any pieces of rhetoric garnished
with rhymes? Examine the innumerable tragedies and comedies of which
Grimm and Colle gives us mortuary extracts, even the meritorious works
of Voltaire and Crebillon, and later, those of authors of repute, Du
Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and Marie Chenier? Eloquence, art, situations,
correct verse, all exist in these except human nature; the personages
are simply well-taught puppets, and generally mere mouthpieces by
which the author makes his declamation public; Greeks, Romans, Medieval
knights, Turks, Arabs, Peruvians, Giaours, or Byzantines, they have
all the same declamatory mechanisms. The public, meanwhile, betrays
no surprise. It is not aware of history. It assumes that humanity is
everywhere the same. It establishes the success alike of the "Incas" by
Marmontel, and of "Gonsalve" and the "Nouvelles" by Florian; also of the
peasants, mechanics, Negroes, Brazilians, Parsees, and Malabarites
that appear before it churning out their exaggerations. Man is simply
regarded as a reasoning being, alike in all ages and alike in all
places; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre endows his pariah with this habit,
like Diderot, in his Tahitians. The one recognized principle is that
every human being must think and talk like a book.--And how inadequate
their historical background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a
contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows
fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where
are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, belonging
to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France, in the
researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the "Louis XI"
of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthelemy, even in the "Essai sur
les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle de Louis XIV" of Voltaire, even in the
"Grandeur des Romains," and the "Esprit des Lois" of Montesquieu, what
peculiar deficiency! Erudition, criticism, common sense, an almost
exact exposition of dogmas and of institutions, philosophic views of the
relationships between events and on the general run of these, nothing
is lacking but the people! On reading these it seems as if the climates,
institutions and civilizations which so completely modifies the human
intellect, are simply so many outworks, so many fortuitous exteriors,
which, far from reflecting its depths scarcely penetrate bene