of his times, and tried to demonstrate that savages (at least some of them) are good. Perhaps some of them are. "Having eluded the subject proposed by the Académie de Dijon, but disturbed, nevertheless, by the terms of the question asked, he unhesitatingly undertook to charge the arts and even the sciences with the corrupting of society which in reality is the result of their own corruption. The martial poetry of conquering peoples, and for example, the Iliad, which long precedes the Battle of Salamis, are works of art, and the tactics of the Macedonians or of the Romans, is the fruit of science. Knowledge is always a force," concludes Baron Seillière, "and alone has given man empire over the globe." But who will say that it has made him more neighborly, less "barbarous" ? We may hope for "rational" imperialism in individuals and groups, but both individuals and societies readily throw their rationalism to the winds when their existence demands it, that is, rational often simply means expedience, do what you can do ; for that we need knowledge it is true, but not virtue. T o Rousseau's statement that men are naturally good, and to those who say the contrary, Ernest Seillière replies that men are naturally "imperialistic," and irrationally so as long as they have not been gradually enlightened by experience,

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and this irrational imperialism often takes the form of what we call "bad", that is, of doing harm to oneself or to one's neighbor. By "natural" Rousseau usually means original or primitive and not that which develops gradually as a fruit. T h u s Rousseau means man was originally good. The Contrai

Social.

A Utopia which supposes the citizen's reason fully developed ; it is an apology of the general will which, under the circumstances, would be an almost constant source of good for society. T h e Contrai Social gave Europe equal suffrage before she was ready for it, for she has achieved neither moral nor intellectual equality. Although, as is usually the case in Rousseau, the Contrat contains much truth in such passages as his Considerations sur le gouvernement de la Pologne, his passion speaks first and so loud that it alone has been heard. Having attacked the bad effects of culture in the first Discours, and contemporary institutions in general in the second, he outwardly attacked the romance conception of life in the Lettre. But outwardly only, for after writing, "Racine enchants me, I have never voluntarily missed a play by Molière", what authority had he left, asks E. Seillière, for warning the citizens of Geneva

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that the introduction of plays into this city would be their destruction. He'loise. T h e He'loise contains a rational element which Ernest Seilliere readily signals and comments : first, by definition, "a lecture on rational and Christian morality, enclosed between two episodes attached to the most suspect romance tradition, that of the galant sixteenth century." This rational passage is of course that part where Julie speaks of her marriage ; the god of passional mysticism cedes to the "God of rational Christianity, He Who founds and supports the family." We shall come back to Ernest Seilliere's definition of "passional mysticism" and to his attitude towards "rational Christianity" and what he means by it. When Julie writes she has been shown the light of truth, Ernest Seilliere comments, the veil of Platonic error has been rent, that is, she no longer believes unrestrained love the source of all goodness. In the books which follow, Julie often takes the defense of rational Christianity ; in the sixth part, finally, Rousseau permits her to contradict the theory of natural goodness, and she writes, "By feeling and light I hoped to govern myself and I acted badly... I believe myself worth as much as another and a thousand others have lived

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more wisely than I... How do they who resist ? They have a better support." This summarizes the rational aspect of the Nouvelle Héloise, almost entirely centered in Julie, between her foolish youth and her questionable death. "It has contributed to reassure many a reader as to the romance inspiration and romantic morality which is present throughout the rest of the book. It was the echo of the author's Christian education, M . Lambercier's lessons, and of his Fénelonian meditations while at Les Charmettes ; for if Fénelon's morality has a few suspect sides which his disciple Jean Jacques has too largely developed elsewhere, it retains traits of that high rational teaching of which the prelate was the depositary, as a director of souls. (•)" Education. If in the Projet pour l'éducation de M. de Sainte Marie Rousseau's views on education are still sufficiently rational, Emile may be considered as an extension, applied to the individual, of his ideas as expressed in the Discours sur l'inégalité. Keep the child in ignorance and let it grow up in natural goodness, says Rousseau. Unfortunately, replies Ernest Seillière, at every (*)

Jean-Jacques, p. 112.

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stage of the development of an individual, there is an expression of the will to power more or less guided by personal or transmitted experience. T h e struggle is more or less regulated by the lessons of tradition. For this reason, education as well as politics, must often be turned against nature, which is irrationally imperialistic in its essence, in order to adapt it to society. Insistance on the principle of natural goodness, is made in the Lettre a M. de Beaumont, and this time it is clear that he means men were originally good, and not that they naturally tend to achieve goodness ; they were primitively good ; they do not seek as a natural end to realize it. T h i s "natural goodness" is analogous to those "natural qualities" which certain neuropaths believed themselves possessed of. Those who seek to be loved "for themselves," fearing that should they be loved for money, charm, youth, or some other perishable quality, they will also lose the love which sustains their vitality or flatters their imperialism. Here the "naturally g o o d " man becomes the exception, and JeanJacques believed himself an exception, in this sense ; especially in the Dialogues, he is the Messiah of the modern covenant. Ernest Seilliere calls it Jean-Jacques' immaculate conception. A n idea born, really, of an inferiority complex.

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There are many people who absolutely need the flatteries and devotion of so-called real friends to invigorate them. Faith afterwards permits these neuropaths to seek these incomparable friendships in the Beyond, and here we have the mystic solution of the problem of psychical tonification for morbid depressions. To a certain extent, Rousseau is among them. Now Rousseau taught that whoever lets himself be led by his feelings cannot go astray ; at least, his errors will be "honest." This, replies Ernest Seilliere, is a very dangerous mistake, for the feelings depend very much upon the senses, and often deceive men in regard to themselves. Rousseau's pride was that of one who believes himself chosen by God to incarnate goodness ; not that he lacked the pride of his genius, but it was secondary. He wished, therefore, to be loved as much as honored, for honor is for the writer only. But he left this love, or friendship he so much desired, and which he exploited so effectively, unrepaid, and to justify his ungratefulness, built up a whole theory of legitimate ingratitude. # # *

At the age of forty-five Jean-Jacques passes

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from the condition of a "grave citizen of Geneva" to that of an erotic dreamer, of a "berger extravagant." Then it is, in 1757, that he falls in love with his charming neighbor, Mme d'Houdetot, "a love half satisfied by her love for another." This "extravagance" makes him suspect Mme d'Houdetot's and Saint-Lambert's friendship, for the impulse of passion, impeded, was most apt to lead to morbid suspicion : pricks of conscience, Baron Seilliere calls them, for Rousseau was but too willing to seduce Mme d'Houdetot, on the one hand, whereas, on the other, what St. Lambert feared was not that the good citizen Rousseau was trying to seduce Sophie, but was trying to separate her from him by moralizing her as to her conjugal duties. "I will not violate you," was the substance of his letters, "but the slightest encouragement, a look, and I will save you the rest of the trouble, and you will have rendered me happy." This, comments Ernest Seilliere, is the attitude of the so-called Platonic seductors of the sixteenth century. And this is what remained at this date of the citizen's "virtue" and of the friend's "sensibility." T o sum up, the situation is that of Tartuffe : Saint Lambert menaced by him whom he believes a model of virtue and whose friendship he esteems.

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When Rousseau finds that his Julie has more success in Paris than in Geneva, he cries, "Do friendship, love and virtue reign more in Paris than elsewhere ?" "No," replies Ernest Seillière, "but they only reign in the novel as a cover to other sentiments, then more general in Paris than in Geneva, those of romance Platonism." The condemnation of Emile and the resultant peregrinations boost Rousseau's fame to its climax and once installed at Motiers he becomes the director of numerous neuropaths who seek consolation from him as the high priest of that laicized quietism to which he has just given the first definitions. In reading the letters or souvenirs of some of these followers of Jean-Jacques, one would think one was reading Saul's visions on the road to Damascus. During his period of spiritual direction, he returned many to the path of religion, but too often their devotion remained confined to their immediate apostle, Jean-Jacques. More wanderings, and Rousseau finally decides to risk a return to France. He is received undisturbed in Strasbourg, "for the brief years which have passed between the publication of Héloise and Emile have singularly advanced the moral revolution of France. Voltaire and the Encyclopédie have done their share, surely, but it is Rousseau who is become the standard-bearer of that great movement which, in spite of its rational

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exterior elements, is at bottom mystic, and which will lead to revolutionary upheavels.'X 1 ) His stay in France is not long ; he is requested to leave Paris and crosses to London with H u m e in January 1766. * * #

Rousseau's quarrel with H u m e is lamentable ; one more crisis of his malady of persecution, of pathological ingratitude. In addition to the friends he had already lost, he added H u m e , Keith and Davenport. He who returned to France in the spring of 1767, comments Ernest Seilliere, was a veritable incurable maniac. His obsession of persecution however, left his genius of expression and evocation intact and his best pages will be written during the last years of his life. *

#

#

T h e change in France had been accomplished ; the upper classes are converted to Rousseauism and Jean-Jacques is received and lodged by the Prince de Conti. But he remains the persecuted maniac he has become, and he suspects all those who surP)

Id.

p. 274.

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round him. He even breaks with du Peyrou. Hardly a year as the Prince's guest before he leaves his chateau blaming all the domestics without exception. M o r e peregrinations : Lyons, Grenoble, Bourgoin, where he "marries" T h é rèse ; Monguin, returning to Paris in M a y , 1770, where he spends the last years of his life. T h e bourgeoisie has been added to his host of admirers, but he suspects them one and all of plotting against him ; thus he goes about, like Diogenes. In the spring of 1778 the need to change lodgings again seized him, and a few weeks before his death he suddenly moved to Ermenonville, guest of the Marquis de Girardin. #

#

*

In conclusion, Ernest Seillière repeats his admiration for Rousseau's genius, his compassion for his sufferings, but insists upon the necessity of rationalizing the too mystic elements of his morality, for they, as Mirabeau pointed out, inevitably lead to crime when applied to practical affairs. W e may now examine more closely the elements and origins of this morality, which Ernest Seillière calls the religion of today.

CHAPTER IV M Y S T I C SOURCES OF C O N T E M P O R A R Y I M P E R I A L I S M .

The mystic deification of Nature, the idea of a Nature-God of which Rousseau's genius made a religion for the majority of his and our contemporaries, took on different aspects according to the need of those who made it theirs. These aspects have already been mentioned as mysticisms of class, nation and race ; passional and esthetic. PASSIONAL

MYSTICISM.

Faguet, we are told, was naively surprised when he noticed the constancy with which the romantics connected God with their adulteries and fornications. It is only natural they should do so, and is the very essence of romantic morality, the result of Rousseauism. By proclaiming everything "natural," unpremeditated, as heaven-inspired, the instincts, subconscious impulses and purely affective acts became sacred. This morality, insinuated into society by JeanJacques, whose Saint Preux found many willing imitators, was illustrated by René, Delphine, Manfred, and their successors,—George Sand's and Dumas fils's heroes and heroines, for example,

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whom we shall consider at some length as Ernest Seillière has presented them, after a briefer survey of Saint Preux, René and Delphine. Saint

Preux.

Ernest Seillière maliciously calls attention to the name : the two words which Christian mysticism on the one hand and traditional romance on the other can furnish to most flatteringly describe a man : Holy knight. We know the character, and the story : seduction with invocation of heaven, destiny, fate ; a classical example dating from the XVIth century Platonic erotics, Marguerite of Angoulème's and de Belleforest's nouvelles. When Julie finally avows her love, she confides in Saint Preux, and trusts his honor will protect her against her weakness, as was the duty of any serious chevalier sans reproche, in the theory, who lived up to the courtly Platonic code ; but few knights were honest in this respect, "and Saint Preux much less than any other." So Julie is seduced, in the name of virtue, fate and heaven. A few aspects and principles of Saint Preux's passion code : An eternal judgement of heaven destined us for each other. This is the first law to be obeyed. Come into mine arms and join the two halves of our being.

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T h e sexual act is identified with marriage, the consent of both parties being essential. Once accomplished, Saint Preux says, "Didn't you follow the pure law of Nature ? Didn't you freely contract the most holy of engagements ? What is lacking except a public declaration ? Be mine, and you will no longer be guilty." One day, having placed her lover on his knees before her, his hands in hers, in remembrance of the old feudal and courtly rite, Julie makes him swear, not faithfulness (as the ancient knights did to their suzerain or lady, remarks Ernest Seillière) because, as she says, no one in love can be sure of himself, but only to tell the truth and to be sincere as to his feelings. A trait, continues E. Seillière, which announces George Sand in Jacques, and clearly marks the difference between romance chivalry, retaining a certain amount of virility, and romantic mentality, henceforth completely effeminate : the one promising, in words, at least, personal effort, mastery of one's acts, the other decided beforehand to submit without reaction to the first call of instinct. (') René. Atala and René, Ernest Seillière tells us, were written by a Rousseauist become indifferent, (J)

Rousseau, pages 334-344.

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not to say hostile, to the religion of his fathers, the result being, that this religion played an almost odious part in Atala (fundamentally Voltarian) and a little-worthy róle in René, "Even after the rectification suggested by the author's new intellectual attitude," says the author of Les Etapes, "Christianity was only to serve as a mystic ragout, to arouse, to spice with the attraction of forbidden fruit the impetuous flight of the passions proscribed. ( 1 )" Remember Atala's first appcarancc. Tears rolled from under her eyelids ; in the firelight, a small golden crucifix shone on her breast. She was regularly beautiful ; there was something virtuous and passionate about her face that made her irresistibly attractive : to this she joined the most tender graces. In her look were joined an extreme sensibility and a profound melancholy. Her smile was heavenly... "I thought she was the Virgin of last loves. (*)" Remember her final confession, at the feet of Chactas and Father Aubry. Conceived in misfortune, and born in pain, Atala was destined to a nunnery. "To save my life, my mother made a vow," she confesses. "She promised the Queen of angels that I would consecrate her my virginity if I escaped death... Fatal vow which speeds me to the grave. ( 8 )" (') Les Etapes, pages 72-73. ( J ) Les Chasseurs, éd. F l a m m a r i o n , p. 52. (») Id., p. 118, Le Drome.

