achieve glory by means of philosophy--fame and sport, it is said, were
the only passions he had. He spent the whole morning writing and
thinking. In composition he had neither the hot haste of Diderot nor the
glittering inspiration of Voltaire. He wrote indeed painfully and
laboriously--as the author born writes when he is weary and
disinclined--as a man always writes whom nature has intended for another
occupation. Sometimes one of the incompetent secretaries had to wait for
hours with his pen in his hand, while his master wrestled with the
refractory thought in his brain, or waited for the inspired phrase to
come down from on high. His wife had not much sympathy with his
philosophies. The philosophers talked so much, and as yet had done so
little! But in everything else she was entirely at one with her husband.
It would be absurd to pretend that before the Revolution there were no
noblemen in France who did their duty by their country estates and
tenants, who looked after the poor on their lands, and, so far as they
could, realised and acted up to the responsibilities of their position.
There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be,
because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring. But that the
conscientious landowner was then a rare and surprising phenomenon is
proved by the fact that when Helvétius and his wife began to devote
themselves to acts of benevolence, everyone turned and stared at them.
To-day, indeed, Helvétius might not be counted extraordinarily
charitable. But it is not by modern standards he can be fairly judged.
Compare him with the immense majority of the great financial magnates of
his day and country, and he stands proven a philanthropist indeed.
When he first bought Voré, he had given a M. de Vasconcelles, a poor
gentleman who owed the estate a large sum, a receipt for the whole,
putting it into his hands saying, ‘Take this paper to keep my people
from bothering you;’ and he further settled a handsome gift of money on
him, to help him to educate his family. One of his next actions was to
bring a good doctor to the place, establish him on it, and himself pay
for the medical services thus rendered the peasants. Daily he and
Minette visited the poor, accompanied by this doctor and a Sister of
Mercy. He also set up in the place a stocking manufactory--and so,
perhaps, supplied an idea to Voltaire. He encouraged and helped the
farmers to farm their land; acted as unpaid judge in their disputes; and
in hard times let them off their debts. There are a dozen stories of the
private individuals he helped. One day, it is a ruined Jesuit priest,
who has abused his confidence and kindness. Helvétius finds one of the
Jesuit’s friends, and gives him fifty louis for his old enemy. ‘Do not
say it comes from me--he has injured me, and he would feel humiliated at
receiving a gift from me.’ Could delicacy go further?
Another day, when he was driving, a woodman leading a horse and cart was
irritatingly slow in getting out of the way of the carriage. Helvétius
lost his patience. ‘All right,’ said the man, ‘I am a _coquin_ and you
are an honest man, I suppose, because I am on foot and you are in a
carriage.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ says Helvétius, with his fine instincts
instantly awake, ‘you have given me an excellent lesson, for which I
ought to pay;’ and he gave the man a sum which, though handsome, was
less generous than the apology.
When famine came to Voré, Helvétius’ deep purse and wise judgment were
both to the fore. Did the man accomplish less good because, though his
heart was kind, it was not warm; because, though he relieved suffering,
there was that in his temperament which saved him from suffering with
it? If the philanthropist must have either a cool head or a hot heart,
better the cool head a thousand times. He will do much less harm.
Many of Helvétius’ charities were performed through his valet, whom he
bade say nothing about them, even after his death. Sometimes he
concealed from his wife, and she concealed from him, the good deeds of
which each had been guilty.
A peasant had been imprisoned for poaching on Helvétius’ grounds, and
his gun confiscated. Helvétius went to him, bought back his gun, paid
his fine, and had him set free, begging his silence because Minette had
warned him to be severe with the man as he deserved. That warning
troubled her generous heart. She too went to the culprit, gave him money
to pay his fine and repurchase his gun, and vowed him to secrecy.
Whether the peasant kept the secrets (as well as the price of two fines
and two guns), and husband and wife confessed to each other, history
does not relate.
