LIBRARY 
 
 UNIV -".ITY of 
 
 CAUPJnNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 
 / o 

 
 A SHORT INTRODUCTION 
 TO THE STUDY OF 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 By 
 PROFESSOR H. H. JOHNSON 
 
 1910. 
 
 LONDON: FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 
 34, MAIDEN LANE, STRAND, W.C.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction . . . . . . I 
 
 i. Celts and the Villon Cult . . 4 
 
 ii. The Sire de Joinville . . . . 6 
 
 iii. Froissart ; Philippe de Comines . . 8 
 
 iv. Rabelais and Calvin . . . . . . 10 
 
 v. The Princess and her Valet ; J. du Bellay 13 
 
 vi. Ronsard . . . . . . . . 15 
 
 vii. To Hell or the Dictionary ; A. d'Aubigne 1 17 
 
 viii. Montaigne ; Malherbe; E. de la Boetie . . 20 
 
 ix. The XVII. Century . . . . . . 23 
 
 x. The Immortals . . . . . . 28 
 
 xi. Rene Descartes . . . . . . 32 
 
 xii. Style Corne"lien . . . . 35 
 
 xiii. Racine . . . . . . 39 
 
 xiv. Blaise Pascal . . . . . . 43 
 
 xv. Poquelin, dit Moliere ; Regnard. . .. 46 
 
 xvi. Boileau Despreaux ; La Fontaine . . 51 
 
 xvii. Bossuet ; Bourdaloue . . . . . . 56 
 
 xviii. Massillon ; Fenelon . . . . 59 
 
 xix. .The Theophrastus of France ; Le Bon Due 61 
 
 xx. Madame de SeVigne and Scarron's Widow 65 
 
 xxi. The Ferney Philosopher . . . . 69 
 
 xxii. L'Esprit des Lois . . . . 74 
 
 xxiii. Jean Jacques . . . . . . . . 78 
 
 xxiv. The Enyclop6die . . - . . . . 83 
 
 xxv. Buffon . . . . . . . . 86 
 
 xxvi. Figaro . . . . . . . . 89
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 (CONTINUED) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 xxvii. Chenier . . . . . . 93 
 
 xxviii. Paul and Virginia ; Rene . . 95 
 
 xxix. Le Premier Empire . . . . . . 101 
 
 xxx. Hugo . . . . . . . . 104 
 
 xxxi. BeYanger and Lamartine . . . . 108 
 
 xxxii. Arcades Ambo .. .. .. 114 
 
 xxxiii. George Sand and Two Preachers . . 121 
 
 xxxiv. 'Cousin ; Simon ; Sainte-Beuve . . . . 127 
 
 xxxv. A Quartette of Historians . . . . 134 
 
 xxxvi. Lacepede ; Cuvier ; Balzac ; Dumas pre 139 
 
 xxxvii. Edmond About ; de Banville ; Baudelaire 145 
 
 xxxviii. Carmen and Mdlle. de Maupin . . . . 149 
 
 xxxix. A. Daudet and Flaubert . . . . 153 
 
 xl. Paul Bourget ; Anatole France ; Emile 
 
 Zola . . , . . . . . 157
 
 A SHORT INTRODUCTION 
 
 TO THE 
 STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 " LITERATURE," says M. de Bonald, " is the expression 
 " of society." Napoleon I. could not separate literature 
 from the life (as a whole) of peoples : their books he 
 found " magnanimes quand le peuple est grand ; 
 " vicieux, frivoles ou insenses quand il se corrompt 
 " et s'abaisse." 
 
 Lamartine says of peoples : " Their memory begins 
 " with their literature." 
 
 For Lemercier literature is the all-in-all, in which 
 and from which and into which all is, comes, goes. 
 
 Voltaire said : " les feuilles volantes sont la perte de 
 " la litterature." 
 
 Guizot thinks that plastically and aesthetically 
 modern letters are inferior to the old, superior as 
 regards sentiments, profundity, and deep-set ideas. 
 
 I have quoted these Frenchmen in the forefront 
 of my Notes, as they give in their own incom- 
 parable way what we can only express as strangers, 
 less well and, to the French, outlandishly. They 
 have been cited, too, in their prose (original or 
 translated). French prose, to many of us foreigners 
 (i.e., non-French), is exquisite, nearly always. French 
 verse generally pleases us less, often very much 
 less. Thus, I should as soon turn to Wordsworth as to 
 Francois Coppee, just dead, and my opinion of that
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Subjective poet is E. A. Foe's. So I have not touched 
 on Coppee. And prose writers have probably been 
 more fully and more often discussed (mollissimo 
 brachid} in these Short Notes than poets. To my poor 
 thinking, some French prose is the nearest sublunar 
 approach to perfection which I know. And I have 
 handled it, or tried to handle it, as Walton, "meek 
 "Walton," counselled to handle the worm. For the be- 
 ginning, if it is thought that perhaps I have avoided the 
 Chanson de Roland, Romans de Troie and 
 d'Alexandre, Chanson d'Antioche, Lancelot du Lac, 
 Berthe aux grands pies, the Celtic (Breton and British) 
 remains that have come down to us and such verses as, 
 in tens of thousands, still cumber the libraries, I have 
 done so deliberately. Vanity of vanities is Celtic 
 study, as I know to my cost. The dilettante may toy 
 with it, but it is time lost. I pray you, eschew it. My 
 order, too, is not strictly chronological. But it is so 
 fairly. In the immense period run over one could, of 
 course, only pick names here and there and make a 
 pen-and-ink sketch, so to say. A poet or two and of 
 prosateurs a handful have been caught, as it were, on 
 the wing. The French view has been ever taken, per- 
 haps, in preference to the British. And that, also, 
 deliberately, to persuade the reader, if reader I have, to 
 Gallicise in his French literature opinions. Of course, 
 once more, the French Government is not France. 
 The official estimate of, say, Zola, or Chateaubriand, or 
 Anatole France is not necessarily that of the majority 
 of litterateurs in their own country. Here will be 
 found no politics, it is hoped, and no parti pris in 
 religion or morality. The only standpoint has been
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 that of Art, of .4istheticism. These last know nothing 
 of Radical or Reactionnaire, of Catholicism or Atheism, 
 of Naturalism or Realism. I have nowhere suggested 
 that Christianity inaugurated the Cult of the Ugly. 
 Nowhere will Paganism and Decadence be found 
 bracketed. Surely, Literature is Catholic, in the Greek 
 sense. And French literature is naturally subsumed 
 under the chef of Literature, unless haply we think that 
 men of Gaul are sinners above all men.
 
 I. Celts and the Villon Cult. 
 
 THAT genial, if feeble, folk, the Celtomane, arrogates 
 to itself all the realm of dream known, not as French 
 Literature but, as Chanson de geste and its congeners, 
 lost to civilised intelligence since the days of Louis 
 XL The Cycle of Brittany and contes de la Biblio- 
 thlque bleue, who can away with them? Miracles, 
 Mysteries, Moralities are as a tale that is told and will 
 bear no re-telling. I stop, then, at Villon (1431-1484), 
 Villon the vagabond, the scamp, what you will, if you 
 but dub him poet This Paris apache only saved his 
 neck from the thief's halter by knowing a 
 fellow-poet our prisoner for twenty-five years 
 Charles of Orleans (!). An out-and-out black- 
 guard is no poseur, as somebody has aptly re- 
 marked, and " R.L.S. " finds his rascality pall 
 on him. Francois still awaits a white-washer, but 
 Rabelais and others have fathered on him tales of two 
 other malefactors. That Francois Rabelais should so 
 treat Frangois Villon is natural in a cure of Meudon 
 revenging the death of a priest, and demands perhaps 
 has received the reprobation of the Villon Society. 
 At this time of day, nobody wishes for the " neiges 
 " d'antan " proverbial tag, and the poet's Will is too 
 well-known, but one passage of the Grand Testament 
 may possibly be adduced, if only to show that Rennes, 
 in Brittany, was known before the Dreyfus trial 
 
 ( J ) In the poesy of Charles d'Orle'ans, M. G6ruzez sees an aftermath of 
 the XIV. Century, an aftermath harvested thanks to a stray sunbeam from 
 Italy thanks, that is, to Valentine of Milan.
 
 CELTS AND THE VILLON CULT. 
 
 [His " honneste mort " must have been soon after 
 October 2, 1461, when he left the gaol of Meung sur 
 Loire (Loiret).] 
 
 Puys que pape, roys, friz de roys, 
 Et concenz en ventres de roynes 
 Sont enseveliz, mprts et froidz, 
 En aultruy mains passent leurs resnes, 
 Moy, pauvre mercerot de Renes, 
 Mourray-je pas ? Ouy, se Dieu plaist ; 
 Mais, que j'aye faict mes estrenes, 
 Honneste mort ne me deplaist (!). 
 
 Many will have remarked how, in a passage well 
 enough known to warrant its non-citation, the bard 
 bequeaths his big spectacles, and gushes into poetry 
 upon the chief God's Acre of Paris. " There lie lords 
 " and ladies, fed delicately on cream and flummery or 
 " rice sweet Jesus, deign to shrive them !" And this 
 prayer we may perhaps breathe in favour of one whose 
 verse, with more self-reliance and more regular execu- 
 tion, would be as admirable in the Twentieth as it was 
 in the Fifteenth Century. Jean de Meung reminds us 
 by a curious coincidence of Villon's last (known) prison. 
 Jean, or Clopinel ( 2 ), was the literary executor of " le 
 " roman de la Rose," 
 
 " Ou 1'art d'aimer est tout enclose." 
 And like unto it is the " roman de renard." 
 
 {*) Grand Testament, Balade, p. 37. 
 
 (*) Jean de Meung, says M. Nisard," a fl^tri la rose en la cueillant." 
 Guillaume de Lorris, in imitating and translating Ovid, does not make such 
 a Bottom of poor Naso. And to make his sin worse, Jean lived in the time 
 of Dante !
 
 II. The Sire de Joinville. 
 
 BUT one must drag oneself away from poesy, for a 
 look at prose in the Middle Ages. The former 
 becomes famous even in the Eleventh Century; 
 whereas in France, as elsewhere, sermo pedester took 
 another couple of hundred years to mature. La Fon- 
 taine explains that prose is as hard to handle as verse ; 
 and certainly, in the absence of political and religious 
 eloquence and in the presence of all-permeating Latin, 
 French unrhymed composition had to languish until 
 the Crusades. These made themselves spoken of 
 " even in my lady's chamber," says Joinville. So place 
 aux dames and -place au Sire de Joinville! The 
 curse of modernism has ruined his text, now happily 
 restored with fair accuracy, and his old age has marred 
 parts of his Vie de Saint Louis. But the Life, or 
 Histotre, is charming in its imperfection "com- 
 " pletest while incomplete," like the child or the rose- 
 bud. Gaston Paris calls it one of the most precious 
 bequests of the Middle Ages. In time, it is a half-way 
 house between Villehardouin and Froissart, of whom 
 the former was born (1150) in the Champagne whose 
 sen6chal was Jean de Joinville (1224-1319). Like 
 Disraeli the Younger, Joinville retouched his work, e.g. 
 his Credo after 37 years. Like Villehardouin and un- 
 like Froissart, Jean told what he had himself seen 
 well, when the events were freshly graved in his 
 memory ; ill, when upwards of eighty years old. To 
 Frenchmen the passage in the His to ire touching his
 
 THE SIRE DE JOINVILLE. 
 
 prestres, or chaplain, has ever appeared delicious. It 
 is surely characteristic. 
 
 " Now the sickness of the host had gotten me. . . 
 " And so it was that my priest sang me Mass before 
 'my bed in my tent, and had the sickness that I 
 " had. Now it came to pass that in his holy rite 
 " he fainted. And when I saw that he was fain to 
 " fall, girt as I was I leaped from my bed and did 
 " catch him in mine arms, in such sort that eftsoon 
 " and right bravely he did his holy rite .... he 
 " came to himself and did his rite and sang his Mass 
 " thoroughly, nor sang it ever more thereafter." 
 
 An eye-witness of St. Louis' 1248-1254 campaign, 
 he becomes curiously and cunningly involved when the 
 1250 accident of Mansourah imprisonment has to be 
 detailed. As the Egyptian town, now very clean and 
 still showing the house where Louis IX. was in durance, 
 has nothing much else to boast of, the royal incarcera- 
 tion should have been well described and fully. But 
 it is in detail that Joinville is often wanting. Elegant 
 he is not, nor nervous and solid as Villehardouin ; but 
 he leaves little to desiderate on the score of running, 
 easy causerie. Geoffrey, Seigneur de Villehardouin, 
 who died in Messinople, a fief of the Constantinople 
 Latin Empire, in 1213, was also a chronicler, not a 
 historian.
 
 III. Froissart. 
 
 To read Villehardouin in his old French garb is a 
 purgatory to the general reader ; and Froissart, who 
 lived from the Thirties of the XIV. to the closing first 
 decade of the XV. Century, is not an author to offer 
 for C. S. Examinations at random, as a whilom friend 
 of the writer's found to his cost. Jean Froissart writes 
 largely from hearsay of Crecy and Poitiers, of Calais 
 and Duguesclin, but always with an eye to princely 
 favour and hospitality. To him the Unities and 
 chronological order were as closed books as the Salian 
 Chant to Horace. A prose Pindar, he wrote for 
 courts, and ran the gamut of chase and tournoi and 
 feast and festival. The Job, xxxix., 19 (p. 217) of 
 Quevedo y Villegas may be applied to him, where the 
 Spaniard says : " En el confuso rumor de cajas y in- 
 '' strumentos de la guerra el tropel de sus galopes 
 " pronuncia ' Cierra.' Erizadas las crines y atentas 
 '*' las orejas, anticipadamente percibe las senas de la 
 " batalla, los movimientos de los reyes, la aclamacion 
 "de los soldados." His History was Sir Walter 
 Scott's liber carissimus, dramatic, Homeric, vivid. Of 
 course, he copied from another Jean, one Le Bel, 
 Canon of Liege ; spent largely where vintners were 
 concerned, on palfreys and greyhounds and cates. 
 But perhaps we may forgive him, as the first country 
 he visited was England and as he did not espouse the 
 Gallic cause against the British. Besides, even our 
 own Keats also has sung lovingly of " dance and Pro- 
 " venial song," such as the ballades, rondeaux, and 
 
 8
 
 FROISSART. 
 
 virelais of Froissart, which leaven North French letters 
 with a tang of the felibriges. He died, in or about 
 1410, at Chimay, Hainaut, after his return from a visit 
 to our Second Richard, a prince long wedded to French 
 ideas of men and things. 
 
 And what are we to say of Philippe de Comines 
 (1445 ? to 1511)? One is not concerned here with his 
 role as courtier in Bourgogne or under Louis XL, 
 Charles VIII., and Louis XII. Still less need his 
 " iron cage " episode interest us. But the difficulty is 
 to fix this amphibious writer, little or nothing a 
 chronicler and largely or altogether a historian. From 
 the chronicling trio just mentioned, Villehardouin, 
 Froissart and Joinville, he is miles apart, perhaps 
 superior to any one of them. For he really wrote 
 history, dull comparatively, but deep. In language 
 and style he is of the Middle Ages, modern in ideas 
 and judgment. Froissart's chef-d'oeuvre (and that of 
 the XIV. Century, say some) was his Chroniques ; de 
 Comines', the Memoires. In the latter we trace the 
 firm hand of the strenuous politician, the insight and 
 profundity of a philosopher or of what then passed 
 muster as such.
 
 IV. Rabelais and Calvin 
 
 WITH Philippe de Comines, then, I bridge the great 
 gulf fixed between 1453 (which closes the Hundred 
 Years War and the Middle Ages) and Modern France 
 Italianised in and after 1498. For the next fifty 
 years we find hardly more than two -prosateurs of 
 genius, Calvin and Rabelais, par nobile fratrum! and 
 but one poet, Clement Marot. Bossuet quotes Calvin's 
 fairly just, if vain, estimate of his own style : " driving 
 home an argument and pregnant brevity." This is in 
 the Histoire des Variations (lib. ix., 55), which fastens 
 on Calvin's " sad " manner of writing, but allows to the 
 Burner of Servetus " cette gloire d'avoir aussi bien 
 " 6crit qu'homme de son siecle." Eloquence and 
 condensation and imagery are blended in the Institu- 
 tion ckretienne, as done into French in 1540. And 
 that by the confession of men little flattered by Calvin's 
 amenities : " chien," " phrenetique," " grosse beste," 
 and apostrophes of that ilk To be sure, that was the 
 age of unmeasured invective. Thus, for Calvin, 
 Rabelais is among the gaudisseurs, and Calvin for 
 Rabelais is " demoniacle, imposteur qui est en ad- 
 miration a tous les gents ecerveles." Probably both the 
 Picard and the Tourangeau only wished to tickle the 
 ears of the groundlings, and all this summer lightning 
 of words was harmless as your lawyers' mutual vitu- 
 perations followed by libations in common and by per- 
 fect peace. The "sad" stylist and the Prince of 
 Buffoonery were both read. The first is one of 
 Pasquier's "fathers of our language," the second is, 
 
 10
 
 RABELAIS AND CALVIN. 
 
 the same Pasquier says, " to be perused for our profit 
 " and our laughter." And as the Institution is Calvin's 
 masterpiece, so Gargantua bears the palm in the 
 realm of mockery. Indeed, it is the very exaggeration 
 of that mockery, the outside rind of accumulated 
 adjective, the profusion of learned " show off " that 
 have kept sweet and perennially new the Meudon 
 cure's kernel of good sense. Meantime the " de- 
 "moniacle" has become diabolically old fashioned. But 
 Gargantua has enlisted the sincerest flatterers, and 
 among his royal recruits are Moliere, La Fontaine and 
 Voltaire, to name but these. La Bruyere's Caracteres 
 avow that Rabelais' work is " a riddle that no man may 
 " rede, a monstrous amalgam of subtle morale and foul 
 " festering. When bad, he transcends the worst ; when 
 " good, he is food for the Gods.'' And so evidently is 
 Beelzebub the Prince of this World that each Bowd- 
 lerised Rabelais is worse than its predecessor. There 
 was one, 150 years ago, by the Abbe de Marsy, and 
 another (Soulacroix) is still coming out in parts to-day, 
 to the greater ridicule of Senator Berthelot's France ! 
 The Annales Rabelaisiennes, we know, exist, and per- 
 haps serve a useful purpose. But they explain 
 Rabelais, and therein they sin grievously. " It is 
 " right earth," as my Lord of Verulam would complain. 
 When M. Alcofribas, in 1535, took away the key of 
 knowledge, " la clef de ces choses abscondes" he did it 
 wittingly and with his tongue in his cheek. Gargantua 
 is, or he is not, Francois I. ; Pantagruel, Antoine de 
 Bourbon ; Panurge, some cardinal or other. But really 
 our Francois had his deal with the genus Man, whose 
 inmost fibres feel the doctor-priest's scalpel, unerring, 
 
 II
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 unpitying. So that it was doubly unkind of this 
 restorer of the Amadis, the Florestans and the Philo- 
 copes instead of aiding, to "throw stones into the 
 " garden " of Calvin, in Henri Estienne's phrase. The 
 pair are inseparable in chronologic literature. M. 
 Nisard has happily said and it is the conclusion of the 
 whole matter : " Les deux grandes sources qui doivent 
 " renouveler 1'esprit Frangais vont s'epandre a grands 
 " flots. La Renaissance nous donnera Rabelais ; la 
 " Reforme nous donnera Calvin." 
 
 (2
 
 V. 
 
 The Princess and her Valet. 
 
 THESE two mighty names are enough even for the 
 reign of a Francois I. But that monarch's sister must 
 have a word. She sheltered the Reformers, favoured 
 the Renaissance, and, of course, wrote poetry. But 
 Marguerite de Valois' title to passing mention is her 
 plagiarism of Boccaccio's Decameron. She reduced, it 
 is true, the ten days to seven. But that is de rigueur 
 now-a-days, also. Thus, in the last two years, I have 
 thrice found the Plagues of Egypt reckoned as seven 
 (*). But Marguerite (1492-1 549) shows originality in her 
 execution, grace and delicacy. Her Heptameron has 
 been called " le premier ouvrage en prose qu'on puisse 
 " lire sans 1'aide d'un vocabulaire," and Gruget, her 
 first publisher, waxing bold, finds that she surpasses her 
 original. C red at Judceus. Her brother, Pere et 
 Restaurateur des lettres, died in 1 547, whereupon she 
 abandoned the Muses, and died herself two years later. 
 
 About 1518, probably in the autumn of that year, 
 Francois I. had given this sister, then Duchess of 
 Alenc.on, a valet de chambre, Clement Marot. Marot 
 was more a poet than his mistress, more a valet than 
 Jean Jacques, less marotique than La Fontaine. With 
 his style marotique, however, his badinage, his special 
 formes and sui generis colour we have to do exclu- 
 sively. His valour at Pavia (February 24, 1525); his 
 
 ( x ) Also A. Daudet's Sapho so reduces them. 
 13
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 eating bacon in Lent next year, when they " sweetly 
 "nailed" him up in Chartres prison ; his flight to Venice 
 and repatriation (1536); his qualmless Sternhold-and- 
 Hopkinsism (what S. Frangois de Sales calls his 
 " rimaillerie ridicule " of 50 Psalms) these are but 
 Stations in a Vita Dolorosa. His quintessence, as 
 Rabelais might say, was what Boileau characterises in 
 him, " badinage avec une supreme elegance." Even 
 Racine, in an epigram on I phi genie, has not disdained 
 to marotise. 
 
 But French was to be proved " capable of higher 
 and better style," as Joachim du Bellay (1524-1560) 
 phrased it. With Horace, du Bellay bade men turn 
 by night and day to Greek (and Latin), devoting to 
 the Jeux Floraux of Toulouse the " rondeaux, ballades, 
 " virelais, chants royaux, chansons et autres epiceries 
 " qui corrompent le gout de notre langue " (spelling 
 modernised). This was in 1549. The Brigade (com- 
 pany] followed, re-named the Pleiade, from the IIAeias 
 of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria and from its 
 imitation by Charlemagne. In 1549, too, the Italian 
 Sonnet (!) made its French debut, under female in- 
 spiration this time, whatever may be the truth about 
 the "Shakespearean Sonnets." "Vous eussiez dit 
 "que ce temps-la estoit du tout consacre aux Muses," 
 writes the contemporary Estienne Pasquier. 
 
 (*) Others attribute its naturalisation in France to Saint-Gelais. Simi- 
 larly, there is no certainly about the names of Pl6ia.de members.
 
 VI. Ronsard. 
 
 AND the Muses, too, gave France at this epoch the Ode, 
 but through Ronsard. Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) 
 has quite recently been newly appraised by George 
 Wyndham. To Pierre, as to us all, the Gods have 
 given good and evil. But the good is overwhelming. 
 His lines were fallen on pleasant places even, one had 
 almost said, up to the ultima linea vitcz. He laid, says 
 Sainte-Beuve, "the foundations of the poetic revolu- 
 tion that altered the future of our language and 
 " poetry." Boileau is severe : 
 
 Ronsard, qui le (Marot) suivit, par une autre methode, 
 Reglant tout, brouilla tout, fit un art a sa mode, 
 Et toutefois longtemps cut un heureux destin. 
 Mais sa muse, en frangais parlant grec et latin, 
 Vit dans Page suivant, par un retour grotesque, 
 Tomber de ses grands mots le faste pedantesque. 
 
 Boileau's severity is just, provided we remember 
 Ronsard's happy inspirations on occasion and the im- 
 petus he gave to poeticism. Another of the Pleiade, 
 Beileau, painter of Nature, in the Chief's parlance, 
 aimed lower, eschewed pedantry and cultivated a pretty 
 gentillesse, something wrinkled, according to Geruzez, 
 save for his sparkling Avril. 
 
 Avril, 1'honneur et des bois 
 
 Et des mois, 
 
 Avril, la douce esperance 
 Des fruits qui sous le coton 
 Du bouton 
 Nourrissent leur jeune enfance. 
 
 15
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Another Ronsardist is Regnier (1573-1613), simple, 
 nervous and roguish. Too cynical, perhaps, he yet 
 improved on the Master by holding fast to the toward 
 and putting away the untoward. Marot seems alive 
 again in some of Regnier's work. Mathurin Regnier 
 is thus the forerunner, unconscious but real, of 
 Malherbe, of cadence and " the right word in the right 
 " place." The reform of Malherbe smacks, " all pro- 
 " portions kept" of Alexander Pope's among us. Each 
 in some sort " reduisit la muse aux regies du devoir. " 
 Ronsard closes the XVI. and Malherbe opens the 
 XVII. Century. The two following specimens give 
 Ronsard at his best and worst, respectively : 
 
 I. Ca, page, ma lyre, 
 Je veux faire bruire 
 Ses languettes d'or ; 
 La divine grace 
 
 Des beaux vers d'Horace 
 Me plait bien encor. 
 
 II. O cuisse-ne, archete, hymerien . . . 
 
 Nourrit-vigne, aime-pampre . . . 
 
 Luckily for Ronsard, Muretus in 1553 began expound- 
 ing him unto the vulgar : Bentley's scholia must be less 
 grateful to the gentle shade of the " Lady of Christ's." 
 