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Which, in spite of Father Aubry's rationalizing, is a sermon against Church vows, proving in romance fashion that Christianity in such cases is directly opposed to most legitimate love. As to René's own story, he must keep it forever to himself, he tells us. However, one fine day Chactas and Father Souel become his confidents. And his first words are of his shame, for he loves his sister Amélie. "At night, when the Aquilon shook my cabin, when the rain fell in torrents on the roof, when through the window I saw the moon plow the clouds as a pale ship laboring the waves, it seemed to me life redoubled in my heart, and that I would have had the power of creating new worlds. Ah ! if I could have shared my enthusiasms with another ! O God ! if Thou hadst given me a woman according to my desires, if, as to Adam, Thou hadst given me Eve... Heavenly Beauty, I would have prostrated myself before Thee, and taking thee in mine arms, I would have prayed God to give thee the rest of my life." When Amélie takes the veil, René remains alone but does not cease to caress his memories and desires for his sister. Of which E. Seillière says, "As to René, we are clearly shown Christianity remains powerless to silence the most guilty of all passions according to European morality—which does not convey a very high 5

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idea of the social "utility" of this religion (') which, however, the author of René pretended to serve. For Amélie shares René's passion. When he decides to commit suicide, she throws herself into his arms. "You would die your sister living ! Do not explain, do not excuse yourself, I know all ; I understand everything, as though I had been with you." And when, after several months of mutual torture, Amélie feels she can no longer resist, she flees, calling Heaven her witness that she would give her life a thousand times to save her brother a moment of pain. "I could no longer have resisted your prayers, and yet,I had to leave," she cries. "O my brother !" she continues, "if I tear myself from you now,it is to join you in eternity.(')" As to René, he feels he has been condemned by some occult power to live with his misery, out of which, however, he does not cease to get some delight. God or the Devil is a partner, but which, E. Seillière is unable to decide. "It is thou, O supreme being, who created me as I am, and thou alone canst understand me," explains René. Delphine. Delphine's guiding principle is that of Spentaci

La Etapes, p. 73.

(')

Raté, p. 200, éd. Flammarion.

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neousness, which Mme de Stael explains as les mouvements simples et irrésistibles d'une bonne nature, and M. de Lebensei tells us that our involuntary movements are naturally virtuous. (*) Our desires were given us as a guide, and man's laws only obstruct the designs of Providence. These arguments will later have their effect upon Delphine, to whom they are addressed, and she will follow her impulses—since the voice of nature and the voice of Providence are one, and both are the voice of God. After Lebensei, Léonce de Mondoville becomes the voice of passional mysticism, and appeals to Delphine's heart : "Question your heart," he cries. "It impels you towards me. It is Nature and your lover speaking. Listen to these protecting Powers of your destiny The Tempter is here presented as a tutelary power, remarks E. Seillière, and no longer hostile or perfidious as the evil spirit of Christianity. Two later striking examples are those of George Sand and Dumas fils. (») George

Sand.

If her earliest work, Rose et Blanche, written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, contains a passing denial of passional mysticism, it voices (*) (*)

Vers le Socialisme, p. 48. Cf. La morale de Dumas Fils and George Sand.

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nevertheless, a revolt against social institutions, and is full of misanthropy resulting from Sand's early deceptions. In Indiana and in Valentine, however, the passions found their tutelary god ; in Indiana, for instance, Mme Delmare replies to Ramiere, when he advises her to return to religion for consolation ; "Don't ask me to think anymore of God, leave that to the priests, whose business it is to touch hardened hearts. As for me, I have more faith than you. I do not serve the same God, but I serve him better and more surely. I believe in him, but I reject the religion you have invented (rational Christianity). All your morality, all your principles, are but the interests ofyour society enacted into laws, and you pretend them God-given. All that is impiety and lies. I who invoke Him, I who understand Him, I know there is nothing in common between Him and you, and it is by attaching myself with all my force to Him that I separate myself from you. In submitting (to the laws of marriage) I cede to human power. If I listened to the voice which God has put way down in my heart and that noble instinct of strong and bold nature which is perhaps the real conscience (another typical definition of the Rousseauist conscience) I would flee to the desert, and I would know how to get along without aid, protection and love ! ( 1 )" (l)

George Sarid, pages 42-43 and passim.

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In Valentine marriage is more bitterly treated than in Indiana. Benedict is a typical Rousseauist lover, a plebeian friend of Saint-Preux, Werther and René. "But," says E. Seillière, "Sand does not yet take fully upon herself the rebellions of her characters. The full ripening of her mystic social convictions joined to the assurance born of the persistant success of her works, will be necessary before she becomes bold enough to marry carpenters and marquises, millers and countesses. In 1832 she still lectures her lovers of unequal birth upon the romantic turn of their thought ; she talks to them of 'dreaming wide awake,' of their 'deceiving sea of wishes and dreams' into which they are falling, of their folly even, and of the cold shower which would calm the agitation of their nervous systems. All this makes us recall that the author, whose works editors are beginning to fight over, still is, six months out of twelve, the bourgeoise companion of M . Dudevant in the castel de Nohant." As to Lelia, it is a momentary denial of passional mysticism, but a denial, which in its too emphatic reproaches of the divine ally, is a more ardent affirmation than ever. * # *

George Sand's adventure with Alfred de Musset was a decisive step in the evolution of her theories

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and fundamental mystic convictions. It was no longer a question of rectifying a loveless marriage by a single unique love as had been the case when she met Sandeau. She will no longer proclaim the right to correct a marriage de convenance by real love declared of divine inspiration, but the right to successive love affairs decreed by Heaven, as steps towards celestial love, or rather towards the love of humanity identified with its divine prototype. And when she finally decides she is in love with Musset, she writes Sainte Beuve, "Thank God for me." When the break with Musset comes, Lelia will try the supreme erotic adventure with Pagello. "Henceforth, to make it a success, she counts upon Pagello's ignorance of the metaphysical nature of the adventure. She alone will this time penetrate into the mysterious sphere of the mystic eroticism where none has yet been able to accompany her with a firm step." "Yes, I can still love," she cries. "Those who say the contrary, lie. There is none but God to say : Thou shalt love no more ! And I feel very strongly that He has not taken the heavenly fire from me, and that the more I have become ambitious in love, the more I have become capable of loving him who will satisfy my ambition... It is you ! yes you !... I didn't want to. You forced me. God also willed it. May my destiny be accomplished."

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But Musset also enlists the gods. "O my child," he writes Sand, "remember that sad night at Venice when you told me you had a secret, you thought you were talking to one stupidly jealous. No, no, George, it was to a friend ! It was Providence that suddenly changed the man to whom you were talking." Shortly after Alfred de Musset's return, he continued in the same tone to invoke God as a witness of the love and friendship which unites him, George Sand and Pagello. Sand is the "thread which attaches me to God," he writes. George Sand in her attitude towards Musset resembles Mme Guyon in her domineering manner. "Could the woman of imperious passions," asks E. Seilliere, "who received this letter ('you are the thread') consider it other than as a trophy of victory ? Here was a recognition of her messianic mission, suddenly accepted by the man who had formerly treated her in such a haughty fashion." Leone Leoni resembles Musset debased in Venice more than Manon become man, as the author pretends she designed, and Juliette recalls Mme Dudevant returned to passional mysticism to dissimulate as best she could, by giving her recent profound deception a halo of Rousseauistic sanctity, rather than a des Grieux turned woman.

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T h e r e are several instances in this book w h e r e passional m y s t i c i s m reaches its highest expression. F o r instance, w h e n F a t e , or the G o d of passional m y s t i c i s m , intervenes to poison the obtrusive princess w h o stood b e t w e e n L e o n e ' s and Juliette's happiness; again, w h e n Juliette, at the end of her story, repays her patient Spaniard fiancé b y deserting h i m at the sight of L e o n e , explaining her act b y letter. "I cannot know he e x i s t s , " she writes, " w i t h o u t desiring him ; I cannot see h i m pass w i t h o u t f o l l o w i n g h i m . I am his femme, he is m y master... A magnetic force stirs me at his approach... I am unable to break the chain w h i c h binds us. It is the ball attached to prisoners. But the hand of God has riveted the ball !" S u p r e m e affirmation of that passional mysticism at the close of a work w h i c h is completely inspired by it, c o m m e n t s Ernest Seillière, and whose object it is to make the most w o r d l y lessons of libertinage acceptable. In Jacques w e h a v e the thesis of w o m a n ' s right to multiple love affairs. #

*

#

A f t e r Pagello's resignation and return to Italy (1834) M u s s e t leaves his solitude to indulge in a little more passional m y s t i c i s m . H e has b e c o m e complete master in the cult. "I swear by m y

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youth and my genius," he writes, "posterity will repeat our names... This will be a more sacred marriage than that consecrated by priests... Future generations will recognize in it the symbol of the only God they will adore... T o the ears of this blasé and corrupt, atheist and crapulous century, I shall sound the trumpet of human resurrections which Christ left at the foot of his cross ! Jesus, Jesus, I too am Thy Father's son. I will render Thee the kisses of my fiancée. It is T h o u Who sent her across so many dangers, so many far voyages, etc." After quoting which, E. Seillière comments : "Here are those pages à la façon de Rousseau with which he will reproach himself later ; they greatly surpass the Genevan's audaciousness in passional mysticism ; their echo, in the pages of the Enfant du siècle and Lettres d'un voyageur, greatly enriched the vocabulary of modern love passion. But with Musset it was the supreme élan of that mysticism which his companion of Venice formerly taught h i m . " George Sand's greatest error as high priest of passional mysticism, says E. Seillière, was to return to Musset, for in so doing she effaced the little mystic prestige which had dazzled him, and subjugated him for six months. "At this moment the Heaven-sent George deprives herself of her halo. How should Alfred, having felt his virile power restored by a second

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victory, still retain the conviction that he had been unpardonable in his Venetian lightness, or believe himself to have been unworthy of his celestial mission to Lelia whom he was charged to reconcile with her Divine Ally, and to have equitably resigned this role of messenger from On High to Pietro Pagello who had been unable to fulfill it ? Under the impetuous breath of sensual appetite, all this extatic phantasmagory is effaced, swept away by a gust of imperious reality !( 1 )" In Musset then, mysticism gives way to XVIIIth century cynicism. As to George Sand's celebrated "goodness," E. Seilliere disagrees with those who hold that she was ready to pardon Musset's very injuries, at least up to Elle et Liti. Just before meeting Michel de Bourges, with whom she will travel the road of social mysticism, she has a furtive return to rational morality and even accuses herself of vice in the past. Dumas

fits.

Sand and Dumas were both children of free love, from which both suffered, if in different ways. Dumas fils was Sand's successor, continuing on the stage her effort against conventional monogamy. He, like her, tended to rehabilitate free love, although sometimes appearing to reprove it. (2) (l) id. P . (*)

Dumas,

120. avant-propos

and

passim.

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Dumas' birth, education and early social position made him susceptible to the ideas of romanticism which left an indelible influence upon him. At twenty, he emulates the Chevalier des Grieux, and under the fascination of Manon carries away the public with La Dame aux Camélias, which was the most striking and lasting of his successes. The censors, says Ernest Seillière, did well in holding up the play and demanding a number of cuts. Its best public was, at first, those women it idealized. Dumas says they make the best shock troops. E. Seillière replies victories so bought are Pyrrhic for the social body within which they are won. As to Dumas' influence, a single incident in the history of acting La Dame aux Camélias suffices. M. Duval, pèrey in the third act, used to keep his hat on as he entered Mile Gautier's ; some thirty years later, when Sarah Bernhardt renewed the play, Duval père had more respect for the heroine. The death scene is an apotheosis of passional mysticism. But, reflects E. Seillière, it is necessary to make such heroines die young in order to elude the social consequences almost sure to follow a des Grieux's or a Duval's passions. Duval is a less refined des Grieux, more overbearing and brutal in his instinctive reactions : Saint Preux, Werther, René, Léonce de Mondo-

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ville, Constant's Adolphe, have not given their lessons in masculine egoism in vain. T h i s idealization of the harlot evoked a commentary from Lebrun in 1858, to the effect that passion which used to be repentant and humiliated, is now glorified. Become insolent, it is honesty which must lower its eyes. T h e s e women are placed on a pedestal, and we say to wives and daughters,—look, they are better than you are. A s they were Dumas' best public, he owed his reputation to his portrayal of their particular shade of passional mysticism.

