and next the rude and violent intellects
given up to instinct and imagery, thinking with half-visions, their
resolve consisting of irresistible impulses? A speculative reasoning of
this stamp could not imagine figures like these. To bring them within
its rectilinear limits they require to be reduced and made over; the
Macbeth of Shakespeare becomes that of Ducis, and the Mahomet of the
Koran that of Voltaire. Consequently, as they failed to see souls, they
misconceived institutions. The suspicion that truth could have been
conveyed only through the medium of legends, that justice could have
been established only by force, that religion was obliged to assume the
sacerdotal form, that the State necessarily took a military form, and
that the Gothic edifice possessed, as well as other structures, its own
architecture, proportions, balance of parts, solidity, and even beauty,
never entered their heads.--Furthermore, unable to comprehend the past,
they could not comprehend the present. They knew nothing about the
mechanic, the provincial bourgeois, or even the lesser nobility; these
were seen only far away in the distance, half-effaced, and wholly
transformed through philosophic theories and sentimental haze. "Two or
three thousand"[3310] polished and cultivated individuals formed the
circle of ladies and gentlemen, the so-called honest folks, and they
never went outside of their own circle. If they fleeting had a glimpse
of the people from their chateaux and on their journeys, it was in
passing, the same as of their post-horses, or of the cattle on their
farms, showing compassion undoubtedly, but never divining their anxious
thoughts and their obscure instincts. The structure of the still
primitive mind of the people was never imagined, the paucity and
tenacity of their ideas, the narrowness of their mechanical, routine
existence, devoted to manual labor, absorbed with the anxieties
for daily bread, confined to the bounds of a visible horizon;
their attachment to the local saint, to rites, to the priest, their
deep-seated rancor, their inveterate distrust, their credulity growing
out of the imagination, their inability to comprehend abstract rights,
the law and public affairs, the hidden operation by which their brains
would transform political novelties into nursery fables or into ghost
stories, their contagious infatuations like those of sheep, their
blind fury like that of bulls, and all those traits of character the
Revol