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Nowadays, when more subtle studies and more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing into principles, a vile and misleading uniformity governs our customs, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mould: incessantly politeness makes demands, propriety issues orders, and incessantly people follow customary usage, never their own inclinations. One does not dare to appear as what one is. And in this perpetual constraint, men who make up this herd we call society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things, unless more powerful motives prevent them. Thus, one will never know well the person one is dealing with. For to get to know one’s friend it will be necessary to wait for critical occasions, that is to say, to wait until too late, because it is to deal with these very emergencies that one needed to know him in the first place.

What a parade of vices will accompany this uncertainty? No more sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded trust. Suspicions, offences, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, and betrayal will always be hiding under this uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under that urbanity which is so praised and which we owe to our century’s enlightenment.We will no longer profane the name of the master of the universe by swearing, but we will insult it with blasphemies, and our scrupulous ears will not be offended….

But here the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have become corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards perfection. Will someone say that this is a misfortune peculiar to our age? No, gentlemen. The evils brought about by our vain curiosity are as old as the world. The daily ebb and flow of the ocean’s waters have not been more regularly subjected to the orbit of the star which gives us light during the night than the fate of morals and respectability has been to progress in the sciences and arts.* We have seen virtue fly away to the extent that their lights have risen over our horizon, and the same phenomenon can be observed at all times and in all places….

It was at the time of Ennius and Terence that Rome, founded by a shepherd and made famous by farmers, began to degenerate. But after Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and that crowd of obscene authors, whose very names alarm one’s sense of decency, Rome, formerly the temple of virtue, became the theatre of crime, the disgrace of nations, and the toy of barbarians. This capital of the world eventually fell under the yoke which it had imposed on so many people, and the day of its fall was the day before one of its citizens was given the title of Arbiter of Good Taste.*

What shall I say about that great city of the Eastern Empire which by its position seemed destined to be the capital of the whole world, that sanctuary for the sciences and arts forbidden in the rest of Europe, perhaps more through wisdom than barbarity? Everything that is most disgraceful in debauchery and corruption — treasons, assassinations, the blackest poisons, and the even more atrocious combination of all these crimes — that’s what makes up the fabric of the history of Constantinople; that’s the pure source from which we were sent that enlightenment for which our age glorifies itself.

But why seek in such distant times for proofs of a truth for which we have existing evidence right before our eyes. There is in Asia an immense country where literary honours lead to the highest offices of state. If the sciences purified morals, if they taught men to shed their own blood for their country, if they inspired courage, the people of China would become wise, free, and invincible. But if there is no vice which does not rule over them, no crime unfamiliar to them, if neither the enlightenment of ministers, nor the alleged wisdom in the laws, nor the multitude of inhabitants of that vast empire was capable of keeping it safe from the ignorant and coarse yoke of the Tartars, what use have all these wise men been to them? What fruits has it reaped from all the honours lavished on them? Could it perhaps be the reward of being an enslaved and wicked people? … Let us contrast these pictures with those of the morals of a small number of people who, protected from this contagion of vain knowledge, have by their virtues created their own happiness and become an example to other nations. Such were the first Persians, a remarkable nation, in which people learned virtue the way people learn science among us, which conquered Asia so easily, and which was the only one to acquire the glory of having the history of its institutions taken for a philosophical novel. Such were the Scythians to whom we have been left such magnificent tributes. Such were the Germans, in whom a writer who had grown weary of tracing the crimes and baseness of an educated, opulent, and voluptuous people found relief by describing their simplicity, innocence, and virtues. Rome had been like that, especially in the time of its poverty and ignorance.

PART TWO

… So answer me, illustrious philosophers, those of you thanks to whom we know in what proportions bodies attract each other in a vacuum, what are, in the planetary orbits, the ratios of the areas gone through in equal times, what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection and cusps, how man sees everything in God, how the soul and the body work together without communication, just as two clocks do, what stars could be inhabited, which insects reproduce in an extraordinary way, answer me, I say, you from whom we have received so much sublime knowledge, if you had never taught us anything about these things, would we have been less numerous, less well governed, less formidable, less thriving, or more perverse? So go back over the importance of what you have produced, and if the work of our most enlightened scholars and of our best citizens brings us so little of any use, tell us what we should think of that crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who are uselessly eating up the substance of the state….

To misuse one’s time is a great evil. But other even worse evils come with arts and letters. Luxury is such an evil, born, like them, from the idleness and vanity of men. Luxury rarely comes along without the arts and sciences, and they never develop without it. I know that our philosophy, always fertile in remarkable maxims, maintains, contrary to the experience of all the ages, that luxury creates the splendour of states, but, forgetting about the need for Sumptuary Laws,* will philosophy still dare to deny that good customs are essential to the duration of empires and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good customs? True, luxury may be a sure sign of riches, and it even serves, if you like, to multiply them. What will we necessarily conclude from this paradox, so worthy of arising in our day, and what will virtue become when people must enrich themselves at any price? Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?

