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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1975 (1975)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1975

(1975)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Belle van Zuylen and the enlightenment

Belle van Zuylen's critics and biographers, from Philippe Godet to Simone Dubois (and indeed several of the contributors to the present symposium) have called attention to her affinities with the movement of ideas which we refer to as the Enlightenment.1. Intellectual curiosity, a spirit of free rational enquiry, hostility to uncritical acceptance of dogma and convention, cosmopolitanism - these general characteristics of the mind of the Enlightenment are all shared by Belle. If, as was not unusual in her days, her taste was formed by reading the French classical writers of the seventeenth century, there can be no doubt that her views on philosophical topics were influenced mainly by the leaders of eighteenth-century thought, especially (to mention only those whom she quotes most frequently) Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Adam Smith and Kant. She was an ‘independent’, spending most of her life in Utrecht and Neuchâtel, without direct contact with Paris or any of the major intellectual centres of the period, but her ideas all bear the stamp of the enlightened thought of her age. For example, in religion she is close to Voltaire, using the deistic argument from design, rejecting both atheism and revelation, and supporting toleration. In politics she is a republican, but admits that in certain circumstances monarchy is a better form of government. In her polemical works she is a champion of liberal reform, suggesting the abolition of the death penalty and lettre de cachet, the redistribution of the wealth of the French clergy and a better deal for Protestants. Likewise she has ideas on education reform and the place of women in society.

 

No one will deny that Belle has a place (a modest one) in the history of the intellectual debate of the Enlightenment. Much scholarly work has already been done in surveying her ideas, tracing them to their literary sources and examining their reception. However, while such studies are extremely useful, there is a danger that merely to classify or describe her ideas on various philosophical topics will miss out what is essential in her writings and overlook the true nature of her originality, which lies not in her pronouncements on abstract philosophical problems, but in her insights into some of the intellectual and emotional problems, which arise out of the ordinary business of living. It would be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that Belle is not a profound or original thinker, she is a creative writer whose concern is with concrete human problems, and particularly with that area of experience where life implies a moral choice. The inspiration of her literary activity is her personal quest for values: she begins with her own private problems and only gradually works outwards towards the

more general problems of humanity. Although she was passionately interested in ideas, where she excels is in testing ideas against experience - her own experience in her letters, the experience of fictional characters in her novels. Indeed, there is a tension between her pursuit of intellectual certainty and her awareness of the ambiguity of the values implied in concrete lived experience. It is a tension which lies at the heart of her creative activity, and which brings her face to face with one of the most important philosophical

illustratie
15. Immanuel Kant.


problems of the Enlightenment - the relation of the rational and the empirical. This is a major theme in such writers as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, and in the eighteenth century it received its most sophisticated philosophical expression in the Kantian synthetic a priori. That Mme de Charrière in Trois Femmes, the most important work of her maturity, and her spiritual testament, should draw her inspiration from her reflexions on the implications of the philosophy of Kant, is not as surprising as might at first appear - and is a useful clue to the problem of her relation, at the deepest level, to the thought of the Enlightenment.

 

Belle van Zuylen begins by asking questions about the meaning of life which are of the kind any lively intelligence will probably ask in all periods of human history. However, in the eighteenth century such questions were of particular urgency: they had been the subject of a literary and philosophical debate, which, if it had not produced universally accepted answers, at least had challenged, if not destroyed, many of the traditional views. Belle was born into a milieu where the traditional religious, moral and social values were still accepted, but, from the beginning, she is on the side of Enlightenment in her readiness to criticise the established views and in her belief that, if the truth is to be discovered about man, nature and society, it is by uninhibited enquiry which takes reason and experience as guides. Describing herself as ‘une fille jeune, moitié savante, motié philosophe, un peu bel esprit’2., she aims at discovering the truth through her own intellectual efforts, and includes knowledge of the physical universe among her studies, writing, characteristically to Constant d'Hermenches:

L'arrangement que Dieu a mis dans l'univers est trop beau pour que je veuille l'ignorer; je voudrais, comme Zadig, savoir de la physique ce que l'on en sait de mon temps, et pour cela, il faut les mathématiques. Je n'aime pas les demi-connaissances.3.