A s D u m a s approaches thirty he becomes l'ami des femmes ; his principal occupation, at least judging from the principal occupation of an ideal ami des femmes, is to change misunderstood wives into model mistresses, for the benefit of energetic lovers. T h e play, L'Ami des femmes, was a failure. It did not yet permit the married woman more than one lover ( G . Sand after Sandeau, but before Musset and Pagello); it permitted but one rectification to marriage, supposed entered into hastily. T h a t is, one could love but once. In other plays of this period, La Dame aux perles, for instance, the heroine is analyzed as

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similar to George Sand's Valentine. A noble lady, indifferent to her husband, falls in love with a highly gifted plebeian, who by adultery, sees herself converted to Jean-Jacques' suspect affective morality. The censors who held up the play eight months objected that it "was a long justification of an adultery legitimized by a badly assorted marriage." And this adultery is attributed to Heaven, for the countess declares that "It is God Who has sent the man she loves," but although this was cut by the censors, the public's sympathy is directed towards the adulterous countess. Dumas fils announces himself as the successor of the author of Antony, of Marion Delorme, of Le'oni and Jacques, that is, he will place passional mysticism on a sure footing on the stage. His "œuvre de prédilection," le Fils naturel, contains a special pleading in favor of bastards, placing them above legitimate children, the author defending his interests. With few exceptions, as for instance the Père prodigue, up to the age of forty, Dumas appears as the protagonist of extra-conjugal love, of leniency towards natural born children, consequently, concludes E. Seillière, as a danger to monogamy, to the family as defined by law. #

*

#

Les Idées de Madame Aubray

(read "George

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S a n d " ) is the first essay to put his talent into the service of the new social ideas and make his plays morally and socially useful. D u m a s ' ideas, his psychology after 1867 are, usually, those expressed by George Sand in Horace. In a series of prefaces he then exposes women's rights to free love, pleading whilst pretending to criticise. A f t e r prefaces to re-editions of several plays, comes one to Monsieur Alphonse (1873), a persuasive Rousseauist plea for woman's rights to love, pleasure, passional liberty, and birth-control ; although the author appears terrified at the thought of the consequences, he nevertheless remains more persuasive than ironic. T h e general trend of his theatre is not the energetic, though brutal solution shown in La Femme de Claude (she is killed by her husband as spy and traitor to her country, not for her adultery), but one of reciprocal tolerance. In his preface to La Femme de Claude as well as in his Academic dissertation (1875) Dumas makes a curious generalization about the theatre, which has become true were it not yet so then : people come together at the theatre to talk of love ; all other subjects are checked at the cloakroom upon entering. L o v e , he proclaims, is the G o d of the temple, and woman is the High Priest; a man must not be shown superior to woman, at w h o m , generally, she laughs, taking vengeance on the stronger sex for the injustices shown her in real life.

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In his Discours Dumas said : To be frank to the end, we are revolutionaries. Ernest Seillière corrects : moral revolutionaries, which, he concludes, is the best word to apply to this close mixture of passional Rousseauism and esthetic mysticism characteristic of Dumas' thought. CONCLUSION.

Beginning with Saint Preux, and even before, passing by way of René, Léonce de Mondoville, and a host of others, we arrive at des GrieuxDuval and the perfection of the deification of the love passion in whatever form it choose to take, legitimate or illegitimate. Passional mysticism exalts an indulgence of egoistic and anti-social love which destroys the family for its own pleasure, that is, it destroys the best protector of children society has been able to invent ; it destroys the society of tomorrow by destroying marriage, institution consecrated by rationally inspired religions and protected by the legal codes of reflective peoples and which assumes the moral progress of the human species in its superior races. (*) Love, we may remark, probably existed before society and will always be able to get along without it, although the two may sometimes be compatible. (*) George Sand, p. 145.

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D u m a s , w h o venerated his mother's m e m o r y , w a s always interested in adultery and seduction. S a n d , less faithful to her mother's m e m o r y , was less so. In spite of these social differences, both portrayed f o u r consequences of passional mysticism, essential influences on modern w o m a n : 1. H e r right to efface a y o u t h f u l mistake (marriage) by real love. (Sand : Horace, Claudie. D u m a s : Madame Aubray, Monsieur Alphonse, Detiise). 2. H e r right to free herself f r o m a manage de convenance under the spell of passion. (Sand : Valentine ; D u m a s : Comtesse de Lys, Duchesse de Septmonts.) 3. H e r right to go beyond even the single adultery. (Sand : Jacques and Cosima\ D u m a s , something similar in UAmi des Femmes.) 4. H e r right to love a man morally u n w o r t h y , but physically irresistible. (Sand : Leoni ; D u m a s : La Princesse Georges, Monsieur Alphonse.) O n c e only did D u m a s define love within the b o u n d s of rational ideas given it by moralists w o r t h y of the name, continues E. Seilliere, that is, in keeping with the necessities of social discipline : this was at the time of the Affaire Marambat, just after 1870. (') (')

Dumas,

p.

74.

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Certainly, admits E. Seilliere apropos of D u mas' criticism of Scribe, the bourgeois social conception has its narrowness and ridiculousness, but it is nevertheless more salutary for the social body on the whole than the bohemian which is almost wholly erotic and which remains that of Dumas and of his successors, even though painted with feeling, with rhetoric and with the humanitarian and demagogic sophistry according to Rousseau's procedure. (') Of divorce, Ernest Seilliere believes it defendable in principle, but nefarious to the country as it is now practised because it is not guided by sufficiently pessimistic psychology. T h e Roman Church, he pretends, which always practised divorce under other names, generally maintained about it the rational and exceptional character which romanticism abandoned. (') T h e basis of the attack on Dumas and Sand is a fight for the respect of the family as the unit of national strength. It seems, however, that one so well advised, would agree that it is better for the state to protect an intelligent bastard than to favor a stupid family product. There will always be bastards and they will often be intelligent. There is no reason why laws which would favor utilizing this intelligence need interfere with the rights (') (»)

Id., pages 145-148. Id.. p. 78.

e

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of those w h o prefer legitimacy. W e cannot all pretend to an immaculate c o n c e p t i o n , w h i c h is only a step removed f r o m legitimacy. Moreover, the fact is, that it is even preferable to have bastards, than to have no children at all, w h i c h is perhaps beside the question f o r m a n y countries, and quite beside the theoretical point of v i e w , but is not entirely irrelevant, considering the actual state of affairs in many civilized countries. T h e situation may be partly d u e to romanticism; the principles may be attacked, but the fact remains, and is not entirely explained away by pointing at Jean-Jacques. H e r e , as elsewhere, the industrial revolution has had its effects, and it is rather social distinctions and the difficulty of the struggle for life w h i c h lead to small families. M o r e o v e r , under-population is less a cause for war than over-population ; if peace be the object of our civilization, this is a source of some comfort. O n l y w h a t nation w o u l d willingly risk peace at this price.

CHAPTER

V

M Y S T I C SOURCES OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM. (

Continued.)

ESTHETIC

MYSTICISM. Pourquoi donc faites-vous des prêtres Quand vous en avez parmi vous? Ces hommes, ce sont les poètes... Vicïor H u c o . It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute irresponsibility of artistic temperament has engendered the modern ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency of conceit or of theory ? Paul Elmer More. (The Humility of Common Seme.)

Alongside of, and often mixed with the idea that God is the special protector of passion in all its forms, is this other that God is the artist's and poet's particular friend. Esthetic mysticism is then "the conviction that the artist in general, the poet in particular, and if need be, the simple writer, are God's privileged allies, his delegates here below with a mission to preach a morality or even a political doctrine of enthusiasm and inspiration which would lead to social happiness through the cult of beauty. (*)" (')

Vers le Socialisme,

p. 60 and

passim.

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Ernest Seilliere, after pointing out the origins of this conception in the primitive identification of the lyric and the prophet, its variations during the several stages of literary history, treats the question at some length for Rousseau, who believed himself a veritable Messiah of the God Nature, and for those German mystics Klopstock, Hamann, the Sturm und Drang group, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. Schopenhauer inspires Wagner, and together they prepare the way for Nietzsche. E. Seilliere's studies of Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert,the Goncourts, and Zola trace the influence of this theory in France. For Beyle, one of the distinguishing marks of genius, poet or artist, is the voice of God, a divine grace without which he is insensible to a picture, poem or symphony. He most often calls it the "musical instinct" (') and in our day we speak of rhythms... we vibrate or we don't to the poem's or to the picture's rhythm. Victor Hugo called the poet a priest, a prophet, and his whole work, as his life, manifests this conviction. ( l ) T h a t Balzac was a votary of esthetic mysticism and believed the artist God's privileged missionary is certain. ( 3 ) A single passage suffices. " T o day," he wrote a friend, "the writer has replaced C1) Philosophic tie ['Impcnalisme, Vol. IV, p. 262. (®) Du Quietisme, p. 84 and passim. (»} Balzac, p. 45.

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the priest ; he wears the martyr's chlamys ; he seizes the light from the altar and enlightens mankind. H e consoles, damns, prays. He prophesies ; his voice is not imprisoned within the cathedral nave, it resounds throughout the world. Humanity becomes his flock, listens to him and meditates... A sheet of paper, frail servant of an immortal idea, can level the world. T h e pontif of this terrible and majestic power no longer depends upon kings nor upon the great, he holds his mission from God. (l)" Although elsewhere one may discover arguments against as well as in favor of the idea that a genius is an extra-social being, and on particularly close terms with G o d , Balzac never completely abjured his faith in this viewpoint. George

Sand.

Liszt, we are told, was undoubtedly Sand's most influential teacher in matters of esthetic mysticism. Les Maîtres Mosaïstes contains a constant apology of the independent artist, sovereign and disdainful of vulgar applause. Les sept cordes de la lyre (1839) contains several passages which illustrate her esthetic mysticism at this time. Example - Hans, the poet : " T h e more artists reveal the Beyond to you, the less f1)

Vtrt le Socialisme, p. 67.

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you understand them, because you close your ears to their oracles. T h e y have climbed the steps of Heaven, they have heard the concerts of Angels, which they translate for you after their manner, but their expression necessarily retains something out of reach which seems mysterious to you... ( 1 ) " Helen, having touched the magic lyre, seems for a time struck with folly which is at the same time a strength. "Her meditation no longer needs to find a sanction in the judgements of human reason. Also, when one is deranged in a certain manner, the cure would be a misfortune. ( J ) " She did not at once arrive at a reconciliation between esthetic and socialist mysticisms ; Michel de Bourges, and Lamennais opposed it, but Leroux facilitated it. In Un Hiver a Majorque we find this summary of the usual arguments of esthetic mysticism : " G o d confided to the servants of the Beautiful, a sacred mission which our contemporaries refuse to recognize." But Sand, at this time, is not yet ready to accept this doctrine without reservations. A s late as 1842, criticizing Hugo, her socialism calls the poet's mystic pretentions "the delirium, the joys and the pains of his pride." (') George Sand, p. 263 and 266. (•) Id.. p. 267.

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Sand's artist is God's prophet, but not of the Hugo or Chateaubriand model ; hers is the plebeian, the proletarian, who is to give the people a new religion. Such is Pierre Huguenin in La Tour de France. If her esthetic mysticism is allied to her socialism, so also is it to her passional code. Here the union is easier. This is illustrated in Horace (1841) for instance, by the character Paul Arsène, big-hearted plebeian artist who generously protects Marthe, who becomes his mistress. Flaubert. Flaubert's correspondence with Louise Colet shows how little place sexual passion took in his life compared with another, that of his art, but this held him entirely. Three letters give us "the most eloquent commentaries of esthetic mysticism which have ever been written. ( 1 ) " Here is his confession of faith in a letter to Louise Colet, dated 1852. "Let us be religious. As for me, everything disagreeable, small or large, makes me cling more and more to my eternal care (Literature). I cling to it with both hands and close my eyes. By calling endlessly upon grace, it comes. God pities the simple... I turn to a kind of esthetic mysticism." (')

Flaubert, p. 128 and passim.

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This conception of art as the supreme thing in life dates back to his ninth or tenth year, when he already fulminated against the violence of censorship. In the letter just quoted he himself recognizes it as a veritable religion, a religion which must find its support, however, outside of Christianity, in some new God. Some will seek it in the flesh, says Flaubert (passional mysticism), others in some outworn religion (as Chateaubriand's neo-Catholicism) ; others again will turn to art (esthetic) or to the cult of humanity (social). For this God of the Arts, Flaubert was ready to be the Moses. Among the commandments were... the artist will keep himself out of his work, and will remain exclusively absorbed in the ardent contemplation of his Beauty God. This God is a jealous God, and will tolerate no other Gods but him. Whoever would sacrifice to happiness and beauty will obtain neither, for beauty can be had only through sacrifices ; so tear your clothes, put on sack cloth and roll in ashes, torture your flesh and tear out your heart. After years of renunciation you may be rewarded ; you may have a vision of Beauty before you die. T h u s the artist is the High Priest of a hierarchy based upon the worship of Beauty as a God and in which all men find their place according to their degree of esthetic sensibility. T h e artist must remain unmoved before the

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spectacle of human passions, look at men, stuff them as dummies, but must not judge them. If Flaubert admits there must be morality to maintain the established order, it is not the artist's business, who should not write to moralize or to instruct. The Goncourts. Esthetic mysticism, as defined by the bohemian romantics of 1830, absorbed the Goncourts almost to the complete exclusion of those two other elements usually associated with it, passional and social mysticism. Their religion was almost exclusively one of art. (') They did not, as George Sand and Hugo, directly invoke a divine alliance, since they professed not to believe in a Christian God, not even in the survival of the soul. It is, nevertheless, a veritable mysticism which presides over their effort at conquest. For instance, in their Journal, January 17, 1865, they write, "We are sure to have been allied for a purpose and someday what we are doing will be rewarded." Clear expression of their belief in a providential mission. Charles Demailly had but one faith, one devotion, one love : Literature. But when the Goncourts shouted at non(')

La Goncourts, p. 147 a n d passim.