The kingdom of Cyrus was conquered with thirty thousand men by a prince poorer than the least of the Persian satraps, and the Scythians, the most miserable of all peoples, managed to resist the most powerful kings of the universe. Two famous republics were fighting for imperial control of the world. One was very rich; the other had nothing. And the latter destroyed the former. The Roman Empire, in its turn, after gulping down all the riches in the universe, became the prey of a people who did not even know what wealth was. The Franks conquered the Gauls, and the Saxons conquered England, without any treasures other than their bravery and their poverty. A bunch of poor mountain dwellers whose greed limited itself entirely to a few sheep skins, after crushing Austrian pride, wiped out that opulent and formidable House of Burgundy, which had made the potentates of Europe shake. Finally, all the power and all the wisdom of Charles V’s heir, supported by all the treasures of the Indies, ended up being shattered by a handful of herring fishermen. Let our politicians deign to suspend their calculations in order to reflect upon these examples, and let them learn for once that with money one has everything except morals and citizens.

What, then, is precisely the issue in this question of luxury? To know which of the following is more important to empires: to be brilliant and momentary or virtuous and lasting. I say brilliant, but with what lustre? A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile concerns would ever raise themselves to anything great. Even when they had the strength for that, the courage would be missing….

Every artist wishes to be applauded. The praises of his contemporaries are the most precious part of his reward. What will he do to obtain that praise if he has the misfortune of being born among a people and in a time when learned men have come into fashion and have seen to it that frivolous young people set the tone, where men have sacrificed their taste to those who tyrannize over their liberty (7), where one of the sexes dares to approve only what corresponds to the pusillanimity of the other and people let masterpieces of dramatic poetry fall by the wayside and are repelled by works of wonderful harmony? What will that artist do, gentlemen? He will lower his genius to the level of his age and will prefer to create commonplace works which people will admire during his life than marvelous ones which will not be admired until long after his death….In this way, the dissolution of morals, a necessary consequence of luxury, brings with it, in its turn, the corruption of taste. If by chance among men of extraordinary talents one finds one who has a firm soul and refuses to lend himself to the spirit of his age and demean himself with puerile works, too bad for him! He will die in poverty and oblivion. I wish I were making a prediction here and not describing experience!

… If cultivating the sciences is detrimental to warrior qualities, it is even more so to moral qualities. From our very first years our inane education decorates our minds and corrupts our judgment. I see all over the place immense establishments where young people are raised at great expense to learn everything except their obligations. Your children will know nothing of their own language, but they will speak in others which are nowhere in use. They will know how to compose verses which they will hardly be capable of understanding. Without knowing how to distinguish truth and error, they will possess the art of making both truth and error unrecognizable to others through specious arguments. But they will not know what the words magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and courage mean. That sweet name of fatherland will never strike their ears, and if they hear talk of God, that will be less to be in awe of Him than to fear Him. I would be just as happy, a wise man said, for my pupil to spend his time playing tennis. At least that would make his body more fit. I know that it is necessary to keep children busy and that idleness is for them the danger one should fear most. What then is necessary for them to learn? Now, that’s surely a good question! Let them learn what they ought to do as men, and not something they ought to forget.

From where do all these abuses arise if it is not the fatal inequality introduced among men by distinctions among their talents and by the degradation of their virtues? There you have the most obvious effect of all our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. We no longer ask if a man has integrity, but if he has talent, nor whether a book is useful but if it is well written. The rewards for a witty man are enormous, while virtue remains without honour. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine actions….We have physicians, mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters, but we no longer have citizens. Or if we still have some scattered in our abandoned countryside, they are dying there in poverty and disgrace. Such is the condition to which those who give us bread and who provide milk for our children are reduced, and those are the feelings we have for them.

…The soul adapts itself insensibly to the objects which concern it, and it is great events which make great men. The prince of eloquence was Consul of Rome, and perhaps the greatest of the philosophers was Chancellor of England.* Can one believe that if one of them had occupied only a chair in some university and the other had obtained only a modest pension from an Academy, can one believe, I say, that their works would not have been affected by their positions? So let kings not disdain to admit into their councils the people who are most capable of giving good advice, and may they give up that old prejudice invented by the pride of the great, that the art of leading peoples is more difficult than the art of enlightening them, as if it were easier to induce men to do good voluntarily than to compel them to do it by force. May learned men of the first rank find honourable sanctuary in their courts. May they obtain there the only reward worthy of them, contributing through their influence to the happiness of those people to whom they have taught wisdom. Then, and only then, will we see what can be achieved by virtue, science, and authority, energized by a noble emulation and working cooperatively for the happiness of the human race. But so long as power remains by itself on one side, and enlightenment and wisdom isolated on the other, wise men will rarely think of great things, princes will more rarely carry out fine actions, and the people will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.

As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not run after a reputation which would elude us and which, in the present state of things, would never give back to us what it would cost, even if we had all the qualifications to obtain it. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves? Let us leave to others the care of instructing people about their duties, and limit ourselves to carrying out our own well. We do not need to know any more than this.