 16
 
 VII. 
 To Hell or the Dictionary. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY with Ronsard was Henri Estienne 
 
 (1532 1598), son of Robert, the printer. The 
 Thesaurus Groecce lingua exists still and will exist, 
 however much Henri's identity may be hidden by 
 later works incorporating him. His French works 
 were only written to recruit himself withal after his 
 Classics. His Precellence du langage fran$ais (i$7Q) 
 supplements du Bellay's Defense et Illustration, but is 
 as curious as his Apologie pour Herodote is, in its way, 
 atrocious. The moral effect of this last and the 
 financial ruin of the Thesaurus crushed him over a 
 quarter of a century before death claimed him. But 
 no posthumous pains of Hell can have touched him. 
 In his life he was purged of sin by lexicography : God 
 
 condenda . . lexica mandat 
 damnatis, pcenam pro pcenis omnibus unam. 
 
 And it was for us, then, ungrateful wretches that we 
 are, putting off Greek from us as an accursed thing, 
 that Henry Stephanus died in a pauper bed in Lyon ! 
 It was for us, whose Latin is comparatively little and 
 whose Greek is nil, that principes poured from the 
 Paris press of Stephens ! It is a small thing, it seems, 
 that we Moderns learn no modern language, while 
 Classics are anathema. Meantime, the Professors of 
 English at English Universities have to learn their 
 native tongue in Germany !
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 A question seems here not unnatural. We may not, 
 cannot answer it. We are too far away from the men 
 in point of time. But, standing in thought at that bed- 
 side in Lyon, where Estienne died in disgrace with 
 Fortune, we may ask : What relation is there, or is 
 there any relation, between the Renaissance and 
 Protestantism? In other words, why did the placid 
 occupation of emending texts end in Stephanus' pere- 
 grinations and poverty? 
 
 At the first blush there seems no connexion between 
 the New Learning and the New Religion. But, then, 
 both were new ; and the old barriers of Catholicism, 
 on the one hand, and of uniformly bad texts (classical), 
 on the other, once broken came the deluge. Aristotle 
 is now to be had in his own original Greek, or some- 
 thing approaching to this ; the Arab and Jewish copies 
 are antiquated ipso facto. The Pope is seemingly 
 wrong over the Indulgences. " Away with Arabic 
 " Aristotles, crucify the Bishop of Rome !" 
 
 This is absolutely illogical, but passing natural in 
 the Many-headed Beast of Plato (read in an editio 
 princeps, or not at all !). 
 
 And that Beast hath power even over gentlemen, 
 your Estienne, your Palissy, your Agrippa d'Aubigne. 
 In the rush and crush the calmest and best-born often 
 fall or are hurried along. 
 
 False analogy and undue extension of reasoning can 
 do much. " The Indulgences are wrong ; argal, all 
 " the Pope does is wrong." 
 
 Or: "Aristotle rules Philosophy; Rome, Religion." 
 Aristotle, we now see, did not believe in a Divine 
 
 18
 
 TO HELL OR THE DICTIONARY. 
 
 Providence watching us personally ; so he is all that 
 Bacon dubs him in contempt. 
 
 Rome and the Stagirite stand or fall together ; 
 Rome is as infected as he. 
 
 This again is absurd, but plausible. 
 
 Sophisms, flaws in reasoning, paralogisms are hidden 
 by a man's self-deception often. 
 
 And such self-deception is common in violent par- 
 tisans. Thus d'Aubigne (1552-1630) thought he 
 babbled in Hebrew in his tender years. For him, in 
 his Tragiques, all Huguenots are the victims and all 
 Catholics Jack Ketches. Unfortunately, however, the 
 Tragiques forget to say what the Memoir es forget to 
 conceal : Agrippa d'Aubigne himself had butchered in 
 cold blood 22 Catholic soldiers who had surrendered 
 without fighting. And this is the militant theologian 
 whom France calls the Gallic Juvenal ; who lay buried 
 in his own endless repetitions, incoherence and ob- 
 scurity ; whom Victor Hugo in 1852 resurrected partly 
 and partially, by copying in his Chdtiments many of 
 Agrippa's faults.
 
 VIII. 
 
 Montaigne and Malherbe. 
 
 INDEED the whole XVI. Century boasts but few first- 
 class men. Of these Montaigne and Malherbe repre- 
 sent the prose and poetry, respectively, of 1533-1592 
 and of 1555-1628. And what prose! Shandean 
 w-Ttpov irporcpov, remarks like " J'ajoute, mais je ne 
 corrige pas," the Preface of Book iii. hidden away in 
 the ninth chapter! All this, too, is as deliberate as 
 putting off Tristram's birth until the end of the second 
 volume. Sterne and Montaigne both travelled in 
 France and Italy, and both travels were published in 
 the closing XVIII. Century. Yorick and Michel 
 Eyquem are, each after his kind, Pyrrhonists or Scep- 
 tics, or may be taken for such. The Essais are a 
 Philosophy of Doubt, that bed whose double pillow 
 for well-shaped heads is deliciously soft and hight 
 " ignorant indifference " (or " indifferent ignorance "). 
 In the Essais all Montaigne's ideas focus in Man, 
 studied more theoretically than by Rabelais and as a 
 Freer Agent than by Calvin. All that Amyot had of 
 good, the Mayor of Bordeaux says better; more 
 varied, he is as exact as Calvin ; he is as free and 
 delightful as Rabelais, but without the jargon. Life 
 is an Abbey of Thelema, where Man may do what he 
 lists. But, whereas in the cure of Chinon, " Thelema " 
 spells the />ov7//ia trapes of the XXXIX. Articles, 
 the same word in the Seigneur de Montaigne has al- 
 most Aristotle's connotation of irpoaipeo-is fiiov. Another 
 
 2O
 
 MONTAIGNE AND MALHERBE. 
 
 trait of Aristotelianisra in him has been happily 
 touched by Nisard, moderation, prr-pum;?. " C'est 
 " surtout par cette moderation admirable que les 
 " Essais de Montaigne sont le premier ouvrage de la 
 " prose franchise. Beaucoup meme le regardent comme 
 " le premier ouvrage de genie, dans 1'ordre du temps." 
 This book, first in seniority among popular works, con- 
 fronts Man with himself in every time and every clime. 
 It studies Man methodically, i.e., as methodically as 
 Montaigne's mad arrangement allows. The Essais are 
 no memoirs, they are nothing didactic. They are 
 neither himself ; nor Amyot, who raised him (he says) 
 from the Slough of Despond of ignorance ; nor the 
 Plutarch he cites ad infinitum ; nor Seneca. They 
 are nothing, and they are all. Cursed bitterly by 
 Balzac, found impious by Port Royal, treated worse 
 than a Jesuit by Pascal, the " pernicious, immoral, 
 obscene " Essais became suddenly cleansed towards 
 the close of the XVIL, and even properly appreciated 
 in the XVIIL, Century. Montaigne seems to have 
 played the role of Pylades (or Orestes) to the Orestes 
 (or Pylades) of ETtienne de la Boetie, who, at 16, ap- 
 pears to have been as strong on Plutarch as was his 
 friend when much older. Another pupil and com- 
 panion was Pierre Charron, moralist and theologian, 
 lawyer and priest, preacher and self-styled successor 
 of the views of the Essais. Whatever the ideas of 
 the Montaigne School may have been and they seem 
 to have suffered from flux, even as the Euripus or the 
 Gospel character the Master was hors de pair as a 
 writer. In the XVI. Century " Eclipse is first and the 
 "rest nowhere." He taxed himself with Gasconing 
 
 21
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 his French, called himself simple, swore soothly that 
 he could not pot-boil without his chronicler of 
 Chceronea. But all this is " pretty Fanny's way," and 
 this pretty Fanny is nothing if not maligne. As a 
 fact, the style is chastened to the utmost ; exact 
 thoughts are couched in kingly raiment ; conceived 
 by a poetic mind, his ideas shine forth living and 
 graphic. What Cardinal du Perron called " le 
 " breviaire des honnetes gens " is the very antipodes of 
 Homer ; it is personal par excellence. 
 
 The list of XVI. Century prose -writers is closed : 
 Rabelais, Calvin, and Montaigne attain unto the first 
 three ; Amyot was but a " translateur," though given 
 the palm by Montaigne "sur tous nos ecrivains 
 " frangois."
 
 IX. The XVII. Century. 
 
 Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628) is the Pollio who 
 ushers in a new Century; as he worthily closed the 
 XVI., so he opens the XVII. Henri IV., if we are to 
 believe Geruzez, made of the French a nation, and of 
 their jargon Malherbe made a speech. France and 
 Navarre are henceforward France. Baragouin is 
 henceforth confined to those Bretons who eat the husks 
 which the swine reject. The autonomy Henri gained 
 and maintained for his kingdom, Malherbe conquered 
 and defended for the republic of letters. 
 
 In other words, a new era has dawned. Standing 
 with Malherbe, and looking forward far as human eye 
 can pierce the future, one sees, or seems to see, already 
 a vista crowded with mighty men. And of these are 
 Richelieu and Corneille. In the pulpit are Bossuet 
 and Fenelon ; philosophy has its Descartes, Male- 
 branche, Pascal ; comedy, its Moliere ; fable and 
 satire, La Fontaine and Boileau. La Bruyere and La 
 Rochefoucauld are there, and the Letters of Sevigne 
 make even Vitre interesting. In a word, the Great 
 Century is all before us, and, in point of time, its 
 coryphceus is Malherbe. He it is that men call "the 
 tyrant of words and syllables " ; that lost son and 
 daughter and son, but reached all sorrow's crown of 
 sorrows on his own deathbed, when a nurse spoke 
 bad French. He had smitten hip and thigh the 
 Ronsardists, whose Pleiade was to him a byword and a 
 hissing. He had told one, Desportes, a rhymer of no 
 mean calibre and drawing over 120,000 francs for 
 
 23
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 doing nothing in three or four abbayes, that he pre- 
 ferred his potage to his verse. Men had feared his 
 supreme disdain, women had adored him and wrought 
 for him the equivalent of worked slippers for littera- 
 teurs in lordly Aberdeen. He had ruined the fair 
 name for poesy of Ronsard ; he had warped the sense 
 of Seneca (how pestilently present in letters of those 
 days was this pet horror of Macaulay !) ; he had 
 villanously imitated Tansillo and put 5. Peter's tears in 
 his bottle. And in his death he was insulted by an 
 hireling that massacred his tongue ! 
 
 There is in Malherbe a touch of Callimachus, to 
 whom no plague was greater than a big book. The 
 " Remains " of Francois are modest, but generally per- 
 fect with the perfection of Alexander Pope. They 
 visibly eschew, as they would the Foul Fiend, Hiatus 
 and clashing vowels and overflowing lines and arbitrary 
 succession of rhymes " male " and " female." His 
 wand gave French verse magical harmony, grace, a 
 noble sostenuto, hitherto lacking. His " Psalm cxlv." 
 is esteemed consummate in workmanship. We still 
 admire in him what his contemporaries extolled 
 novelty. The " majority " of the French genius seems 
 attained in him. In him French speech has the vigour 
 and the virility that are now due to it. He was chef 
 d'ecole. Interpreter of the Muses, he started a reform, 
 in whose vitality he was himself a fervent believer. 
 He taught poetry orally : one had almost said that he 
 retailed it like cheese, in the manner of the Frogs' 
 Inferno of Aristophanes. He sorely rated his unhappy 
 pupils. And yet this middle-aged idol was no grand 
 poet, no genius. Regnier opined that " he prosed in
 
 THE XVII. CENTURY. 
 
 '' rhyme and rhymed in prose," and Regnier was right. 
 The Spirit never " moved " him : the bard would not 
 allow it. He went to work with compass and foot- 
 rule. Meting, he meted the line very cunningly, but he 
 put no fire in it. Fire or passion or enthusiasm dis- 
 turbs one's equilibrium, and Malherbe's balance was 
 very sure. Trim and tidy and true to the canon is 
 each line -each word, each vowel. Reading his 
 Stanzas to Duperrier and every proper person knows 
 them by heart one hears the vocal condolence rise as 
 it ought to rise, or fall as is most justly due, at the 
 precise moments consecrated to arsis and to thesis 
 respectively. In short, to him we owe the mould of 
 Corneille and Racine. 
 
 Lord Byron has somewhere remarked that, had he 
 known Pope's careful cadence better, he had written 
 finer verse, and perhaps Swinburne was of his opinion. 
 Even an untamed steed of Mazeppa should be trained, 
 should be held with bit and bridle, lest it fall upon us. 
 
 Something such as I have tried to limn was 
 Malherbe. De Guez de Balzac did Malherbe's work, 
 in prose reform. Under Balzac's touch the language 
 of his country became supple, bright, cleaned of out- 
 landish terms in Greek and Latin and Italian and 
 patois. The French torrent of speech learns perforce 
 to respect its banks. To borrow Macaulay's figure, 
 the garden of prose now becomes geometrically cor- 
 rect : all is square and angular, in absolute obedience 
 to a law of order that knows no exceptions. Con- 
 ceivably it might not have struck this " Hermit of the 
 Charerite " to be so sublime, so perfect, so four-square 
 
 25
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 without flaw, had he not been praised once by Mal- 
 herbe an event to be marked with the whitest of 
 stones. Condemned, however, as he was to keep him- 
 self at that dizzy height of transcendent excellence, 
 Balzac palls with bated breath be it said on the 
 average poor sinner perusing his prose. The cadences 
 are too sweet, the regularity too regular. The usual 
 carnal reader is in the parlous frame of mind shown by 
 a prince now existing, whom the writer makes no claim 
 to know. This Heir Apparent had been feasted 
 through four mortal hours with consummate correct- 
 ness by a living Lord. The scion of Kings could bear 
 no more. When the ladies retired, he slapped a com- 
 moner on the back and bespoke him then and there 
 for a dance. 
 
 Corneille must have cried " Halt there ! and write 
 vulgar French " when he got Balzac's reply to his 
 " paquet " : " Your Cinna heals the sick, makes the 
 " palsied clap their hands, gives speech to the dumb 
 " ' to one with cold in head ' were too little to say. 
 " And really I had become speechless and voiceless. 
 " Voice and speech recovered thanks to you, it is right 
 " meet that I use them twain to your greater glory 
 " and to crying unendingly ' oh, passing fair !' " 
 
 Had Balzac been Voiture writing to a dame, he 
 could hardly have been more precieux. Nisard calls 
 him vir probus, dicendi peritus. which is a criticism 
 like another. 
 
 Malherbe, then, sowed, and Balzac watered, and 
 Richelieu gave the Academic franchise The avowed 
 
 26
 
 THE XVII. CENTURY. 
 
 intention of this 1635 creation was " d'etablir des 
 " regies certaines de la langue franchise et de rendre 
 " le langage franqois non seulement e'egant mais 
 " capable de traiter tous les arts et toutes les sciences."
 
 X. The Immortals. 
 
 As shading is necessary above all in a picture, so 
 in a poetical assembly (dashed with prose) obscurities 
 are inevitable. The first Forty Immortals included 
 Chatelet, Porcheres, etc. The ruling triumviri were the 
 creating Cardinal, Chapelain and Vaugelas. Of these 
 the second was, by universal consent at the time, worthy 
 of poetic palms . . . had he not tried poetry. " Parler 
 " Vaugelas " was the best of bon ton about 1672, when 
 the chic treated cavalierly terms that were damned 
 unequivocally by Remarques sur la langue franfaise. 
 This work shows the hereditary descent and evolu- 
 tion of the Academic from the Hotel de Rambouillet. 
 French now (1635) can hold its own against Latin, 
 chosen as late as 1604, by de Thou, for his Universal 
 History. Even the court Gascon, like Montaigne, in 
 its parlance had been purified by Malherbe, and 
 could appreciate the nation's actual linguistic assets. 
 From that naughty court, say some, had sprung the 
 salon d'Arthenice, who could not brook barbarisms in 
 language and irregularity in morals. And to this 
 Henri IV., those before and those after him at the 
 helm of State were unduly wedded. From ill, there- 
 fore, good had sprung the chambre bleue, following 
 the boudoir of Artkenice, and the Academic crowning 
 the work. The literary reunions, also, at the house of 
 Conrart (1603-1675) had sprung from meetings at the 
 Hotel de Rambouillet, and these reunions had been 
 mentioned to Richelieu. All, then, had worked to- 
 gether for the purification of the country Court, 
 
 28
 
 THE IMMORTALS. 
 
 tongue, letters. All which gives certain British huge 
 leverage against ourselves. For we have no Academy, 
 and, consequently, no " rule of the road " in our 
 attempts at writing or pronouncing our language. Now 
 reason would that we should have fixed limits and 
 canons beyond which we could not go and which we 
 should follow. These the French have. Whatever 
 we may think of their verse in general, their prose is 
 usually delightful reading exactly for this reason that 
 the correct word is in the correct place. Their 
 Grammar tells us where to put the accent, on the last 
 syllable : the exceptions are all tabled : a man cannot 
 choose but go straight he is so "personally 
 " conducted." French schools have their various 
 courts for their various classes, with a 
 pion for each yard. The dear children can 
 hardly breathe without being observed by a surveil- 
 lant, whether in play time or in the street. On leav- 
 ing la boitey the army soon claims them, and there they 
 are again subjected to the official glare. The 
 Academy, a Government institution, keeps writers in 
 swaddling clothes in like manner. Now the great sin 
 is this : not to have the fear of the Academy before 
 one's eyes. God and the Prophets are as dust in the 
 balance, the Academy is all in all. The most porno- 
 graphic authors must be very careful as to the gender 
 of foudre. They must make no confusion over the 
 suitable and only suitable mood and tense in a tem- 
 porary clause. Of late years, it is true, certain tolerance 
 is extended touching the Past Participle and cognate 
 horrors, but the man who avails himself of such toler- 
 ance runs a risk in some circles of being mal vu. True, 
 
 29
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Voltaire (for instance) ignored or was ignorant of such 
 and such a rule and has even broken it. His crime 
 be on his own head! It has perished with him, and 
 must never be renewed. Possibly it may be explained 
 as metri causa, or as making no difference to the read- 
 ing of the line ! But never more be such felony seen : 
 it must never be imitated. Such, roughly, seems the 
 standpoint of the Academicians and of the majority 
 of Gauls, who all dread to offend. These same " Im- 
 mortals " have from their very creation decided on 
 composing not only a Grammar but also Rhetorique, 
 Poetique and a Dictionary. About the last-named, at 
 least, they are still deciding with a slowness and de- 
 liberation worthy of a better cause. Such nonchalant 
 sauntering through " groves of Academe " is meet 
 enough in the case of men whose names are to live for 
 ever. But the Accademia della Crusca, the Florentine 
 1582 equivalent of the Academic, seems to have com- 
 piled its dictionary and published many excellent 
 editions of older Italian poets. 
 
 A curious coincidence is Richelieu's and Charle- 
 magne's having had the same idea of founding learned 
 societies. Later than Charlemagne, there was the 
 Academic des feux floraux (already referred to) at 
 Toulouse, 1323, for poesy culture only. Suppressed, 
 of course, by the Convention of 1793, the Academic 
 franchise was restored, under that name, in 1816, by 
 Louis XVIII. Though centralisation a la fran^aise 
 in the matter of an Academy has never been possible 
 in England or Germany, our Transatlantic cousins 
 have their American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 
 Boston, since 1 870. Franklin originated it in an earlier 
 
 30
 
 THE IMMORTALS. 
 
 form. Boston, however, is not sufficiently select per 
 se for modern up-to-date philology, which has its Cave 
 of Adullam, or turris eburnea, in Brookline, the aristo- 
 cratic suburb of Franklin's birthplace. To these 
 Sybarites of Science, the dwellers in Brookline, and 
 to none beside under Heaven's broad canopy, has pure 
 English been vouchsafed. Indeed, the writer of " Poor 
 Richard " does well to be dead, as, should he arise from 
 the grave to-day, his ignorance of his language, as 
 settled in Brookline drawing rooms, might shock many 
 of his countrymen and townsmen.
 
 XI. Rene Descartes. 
 
 IN less hurry to be born than even Darwin's 
 elephant, the Academic franchise, officially constituted 
 by letters patent of Louis XIII. on January 2, 1635, 
 only met for the first time on July 10, 1637. In that 
 same year appeared Descartes' Discours sur la 
 Methode, which was at once translated into Latin, but 
 took twenty-one years to reach a second edition. Had 
 Descartes attempted, like Zola, to enter the ranks Im- 
 mortal no doubt, he would have been equally un- 
 successful. A contemporary grammarian and of 
 them was the Kingdom of the Academic Pierre 
 Cesar Richelet, does not even mention Descartes, 
 though Rene has apparently used the word -poele. in an. 
 unusual sense but, I piously trust, in the appropriate 
 gender. The Discours was thought in Latin, though 
 first written in French, which perhaps surfers in conse- 
 quence. A " conversation etudiee," it tries not to be 
 dry, and yet claims to be scientific. Surely Edgar 
 Allan Poe would not think himself scientific when he 
 wrote that he " held within his hand grains of the 
 golden sand," when he bitterly asked if " all that 
 "we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." 
 And yet this is but Descartes' " II peut se faire que 
 "je me trompe, et ce n'est peut-etre qu'un peu de 
 "cuivre et de verre que je prends pour de Tor et du 
 " diamant." Elsewhere the " scientific " philosopher 
 so far forgets himself as to adapt the figure of the 
 house built upon the sand from the Gospel quo quid 
 jejunius? In yet a third passage he calls himself a 
 
 32
 
 RENE DESCARTES. 
 
 remover of quicksand in quest of bedrock : this, all 
 this in 1637 must have seemed unscientific and the 
 " Method " of madness. And yet, if we must (indis- 
 creetly) speak the truth, the Discours de la Methode, 
 not running into one hundred pages, is, without inten- 
 tion on the part of its author, literature. O ! that mine 
 enemy would write a book ! may have been the feeling 
 of this member of a noble family, all gens d'epee but 
 his father, fallen so low as to be conseiller au Parle- 
 ment at Rennes, Brittany. Rene was no hack, no 
 " Grub Street " denizen. But he was gentleman enough 
 to give his book all the treasures of his experience 
 and genius, and that made something literary, how- 
 ever little he may have wished it. His words are 
 well chosen. Clearness reigns supreme. That the 
 Classical Latin construction betrays itself is a 
 fault, but a venial one. But Descartes was neither the 
 father nor the grandfather of the XVII. Century 
 literature, as Amos was no prophet, neither was he 
 a prophet's son. Had the philosopher never existed, 
 sense and sweet reasonableness would yet have char- 
 acterised the literature named. He was the child of his 
 time, not its sire. What his contemporaries applied 
 to politics and letters, he made work in science and 
 philosophy to wit, common sense. The Papal 
 authority of Aristotle and S. Thomas Aquinas was 
 now melting, whether the crucible of Cartesian genius 
 were therefor employed or no. Such, at least, is the 
 saner view of the two. The other is that Descartes 
 was a primum mobile, originating (before his birth) a 
 movement that whirled both him and his fellows; 
 
 33 D
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 that all XVII. Century bookmanship bears date 
 " 1637 " and the same imprimatur as the Discours. 
 Somebody has found out that bon sens (Descartes' 
 supposed invention) was really known to Corneille 
 in 1628. Perhaps it is even older. In like manner, 
 " Hell is paved, etc.," was attributed to various recent 
 Doctors, Samuel Johnson among the number, until it 
 was found enshrined in Job. If we must father some- 
 thing on the Hermit of Holland, let us call him " le 
 "pere d'une nouvelle ecole fondee sur le libre examen." 
 Furthermore, let us allow that this father of modern 
 philosophy, in his hunger and thirst after truth univer- 
 sal, burrowed in the pit whence were digged the truths 
 of a French thinker, who multiplied himself as the 
 locust and who called himself Pascal, La Rochefou- 
 cauld, La Bruyere, what you will. Some of these 
 thinkers went further than Descartes in their 
 spiritualism. Some of them are seers who see and 
 prophesy Absolute Truth. And all of them preach, 
 pray or prophesy in excellent French. Cousin calls 
 Descartes' language " a creation worthy of those other 
 " creations " that he lavished on men, a language " naif 
 " et male, severe et hardi, cherchant avant tout la clarte 
 " et trouvant par surcroit la grandeur." 
 