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artists to g o " c r o a k " of hunger t h e y did so in all security, for thanks to a family inheritance t h e y at least could live, creators or not. And then w e m a y ask, also, is creative ability measured b y financial success ? S u c h would be the corollary of this thesis. E d m o n d , F e b r u a r y 4, 1888, w r o t e the most frank declaration of esthetic amorality then known: " A m o n g writers, no honest person has ever said he gave a rap about morality or immorality, w h o was interested in anything but creating a beautiful, a great, a h u m a n thing, and that if immorality a d d e d the least thing to his work of art he would serve immorality to the p u b l i c , frankly and without lying, w i t h o u t hypocritically professing to be i m moral w i t h a moral end, without w o r r y i n g about the g n a s h i n g of teeth this might cause a m o n g the virtuous conservative or republican j o u r n a l i s t s . " E r n e s t Seilliere calls this the esthetic mysticism of "victory at any p r i c e " ; he cannot imagine a n y o n e h a v i n g unselfish convictions of this kind. A s to politics E d m o n d assures us he is so little interested in it that he never voted. It is only t o w a r d s the very end of his life that he no longer protests against having an interest in socialism. T h e G o n c o u r t s were never seriously in love, and are far removed f r o m such romantics as L a m a r t i n e , V i g n y , M u s s e t , Sand, w h o did not think love a loss of time. A n d marriage, they b e l i e v e , is incompatible with art.

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Such are the principal tenets of the Goncourts' mystic code. Zola. "Frankly," writes Zola, "I sacrifice humanity to the artist. Should I formulate a theory of art, it would be this : a corner of creation seen through a temperament. What matters the rest. What more do you ask ? I cannot give you anything else, since I give myself entirely in my violence and in my calm, as God made me. ( ' ) " Pointing to this, Ernest Seilliere distinguishes between the mystic and the rational conceptions of life, the latter holding that man can modify his irrational imperialism for the greater benefit of society, and for this reason should not attribute to God what experience has found it wiser to attribute to a fall or to an original sin, and that one should not write or speak without leaving his violence aside. But Zola had no such conception of literature at this time. He writes that "our works are so fair that humanity weeps at our school and forgets right and justice and is nothing but flesh and heart. A perfect expression of the almost purely erotic element of Rousseauist mysticism. This same essay contains another fiery pro(')

Zola, pages 61-64 and passim-

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fession of faith in the mission of the artist in which he appears as the sworn enemy of society. "Carve your works by the dozen and let them obey you (Proudhon) ; but let God's workers obey G o d only. T h e y work as the flesh and their intelligence move them. Y o u r rational and social art is the very negation of art. On the contrary, our art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual outside of all social rules and necessities, sincc the artist worthy of the name holds aloof from society and his kind by lifting himself above them, by disdaining their justice and their laws. When he does so he knows his heart is right, that he obeys his nature and feels that his work will be beautiful. What does the rest matter to him ?" One may imagine Vigny's Chatterton, but this is far removed from Hugo's views of the poet as a social leader. " T h a t naturalism was prepared by convictions of this k i n d , " writes Ernest Seilliere, "at a time when its future chief called himself 'realist,' Balzac's and Flaubert's pupil, is enough to make us feel what this new philosophic thesis will be, really. Allowance made for a few rational corrections, imposed by the pressure of facts and the experience acquired since the beginning of the movement, it will be neither the negation nor even the rectification of the romanticism of 1830, as has generally been taught up to the present, but on

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the contrary, an audacious exaggeration of it, impudent at times. It will be the most decided profession of mystic faith ever dissimulated under pseudo-rational, or even pseudo-scientific and specious formulae, since the origin of the new religion." CONCLUSION.

Experience has shown the weakness of following the political leadership of poets, concludes Ernest Seilliere. (') Even during crises, when they can render certain services, lyrics are not the best counselors for a government to follow because, whereas mystic exaltation is a useful aid to will and action, it would often thrust us against passive material resistance. A more certain means of success is methodic effort, based upon h u m a n experience interpreted with coolness and energetically synthesized. T h e artist's mystic belief in a divine ally, his belief in his mission is a bid for special consideration, the expression of his determination to have a place in the sun. However, it may be suggested that without the poets it would be impossible to get men to die for an idea, were it the most rational, and that, notwithstanding, poetry may be more efficacious than reason in furthering peace. O

Vtrt le Socialitmt, p. 60.

CHAPTER VI MYSTIC

S O U R C E S OF C O N T E M P O R A R Y

IMPERIALISM.

( Concluded.)

NATIONAL

MYSTICISM. We talk of democracy, but perhaps, after «II the thing is far from us. We are aristocrat«. John Erskine. (American Democracy.)

God said : I have beheld the suffering of my people which is in Egypt... and He chose Moses to lead them into the land with milk and honey blest. For Israel was God's chosen people. Thus the Phoenecians were Moloch's elect, the Dorians, Apollo's, the Athenians, Pallas Athena's... When Rome and Carthage were disputing Saguntum, Hannibal said, "Carthage never abandons the oppressed." Rome's sacred origin assures her its eternity. East, West and Rome : these are the three characters in the drama, writes M. Bontempelli in an open letter to M. André Lévinson. Rome is the energy which keeps them balanced by renewing, from one epoch to another, the sources of civilization.

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After entering Fiume, Gabriel d'Annunzio : Brothers, You know henceforth what we have done, inspired and protected by our God. I was ill, in bed ; I rose to answer the call. Not only I, but all of us obeyed the spirit and we have been purified of all ill... The French said : Gesta dei per francos, and the Germans, Gott mit uns, whereas former President Coolidge recently affirmed that were the United States the only armed nation in the world we should soon find a good excuse for overrunning all the rest of mankind. And we would probably trust God to lead us, and bless us. This pretention on the part of a race or a nation to particular divine protection is the essential of what Ernest Seilliere calls racial or national mysticism, basis for those imperialisms whose modern representatives were Gobineau, Chamberlain and Rhodes. Every nation has made and will probably always make an appeal to a supernatural being in its conquest for power. It is a source of encouragement and moral strength to itself, and a justification in the eyes of the world, at least it believes so. It may also be a source of fanaticism such as has from time to time threatened to submerge everything before it. In France, Augustin Thierry traced the theory of divine protection of a conquering race which subsequently claimed to rule by divine right.

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Considering the Frankish conquest as Christian, and apostolic, and realized by Charlemagne in the name of Jesus, their descendants pretended keeping their privileges. Boulainvilliers, Saint Simon, Fénelon and later Montlosier defended these politically aristocratic doctrines which later entered into that elaborated by Gobineau. Ernest Seillière has copiously studied the birth and expansion of pan-Germanism, the most complete expression of race mysticism with all its consequences in modern times. After the contributions furnished by the early romantic group, the Germans enthusiastically shunt Gobineau's doctrine from its author's conclusion to those more apt to serve a German imperialistic program^ 1 ) RACE

MYSTICISM.

Gobineau, Gobineau wept over the world's not being ruled by a race which no longer exists. An aristocrat by temperament and convictions, Gobineau would gladly have us believe Odin his grandfather. Joining the ideas he may or may not have got from Boulainvilliers and Montlosier, from Lessing, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, (') Cf. P. de Tl„ Vol. I; Les Mystiques du Néoromantisme : Chamberlain ; Les Pangermanistes d'après guerre ; Morales el religions nouvelles en Allemagne.

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Gervinus, Dahlmann and others, he made of his chosen ancestors the unique civilizers of the world, the "salt of the earth." Unfortunately the descendants of the Germanic branch of the Aryans whom God had specially chosen to rule others for their own good, degenerated through inter-marriage with inferior races, or with inferior branches of the Aryans, — Celts, for instance. And Gobineau decides, in good faith, that he alone, or almost alone, thanks to Providence, is still possessed of those social virtues which distinguished the primitive pure German. As to political contemporary Germany, he considered it, in his Inequality, as long ago become Celtic in the West, and Slavonic in the East, that is, practically emptied of those gifted Germans she claimed to possess ; Gobineau's view was first historic, pessimistic for the future. "This is not surprising," explains Ernest Seilliere, "for his theoretical viewpoint took shape about 1848, when Germany showed an almost complete military and political weakness. His pan-Germanism was the result of personal preoccupations. It was a subterfuge of thought to persuade himself and to insinuate that a society less debased than ours by democratic ideas would have continued to make of him and his class the divine rulers of the country, as in the middle ages." Years later, Gobineau met Richard Wagner... 7

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Germany had taken two important steps : 1866 and 1870, and her enthusiasm was guided by the Bayreuther Blaetter towards the possibilities of Gobineau's Germanism. Its sterile conclusions received an optimistic interpretation and under the impulse of their visions of the future, Gobineau, a Frenchman, was transferred from the "prophets of the past" to one of the future, and became one of the principal exponents of panGermanism. Chamberlain. After Gobineau, an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in his Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhnnderts (1899) influenced events in the same direction. Chamberlain, born at Portsmouth in 1855, spent most of his life in France, Switzerland and G e r m a n y . While at Ems, in 1870, the sight of the Prussians leaving for the French front filled him with enthusiasm and won him over to Germany (') ; a young theological student, Otto K u n t z e , completed his education by initiating him into German mysticism. It was about this time that he wrote his confession of faith : "I believe that the future of all Europe, that is to say of the whole world, is in (l)

La Sagesse de Darmstadt, Vol. I, p. 12 and passim.

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Germany's hands and this faith has recently become a certainty for me. ...But," he added, "if the present entirely corrupt moral dispositions of the Germans are not modified, if the whole nation does not understand that purity is a people's greatest force and if she doesn't arm herself with national morality against the rest of the world, Germany will soon perish without having accomplished her great destiny and will become the prey of barbarians." Such was the tone of his preaching at this time, and it remained thus until he finally saw, as a matter of fact, the barbarians get the upper hand. A m o n g Chamberlain's admirers was the E m peror, and among his followers, D r . L u d w i g Woltmann, famous for his Germans and the Italian Renaissance, and Germans in France ; Bernhardi's book vulgarized the doctrine on the eve of 1914. Here as in preceding mysticisms, we find Rousseau's influence. T h e world in general is degenerate, overcivilized. There used to exist a race vigorous and fit... in Rousseau's case, the man of nature, in Gobineau's or Chamberlain's, the primitive German. But contemporary German mysticism is no longer based upon the idea of race as defined by Gobineau or the German anthropologists ; it does not predict a specifically German religion, with a regenerative world mission, as suggested

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by Chamberlain ; it has become in Thomas Mann, for instance, national, esthetic and ethic at the same time, based upon two essentials, German burgher morality and musical temperament. Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes did not follow Chamberlain to Germany ; he stayed at home, in the Empire over which the sun never sets, to put into practise his conviction that painting the world red with English peace, justice and liberty was working hand in hand with God, for H e had clearly chosen the white race as rulers—and who among the whites has received surer signs of favor than the Anglo-Saxons in the person of John Bull ? America for the present has limited her goodness to spreading her doctrines at home and to those barbarians too far away to have heard of her, but having consented to fight for Democracy once, there is no telling when the spirit may move us again. In the meantime, Ernest Seilliere's remarks on the advantages of rational preparation may offer certain advantages it would be unwise to neglect. CLASS

MYSTICISM.

Classes also have their gods ; become conscious

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of themselves, classes have organized for selfdefence, and for aggression. There used to be nobles, burghers and serfs ; today there are capitalists and proletarians. It would be impossible to limit classes for practical purposes, in this manner, especially in countries where the individual economic status is so unstable as in the United States, were it not for the labor unions or political parties which inculcate in their members a very particular mentality. Class mysticism, resulting finally in communism, is another variation on the theme that the less man is spoiled by civilization, the better he is ; hence the proletarian is nearer God than the aristocrat ; vox popult vox dei. (') The proletariat is thus infallible in everything which has to do with public affairs ( 2 ), a new aristocracy whose basis is lack of culture, social position and individual economic power,—aristocracy by divine right, differing from the ancient nobility in that the former is temporarily unknown and unappreciated by society. This is simply the basis of a doctrine of conquest, and in the words of Ernest Seillière, these advanced parties are "themselves the most decided imperialists who have ever shown their ambitions for power." "It is simply over men of their own country they believe it easier to establish their empire," he i 1 ) Peril mystique, p. 26. (») Barbey, p. 16.

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writes in La Religion romantique, "by imposing upon them a dictatorship profitable to the dictators ; in fact, class imperialism is worth no more nor less than that of race or nation." Its value, he concludes, is in proportion to its chances of success, that is, its knowledge of the strength of its adversaries, and more particularly in the rationalization of its ambitions and methods. A m o n g the theorists and popularizers of social or

class mysticisms are Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, Sorel, Quinet, George Sand, Hugo, Zola and Tolstoi. Fourier. Rousseau's direct descendant, Charles Fourier, was the authentic father of social mysticism, or the "romanticism of the poor." Babeuf, SaintSimon and Owen, who are also Rousseau's descendants, each contributed something, but less directly, and less vigorously. On the one hand, writes Ernest Seilliere, neither Owen, nor his English disciples, had much influence on the Continent, except perhaps by those suggestions furnished Marx ; Saint-Simon's influence was felt through members of his school, as Bazard or Enfantin, and it is likely they borrowed much from Fourier, which explains how the first active Fourierist group was able to collect the dying remains of Saint-Simonism after 1830. As to Babeuf, his backward, anti-industrial, Spartan

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and ascetic Utopia is unfit for our age except by the destruction he advises, and not by the institutions he proposes. After Buonarotti's 1828 experience, it was obliged to undergo Fourierisation in order to have its influence in 1830. For Fourierism is the contrary of asceticism; it promises material progress as well as moral progress, in spite of reserves and contradictions. It is openly founded on the desire for comfort, upon luxisme, which its founder says is not only a justifiable, but a fundamental and providential tendency of human nature. This is why Fourier's German admirers have often compared him with Hegel, the great metaphysician and poet of progressive evolution. If he sometimes seems to look back at the golden age, like Jean-Jacques and Babeuf, and the apostles of "back to nature," Fourier at least dreams of a transformation of this golden age, perfected and reconciled with its opposite, civilization. In all of which, he appears an unconscious adept of Hegelian dialectics. His latent influence is very much greater than that of Babeuf, Owen or Saint-Simon, and as stated by a brilliant authority, Georges Sorel, nine out of ten Frenchmen are Fourierists... illogical and incomplete, fortunately for them, concludes Ernest Seilliere. (*) (')

Le mal romantique, pages 1 -2 and passim.

