Part 12 (1/2)
2.
Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard into his life and works enable us to appreciate him. If it is an overstatement to say that his soul reflected in miniature the very soul of his age, [Footnote: L. Beclard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie, son oeuvre, son temps (1903), p. vii.] he was a.s.suredly one of its characteristic products. He reminds us in some ways of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, who was one of his heroes. All his activities were urged by the dream of a humanity regenerated by reason, all his energy devoted to bringing about its accomplishment. Saint-Pierre's idea of perpetual peace inspired an early essay on the scourge of war.
The theories of Rousseau exercised at first an irresistible attraction, but modern civilisation had too strong a hold on him; he was too Parisian in temper to acquiesce for long in the doctrine of Arcadianism.
He composed a book on The Savage to ill.u.s.trate the text that the true standard of morality is the heart of primitive man, and to prove that the best thing we could do is to return to the forest; but in the process of writing it he seems to have come to the conclusion that the whole doctrine was fallacious. [Footnote: Mercier's early essay: Des malheurs de la guerre et des avantages de la paix (1766). On the savage: L'homme sauvage (1767). For the opposite thesis see the Songes philosophiques (1768). He describes a state of perfect happiness in a planet where beings live in perpetual contemplation of the infinite.
He appreciates the work of philosophers from Socrates to Leibnitz, and describes Rousseau as standing before the swelling stream, but cursing it. It may be suspected that the writings of Leibnitz had much to do with Mercier's conversion.] The transformation of his opinions was the work of a few months. He then came forward with the opposite thesis that all events have been ordered for man's felicity, and he began to work on an imaginary picture of the state to which man might find his way within seven hundred years.
L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote: The author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German translation, by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The English version, by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new edition in 1802; the translator changed the t.i.tle to Memoirs of the year Two thousand five hundred.] Its circulation in France was rigorously forbidden, because it implied a merciless criticism of the administration. It was reprinted in London and Neuchatel, and translated into English and German.
3.
As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of Leibnitz that ”the present is pregnant of the future.” Thus the phase of civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome of the natural and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D. 2440 in which a man born in the eighteenth century who has slept an enchanted sleep awakes to find himself, is composed of nations who live in a family concord rarely interrupted by war. But of the world at large we hear little; the imagination of Mercier is concentrated on France, and particularly Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that slavery has been abolished; that the rivalry of France and England has been replaced by an indestructible alliance; that the Pope, whose authority is still august, has renounced his errors and returned to the customs of the primitive Church; that French plays are performed in China. The changes in Paris are a sufficient index of the general transformation.
The const.i.tution of France is still monarchical. Its population has increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same. Paris has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary arrangements have been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and every provision has been made for the public safety. Private hospitality is so large that inns have disappeared, but luxury at table is considered a revolting crime.
Tea, coffee, and tobacco are no longer imported. [Footnote: In the first edition of the book commerce was abolished.] There is no system of credit; everything is paid for in ready money, and this practice has led to a remarkable simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only through mutual inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is governed by the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit, to the promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish are taught in schools, but the study of the cla.s.sical languages has disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is neglected and discouraged, for it is ”the disgrace of humanity, every page being crowded with crimes and follies.” Theatres are government inst.i.tutions, and have become the public schools of civic duties and morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out his programme of composing and adapting plays for instruction and edification. His theory of the true functions of the theatre he explained in a special treatise, Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur l'art dramatique (1773).]
The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained perpetual repet.i.tions of the same thing. A small closet in the public library sufficed to hold the ancient books which were permitted to escape the conflagration, and the majority of these were English. The writings of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed next those of Fenelon. ”His pen was weak, but his heart was sublime. Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities.”
The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely abolished. There is no preventive censors.h.i.+p to hinder publication, but there are censors. There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are admonitions. And if any one publishes a book defending principles which are considered dangerous, he is obliged to go about in a black mask.
There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does not believe in G.o.d. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put through a course of experimental physics. If he remained obdurate in his rejection of a ”palpable and salutary truth,” the nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders.
Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As there are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor work-men employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few daily hours of labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors inquire into men's capacities, a.s.sign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.
These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for ”where can the perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical arts and chemistry?” But in his scanty prophecies of what science might effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific discoveries might trans.m.u.te social conditions. The world of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow for the strength of human pa.s.sions and interests, and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the reformers acclaimed and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value of the principle. They did not see that in a society organised and governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the ”vile” Aristophanes, whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.
4.
That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would a.s.suredly have rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages would be arranged in ”the year 2000,” by which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of ”our well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII.” It was the Revolution that converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and t.i.tle of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an 2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.
The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution, [Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English translation ran to a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.
Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and cla.s.sical antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man's destinies from the point of view of a student of the revolutions of empires.
The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of Palmyra.
”Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and empires vanish away... Who can a.s.sure us that desolation like this will not one day be the lot of our own country?” Some traveller like himself will sit by the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins, and weep for a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name. Has a mysterious Deity p.r.o.nounced a secret malediction against the earth?
In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who unveils the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due to themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he has only to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the causes of his evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are self-love, desire of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the simple and prolific principles of everything that happens in the moral world. Man is the artificer of his own fate. He may lament his weakness and folly; but ”he has perhaps still more reason to be confident in his energies when he recollects from what point he has set out and to what heights he has been capable of elevating himself.”
The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the ancient Egyptian and a.s.syrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to infer from their superficial splendour that the inhabitants generally were wise or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe perfection to past epochs is merely ”the discoloration of his chagrin.” The race is not degenerating; its misfortunes are due to ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love.
Two princ.i.p.al obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of transmitting ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them rapidly from man to man. These have been removed by the invention of printing. The press is ”a memorable gift of celestial genius.” In time all men will come to understand the principles of individual happiness and public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars, disputes will be decided by arbitration, and ”the whole species will become one great society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable.” The accomplishment of this will be a slow process, since the same leaven will have to a.s.similate an enormous ma.s.s of heterogeneous elements, but its operation will be effectual.
Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward the west, ”The cry of liberty uttered on the farther sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic has reached to the old continent.” A prodigious movement is then visible to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the Mediterranean; tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code of laws is drafted on the principles of equality, liberty, and justice. The liberated nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants, but her legislators propose to the other peoples to hold a general a.s.sembly, representing the whole world, and weigh every religious system in the balance. The proceedings of this congress follow, and the book breaks off incomplete.
It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the earth, it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It made no contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly helped to popularise it.
CHAPTER XI. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET
I.