 34
 
 XII. Style Cornelien. 
 
 A FEW months before the Discours came out 
 Corneille's Cid. Nowadays it is difficult and laudable 
 to read Pierre Corneille le grand without somnolence. 
 Even a modern surgeon and physician, Professor of 
 Anatomy at a French University and a Frenchman 
 born and bred, who would write himself Gaul in any 
 warrant or quittance in France and Navarre, confessed 
 as much to me. Sceptical, I saw Polyeucte and 
 believed. And I put down this feeling first, to my 
 own dvaurdrp-ia and, secondly, to Corneille's ignor- 
 ance of Greek, and, say, of Sophocles. Richelieu 
 found the author of the Cid lacked I' esprit de suite 
 Thus his Rodrigue is ordered by the King to fight a 
 duel, whereas duelling was his previous crime 
 in the eyes of the same King. His Medee 
 is inspired by Seneca's, not Euripides' ; but 
 it has purpurei panni, in spite of Horace, 
 and to the delight of his countrymen, contem- 
 porary and other. In his 1633-1634 plays Voltaire 
 finds only sparks of genius: one can say of Polyeucte, 
 it keeps Boileau's Unities. Theodore was hissed, in 
 1645, and Pertharite, rot des Lombards, in 1652. If 
 jEschylus painted men as gods ; Sophocles, men as 
 they ought to be, and Euripides men as they are 
 Corneille characterised mankind, roughly speaking, as 
 did Sophocles. Of women he knew very little. And 
 without the harem the average playwright cannot 
 make his pieces take. Even a book of adventure 
 where love is tabooed and women not mentioned, 
 
 35
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, 
 requires consummate art to make it popular. His 
 Psyche verses (act iii., sc. iii.) are a brilliant exception 
 to his failure in writing up love. As in the case of 
 Sophocles, too, he wrote these delicious lines within 
 some few years of his death, when freshness and 
 vigour and passion are usually spent in a man and 
 poet. Corneille's love is too often that of an ivory 
 statue (objectively or subjectively or both). 
 Aphrodite is chary of vivifying his Galateas for the 
 behoof of his Pygmalions, love's laggards often. 
 Simple and grand as sculpture, his characters are not 
 seldom as immovable. Action flags seems, indeed, 
 on occasion unable to claim the name of action. 
 Evolution has nothing to do with great Pierre's 
 heroes and heroines; they are as Cicero's fellow- 
 orator, who idem manebat sed non idem placebat. 
 Their measure is taken by the reader as soon as they 
 are presented to him. The heroines have been called 
 " adorable furies," but have little ^Eschylean. We are 
 bidden by certain critics to put down the monotony of 
 Corneille to his environment ; to Richelieu's conduct 
 towards the Cid, that unique breaking from the then 
 admired Classical gray dullness ; to contemporary 
 lust after Seneca. Corneille, we are amiably reminded, 
 was nothing but genius, rightly struggling to be free, 
 to soar and etherialise. To these Mentors there can 
 be but one answer, and that Hudibrastic : 
 
 We grant, altho' he had much wit 
 
 He was very slow of using it, 
 
 As being loath to wear it out . . . 
 
 36
 
 STYLE CORNELIEN. 
 
 Not to wear it out, le grand Pierre puts it one day on 
 Polyeucte, another on Rodrigue e.g., the line 
 
 Je le ferais encor, si j'avais a le faire. 
 
 Neither damages the cloth much, as both do nothing 
 much beyond talking, and " action " is confined largely 
 to messengers, confidants, ayye\oi and e^ayyeAoi. 
 
 The young Horace remarks on the absence of such 
 heroes as himself from the World's stage, being as 
 they are antes peu communes. These great men coined 
 in Corneille's mint speak a special language 
 " vehemence," Bossuet calls it, and mere men name it 
 cornelien. 
 
 Against this cornelien mould, stereotyped, gray, 
 immobile, wherein superior persons speak superiorly 
 in a Homenc strain, no wonder Richelieu rebelled. 
 He put up Scudery and minor men to attack the beau 
 Cid, which he got his scullions to parody. He even 
 abused his authority with his own creation, the 
 Academie, summoning it to damn the adaptation of 
 Guillem de Castro. In a quandary, the poor Acade- 
 micians "hedged." Their Sentiments sur le Cid 
 remind us of Luther's comical strictures on Henry 
 VIII. The Academic had to indict in writing, "The 
 " Defender of the Faith " had a wish to publish a 
 be ok. " Wie solt ein arm Man thun, der gern schreiben 
 "wolt, und kiind nichts? Er muss ie so firlefantzen, 
 "und mit Worten umbherschweissen das die Leut 
 " dencken er wolle ein Buch schreiben." Some have 
 affected to see in Richelieu's otherwise mean conduct 
 towards the Cid political discretion. He wished, 
 according to this theory, to prevent Spaniards, then
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 at war with France, and duelling, another pet aversion, 
 from being extolled on the stage. In other words, 
 the cardinal was only doing something like the con- 
 verse of our play licenser, who lately stopped for a 
 season the performance of the Mikado, because 
 forsooth we and the Japanese are friends !
 
 XIII. Racine. 
 
 WE have seen that Corneille did not know Greek ; 
 Racine (1639-1699) could read Sophocles at 16. Besides, 
 his debut was well timed. In 1664, he also was corne- 
 lien, but began to be himself in the Andromaque of 
 1667. He certainly surpassed Corneille with Berenice, 
 and transcended Euripides with his Iphigenie, if we are 
 to trust Boileau which it is not absolutely necessary 
 to do, as Boileau and Racine were personal friends and 
 as Euripides is no mean bard. But Racine Christian- 
 ised sad Electra's poet in his Phedre, and that artisti- 
 cally is for a pagan writer worse than defeat. Poor 
 Phaedra is henceforth to figure aureoled with uncoven- 
 anted mercy. So can one imagine say, in the Louvre 
 or Vatican a statue of Priapus with head of St. Peter ! 
 Incongruity could no further go. Now " conversion " 
 is an excellent thing. Huysmans died "converted," 
 Paul Bourget is living a " converted " life. But 
 aesthetically none of these good men, alive and dead, 
 had or have the right to foist their views at too acute 
 an angle on their readers. Phaedra is perfidious and 
 incestuous. This is evil or this is good. At any rate, 
 mythology, tradition, the whole literary environment 
 of her name and fame hold her perfidious and inces- 
 tuous. We have not the right to Christianise her if 
 for no other cause, for the sufficient reason that she 
 lived, or is imagined to have lived, before Christ. 
 Taine has argued similarly regarding Dickens. In 
 that humorist the scamps either become converted or 
 die the death. There is no (Newman's) via media. 
 
 39
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Such an iron alternative is as anaesthetic and inartistic 
 as to kill off " Little Nell " for the gross commercial 
 reason that American pirates had made her " live 
 " happily ever after." The pirates deserved no 
 consideration from Dickens, but the public does from 
 us. So Racine's break with tradition, because he 
 thought the traditional subject he was treating 
 immoral, admits of no excuse, artistically speaking. 
 (Erasmus' " Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis " is not 
 more absurd : this last, however, is probably intention- 
 ally comic.) Racine's choice of Esther and his treat- 
 ment according to the Bible story of her character are 
 absolutely just, religiously and artistically. He finds 
 her a Jewess and he leaves her a Jewess. Why, then, 
 could he not let Iphigenia and Phaedra live and die in 
 sorrow and sin, in paganism and peace ? Madame de 
 Sevigne writes (Feb. 21, 1689) of Esther's innocence, 
 sublimity and simplicity ; Boileau calls the Athalu 
 Racine's fairest work but the public caballed and 
 damned it. Seventeen years after the author's death, 
 some of the same public clapped it Extinctus 
 amabitur idem. 
 
 Even during the life of the younger, the two 
 dramatists had been compared and contrasted. In 
 1686, Longepierre admired the statuesque Corneille 
 and the picturesque Racine. La Bruyere judges the 
 former more " moral " and Racine more "natural," as 
 respectively Sophocles and Euripides. Bossuet 
 extols the force and vehemence of Corneille and 
 Racine's greater " justesse " and regularity (Lettre au 
 Cardinal du Bouillon?) We may go further and 
 deeper. Low down in the characters of each 
 
 40
 
 RACINE. 
 
 dramatist is an inherent difference of point of view. 
 The spring of tragic action (or rather inaction) in 
 Corneille is the grandiose ; whence winged words 
 from heroes placed in strangest, most unnatural 
 situations. He " falsified " history in Heraclius 
 (1647) and remarked that " le sujet d'une belle 
 " tragedie doit n'etre pas vraisemblable." Racine, on 
 the other hand, preached and practised on the prin- 
 ciple that " il n'y a que le vraisemblable qui touche 
 " dans la tragedie." Corneille's sublime souls are 
 " Titans unconquered still," innocent of repentance 
 or remorse ephemeral affections! Racine's poor 
 storm-tossed, passion-ravaged Nero, Athalia, Andro- 
 mache are very human, shaken with every veering 
 wind of thought, a prey to agitation and uncertainty : 
 there is no peace to the wicked. Racine's action 
 exists. But it is intermittent. It depends on the 
 swaying soul-seizures of the chief characters. In 
 these any new idea sends him off on a new quest. 
 Action, too, which is cribbed and confined by the 
 " Three Unities," as except Esther all Racine's is, 
 may be that of man's mind tumult raging while out- 
 ward calm holds the man. And his description of the 
 agitated Ego and burning brain of such and such a 
 hero (and a villain is a hero, for the nonce) goes 
 straight to the heart of the Frenchman. To that of 
 a non-Frenchman it often goes with diminished 
 current. 
 
 Excepting the inevitable Seneca, Corneille seems to 
 have owed little to predecessors ; Racine owed much 
 to Corneille. And it is unfair to sit in judgment on 
 the two, as if they were comparable. The pair does not 
 
 41
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 start from scratch: an appreciable handicap is inevit- 
 able. Corneille has left too many plays and Racine 
 too few, for comparison to be just. Besides, the latter 
 knew Greek and could help himself with both hands 
 when and if he wished Corneille had not this 
 advantage. He was also sui generis, a fact which 
 alone puts him out of court for any comparison. 
 
 Jean Racine was buried, by his own desire, in Port- 
 Royal ; on the destruction of which he was exhumed, 
 in 1710, and lies in the Church of St. Etienne du 
 Mont, with Pascal, now to be considered briefly. 
 
 42
 
 XIV. Blaise Pascal. 
 
 THE work of Pascal (1623-1662) consists chiefly of 
 the Lett res au provincial (les Petit es let ires de Louis 
 de Montalte) and the Pensees. Now it was only in 
 1842, 1 80 years after their author's death, that Victor 
 Cousin consulted the MS. kept in St. Germain des 
 Pres library, and discovered that Port-Royal had in 
 1670 mutilated the original of the Pensees and, like 
 Mezentrus, joined their dead (prose) to the living 
 (writing of Pascal). The only excuse for Port-Royal 
 seems to be that, by their trick, they made possible 
 the appearance of what was less or more Pascal in 
 the reign of Louis XIV., and that by depositing the 
 MS. in St. Germain they had, also, made possible the 
 detection of their own deceit. Since the day when 
 Aristotle's work was recovered, as we are told, from 
 the Skepsis cellar, few stranger literary histories have 
 been handed down. If his great friends, they of 
 Port-Royal, could so act with his " Remains," reason 
 would that Pascal himself might have peculiar views 
 of morality ; such as is concerned with property in 
 writing, priority in discovery and kindred themes. 
 We know, at least, that quite lately his countrymen have 
 been combating his claim to fair fame under these 
 heads. But then the French dearly love " showing 
 " up " foes and friends, others and themselves. Thus, 
 the more Mr. Andrew Lang writes up, the more 
 Anatole France writes down, Jehanne d'Arc (Dare). 
 Voltaire's version had long been half-forgotten when 
 up rose Thalamas. In the France of to-day, however, 
 
 43
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 where Free Thought has reared himself a throne, the 
 Man in the Street recks nought of theological 
 polemics. Pascal's Paris thought apparently of little 
 else. His Century had witnessed previous dogmatic 
 skirmishes against M. M. les R.R. P.P. Cotton, Garasse 
 and Le Moyne. Pascal's Provinciales fight, opening 
 with theologic long range firing defensive, brusquely 
 became offence. The objective changed too : now it is 
 Grace, now Casuistry, now those Casuists of all others, 
 the Society of Jesus. Theology proper shades off all 
 but imperceptibly into Morale, Some say that Pascal 
 lied right cunningly in this quarrel, others aver he 
 made mistakes ; all are at one on his cleverness. He 
 aided or he marred the cause of religion. But the 
 vehicle of help rendered or of ruin wrought was excel- 
 lent fooling of the foe. One of the foe is even credited 
 with praising indirectly Pascal's workmanship. " Had 
 "you not written what you have, of what would you 
 " wish to be author ?" a bishop is said to have queried 
 of Bossuet. And Bossuet (in the tradition) answered : 
 " The Provinciales." But therfrwas Modernism in those 
 days, as in ours. A Jesuit seems to have invited 
 Pascal to join in assailing the walls of this Jericho. 
 For his last four years of life, then, the Truce of God 
 obtained. Saul, whose name was Blaise, breathed no 
 more slaughter, but anonymously (observe this touch) 
 helped the cures of Paris and its neighbourhood in 
 the course of the year 1658. If, as Buffon will have it, 
 the style is the man, then Blaise Pascal was many men 
 in one, for his manner of inditing is various. He 
 seems under the empire, to use a Gallicism, of sensi- 
 bility, wit (in the reign of Queen Anne sense) and 
 
 44
 
 BLAISE PASCAL. 
 
 " chaffing " gaiety. He is, or appears to be, at various 
 times possessed of the spirit of Descartes, Bossuet, 
 La Bruyere, Fenelon, Voltaire. 
 
 Without Pascal there would not be much heed taken 
 by the rapid reader of Port-Royal. And yet Port- 
 Royal and the Academic were schoolmasters of the 
 XVII. Century. From 1660 the teaching of the one 
 and the linguistic studies published by the other had 
 worked wonders. From 1660 the clever writer must 
 be true, substantial, natural ; Reason must have the 
 upper hand ; the glory has departed henceforward 
 from mere bel esprit. The T/OITOS avOpuiros in the 
 Century's influence over letters was Louis XIV. in 
 proper person. The King's share in shaping the 
 destiny of literature in his time was, perhaps, more 
 negative than positive. He lived and let live. If the 
 matter published, read in the salons, handed from one 
 courtier to another did not affect him, Louis allowed 
 it currency. For an absolute monarch this was much, 
 and in this sense he was complaisant enough. 
 
 45
 
 XV. Poquelin, dit Moliere. 
 
 IN my lightning sketch of the French stage during 
 the careers of Pierre Corneille and Racine I have pur- 
 posely omitted touching on their comedy, as Moliere 
 was so soon due. J. B. Poquelin, which is Moliere 
 (1622-1673), was a spoiled child of the Grand Monar- 
 que. His toupet was encouraged, his hardiesses were 
 applauded. Indeed, the stage, tragic and comic, seems 
 to have been granted a freedom otherwise unknown 
 at the time. Comedy kings were Louis' royal 
 buffoons ; tragedians, his chaplains. Jean Baptiste 
 was to him what Archie the fool was to Bluff Hal 
 (VIII). The " folly of preaching " on the comic stage 
 made many a courtier " laugh yellow," in right sardonic 
 sort, against himself, in his own despite. Hypocrisy 
 was now grappled with, and scotched, by a poet whose 
 Protean personality, itself impalpable, seemed present 
 everywhere. Like Aristophanes, he corrected abuses ; 
 unlike him, he had no Parabasis. Moliere was 
 impersonal, though acting ever in the title-r61e. He 
 was born exactly at the right time, when the young 
 Kingf was all for pleasure, when Parisian society was 
 of the utmost refinement, when he was, like Rev 
 Booker Washington, actually invited to dine with the 
 Chief of the State. The Precieuses ridicules then, as 
 now, were scandalised. Preciosite is not so dead, even 
 after the ingenious satire played in 1658. But Moliere 
 was worth many dinners. He paid back his hosts 
 with an endless feast of laughter, a Banquet of Trimal- 
 chio, where the courses continue indefinitely amid 
 
 46
 
 POQUELIN, BIT MOLIERE. 
 
 ostentation and flattery and grandeur and coarseness 
 exhibited by Petronius, satirised by the great come- 
 dian. The successful man is often he who is unsucces- 
 ful at the start. Like the wren which builds several 
 sham nests before it decides on furnishing one for the 
 eggs and brood, the prosperous character has often 
 varied his life-essays. So Moliere. On returning 
 from his long tour in the provinces, in 1658, what he 
 played before the King was the tragedy of Nicomlde t 
 not a comedy. Indeed, it has been observed that 
 " la comedie de Moliere cotoyait perpetuellement le 
 "drame." Most of his great comedies leave on the spec- 
 tator, or reader, a feeling of sadness. Thus the 
 Tartufe should finish artistically by the ruin of 
 Orgon and family at the end of the fourth act. The 
 fifth is a Satyric Drama, grafted on to the tragedy of 
 the first four Acts. To call the whole a comedy is 
 almost to play with words. But professionally 
 Moliere was a comedian actor and author, and was 
 destined to die in harness, representing a malingerer 
 when he was all but in extremis. Pagliacci must 
 laugh because he is Pagliacci aye, even when his 
 soul is rent and he gives perforce his darling to the 
 dogs. His range was very great, from romantic to 
 heroic comedy, from farce gauloise dating from the 
 Middle Ages to character-painting proper. He fol- 
 lowed Nature regularly, and Aristotle's rules, when 
 at his best works, cedro linenda. Aristotle, he says 
 in the Critique de I'Ecole des Femmes (sc. vii.), spells 
 bon sens. He was always " taking stock " of things ; 
 his friends rallied him on this, saying he could not 
 go into a barber's shop without taking in at a glance 
 
 47
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 every article. This Sherlock Holmes habit of mind 
 was the making of him. Great range often implies 
 superficiality. But his depth is immense in forming 
 types his Harpagon, his Tartufe, each obviously 
 nobody's portrait, but each a unique avatar of Avarice 
 and Hypocrisy. As he loved truth to Nature and as 
 sunt lacrimce rerum, Moliere was bound to be sad. 
 As he was a comic author and comic actor, he had 
 to raise a laugh. Hence he was professionally a 
 Democritus, at heart a Heraclitus. He "saved his 
 " face " in his comedies by poor makeshifts. Fun is 
 made, almost unseasonably often, by Dorine, Martine 
 or Nicole. Sganarelle and maitre Jacques crack 
 jests. M. Dimanche or the maitre de philosophic is 
 told off to be absurd. This is a weak side in the 
 author. The fact that one has laughed, almost 
 through one's tears, a laugh extorted, so to say, does 
 not prevent the general impression from being sad. 
 And that is not really all, or even mostly, comic, which 
 leaves one brooding when home again after the 
 theatre. Not that Moliere makes us good. It was 
 neither his intention nor his duty to do so. I take 
 it that didactic poetry is a sin against Art. Our 
 comic poet did not commit this sin. Thus he attacked 
 the Precieuses and the Pedantes, but did not convert 
 them. Nothing was further, probably, from his inten- 
 tion. No Blue-stocking became an ideal wife and 
 mother after hearing or reading him. So, we may 
 imagine, no husband ever found his tea more ready 
 for him, on his return from work, since Dickens 
 painted the literary portrait of a wife clothing the 
 Africans to the detriment of her London menage. An 
 
 48
 
 POQUELIN, DIT MOLIERE. 
 
 actor-author who was his own impresario could not 
 have had much time on his hands, especially one who 
 died between the shafts. So we find in Moliere traces 
 of hasty work, redundancy, "padding," carelessness, 
 obscurity even in the Femntes scavantes and Misan- 
 thrope. Poetic comedies are with him the great 
 offenders in this respect. Those in prose are better. 
 The best are, perhaps : Don Juan, le Medecin malgre 
 lui, FAvare t le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, les Four- 
 Series de Scapin, le Malade imaginaire. 
 
 Those precieux, La Bruyere and Fenelon, have 
 taxed him, the one with jargon and barbarism, the 
 other with " worse verse than prose." So Horace, who 
 could not (probably) have written a play for his life, 
 finds that his earlier countrymen were over-indulgent 
 for the wit of Plautus. Your honest critic who is 
 above-board in all his dealings should himself essay 
 the genre in which he picks holes : succeeding in that, 
 he may hope for a hearing at the bar of posterity. So 
 with Moliere's judges. A comic poet evidently can- 
 not make his divers and diverse characters all speak 
 in the same style. Philaminte, Henriette, Chrysale, 
 and Martine are not cast in the same mould, neither 
 can each fashion to pronounce her French as sweetly 
 upon her tongue as La Bruyere possibly pronounced 
 his. Others have admired Moliere for forming a har- 
 monious whole out of different dialects and for ob- 
 serving the art des nuances. Boileau told Louis 
 XIV. that Moliere was the greatest writer of his 
 reign. " Moliere c'est mon homme " cried La Fon- 
 taine, whose verdict was not necessarily influenced by 
 his friendship. 
 
 49 E
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 After Moliere's death (1673) the Grand Monarque 
 passes through two stages. During the first twelve 
 years, up to 1685, he encouraged authors and actors, 
 collects the disjecta membra of Moliere's troupe, 
 creates the Comedie fran$aise. Thereafter he was 
 Mme. de Maintenon's husband, more regie and less 
 of a first-nighter. The adapter (not to say author) of 
 Don Juan did well to die before 1686, when appar- 
 ently the Oratorian preacher before the King at- 
 tacked Spectacles, to the horror of the courtiers and 
 the building up of Louis. An imitator of Moliere, 
 Dancourt or Carton, gave up the stage in despair at 
 the new-born piety. Like the famous Dr. Kenealy, 
 he wrote Psalms in verse, but providentially omitted 
 to publish them. Voltaire has somewhere unearthed 
 the Grandeur of Brueys and Palaprat, " Superieur a 
 " toutes les farces de Moliere." Regnard (1655 1709) 
 also pleased Voltaire : " qui ne se plait pas avec 
 " Regnard n'est pas digne d'admirer Moliere." He lives 
 chiefly by his prodigious lies regarding his imprison- 
 ment by Musulmans that ready subject for exaggera- 
 tion ! He has also a character, Angelique, " sotte a 
 " vingt-trois carats." Indeed, so low had French 
 comedy now fallen that Boileau thought the King 
 had better have driven out the French than the 
 Italians in 1697.
 
 XVI. 
 
 Boileau Despreaux, La Fontaine. 
 
 I PASS on to the author of I' Art poetique. 
 Of this Boileau is less the author than the 
 spokesman. For it is what M. Nisard calls it, "la 
 " declaration de foi litteraire d'un grand siecle." Its 
 doctrines, as there put forth, Horace apart, had been 
 threshed out and discussed by Moliere, Racine, La 
 Fontaine and Boileau himself. Each member of the 
 " Symposium " had given his author's view of his own 
 genre and his critic's view of the genres of his friends. 
 VArt poetique is the code of good taste. Boileau 
 never dreamed of having any other readers than the 
 public, the Man in the Street. So he is not methodi- 
 cal, not complete ; speaks neither of Corneille nor of 
 Racine, neither of Plautus nor of Euripides. La Fon- 
 taine does not figure by name. Unlike Pope, the 
 French Horace was not trucelessly at war with dunces. 
 Cotin, enough drubbed by Moliere, and poor Chape- 
 lain are passed over in silence. Indeed, it is probably 
 owing to this his " undangered meed," as Pindar calls 
 the quality, that the King put him into the Academy. 
 His silence on paper was sweetness long drawn out. 
 In over a (literary) half-century he was guilty of some 
 7,000 verses only, divided over the Satires, the 
 Epistles, the Art poetique, the Lutrin, the Ode on the 
 taking of Namur (1692), and a few fleeting pieces. 
 In prose, he translated Longinus' on the Sublime and 
 
 51
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 wrote his Reflexions sur Longin, with a Dialogue sur 
 les hiros de roman. And that is nearly alL 
 
 One of the characteristics of his countrymen in de- 
 scribing this good man's good verse is their own per- 
 fect silence on his model. Not a syllable hardly is 
 breathed of Horace. No comparison or contrast be- 
 tween the lamp Venusine and Despreaux is hinted 
 at. A native reader would imagine that Boileau did 
 the whole thing off his own bat. Similarly for a 
 " crib " from Martial, the epigram on Paulus' verses 
 being his own because he had bought them, we read 
 (in Dr. Deltour's Literature fran$aise, p. 84) : " On 
 " connait cette epigramme de Boileau : 
 
 On dit que 1'abbe Roquette 
 Preche les sermons d'autnii ; 
 Moi, qui sais qu 'il les achete, 
 Je soutiens qu'ils sont a lui. 
 
 " Le poete romain Martial avait dit avec mains de 
 " finesse : ' Paulus achete des vers, etc.' " To believe 
 the French Docteur-es-lettres, Boileau epigramma- 
 tised, Martial bungled. Horace, no doubt, has to 
 thank Despreaux for imitating and adapting him and 
 so much improving him. French finesse, after all, 
 does so add to a robbed Roman author, especially 
 when that Roman author is ignored Pope was more 
 open as regards his debt to Flaccus, and Pope was not 
 famous for franchise. 
 