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Passing over his neologisms, analogies and cosmological ravings which mark his folly, Ernest Seilliere calls him a degenerate ; we see him resolutely at work constructing a morality perfectly in tune with the fundamental doctrines of romantic psychology. T h e principle of Fourier's mystic social constitution is God's responsibility, who naturally is its personal ruler. God would not think of being a constitutional monarch ; this idea is a Christian impiety taught by the Church, making humanity responsible. Fourier is so certain of this that he makes fun of those legislative bodies who begin their lawmaking by praying God's guidance. Fourier explained the contradiction resulting from what he believed necessary, agriculture and big business, abundance and luxuries, and men's unhappiness, as due to man's obstructing nature by interposing his reason between God's plan and the execution. We may know God's plan, who certainly wills our happiness. Therefore, as He has filled us with desires, He has also assured the means of satisfying them. Is it not absurd to suppose He would create us with a passion only to forbid us satisfying it ? Our natural impulses lead to the harmonious order of things, and only those born of civilization make us desire evil. "The passions which were believed enemies of

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peace and against which so many thousands of volumes have been written and which have fallen into oblivion, the passions, I say, lead only to concord, to that social unity from which we believed them so separated ; but they can only become harmonious as long as they develop regularly in progressive or group series. ( 1 ) " A n d Fourier to group men in his famous series, for "series create harmony." Proudhon.

(')

Proudhon is a mixture of reason and proletarian mysticism. All men are absolutely equal, he tells us in What is Property, and consequently capitalism and salaries are injustices. In Economic Contradictions he later confronts the bourgeois thesis of rational individualism and the socialist idea of equality, without succeeding in the synthesis, to pass still later to the thesis of equality as resulting from the equality of soul. Karl

Marx.

Ernest Seilliere distinguishes three periods of intellectual activity in Marx : before 1848, 1848 to 1870, and after 1870. T h e first is historical and philosophical, characterized by the Communist (>) (*)

Cf. R. Gil/own, p. 132. C f . Philosophic Je rimperialismc, vol. 111.

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Party manifest ; the second, economic, during which he prepared a work of such proportions that only fragments were published ; the third, hindered by ill health, but whose tendencies are seen in the Letter on the Gotha program (1875). The present order of things calls for the victory of the proletariat. "Social relationships are intimately united to productive forces. By acquiring new productive forces, men change their way of producing, the way of earning a living ; they change all relationships. The hand mill will give you society with a suzerain ; the steam mill, society with the capitalist manufacturer." Productive forces are also the motive forces of society ; they mould it in their image. Ernest Seilliere calls this a mysticisme technique. Three stages : feudal, replaced in 1789 by the bourgeoisie, which will give place to the proletariat. In these changes man often plays a passive role, as though these productive forces were some mysterious god specially protecting the proletariat destined to replace both nobles and bourgeois. One of the fundamental theses of Capital is that the simple laborer alone is creative, and that all men have an equal labor capacity and therefore economic inequality can only result from the exploitation of man by man. Already as in the Misery of Philosophy we find this idea, based upon the subordinate position of man to

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the machine : time is everything, man nothing ; quality is subordinate to quantity. As all human misunderstandings result from the struggle of the working and employing classes, according to this doctrine, they will cease with the leveling of these classes. Rousseau's man of nature has become Marx's theoretical proletariat... becomes also a person without individually, without initiative... the skeleton of time, the unit of simple labor by which, led by his new god, Productive-force, he will return to Eden. Georges Sorel. Georges Sorel, who has most recently been studied by Pierre Lasserre, was influenced by Marx, Nietzsche and Proudhon, we are told. Sorel, according to Mr. Lasserre, is the théoricien de l'impérialisme, and according to Baron Seillière, the théoricien de Vimpérialisme ouvrier, which rectification is suggestive if we accept as a full expression of his views, his teachings that today the working-classes constitute the new aristocracy, or will do so in the future. As a means he proposes rallying these classes about an idea, or rather an ideal, a mythe, to become their warcry, and which he specifies : a general strike. Ernest Seillière, in La Religion romantique, calls this negative means of arriving, a blackmail

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practised on a nation to impose upon it the tyrany of a handful of dreamers. T h e debate has been opened as to whether Lenine and Mussolini are his disciples. Edgar

Quinet.

Edgar Quinet was born in 1803. His father was a French Catholic, his mother Swiss and German, and a Protestant ; his wife was German. He was impressionable and nervous, thus susceptible to romanticism. His childhood and youth were typical of those of his romantic generation : youthful hallucinations, attempts at suicide, suffering at the first encounter with society in school. A s a result of this sensibility he was inclined to an excessive vanity over his writing. Michelet's Hugolistic praise encouraged him in this over-estimation of his artistic ability. " Y o u have written the capital book of the century," said Michelet of his Merlin VEnchanteur. He willingly took on the airs of a prophet. As a reward for his anti-Restoration attitude, Quinet hoped for a small prefecture after 1830. " W e would be entirely independent, with no one above us in our arrondissement," he wrote to his future wife. T h e usual aim of those who shout for equality, adds E. Seillière. W h e n Quinet entered the Collège de France

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he gave a course on Christianity and the French Revolution ; he expressed in a letter of this date his hope that France would wipe out Waterloo by a new victory, that she might carry out her divine mission of fraternity and equality : example both of national and class mysticism. (*) In 1826 Quinet had gone to Heidelberg, where he became German at heart, and where he underwent a second romantic baptism, a Rousseauism crossed with Klopstock, Herder and Goethe. His enlarged Rousseauism took shape and remained his philosophy of history for twenty years and is best seen in his Génie des Religions. He soon believed himself charged with a special mission to explain German philosophy to France. And up to 1848 he applied himself to the preaching of social mysticism. *

*

*

An example of his philosophy of history is the explanation of the wars of the French Revolution as real crusades, more worthy of the name than those of the middle ages. T h e heroes of these wars desired the freeing, the moral progress of their enemies. This, remarks Ernest Seillière, was the same object the crusades had, as it was that of the Pan-Germanists of 1914. (')

Edgar Qanel,

page* 1-12 and passim.

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T h e volunteer of 1792, insisted Quinet, loved those he fought. In the evening he preached his beliefs with enthusiasm to those who billeted him for the night. In exchange for his daily bread, the crusader gave his host an idea ; he forgot his food and drink to teach the children the fundamentals of the French Republic. Austria profited by Rivoli, Egypt from Heliopolis, Rome from Marengo. T h i s is why the men of all nations had the same hero, Napoleon. The hundred battles which made the early Nineteenth Century famous lead to the unity of her enemies. France gives, and receives nothing in exchange ! Another view of Quinet's : the French Revolution was the realization of Christianity ; it is the N e w Testament become law. T h e people become G o d ' s allies. T h e theoretical and practical weakness of Quinet's philosophy of history, says Ernest Seilliere, results from his fundamental Rousseauism, which makes him blind to the truth : that the French Revolution really has a religion at its basis, that this religion is an affective mystic heresy of traditional Christianity and that, like all past revolutions, the French Revolution can arrive at no durable results for civilization and progress except by sufficient rationalization, through contact with real human nature. T h i s , Quinet failed to see, and insisted upon the proscription of Catholicism, at least between 1850

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and 1855, after w h i c h he modified some of his ideas ; b e c o m i n g suspicious of economic Rousseauism, he no longer holds the people's natural goodness as indisputable, nor is he so sure of their divine inspiration in political matters. Q u i n e t t h e n looks at A m e r i c a , where conditions w e r e ideal f o r a realization of Rousseau's sociological ideas : but what happens ? Instead of any successful effort at c o m m u n i s m , each individual immediately marks off his bit of earth with the w o r d Rousseau thought the source of all t r o u b l e . H u m a n nature goes in one direction, Rousseauist sociology in another. T h i s leads him to a partial rationalization of F r e n c h history in general and of the Revolution in particular ; he sees and explains Rousseau's influence, saying Rousseau was to the Revolution w h a t the seed is to the tree. W h e n he returned to Paris in 1870, f r o m w h i c h he had been absent since 1858, he became a radical d e p u t y and the champion of mystic d e m o c r a c y ; G a m b e t t a called him his master, H u g o treated him as an equal, most of the chiefs of the T h i r d R e p u b l i c were his correspondents or friends. His Rousseauism alone was the source of his last political suggestions. H e w o u l d make of the principle of natural selection a condemnation of the u p p e r classes, whereas, according to E . Seilliére, it is the very justification of their

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power, although it explains at the same time their replacement by others when certain individuals among them degenerate. George

Sand.

In April 1835,Sand, leaving passional mysticism with Musset, wrote her new lover : " W h o wants my present and future life ? If it were put to the service of an idea and not of a passion, in the service of truth and not of a man, I should consent to be governed." In Le Poeme de Myrza we already see the people better able to judge of virtue than the elders, and the crowd shows itself generous in protecting the priestess of truth. But Simon is her first republican novel written to serve the democratic ideal. Fiamma will be the incarnation of the republican heroine, offspring of romantic meridionalism and democratic mysticism, destined to be the wife of the plebeian French genius, Simon. T h e novel is weak in those pages where the author, at the request of Michel de Bourges, is obliged to give her heroine those austere and irreprochable morals called "republican," for her strength lies in giving her characters her own personality. After Simon, she modifies Le'lia in the sense of socialist mysticism and adds a third volume in which the coming of the universal republic is prepared.

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For a moment, a certain Catholic influence is introduced due to Lamennais ; but this is short and the inspiration of Pierre Leroux accounts for the contradiction between the central part of the work and the last chapters. Mauprat is the last of the novels written under the direct influence of M. de Bourges. The republican idea covers it like a varnish and has little effect on the plot. The most Rousseauist of the characters is Patience, man of primitive nature designed with a view of inspiring readers with an admiration for the primitive morality which man has unfortunately suppressed in himself. But at the very moment she is under the spell of Michel de Bourges, she is defending passional mysticism against the despotism of socialism. And she makes one of her characters say, "I couldn't understand his taking more pleasure in the crowd's caresses than in mine. ( 1 ) " *

#

#

After Michel de Bourges, George Sand became attached first to Lamennais, then to Pierre Leroux. In E. Seillière's language, Lamennais was trying, as best he could, to link Rousseauist mysticism to rational Christianity. This was (')

George Sand, pages 164-165 and passim. b

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also the subject of the first four Lettres á Marcie. The sixth, contradiction of the morality of these four, leads to the break between Sand and Lamennais. Sand couldn't keep her mysticisms straight ...she perhaps wasn't alone in this matter, she mixed too easily the erotic and the social. When Lamennais, ready to accept her social and esthetic doctrines, refused to applaud her flight into the realm of passion, Pierre Leroux appeared. Their liaison was purely intellectual. Sand found in him a philosophy of history imitating that of the German romantics, whom Leroux read in the original. From 1839 on, she gives herself heart and soul to his doctrines. They are a religion to her, fragmentary, it is true, but where lay the foundations of a temple to the real divinity. His influence was complete for years and it was only 1848 which "opened her eyes" to his faults. Her new doctrines are embodied in Les Sept Cordes de la lyre (faith in an eternal humanity, continual moral progress) and in Spiridion (Lamennais corrected by Leroux, which will also appear in Sand's later works). The truth is, says Ernest Seilliére, that Leroux, having noticed the pretentions to social reform which have been the corollaries of most mystic Christian heresies, had no difficulty in recognizing their relationship with the Rousseauist mysticism which he himself professed without knowing i t ; for such is the

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veritable basis of his philosophy of history, very invigorating to the appetites of modern demagogy, as one may imagine. T h u s Spiridion is a very interesting manifestation of that spiritual state called social mysticism. Consuelo and the Comtesse de Rudolstadt also belong to the socialist period. T h e former, says E . Seillière, contains more undigested mystic ideas than any other of her novels ; as to the latter, it proceeds directly from Leroux, and might be called illuminist as well as socialist. (') A f t e r 1840 George Sand's doctrines, following L e r o u x and Rousseau, may be summed up thus : T h e common people, now more than ever, are G o d ' s spokesmen ; if our rulers would listen to them they would be guided as by oracles, and all our present social problems would be solved. T h e s e sentiments are introduced into La Dernière Aldini and even more emphatically into Le Compagnon du tour de France where Pierre Huguenin incarnates the " p e o p l e " ennobled, superior to the ancient aristocracy ; " Y o u r ancestors were serfs and mine were soldiers," says Mlle de Villepreux to Huguenin, "that is to say, you descend from the oppressed and I from the oppressor ! H o w I envy you your nobility, M . Pierre." But if the abolition of inheritance is the founi1)

Id., pages 175-201.