There is, indeed, a reverse side to Helvétius’ character as enlightened
landowner. Carlyle, in his ‘Essay on Diderot,’ quotes Diderot’s ‘Voyage
à Bourbonne,’ in which the ex-Farmer-General is portrayed as a cruelly
strict preserver, living in the midst of peasants who broke his windows,
plundered his garden, tore up his palings, and hated him so savagely
that he dared not go out shooting save with an armed escort of
four-and-twenty keepers. Diderot added that Helvétius had swept away a
little village of huts which the poor people had built on the fringe of
his preserves; that the good philosopher was a coward, and the
unhappiest of men. But it must be remembered that Diderot did not speak
from first-hand observation, but drew, and said he drew, all his
information from a Madame de Nocé, a neighbour of Helvétius. Now happy,
unsociable people like Helvétius and his wife are not likely to be
popular in a limited country society, which would expect much from them,
and get practically nothing. Saint-Lambert and Marmontel both speak of
Helvétius’ liberality, generosity, and unostentatious benevolence.
Morellet, who was his closest intimate for many years, adds like
testimony, and especially mentions his mercy to poachers. One story
illustrating it has been told. Another runs that Helvétius found a man
poaching under the very windows of his house, and at first naturally
inclined to wrath, curbed himself: ‘If you wanted game, why did you not
ask me? I would have given it to you.’
Perhaps the truth of the whole matter lies in that anecdote. The keen
sportsman and preserver did sometimes lose his temper and forget his
compassion: his better self soon recalled it, and that rare disposition
of humility and love for his fellows hastened to make amends.
In 1755, the book to which he had devoted those long, laborious mornings
at Voré (by which I must certainly achieve glory, if I am to achieve it
at all!) was finished at last. It was to be called ‘De l’Esprit’--not to
be translated ‘Wit,’ as Croker translated it, but something much more
serious--‘On the Mind.’
It set out to prove a new theory of human action, and a new system of
morality. Virtue and vice? There are no such things. Self-interest,
rightly understood, is the explanation of the one, and self-interest,
misunderstood, of the other. Selfishness and the passions are the sole
mainsprings of our deeds. So far from character being destiny, as
Novalis is to declare, destiny is in all cases character. Everybody is
the creature of his environment and his education. Free Will? What free
will to be an honest man has the child of thieves, brought up to thieve
in a slum? Change his condition, and you change him. Leave him, and he
will steal as certainly as fire burns and the waves beat on the shore.
As for the vaunted superiority of the human intelligence over the
brutes, ‘an accident of physical organisation’ can account for that. We
are _as_ the brutes, only a little better, and the difference is wholly
of degree, not of kind.
Put these theories, with their showy falsehood and their substratum of
truth, on the library table of any clever man, and get him to do his
best to prove them by sophistry and ingenuity, by trick, by subterfuge,
by illustration--somehow, anyhow, so that he prove them to the hilt--and
the result will be pretty well what Helvétius made it. There was
scarcely a good story, or a bad one, he had heard in his early gay life
in Paris that he did not bring in, by hook or by crook, to point and
enliven his paradox. Madame de Graffigny told Bettinelli that nearly all
the notes were the ‘sweepings’ of her _salon_.
‘On the Mind’ is entertaining or nothing--difficulties presented solely
that they may be wittily demolished--easy, inaccurate, trifling; a style
‘insinuating and caressing ... made for light minds, young people and
women,’ says Damiron; a book which fashion might skip at its toilette,
and then, on the strength of remembering two or three of its dubious
anecdotes, claim a complete knowledge of its _bizarre_ philosophy. For
it was but a _bizarrerie_--a _jeu d’esprit_--and Helvétius knew it. He
was merely concerned to see how far his impossible theories could be
made plausible, and wrote them to catch the public ear, and turn their
author into the lion and darling of the season.
When the thing was ready he took it to Tercier, the censor, who passed
it, suggesting only the omission of a few too complimentary references
to free-thinking Hume. Helvétius cut them out. Malesherbes, during its
printing, observed uneasily that the book contained ‘some very strong
things’--insolent remarks, for instance, on that dear, crusted old
despotism under which we all live, and certainly a suggestion that any
means to overthrow tyranny are permissible. But, all the same, in May
1758 it received its privilege. Majesty was graciously pleased to accept
a copy from the author, our _maître d’hôtel_. It was already in the
hands of the philosophers. And everybody began to read.
