"M. Helvétius, in his youth," says Chamfort, "was as handsome as love
itself. One evening, as he was seated very peacefully before an open
fire, at the side of Mile. Gaussin, a renowned financier came and
whispered into this actress's ear, loud enough for Helvétius to hear:
'Mademoiselle, would it be agreeable to you to accept six hundred louis
in exchange for a few favors?'--'Monsieur,' she replied, loud enough to
be heard by Helvétius, and pointing to him at the same time, 'I'll give
you two hundred of them if you will kindly call on me tomorrow morning
with that fellow over there.'"
Helvétius was not content with being very handsome. He was also
exceedingly wise, very rich, and very happy. No mortal, perhaps,
received so many gifts from the gods, the rarest of which was Mme.
Helvétius, one of the most charming and gifted women of the eighteenth
century. Like her husband, she was very beautiful,--so beautiful that
persons paused, struck with admiration, to look at her. There is, in
this connection,--quoting again from Chamfort, a very pretty anecdote:
"M. de Fontenelle, aged ninety-seven, having just uttered to Mme.
Helvétius, young, beautiful and newly wed, a thousand amiable and
gallant remarks, passed by her to take his place at table, without
raising his eyes to her. 'You can see,' said Mme. Helvétius, 'how much
stock I may take in your compliments; you pass me by without so much as
looking at me.' 'Madame,' replied the old man, 'if I had looked at you,
I would not have passed by.'"
Happiness is often egotistical. It is even a question whether a
certain egotism is not necessary to the acquirement of a certain
happiness. Helvétius gave a peremptory denial to these sorry notions.
Happy himself, he had but one passion: the happiness of humanity. He
noticed, in his observation of mankind, that the natural desire to
be happy, which each of us bears within, is opposed by a thousand
prejudices, the most terrible of which are the religious prejudices,
and he determined to combat them with all his strength. M. Albert Keim,
who knows Helvétius better than any other man in France, has just
republished certain notes written in the philosopher's hand; the first
of which runs thus:
"Prejudices. They are to the mind what ministers are to monarchs. The
latter prevent their rivals from approaching the king, and in the same
way prejudices prevent truths from reaching the mind, for fear of
losing the power they usurp over it."
One of the most widespread prejudices is that which considers
it impossible to attain happiness; as that does not prevent us
from desiring it, such an idea corrupts life and often renders it
unbearable. Priests have believed that they could remedy this by
inventing a second life, where the person who has consented to be
quite unhappy in the first will find at last a sort of equivocal
happiness, little calculated to tempt one of intelligence. The
people, nevertheless, snap at this bait and accept, in view of future
recompense, the direst tribulations of the present life. Thus a
frightful slavery is perpetuated, for it is very evident that all
this is nothing but a hoax and an imposition. Whoever wishes to taste
happiness, if this word stands for anything more than a dream, should
set about it in this life, since the other one is but a chimera,
lucrative for the clergy alone. But how be happy? Through virtue? Very
well, what is virtue?
"Virtue," replies Helvétius, "is only the wisdom which harmonizes
passion with reason and pleasure with duty."
He assigns a large place in life to pleasures and passions; but he
does not consider them only as elements of happiness; he makes of them
sources of activity. Man instinctively seeks pleasure. When he has
experienced it, and later loses it, he will work with all his might
to win it anew. All forms of pleasure, then, are easily reconcilable
to virtue. Who knows whether pleasure taken in wise moderation is not
virtue itself? And he dares to write this maxim, which will perhaps
frighten some: _One is never guilty when one is happy._ Helvétius, who
was a very gentle and kind person, is often, in his writings, rashly
bold. His intimate notes are violent, impassioned, even brutal. He
speaks in them of love with magnificent frankness, and one readily
divines that it is chiefly in the exercise of this amiable virtue that
he found happiness.
I am not at all writing here a study of Helvétius, one of the most
skilful demolishers of the ancient regime; I am running through a
portfolio of private notes, printed at first in a few copies, and the
reading of which will reveal at once an ingenious philosopher and the
most spirited of poets. He is, on the subject of love, inexhaustible;
he is in turn tender, subtle, passionate, raving. His delirious attacks
are of a beautiful candor; the majority of his thoughts are charming
and most seductive: "Each moment of pleasure is a gift of the gods."
This verse, which would be greatly admired and celebrated if it had
been found in André Chenier,--does it truly come from the pen of
Helvétius? This is what M. Albert Keim asks himself. That is a query
to propound to the erudite spirits of _l'Intermédiaire_, who have read
all the old authors; in the meantime I consider it as being highly
characteristic of the philosophy and the poetry of the author of
_Bonheur_ (Happiness). One can imagine nothing more pagan, more gently
anti-Christian. And anti-Christianism is the real basis of Helvétius'
philosophy. He oversteps the bounds a trifle when he adds: "Pleasure
is the sole occupation of life." The ardor of this young man is
excessive. He himself will soon learn and declare that life has other
employments, such, for example, as composing a philosophy.
His second motto will be: "Minerva and Venus in turn," which is
wisdom itself; he will devote himself to plucking at once "the fruits
of reason and the fruits of pleasure." He is forever recurring to
voluptuousness, whose images pursue him: "Who takes all pleasures takes
very few of them." Love to him is the most noble of passions because it
is the fecund passion and mother of life. This is what makes him say:
"It is not, moreover, without a certain secret melancholy," for, he
avers, "The flower that one plucks is ready to wither."
Do you wish to see him in his rôle of a serious philosopher? He will
say, as if he foresaw the war against science, in which, in our own
days, we have seen the Veuillots and the Brunetières distinguish
themselves: "There are things over which the veil of skepticism should
be spread; but, in the matter of science, it would be necessary, in
order to win the right of skepticism, to know all that the human mind
may learn: then one might permit himself to declare that science is
nothing." Like the modern positivists, like Renan, remarks M. Keim,
Helvétius had the greatest confidence in science. He is forever
celebrating the triumphs of human intelligence. He believes in
progress, in the transformation of society by the scientific mind. Thus
he launched a powerful attack against Rousseau's thesis upon the ills
of civilization. Yet at times one notes in him a little discouragement,
and he will confess: "Almost all philosophical views are worthless. Not
that they are not excellent, but because there are too few persons who
can understand them."
The number of persons who can understand Helvétius has greatly
increased, and besides, it is not so difficult as he believed; all one
needs is a little common sense. It is a good sign of our intellectual
health that Helvétius is coming back into fashion. Tomorrow it will
be d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Tracy, the master of Stendhal,--all those
eighteenth-century philosophers who are so clear, so simple, so human.
The absurd German metaphysics has annihilated them for sixty years,
but it seems that the day of their revenge has come. The dry notion of
abstract duty according to Kant has outlived its day. It is beginning
to be understood that man's first duty is to be happy. Otherwise, what
is the use of living?