 Joubert says : " Boileau est un grand poete dans la 
 " demi-po^sie," and his popularity was immense. I 
 come to another perhaps the most popular poet, or 
 " demi-poet," of France. My personal experience is 
 
 52
 
 BOILEAU DESPREAUX, LE FONTAINE. 
 
 that I can never be in any Frenchman's company for 
 an hour without having verses of La Fontaine buzzing 
 about my ears. In vain have I pointed out that all 
 these fables are infinitely better in the original Greek 
 of Babrius, and as good in Phadrus. I am treated 
 as a scoffer and "profane." ALsop is not known in 
 the pleasant land of France. He perhaps existed, 
 tolerance will half admit. He, or " another of the 
 " same name," conceivably handed down the Fables. 
 But for Fables there is nobody, there was nobody, 
 there never will be anybody (in French eyes) but La 
 Fontaine. Who thinks the opposite " makes strait the 
 " borders of the land of his birth." Trembling we 
 listen to the panegyrist of Moliere and of the Fabulist : 
 * Le parallele," cries M. Geruzez, " entre le genie de 
 " ces deux grands poetes est done inevitable. Rome 
 " et la Grece nous opposent des poetes qui 
 " soutiennent la comparaison avec Corneille, Racine 
 "et Boileau, mais elles n'ont rien a placer 
 " legitimement en regard de Moliere et de La 
 " Fontaine. Si ceux qui les deprecient savent ce qu'ils 
 " font, ils sont bien coupables ; et bien aveugles, s'ils 
 " 1'ignorent : ils amoindrissent la France." The reason 
 of this extraordinary (to us Islanders) partiality for 
 their fabulist is perhaps given by M. Nisard : " La 
 " Fontaine is the milk of our first years, the bread of 
 " the ripe man, the old man's last substantial food. 
 " We have babbled his fables when mere infants. 
 " Fathers, we have been astonished, when quoting 
 " them to our children, to find in them serious pleasure 
 " for our age of maturity, after we have been so keenly 
 
 53
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 " interested in them as children." He calls La Fon- 
 taine the familiar genius of each home. Again, the 
 contes are not bad in point of morality, we learn, 
 because La Fontaine's view was different from that 
 of his critics. " Je dis hardiment," are the words 
 of La Fontaine in self-defence, " que la nature du 
 " conte le voulait ainsi " ; in fact, Horace's precept was 
 with the impugned raconteur. Priests and sad folk 
 tried to make him see the falsity of his reasoning, but 
 he contended that the gayer the conte, the less impres- 
 sion it makes ; the sweeter the melancholy of chaste 
 tales, the more dangerous they are. I shall not dare 
 to canvass the great fabulist's reasoning : it is too great 
 for me. I only seem to remember the case of 
 Boccaccio, who died at Certaldo in 1375 after long 
 retirement, repeated wishes to enter Orders and deep 
 contrition for having published certain recast fabliaux 
 not absolutely unlike the contes. Of course, too, we 
 know that Voltaire, in his 1769 Correspondance, 
 called the contes " autant au-dessous de 1'Arioste que 
 " 1'ecolier est au-dessous du maitre." But Arouet 
 must needs have his fun. Like the Arabs, who have 
 200 words for "camel" and ico for "lion" (or vice 
 versa), La Fontaine gives the " fox " and " king of 
 beasts " a different epithet pretty much every time he 
 mentions them. The French are much struck with 
 this. The German Lessing, ut ca-ptus est German- 
 orum, has tried to improve on La Fontaine, as another 
 Teuton essayed to do on Shakespeare. The Saxon 
 poisons the cheese in the parable of the Fox and the 
 Crow! Another instance to show that painting the lily 
 is the Teutons' speciality, which they cannot renounce 
 
 54
 
 BOILEAU DESPREAUX, LE FONTAINE. 
 
 even in the apologues of him whom Furetiere calls 
 " inimitable." As La Fontaine praised Mohere, so 
 Moliere said of La Fontaine : " Nos beaux esprits ont 
 " beau se tremousser, ils n'effaceront pas le bon- 
 " homme." Joubert finds in him a " plenitude de 
 " poesie." His rhyming is extolled. He seems to 
 have handled the "free" verse, imported from Italy 
 about 1625, in a masterly manner, ringing the changes 
 on alexandrines, seven, eight and ten foot lines with 
 perfect ease and grace. 
 
 55
 
 XVII. 
 
 Bossuet and a French Fr. 
 Bernard Vaughan, SJ. 
 
 Paullo majora canamus. 
 
 Bossuet (1627-1704) is practically contemporary 
 with La Fontaine (1621-1695). But the difference 
 between them in general is immense, even in style. 
 Bossuet is one who, in Fenelon's phrase, only uses 
 words to express thought, and thought only for virtue 
 and truth. Severe in the vehicle of reasoning, as in 
 reasoning itself, he was convincing by dint of pushing 
 home an irresistible logic. Himself instinct with the 
 truths he preached, he " emptied himself " readily in 
 page-long periods. His, as he says, were "the light- 
 "nings that pulverise, the thunders that terrify, the 
 " bolt that smites the heart." A poet in imagination, 
 he could fathom the meaning of the Major Prophets, 
 while the simplest truths to religieuses were clothed 
 by him in finest raiment. We are not obliged to take 
 the Gallic estimate of them, to compare them to 
 Demosthenes' best efforts, to award them the palm 
 over Cicero. Such be the ravings of perfervid 
 patriotism. But Bossuet is fine, in the heavy old- 
 fashioned style, once so much praised, now so little 
 read. Panegyric is so much easier than perusal. And 
 Bossuet's panegyrists prove too much. They are not, 
 as a rule, content to do what he himself confesses to 
 having done, metaphorically skated warily over thin 
 
 56
 
 BOSSUET AND A FRENCH FATHER 
 
 ice, when necessary. They praise en bloc. There is 
 about this a divine simplicity that we do not find in 
 most of Bossuet, who employs tropes and figures to 
 embalm that great man, dead, whose good works, 
 living, were rare. He mentions the false colours of 
 rhetoric, the devious ways of official flattery indispen- 
 sable to glossing over, or passing in sonorous silence, 
 licence and ambition, self-interest and injustice. 
 Purple iniquity and crowned crime incarnate must die. 
 Dead, they must be praised for such evil as they did 
 not or could not do. And that needs delicate delivery 
 in the preacher. Fear of the court might, Bossuet 
 hints, suggest a sermon so profane as to nullify the 
 altar sacrifice. How trim one's sails clo'se to the 
 wind? How find for official recommendation virtues, 
 Christian virtues, in a great man of the earth earthy ? 
 Bossuet's cleverness is equal to any pious emergency. 
 Mourning the English Queen, 1669, he advocates 
 Protestant and Catholic re-union ; lamenting the 
 Duchess of Orleans, he chants a memento mori (1670) ; 
 Marie-Therese "the Spotless" (1683) he holds up as 
 an example to the King, less immaculate ; the former 
 Magdalen career of de la Valliere, now Sister Louise 
 de la Mis6ricorde, he paints in lurid colours, if haply 
 he may save alive the soul of Conde (1685). This 
 continual position between the Devil of courtly 
 "whitewashing" and the Deep Sea of blasphemous 
 complaisance (and compounding scarlet sin) wearied 
 the "citizen prelate." Academic pomp and vanity 
 and lies avoided and rhetoric employed they weighed 
 on him heavily, and he took his leave. He loved his 
 own Dlscours sur VHistoire universelle (published in 
 
 57
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 1681). Of this the Suite de la Religion owes much 
 to Pascal's Pensees: in the Empires he anticipates 
 part of Montesquieu. 
 
 After Elias, Elisha; after Bossuet, Bourdaloue. 
 Mme. de Sevigne, who was very chaste herself, 
 describes this Jesuit as "frappant comme un 
 " sourd, disant des verites a bride abattue, 
 " parlant a tort et a travers contre 1'adultere." In 
 fact, Bourdaloue was the Fr. Bernard Vaughan of the 
 day and preached to and against the " Smart Set." 
 Mme. de Sevigne describes how that Set went "en 
 " Bourdaloue," where the crush was awful, especially 
 when the priest began piquantly " depeindre les gens." 
 The Lady of Vitre confesses she heard him breath- 
 lessly, hanging on his words, powerless to respire 
 "until he was pleased to stop." Conde" applied to 
 Bourdaloue Gambetta's famous phrase voila Vennemi! 
 which the French-Italian must have plagiarised and 
 applied not to the individual, but to the genus, Cleric. 
 As usual, nobody in France dreams that Gambetta 
 was not original. Great is the company of XVII. 
 Century preachers, and I propose to close with two 
 only, Massillon and Fenelon.
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Massillon and Fenelon. 
 
 Jean Baptiste Massillon (1663-1742) was, for the 
 times, an extraordinary bishop : he visited his parishes 
 (in the Clermont-Ferrand diocese). Voltaire judged 
 him in his genre as perfect as Racine's Athalie. A 
 very strict Christian would not please the author of 
 Zaire: consequently, we find that his extolled 
 " Entretiens " of Massillon are almost Deist enough 
 to be delivered in a synagogue or mosque. The 
 bishop slurs over every-day truths, to fight passion 
 and vice more resolutely. He is methodical without 
 rigidity. His art conceals art in the admired way of 
 the Ancients. 
 
 " Ruined by a woman " is the epitaph of Prangois 
 de Salignac de La Mothe-Fehelon (1651-1715). 
 Mme. Guyon was mystically married to the 
 Infant Jesus when her quiet is t doctrines disturbed 
 Fenelon's balance. For this she was imprisoned, while 
 her dupe was made Archbishop of Cambrai and, after 
 consecration by Bossuet, took her side openly. A 
 veritable Tract controversy begins between consecra- 
 tor and consecrated. While the Pope is condemning 
 and Louis relegating Fenelon, his Telemaque (that 
 infested our youth) is robbed and published This 
 work is, with the Fables of La Fontaine, the most 
 popular in the France of the Great Century. Calypso, 
 Eucharis and Antiope disport themselves in the 
 
 59
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Telemaque's rhythmic prose, and dispense the author 
 from doing what he could not write poetry. 
 Fenelon himself discounts Voltaire's commendation 
 when he says : " C'est une narration faite a la hate . . 
 " il y aurait beaucoup a corriger." There was, at any 
 rate, much to deny, e.g., that Kings Idomenee, 
 Sesostris, Adraste, and Pygmalion had any con- 
 nexion with Louis XIV. ; that Mentor was Fenelon ; ' 
 and that Telemaque was the due de Bourgogne. More 
 innocent, if unpractical, is his Lettre & I* Academic 
 (1714), addressed to Dacier, secretaire perpetuel. 
 
 His quarrel with Bossuet reminds one a little of the 
 famous dispute between Cardinal Newman and 
 Charles Kingsley. But the French prelates' fight was 
 worse, at it gave the Voltairians a welcome handle 
 against the theologians and an occasion to extol 
 Fenelon unduly. Strong reaction set in during the 
 XIX. Century, and against that again the candid 
 critic must guard. M. Villemain has hymned the har- 
 mony of the whole in the Telemaque, the grandeur of 
 the general idea and the dexterous blending of the 
 episodes. It certainly is not suited for early stages 
 of learning French, however consecrated by long 
 usage in our schools. It should be read for profit 
 much later in life, and for Quietism without concern- 
 ing oneself as to the identity of such and such a 
 Greek name with un quid am. His prose is not 
 nervous but flowery, lit up with flashes of eloquence. 
 His Fables, Dialogues of the Dead, Girls' Education, 
 Existence of God, Ministry of Pastors, and Maxims 
 of the Saints practically complete the list of his 
 works. 
 
 60
 
 XIX. 
 
 The Theophrastus of France 
 and " le bon due." 
 
 La Bruyere (1645-1696) wrote his Dialogues sur le 
 Quietisme at Bossuet's request, and before that pre- 
 late's fight on the question with Fenelon La 
 Bruyere, like his friend Boileau, was simple and dis- 
 interested in his own character. For his Caracteres he 
 had in his manner of life, as one of the Conde house- 
 hold, every facility of observing Court, town, rich, de- 
 serving, e sprits forts. These and others appear in 
 Les Caracteres de Theopkraste traduits du grec, 
 ai.cc les Caracteres ou les Mceurs de ce Siecle 
 (1688). The book, which gave him fame and a 
 swarm of enemies, appeared in the Century as 
 one bom out of due time. The order is most 
 admired disorder, and his own countrymen, on 
 occasion, confess that to read a whole chapter at a 
 sitting is hard. The same might be, and even has 
 been, said of perusing similarly a Book of the 
 Paradise Lost. The Beautiful is hard! Besides, 
 evil men are the majority, and they are satirised by 
 La Bruyere. It is not any one or more individuals 
 that are lashed under each chapter-heading. La 
 Bruyere, like Moliere, has made patchwork, choosing 
 his rags and patches, as he listed, to make one whole. 
 This who'e is only ideally bad, lor in this life we can- 
 not find it in the fulness of us badness. La Bruyere's 
 
 61
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 evil " character " is held up to its own execration ; but 
 before it can execrate or love itself, it must at least 
 exist. And that is what it does not do. This absence 
 of one-ness and simplicity in the " characters " is 
 noticeable even in the style of the book. It is not 
 simple. The labor lima is too apparent and has been 
 too destructive even to the extent of dilution in the 
 sense. He lacks the ease and graceful manner of the 
 writer comme il faut. He is always striving after 
 effect. He has not the grande maniere. Unlike his 
 predecessors, pioneers in his genre, he cannot or will 
 not be natural. He grinds out witty sentences, and 
 the voice of his grinding is not low enough. (This 
 remark is made with extreme respect to the witness, 
 M. 1'Abbe d'Olivet, who had known La Bruyere per- 
 sonally and describes him as "craignant toute sorte 
 " d'ambition, meme celle de montrer de l'esprit.") The 
 French remind us that " La Bruyere envied neither 
 " opulence nor high dignities " " on condition of 
 " ridiculing these goods of the gods," they might have 
 added. More difficult would it appear a priori to 
 rant daily against the bourgeois, be a leader of 
 Socialists and live in a fine chateau all the time 
 especially with the brain and body of one and the same 
 Depute. La Bruyere is known as fin. Finesse, on 
 which the French so pique themselves, is generally a 
 rapid exposure of but one side of thought, the re- 
 mainder being left to the reader's intelligence. Hence 
 finesse branches off into antithesis and allusion. A 
 work naturally becomes impossible for continuous 
 reading, when it teems with such figures, as does much 
 of La Bruyere and of La Rochefoucauld. 
 
 62
 
 THE THEOPHRASTUS OF FRANCE. 
 
 La Rochefoucauld long called prince de Marsillac 
 (1613-1680) is " le bon due " of Mme. de Sevigne and 
 was the friend of such gens de lettres as Bossuet and 
 La Fontaine, Mesdames de Sable and de la Fayette. 
 Commerce with such literary folk was chiefly the occa- 
 sion of his publishing the Memoir es (1662) and the 
 (anonymous) Maximes (1665). No book, says Vol- 
 taire, did more to form the taste of the nation. Few 
 books also, perhaps, have encountered such distaste, 
 or dislike. Some, however, think that it depends on 
 the mood in which one reads the Sentences et Maximes 
 morales whether the reader dubs them a gross libel 
 or judges them a masterly exposure of man's baseness 
 and inconsequence. Incisive, brief, clear, finished, 
 epigrammatic, melancholy, subtle, built up on personal 
 experience, couched in independent critical terms 
 such, to imitate his own brevity, is the Duke's book. 
 Cherchez la femme for his several failures in life, 
 Mme. de Chevreuse, Mme. de Longueville, Mme. de 
 Sable, Mme. de la Fayette. (He had also, entre par- 
 entheses, a wife of his own, Andree de Vivonne, 
 married by him at the age of 15.) His comparative 
 shipwreck of existence evidently embittered him and, 
 as evidently, is responsible for much of his "morale," 
 over which he raised (in 1675) the superscription: 
 " Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices 
 "deguises." Crossed continually in his ambition, 
 knowing no world but that of the Court, La Roche- 
 foucauld describes courtiers bitterly. The explana- 
 tion is "pas plus difficile que cela." As for his self- 
 love, we know, from all we have read in and written 
 on Aristotle's Ethics, that 3>tAavria is the spring at 
 
 63
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 once of all that is noblest and of all that is lowest in 
 Man. From self-love, one gives his life for his friend, 
 as the glory of doing so is the highest ambition of the 
 self-lover (in the proper sense). Egoistic, too, in 
 Bossuet's eyes, was the self-devotion of nursing the 
 sick. For that divine, hospitals were " la banque du 
 ciel, un moyen d'assurer et de multiplier ses biens par 
 une celeste usure." But La Rochefoucauld's egoisme 
 which, for him, initiates every action is inconsis- 
 tent with any virtue. The Duke is too absolute in his 
 judgments, and would fain make us universalise his 
 views, which do apply with a rough truth to the epoch 
 of the Fronde. From some of them one would readily 
 be misled to criticise the author's own character 
 severely, had we not his life to correct us. He gave 
 the Court a good example as a " straight " man and 
 was a trusty friend. Most honourable, too, and as 
 irreproachably moral as charming in society were 
 Mme. de la Fayette, authoress of Za'ide and the 
 Princesse de Cl&ves, and Mme. de Sevigne. 
 
 64
 
 XX. Madame de Sevigne 
 and Scarron's Widow. 
 
 MME. DE LA FAYETTE says of Mme. de Sevigne 
 that her " esprit eblouissait les yeux.". As the 
 Comte de Bussy-Rabotin has said : " L'agreable, 
 " le badin et le serieux y sont admirables" (in 
 the Letters of Mme. de Sevigne). He justly, 
 also, praises her naturalness, her ease, her 
 occasional bold negligence ; he finds nothing " dead," 
 nothing forced, in her style. Suard finds her delightful, 
 " raisonneuse ou f rivole, plaisante ou sublime." He 
 quotes proof of her "grace," " souplesse d'esprit." 
 Whether she describes Mme.de Brissac lying ill of a 
 colic, " belle et coiffee a coiffer tout le monde," or de 
 Louvois' sudden death (description a la Bossuet), or 
 Cardinal de Retz and his astounding insouciance of 
 life's duties, or her reading of Plutarch (by quoting), or 
 Louis XIV. speaking to her of Racine s genius Mme. 
 de Sevigne holds the "perpetual secretary" enrap- 
 tured. He taxes her with vanity, however, and with 
 being momentarily "caillette." But his instance is of 
 the historic and " heroic " occasion when the Monarch 
 of the Century (and of all Time !) danced a minuet 
 with the Lady of Vitre. And what is M. Suard that 
 he should smile in print ? He is gallant, however, like 
 every Frenchman, in allowing that a cultivated woman 
 writes letters better than the best mere men who 
 write. He is at one with Montaigne in finding the 
 female esprit to be more prime-sautier. Sedentary, 
 
 65 F
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 ladies observe better and attend more to le monde. 
 They describe events with more ease in expression, 
 more delicately, more on the spur of the moment and 
 with the ideas felt at the moment, with more supple- 
 ness and variety, with happy turns, with piquant col- 
 locations of words, with an inspiration of their own 
 and a felicitous negligence lovelier far than exactness. 
 Again, there is a difference in letter-writing between 
 the glory of woman and of woman. Against the grace, 
 variety and vivacity of Mme. de Sevigne put but the 
 serious and uniform tone of Mme. de Maintenon! 
 That Goth, Voltaire, says of the former lady "C'est 
 dommage qu'elle manque absolument de gout!" 
 Happily Voltaire does not count in such criticisms : 
 here he has confused a "defaut de gout," such as 
 Marie de Rabutin-Chantal's depreciation of Racine 
 (and of coffee), with " une f aute de gout." The delec- 
 table Marie had every right, if she had the wish, to 
 prefer Flechier to Mascaron and Corneille to Racine ; 
 even her favourite beverage to coffee. Her affection 
 for Mme. de Grignan was, no doubt, excessive, and 
 the daughter's not enough, perhaps, for her mother. 
 Though the " Rochers " is a short (and very agreeable) 
 walk from the mediaeval-looking Vitre (Victor Hugo 
 mentions it) and Vitre a very few minutes by train from 
 Rennes, that " capital " is hardly ever mentioned in 
 the Letters. (Vide "Aux Rochers, 21 Juin, 16/1.") 
 Even at Vitre Tartufe was "point trop mal joue;" 
 A ndromaque received the meed of six Sevigne tears ; 
 c'est assez pour une troupe de campagne, where it 
 rained every day for a month in spring, and where 
 "the good families are nothing," but where Lucian 
 
 66
 
 MADAME DE SEVIGNE. 
 
 made good reading. When we remember that this 
 life in Brittany was for economy, so that the mother 
 could send Mme. de Grignan sums that she wasted, 
 we sympathise with the mother and blame the 
 daughter, as does Saint-Simon. Besides being useful 
 to correct the history of her times, Mme. de Sevigne 
 had sympathy, e.g., with Nature, which sympathy was 
 rare in those days ; though, on the other hand, she did 
 not mind how many Bretons were hanged on trees, 
 and found Brezonnec the most absurd language. 
 Somtne toute, practically everyone finds de Sevigne 
 delicious, as did Mme. de Coulanges, who pestered 
 her to leave her " damp Rochers " and was snubbed 
 prettily for her pains. Madame de Maintenon (1635- 
 1719) takes lower rank as a writer of letters. 
 Franchise d'Aubigne knew the Meuse, and on 28 May, 
 1692, sent an amusingly sad account of Dinant (Dinan- 
 dium) to Mme. de Veilhan. " The roads are," she 
 says, " indescribable, and gave Mme. de Villeneuve the 
 " vapours." " Unplucked chickens cost 30 sous ; 
 meat 8 the pound, and bad at that" She almost agrees 
 with Suson, her chambermaid, that "the King was 
 "wrong to take such places from the enemy, who 
 should be welcome to them." "The French King 
 " had the gout in both feet and the English King, 
 "William III., would be late in succouring Namur." 
 The whole letter is one of the best by Mme. de Main- 
 tenon, generally so serious, and is given in part as 
 a contrast to her usual style. Mme. Scarron had 
 suffered, and even on the steps of the throne, as has 
 been said, was ill at ease often. From such a woman 
 nothing like the gaiety or abandon of Mme. de 
 
 67
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Sevign6 could be expected. Saint-Simon, who was 
 none of her admirers, says that "she wrote singularly 
 "well and readily." His qualifying her language as 
 " doux, juste en tous points et naturellement 61oquent 
 " et court " shows his honesty and her good style.
 
 XXI. 
 
 The Ferney Philosopher. 
 
 BUT I am in a hurry to reach Voltaire (1694-17/8). 
 Francois-Marie Arouet, who at 20 rebaptised himself 
 Voltaire, was, about the same time, imprisoned in the 
 Bastille, for satirising, it was thought, the Court morals. 
 The Henriade was " put on the stocks " and CEdipt 
 composed in jail. From the putting of the latter on 
 the boards until the Irene was played, in 1/78, 60 
 years passed, years replete with Voltaire's work in 
 every branch. I touch lightly on the tithe of a tithe. 
 His expulsion from France and importation into 
 England did him good. Unlike most of his country- 
 men, he learned English, tongue, manners and 
 customs. The trace of Great Britain is in the Brutus 
 tragedy of 1730 and, specially, in the Lettres anglaises 
 of 1734, burnt by the public executioner. The divine 
 Emilie, whom men called the marquise du Chatelet, 
 claimed him and made him write philosophy, criticism, 
 physics, mathematics and plays. A year after her 
 death he was induced to " work for the King of 
 " Prussia." 
 