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dation of her temporary communism, she later writes, as to her own fortune, that she believes it the duty of parents to leave their goods to their children, as the only guaranty of the liberty due them. "In other words," writes Ernest Seilliere, "liberty is the result of power, and to diminish the social power of one's children willingly, is to restrict, in the same proportion, their liberty— at least in this "imperialistic" world where we must live and which is so imperfectly portrayed in Rousseau's romantic dream." This we may say is perhaps an explanation, but not a justification of the institution of inheritance. And since money is power, why should it be handed down more than political power ; why should a senator's son not be a senator ? Certainly, if the son is without intelligence, he will loose his power as quickly as the feeble rich man's son will lose his money. Insofar as the State is concerned, it would probably be more profitable and better for the public welfare to have money and power in the hands of intelligent children regardless of the intellectual or economic fortune of their progenitors. Which amounts to saying that the probably unrealisable ideal would be "preferential" or "discriminating" inheritance laws. For who would apply them ? It is strange to remark, comments Ernest Seilliere, that during her communist period, most of Sand's novels end by the growing fortunes

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of the more likeable of her characters ; viz, the heroine of the Meunier d'Angibault, the young couple in Péché de Monsieur Antoine, etc. George Sand uses the word " c o m m u n i s m " for the first time in Horace (1842) ; Leroux had warned his pupil that he preferred communionism. C o m m u n i s m meant to her a state of equality between the feeble and the strong arrived at by a voluntary reduction of social power by the latter in favor of the former. Later on she will change her formula from Louis Blanc's "to each according to his needs" by adding "to each according to his w o r k s " ; that is to say, food for all first ; the surplus divided according to capacities and production. But this, says Ernest Seillière, is just what capitalist society through Christian societies has accomplished, for public and private charity has made death from hunger practically unknown. But at what price ? often at the death of that self-respect without which the soul itself sombers into non-existence. For having tasted the bread of Christian charity, men are repudiating it... not the bread but the charity. In George Sand's Lettres au Peuple, Ernest Seillière notes such socialist outbursts as " O people, you are strong, because you are so good" ; "I have seen the distrust and the terrible skepticism, sorry inheritance of monarchical times, insinuate themselves into the hearts of the rich

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and put out the spark ready to kindle in them... these hide and paralyze their riches, those slander the people's intuitions... men are naturally so little bad, that when evil institutions change their instincts and falsify their needs, thev become foolhardy. (')" In May 1848 she publishes a number of articles on the religion France should henceforth embrace : real Christianity, that is "the erotico-romantic heresy of Jean-Jacques, Lamennais and Leroux." Then, after June, 1848, she puts off indefinitely the realization of communism, the people being too stupid for it. But her normal state is the mystic aspiration balanced by bourgeois wisdom ; she returns to it in March 1849. And when Louis Bonaparte appears she calls him "the man God sends and whom the people accept." Thus there is a continual variation from expressions rather mild and "rational," to the most mystic of socialisms. Victor Hugo. (2) Victor Hugo is usually inspired by the naturist faith of his times ; like Michelet, it was in his blood, as a result of his plebeian origin in spite of his efforts to establish the contrary. He is one of the most striking examples of democratic or ('! (",'

la., pases 206-235. Du Quieihmc, p. 76 and passim.

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social mysticism, for he constantly expresses his conviction that the people's voice is the voice of God. After his Catholic and royalist period, he rapidly evolves towards an exaggerated democratic mysticism, like that of Marius Pontmercy, in Les Misérables ; Pontmercy saw in the Revolution the sovereignty of the people, and in the Empire, the sovereignty of French ideas imposed upon Europe ; two roots : one, democratic, the other patriotic. "One might say he made the God Nature the ally of a Gallo-Republican imperialism. The Préface de Cromwell contains an early expression of Hugo's democratic mysticism ; the rehabilitation of the grotesque is also a rehabilitation of the instincts, too often mistreated by the moralists, instincts from which proceed the good as well as the beautiful. "You are not ugly," says the Duchess Josiane in the Homme qui rit, "you are deformed ! Deformity is great ; it is the reverse of the sublime." The court fools, plebeians with natural genius, will have a large place in his plays. Quasimodo, a physical monster, is a representative of plebeian natural goodness, "for Lord knows," says Ernest Seillière, "his education was neglected enough." He will be grotesque of body, according to the new esthetic, strong muscled, sublime of soul, tender, sanctified, transfigured by love. As he saved Esmeralda from the executioners : "He was

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beautiful, he, the orphan, the waif, the scum ! He felt himself august and strong ! He looked the society from which he was banished and in which he had intervened as forcefully in the face as he did that human justice from which he snatched its prey, all those ferocious tigers he forced to close their empty jaws, those sbires, judges, executioners, all that force of the king he, crippled, had just broken with the strength of God !" The cathedral itself is celebrated as the early expression of Voltairianism Rousseaufied, which is the religion of our times, that is, a religion which invokes the God Nature speaking to humanity now by means of the artist, now through the people inspired and in the case of the cathedral, the People prophet and artist. The Preface to Hernani defines romanticism as libéralisme en littérature. After the fall of the Bourbons, Hugo formulated his political ideas in the Journal of which Ernest Seillière cites the following passage in a telling way, turning it against its author by substituting people for king. Hugo wrote : "The idea of God and the idea of king are two and must be two. Louis XlVth's monarchy confounds them to the detriment of the temporal as of the spiritual order. T h e result of this monarchy (divine right) is a kind of political mysticism, of royalist fetichism, a kind of religion

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of the royal person (as G o d ' s ally) who has a palace for a temple and nobles for priests, with etiquette for decalogue... Real divine right is justice, real legitimacy, intelligence, and real grace, reason." N o doubt, approves our commentator, but objects that the masses at that time had neither a sense of justice nor intelligence, nor reason. Which is certainly very questionable. For if they lost their heads during the Revolution, so did the Church during the Inquisition, and so did the Bourbons restored to power. Lack of these three elements is not restricted to the masses and authority and titles arbitrarily conferred do not replace them. However, the paragraph rewritten is an ingenious and searching commentary showing the weakness of the opposite extreme. " T h e idea of G o d and the idea of People are two and must remain two. Naturism, expanded in Rousseau's spiritual descendants, confounds them in its turn. T h e result is a kind of social or democratic mysticism, of plebeian fetichism, a kind of worship of the people in abstractor which has electoral colleges as temples and orators or ambitious journalists as thurifers, with, as decalogue, the Declaration of Rights without sufficient mention of the corresponding duties." Hugo too will have his hesitations in December 1830.

In Hugo's plays, as in his novels, the hero is a

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lyric in power : often a plebeian, as Didier, Ruy Blas or Gilliat, and even a social paria because of his physical disgrace, as Quasimodo, T r i boulet and Gwymplaine ; or, when other, déclassé, and a bandit, as Jean d'Aragon, saltimbanque as Lord Clancharlie, or a cynic bohemian as César de Bazan. Triboulet, in Le Roi s'amuse, is another plebeian physically disfigured, mentally strong, big hearted, but whom kings and nobles have rendered bad, as Quasimodo, whom paternal love instead of passion will transfigure ; he eloquently pleads the rights of his class. Ruy Blas is the genial plebeian, a personification of the people oppressed. Gilbert (Marie Tudor) rises above his modest situation through marriage, but Ruy Blas is everywhere handsome, genial and good. T h r e e novels, Les Misérables (les Amis de l ' A . B. C.), L'Homme qui rit (Gwymplaine's speech before the house of Lords) ; Quatre-vingttreize (Gauvain) is a generous republican who multiplies a hundred fold the product of work to extend comfort and well-being everywhere : a veritable Fourierist) vulgarizes on a large scale democratic mysticism. But communist he was not, for he left a comfortable fortune to his family... and Biré has some unflattering commentaries as to Hugo's "communistic" ideas of sharing.

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Zola. Zola uses the term "social mysticism" to define the convictions of one of his characters, Silvère Mouret, in the Fortune des Rougon. (*) Silvère loves Miette, despised because her father was convicted of murder after killing a game warden who caught him poaching. Zola refuses to see a criminel in this outlaw and Silvère is charged with the holy task of redeeming Miette's good name ; he sees her enthroned in the village and all the neighbors bowing down before her. His socialism is often shown, as in Pot Bouille, by contrasting the degenerate bourgeoisie and the perfectly healthy proletariat. Germinal will be his poem of social mysticism, a work of communistic agitation., the fat bourgeois against the starved miner ; Argent leans visibly towards Marx and in Lourdes, Rome and Paris, Zola seeks to found a religion for the people. L'abbé Pierre Froment seeks it among pilgrims at Lourdes, among the vicars at Rome, among the socialists and communists in Paris, but is disatisfied until he finally discovers in his older brother Guillaume Froment, a man nearer the truth, who will give him an idea of the ideal society of the future. Guillaume's philosophy is a Rousseauist (')

Zola, p. 251 and passim.

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mysticism ; it represents Zola's state of mind at this epoch of his evolution (retrogade, says Ernest Seilliere), towards social mysticism, which will be the final expression of his temperament, his surroundings and his times. Paris, although Hugo had already said all it contains, was one of the most influential pamphlets for social mysticism ever distributed on the literary market. In 1900, in Travail, Zola is clearly Fourierist, that is, he has accepted an extreme social mysticism. T h e people, sometimes brutal, but fundamentally good, are again contrasted with the evil and corrupt bourgeoisie. Young Luc Froment, the real hero of the book, shows us the excellent results of his practical Fourierism : work, reduced to three hours a day in the phalanstery he created, takes on the appearance of a holiday. T h e example of his success is contagious, and everywhere other associations imitate it. Courts have been carried away by a storm of justice and truth, with the rest of the abominable world. Electricity will take care of all labor : soon the direction of the clouds will be under control ! And following Fourier's ideas, a good share of these miracles was realized thanks to the instinctive neip of children. ., and, O surprise, comments Ernest Seilliere, in Travail all children are dear little creatures, even those of the corrupt bourgeois.

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5

Léon Tolstoi. Tolstoi himself has told us that he did more than admire Rousseau ; he worshipped him. (*) Schopenhauer later continued Rousseau's influence. In one of his last books he energetically affirmed his belief in man's natural goodness. "The privileged members of the present regimen," he said, "imagine that the suppression of all state organizations would engender complete anarchy and a free-for-all struggle, as though human beings were not only animals but some kind of monstrous creatures, guided in their actions only by hatred and folly. They imagine men thus because they attribute them dispositions contrary to their nature and which, in reality, were developed by the state of affairs they perpetuate." We sometimes feel that although they may not have been developed by civilization, they must be practised to get along, civilization being what it is. After a period of separation from Christianity, Tolstoi returned to it for a personal God. However, he makes a Bible of his own, by retaining only that which agrees with his temperament. If Tolstoi himself did not for long keep up his moujik existence, he did not cease to see in the (')

Mystiques du Néo-Romantisme, pages 317-347.

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small Russian agricultural community the ideal of future society. Distribute the land among those ready to farm it, and join them in their instinctive, joyous, varied work, such was his almost Fourierist dream. Impossible to associate our material state of things with liberty : we are obliged to choose between civilization and liberty. Let electricity and railroads go to the devil if they are to cause ninety-nine per cent of mankind to be enslaved. Another curse is preparing for tomorrow : man should count upon his daily labor for his existence, and upon his neighbors. All of which are his interpretations of the N e w Testament. A b o u t 1895 Tolstoi meets the Doukhobors whose ideas resemble his, and there is an exchange of influences. Tolstoi's disciples spread his doctrine among them and they became living examples of his precepts : they sold what was not strictly necessary to life ; practised vegetarianism, refused to pay taxes, threw off all civil and military service. T h e latter especially caused them trouble, and they had to migrate, some to Canada, others to Cypress. Tolstoi himself said : I have no need of a state... I know I have no need of attacking the men of other nations, to kill them, etc. N o arms, no land, no taxes, no police. Pa-

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triotism, esprit de corps, family ties are evil seductions, remains of our animal nature. The gospel admonition to turn the second cheek must be literally followed. Non-resistance was Tolstoi's one rule for the future, a precept which Ernest Seilliere calls against nature. In conclusion, Ernest Seilliere insists he is a partisan of mysticism here as elsewhere, for it furnishes the necessary enthusiasm for success, but only when it does not blind us from seeing the insurmountable obstacle when it looms ahead.

CHAPTER

VII

TENDENCIES OF THE I.

ROMANTICISM

TIMES.

IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE.

Ernest Seillière offered us an interpretation of contemporary Europe in his Pour le centenaire du romantisme, and especially of France in his chapter on the enigma of the new century, in which he studies the Romantic Catholicism of the Twentieth Century in Paul Bourget, a social mysticism more emancipated of its restraints in Roland Dorgelès, and other tendencies in analyses of Pierre Dominique, René Gillouin, and André Chevrillon. In 1830-1930, La Religion romantique et ses conquêtes, the essays are continued. #

#

#

According to T h e o d u l e Ribot sports were to turn our contemporaries in France from the arts to a more practical and active life. Esthetic mysticism was to disappear. T h i s opinion showed a lack of understanding of the expansive force of that naturisi religion which flatters man's will to power, answers Ernest Seillière. (') (l)

Religion, p. 251.