It would not have been wonderful, if the theories had had a little more
_vraisemblance_, that most people, particularly people who had devoted
their lives and their fortunes to others, who had laboured in poverty
that other men might be free and rich, should object to see their
self-denial set down as self-interest, and to be informed that the
highest aspiration of their soul was really nothing but a morbid
condition of the body. But, considering their manifest absurdity, it is
wonderful that these assertions were taken seriously.
Madame du Deffand, indeed, might naturally say that in making
self-interest the mainspring of conduct, Helvétius had revealed
everybody’s secret. He had so certainly discovered hers. But Turgot,
whose life was to do good, had better have laughed at an absurdity than
have risen up to condemn it as ‘philosophy without logic, literature
without taste, and morality without goodness.’ A Condorcet, whose long
devotion to duty was rewarded only with ruin and death, need not have
troubled to loathe it. Rousseau immediately sat down to refute it: some
of the most inspired pages of his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ still glow with the
hatred with which it inspired him. Grimm wisely only pooh-poohed it.
Voltaire grumbled that his pupil had promised a book on the Mind, and
presented a treatise on Matter; that he had ‘put friendship among the
bad passions,’ and, much worse than all, has actually compared
_me_--ME--to two such feeble, second-rate luminaries as Crébillon and
Fontenelle! No wonder that he found the title, ‘De l’Esprit,’ equivocal,
the matter unmethodical, all the new things false and all the old ones
truisms.
For a very short time, however, approved or disapproved, taken as folly
or mistaken for reason, the book went its way gaily. It bade fair to
become what Helvétius had meant it to be--the success of a season. But
for the besotted stupidity of the Government, it never would have been
anything else.
One unlucky day the Dauphin, who was more virtuous than wise, came out
of his room with a copy in his hand and fury in his face. ‘I am going to
show the Queen the sort of thing her _maître d’hôtel_ prints.’
On August 10, 1758, the privilege for its publication was revoked.
Tercier was deprived of his office. ‘On the Mind’ was furiously attacked
in the religious papers. The _avocat général_, Fleury, pronounced it ‘an
abridgment of the Encyclopædia.’ The Archbishop of Paris declared it
struck at the roots of Christianity. At Court, Helvétius was all at once
‘regarded as a child of perdition, and the Queen pitied his mother as if
she had produced Anti-Christ.’ Rome banned the accursed thing. On
January 31, 1759, the Pope attacked it with his own hand in a letter. On
February 6 the Parliament of Paris condemned it. On February 10 it was
publicly burned by the hangman, with Voltaire’s ‘Natural Law.’ On April
9 the Sorbonne censured it, and declared it to contain ‘the essence of
the poisons’ of all modern literature.
Helvétius, from being the happiest of easy-going, benevolent
philosophers, found himself, as it were in a second, in a position of
great danger, and what Collé in his Journal called ‘cruel pain.’ His
friends hotly urged upon him a retractation to soften the certain
punishment awaiting him. His mother begged it from him with tears. Only
Minette, a sterner and a braver soul, refused, though ‘a great
personage’ besought her, to add her own entreaties to that end.
Still, it had to be done. Something of a coward this Helvétius, as Collé
suggested now, as Diderot had suggested before? The rich and easy life
he had led does not breed courage certainly. But, after all, Helvétius
only did what Voltaire and many a better man declared it was essential
to do in that day. He produced a ‘Letter from the Reverend Father ...
Jesuit,’ in which he stated that he had written in perfect innocence and
simplicity, and (this was undoubtedly true) that he had not had the
slightest idea of the effect his book would create. He added, in the
stiff phraseology of the time, words to the effect that he was an
exceedingly religious man and very sorry indeed. The _amende_ was so far
accepted that the Parliament simply condemned him to give up his
stewardship, and exiled him for two years to Voré.
What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author,
persecution did for them both. ‘On the Mind’ became not the success of a
season, but one of the most famous books of the century. The men who had
hated it, and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him
now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional.
‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the
burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy
trifle as that! ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now. But he soon came, as
a Voltaire would come, to swearing that there was no more materialism in
‘On the Mind’ than in Locke, and a thousand more daring things in ‘The
Spirit of Laws.’ Turgot and Condorcet forgave the philosophy, in their
pity for the philosopher. D’Alembert made common cause with the man with
whom he had nothing else in common. Rousseau instantly stopped writing
his refutation. Diderot roundly swore ‘On the Mind’ was one of the great
books of the age. Though Rome had censured it, cardinals wrote to
condole with its author on the treatment it had received. It was
translated into almost all European languages. Presently, England
published an edition of her own. And Helvétius, when that two years’
exile--a punishment surely only in name?--was over, returning to Paris,
found himself the most distinguished man in the capital.
In their fine hotel in the Rue Sainte-Anne (Rue Helvétius, the
municipality of 1792 rechristened it, and Rue Saint-Helvétius, the
_cochers_ of Paris!) he and his wife received the flower of French
society. Turgot introduced to them Morellet, who soon became a daily
visitor, rode with them in the Bois, and stayed with them in the
country. To their Tuesday dinners at two o’clock came Condorcet,
d’Alembert, Diderot, d’Holbach, Galiani, Marmontel, Saint-Lambert,
Raynal, Gibbon, and Hume--‘the States-General of the human mind,’ says
Garat. Only time-serving Buffon, in order not to offend the Court, gave
up visiting at the house. If Galiani found the religious, or
irreligious, views of the _salon_ too free, Madame his hostess shared
his opinion, and would often purposely disturb a too daring conversation
by drawing aside one of the coterie to talk with her _à part_. Helvétius
himself was still, as he had ever been, listener rather than talker; or
talker chiefly when he laid before his friends, with a _naïveté_ and
simplicity wholly at variance with the sophistry and artificiality of
his writing, the difficulties he had encountered in it that morning, or
some theories which it had suggested.
Sometimes, directly dinner was over, he slipped out to the opera, and
left his wife to do the honours alone. When they were not entertaining
themselves, they rarely went out, unless it were on Fridays to Madame
Necker’s. ‘Jealous of his wife,’ said acid Grimm, accounting for this
unsociability. ‘Happy with her,’ is perhaps a truer solution.
But if their own _entourage_ was thus satisfactory, the Court was still
bitterly hostile. Though Helvétius, of course, knew very well that that
hostility had been the advertisement to which his book owed everything,
still, its injustice rankled.
Admiring England invited him to her shores; and on March 10, 1764, he
landed there, accompanied by his two daughters, Elizabeth and Geneviève,
who, being only ten and twelve years respectively, were certainly rather
young for their father to be seeking husbands for them among ‘the
immaculate members of our august and incorruptible senate,’ as Horace
Walpole declared that he was.
All the great people, including King George the Third, received the
persecuted philosopher with _empressement_. ‘Savants and politicians’
flocked to be introduced to him. Gibbon found him ‘a sensible man, an
agreeable companion, and the worthiest creature in the world.’ Hume
(remembering the compliments it contained and the many more it would
have contained but for that wretched censor) naturally thought ‘On the
Mind’ the most pleasing of writings, and had even entered into an
agreement with its author to translate it into English, if he, on his
part, would translate Hume’s philosophical works into French. (This
bargain was never concluded.) Warburton, indeed, declined to meet this
French ‘rogue and atheist’ at dinner. But Helvétius, as a whole, had
every reason to like Englishmen, and he came back to France, Diderot
told Mademoiselle Volland, as madly attached to England as d’Holbach was
the reverse. ‘This poor Helvétius,’ says Diderot, to excuse him, ‘saw
only in England the persecutions his book had brought him in France.’
There may certainly be truth in that.
A year later, in 1765, he went to stay with Frederick the Great. That
astute monarch had not at all approved of ‘On the Mind.’ ‘If I wanted to
punish a province, I would give it to philosophers to govern,’ said he.
But he found Helvétius, as all the world found him, a thousand times
better than his book, and observed very justly that in writing he had
much better have consulted his heart than his head.
But that was what Helvétius could never do.