From a passage like this, with its reference to mathematics and rational order in the created universe, as from her long letter of 19 June 1764 to Boswell on the proofs of the existence of God4. and her frequent references to ‘la raison’ and ‘la nature’ (which she takes as fixed objective standards known, or at least knowable, to the human mind), Belle's intellectual position is clear: she is in tune with the common rationalism of the Enlightenment, believing, like Descartes and Voltaire (the Voltaire of Zadig), that certainty can be established by logical and mathematical demonstration. We find a similar rationalism in her aesthetic and moral judgments where both literary affectation and libertinage are condemned in the name of ‘la raison’.

The same eighteenth-century rationalism is apparent in her only published work of this early period, Le Noble (1763). Scrutinizing society in the light of reason (or nature), she is immediately struck by the irrationality of much human behaviour, and the way is open for that ironic and satirical vision of humanity which so many of her Dutch contemporaries found alarming. Just as Montesquieu, in the Lettres persanes, says, ‘Comment peut-on être Persan?’, so Belle, with the same cosmopolitan detachment typical of the Enlightenment, seems to say, ‘Comment peut-on être Hollandais?’, or, to quote her own words, ‘C'est, en vérité une chose étonnante que je m'appelle Hollandaise et Tuyll’.5. Taking universal reason as her standard, the fact that she belongs to a family proud of its ancient nobility does not prevent her from writing a work which satirises aristocratic prejudice and where the heroine can find no better use for the portraits of her ancestors than to throw them into the moat so that she can jump on them as she escapes from the ancestral castle to elope with her lover.

 

While Belle is a rationalist, she is at the same time influenced by the sentimental morality of the period. She had a great admiration for Adam Smith, and shares his view that God has implanted morally good impulses in man.6. When she declares to Boswell that she follows ‘sentiment intérieur’7., this is, presumably, not an apology for the irrational or an appeal to mere subjectivity: she seems to be assuming that there is a pre-established harmony between reason and sentiment, between head and heart. Likewise in Le Noble, the heroine follows the spontaneous promptings of her heart: sentiment is on the side of reason in rejecting irrationality and absurdity, and the protagonists live happily ever after.

 

If Belle van Zuylen had done no more than express the views which have so far been analysed, she would be little more than a rather dated rationalist whose ideas, if one examines their presuppositions, remind one of the early eighteenth-century optimism of Pope or Shaftesbury. That she can express such ideas as late as the 1760s reminds us of her youth and her physical remoteness from major centres of intellectual discussion. Indeed, when she compared herself to Voltaire's naîve young Zadig, she was closer to the truth than she imagined. However, it is only at the beginning of her literary career, and then only in certain moods, that Belle expresses views which imply this optimistic rationalism. It is not long before she becomes aware of the ambiguities and paradoxes of her philosophy. Such ambiguities were well known to the rationalists of the period, for example to Voltaire, and it is a

familiar chapter of eighteenth-century intellectual history how he moved away from his early optimism to the sombre philosophy of Candide. Belle, rather more rapidly than Voltaire, but in much the same way, becomes disillusioned. She discovers that Cartesian reason yields only a few general abstract principles which are difficult to apply in real life, and that any ideas she might have been tempted to hold about a pre-established harmony between the rational and the empirical, or the head and the heart, are belied by experience. She also discovers that satire of artificial conventions in the name of ‘reason’ or ‘nature’ leads to a kind of anarchic naturalism.