 Besides recriminations and final departure for Vol- 
 taire, his Berlin- Potsdam Prussianising gave literature 
 the Silcle de Louis XIV. After "feeling his feet" 
 for a time, he started country gentleman in earnest in 
 1760, at Ferney. Like the late Marquis of Anglesey, 
 he built himself (but not, perhaps, out of a chapel) a 
 theatre. Here he had his own plays acted, even those 
 
 69
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 that nothing could applaud but undue sympathy 
 witheld. History was now enriched by his Peter the 
 Great (1703), Louis XV. (1768), Pans Parliament 
 (1769); his Deism and anti- Christianity were repre- 
 sented by the Philosophic Dictionary (1764). With 
 him, however as since, and, to some extent, now, in 
 France Christianity means only Catholicism. Thus, 
 he worked hard to rehabilitate the memory of the 
 Protestant, Calas, executed in 1762, and that of Lally- 
 Tollendal. But opium and coffee plus 64 years of 
 unremitting work carried him off in 1778, after a 
 triumphal return to Paris, like another Alcibiades (to 
 Athens). One can no more appraise him morally than 
 catalogue or criticise the literature of the man. The 
 French politely remind us that there have been 
 Caesars. They say he (Voltaire) advanced their 
 language, ideas, and habits right rapidly in Europe. 
 They invite us to remember that their Revolution, 
 which we are to commend, bien entendu, their Revolu- 
 tion as understood by the Assemblee constituante, 
 was practically all Voltaire's. They hint that " liberty 
 " for all " and such (now well-worn) watchwords were 
 first proclaimed as planks in Arouet's platform. 
 Lastly (for the nonce), they say that the Ferney 
 patriarch's damage to religion has long ago collapsed 
 by the very weight of the lies he told against re- 
 ligion. These propositions do not seem hard to rebut. 
 I pass to the criticism of some of his works. He 
 did not succeed communi consensu as much as he 
 fondly conceived, in asymptotic perfection epic and 
 tragic. The lighter pieces are naturally more finished. 
 His prose is perhaps, even from the French standpoint, 
 
 70
 
 THE FERNEY PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 superior to his verse. His ideas are as dead as himself, 
 but his style is living as that of Pascal or Bossuet 
 simple and clear, sine fuco ac fallaciis. His com- 
 plete works make up 60 to 80 big volumes verse, 
 history, philosophy, correspondence. Of the first, 
 the tragedy, then over-admired, is now considered 
 something wooden, and his drama unduly philosophic. 
 One is drilled to admire his grace and naturalness in 
 light poesy, though his epic effort the Henriade has 
 fallen into complete discredit. Even the happy idea 
 of joining St. Louis to the trio Discord, Love and 
 Truth did not, we infer, save the Henriade. And 
 yet there should be great virtue in such junction, re- 
 sembling the addition of an ounce of gold to butter 
 and eggs and a pound of cheese, and the square root 
 extraction of the result. He was a hard worker, this 
 esprit fort. For 40 years, Voltaire toiled at his 
 history. Charles XII., Louis XIV., and the Essai 
 sur les maurs et V esprit des nations stand out remark- 
 able. The first is original, to a large extent The 
 second is wanting in unity, incomplete His corres- 
 pondence shows him at his worst and at his best. In 
 this it resembles Cicero's, which was never intended 
 for publication (unlike the Younger Pliny's), and so 
 shows up every flaw in that vain Roman Consul's 
 character. Apropos, Catilina, ou Rome Sauvee 
 (1752) is one of the most celebrated among the 27 
 tragedies of Voltaire. Others are Mariamne, La 
 mort de Cesar (1735), Merope (1743), Semiramis 
 (1748), Tancrede (1760). When this reforming trage- 
 dian boasted of his improvements, especially in en- 
 hancing movement, d'Alembert said : " Corneille 
 
 71
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 " disserte, Racine converse, vous nous remuerez." The 
 tragic reformer did not scruple to give the rules of 
 tragedy, fallen short of lamentably by Corneille, it 
 seems, and by Voltaire, very surely. Neither was 
 this reformer above appropriating and recasting 
 Crebillon's Catilina. True, he paid back the poet 
 with affectation of contempt. Voltaire, then, did much 
 harm and some good. The one is hard to estimate, 
 and the other almost lost in the fulness of the evil. 
 His big prose works have had, probably, most influ- 
 ence on literature and litterateurs. Ardent, full of 
 knowledge, clear, he was wanting in and despised 
 depth. What he could not do was not worth doing, 
 in his eyes, and he could not dive deep down or attain 
 unto the fulness of the height of things. This limits 
 his excellence to the light and fugitive : in airy, ephem- 
 eral writing he was past master. What he did not 
 understand he made as though he believed not. His 
 belief, however, was shown by his painstaking efforts 
 to destroy what he affected not to believe. We know 
 the proverbial cause of the Devil's tremolo. Voltaire's 
 very reason had set a trap for him, and with marked 
 success. His strength is his weakness. Led astray 
 by the will o' the wisp of his own great powers, he has 
 fallen into the quagmire that the ignis fatuus con- 
 cealed by excess of light. "Be not over-clever" is 
 the lesson of Arouet's career. Plato's Cave folk (in 
 his allegory) take shadows for realities. Voltaire 
 took his own great abilities for inspiration of absolute 
 truth. Those abilities were as wandering and capri- 
 cious as they were great. His range was immense, 
 
 72
 
 THE FERNEY PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 but his touch was often so light as to leave little or no 
 mark. 
 
 " We know only too well," says M. Geruzez, " that 
 " the Henriade is not the only epic of Voltaire : the 
 " second we dare not name, even to condemn. How 
 *' comes it that a poet, that a Frenchman has dared 
 " assume the ton badin of Ariosto, blending therewith 
 " the cynisme of Apuleius, on the subject of the chaste 
 " heroine whose miraculous intervention saved France ? 
 " Neither a libertine wit nor the irreligion of the Cen- 
 " tury can explain this outrage : these depraved tastes 
 " could have been otherwise satisfied." The critic goes 
 on to divide the blame between the country and Vol- 
 taire. " That France possesses a long obscene poem 
 " is a calamity and a stain, but that it travesties and 
 " sullies the fairest page of our annals is the chastise- 
 " ment of culpable indifference." M. Geruzez had not 
 seen the recrudescence of this crusade against la 
 Pucelle, the book following the class-room strictures 
 of M. Thalamas (whom the French Government trans- 
 ferred to another Lycee) and the so-called historical 
 work of M. Anatole France. The Blessed Jehanne 
 may be safely left to Mr. Andrew Lang, who is her 
 knight and champion, loyal and true. On the whole, 
 too, it seems safe and charitable, in speaking of such 
 a man as Arouet, to steer as even a keel as possible 
 " between anathema and apotheosis," supposing always 
 that at this time of day the public is interested enough 
 in him either to curse or to bless. 
 
 73
 
 XXII. " L' Esprit des lois." 
 
 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689 
 1755), became " conseiller au Parlement de Bordeaux," 
 as did Montaigne in his time. In 1718 he was M. le 
 president de Montesquieu, member of the Bordeaux 
 Academic in 1716 and soon author of la Politique des 
 Remains dans la religion. He scored a big success 
 in 1721 with his Lettres persanes, which let him later 
 into the Academie fran$aise. Visiting Austria, Italy, 
 Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and England, he 
 brooded over all he saw, and, in 1734, published his 
 Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la 
 decadence des Remains. This was followed by the 
 Esprit des lois, in 1748, and his Defense of the same 
 in 1750. He died, really regretted, in 1755. Other 
 works of his are the Temple de Gnide, Lettres, and an 
 Essai stir le gout. 
 
 Montesquieu's own description of his Esprit des lois 
 is that " its scope is immense, that he distinguishes and 
 " examines all human institutions, seeking their origin 
 " and causes, moral or physical." The strange accusa- 
 tion would that it were commoner! was made 
 against the Esprit des lois that it was esprit pure and 
 simple, a lavishing of esprit. A man according to 
 such accusers cannot legitimately write wittily on a 
 dry subject. They ignore or are ignorant of the fact 
 that one joke, old and hoary but living, adorned the 
 pages of L. and S.'s Greek Lexicon ; that the author of 
 
 74
 
 "L'ESPRIT DES LOIS." 
 
 Alice in Wonderland in my own Oxford days, also- 
 cracked jokes in his Algebra lectures ; that the time- 
 honoured Art of Pluck, famous in our grandfathers' 
 days, had cold-blooded jests on Trigonometry! 
 Others, on the contrary, will have it that Montesquieu 
 and Rousseau, after Voltaire, are the two most famous 
 creators of the current of opinion directly leading to 
 the Revolution. Even my lord Chesterfield, whom 
 Montesquieu met at Venice and in Holland, would 
 allow, probably, a proper kind of wit properly scintillat- 
 ing in a gentlemanly manner the desipere in loco. (Of 
 taste, on which he wrote in the Encyclopedic, our 
 author knew something). Besides, it has been found 
 that " 1'esprit fran^ais se releve . . . par le genie dans 
 " Montesquieu, Voltaire et Buffon." The Esprit des 
 lois is half a Melchizedek ; " prolem sine matre 
 " creatam " Montesquieu himself calls it, meaning that 
 it is original. He considered it also a " work of pure 
 " politics and of pure jurisprudence." Its great defect 
 is chaotic arrangement its plan being in the last 
 lines of Book L, and its complete conclusion in Book 
 XXIX. Errors, inexactitudes and paradoxes teem ; 
 an epigram serves as definition, an antithesis as fresh 
 thought ; quotations are garbled occasionally. His 
 style is too concise and obscure, staccato, flowery. We 
 are bidden admire in him the thinker, not the stylist, 
 " un g6nie heureux et profond, qui pense et fait 
 " penser." Our Newton and Locke had their share in 
 making him think, also Cujas, Jean Domat, Pascal's 
 literary executor, and, possibly, J.-B Vico. Professor 
 Hastie says: Montesquieu's great work "came too 
 
 75
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 " late to save France from the political errors that cul- 
 " minated in the Revolution, but it inspired and guided 
 " its greatest men." 
 
 His Causes of Roman greatness and fall (1734) 
 some call his ablest work, including as it does the first 
 real application to history of the modern scientific 
 " spirit " (if we may use the word, without any French 
 connotation of goguenardise, in connexion with 
 Montesquieu). The idea was not his. Bossuet, in his 
 Discours sur Vhistoire universelle, had sought to pour 
 the full light of his great intelligence on the human 
 causes of the (progress and) decadence of empires 
 generally, and the Roman in particular. This was 50 
 years before Montesquieu. Bossuet put down all to 
 chance, with odds on the best man (for the divine is 
 almost sporting in his language : " a tout prendre, il 
 " en arrive a peu pres comme dans le jeu, ou le plus 
 " habile 1'emporte a la longue"). Tacitus, we know, 
 thought all depended on cycles. Bossuet was too much 
 occupied to work out his own theory, and to Montes- 
 quieu fell this heritage of an old man in a hurry. 
 Decadence takes up 16 out of 23 chapters composing 
 the work, grandeur having only the first seven. 
 Montesquieu is more detailed and political than Bos- 
 suet, but less philosophic. Charles de Secondat's book 
 is more useful reading "should be the breviary of 
 such as are called to govern others," writes Voltaire of 
 the Esprit des lois t and the sentence stands good of 
 the " Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de 
 " la decadence des Remains." By the way, has any- 
 body remarked what a cant word is this same term 
 " breviaire " ? Here we have Montesquieu's work so
 
 "L'ESPRIT DES LOIS." 
 
 dubbed. " C'est le breviaire des honnetes gens," said 
 Cardinal du Perron of Montaigne's Essais. " Nous 
 " autres ignorants etions perdus si ce livre ne nous 
 " cut retires du bourbier .... c'est notre breviaire," 
 writes Montaigne himself of Jacques Amyot, " trans- 
 " lateur " of Plutarch's Lives. " Breviaire " must have 
 been formerly in France the " gag " that " liberte " 
 now is there, or that " mandate " is with us. " Liberte " 
 in Modern France means, among other things, pre- 
 venting Republicans manu militari from doing what 
 they have always done before. In England each 
 Party in politics is ever appealing to an imaginary 
 " mandate " of the People to do what the opposite 
 party dislikes. By dint of repetition these cant terms 
 become their own dilution. Ernest Renan probably 
 meant "breviaire," also, when he said he would die 
 happy could he believe his works would grace the fair 
 French hand of a church-going dame or demoiselle, 
 gloved and pious.
 
 XXIII. Jean-Jacques. 
 
 VERY different were the political ideas of J.-J. 
 Rousseau (1712 1778) from those of Montesquieu, 
 his senior by 23 years. Jean-Jacques, son of a Geneva 
 watchmaker, was brought up, or rather " dragged up," 
 pretty much anyhow. But his literary milk was Plu- 
 tarch, not the usual Seneca, Originally a Protestant, 
 he changed his religion with the ease of a Pierre Bayle 
 (1647-1706), being, like him, a 'vert and revert, to go 
 back to the religious slang of the Seventies. Graver, 
 groom, musician, seminariste, bagman, teacher, music 
 copier, protege of Mme. de Warens, he was given the 
 Dijon Academy prize for " sustaining " his paradox 
 against civilisation as a factor in the purity of manners 
 (1750). He now jumped to sudden fame, at the age 
 of 38. Some of his works are : Devin de Village 
 (1752), Inegalite des conditions (1754), Les Spectacles 
 (1758), Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Contrat Social (1762), 
 Emile ou de V education (1762); others, as Confes- 
 sions and Reveries, were brought out after his death, 
 as publishing was forbidden him in France after 1 762. 
 Misanthropical and paradoxical, he abandoned his 
 children and kept his unworthy " compagne " with 
 him, mostly at the expense of others. France alter- 
 nately petted and tried to imprison him. He did 
 not like Switzerland much, nor England at all. He 
 was naturally good, too good. Without any monl 
 sense whatever, he was bad, too bad. To be natural 
 and naif is, perhaps, not enough : it was not in the case 
 of Goldsmith. Candour and franchise are excellent, 
 
 78
 
 JEAN JACQUES. 
 
 but British insular hypocrisy is preferable to some 
 things in the Confessions. There, among other bar- 
 ings of his bosom in the genre of the Salvation Army, 
 he throws mud on his benefactors of both sexes. But 
 he was not sorry, like the folk that confess publicly in 
 the " Barracks." Even as Montaigne, in his Institu- 
 tion des enfants, he cannot be taken as a guide in 
 life-conduct. He speaks of his vices and of that 
 " snowy peccadillo," which in him multiplied itself 
 noticeably, with wondrous calm. If he had to live a 
 second life, he would follow the same penchants, unless 
 his second life fell on a period of more exquisite 
 viciosity. In Jean- Jacques pride and sickliness helped 
 each other, interacting. Had he not been so sickly, 
 he had not been so conceited ; and had he not been 
 eaten up with conceit, as with a cancer, he had not 
 been so unwholesome a subject. It was not the fault 
 of Society that he had been a laquais, that his educa- 
 tion was defective, that he was born and long remained 
 poor. He chose to lay the blame at Society's door. 
 So much the worse for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His 
 misanthropy hurt nobody ; contrariwise, it and 
 his paradox make a pretty blend in his writings. 
 Literary French has been influenced largely by these. 
 Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761) was originally 
 called " Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une 
 ''petite ville au pied des Alpes" and continued the 
 series of Gil Bias (1715, 1724, 1735). (Gil Bias. 
 like Rousseau, was not French and was a laquais.} 
 Psychology enshrined in enchanting style became 
 monotonous in the time-honoured vehicle of letters. 
 Some of us in our youth, and (no doubt) for our sins 
 
 79
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 which were scarlet, have read Smollett a romance 
 in endless letters! Peradventure we have groaned 
 in the spirit, but, fleshed with interest, have gone on 
 . . . on to the bitter end. I pass to Emile ou de 
 I' education (1762). This aspires to philosophy, and 
 to what is harder, bringing up children. Rousseau, 
 we have seen, sent his away " gaillardement et sans 
 " scrupules," to the Enfants trouves. Difficult now in 
 France, and impossible in England, making one's pro- 
 geny State Property sounds a heaven-born system, 
 and Spartan, besides. Emile, however, does not go to 
 the Poor House, he is not " farmed," though he is an 
 orphan, which Jean-Jacques' infants were not. 
 Solomon's and Guy Patin's idea, that " young bar- 
 barians " must be beaten and made into men by educa- 
 tion, was not Rousseau's, who said: "Tout est bien, 
 " sortant des mains de 1'auteur des etres, tout degenere 
 " entre les mains de rhomme." Emile's teacher, then, 
 teaches him nothing consciously, and the boy starts 
 re-inventing things, like Pascal (aged 12) with geo- 
 metry. Languages, living and dead, are tabooed, but 
 a craft is allowed the youth, as it is in the Hohen- 
 zollern family. Like the Kaiser, St. Joseph, or the 
 Christ, he becomes a carpenter, for the prophetic if 
 inconsequent reason that " nous approchons de 1'etat 
 " de crise et du siecle des revolutions." This was in 
 
 X 
 
 1762. What good joinering was to do Emile among 
 Rousseau's disciples, the best Vitruviuses of ruin that 
 the world has ever seen, is not expounded. At 1 8, 
 Emile has finished his books, and must enquire into 
 the delicate question of having or not having a soul. 
 
 80
 
 JEAN JACQUES. 
 
 The vicaire Savoyard helps him, with Deistic elo- 
 quence. The vicaire is of a type familiar to-day. His 
 \oice is the voice of Rousseau, and Emile is what the 
 author calls it : " reveries d'un visionnaire sur 1'educa- 
 " tion," chimaeras dire, blended "divagations insensees" 
 (to quote another) and sage counsel. But enough of 
 Emile. I should wish only to compare it with what 
 ;s attributed to James Mill, in his education of his son, 
 Jc'hn Stuart Mill. Naturally, in real life, as in the 
 visionary's roman, the child admires the Bible, or 
 things religious, when artistic or aesthetically appeal- 
 ing, but rejects Christianity. " No man, after drink- 
 " ing old wine." . . . No man, who has read 
 Thucydides, loves over-much the Hellenics, " a des- 
 "cent truly mournful." No man, or boy, fed on the 
 last chapters of Isaiah, takes kindly, unaided, to the 
 Gospels. 
 
 The Contrat Social ! What misery it gave us in 
 the Oxford College lectures, when we were dying to 
 be out and about instead of doing Political Philo- 
 sophy ! This Principe du droit politique appeared 
 the same year as Emile (1762), rests equally on a 
 paradox, and was caused, or originated, by the reading 
 of the Esprit des lois of Montesquieu. The People 
 alone are to govern ; majorities (absolute, apparently) 
 should impose their authority, and their decisions are 
 infallible. Deputes are not allowed. Would Jean- 
 Jacques approve of Modern France? of the deputes, 
 who pay themselves at their own sweet will, and who 
 lately raised their salaries so notably? of the vicaires, 
 Savoyards and other, being cut off, with the cures, 
 
 81 G
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 from living de I'autel, as before? The Confessions 
 (published in 1782) were written by Rousseau on his 
 return from England, and are happily sui generis. St. 
 Augustine's Confessions are those of a penitent and 
 the son of a penitent. We hear of the robbed 
 orchard ; of St. Monica's tippling habits, until the 
 servant put her to shame. The Saint puts sackcloth 
 on his head, as it were, and prays, humbling himself. 
 Rousseau's is only a sham-confession, of which the real 
 name is bravado, glorying in his shame wildly, 
 madly. Not being strong in cultes, I do not know 
 accurately whether the culte in Jean-Jacques Rousseau 
 is dead. Two of the earliest fanatiques de Rousseau 
 were Robespierre and Marat : the principle of the 
 Terreur was the application of the Contrat social 
 theories. 
 
 82
 
 XXIV. The Encyclopedic. 
 
 AFTER the man whom his country of adoption ex- 
 pelled for his Emile, come for our consideration in 
 brief one who, like Zola, could never enter the Acade- 
 mic, and his collaborateur, secretaire perpetuel of that 
 august body. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean Le 
 Rond d'Alembert are arrangers and publishers of the 
 " Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des 
 " metiers, par une societe de gens de lettres." Illus- 
 trious personages, we are told, subscribed, in advance 
 and without any premonitory qualms, to such a harm- 
 less work as this seemed. Louis XV. gave a " privi- 
 " legium " to Diderot and his printer. But on the 
 appearance of its "maxims tending to destroy royal 
 11 authority " and to favour " the corruption of morals, 
 "irreligion and incredulity," the King's Council sup- 
 pressed it. Really, Diderot was indifferent in morals, 
 and had never won any spurs for King and altar. As 
 the work broke out again in 1753, and a volume ap- 
 peared yearly up to 1757, the Parliament of 1759 
 hurled a more blazing bolt of interdiction, turned into 
 brutum fulmen by Mme. de Pompadour, de Choiseul, 
 de Malesherbes and public opinion. (d'Alembert had 
 given up in 1758.) Diderot's Dictionnaire was now to 
 hail nominally from Amsterdam, and, to the horror of 
 the " arranger," the printer weeded some articles. Her- 
 culean efforts succeeded in having published the 
 Encyclopedic, which consists of 28 folio volumes 
 (1751-1772). From 1776-1777 appeared the Supple- 
 ments; in 1780, the Volumes de tables raisonnees. For 
 
 83
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 size and difficulties surmounted, seldom has such a 
 work been completed so soon. There we have the 
 whole XVIII. Century, aspirations, illusions, rashness, 
 evil passions. Travestying Horace, one may say of 
 Diderot's Dictionary : " As the potter's wheel runs on, 
 " why comes forth a machine of war ?" Rapid notes 
 on literature are not the place for politics, philosophy, 
 religion, morale. Behold, they are written in the 
 Book of Diderot and d'Alembert, of Voltaire and 
 Rousseau, of Dumarsais and de Prades, of Condorcet 
 and Turgot, of Marmontel and Daubenton ! 
 
 The list of writers in the Encyclopedic is not 
 exhausted. " There is a sea, and who shall quench 
 " it ? " There is a " gulf," as Diderot himself named 
 it. wherein " hacks and rag pickers " flung an endless 
 " lot of things disreputable, dyspeptic ; good, bad, 
 " abominable ; true, false, uncertain always inco- 
 " herent and ill-assorted." Diderot's own " stuff " is 
 not first rate always, written as it is in general against 
 time. Strangely enough, with all its ton-pet as a rule, 
 the Encyclopedic is a craven and sounds no certain 
 note on Language and Literature. We remember 
 that a French translation (by Mills) of Chambers' 
 Cyclopedia formed the original basis of this organ 
 of the Encyclopedistes, the most advanced Revolu- 
 tionaries of the time. Of these Diderot himself, fiery 
 and passionate, more philosophical than Voltaire and 
 less fluid, is an epitome of the Century's virtues, vices, 
 convictions. He continued to the end with his editing. 
 d'Alembert, before breaking like the Psalmist's bow 
 and bending before the storm of King and Church, 
 wrote the preface with a certain dry simplicity: in it 
 
 84
 
 THE ENCYCLOPEDIE. 
 
 is the family tree of human knowledge. Other 
 Encyclopedistes are foreigners, who wrote, like 
 Frederic II. himself, in French: le baron d'Holbach 
 (1723-1789) and Helvetius (1715-1771) apostles (re- 
 spectively) of Selfishness reared into a system, and of 
 the sin against the Holy Ghost, or as near as the 
 author of De I' Esprit could get to it. In his preface, or 
 Discours preliminaire, to the Encyclopedic^ d'Alem- 
 bert speaks flatteringly of Buffon's Natural History : 
 perhaps, he ineffectually wished to draw him into the 
 net of his literary contributors.
 
 XXV. 
 
 " Les manchettes de Buffon." 
 
 Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788), began 
 by translating from English. English, we have seen, 
 has become quite fashionable during the XVIII. Cen- 
 tury. If Saint-Evremond (1613-1703), who died as 
 the Century began, after 40 years in the desert of our 
 fog-bound isle, could or would say nothing in our 
 barbarous baragouin, Voltaire, in 1726, 1727, 1728, 
 1729, learned our " idiome " we are told and we 
 somewhat believe to read and to write. Arouet was 
 the first important Frenchman to learn our language, 
 men, manners, authors. Montesquieu (1689-1755) we 
 have seen affecting, or being affected by, Lord Chester- 
 field, and studying our philosophers in their own 
 Cimmerian land, where men kill game in fine weather 
 (so-called) and themselves in November. We find 
 him passing a short two years there. Like Montes- 
 quieu, in another respect, Buffon studied science 
 geometry and physics after his visit to the S. of 
 France (he was a Montbard man), Italy, Switzerland, 
 and England. Specialising in Natural Science from 
 1739 (when he was appointed intendant du Jardin du 
 Roi) he brought out in 29 volumes his works, which 
 chiefly comprise the Histoire naturelle and Epoques 
 de la Nature. We owe Buffon's Discours sur le style 
 to the peculiar circumstances attending his admission 
 to the Academic francaise in 1753. Not wishing to 
 damn, out and out or with faint praise, his predecessor 
 
 86
 
 "LES MANCHETTES DE BUFFON." 
 
 in the fauteuil, he shirked his Academic duty and 
 spoke on style. This was surely better, though 
 against all precedent, than to wallow in any or many 
 of the Sens archbishop's religious squabbles on paper ! 
 Less than two months before his reception, Buffon 
 seems to have expected the Spirit to move him : " il 
 " me viendra peut-etre quelque inspiration, comme a 
 " Marie Alacoque, et je ne parlerai pas d'elle, de peur 
 "du coq-a-1'ane." Of course, the Discours sur le style 
 is not in good style ! Certain Frenchmen go further : 
 " it is neither very well written nor excellently com- 
 " posed" The average man finds it good enough for 
 him, and inevitably cites " le style est rhomme," 
 whereas the text always adds meme after rhomme and 
 sometimes de after est. His countrymen find that 
 Buffon did well to emphasise the value of style, as his 
 own reputation as savant will write, perhaps has 
 written, itself on water. He rejected the classification 
 of Linne, his rival and foe. He was capable of para- 
 dox. Other works are : Tkeorie de la terre and a 
 Discours for his Natural History. With the delicious 
 exaggeration to which we are accustomed, a critic of 
 his own country finds Buffon more bold and eloquent 
 than Aristotle : perhaps, for " Aristotle " read " Demos- 
 " tkenes" ? M. Villemain does not find him monotonous. 
 Buffon was happy in his life, and in the year of his 
 death, 1788, twelve months or less before the outbreak 
 of the Revolution that slew his only son, as it killed 
 Andre Ch6nier in 1794. 
 
 To shirk criticising his Natural History, as Voltaire 
 did, by uttering three words " Pas si naturelle ! " 
 is flippant And that a man should never be. To 
 
 87
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 swear that he put on his Court dress when he began 
 to write, (!) in le style. " a manchettes" his eulogy of the 
 goose, or his comparison of the eagle and lion, is false. 
 And this, again, is vanity, and smacks of Voltaire. 
 Besides, if Montaigne's fine head rested on the pillow 
 of doubt, why should not the comte de Buffon write 
 with quills by day and sleep on plumage by night? 
 " La plus belle plume du siecle " is Rousseau's name 
 for him, in apt and Capitolian defence. 
 
 But the Century of Revolutions is closing, and I 
 must catch -pieces litter air es as they come, and go. 
 The great storm was preceded, as usual, by a great 
 calm in politics, when literature flourished passably 
 well. 
 