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Among examples of modern esthetic mysticism, he places a novel of Somerset Maughan's, recently translated under the title of UEnvoute, and of which Paris is the setting for the significant chapters. The story : Strickland, the broker, has a hunch at forty and leaves his family to go to Paris to paint ; Strickland's replies to those who reproach him for his conduct seem to E. Seilliere significant of the contemporary Rousseauist state of mind, in France as in England. Another remarkable trait is the absence of remorse, "formerly the great spring of English literature... of which our contemporaries no longer know the meaning." One of the characters has occasion to say : "Has merit ever sufficed to force success ?" And Ernest Seilliere replies : Axiom which is much truer today since the reign of naturism and of those who know how to avail themselves of it, than heretofore. Strickland, who calls himself simply normal, is an example of what Ernest Seilliere calls natural, for society has introduced certain less cynical traits into the meaning of normal. The time was, writes Ernest Seilliere, when estheticians readily assured us that Beauty leads to Goodness. Edmond de Goncourt was the first, perhaps, to write that to create Beauty he would willingly pass over morality's corpse. 9

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T o d a y the separation, the antithesis, is more marked than ever between the esthetic revelation from On High, and old-fashioned bourgeoise morality. Strickland left his family in need ; then, in Paris, he destroyed an artist's home. With the woman and the love which the passional mysticism of 1830 exalted, Strickland is even more of a cynic than the characters in Charles Demailly or Manette Salomon, says our critic. T h i s analysis, in spite of its moral penetration, fails to show any sympathy with the necessity men have felt to break away from the Taylorized existence modern civilization would impose upon them, and which is otherwise imperialistic and demoralizing. Another contemporary example of naturist mysticism chosen by Ernest Seillière is Lenormand's La Vie secrète, produced in Paris in 1929, and whose Michel Sarterre seems to him most representative of the new esthetic mysticism. Sarterre no longer talks of G o d ; he substitutes the Old Man, some vague allusion to an even vaguer being somewhere in Asia, as others simply substitute Life. But he, as most other modern artists, refuses to give up his pretention to a mystic ally who assures him a natural or supernatural superiority over the rest of mankind. In his outward indifference Sarterre conceals his antipathy even for Europeans. T h i s Old M a n , says Ernest Seillière, who is the source of Sar-

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terre's creative power, is simply the Devil of Christianity. (*) The analyses of other authors, such as Daniel Rops, author of two volumes of essays, Notre Inquietude and Carte d'Europe and a novel, L Ame obscure, show Ernest Seillière convinced that the sixth romantic generation is in full activity in Europe, and that there is need for a return to conservatism in morality. What he does not touch upon, and what is of great interest to us, is the constant expression of a national mysticism, shouted at us from all directions, and which makes us wonder how long Geneva, Locarno and less successful conferences will be able to keep before the international mind the hope of a rational, peaceful satisfaction of so many conflicting national necessities. For some reply to what his opinion is on this matter, it is interesting to note the commentaries of one of his most authorized disciples. France, as a whole, and as represented by her leading thinkers, up to very recent years, was without a race and national imperialism, comments René Gillouin. She lacked even a rational imperialism which would have been for her good. England practised, as she has for centuries, that rational imperialism which has been the secret of her success ; Germany, without the genius of 0) id..

p. 266.

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Bismarck, became less and less rational until overwhelmed by inevitable catastrophy. As for present-day England, Ernest Seilliere's commentator puts the question this way : who will come out ahead, Wells or Kipling ? One may reply that the question is badly put, as some feel that between these two the difference is not simply one of imperialism and socialism. Louis XIV's insatiable desire for glory lead to an irrational imperialism to be sure, and France long suffered the consequences, for, as Fustel de Coulanges said, to win two provinces, France lost the friendship or alliance of Holland, England, Sweden, and Germany, and left the country ruined and reduced by one third of her population, encircled by a mistrust hardly extinguished when Napoleon upset all she had gained in the interval. But it is certain, writes M . Gillouin, that modern France had passed from one extreme to another and was completely occupied with party strife and with those esthetic quarrels which make men forget those ambitions necessary to national preservation. And in what sense this is to be construed when used by Ernest Seilliere or his disciples, we see in the following "confession." (') "Modern France," writes R. Gillouin, "was, and still is, profoundly touched by romanticism (») R. Cillcuin, p. 247.

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in its effeminate, instinctive, affective forms ; the malady is certainly curable, and the war showed that a very old and very noble people such as the French, placed in the face of a mortal danger, could find in themselves resources unexpected by others and by themselves, but, let it be understood as I mean, if the war was to arrive, it was high time it did so. T h e task of reconstruction remains urgent ; it is immense, and it is not by admiring ourselves and 'loving' ourselves, by childishly getting excited against pretended foreign influences, by constantly making our mea culpa on the breasts of others, that we are making any real progress in this sense. It is within we must undertake our reform, after a vigorous self-examination and, let us say it frankly, in the modest and serious conviction that our faults are our own, as is our force and our virtue." This was written a few years ago, and the times, it seems, confirm both Ernest Seilliere's and his follower's optimism in the belief in the fundamental stability of the race ; their fear of the romantics of 1930 is unfounded if we may judge by the course of events which has kept most of her best men at the political helm these past years, has secured the adoption of a policy of choosing experts for the administration of her technical affairs (after some sad experiences, it is true), carrying her through a great post-war crisis,

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out of which she is coming after much hardship in a state of astonishing economic and financial stability. 2.

IMPERIALISM IN

AND

THE

MORAL

CRISIS

AMERICA.

T h e author of the Philosophy of Imperialism has devoted several essays to the moral evolution and what he calls the moral crisis in the United States. His first study resulted from his contact with Edith Wharton's novels. From his viewpoint (') Mrs. Newland Archer, for instance (Age of Innocence) incarnates the conservative resistance to naturist and romantic innovations ; M r . Archer is on the way to assimilate these innovations. T o Ernest Seilliere, Archer seems an "imprudent young man who doesn't appreciate his good fortune" ; a little-penetrating, littleprudent man, who has lost the sense of rational moral tradition, which was long the safeguard of his race. T h e portrait of Dallas Archer seems to him an evil forecast of the rapid moral evolution to take place in America. In the survival of Puritanism, which still existed some years ago, Ernest Seilliere saw the hope and strength of the United States, for Puritan (')

Pour le Cenlenaire. pages 237-246.

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morality, he writes, was simply rational moral Christianity based upon a healthy mistrust of human nature and the suggestions of instinct, which are, in part, anti-social. As long as the psychology of original sin remained intact, naturist mysticism had made little inroad upon our North American mentality. The typical American was the man of selfcontrol, self-reliance and self-restraint ; at least he passed for such. Ernest Seilliere is full of admiration for such principles as those which advise a young man to do his best in no matter what situation he may be, and teach him that a great success is the result of a perpetually renewed effort. This, he says, is the conception the classics held. He is at the same time a defender of what others have stigmatized as materialism, but which seems to him a rational attitude towards life. He recalls and insists upon the literary and artistic state of affairs in 1913 : not an adultery on the literary horizon, not a lover in sight ; nothing but quiet comfortable bungalows with respectable couples in front of log fires listening to the phonograph, mother sewing for the future baby, father smoking his "jimmy pipe" behind a legitimate newspaper. This is changed, and in the terms of Ernest Seilliere, there has arisen a national mysticism which aims at nothing less than world-conquest ;

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a passional mysticism which is based upon the idea of the individual's right to be happy ; in art, the esthetic mysticism we have defined elsewhere. Nevertheless, he does not believe that in a country so trained by Puritan virtues, a moral revolution can so rapidly overthrow tradition. T h e administration of Calvin Coolidge must have been a comfort to him. *

#

*

In his most recent book, La Religion romantique et ses conquêtes, Ernest Seillière studies the "moral crisis in A m e r i c a , " taking Calvinism as exposed in the Institution chrétienne as the basis of American morality : profession of profound humility, at least in appearance ; man is nothing, and good deeds can do nothing for his salvation ; in the face of this humility, the doctrine of predestination serving as a basis to our faith in our mission ; and, a third proposition, justification by faith, which, perhaps, accounts for our motto, "In G o d we trust." Here is an explanation of a certain kind of American charity. If G o d has thus elected whom H e pleases, w h y should we take the trouble to live saintly lives, since God's choice is all that counts ? Would it not be naïve not to enjoy life, since

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nothing we can do has any importance ? The answer is that those who reason in this fashion thus show most clearly they are not chosen. Those chosen by a God conceived as moral could not be otherwise than moral themselves. Those who feel sure of themselves because of their faith will therefore, once feeling sure of their choice, tend to seek the incomparable perfection of their God ; they will seek, if not to "merit" the choice, at least to recognize and to justify afterwards the favor God bestowed upon them out of pure goodness. "What is more, and this is another concession to the psychology of experience," adds Ernest Seilliére, "what is more, this gratitude expressed by moral acts is not incompatible with failings of a will which in spite of all is corrupted by sin. The faith which justifies, or rather shows that one is justified for all time, in no way means sinlessness. It would really be too little in keeping with experience to pretend it. But the failings are not, among the elected, anything but an occasion for redoubling courage, praying more, to make more constant effort at restraint." And thus justification by good works is reintroduced into this "Christianity re-thought in the erudite and Stoic Renaissance manner." In the sight of the elected these acts are indispensable in confirming him in his confidence in the immense privilege of which he is the bene-

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ficiary. In men's eyes it is the only visible sign of election. And it is not at all a matter of indifference to pass for one of the chosen in a society where the predominating preoccupation is being in right with God. #

*

#

Among American rationalists Ernest Seilliere places W . C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt who were recently the subject of an interesting volume by Louis Mercier. (') Of the three, Ernest Seilliere's views coincide more often with those of Irving Babbitt, who has frequently commented the author of the Philosophy of Imperialism. Henry

Ford.

Henry Ford's book gave Ernest Seilliere an opportunity to compare notes. This resulted largely in agreement between the two. Both repudiate the idea of natural equality, naturist C') Le Mouvement humanuU aux Etats-Unis, by Louis Mercier.—Another interesting collection of essays by Irving Babbitt. Paul Elmer More, T . S. Eliot, Louis Trenchard More, Robert Shafer and a group of young humanists was recently edited with a preface by Norman Foerster. (N. Y., Farrar and Rinehart, 1930). In France, an Enquile on humanism has just appeared, edited by P. Arbousse-Bastide, with a preface by Fortunat Strowski. Among the many interesting replies it contains, are those of Henri Bremond, Leon Brunschwicq, Jacques Chevalier, Camille Jullian, Jacques Maritain, and Romain Rolland. (Pour un humanisme nouveau, CAHIERS FOI ET VIE, Paris 1930.)

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I

39

socialism and the folly of exaggerated optimism. T h e abuses of capitalism, both agree, are due to human imperfections, and those who offer us remedies for them begin by supposing men fundamentally good, that is, man as primarily a rational being. Although our present system has faults, it would suffice largely for man's happiness were all men honest and good. In order to succeed, a system must first of all keep human nature in check instead of blindly confiding in it, which manner of talking meets Ernest Seillière's enthusiastic approval. They also agree in condemning Russia's experience, being of the opinion that peaceful cooperation between capital and labor, with superior material benefits for the leaders, is the only way to progress ; Russia's experience is moreover a confirmation of E. Seillière's imperialistic interpretation of human nature. Although H. Ford's views of the future, of administration and of a business man's obligations to the community seem extremely rational to his commentator, he makes a reservation : H. Ford's Christianity superposed upon his fundamental rationalism seems to overstep reason, ending up in a kind of mysticism of intensive production, the consequences of which might lead to catastrophy. When Ford writes that there will be no more war profiteers, if there are any more wars (there

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are plenty going on at this minute) because of the shame attached to such profits, Ernest Seilliere justly remarks that if this is so, human nature will have been radically changed, for experience sadly proves that the reprobation attached to this sort of profit has less and less moral hold upon a society where naturism has sapped the foundations. It is perhaps not the fault of naturism but of the acceptance of business success as the measure of a man's value. Moreover, we may recall everything has always been forgiven except poverty. For the poor the entrance to heaven is still extremely difficult, given the fact they have about as many sins to pay for as the rich. *

#

*

A correspondent of Ernest Seilliere's, during his residence in America, was astonished, frightened, by the invasion of naturist mysticism, and the growing manifestation of a desire for more power. The picture of our moral degradation is the one we were accustomed to draw of Europe in the good old Puritan days. And he is certain that Europe is, in a moral way, much better off today than America. Isn't it paradoxical to speak of a moral crisis in a country where the mass works hard, where prohibition is a law, where men are refused work because they smoke, where laws of all kinds

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protect women and children, where prostitution and evolution have been struck from the dictionary, and where the history of poetry is the history of theological disputes ? Prohibition, eugenics, Ku Klux Klan are manifestations of the Puritan element against the emigrants, observes A. Siegfried ; the reaction against Puritanism and conservative Americanism would be due to foreigners. It is always a very easy way to explain interior agitation. It is certain that there is, or was a difference between the American and European conception of liberty in that the American citizen conceived his liberty as bounded on all sides by duty, and circumscribed by respect for his neighbor's rights. "One of the great difficulties in maintaining popular selfgovernment," writes William Howard Taft in Some Impressions of 150,000 miles of Travel, (') "is in securing a sense of responsibility for the government that all people must feel if the government is to be a success." Freedom consists in the right to do what does not infringe upon those higher obligations each owes the state and the abuse of which would lead to its destruction and as a result to the loss of that protection necessary to ensure all law and order without which no liberty can exist. That is, the fundamental conception is based upon a (')

The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. LVII, no. 5 (May, 1930), p. 580.

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pessimistic view of human nature and man's natural imperialistic tendencies. Europeans conceive of freedom as freedom from all restraint ; they feel obsessed by the desire to show their independence on all occasions, not being used to it ; Ernest Seilliere, speaking of France, calls it essentially egoistic and envious ; they are exceedingly jealous of it, as Patrick Henry was ; the French wear their freedom as they do their clothes, with a good deal of individuality, but the American prefers, or preferred, that self-restraint and order without which freedom too easily becomes anarchy, Ernest Seilliere's attitude towards "100 % Americanism" is summed up in his remarks on our worship of material progress. Material progress assures man an increasing control over the forces he must master and direct, he writes in agreement with Lucien Romier. T h e mistake of certain intellectualists and moralists is to believe that one can separate spiritual strength from material progress, or to think it sufficient to dote upon a glorious past to remain master of the future. A l l the great centuries of intellectual history were also great economically and politically : the Renaissance with Florence and Venice ; Spain with American gold, Holland so rich from the seventeenth century on, and the French during the days of Sully, Richelieu and Colbert.