 

One of the paradoxes of rationalism, with its assumption that man is a rational animal, is that it leads to an enhanced awareness of human irrationality. We have already noted Belle's good-natured satire of such irrationality in Le Noble, where, however, reason and sentiment triumph in the end. A deeper note is struck in the Addition to the Portrait de Zélide, where human irrationality is not so easily overcome, for ‘la moitié des hommes sont méchants’8. and deserve only disdain. Nor is she sure that heart and head lead the same way, writing of herself, in the Portrait de Zélide, ‘Quand est-ce que les lumières de l'esprit commanderont aux penchants du coeur?’9. However, Belle's satire of human irrationality, which ranges from the gentle mockery of her self-portrait to the bitter irony of some of her letters to d'Hermenches, goes beyond the mere surface of human behaviour to attack, occasionally, the very conventions and traditions on which society is based. Sometimes seriously, sometimes half seriously, she becomes an apologist of ‘la nature’, and pursues her argument to the point where it is no longer clear whether ‘la nature’ means the rational or whether it is synonymous with the primitive and instinctive. Her most spectacular exploration of this line of thought is concerned with her position in society and the question of her marriage. The outcome is the remarkable series of letters to d'Hermenches where, placing ‘la probité’ above ‘la décence’, she performs a kind of intellectual striptease and, acknowledging her ‘natural’ emotional and physical needs, admits that in certain circumstances logic might lead her to become a kind of Ninon: ‘Si je n'avais ni père ni mère je serais Ninon peut-être’10. to be a Ninon is presumably a closer approximation to nature than to accept the artificial convention of marriage.

 

It is here that we have Belle at her most outspoken, where her rationalism leads almost imperceptibly to a kind of naturalism which reminds one not of Montesquieu or Voltaire, but of a much bolder thinker - Diderot. Just as Diderot has a remarkable talent for pushing lines of thought to their extreme consequences and says, ‘Mes pensées sont mes catins’11., so Belle follows up her ideas even if they lead to taboo

subjects and expose the secret inner recesses of her mind. She shares Diderot's fondness for dialogue, and one wonders if there is not some affinity between her fascination with d'Hermenches (a libertine with a bad reputation in respectable society) and Diderot's fascination with such morally subversive characters as Rameau's Nephew - the same eagerness to engage in dialogue with someone quite different from oneself, or perhaps, in some sinister way, not so different after all. These are, of course, no more than parallels which strike the modern reader: the essential point is that Belle, by discussing her own problems in terms of the nature-convention dichotomy is, in her own way debating some of the intellectual problems which are central issues in the thought of the Enlightenment.

 

A further paradox of rationalism is that it can lead to an attitude which, at least superficially, is not far removed from scepticism, for while ‘la raison’ is a powerful weapon of destruction when turned against the conventions of society, it can yield few certainties outside the truths of mathematics. At least so it was commonly believed in the eighteenth century, and Belle expresses the rationalist's dilemma, when she writes to d'Hermenches:

Je sais bien qu'une heure ou deux de mathématiques me rendent l'esprit libre et le coeur plus gai: il me semble que j'en dors et mange mieux quand j'ai vu des vérités évidentes et indisputables; cela me console des obscurités de la religion et de la métaphysique, ou plutôt cela me les fait oublier: je suis fort aise de ce qu'il y a quelque chose de sûr dans ce monde.12.

Her doubts on religion are well known: while accepting the existence of a deity as rationally certain, and retaining a disposition to believe in the immortality of the soul, she was uncommitted with regard to revealed religion. Her remarks on metaphysics are numerous, and usually amount to a declaration of total uncertainty:

Une sorte de scepticisme fort humble et assez tranquille, c'est là que j'en suis restée; quand j'aurai plus de lumières et plus de santé, je verrai peut-être des certitudes.13.

However, she is never a complete sceptic: she retains the rationalist's desire for certainty, and reason and nature, though hard to define, remain her guides.