 (*) Something equally awful is whispered quite currently of Goethe's 
 dress for writing I 
 
 88
 
 XXVI. " Figaro." 
 
 Beaumarchais (1732 1/99) is preceded by Diderot, 
 our old friend of the Encyclopedic, reforming the 
 theatre this time with his discours-manifeste " Sur la 
 " poesie dramatique." Beaumarchais is followed by 
 that Duds who tried to do what Voltaire had not at- 
 tempted on his return from London acclimatise 
 Shakespeare in Paris, where now it flourishes. His 
 " Divine Williams " is quite French. As the spirit of 
 Beaumarchais and of Lesage is Spanish, and as one of 
 the best and earliest (no solo una de las primeras de 
 sit genero en la literatura espanola, sino tambim 
 una de las mejores} is a novela of Lope Felix de Vega, 
 I add a Spanish description of the same : " Una novela 
 " in prosa, intitulada ' el peregrino en su patria,' ... en 
 " 1603 . . . Es la historia de dos amantes que, despues 
 " de correr varias aventuras por Espafia y Portugal, 
 " son cautivados por los Moros, y vuelven por ultimo 
 " en peregrinacia a Espafia, pasando por Italia. 
 " Primero los hallamos naufragos en Barcelona en cuya 
 " cuidad ... el desembace se verifica en Toledo, donde 
 " los dos amantes se casan con acuerdo y plauso de sus 
 " amigos. La epoca es indeterminada, los episodios 
 " estan ingeniosamente enlazados con el cuerpo prin- 
 " cipal de la historia, y ademos el libre contiene varias 
 " poesias, conpuestas sin duda en diversas ocasiones, 
 "y cietos dramas que seguramente se representaron 
 " en las circumstancias alii descritas." 
 
 To anyone who has read Petronius (and who has 
 not ?) there does not seem much original in the above. 
 
 89
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Pierre-Augustin Carron was the real name of 
 Beaumarchais ; as Poquelin of Moliere, and Arouet 
 of Voltaire. Like Voltaire, too, Beaumarchais had a 
 business habit, so rare in men of genius, and made 
 money in Court circles. Later, the Revolution relieved 
 him of this. His drames bourgeois a la Diderot fail- 
 ing, he fell back on his own jolly temperament and on 
 the theatre's ancienne et franche gaite, as he called 
 what he imitated and embodied in his " Bar bier de 
 Seville, ou la Precaution inutile" (1775) an d h* 8 " ^ a 
 " Folle fournee, ou le Mariage de Figaro" (1784). 
 " Figaro" succeeded in an unprecedented manner, 
 being almost -in the judgment of some as brilliantly 
 witty as Moliere's masterpieces. " Figaro," as a char- 
 acter, is, humanly speaking, from everlasting to ever- 
 lasting. We all remember the gentleman in Horace 
 and " tonsoris in umbris," who was manicuring. We 
 al! know the garrulous barber, a bit of a scamp and 
 much of a wit he is ubiquitous ; his cunning, intrigue 
 and dexterity as Almaviva's valet are beyond all 
 praise, or blame. (Since 1854 he has given his name 
 to a Parisian paper). Quite recently in France I have 
 been able to laugh at real Beaumarchais, but in Eng- 
 land it seems " better form " to imbibe one's Franco- 
 Spanish humour filtered through Mozart and Rossini. 
 It is so good to be good and to take one's pleasure 
 sadly. Beaumarchais had good and evil in his life, 
 mes six epoques (1793), as he calls them. Deaf in his 
 declining years, he died in 1799. But he had had 
 his share of this world's goods a handsome person, 
 two rich widows as wives, a rich banker (Duverney) 
 as financial "back" and as an advertisement of his 
 
 90
 
 " FIGARO." 
 
 championing public rights, on the same banker's death 
 The Memoires du Sieur Beaumarchais -par lui- 
 mtme (1774-1778) appear at this epoch, and show the 
 author to be no mean frondeur. Indeed he is Scid to 
 have made Voltaire fear he must look to his laurels 
 as debiteur of satire (and logic). Editing that satirist 
 was ruinous to Beaumarchais, now accused, also, of 
 trying to sell arms to Holland, and obliged to fly 
 for his life. He had lived too long, though he was 
 only 67. 
 
 It may be fanciful, but something of an analogy 
 suggests itself here and there between Beaumarchais, 
 ne Carron, and Defoe, ne Foe. The works of both will 
 live, and the personal characters of both are am- 
 Hguous. Harley was to Defoe what Duverney was 
 to Beaumarchais. Each was happy in business, tor- 
 tuous in politics. Each was embarrassed financially, 
 though Defoe died rich, after all. Bowing in the 
 house of Rimmon, the Pomegranate god, suited both, 
 on occasion. Defoe served with Monmouth, though 
 I do not remember his figuring in Conan Doyle's 
 Micah Clarke. Beaumarchais fled Paris on accusa- 
 tion of arming, or trying to arm, his country's enemy. 
 Each writer was, or feigned to be, true to the Revo- 
 lutionary principles of his time and land In his 
 genre of composition, each is all but first Beaumar- 
 chais only second to Moliere, and Defoe to Swift. Of 
 course, Beaumarchais copies Moliere shamelessly, 
 more nakedly than Regnard. Figaro is Sea-pin, Basile 
 is Tartufe, etc. But the copyist goes to Lesage and 
 Gil Bias for the dresses; to the city or environs 
 of Seville for his locus in quo. Male morales^ as 
 
 91
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Horace would insist, the plays scintillate with wit, 
 with repartee, with esprit de saillie t golden clap-trap 
 which would have been dross in Moliere's eyes, but 
 "took" in 1/75, when Jean-Baptiste Poquelin "ruled 
 "low." Lesage had made Gil Bias French. Beau- 
 marchais restores him his clothes and rechristens him. 
 Even in Welsh we have Bardd Cwsg stolen from 
 Quevedo y Villegas, and quite acclimatised to Wales. 
 Twm o'r Nant, again, stole from the Bardd, as Beau- 
 marchais from Lesage's work. Without Spain, there 
 would be no Lesage, no picaresque novel, no Smollett, 
 no Dickens, no followers of Dickens in France or else- 
 where.
 
 XXVII. Chenier. 
 
 THE XVIII. Century, so rich in prose and versifica- 
 tion, does not close without one poet, in the strict sense 
 of the term. Andre" de Chenier (1762-1794), born in 
 Constantinople, of a French father the then Consul 
 and of a Greek mother, had passed round among 
 his friends some exquisite verse when that Revolution 
 broke out which was to kill him. Le Mendiant, 
 I'Aveugle, Suzanne, ^Invention, Hermes (Lucretian), 
 La Jeune Captive, Le Jeune Malade, Versailles 
 are among Andre de Chenier's best known 
 works. His poems have been fifty-nine years 
 in process of publication, 1819-1878, and in- 
 clude, besides fragments, Idylles, Elegies, short 
 Poemes, Hymnes, Odes, lambes of vengeance from 
 Saint-Lazare prison. He is, poetically, two men, 
 a Grecian (or Hellenist, in spirit), son of a Greek 
 woman of beauty and wit, who sipped from Homer 
 and Theocritus above all, and who was as French as 
 his father, loving Racine like a Gaul and understand- 
 ing La Fontaine, which in French eyes no foreigner 
 can do. A reformer, de Chenier was no pedant; a 
 poet, he was caviare to the general ; understanding 
 the Poetic Principle, whereon E. A. Poe afterwards 
 lectured, he saw the continuity of Hellenic and French 
 poesy. At least, the French affect to believe, perhaps 
 do believe, this. To the ordinary reader, however, 
 even Andr6 de Chenier has nothing to compare with 
 John Keats' Odes on a Grecian Urn, to Maia, to Pan, 
 
 93
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 to Psyche. His Ode a la Jeune Captive has been 
 endlessly quoted, his prison lambes compared with 
 those of Archilochus, as Gilbert's satire is put into the 
 balance with Juvenal. But we are accustomed to that 
 in Modern France, or in Modern Greece. The recipe 
 is simplicity itself : Take the very biggest names in 
 antiquity in connexion with any type of literature, 
 make another list of modern imitators at the most 
 respectful of distances, then compare the servum pecus 
 with the old original stock. On occasion, go one step 
 further, and explain how the genius nearer our time 
 has improved on the old Greek or Roman. 
 
 94
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 " Paul and Virginia " and " Rene/' 
 
 ANOTHER extreme to which it is now fashionable to 
 go is to attack one's own great men. Thus, it has 
 been found that Bernardin de Saint- Pierre (1734-1814) 
 was anything but what his Paul et Virginie (1788) 
 might make us think. We are now invited to see in 
 this friend of Rousseau a very mediocre character. 
 All we care for, however, is to know and feel, as we 
 do in reading the book, that the natural scenery in 
 Paul and Virginia is idyllic, that the sentiments are 
 pure, that a charming spirit reigns supreme in the 
 little work. Again, M. Anatole le Braz, a Breton- 
 speaking Breton, is making a fierce onslaught on 
 Chateaubriand (1788-1848). He had already de- 
 molished and made appear a forger a la Macpherson 
 the genial Villemarque. It is now the turn of 
 Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who for 
 M. le Braz is as great a liar as Voltaire's " Pucelle " 
 . . . laisse a desirer. To the eye of vulgar (logic and) 
 history, Chateaubriand lived in London* in great want 
 after the Revolutionary earlier " events ; " compared 
 ancient and modern upheavals with the French Revo- 
 lution (1797); published Atala (1800), the Genie du 
 Christianisme (1802), Rene (1805), Martyrs (1809), 
 his Journey to Jerusalem (1811). He seems to have 
 been paid in his life-time that post obitum, his Me- 
 moires d'outre-tombe. For excellence, the Abcncer- 
 rages is that work of his which usually is bracketed 
 
 * and Beccles and Bungay. 
 
 95
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 with the I finer air e de Paris a Jerusalem. Of the 
 above, the Martyrs is believed now to prove the con- 
 trary of what the Vicomte wished. (So Milton has 
 shown that Satan is not only the Prince of this world 
 but his own hero, though the poet apparently wished 
 to make the Just Cause first and foremost.) Rene, 
 being the author's autobiography (as so often Byron's 
 heroes are himself), is dangerous reading, we are told 
 to-day. Chateaubriand has sinned horribly, we are 
 assured, against good taste and Boileau's canon, in his 
 Genie du C hristianisme, ou Beaut es de la religion 
 chretienne. Has he not, in fact, " bedizened with gay 
 " ornaments the awful mysteries of a Christian's 
 " faith " ? Are not the salient qualities of Chateau- 
 briand pride and selfishness? Did he not live in 
 eternal demi-solitude, sunk in the deep ennui of which 
 his finest works bear trace? One understands the 
 reason of attacking the Vicomte, whose work in part 
 synchronised with the epoch of the Concordat, now 
 that that Instrument has been torn, not rescinded, and 
 that openly believing means being permanently 
 shelved for promotion in the " Church's Eldest 
 Daughter." 
 
 The Genie du Christianisim Sainte-Beuve called a 
 coup de theatre et d'autel. It focussed the then re- 
 action against scepticism, and helped to send the 
 author to Rome in 1803, as Secretary to the Embassy. 
 But it was from Old Rome to New Rome, according 
 to Sainte-Beuve, that he transferred the capital of 
 prose, with his Lower Empire style, his Byzantine 
 imagery and sentiment. Illogical, inconsistent in 
 politics, as unstable as Byron, whom he called his 
 
 96
 
 "PAUL AND VIRGINIA" AND "RENE." 
 
 pupil, or as his master in anti-social propaganda, 
 Rousseau Chateaubriand founded the School of 
 Romanticism, standing first in description of weird, 
 wild Nature. He has made French give up more than 
 it ever did before out of its treasures of style its 
 colouring, its ornateness, its vivid glow. 
 
 Chateaubriand had as assistant, from 1802, in his 
 attempts at renovating and reforming style, a woman, 
 of whom good and the reverse have been spoken, but 
 only good as regards her composition. She could 
 write write, that is, in her own way, with her own 
 cachet. She wished to do most things her own way, 
 and that was the cause of the trouble between her and 
 Napoleon. The Suffragettes will not see eye to eye 
 with me, but I have an infinite pity for Bonaparte. 
 My reason I may, perhaps, make clear through the 
 darkness of a parable, a real event. A whilom friend 
 was en villegiature: the hour of lunch was near: a 
 blue stocking of the bluest was announced. My 
 whilom friend was no coward, and a scholar of no 
 mean sort, but he trembled in his inmost soul. Lunch 
 began, and the floodgates of female knowledge opened 
 upon my whilom comrade. Like Mark Twain's hero, 
 he answered everything in negative monosyllables and 
 knew no one in the whole world of letters, art, science. 
 The noise of the great waters went on but he was as 
 mute as the fish of Sophocles (or of Natural History). 
 His mind was an apparent blank upon every subject 
 broached, his politeness was exquisite. The lady 
 winced visibly, pensively reflected and left. But 
 this was just what Anne Louise Germaine Necker, 
 Mme. de Stael, would not do, except when Napoleon 
 
 97 H
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 interdicted her from fire and water, like another 
 Publius Clodius cutting off the commons, or " scant- 
 " ing the sizes," of another Marcus Tullius Cicero. In 
 1803 she was ordered to keep 40 leagues off Paris. 
 The Directory had already suggested her leaving 
 Lutetia for Coppet. Her father, the illustrious Swiss 
 minister of Louis XVI., had brought her up to letters, 
 and her mother had loved Edward Gibbon when at 
 Lausanne : she was, then, fated to be literary. Letters 
 on Rousseau's writings and character (1788), 
 Delphine (1802), Reflexions sur le Proces de la Reim 
 '1793), Reflexions sur la Paix interieure (1/95), Essai 
 sur les Fictions, De V Influence des Passions (1796), 
 de la litterature consideree dans ses Rapports avec Us 
 Institutions sociales (1800), Life of Necker, Corinne, 
 Considerations sur la Revolution fran$aise (un- 
 finished and published posthumously, like her Dix 
 annees d'exil}. In 1810 she finished De VAllemagne, 
 and went to Chaumont to see it through the press, 
 when 10,000 copies, struck off, were seized by Savary, 
 and she was ordered off to Coppet. We do not hear 
 whether she was personally conducted by Napoleon's 
 orders, as was Mgr. Montagnini lately by command of 
 Clemenceau. The then John Murray got hold of a 
 MS. of the Germany, and printed it in 1813. Mme. 
 de StaeTs present renown is not equal to what it was 
 during her life and even for some time after her death. 
 She is considered to have influenced Guizot and the 
 Doctrinaires ; also, Lamartine and the Romantic 
 school. Now people generally find her tiresome with 
 her over-sensibility, under-creativeness and careless- 
 ness of style. Her courage and novelty of view have left 
 
 98
 
 "PAUL AND VIRGINIA" AND "RENE." 
 
 some influence, however, on French literature. Espe- 
 cially noticeable is the Allemagne, where she studies 
 Goethe and Schiller, Teutonic manners, arts, philo- 
 sophy, morals and religion. Her object, as and more 
 than Chateaubriand's in his work, is to root in France 
 "la litterature romantique ou chevaleresque." Her 
 ignorance made her unfair to Classicism, to Bossuet, 
 Pascal, Moliere and La Fontaine. An agent of 
 Napoleon wrote to her to say that her book was not 
 French, as who should accuse a British author of being 
 " un-English," that question-begging term. First, 
 Necker, her father, was from Geneva, as was J. J. 
 Rousseau ; secondly, it was not " un-French " to show 
 the good of Schiller and Goethe even to those inimit- 
 able stylists, the Classical school, and to their ad- 
 mirers. Coming to her conversational powers, we are 
 told that one lady wished to be a queen, only to order 
 Mme. de Stael to talk to her for ever, apparently. On 
 the other hand, he that was King and more than King, 
 Napoleon, received her, at their first meeting, with 
 studied coldness. (Later, this became severity against 
 her.) In 1803, Goethe was only negatively pleased 
 with her arrival in Weimar, and Schiller was pleased 
 when she went away. Where, then, is appreciation 
 of her causerie ? Perhaps she " disimproved" on ac- 
 quaintance and repeated herself. Like the fire of 
 stubble, she may have begun excellently well, but died 
 out rapidly. When, like the Ancient Mariner, she 
 fastened upon you (" button-holed " will not apply to 
 a lady), you could not seek relief fromi her eloquence 
 in the harvest of her eye she was not good looking 
 nor m the studied detail of her dress she did not 
 
 99
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 robe herself with taste. Her works live after her, and 
 these we can admire more than read, as many men do 
 now with the Principe of Machiavelli. In her one 
 seems to see a reactionnaire, who had, we know, be- 
 lieved in the Revolution until it evolved. In her col- 
 laborateur, so to say, Chateaubriand, we may perhaps 
 find a believer in the Concordat, though not in the 
 giver of the Concordat. Both represent something of 
 optimism "the optimism of evolution, as distin- 
 " guished from the optimism of revolution or (reaction 
 or) quietism." If, in the phrase of Aristophanes' 
 Clouds, " Revolution has ostracised Zeus," Zeus (with 
 the aid of " Rene ") has come to his own again ! 
 Naturally, the old poet was disillusioned, as was our 
 own old poet, Tennyson, when, in the vale of years, 
 he sang sadly of the lies that multiply themselves. 
 But the Titan was unconquered still, to the last " lap," 
 in 1848. 
 
 100
 
 XXIX. Le Premier Empire. 
 
 I TURN now to the poets of the First Empire. 
 
 The opening XIX. Century boasted nothing much 
 better than rhymers. Erudition choked all passion 
 and enthusiasm. We seem once more in the days of 
 Callimachus and his pupils and rivals. Battiades him- 
 self could not excel in plethora of knowledge (standing 
 in the place where it should not) Francois de 
 Neufchateau, Legouve, Millevoye and such elegant 
 conductors of poetry to the mouth of the Pit. But, 
 about 1820, thanks to the efforts of Mme. de Stael 
 and Chateaubriand, a real revirement took place in 
 French verse-writing. This is now Romantic or 
 chevaleresque, being the terms used by Mme. de Stael 
 in her Allemagne (burned in 1810, by order of 
 Napoleon, but published, from the MS., by Murray, in 
 1813). Poetry is henceforth to have no debt to pay 
 and no gratitude to feel to the Classics, Latin and 
 Greek. But the first adherents went further. They 
 claimed that they broke with immemorial tradition. 
 (They did not do so). They wished to put off all 
 restraint, they said, as in the language of Hugo 
 the poet " ne doit prendre conseil que de la nature, de 
 "la verite et de 1'inspiration." (Really these fierce 
 innovators accepted most of the old rules of poetry). 
 What canons of versification were rejected by these 
 Protestants of Verse were superseded by strictest 
 rhymes, temps forts, temps faibles and such severi- 
 ties. Boileau's rest of the hemistich and overflowing 
 line counsels of perfection began now to be scouted. 
 
 IOI
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Young men always know everything so much better 
 than wiseacres dead and gone. Young men come 
 fresh to the work. They are not overweighed by 
 experience and crippled by the superfluity of naughti- 
 ness cleped Erudition. They forget readily and who 
 can blame them? that it is not given to all men to 
 know all things, no, not even to the youngest. These 
 clever youths attacked Racine, who had been unfortu- 
 nate enough, we remember, to displease Mme. de 
 Sevigne (except when the Monarch spoke to her of 
 him on a never-to-be-forgotten occasion). Racine and 
 coffee she considered " fads " of a day. Racine had 
 pleased Boileau so much that the author of the Art 
 poetique had, from him and Corneille, and from deep 
 study of them, engraved the Doctrine of the Three 
 Unities in the lines: 
 
 Qu'en un lieu, qu'en un jour un seul fait accompli 
 Tienne jusqu'a la fin le theatre rempli. 
 
 These Three Unities must have appeared to these 
 Golden Youths as absurd as the Trinity. They set 
 themselves deliberately to break them in their com- 
 position. So we have now-a-days the, no doubt 
 equally golden, adolescence, which is nothing if not 
 decadent. " Emancipated " means, in France, to-day, 
 not only " let loose finally from the pion and surveil- 
 " lant of the lycee " but also, " freed from all duty to- 
 " wards God and towards man " (woman still exacts 
 an exaggerated service of hypocrisy). Dressed as 
 decrepit men, cerei in vitium, young men affect, 
 shortly after "emancipation," poetry of the decadent 
 school, so largely redolent of " Slang " that few can 
 
 1 02
 
 LE PREMIER EMPIRE. 
 
 read it aright or profane it by comprehending its 
 esoteric neologisms. " Decadent " poets adorn their 
 lucubrations with " decadent " imagery, nightmares in 
 pen and ink, portentous, preposterous. In a word, the 
 Government-supported clubs for Undergraduates, 
 when the " International " is hurled forth upon the 
 midnight air and the /crtAos tepeus is a hissing and a 
 by-word, teem with " decadent " raw recruits for the 
 army, first, and, after, for any official job that offers. 
 From what we see to-day we can, mutatis mutandis, 
 reconstitute the Young France of the closing XVIII. 
 and opening XIX. Centuries. 
 
 103
 
 XXX. Hugo. 
 
 Mercier (1740 1814) had damned two of the 
 Unities by calling them de cadran et de salon. He 
 outdid Diderot's Discours with his Du theatre, ou 
 nouvel essai sur Part dramatique. But the damna- 
 tion of Diderot had to be shared by this reformer, 
 who cursed bitterly but built not up. Sanballats, too, 
 were the romantigues. For these, Classical tragedy 
 was inflated, the distinction between Tragedy and 
 Comedy absurd. Racine and his contemporaries 
 agreed with Bossuet that Art should " embellish 
 Nature " ; Victor Hugo and the romantiques found 
 " all Nature inherent in Art." Thus the same drama, 
 on this principle, may combine in Hugo's phrase 
 "le grotesque et le sublime, le terrible et le buffon." 
 Victor Hugo's Preface de Cromwell (1827) appro- 
 priately and regicidally killed dead Racine, treated him 
 as a " blackguard Pitt." Three years later, Hugo, like 
 Mercier, practised what he preached ; and, unlike him, 
 succeeded Hernani, then played (1830), might be 
 called the Five Disunities, one for each Act. One 
 there marches on from improbability to improbability. 
 Scenes : Saragossa, a " place," a mountain castle, Aix- 
 la-Chapelle. Action: The King of Spain saves his 
 rival, Hernani (Act I.) ; conversely (Act II.) ; Hernani 
 unites with de Silva against the King (Act III.) ; the 
 King shuts himself up in Charlemagne's tomb, whence 
 the Kaiser borrowed the death-trappings the other 
 day; comes out Emperor; pardons everybody who 
 has been seeking his royal life, and marries dona Sol 
 
 104
 
 HUGO. 
 
 to Hernani (Act. IV.); all but the King kill them- 
 selves (Act V.). The details are fine, of course, but 
 character-sketching there is none. This, then, is the 
 kind of thing that takes the place at this period of 
 Boileau's Canon of the Three Unities. If the 
 Romantic contention is true and " all that Nature com- 
 " prises is contained equally in Art," then Zola, for all 
 his Zoiluses, is right and Nature's filth must be, or may 
 be, described ad nauseam, in every sense; por- 
 nography may claim to be artistic, as it certainly 
 paints Nature. Classicism is net, clean-cut, formal ; 
 Romanticism is reldcke, rough-hewn, neglige. There 
 is between them something of the difference between 
 the lady of France in January, say, when she is paying 
 her state calls on people she sees once a year, and the 
 same dame with an intime. The resemblance is 
 small, almost negligeable, between these avatars of 
 the same Fran$aise. 
 
 Victor Hugo's and his disciples' romantique success 
 was short-lived, dying with the Bur graves (1843), 
 produced before a frigid House, though the work is 
 still read in (clerical) schools in France, for some 
 " holy reason," no doubt, as Herodotus would subjoin. 
 Romantic drama was dead, but Classicism had re- 
 ceived a deadly blow, too. From Cromwell, then, by 
 Hugo, in 1827, to Hugo's Bur graves, in 1843, is the 
 chronologic tether of Romanticism, whose appearance 
 had at least given life to the dead-and-alive literature 
 of its epoch. By his first Odes et ballades (1822- 
 1826) Hugo had caught the public ear and a little 
 distracted it from the poet of the Meditations. 
 Orientales (1829), Feuilles d'Automne (1831), Chants 
 
 105
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 du Crepuscule (1835), Voix interieures (1837), Les 
 Rayons et Us Ombres (1840) emphasised that effect 
 on the public. Imagery and colouring were especially 
 appreciated in his poetry. Between his Hernani and 
 Bur graves had appeared his Marion Delorme (1831), 
 Le Roi s 'amuse (1832), Lucrece Borgia and Marie 
 Tudor (1833). Anti-romanticism made his entrance 
 into the Academic " a journey as the path of heaven " 
 for difficulty: he entered in 1841. From the Bur- 
 graves to the Chdtiments (in 1852) published in 
 exile in Jersey he was silent, occupied in politics. 
 His Contemplations (by the melancholy ocean) came 
 out in 1856 and, three years later, the Legende des 
 Siecles (1859). In the Marion Delorme year he had 
 published Notre-Dame de Paris, and now he broke 
 out again into romans, the Miserables (1862), the 
 Travailleurs de la mer (1866), UHomme qui rit 
 (1869). These latter can scarcely be classed as highly 
 as Notre-Dame. Mixed up with them in point of time 
 come: William Shakespeare (1864), Les Chansons 
 des Rues et des Bois (1865). UAnnee terrible came 
 out in 1872, Quatre-Vingt-Treize in 1874, Histoire 
 d'un Crime in 1 877. The work of " Hugo in decay " 
 is deliberately omitted, with much beside of this multi- 
 tudinous writer of an " abounding insincerity " and 
 "self-sufficiency." In rhythm and rhyme specially he 
 is considered unparalleled and, generally, in poetry 
 is at his best. Paradoxes, antitheses, and lies play a 
 big part in his prose (the lie in verse being ex hypo- 
 thesi impossible). He could act a lie, also, packing 
 houses and engineering his reputation. He "wobbled" 
 in politics between the Right and the Left. He 
 
 1 06
 
 HUGO. 
 
 was part Teuton and part Breton, born at Besan- 
 qon, and lived long enough, 83 years, to write himself 
 out and begin afresh ; to stultify himself, get the 
 stultification forgotten and re-stultify himself. 
 