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This is Ernest Seilliere's opinion ; "I believe," he writes, "that America's future lies in a rational socialism, which will reduce the state to its true role of surveillance and control, legitimate place of society in the general activity of the human group. If America can avoid suffering the illusions of romantic naturism before arriving at this point, she will save much trouble and will keep without difficulty the advance which her moral formation as much as the natural richness of her resources have assured her." Here again the American differs from certain Europeans ; in America, material gain, as is seen in Mr. Feather's book, is associated with service ; in France the association of these two enthusiasms would often cause a smile and the devotion to money would tend to cause the corners of the mouth to turn down. As to the other moral crisis, novel and theatre, the calmness with which Americans support censorship seems a proof of their good will if not of their good inclinations. It is paradoxical. It certainly shows a lack of something so fundamentally necessary to life, one wonders how we shall muddle through, for a certain sign of a lack of virility is the fear that imposed and permitted the imposition of prohibition on the one hand, and on the other, the weakness that supports its non-enforcement. Fear, lack of self-reliance or lack of confidence in the people

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is the only excuse for such legislation, and it is a sorry confession of national weakness to make. The most serious reproach we have to make to his system is that it is too systematic, and that it fails to take into consideration sufficiently the fact that men are capable, as was Saint Francis, of loving the flowers and the birds and the grass he trod upon. It is just as difficult to follow him in his belief in man's moral perfectibility, for which it is as impossible to find scientific proof as for Rousseau's original goodness. When did man become man ? Exactly what was the change that took place ? Has he made any moral progress since ? Eden before the Fall or after the Fall ? What scientist will undertake to answer ? And where is the inventor of a model of moral perfection he can impose upon mankind ? If there has been evolution, it seems to have been away from authority, away from demagogy, systems, superstition. But who will say there were no freemen in prehistoric times ? Look at the sketches of animals discovered in the Grotte de Font de Gaume ; the artist's movement indicates a greater idea of freedom, a higher idea of morality than many of us have today. Consider some of the skulls of twenty-five thousand years ago ; they are of a certain nobility which is not common today. Real freedom,

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real morality, is an individual matter ; some are born with it, some arrive at it through an evolution, but an evolution which must take place in four score and ten years ; it cannot await the Messiah. The real interest Ernest Seilliere's doctrines have, so far as America is concerned, it seems to me, is their application to imperialism, individual and collective, in their analysis of other nations and the clearer analysis it permits us to make of ourselves. T h e crisis is less "moral" than "imperialistic" ; we are not so much in danger of lax morality due to our ideas of natural goodness as to a softening of the mind and a readiness to submit to those imperialists who would make us think ourselves too weak to use any judgement or discipline. And it will keep us from believing a wish sufficient for attaining an ideal, and an idea sufficient for maintaining peace.

10

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

NOTE

References have been reduced to a minimum. The reader is referred for a more complete bibliography to the latest volume published by Baron Seillière : 1830-1930, La Religion romantique et ses conquêtes, Paris, Champion, 1930. He may also consult Romanticism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1929, or J . M. L. Boudeau, Ernest Seillière, Paris, Emile Paul, 1925. The following is a list of abbreviated titles used ; they refer to the volumes set under the abbreviations, and are arranged in the order cited.

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FERDINAND LASSALLE.

Ferdinand Lassalle. Paris, Plön, 1897.

In-8.

MYSTIQUES DU NÉOROMANTISME.

Les Mystiques du néoromantisme, Marx, E. Rhode, Tolstoi, les pangermanistes. Paris, Pion, 1910. In-16.

ZOLA.

Emile Zola,Le Romantisme des naturalistes. Paris, Grasset, 1923. In-16.

G U Y O N ET FÉNELON.

Mme Guyon et Fénelon, précurseurs de Rousseau. Paris, F. Alcan, 1918. In-8.

H . S . CHAMBERLAIN.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, le phis récent philosophe du pangermanisme mystique. Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1918. In-16.

PHILOSOPHIE DE L'IMPÉRIALISME.

4 volumes in-8 published by Pion, Paris, 1903 to 1908. 1. Le Comte de Gobineau et VAryanisme historique, 1903. 2. Apollon ou Dionysos ? (Study of Nietzsche), 1905. 3. VImpérialisme démocratique, 1907. 4. Le Mal romantique, 1908.

VERS LE SOCIALISME.

Vers le socialisme rationnel. Aperçu d'une philosophie de l'histoire moderne. Paris, F. Alcan, 1923. In-8.

L A PENSÉE (OU L A PENSÉE D'ERNEST SEILLIERE).

La Pensée d'Ernest Seillière. Douze études par MM. Dominique, Lote, Baisse, Héritier, Lichtenberger, Lacroix, Viatte, Joussain, le Dr. Papillaut, Estève, Gillouin, Autin. Paris, 1923. In-18.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

149

ORIGINES.

Les Origines romanesques de la morale et de la politique romantiques. Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1920. In-16. PÉRIL MYSTIQUE.

Le Péril mystique dans Finspiration des démocraties contemporaines. Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1918. In-16. JEAN-JACQUES

ROUSSEAU

(or

ROUSSEAU).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris, In-16.

Garnier,

1921.

LES ÉTAPES.

Les Etapes du mysticisme passionnel. (Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, Byron.) Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1909. In-16. R.

GILLOUIN.

Une Nouvelle philosophie de Vhistoire moderne,par René Gillouin. Paris, Grasset, 1921. In-16. L A MORALE DE DUMAS FILS (or DUMAS).

L'Avènement du mysticisme passionnel au théâtre. Alex. Dumas fils. Paris, F. Alcan, 1921. In-16. GEORGE SAND.

George Sand, mystique de la passion, de la politique et de l'art. Paris, F. Alcan, 1920. In-i6. Du

QUIÉTISME.

Du quiétisme au socialisme romantique, Victor Hugo. Paris, Alcan, 1926. In-16. BALZAC.

Balzac et la morale romantique. Paris, Alcan, 1922. In-8. FLAUBERT.

Le Romantisme des réalistes, G. Flaubert. Paris, Pion, 1914. In-16.

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L E S GONCOURTS.

Les Goncourts moralistes. Paris, Revue critique, 1928. In-16.

La

Nouvelle

L E S PANGERMANISTES D'APRÈS GUERRE.

Les Pangermanistes d'après guerre. 1924. In-8.

Paris, Alcan,

MORALES ET RELIGIONS NOUVELLES.

Morales et religions nouvelles en Allemagne. Payot, 1927. In-8.

Paris,

L A SAGESSE DE DARMSTADT.

Le Néoromantisme en Allemagne, tome II. La Sagesse de Darmstadt. Paris, Alcan, 1929. In-16. BARBEY.

Barbey d'Aurevilly. LE

Paris, Bloud, 1910.

In-16.

Le Mal romantique (Stendhal, Fourier). Pion, 1908. In-8.

Paris,

MAL

ROMANTIQUE.

EDGAR QUINET.

Edgar Quinet et le mysticisme démocratique. Paris, Société d'Economie sociale, 1920. In-8. RELIGION.

1830-1930, La Religion romantique et ses conquêtes. Paris, Champion, 1930. In-8. POUR LE CENTENAIRE.

Pour le centenaire du romantisme, « Un Examen de conscience ». Paris, Champion, 1927. I11-8.

INDEX Adolphe, 76. Affaire Marambat, I', 80. d'Ago ult, Mme, 39. Alumbrados, 30. Amadour et Floride, 28, 29. d'Annunzio, Gabriel, 95. Arbois de Jubainville, 24 Atala, 63-66. d'Aulnoy, 31. Babbitt. Irving, 138. Babeuf. 103. Ballanche, 47. Balzac, 14, 21, 84, 85, 92. Barrii, 1. Basile. Mme, 48. Belleforest, François de, 29, 62. Bergson, Henri, 12. Bontempelli. M „ 94. Bossuet, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39. Boulainvilliers, 96. Bourget, Paul, 128. Brownell, W. C., 138. Calvinism, 136. Cambrai, M. de, 37. Campanella, 30. Catherine Fieschi, 30. Chamberlain, H. S., 95, 98. Chateaubriand, 46. Chevrillon, André, 128. Chrestien de Troyes, 26, 27. Clédat, 24. Clotilda, 18. Colet, Louise, 87. Comte, Auguste, 3. Conti. Prince de. 59-60. Coolidge, former President, 95. Dagoucin. 29.

Dame aux Camillas (La), 75. Daniel-Rops, 131. Dante, 27. Davenport, 59. Delphine, 61, 66-67. Divine Comedy, 28. Dominique, Pierre, 128. Dorgelès, Roland, 128. Duke of Burgundy, 37. Dumas fils, 61,74-79, 80-81. Faguet, 61. Feather, Mr., 143. Femme de Claude (La), 78. Fénelon, 21. 22. 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41. 43, 44, 46, 47, 54. Flaubert, 84, 87-89, 92. Foisset, 14. Ford, Henry, 138-140. Fourier, 21, 102-105. Francis Ist, 28. French Revolution, 109. Gillouin, René, 18, 19, 128, 131133. Girardin, Marquis de, 60. Gobineau, 95, 96-98. Goethe, 84. Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 84, 89-91. Gombervilie, 31, 47. Guinevere, 26, 27. Guyon, Mme, 22. 30, 32-47. Hamann, 84. Hannibal, 94. Hegel, 7. Heidelberg, I. Hemet, Father, 50.

152

INDEX

Hiver à Majorque, Un, 86. Horace, 80. 87. 117. Houdetot, M m e d', 57. Hugo. 21. 84, 86. 118-123. H u m e . 59. Hobbes, Thomas, 13, 14. Idées de Madame Aubray, Les, 77, 80. Imitation of Christ, The, 28. Indiana, 68, 69. Uriel. 94. Jamblicus, 24. Jean de la Croix, 30. Jenghiz Khan, 15. Kant, 84. Keith, 59. Klopstoclc, 84. Laborde, Marquis de, 1. La Calprenède, 31. Lacombe. 32, 33. 34. 35, 41. Lacordaire, 14. La Fayette, M m e de, 31. La Force, 31. Lambercier, 54. Lamennais, 113, 114, 118. Lancelot, 26-27. Lassalle, Ferdinand, 1-8. Lasserre, Pierre, 107. Lebrun, 76. Lefranc, A., 29. Lilia, 69. Lenormand, 130. Léonce de Mondoville, 79. LéoneLeoni, 71, 80. Leroux, Pierre, 113, 114, 118. Lettres au peuple, 117. Le Picart, Mother. 39. Lévinson, André, 94. Limousin, 25. Liszt. 85. Louis XIV, 37.

Maine de Biran, 47. Manfred, 61. Marco Polo, 15. Marguerite d'Angoulême, 28, 29, 62. Maria d'Agreda, 30. Martin. Jean, 30. Maughan, Somerset, 129-131. Marx, 7, 105. Meaux, M. de, 37. Mercier. Louis, 138. Michel de Bourges. 74. 86. 113. Michelet. 118. Mirabeau. 60. Molière, 52. Molinos, 30-33. Montemayor, George de, 30. Montlosier, 96. More. Paul Elmer, 138. Murât, 31. Musset, Alfred de. 69-74, 112. Nietzsche, 7-13. Noailles, 38. Olier, 30. Pagello. 70, 71. 72. Paris, Gaston, 24. Peyrou, du, 60. Petit Jehan de Saintré, Phœnicians, 94. Plato, 23, 26. Platonic erotics, 62. Plotinus. 24. Poincaré, 1. Poitou, 25. Proclus, 24. Proudhon, 105. Quinet, E., 108-112. Racine, 52. Renan, 24. René, 61, 63-66.

28.

INDEX Rhodes, C„ 95. 100. Ribot, Théodule, 128. Rome. 94. Romier, Lucien, 142. Rose et Blanche, 67. Rousseau, 4. 5, 21, 22, 23, 31. 32. 39. 44. 46. 47, 48, 49. 50, 51, 52, 54. 54, 55, 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. Russia, 7. Sandeau, Jules, 67, 70. Saint-Aignan, Mme de, 40. Saint Cyran, 13. Saint François de Sales, 30. Saint Lambert, 57. Saint-Mihiel, I. Saint-Preux, 29, 61. 62-63, 75. Saint-Simon, 86. 103. Saint Sorlin, 30. Sand, George. 39, 47, 61, 63, 6774. 76, 80. 81. 84, 85-87, 112-

118.

Sannazaro, 30. Schiller, 84. Schopenhauer, 84. Scudéry, 31. Sept cordes Je la lyre. La, 85. Seurre, de, 30. Siegfried, A.. 141. Simon, 112. Solar, 48.

»S3

Sorel. Georges. 103, 107-108. Spiridion, 114, 115. Stael, Mme de, 67. Standhai. 84. Sydney, 31. Sturm and Drang, 84. Taft, William Howard, 141. Taine, 7. Tasso, 31. Theresa of Avila, 30. Thierry. A.. 95. Tour de France, La, 87. Tolstoi. 125-127. Triitan and Iseull, 24. Tronson, 38. Urfi, 31. Valentine, 68, 69. Venus, 23. Vercellis, Countess of, 48, 49. Voltaire, 58. Wagner, Richard, 97. Warens, Mme de, 46, 47, 48. 50. Webster. 19. Wharton, Edith, 134. Woltmann, Dr. Ludwig, 99. Zola, 14-21, 91-93, 123-125.

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