Cervantes is not very sympathetic to me. He is tainted with the perfidy of the man who has made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, the aristocracy, with those in power), and then conceals the fact. Philosophically, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he appears vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers above all his contemporaries on account of the success of a single invention, that of Don Quixote and Sancho, which is to literature what the discovery of Newton was to Physics.
As for Molière, he is a poor fellow, who never attains the exuberance of Shakespeare, nor the invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more social, more modern than Cervantes. The half-century or more that separates the work of Cervantes from that of Molière, is not sufficient to explain this modernity. Between the Spain of _Quixote_ and the France of _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, lies something deeper than time. Descartes and Gassendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes.
A French journalist who visited my house during the summer, remarked:
"The ideas were great in the French Revolution; it was not the men." I replied: "I believe that the men of the French Revolution were great, but not the ideas."
Of all the philosophical literature of the pre-revolutionary period, what remains today?
What books exert influence? In France, excerpts from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau are still read in the schools, but outside of France, they are read nowhere.
Only an extraordinary person would go away for the summer with Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's _Emile_ in his grip. Montesquieu is demonstration of the fact that a book cannot live entirely by virtue of correctness of style.
Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in the eighteenth century, the only one who will bear reading today is Voltaire--the Voltaire of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ and of the novels.
Diderot, whom the French consider a great man, is of no interest whatsoever to the modern mind, at least to the mind which is not French. He is almost as dull as Rousseau. _La Religieuse_ is an utterly false little book. Some years ago I loaned a copy to a young lady who had just come from a convent. "I have never seen anything like this," she said to me. "It is a fantasy with no relation to the truth." That was my idea. _Jacques, le fataliste_ is tiresome; _Le Neveu de Rameau_ gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to something, to something powerful such as the _Satiricon_ of Petronius, or _El Buscón_ of Quevedo; but at the end, it is nothing.