 This long life of Victor Hugo (1802 1885), practi- 
 cally co-extensive with the Century, except for the ~fin 
 de SilcU authors, ran parallel with most of Beranger's 
 (1780 1857) and Lamartine's (l/QO 1869) lives. I 
 touch on Beranger. 
 
 107
 
 XXXI. 
 
 Beranger and Lamartine. 
 
 Pierre Jean de Beranger (1780 1857) lived in a 
 garret, as we all know from his poems, when in Paris, 
 after his father's financial loss in 1798. In 1804, he 
 applied successfully for help to Lucien Bonaparte. 
 One of those versifiers, rather than poets, who flour- 
 ished before the date (roughly, 1820), when the influ- 
 ence of Mme. de Stael and Chateaubriand improved 
 poetry, was Arnault (1766 1834) : he found Beranger 
 a clerkship in the Imperial University office. Pierre 
 Jean's first songs (1815) showed him as the lyrical anti- 
 Bourbon. He became the chansonnier of the working- 
 classes, whom he moved as he willed Fletcher of Sal- 
 toun's mot was again shown true in Beranger. Even 
 printing the chansons was not necessary as advertise- 
 ment. They were bought up unprinted. In the end, 
 1821, the Government interfered 500 frs. and three 
 months. In 1825, when the award was 10,000 frs. and 
 nine months, Hugo, Dumas and Sainte-Beuve visited 
 him in prison. Chansons nouvelles appeared in 1830, 
 in 1840 his Life. He still retains his popularity, and 
 I know a juge de paix whose literary baggage is practi- 
 cally nothing but Beranger and Mme. de Sevigne. 
 To liken him to Burns is fair to neither him nor the 
 Scots' poet. The Frenchman a Parisian, to boot 
 has the defects of his qualities (and vice versa). Flit- 
 ting from subject to subject, vivacious, witty, tripping, 
 spontaneous; gaiety on the borderland of pathos, 
 
 108
 
 BERANGER AND LAMARTINE. 
 
 laughter too ready to let satire lurk and canker 
 something such is he, and not much other than the 
 above is his poetic name. The chanson on the ground 
 of the politician is poaching paramount. The chanson 
 trenching on the ode is innovation. Prison and popu- 
 larity went hand in hand, and Beranger could never 
 long be sad or bear a grudge, one would say. He had 
 a tremendous name as a chansonnier, and deserved it. 
 And now I come to a man who, by one or other of 
 Ijis various sides of character, resembles, in turn, 
 Chateaubriand, Sir Walter Scott (so superior, accord- 
 ing to W. E. Henley, to Victor Hugo in his rowans) 
 and E. A. Poe. This man's works are certainly losing 
 their hold on France, as a whole, but some choice 
 spirits still swear by him. He began with his best, or, 
 as his countrymen say, he " started with having his 
 swan-song." As a historian, he was as untrustworthy 
 as, say, ]. A. Froude, but plus poetry in historic prose. 
 Alphonse de Lamartine, then, lived some 79 years (1790 
 1869), and did not begin to flourish precociously. 
 After studying in such quiet as those Revolutionary 
 times allowed, he was already 30 when he surpassed 
 his own future in Miltonic phrase with Meditations 
 poetiques (1820). The noise these made had hardly 
 ceased when he printed more Nouvelles Meditations 
 (1823) and Harmonies poetiques (1829), on which 
 last he was elected unanimously to the Academic. 
 His poetic status thus fixed, de Lamartine must needs 
 make a tour in Greece, Syria, and specially Palestine, 
 like Chateaubriand, whom he resembled in his ante 
 d' elite. By 1833, however, his opinions in politics were 
 changed suddenly ; he was depute now, as well as poet, 
 
 109
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 and published Jocelyn (1836), Chute d'un ange (1838), 
 Recueillements poetiques (1839), Histoire des G iron- 
 dins (1847). " Power showed the man " in 1848, and 
 that man retired right rapidly. Again, like Chateau- 
 briand, or like Sir Walter, the poet in his last years 
 was sad enough, giving with both hands, obliged to 
 put his pen at the publishers' service. Parliament 
 voted de Lamartine a moderate pension, and the Paris 
 town council gave him a chalet in the Bois de 
 Boulogne. Among interesting things in his career is 
 his marriage with Marianne Birch, an Englishwoman 
 who shared his aspirations. Another event of import- 
 ance is his publishing the Histoire des Girondins: by 
 the Conservatives considered a cause, or the cause, of 
 the 1848 Revolution. Really, the Histoire is only 
 another illustration of poetic and prophetic tempera- 
 ments being, apparently, closely allied. Jean Jacques* 
 reference to the age of Revolutions is a case in point 
 We may choose to consider that the old Scriptural 
 Prophets, e.g., Isaiah, wrote or had written their pro- 
 phecies in verse rather than in prose because they lived 
 in the poetic period, when all was poetry and parable, 
 and a straight thought could not be told in a straight, 
 off-hand manner. This is, however, only a partly 
 correct explanation, probably. The nervous conditions 
 of poet and prophet are, we may imagine, largely the 
 same, and the province of the seer readily passes over 
 into that of the singer. So the Girondists' historian in 
 no way caused the Revolution. He had, one can 
 allow, read the stars better than his fellow-politicians, 
 had seen into the future far as human eye could see 
 at the time. He hated the double-dealing of the 
 
 no
 
 BERANGER AND LAMARTINE. 
 
 Orleanists, insisted on an appeal to the people, was 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs in the new Republic, sup- 
 pressed the 1 5 May outbreak, but had disappeared from 
 politics before Louis Napoleon began his reign (!). 
 Nothing but academical discussions with friends on 
 the events of the day troubled his literary repose any 
 more, a repose which worked hard enough to publish 
 the Confidences, Raphael, Genevieve, Tailleur de 
 Pierres de St. Point, Histoire de la Restauration, 
 Collections, Discours divers, Entretiens familiers. 
 He lives by his Meditations, chiefly. The Lac is ever 
 in favour in France. What he wrote in the first heat, 
 as it were, is best, and this he wrote early, before he 
 was 30. Moved himself, he can move his reader. 
 Imagination and harmony have in him at this period 
 a blended charm that is contagious. He is a poet in 
 everything he touches in History, in practical 
 politics. Accuracy, in the one, is sacrificed to poetry, 
 and so is success enduring success in the other. 
 Incorrections there are in foison, and obscurities, in vie 
 Lamartine's songs. These caress the ear, like E. A. 
 Poe's verse, musically and melancholically, and the 
 rapt hearing doth dispense with sense ( 2 ). A first 
 reading is perfect, a second fatal. The overture is all 
 delight, its repetition palls upon us especially if we 
 
 (l) " La poesie etait revenue en France avec la Iibert6 " is a phrase of 
 de Lamartine, of which the Greeks whom he visited make great 
 capital, and which they apply to their own case. The Armenians, also, 
 still set store by the author of Meditations, as I learned in Stamboul. 
 
 ( a ) " A voce piii ch' al ver drizzan li volti" (Dante, Purg. xxvi., v. 121) 
 may be pressed into the service cf this contention, viz. : that Poetry speaks 
 more to the ear than to cold appreciation of Truth. Tasso would have it 
 that " nella poesia il diletto fe mezzo e non fine." de Lamartine's is 
 " L'art c'est le cceur." 
 
 Ill
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 are ill-advised enough to ask for a sense that is not 
 there. Music is the soul of the piece, sense but its 
 clogging body. Sense, pressed home, is even "the 
 " body of its death." But surely, in de Lamartine, as 
 in Poe, it were better, sweeter, to lull us with the 
 musical sounds, and let the sense take care of itself. 
 There is enough sense to pass muster in a sympathetic 
 reading. Music and melody and rhythm and rhyme 
 and a subtle melancholy make up largely for any lack 
 of sense. Poe's own words in his address On the 
 Poetic Principle have always seemed to me true : they 
 are particularly pertinent to Poe himself and to de 
 Lamartine : " And thus there can be little doubt that 
 " in the union of Poetry and Music in its popular sense 
 " we shall find the widest field for the Poetic develop- 
 "ment . . . Unless incidentally, it [the Poetry 
 " of words] has no concern whatever either with Duty 
 " or with Truth." Before, the Poet of Music has just 
 said : " It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most 
 " nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired 
 " by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles the creation of 
 " supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this 
 *' sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We 
 " are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that 
 " from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot 
 " have been unfamiliar to the angels." Certainly, to 
 decline the aid of Music is, to say the least, unwise. 
 Poe and de Lamartine knew this, and made the most 
 of the knowledge by translating this knowledge into 
 "the music of wonderful melodies." And of these 
 some are still with us in memory, but most have fallen 
 on sleep. Not so with Swinburne's rhythmic music, 
 
 112
 
 BERANGER AND LAMARTINE. 
 
 his earlier and, to most (there is no doubt), his best. 
 This haunts us by day and by night the sensuous, 
 luscious music in verse, of which the meaning is what 
 it may be. It is Swinburne, the " drunk with Music," 
 as Barukh Spinoza was " drunk with God," not Swin- 
 burne the looker-forward to a " democratic millennium, 
 " with Mazzini for its John the Baptist," that we 
 remember, with lilting fragments of him on our tongue, 
 with gratitude for showing us " supernal beauty " done 
 into perfect melody with his Proserpine, too ex- 
 quisite to be desecrated by being rendered into any 
 language, living or dead.
 
 XXXII. "Arcades Ambo." 
 
 (Verg: Eel: vit, 4.^ 
 
 AFTER de Lamartine come two of his followers, the 
 two Alfreds, de Musset and de Vigny. 
 
 Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) wrote, as has been well 
 said, to a master in his own art when he indited the 
 Lettre a Lamartine. Victor Hugo's Cenacle, " Holy 
 " of Holies " of the then Romanticism, received him 
 on his publishing his Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie. 
 His works generally divide themselves, as to time and 
 character, by the fatal Italian trip which he took with 
 George Sand (1804-1876). If he was Alfred before, 
 fascinating and a spoilt child, splendid and brilliant, 
 he was the Rene of Chateaubriand, after that visit to 
 Venice, in that winter of content, short-lived. Les 
 Poesies diver ses (1831) followed the fiasco (Odeon 
 1830) of La Nuit Venitienne (infatistum nomen!}, and 
 in 1832 came out the Spectacle dans un fauteuil: with 
 it was Namouna. The Revue des Deux Mondes, in 
 1833, published his Andre del Sarto and Caprices de 
 Marianne (" not a woman, but woman "). Rolla has 
 fallen short of its promise of life. Then comes the 
 journey of Elle et Lui (her version), 1859, or of Lui et 
 Elle (his brother's version, same year). In the former 
 account Alfred had had a fever, which made him think 
 that his loving Aurore was faithless ; in the Gospel 
 according to Paul (de Musset) there was real infidelity 
 on the lady's part, and no fever or delirium in the 
 gentleman. Tradition, as apart from Gospel, has it 
 
 114
 
 "ARCADES AMBO." 
 
 that Alfred came back, broken in health and spirits, 
 alone, in April, and that the " baronne" wrote romances 
 of one who was or was not Alfred, and was named 
 Laurent (Jacques). Certain have hinted that the ex- 
 perience served her as material, and spurred her on 
 to literary activity. We have the similar case to-day 
 of Gabriele d'Annunzio and Eleanore Duse, if what is 
 told, or even a tithe of what is told, is true. In any 
 case, winnowing fact from fiction is a game not worth 
 the candle. The author of // Fuoco, we are told, wrote 
 up (or down) the experiences which The Duse had 
 given him ; and the author of Elle et Lui busied herself 
 in writing of one who made her write well, and whose 
 acquaintance was the cause of her having such good 
 " copy." It is not now thought, in England, " good 
 form " to subject a friendly lady's intense passion for 
 oneself to the scalpel of " paying " romances' intro- 
 spective dissection. I cannot believe that, in the 
 France of the Thirties, even a " baronne " gained in 
 the eyes of society by vivisecting the feelings, so to 
 say, and photographing in words the soul-writhings of 
 un enfant du siecle. That enf ant's " confession " 
 came out in 1836. It shows that the iron had entered 
 even into the soul. Where now the old " girdings " ? 
 Where now the paradoxes voulusl Where now the 
 young Mohawk? All is correct and melancholy and 
 admirable and pathologic. Alcohol added an artful 
 aid, and to this date at least, to 1852 we can trace 
 back the still popular pun between " s'absenter " and 
 " s'absinther." Sainte Beuve records de Musset's tipsy 
 attendance at the Academic, to which he was with 
 difficulty elected in 1852; but soon "il s'absentait 
 
 US
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 "trop." He died, of heart, on May ist, 1857. I turn 
 to his verse. And first of an anonymous critic 
 (Quarterly Review, July, igoo). " It is never possible 
 " to convince a foreigner that Byron is often not even 
 " correct as a writer of verse. . . . How many English- 
 " men know quite how bad, as verse, is the verse of the 
 " French Byron, as he has been called, Alfred de 
 " Musset, and quite why it is bad ? And as Byron's 
 " best verse, even more than Musset's, is worldly 
 "verse, it is still more difficult to detect a failure in 
 " accent, in that finer part of what Byron calls ' the 
 ' ' poetry of speech.' " George Sand made Alfred de 
 Musset sincere, even as Byron was sincere. " He 
 " [Byron] is fundamentally sincere, which is the root 
 " of greatness " : he defines History as " the Devil's 
 " Scripture," Rome as " the Niobe of nations." In 
 passion following Byron, de Musset has been, even by 
 British critics, placed before him for reality, if not for 
 " finish " and exquisite art. De Musset, after his 
 disillusion, is classical severely classical. And this, as 
 Goethe saw, Byron had plus " comic elegance." Byron 
 was, he says himself, " ennuye at nineteen " ; the 
 desesperance of Alfred was given to the world in 1836, 
 and the world comprehended it not. Byron was 
 rhetorical; de Musset deliberately rejected rhetoric's 
 developments, trusting rather to the enthymeme. He 
 said you must read between the true poet's lines two or 
 three times what the bard says : the reader is to serve 
 up the vers remarquable to himself with his own 
 sauces. Admirable are his Espoir en Dieu, la Nuit de 
 Mai, la Nuit cTOctobre, VOde a la Malibran. The 
 first of these has, I shrewdly suspect, kept the kernel 
 
 116
 
 "ARCADES AMBO." 
 
 of Belief in a Professor of Anatomy I know in France, 
 whose " pride of intellectuality " would, but for the 
 Espoir, have flouted Religion. Dead well over a half- 
 century, de Musset has still a select few who love his 
 memory and his poetry. In this, as in his exquisite 
 prose, Contes et nouvelles, and Comedies et proverbes, 
 he resembles E. A. Poe. (!) There remaineth a 
 remnant which worships. The high-water mark of 
 lyrical excellence is reached in the Nuits. Sainte- 
 Beuve prefers two of them to the Penseroso. His 
 " small glass " of lyricism is often perfect, and his little 
 volumes of plays and stories are excellent almost in in- 
 verse proportion to their size and number. Thus, it has 
 come about that of these three de Lamartine, Victor 
 Hugo, and de Vigny who have all written more than 
 de Musset, not one has as good friends, perhaps, as 
 the smallest writer in point of bulk. This last has out- 
 and-out partisans. These give as the reason of the 
 faith that is in them that the de Musset of the Poesies 
 nouvelles is of all modern poets the most candid, elo- 
 quent (in the French sense), sober as a metrist, and 
 "correct." For "correctness" he is comparable to 
 Boileau himself, whom he has cursed bitterly, and to 
 La Fontaine. Of de Musset is true, on occasion, what 
 has been said of Byron again, of Byron ! 
 
 {) Mimi Pinson is a conte; so is Le Merle Blanc: both are still 
 favourites in France, at least. In the Nouvelles we are said to find 
 himself, under the name Valentin (Deux Mattresses). To the Comedies 
 belong the important Andr& del Sarto, Lorentacciu, On ne badine pas avec 
 t Amour. His proverbes, by their very titles, make us think of that married 
 misogynist and vegetarian Fabian, George Bernard Shaw : e.g., 
 
 // ne faut jurer de fien, 
 On ne saurait penser d tout.
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 " What is not there is precisely the magic which 
 " seems to make poetry its finer self, the perfume of 
 " the flower, that by which the flower is remembered, 
 " after its petals have dropped or withered." 
 
 As promised above, I pass on to Alfred de Vigny, 
 leaving for a more convenient season Mme. George 
 Sand, whose " call " it might well be here. 
 
 Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) combined Royalist 
 soldiering and verse, of which latter the first saw the 
 light in 1822, the year of Odes et Ballades (Victor 
 Hugo's challenge to de Lamartine). De Vigny's 
 debut was an aping of Andre Chenier. Soon a revire- 
 ment and the French dearly love a revirement made 
 the new poet philosophic and moral in the guise of 
 dramatist or epic writer. All his aristocratic elegance 
 could not warm his work ; perhaps he was deliberately 
 cold he certainly had no wish to please others or him- 
 self, and in this double negation was successful. He 
 had a few grand views, which possessed him and en- 
 force one's thought, if one would enter into his mind. 
 Rich in ideas, he is poor, comparatively, in work done, 
 in poetic execution. Emile Faguet asks " What, with 
 " all his thought, has de Vigny done commensurately ?" 
 He is, in this respect, the converse of Hugo, whose 
 splendour of diction hides a deep-set want of tower- 
 ing thought. All this effort of de Vigny shows 
 originality, at least, in the result, if there is no very 
 alarming literary output to his credit. oXLyov re <}>i\ov T 
 might be his Homeric formula: "his work is Zoar, a 
 "little thing, but his own." As a Romanticist, he 
 rouses Sainte Beuve's scorn: he went "to his ivory 
 " tower before the heat of the day," according to the 
 
 118
 
 "ARCADES AMBO." 
 
 author of Portraits and Nouveaux Lundis. And such 
 shelter from perfervid partisanship suited well such a 
 cold and undemonstrative noble as our comte. Some- 
 times, however, as in the Servitude et Grandeur Mili- 
 taires, he forgot to be his own bitter and cold and 
 melancholy self. 
 
 Siendo el remedio olvidar, 
 Se me olvidaba el remedio. 
 
 But de Vigny, on this occasion, forgot himself and 
 his pose (and part-reality) of pessimism, and this self- 
 forgetting was the remedy against himself. This, his 
 self-stultification, is a type of the man. He was uncer- 
 tain. He denned Art as the truth chosen by the artist, 
 but this at once makes the Art-standard subjective. 
 And with subjectivity enter in multiplicity and all types 
 of confusion. We picture the cold, grand noble in his 
 sadness and thoughts of the lost Mme. Dorval, orbed 
 in his isolation, hating a universe that recked nought 
 of him. The French, indeed, in a manner disowned 
 him and de Musset ; of both " the intellectual father- 
 land," according to Gautier, was England. (Mme. de 
 Vigny was nee Miss Lydia Bunbury). Eloa (1824), 
 Poemes antiques et modernes (1826), Cinq Mars (1826), 
 Othello translated (1829), La Marechale d'Ancre 
 (1830), Stello (1832), Chatterton (1835), are the chief 
 works he printed in his life-time. Some of his best 
 writing, e.g., Destinies, was published after his death. 
 One of his worst efforts was apparently vented on the 
 Academic, which elected him in 1845. On the whole, 
 one rather gathers that the comte was insufferably 
 " superior," and his Chatterton, at least, is guilty of bad 
 
 lip
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 taste, to our insular mind, besides saddling the Bristol 
 poet with such atrocities as deslavatie, acrool, mynd- 
 bruck cacophonous, if Chattertonian. His " Mistress 
 Kitty," in the same, also, is weakly drawn and fairly 
 colourless: the sentiment seems thin. But for his 
 countrymen by birth (not " by intellectuality ") the 
 Chatterton has a charm of its own, partly (perhaps) be- 
 cause it is thought severe on us British, the compatriots 
 intellectual, from whom he took to wife the strange 
 woman, as did Lamartine. He has no statue yet in 
 Paris, so full of statues. 
 
 120
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 George Sand and Two Preachers. 
 
 AFTER verse, prose prose idyll and love of nature, 
 an inheritance of J. J. Rousseau, say some 
 
 Lucile Aurore Dupin, who called herself Arman- 
 dine or Amantine, whose nom de guerre was George 
 Sand, and who claimed to be " baronne " Dudevant, 
 was the grand-daughter of Dupin de Francueil, famous 
 in the Rousseau circle, and of Mme. Dupin (en 
 premieres noces, Ctesse. de Horn). (Her mother, who 
 did not count for much, was a modiste}. Mme. Dupin's 
 death left her a small heiress, and she married a man 
 who had " no name," but some money, M. Dudevant 
 a mariage de convenance. He was devoted to sport 
 and she to Platonic friendships until they separated, 
 after nine years, she to Bohemian life in Paris and 
 men's clothes, he to enjoy her money, until a legal 
 separation gave it back to her. Her poetic " voyage " 
 with de Musset has been described in brief ; her musi- 
 cal tour (Hiver a Majorque) with Chopin behold, it 
 is written in the life of that virtuoso. The beginning 
 of this acquaintance was in 1836, and it lasted for seven 
 years, when Aurore " vivisected and stuffed " Prince 
 Carol (Lucrezia Floriani describes the Lorraine 
 Pole) " and added " him " to her collection of heroes 
 " for novels." So Liszt, who introduced the " Prince " 
 to the " baronne" Her Histoire de ma Vie gives her 
 version, as her Elle et Lui gives her account of herself 
 and de Musset. Elsewhere she depicts Lamennais, 
 
 121
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 that Breton of Bretons, and in some ways a prototype 
 of Ernest Renan, of the same nationality. Her 
 Lamennais experiences belong to her second decade 
 of great acquaintances. About 1848 she began to be 
 sensible, continuing such and at Nohant (Indre) for 
 over twenty-five years. Romantic at first in her style, 
 when she lauded the femme incomprise, she became 
 tinged by her philosophic friends ; later, she was rustic 
 and spontaneous, to taper off into something more 
 strained and less natural. She wrote poetry, too, and 
 letters to Flaubert and others. Indeed, her chief 
 crime, artistically speaking, is over-writing. Senti- 
 mental romans are Indiana, Lelia, Valentine] social, 
 Consuelo ; rustic, la mare, au diable, la petite Fadette t 
 Francois le Champi. The following is her literary 
 character in two or three words : " imagination roman- 
 " esque, psychologic intelligente et fine." There were 
 brave men before Agamemnon, and " rustic " poetry 
 and prose before George Sand. Among the later 
 Roman poets, from Statius, we seem to trace in its 
 development an approximation to modern feeling for 
 Nature. The author of the Thebais gives us, in 
 Vopiscus' villa, glimmering leaves, gleaming water, 
 murmuring waterfalls. Wordsworth is anticipated by 
 some of Ausonius his Moselle and Roses. Sand is a 
 late but in her way a good exponent of rustic 
 scenery. Her having been such, even in a phase of 
 her multicolore life, redounds to her credit. Her 
 artistic sin is diffuseness. 
 
 Her description of Felicite de Lamennais has been 
 referred to, and brings me naturally to speak of that 
 
 122
 
 GEORGE SAND AND TWO PREACHERS. 
 
 philosopher and theologian. His gamut is well-known : 
 priest, apologist of the theocratic principle, Catholic 
 Liberal and fiery apostle of revolutionary doctrines. 
 Between those extremities marked by the Essai sur 
 C indifference en matiere de religion and Paroles d'un 
 croyant there is almost the totality of a human life. 
 The first dates from 1818, when Lamennais was just 
 ordained priest at thirty-four. The success of the 
 Essai has been likened to that of that other Breton's 
 Genie du Christianisme. (Lamennais' mother was of 
 Irish extraction). A previous venture into literature, 
 
 .' 
 