When he got back to Voré, to Minette and the little daughters (he had
not found any spotless and disinterested members of parliament to marry
them and enjoy their fortunes of fifty thousand pounds apiece), he
settled down to literature again and wrote, with seven years’ severe and
unremitting labour, ‘On Man, his Intellectual Faculties, and his
Education,’ which was a sort of defence of ‘On the Mind’ and an answer
to the criticisms both friends and foes had brought against that work.
If he had been persistently lively on ‘Mind,’ he was persistently dull
on ‘Man.’ When it was published, after his death, only a few friends who
had loved its author defended it. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse voiced a
very general opinion when she declared herself ‘staggered’ at its
preposterous length; and Grimm (of course) declared that, for his part,
he would rather have ten lines of the dear little Abbé Galiani than ten
volumes such as that.
Meanwhile, it had given Helvétius the best solace chagrins and declining
life can have--a regular occupation. He was not old, and he was framed,
says Guillois, to be a centenarian. But at that epoch men spent their
health and strength with such fearful prodigality in their youth, that
they rarely lived beyond what is now called middle age. Helvétius was
not more than five-and-fifty when he became conscious of failing powers.
Sport, which had been the delight of his life, lost its zest. The
bankrupt condition of his country, her light-hearted descent to ruin,
lay heavily now on a soul framed by nature to take the world serenely
and to see the future fair. He was occupied, it is true, to the end in
those works of benevolence and kindness which pay an almost certain
interest in happiness to him who invests in them. Then, too, to the
last, there was his wife, who might have loved a better man than he,
but who--love, fortunately for most people, not being given entirely to
worth--spent on him the fidelity and devotion of her life.
On December 26, 1771, Helvétius died. He was buried in the Church of
Saint-Roch, in Paris.
Minette, a very rich widow, bought a house in Auteuil, where, visited by
Turgot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Morellet, and the famous young
doctor, Cabanis, she lived ‘to love those her husband had loved, and to
do good to those he had benefited.’ Franklin, it is said, would fain
have married her. And Turgot--who knows? Elizabeth and Geneviève,
enormously rich heiresses, were married on the same day, a year after
their father’s death, each to a Count.
In 1772, ‘On Man’ was published, with the reception which has been
recorded. That early poem, ‘Happiness,’ also now publicly appeared for
the first time, with a prose preface by Saint-Lambert--the prose, said
Galiani, being much better than the verse.
To Helvétius’ works, or rather to his work, for ‘On the Mind’ is the
only one that counts, is now generally meted the judgment which should
have been meted to it when it appeared. Catch thistledown, imprison it,
examine it beneath a microscope, and a hundred learned botanists will
soon be confabulating and fighting over it. Put it in the free air and
sunshine--and, lo! it is gone. ‘On the Mind’ was but thistledown, and
the winds have blown it away.
But the man who wrote it deserves recollection because, though he wrote
it, he and Turgot alone among their compeers realised in practice that
the best way to do good to mankind is to do good to individual man, here
and to-day, and that the surest means to relieve the sorrows of the
world is to help the one poor Lazarus lying, full of sores, at the
gate.
VIII
_TURGOT: THE STATESMAN_
Among Voltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely
great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and
noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern
code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s.
But Turgot was something more even than the best man of his party. He
was the best worker. While Voltaire clamoured and wept for humanity,
while d’Alembert thought, Grimm wrote, Diderot talked, and Condorcet
dreamed and died, Turgot laboured. Broad and bold in aim, he was yet
content to do what he could. Of him it might never be said ‘L’amour du
mieux t’aura interdit du bien.’ To do one’s best here and now, with the
wretched tools one has to hand, in the teeth of indolence, obstinacy,
and the spirit of routine, to compromise where one cannot overcome, and
instead of sitting picturing some golden future, to do at once the
little one can--that was this statesman’s policy.
[Illustration: ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.
_From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy._]
It was so far successful, that all men now allow that if any human power
could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have
been the reforms of Turgot.
His father was the Provost of Merchants in Paris, and has earned the
gratitude of Parisians by enlarging the Quai de l’Horloge and joining it
by a bridge to the opposite bank of the Seine, and by erecting the
fountain in the Rue de Grenelle de St. Germain.