A new edition of Bayle in France is an event in literary history which
could not have been easily predicted. Every work which creates an epoch
in literature is one of the great monuments of the human mind; and Bayle
may be considered as the father of literary curiosity, and of modern
literature. Much has been alleged against our author: yet let us be
careful to preserve what is precious. Bayle is the inventor of a work
which dignified a collection of facts constituting his text, by the
argumentative powers and the copious illustrations which charm us in his
diversified commentary. Conducting the humble pursuits of an Aulus
Gellius and an Athenæus with a high spirit, he showed us the _philosophy
of Books_, and communicated to such limited researches a value which
they had otherwise not possessed.
This was introducing a study perfectly distinct from what is
pre-eminently distinguished as "classical learning," and the subjects
which had usually entered into philological pursuits. Ancient
literature, from century to century, had constituted the sole labours of
the learned; and "variæ lectiones" were long their pride and their
reward. Latin was the literary language of Europe. The vernacular idiom
in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered
to read Italian books, their native productions. Varchi tells a curious
anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where he was kept on bread
and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading Italian
books! Dante was reproached by the Italians for composing in his
mother-tongue, still expressed by the degrading designation of _il
volgare_, which the "resolute" John Florio renders "to make common;" and
to translate was contemptuously called _volgarizzare_. Petrarch rested
his fame on his Latin poetry, and called his Italian _nugellas
vulgares_! With us Roger Ascham was the first who boldly avowed "_To
speak as the common people_, to think as wise men;" yet, so late as the
time of Bacon, this great man did not consider his "Moral Essays" as
likely to last in the moveable sands of a modern language, for he has
anxiously had them sculptured in the marble of ancient Rome. Yet what
had the great ancients themselves done, but trusted to their own
_volgare_? The Greeks, the finest and most original writers of the
ancients, observes Adam Ferguson, "were unacquainted with every language
but their own; and if they became learned, it was only by studying what
they themselves had produced."
During fourteen centuries, whatever lay out of the pale of classical
learning was condemned as barbarism; in the meanwhile, however, amidst
this barbarism, another literature was insensibly creating itself in
Europe. Every people, in the gradual accessions of their vernacular
genius, discovered a new sort of knowledge, one which more deeply
interested their feelings and the times, reflecting the image, not of
the Greeks and the Latins, but of themselves! A spirit of inquiry,
originating in events which had never reached the ancient world, and the
same refined taste in the arts of composition caught from the models of
antiquity, at length raised up rivals, who competed with the great
ancients themselves; and modern literature now occupies a space which
appears as immensity, compared with the narrow and the imperfect limits
of the ancient. A complete collection of classical works, all the bees
of antiquity, may be hived in a glass-case; but those we should find
only the milk and honey of our youth; to obtain the substantial
nourishment of European knowledge, a library of ten thousand volumes
will not avail nor satisfy our inquiries, nor supply our researches
even on a single topic!
Let not, however, the votaries of ancient literature dread its neglect,
nor be over-jealous of their younger and Gothic sister. The existence of
their favourite study is secured, as well by its own imperishable
claims, as by the stationary institutions of Europe. But one of those
silent revolutions in the intellectual history of mankind, which are not
so obvious as those in their political state, seems now fully
accomplished. The very term "classical," so long limited to the ancient
authors, is now equally applicable to the most elegant writers of every
literary people; and although Latin and Greek were long characterised as
"the learned languages," yet we cannot in truth any longer concede that
those are the most learned who are "inter Græcos Græcissimi, inter
Latinos Latinissimi," any more than we can reject from the class of "the
learned," those great writers, whose scholarship in the ancient classics
may he very indifferent. The modern languages now have also become
learned ones, when he who writes in them is imbued with their respective
learning. He is a "learned" writer who has embraced most knowledge on
the particular subject of his investigation, as he is a "classical" one
who composes with the greatest elegance. Sir David Dalrymple dedicates
his "Memorials relating to the History of Britain" to the Earl of
Hardwicke, whom he styles, with equal happiness and propriety, "Learned
in British History." "Scholarship" has hitherto been a term reserved for
the adept in ancient literature, whatever may be the mediocrity of his
intellect; but the honourable distinction must be extended to all great
writers in modern literature, if we would not confound the natural sense
and propriety of things.