It was common in the eighteenth century - at least in the second half of the period - to speak of rationalist speculation as a dangerous occupation which led to conclusions which were curiously remote from life. Voltaire satrised the vanity of metaphysics in his portrayal of Pangloss, who was so much obsessed with theory that he had lost contact with life. Did Belle succumb to the temptations of excessive speculation? Obviously there is no question of comparing her with the grotesque Pangloss; however, at times her desire for rational certainty and love of speculation almost became ends in themselves - at least such was the opinion of some of those who were close to her. Thus Boswell reports a conversation he had with Professor Hahn:

He said Zélide ... had no pleasure in realities. All must be ideal, all visionary. She was not a bit amused with the most ingenious chemical experiments.14.

Convinced that she was too much addicted to metaphysics, Boswell prescribed a cure, which amounted, in fact, to telling her: ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’:

David Hume, who has thought as much as any man who has been tortured on the metaphysical rack, who has walked the wilds of speculation, wisely and calmly concludes that the business of ordinary life is the proper business of man.15.

Even d'Hermenches gives much the same advice:

Vous êtes trop bonne, trop honnête, trop naturelle. Faites-vous un système qui vous rapproche des formes reçues, et vous serez au-dessus de tous les beaux esprits présents et passés.16.

In fact, with or without such advice, Belle acknowledged that she must come to terms with empirical reality: she might dream of becoming a Ninon, but in practice she accepted that she must become an honest married woman.

 

At times Belle shows a robust confidence in her practical reason, as when she writes:

Je me mets rarement en frais de raisonnement, peu de principes fixes, point de systèmes, quand un raisonnement me paraît juste, évident, indisputable, il devient aussitôt une règle invariable de ma conduite.17.

However, she is willing, as a rule, to accept reality only on her own terms. Thus, while she has the greatest respect for the honest and honourable values which the Tuyll family stood for, she refuses to obey her parents and give up her clandestine correspondence with d'Her-

menches, taking her own notion of ‘la probité’ as her criterion of what is right and wrong:

pour ce qui s'appelle bienséance, comme elle n'est fondée que sur l'opinion, je ne vois pas un grand mal à la violer lorsque cela n'alarme point la vertu ni ne trouble le bon ordre.18.

Again, while she accepts that she will become an honest married woman, she states that her aim is to become her husband's mistress - a suggestion which alarmed poor Boswell, who had never heard of such a shocking idea, but which in its stark paradoxical form is something of a key to her emotional and intellectual dilemma.19. Indeed, while accepting reality, her rationalistic (and naturalistic) ideal was never far in the background:

Etre à la fois sage et voluptueuse, répandre et trouver les fleurs de plaisir dans le lieu du devoir, serait en effet la félicité céleste.20.

But such ‘félicité céleste’ was not to be found in real life, and at times, in a melancholy mood, she simply resigns herself to a kind of fatalism or a philosophy of living for the moment:

Je n'ai point de systèmes: ils ne servent, selon moi, qu'à égarer méthodiquement; je laisse mon penchant me déterminer selon les circonstances; il est assez constant, assez uniforme, pour pouvoir m'en fier à lui. Il est bien vrai, je ne vis que presque pour le moment; mais cela est-il si déraisonnable? Le moment seul est à nous, le moment seul est certain. Nous ignorons ce que sera l'avenir, nous ignorons même s'il y en aura un pour nous.21.

It would be a mistake, however, to overstress the ‘tragic’ side of her dilemma, or to think of her as sinking into a melancholy resignation. She had a strong will to make the best of things, and when she received a depressing letter from d'Hermenches in 1770, shortly before the preparations for her marriage with Charrière, she wrote, with an interesting allusion to Candide:

Je n 'ai pas répondu à votre dernière lettre, parce qu'elle m'a paru aussi affligeante qu'un chapitre de Candide, et tout aussi peu raisonnable. Pourquoi chercher à démontrer que les choses les plus désirables et les plus désirées, quand elles sont obtenues, ne font pas notre bonheur? Si cela est, je veux l'ignorer, je veux espérer. Quand cela serait, que me servirait d'en être persuadée? Cette persuasion serait-

elle un bon guide pour notre conduite? Quelle conclusion en tirerai-je?22.

