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June
20, 1733
As you have
it in your power, sir, to do some service to letters, I implore
you not to clip the wings of our writers so closely, nor to turn
into barn-door fowls those who, allowed a start, might become eagles;
reasonable liberty permits the mind to soar--slavery makes it creep.
Had there
been a literary censorship in Rome, we should have had to-day neither
Horace, Juvenal, nor the philosophical works of Cicero. If Milton,
Dryden, Pope, and Locke had not been free, England would have had
neither poets nor philosophers; there is something positively Turkish
in proscribing printing; and hampering it is proscription. Be content
with severely repressing diffamatory libels, for they are crimes:
but so long as those infamous calottes are boldly published, and
so many other unworthy and despicable productions, at least allow
Bayle to circulate in France, and do not put him, who has been so
great an honour to his country, among its contraband.
You say that
the magistrates who regulate the literary custom-house complain
that there are too many books. That is just the same thing as if
the provost of merchants complained there were too many provisions
in Paris. People buy what they choose. A great library is like the
City of Paris, in which there are about eight hundred thousand persons:
you do not live with the whole crowd: you choose a certain society,
and change it. So with books: you choose a few friends out of the
many. There will be seven or eight thousand controversial books,
and fifteen or sixteen thousand novels, which you will not read:
a heap of pamphlets, which you will throw into the fire after you
have read them. The man of taste will read only what is good; but
the statesman will permit both bad and good.
Men's thoughts
have become an important article of commerce. The Dutch publishers
make a million [francs] a year, because Frenchmen have brains. A
feeble novel is, I know, among books what a fool, always striving
after wit, is in the world. We laugh at him and tolerate him. Such
a novel brings the means of life to the author who wrote it, the
publisher who sells it, to the moulder, the printer, the paper-maker,
the binder, the carrier--and finally to the bad wine-shop where
they all take their money. Further, the book amuses for an hour
or two a few women who like novelty in literature as in everything.
Thus, despicable though it may be, it will have produced two important
things--profit and pleasure.
The theatre
also deserves attention. I do not consider it a counter attraction
to dissipation: that is a notion only worthy of an ignorant curé.
There is quite time enough, before and after the performance, for
the few minutes given to those passing pleasures which are so soon
followed by satiety. Besides, people do not go to the theatre every
day, and among our vast population there are not more than four
thousand who are in the habit of going constantly.
I look on
tragedy and comedy as lessons in virtue, good sense, and good behaviour.
Corneille--the old Roman of the French--has founded a school of
Spartan virtue: Molière, a school of ordinary everyday life.
These great national geniuses attract foreigners from all parts
of Europe, who come to study among us, and thus contribute to the
wealth of Paris. Our poor are fed by the productions of such works,
which bring under our rule the very nations who hate us. In face,
he who condemns the theatre is an enemy to his country. A magistrate
who, because he has succeeded in buying some judicial post, thinks
that it is beneath his dignity to see Cinna, shows much pomposity
and very little taste.
There are
still Goths and Vandals even among our cultivated people: the only
Frenchmen I consider worthy of the name are those who love and encourage
the arts. It is true that the taste for them is languishing: we
are sybarites, weary of our mistresses' favours. We enjoy the fruits
of the labours of the great men who have worked for our pleasure
and that of the ages to come, just as we receive the fruits of nature
as if they were our due [...] nothing will rouse us from this indifference
to great things which always goes side by side with our vivid interest
in small.
Every year
we take more pains over snuffboxes and nicknacks than the English
took to make themselves masters of the seas [...]. The old Romans
raised those marvels of architecure--their amphitheatres--for beasts
to fight in: and for a whole century we have not built a single
passable place for the representation of the masterpieces of the
human mind. A hundredth part of the money spent on cards would be
enough to build theatres finer than Pompey's: but what man in Paris
has the public welfare at heart? We play, sup, talk scandal, write
bad verses, and sleep, like fools, to recommence on the morrow the
same round of careless frivolity.
You, sir,
who have at least some small opportunity of giving good advice,
try and rouse us from this stupid lethargy, and, if you can, do
something for literature, which has done so much for France.
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