Modern literature may, perhaps, still be discriminated from the ancient,
by a term it began to be called by at the Reformation, that of "the New
Learning." Without supplanting the ancient, the modern must grow up with
it; the farther we advance in society, it will more deeply occupy our
interests; and it has already proved what Bacon, casting his
philosophical views retrospectively and prospectively, has observed,
"that Time is the greatest of innovators."
When Bayle projected his "Critical Dictionary," he probably had no idea
that he was about effecting a revolution in our libraries, and founding
a new province in the dominion of human knowledge; creative genius
often is itself the creature of its own age: it is but that reaction of
public opinion, which is generally the forerunner of some critical
change, or which calls forth some want which sooner or later will be
supplied. The predisposition for the various but neglected literature,
and the curious but the scattered knowledge of the moderns, which had
long been increasing, with the speculative turn of inquiry, prevailed in
Europe when Bayle took his pen to give the thing itself a name and an
existence. But the great authors of modern Europe were not consecrated
beings, like the ancients, and their volumes were not read from the
chairs of universities; yet the new interests which had arisen in
society, the new modes of human life, the new spread of knowledge, the
curiosity after even the little things which concern us, the revelations
of secret history, and the state-papers which have sometimes escaped
from national archives, the philosophical spirit which was hastening its
steps and raising up new systems of thinking; all alike required
research and criticism, inquiry and discussion. Bayle had first studied
his own age before he gave the public his great work.
"If Bayle," says Gibbon, "wrote his Dictionary to empty the various
collections he had made, without any particular design, he could not
have chosen a better plan. It permitted him everything, and obliged him
to nothing. By the double freedom of a dictionary and of notes, he could
pitch on what articles he pleased, and say what he pleased in those
articles."
"_Jacta est alea!_" exclaimed Bayle, on the publication of his
Dictionary, as yet dubious of the extraordinary enterprise; perhaps,
while going on with the work, he knew not at times whither he was
directing his course; but we must think that in his own mind he counted
on something which might have been difficult even for Bayle himself to
have developed. The author of the "Critical Dictionary" had produced a
voluminous labour, which, to all appearance, could only rank him among
compilers and reviewers, for his work is formed of such materials as
they might use. He had never studied any science; he confessed that he
could never demonstrate the first problem in Euclid, and to his last day
ridiculed that sort of evidence called mathematical demonstration. He
had but little taste for classical learning, for he quotes the Latin
writers curiously, not elegantly; and there is reason to suspect that
he had entirely neglected the Greek. Even the erudition of antiquity
usually reached him by the ready medium of some German commentator. His
multifarious reading was chiefly confined to the writers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With such deficiencies in his
literary character, Bayle could not reasonably expect to obtain
pre-eminence in any single pursuit. Hitherto his writings had not
extricated him from the secondary ranks of literature, where he found a
rival at every step; and without his great work, the name of Bayle at
this moment had been buried among his controversialists, the rabid
Jurieu, the cloudy Jacquelot, and the envious Le Clerc; to these,
indeed, he sacrificed too many of his valuable days, and was still
answering them at the hour of his death. Such was the cloudy horizon of
that bright fame which was to rise over Europe! Bayle, intent on
escaping from all beaten tracks, while the very materials he used
promised no novelty, for all his knowledge was drawn from old books,
opened an eccentric route, where at least he could encounter no
parallel; Bayle felt that if he could not stand alone, he would only
have been an equal by the side of another. Experience had more than once
taught this mortifying lesson; but he was blest with the genius which
could stamp an inimitable originality on a folio.
This originality seems to have been obtained in this manner. The
exhausted topics of classical literature he resigned as a province not
adapted to an ambitious genius; sciences he rarely touched on, and
hardly ever without betraying superficial knowledge, and involving
himself in absurdity: but in the history of men, in penetrating the
motives of their conduct, in clearing up obscure circumstances, in
detecting the strong and the weak parts of him whom he was trying, and
in the cross-examination of the numerous witnesses he summoned, he
assumed at once the judge and the advocate! Books are for him pictures
of men's inventions, and the histories of their thoughts; any book,
whatever be its quality, must be considered as an experiment of the
human mind.