In fact she was not so different from Voltaire as she supposed: both Voltaire and Mme de Charrière reject the implications of pessimism, and neither give up hope in the possibilities of living or improving the human lot.

 

When we turn from the early writings of Belle van Zuylen to the novels of Mme de Charrière we seem, at first glance, to be entering a different world. However, there is continuity, and the novels are, in fact, variations on a different key on some of the themes which we have already mentioned. In Mistriss Henley (1784) the conflict between husband and wife is a variation on the tension between rigid convention and spontaneity. In the Lettres neuchâteloises (1784), as in Le Noble, we find a cosmopolitan detachment which satirises the absurdities of provincial life, and a moral dilemma which is solved by the rather unconventional young heroine, Marianne de la Prise, who places kindness and humanity (and her own personal values, which are those of the heart) higher than the social bienséances. In the Lettres écrites de Lausanne (1785) the theme is not simply that contrast between reason and conventions which leads almost inevitably to satire and irony, but the tragedy implied in passive acceptance of the values of society when society judges human beings not for the intrinsic worth of their sentiments, but by external criteria. It is a theme which, in its study of the ambiguities of sentiment in relation to the social order, reminds one of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloise. Mme de Charrière's heroines, Cécile and Caliste, though not the favourites of fortune, are strict in their observance of the bienséances imposed by society. Cécile's exemplary attitude and her personal integrity lead nowhere. Caliste accepts society's judgment that, on account of her past (for which she is not responsible), she is not quite respectable, and acknowledges that in the last resort the rigid conformist values of society are to be accepted in preference to the natural feelings of the heart. Acceptance of social conventions, when they conflict with sentiment, is portrayed by Mme de Charrière in terms of weakness in men and waste, frustration and death in women. The artistic power of the novel is increased by the absence of any suggestion of a solution to the dilemma.

 

The Lettres écrites de Lausanne is a work of art, not autobiography, and although it may owe its inspiration to an unhappy love affair which has remained something of a mystery to Mme de Charrière's biographers23., and corresponds to a period of deep depression in her life, it was not in her nature to remain passive. Indeed, at about the

time when she was composing her novels, she expressed feelings which are anything but feelings of passive acceptance, and which were recorded by Chaillet:

Dans un de ses accès, elle nous a soutenu que la vertu n'était bonne à rien, qu'elle ne rendait heureux ni celui qui se tourmente à l'avoir, ni ceux qui l'environnent, qu'il ennuie et fatigue de sa raison, qui sont les victimes de sa vertu.24.

Nor, when she met Benjamin Constant in 1786, did she have much in common with the tragic heroines of the Lettres écrites de Lausanne:

Toutes les opinions de Mme de Charrière reposaient sur le mépris de toutes les convenances et de tous les usages. Nous nous moquions à qui mieux mieux de tous ceux que nous voyions; nous nous enivrions de nos plaisanteries et de notre mépris de l'espèce humaine.25.

In such moods she is not markedly different from her early years: her attitude is still that of a rationalist exasperated at human folly.

 

As we follow Mme de Charrière through her later years, many of the themes which we have already encountered are repeated. She remains a rationalist, not only in her satire of human irrationality, but, for example, in her belief in a Clockmaker God and her defense of fixed standards in taste which lead her to reject the newer developments in literature associated with Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël. She never tires of repeating that she is hostile to metaphysical speculation, and blamed the French revolutionaries for being more interested in abstract principles than in the concrete problems of ordinary men:

Ceux qui veulent faire le bien des peuples et ne pensent pas à faire le bien de quelques individus du peuple, me paraissent des hypocrites ou des sots. Ils négligent une réalité à laquelle ils peuvent atteindre, et s'exaltent pour une chimère, pour un fantôme qu'ils ne conçoivent pas même nettement.26.

It is now Belle who is taking metaphysicians to task and repeating to others the advice she had received from Boswell: ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’!