In controversies, in which he was so ambidextrous--in the progress of
the human mind, in which he was so philosophical--furnished, too, by his
hoarding curiosity with an immense accumulation, of details,--skilful in
the art of detecting falsehoods amidst truths, and weighing probability
against uncertainty--holding together the chain of argument from its
first principles to its remotest consequence--Bayle stands among those
masters of the human intellect who taught us to think, and also to
unthink! All, indeed, is a collection of researches and of reasonings:
he had the art of melting down his curious quotations with his own
subtile ideas. He collects everything; if truths, they enter into his
history; if fictions, into discussions; he places the secret by the side
of the public story; opinion is balanced against opinion: if his
arguments grow tedious, a lucky anecdote or an enlivening tale relieves
the folio page; and knowing the infirmity of our nature, he picks up
trivial things to amuse us, while he is grasping the most abstract and
ponderous. Human nature in her shifting scenery, and the human mind in
its eccentric directions, open on his view; so that an unknown person,
or a worthless book, are equally objects for his speculation with the
most eminent--they alike curiously instruct. Such were the materials,
and such the genius of the man, whose folios, which seem destined for
the retired few, lie open on our parlour tables. The men of genius of
his age studied them for instruction, the men of the world for their
amusement. Amidst the mass of facts which he has collected, and the
enlarged views of human nature which his philosophical spirit has
combined with his researches, Bayle may be called the Shakspeare of
dictionary makers; a sort of chimerical being, whose existence was not
imagined to be possible before the time of Bayle.
But his errors are voluminous as his genius! and what do apologies
avail? Apologies only account for the evil which they cannot alter!
Bayle is reproached for carrying his speculations too far into the wilds
of scepticism--he wrote in distempered times; he was witnessing the
_dragonades_ and the _révocations_ of the Romish church; and he lived
amidst the Reformed, or the French prophets, as we called them when they
came over to us, and in whom Sir Isaac Newton more than half believed.
These testify that they had heard angels singing in the air, while our
philosopher was convinced that he was living among men for whom no angel
would sing! Bayle had left persecutors to fly to fanatics, both equally
appealing to the Gospel, but alike untouched by its blessedness! His
impurities were a taste inherited from his favourite old writers, whose
_naïveté_ seemed to sport with the grossness which it touched, and
neither in France nor at home had the age then attained to our moral
delicacy: Bayle himself was a man without passions! His trivial matters
were an author's compliance with his bookseller's taste, which is always
that of the public. His scepticism is said to have thrown everything
into disorder. Is it a more positive evil to doubt than to dogmatise?
Even Aristotle often pauses with a qualified _perhaps_, and the egotist
Cicero with a modest _it seems to me_. Bayle's scepticism has been
useful in history, and has often shown how facts universally believed
are doubtful, and sometimes must be false. Bayle, it is said, is
perpetually contradicting himself; but a sceptic must doubt his doubts;
he places the antidote close to the poison, and lays the sheath by the
sword. Bayle has himself described one of those self-tormenting and
many-headed sceptics by a very noble figure, "He was a hydra who was
perpetually tearing himself."
The time has now come when Bayle may instruct without danger. We have
passed the ordeals he had to go through; we must now consider him as the
historian of our thoughts as well as of our actions; he dispenses the
literary stores of the moderns, in that vast repository of their wisdom
and their follies, which, by its originality of design, has made him an
author common to all Europe. Nowhere shall we find a rival for Bayle!
and hardly even an imitator! He compared himself, for his power of
raising up, or dispelling objections and doubts, to "the
cloud-compelling Jove." The great Leibnitz, who was himself a lover of
his _varia eruditio_, applied a line of Virgil to Bayle, characterising
his luminous and elevated genius:--
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.
Beneath his feet he views the clouds and stars!