 

Aware of the ambiguities of her rationalism, distrusting metaphysical speculation, and weary of self-analysis (‘Il faut sortir un peu de soi pour n'être pas trop malheureux’)27. Mme de Charrière,

in her later years, turns to the world of reality in much the same spirit as Voltaire after Candide. When Voltaire preached the philosophy of ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’, this was not meant to be taken as mere resignation to the status quo; it is a rejection of abstract rationalism, but reason remains a guide and a weapon in a world of wickedness and folly, where there is still hope of practical improvement. It is with an eye on practical problems that Mme de Charrière writes her Observations et conjectures politiques (1788) and Lettres d'un Evêque français à la nation (1789), and from 1789 to her death in 1805 both her literary activity and her day-to-day life were concerned with practical questions, of which not the least was offering help and advice to her protégés, including many unfortunate émigrés. Her later attitude is admirably summed up when she says:

Je pense à ces grandes irrésolvables questions [de la métaphysique] le moins que je puis, et me borne à de petites indignations et pitiés individuelles, partielles, privées.28.

Unlike the revolutionary radicals, who thought only of man in the abstract, she concerns herself with what really matters: concrete human beings and their problems.

 

It is strange that Philippe Godet (and some later critics) should have seen Mme de Charrière's later years in terms of total despair:

A quoi bon agir, en effet? A quoi bon s'enthousiasmer? A quoi bon vivre? A quoi bon? Cela résume, hélas! pour Mme de Charrière, sa conception de l'humaine destinée.29.

Elsewhere Godet says that, ‘profondément sceptique, naturellement désabusée, elle ne crut jamais à la vie’.30. In fact, she was never as sceptical as Godet supposes, and would have agreed with the hero of Sainte-Anne (1799) when he says:

Le sceptique varie ses erreurs, plutôt qu'il ne se soustrait à l'erreur, car il n'est pas possible à l'homme de rester dans un doute perpétuel .. Si vous pouviez voir le dedans de la tête d'un philosophe pyrrhonien, vous le verriez superstitieux vingt fois par jour.31.

And when Godet says, ‘elle ne crut jamais à la vie’, he overlooks not only her literary and practical activities, which are all on the side of life and improvement of the human lot, he also overlooks her hostility to those detractors of humanity whose teaching leads to despair by robbing us of motives for action:

Jamais les destructeurs de la religion et de la morale, de nos devoirs ici-bas, de nos espérances pour un autre séjour, ne pourront venir à bout d'ôter à la bienfaisance son mérite et son charme.32.

If she admires Jean-Jacques Rousseau it is because, ‘His words were music, his thoughts celestial dreams’, and of his noble idealism she says:

Si c'est plus qu'on ne peut faire et obtenir, ce n'est pas plus qu'il ne faut vouloir et tenter.33.

What Godet takes for despair in Mme de Charrière is her realism, her awareness of the reality of human suffering and of the disproportion between that ideal world which she never entirely lost sight of and the empirical world in which she lived.

 

I have referred earlier to Trois Femmes (1795) as Mme de Charrière's spiritual testament, and it deserves a fuller analysis than is possible here. Its affinity with Candide is unmistakeable. Just as Voltaire shows that the abstractions of the metaphysics of Leibniz are not applicable to real life, so Mme de Charrière takes issue with the abstract ethical philosophy of Kant, testing it against experience. However, unlike Voltaire, Mme de Charrière does not mock the philosopher with whom she disagrees, nor is her aim primarily destructive. It might be said that whereas Voltaire, after demolishing metaphysical optimism simply tells us ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’, without explaining precisely what this means, Mme de Charrière takes ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ as her starting point and explains its meaning in considerable detail. To illustrate her meaning she builds her narrative around the moral dilemmas of her three women, Emilie, Constance and Joséphine. They each achieve happiness and fulfilment, but judged in the light of a stern Kantian morality they must be condemned, for Emilie has yielded to the inclinations of her heart rather than to duty, Constance has inherited ill-gotten gains which she cannot (or at any rate does not) restore to the rightful owners, and Joséphine (helped by some diplomatic lying by Emilie and Constance) succeeds in marrying her seducer, whose child she bears, though her immoral conduct with other men hardly deserves such a happy outcome. One of Mme de Charrière's émigré friends, judging the three women in the light of cold reason, said pithily: ‘C'est une catin, une friponne et une bégueule’.34. Mme de Charrière hopes that the reader will not come to the same conclusion: she hopes to have shown that each action, each moral decision made by her heroines was the best that could have been made in the circumstances. Moral decisions are portrayed not simply as a question of obeying some abstract code, but of making a choice

between different courses of action, none of which are simply good or simply evil. In fact, moral choice becomes a complicated kind of casuistry, of balancing good against good and evil against evil. Mme de Charrière appeals to the reader's common sense, experience, pity and humanity, asking, for example, whether it is better that Joséphine should, in the name of strict morality, become the mother of an illegitimate child (an extremely unpleasant fate in the eighteenth century), or whether some diplomatic ruse should be employed in persuading her seducer to make her an honest woman. Likewise we are invited to judge whether it would be better for Constance to attempt to restore her wealth to its owners, or, instead of wasting time on this almost impossible task, to use it for the happiness of those in her immediate surroundings. As for Emilie, by following the promptings of her heart (and even allowing herself to be persuaded to elope), she avoids the fate which befell Cécile.

 

Throughout the work Mme de Charrière implies that a metaphysical morality cannot answer the complex questions which emerge in real life without coming to conclusions which are unacceptable to compassion and common sense. As she says elsewhere, ‘il n'y a rien de général pour les individus.. il faut toujours faire des applications particulières si l'on veut connaître la vérité’.35. In other words, one must cope with empirical problems as they arise and seek, not perfection, but whatever relative good can be achieved in the circumstances. The reader is reminded not only of Voltaire in his later years, but also of Montesquieu, who likewise rejected the facile solutions of systematisers, and was tolerant of human imperfections:

On demanda à Solon si les lois qu'il avait données aux Athéniens étaient les meilleures: ‘Je leur ai donné, répondit-il, les meilleures de celles qu'ils pouvaient souffrir.’ Belle parole, qui devrait être entendue de tous les législateurs.36..

In all Mme de Charrière's later writings, whether on politics or on moral problems, one finds this same moderation, which, though unfashionable among most of the writers of the revolutionary period, is characteristic of some of the major authors of the Enlightenment.

 

Belle van Zuylen begins her literary career as an eighteenth-century rationalist living in an irrational world, enjoying the sense of liberation which comes from challenging accepted values in the name of ‘la raison’ and ‘la nature’, but aware of the ambiguities of her philosophy and exasperated at the intractability of the empirical world. Hers was a dilemma typical of the Enlightenment, and to which there was no easy solution unless one accepted the optimism of ‘Whatever is, is right’, which saw no serious divergence between the rational

and the empirical. Belle was never a facile optimist (although the presuppositions of some of her early pronouncements are those of optimism), and her increasing awareness of the dichotomy between nature and culture, the rational and the real, is the central theme of her writings. Various intellectual attitudes were possible, ranging from dogmatic rationalism to a plunge into the irrational. Belle, like Voltaire, and the moderate thinkers of the period, acknowledges the complexity of the real world and the limitations of rationalism, though she remains a rationalist to the end, taking reason as a guide in her dealings with practical problems.

 

However, in assessing Belle's place in the Enlightenment, one must not lose sight of the unique quality of her writings. What to the intellectual historian is a problem to be discussed in terms of rationalism and empiricism was to Belle a dilemma which was lived and felt with intensity. Everything she wrote has the ring of authentic lived experience.

 

C.P. COURTNEY

 

Christ's College, Cambridge.


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