 Reflexions sur I'Etat de PEglise (1808) had been sup- 
 pressed by the Government. In collaboration with his 
 eldest brother, a priest, he wrote the Tradition de 
 VEglise sur V Institution des Eveques (1814). In 
 London during the Hundred Days, he returned and 
 was ordained at Vannes, 1815. One seems to see this 
 philosopher, with trouble of mind before and harassed 
 soul after his ordination, in that old-fashioned town of 
 Vannes famous for Jules Simon's school, for its strip 
 of sea and shady promenade, for its Royalist traditions, 
 as in an environment of the most unsuitable. Even 
 Treguier as a framework for Ernest Renan is not much 
 more wrong aesthetically, one seems to think. " Down 
 " with private judgment " is the burden of his Essai. 
 There he shows the falsity of atheism, of deism, of 
 Protestantism. Then comes his Defense de V Essai, 
 against Free Thought, against antipapal Gallicans, 
 against Ultramontanes. Pure theocracy ideas now 
 became blended in his thoughts with new dreams of 
 liberty (Progres de la Revolution, 1829). After the
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 1830 revolution, he, Lacordaire and Montalembert 
 founded UAvenir and, after it was stopped in 1831, 
 set out for Rome (affaires de Rome, 1836). Paroles 
 d'un Croyant (1834) mark a new stage in the dis- 
 illusioned Breton, viz., a start of mystic religion with a 
 new Heaven and a new Earth, a new Society Paradisia- 
 cal, the working out of perfect freedom through the 
 service of God, Who is Love. Sainte-Beuve says even 
 the printers' devils trembled with emotion in reading 
 these Apocalyptic prophesyings. The Church anathe- 
 matised it. The People was with the author apostolic : 
 thus, we have Le livre du peuple, Du passe et de 
 I'avenir du peuple and Une Voix de prison, and, in 
 fact, he was for one year in Sainte Pelagic prison. 
 The 1848 revolution saw him as brave as ever, but 
 broken by evil days and loss of friends and shattered 
 health. Austere, excessive, passionately truthful, born 
 to suffer, he lies in Pere-la- Chaise, among the poor. 
 But his grave ! No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto 
 this day. 
 
 Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire (1802 1861) was, 
 we have seen, a collaborateur of Lamennais in the 
 establishment and carrying on of VAvenir newspaper, 
 High Church and Radical. Here, the two opposed 
 the appointment by Louis Philippe of two bishops, and 
 were summoned, but acquitted. The paper lasted only 
 thirteen months. A school opened by Montalembert 
 and Lacordaire, ordained priest in 1827, was closed. It 
 would be the same to-day, if an unauthorised clergy- 
 man started a school. To-day, too, the highest degree, 
 agregation, cannot be held by a priest. To-day, also, 
 the best Assyriologist, Father Schiel, was rejected for 
 
 124
 
 GEORGE SAND AND TWO PREACHERS. 
 
 the chair of Assyriology in favour of a Protestant 
 " understudy." To-day, once more, the idea is to 
 throttle all clerical teaching establishments in favour 
 of the lay. Lay nurses are to-day being everywhere 
 substituted for religieuses that is, ladies who make 
 the Government pay them for their services substituted 
 for ladies who do everything for a mere pittance or 
 even for nothing. All religion and all religiosity 
 apart, the economic result of such governmental 
 conduct is plain to all who have eyes to see and who 
 buy in the best and cheapest market, whether that be 
 Jew, Gentile, Turk, Heretic or Infidel. In 1848 
 Lacordaire " accepted the Republic " of that time 
 i.e., was what would now be called a Rallie. After 
 his famous Conferences as well attended as, say, 
 Father Bernard Vaughan's in these latter days he was 
 allowed to direct the Dominican School of Soreze 
 (Tarn). (He had entered the Dominican Order in 
 1839. Father Burke of Tallaght, Dublin, was of the 
 same Order and a marvellous speaker.) Besides his 
 Conferences, we have of him three funeral orations, 
 worthy of Bossuet in their genre. And we remark 
 that his country was Recey sur Ource (Cote d'Or), 
 while Dijon gave birth to Bossuet and St. Bernard : 
 (of this Saint, again, Bossuet pronounced a panegyric). 
 Like Socrates before Alcibiades, Lacordaire before his 
 hearers was romantique, and spoke of familiar or trivial 
 objects in the very midst of boldest images or flights 
 of eloquence (not that Socrates would stoop to being 
 eloquent). He had to be heard, not read. Big men 
 of the pulpit there have been since in France, but they 
 do not figure in accounts of preaching, as this 
 
 125
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Dominican has apparenly swamped all since his time 
 (and all predecessors as far back as Mascaron, 1703). 
 
 [St. Bernard, just mentioned above, was the adver- 
 sary of Abelard, and one had to go back to the time 
 of Pierre Abelard (of Nantes and Heloise) that is, 
 to the XI. and XII. Centuries to get an audience like 
 Lacordaire's.] 
 
 126
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 Cousin, Simon, Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 Victor Cousin (1792-1867) inter alia edited Abe"lard 
 and wrote etudes on those courtly Heloises, Mesdames 
 de Longueville, de Chevreuse et de Sable. He is the 
 greatest eclectic philosopher of modern times. "What 
 is Truth?" asked Pontius Pilatus, whom nobody has 
 answered up to date. Eclectics are always essaying a 
 reply. It is a far cry from Pancetius and Posidonius 
 to the XIX. Century, from Carneades and Philo of 
 Larissa to " M. le suppleant de Royer-Collard a la 
 " Sorbonne." The Sophists of the V. Century B.C. 
 were eclectic, and Plato and Aristotle were themselves 
 tarnished with some eclecticism. So was Cicero. So 
 was, largely, Seneca. Weak eclecticism was Neo- 
 Platonic (or Platonic Stoic) and Neo-Pythagorean. 
 Philo's was a new kind. Lastly, for Greece, we have 
 Neo-Platonism (proper). Early Christians were eclec- 
 tic, e.g., Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Through 
 Eckhardt, Bruno and Campanella we arrive at eclectic 
 Leibniz, who hunted after a common basis for philo- 
 sophy. Cousin was introduced to Scotch tenets 
 through Royer-Collard and to Locke and Condillac 
 through Maine de Biran. His selection system was 
 sketched by means of his psychological analysis. His 
 school waxed and prospered, with such pupils as 
 Jouffroy and B. Saint-Hilaire. Even British critics of 
 Cousin allow that he showed more brilliancy than his 
 originals the Scots. Had only the French said so, 
 
 127
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 it would only be de regie. During his second visit to 
 Germany, to learn their philosophy more thoroughly, 
 he was imprisoned on suspicion of Carbonarism, per- 
 haps because " bons cousins " is the style and title 
 of the initiated. Our bon Cousin made use of cap- 
 tivity in Berlin to learn more Hegel. This was in 
 1824-1825. Before his imprisonment, he had been 
 removed from his Chair, which he later re-occupied. 
 Like most Frenchmen, he was lucid and had a fine 
 &tyle ; he made History and Philosophy mutually 
 helpful. When, after the revolution of 1830, Guizot, 
 his friend, was made chief of the government, Cousin 
 was named on the Public Instruction Council and, later, 
 
 / 
 
 Director of the Ecole Normale. In 1840 he was 
 Minister of Public Instruction. After favouring the 
 1848 revolution and Cavaignac's government, he re- 
 tired from public life during the next year, dying in 
 1867. In 1827, 1841, 1840-1841, he published works 
 on his favourite History of Philosophy, whether pure 
 or modern or moral. Kant and the women of the 
 XVII. Century occupied him in 1842, 1853, while in 
 1854 came out his famous Du Vrai, du Beau et 
 du Bien, which has run through many editions. There 
 is among many others a work on him (1887) by 
 Jules Simon, whom I shall now discuss with the utmost 
 brevity due. 
 
 Jules Simon (1814-1896) succeeded Victor Cousin, 
 his master, as lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne, 
 1839; was minister of Public Instruction in the 
 National Defence Government, as was Cousin in 1 840, 
 but was forced by the clericals to resign in 1873, 
 
 128
 
 COUSIN, SIMON, SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 he began to lead the Left. He took up the direction 
 of the Siecle paper in 1874, and was minister of the 
 Interior and chief of the Government in 1876. But 
 MacMahon and the Right made him resign. Advanc- 
 ing years so cooled his republicanism that he opposed 
 Jules Ferry's religious orders expulsion bill. In 1880 
 he was elected member of the Supreme Educational 
 Council by the Academic. Descartes, Bossuet, Male- 
 branche and Antoine Arnauld were edited by him. 
 On the whole of his works reason would not that I 
 write at length. Below are a few, chronicled for 
 reference and so that they will perhaps make a reader 
 perforce think of John Stuart Mill, politician, 
 philosopher, economic writer. Indices et por- 
 traits, 1893, his last work, Histoire de I'Ecole 
 d'Alexandrie (1844-45), La Liberte, La Libertt 
 de conscience (1859), La Religion Naturelle 
 (1856), L'Ouvriere (1863), VEcole (1864), Le 
 Travail (1866), La Politique radicale (1868), 
 Souvenirs du 4 Septembre (1874), Le Gouvermment 
 de M. Thiers (1878), Dieu, Patrie, Liberte (1883), Une 
 Academie sous le Directoire (1885), Memoires des 
 autres (1889), and Studies on Thiers, Guizot, Remusat, 
 Mignet, Michelet, Henri Martin, Victor Cousin, Caro, 
 Reybaud, Chevalier and F. de Coulanges. Obviously, 
 to arrive at a fairly correct estimate of any such man, 
 endless data are demanded. Obviously, too, such, in 
 their fulness, cannot be given, as a rule. Among such 
 data are, it would seem, a knowledge of the environ- 
 ment of the person treated of and acquaintance, as 
 deep as may be, of their character. Villemain (1790- 
 
 129 J
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 1867) is the chief preacher of the first desideratum; 
 Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), of the second. If, as in 
 the case of a French Cardinal born en deuxiemes 
 noces, the character even of the first husband shows in 
 the child of the second male partner, the complexity 
 of the problem, which critics such as the above set 
 themselves to resolve, becomes infinite. Sainte- 
 Beuve's monographs study individual dispositions au 
 vif, and are quite exceptionally interesting. 
 
 In Sainte-Beuve, again, we find British blood. His 
 mother was daughter of a Boulogne sailor's English 
 wife. This fact has been held to explain in part his 
 special bent for our literature, his special penchant for 
 our poetry. A medical student in 1 824, he was invited 
 by an old professor of the College Charlemagne to 
 collaborate on his new venture, the Globe, blessed by 
 Goethe. His short articles on this paper, where 
 Jouffroy, Remusat, Ampere and Merimee also wrote, 
 are now known as his Premiers Lund is. His eulogy 
 of Hugo's Odes et ballades made that bard intro- 
 duce him into the cenacle and turn him into a Roman- 
 ticist. He published his Tableau de la Poesie 
 franqaise au XVI. siecle (1828) partly to uphold 
 Romanticism. In 1829 and 1830 his Joseph Delorme 
 and Consolations came out, as well as his first Causerie, 
 or critique on French literature. Saint-Simoniens and 
 Lamennais next occupy him: his one novel, Volupte, 
 belongs to 1834. He breaks with Lamennais' intimacy 
 in 1836 and begins lecturing on Port Royal, at 
 Lausanne, in 1837. In Switzerland he wrote his last 
 poetry, Pensees d'Aout. Here he seems to resemble 
 
 130
 
 COUSIN, SIMON, SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 our Wordsworth and the " Lakists," or Frangois 
 Coppee, just dead, in his deliberate simplicity, as a 
 protest against rhetorical verse. God forbid, of course, 
 that I should wish however distantly to hint that 
 Sainte-Beuve, in his most perdues of heures, could 
 stoop to anything like Peter Bell. His August 
 Thoughts have nobody at the pony's tail, patting it 
 where or when she knows not, nobody telling Johnny 
 never to mind the Doctor. Besides, luckily Pensees 
 d'Aout were not over-successful Sainte Beuve's 
 Italian journey, he says himself, heralds his changed 
 criticism. He is now the " naturalist of minds," 
 keeper of the Mazarin Library and writing at his ease, 
 probably in the manner our Winston Churchill advo- 
 cates, for the Revue des Deux Mondes, once more. 
 Election to the Academic (to his mother's delight), 
 professing French literature at Liege, publishing 
 Chateaubriand et son groupe litteraire sous I'Empire 
 took up much of his time till 1849. Causer ies and 
 Nouveaux Lundis took twelve hours a day for many 
 years. He was indifferent to governments, Napo- 
 leonic or other, but College de France students were 
 not indifferent to his indifference. And that because 
 they were students. For this reason they conspuent, 
 they cry. So the hireling flies because he is an hire- 
 ling. Sainte-Beuve's criticism of Virgil did not suffer, 
 as it was published afterwards (Etude sur Virgile}. 
 Also, the greatest critic of modern times has no more 
 need for boys to praise him than had, say, Aristarchus 
 of a panegyric by Ptolemy Physcon. He of Samo- 
 thrace wrote some 800 works, we read, and he of 
 Boulogne-sur-mer was not chary of using his pen for
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 some eight hours a day. The modem has entered in 
 into the very heart and reins, as it were and as the 
 Psalmist graphically puts it. In banal phrase, " he 
 " educes the interest" He knew men and things. 
 He knew in the fulness of the term " know." 
 Incorruptus judex, he sits on the critical woolsack 
 and marks a period, a consulship of Charles- 
 Augustin, that is well-recognised in European 
 history of men and letters. For he studies the men 
 and their letters and their environment and the angles, 
 under which they should, singly and together, be 
 " envisaged." Sainte-Beuve has been likened to 
 Montaigne, who may, perhaps, and in his turn, be 
 likened to our own Lord Rosebery for knowledge and 
 indolence. In the older, as in the younger, Frenchman 
 we have many-sidedness and inconclusiveness, a 
 dainty delicacy in both and, in the second, the pre- 
 cision of " a very subtil man." In Sainte-Beuve insight, 
 sympathy, detailed knowledge work wonders. Men 
 were to him an open book, and that not the book of a 
 sedentary scholar. Among his works are : Tableau his- 
 torique et critique de la poesie fran$aise et du theatre 
 "franqais au XVI. Siecle, poesies completes, Volupte, 
 Port-Royal, Critiques et portraits litteraires, portraits 
 ccntemporaires, -portraits, portraits de -femmes, les 
 cahiers, chroniques parisiennes, lettres a la Prin- 
 cesse, etude sur Virgile, le general Jomini, Monsieur 
 de Talleyrand ; P. J. Proudhon, sa Vie et sa corres- 
 pond ance ; correspondance de C. A. Sainte-Beuve. 
 Closing now this briefest reference to a great man, I 
 cannot, perhaps, do better than quote two sentences on 
 what was that man's chief achievement in the eyes of 
 
 132
 
 COUSIN, SIMON, SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 such as live after him, viz., his application of evolution 
 to literature. " There is no order of phenomena which 
 " is not conditioned by its environment, which does not 
 " depend on circumstances outside itself ; and of this 
 " great rule poetry is a signal example. The greatness 
 "or the littleness of the poetry of any given period 
 " depends to some extent on the faculties of the poets 
 " themselves ; but to some extent also, and far more 
 " than was once thought, it depends on the social con- 
 " ditions into which the poets have been born : and 
 " poetry being thus connected with social history, the 
 " criticism of it, within certain limits, is a portion of 
 "the science of sociology." In the above, generalise 
 by reading literature and litterateurs for poetry and 
 poets, respectively, and we have that evolution which 
 Villemain and Sainte-Beuve and their school of 
 thought applied with such excellent effects. 
 
 133
 
 XXXV. 
 
 A Quartette of Historians. 
 
 ALMOST a one-book man, Alexis Charles Henri 
 Cherel de Tocqueville (1805 1859) did the proper 
 things toured in Italy, visited England and married 
 an Englishwoman. He was, also but on that one can 
 express no opinion of virtue or vice the darling of the 
 Whigs for a time. He did not favour the Socialists 
 nor extreme Republicans nor yet Louis Napoleon. 
 Depute in 1839, he was, ten years later, Minister of 
 Foreign Affairs. After the coup d'etat, he was back 
 at his Norman seat, whence he took his name. This 
 " one-book " man wrote not only his book par excel- 
 lence De la Democratie en Amerique (1835) but also 
 VAncien regime et la Revolution (1856) and a pre- 
 vious work on the reign of Louis XV. (1846-1850). His 
 CEuvres et Correspondance inedites were published, 
 1 860, by de Beaumont, with a biography. We have his 
 Souvenirs and his Conversations and Correspondence 
 with Nassau Senior. His Democratie has been con- 
 sidered by some a continuation of Montesquieu's work 
 and the biggest political writing of its time. By all it 
 has been praised, while the Ancien regime has been 
 generally found wanting. The Democratie shows accu- 
 racy, clever ' boiling down/ a fine style. His accept- 
 ance of the Government's offer to send him to America 
 to report on penitentiaries was the occasion of his 
 making himself a great name in Political Philosophy 
 and its history. 
 
 134
 
 A QUARTETTE OF HISTORIANS. 
 
 Before passing to the Historians of the XIX Cen- 
 tury, perhaps it would be as well to see what the 
 French understood by the requisites of a historian. 
 Villemain, the historian of French literature & la 
 Facult^ des lettres for 10 years, explained these requi- 
 sites in 1826. Omitting Lucian, Francois Villemain 
 comes to Machiavelli, de Thou and Bossuet, but finds 
 none of their styles suitable to his own epoch. Machia- 
 velli writes of Florence as of Ancient Rome ; de Thou 
 was impartial and calm and just ; Bossuet marshals 
 before his episcopal throne the human races of the past. 
 The historian should be truthful, according to Ville- 
 main, should make live again men and manners (as the 
 author of graphic Salammbo, let us say). His his- 
 torian should love humanity and freedom, not be 
 colourless in religion, politics, country. The XVIII. 
 century historians are often, for him> wanting. Daniel 
 is servile and fanatical ; Rapin de Thoiras is a savant, 
 but cold and diffuse. 
 
 I come now to Guizot (1787 1874). Francois 
 Pierre Guillaume Guizot was charge de cours 
 at the Sorbonne and taught history. His system 
 was largely the reducing in scale of battles and 
 treaties, so as to give larger play to political institutions. 
 His Cours d'histoire moderne is of this genre, and so 
 far good, though his style and his " correction " have 
 been criticised unfavourably. But his reputation was 
 now established. Before, he had published his Nouveau 
 dictionnaire des synonymes (1809), an essay on the fine 
 arts (1811), a translation of Gibbon (1812). This last 
 must have been easy, as Gibbon himself had thought 
 
 US
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 seriously of writing in French originally. With friends, 
 he had published Memoires relatifs a Fhistoire dt 
 France jusqu'au xiiime Siecle and Memoires relatifs a 
 la Revolution d'Angleterre ; he began his " English 
 Revolution," and edited in French Shakespeare and 
 Hallam. We have nothing to do with " Pam's " opinion 
 of him, of his " Spanish Marriages," of his being au 
 pouvoir in 1847 and until Louis Philippe's "graft" 
 government fell in 1848. He only interests us again 
 after the coup d'etat of 1851, when he returned a ses 
 chores etudes t Monk, Chute de la Republiqut (ang- 
 laise}, Cornell le et son temps, " Shakspeare" Memoires 
 pour servir a rhistoire de mon temps, Melanges (1868), 
 Melanges (1869), Washington (1839 1840). His last 
 work, French history racontee a mes petits-enfants, has 
 all his old " beaute austere," plus an increased power of 
 writing well. For learning his craft as he went on, 
 Guizot has been likened to Sainte-Beuve. Of course, 
 his antagonist in politics and his brother-in-arms, as 
 far as literature goes, Thiers (1797 1877), must have 
 a line here. In politics, these men were not separated : 
 in letters, the least political mind naturally looks at the 
 two together. 
 
 Louis Adolphe Thiers, historian, politician, president 
 of the French Republic (1797 1877), is another in- 
 stance of heredity, as his mother was of the Chenier 
 family. He knew Mignet (1796 1884), when a law 
 student at Aix, and he became his most intimate friend. 
 With Mignet, Thiers went to Paris, on being " called 
 to the Bar." Getting on to the Constitutionnel, 
 through Lafitte, he had the entree in Opposition circles 
 
 136
 
 A QUARTETTE OF HISTORIANS. 
 
 and made the acquaintance of Talleyrand and Casimir 
 Perier, while he was engaged with his His to ire de la 
 Revolution fran$aise, untrustworthy and inaccurate. 
 His new venture, the National, was interdicted, and, 
 in return, helped to exile Charles X. He returned to 
 French History (Histoire du Consulat et de I'Empire, 
 1845 1860), his most ambitious and biggest literary 
 achievement, in fact rhetorical, brilliant, inaccurate, 
 unjust. After 185 1, he was busy with history for eight 
 years at a stretch. His French Revolution has gone 
 through endless editions, owing its popularity to the 
 spirit in which Thiers has conceived it, viz. : imparti- 
 ality, or what he considered to be such ; on no Jacobin 
 system, with no attempt on his part to palliate crime. 
 Thiers and Guizot's history is what the French call 
 " regeneree. These two rivals resemble Gladstone and 
 Disraeli, each, when in office, writing little, and much 
 when out of the Cabinet for the time being. Thiers' 
 experience was something extraordinary, and is shown 
 to be such in some of his best historical work. 
 
 Nothing can be better than what was (traditionally) 
 said of a brother-historian of Thiers, Michelet (1798 
 1874), tne P oet f history, as against its dramatist, 
 Thierry (1795 1856). Documente work seemed an 
 eternity to Michelet, who, however, still " consulted 
 " occasionally the archives of his imagination." 
 Michelet has characterised historical science in the 
 XIX. Century ; what is of Thierry is narration ; 
 
 Guizot's is analysis ; 
 Michelet's is resurrection. 
 This is good, but not original. We remember how P. 
 
 137
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Corneille and Racine were described, and that 
 /Eschylus' drama painted men as gods ; 
 Sophocles' drama painted men as they should be ; 
 Euripides' drama painted men as they are. 
 In the above historian-politicians, who are only samples 
 of several belonging to this Louis-Philippe period, we 
 find neither very remarkable politics nor quite excel- 
 lent history. The idea, current among politicians, that 
 they can burn the candle at both ends, is not neces- 
 sarily true. They cannot be prodigies as govern- 
 mentalists and literary phenomena as homines um- 
 bratiles in the shades of Opposition. The average 
 man cannot make history and write it well. Glad- 
 stone's Homer is all wrong, Disraeli's Lord Bute is far 
 from right. Justin McCarthy is Parliamentarian and 
 historian, but only good in the second capacity. Ten 
 to one, had he been the opposite of Parnell's criticism 
 of him as a politician, his treatment of Courtly things 
 had been much poorer. William O'Brien's novels are 
 read for the politician's sake, not for that of the writer. 
 "Politico-litterateurs cannot have it both ways when 
 in office, make money out of politics; when out of 
 office, dish up into paying prose the stale dregs (I am 
 but Demosthenean) of Parliamentarianism. Perhaps 
 the ideal man, in such cases, is he who is of a literary 
 stock, but thrust into Parliament for his sins or for 
 those of his forebears. This ideal man one day sees 
 that his bent is to writing only. That day he rises in 
 the House of Commons and valedictorily tells it that 
 he wills not " propter vitam vivendi perdere causam :" 
 contrariwise, he will write. And this ideal man does 
 now write and writes ideally. 
 
 138
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 Lacepede, Cuvier, Balzac, 
 Dumas pere. 
 
 IF my digression is not in order, I pass on with all 
 contrition to the scientists and novelists. Above, we 
 have seen something of Buffon and his " style." 
 Lacepede (1756 1825) tried to do for Buffon what 
 some ill-advised folk have even attempted for Gibbon, 
 aped his manner of writing. A caricature may please, 
 but conscious and serious imitation of a difficult system 
 of composition rarely succeeds. One has not, for an 
 illustration, to go further than R. L. Stevenson's S/. 
 lues, continued and finished. " Ce qui frisait 1'impos- 
 "sible devient absurde." So Lacepede has been attacked 
 by some, and damned with faint encomium by others, 
 for his interpretation of the " pompous Buffon " role. 
 Natural History Cuvier is another literary man, as well 
 as Comparative Anatomist. Leopold Christian 
 Frederic Dagobert Cuvier, dit Georges Cuvier (1769 
 1832) was anti-" Descent " in theory, and could say so 
 in good French. Whether he was wrong or right did 
 not affect his prose. Energy, depth, breadth of view 
 made him recognise that the organism is a unity, parts 
 of which sympathise one with another. His " types " 
 have been confirmed by the independent work of 
 others. A Linnean, he was wrong, but he put his 
 faults so well that one is sorry so much good writing 
 rests on a false basis. He over-simplified Nature's 
 
 139
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 complexity in words so well chosen that they really 
 should have been reserved to elucidate a correcter sys- 
 tem. Lemons cTAnatomie comparee (1801 5), I'ana- 
 tomie des mollusques (1816), richer ches sur les 
 ossements fossils des quadruples (1821 4), histoire 
 naturelle des poissons (1824 49), le regne animal dis- 
 tribue d'apres r organisation (1817), Discours sur 
 les revolutions du globe (1821). Education was not 
 alien from him, nor politics. Of course, he visited 
 England in 1 8 1 8, and, of course, he was well received. 
 Louis-Philippe made him a baron just a year or so 
 before he died of paralysis, in 1832, but he was saved 
 being Minister of Interior. 
 
 Les romans, les contes et les nouvelles. Such is yet 
 another little list to deal with rapidly in this Century's 
 literature. The Martyrs, Delphine and Corinne, Atala 
 and Rene seemed to give the new Jahrhundert a spice 
 of ante-Revolution times. The public, that myriad- 
 headed Beast, revelled in its old absurdity, the making 
 and reading of many books, several so " thin " that 
 their name outlived their authors but a bare twenty or 
 thirty years. In such cases a hierarchy becomes diffi- 
 cult to determine, and we can only avoid deceiving our- 
 selves by naming the writers almost per saturam. 
 Thus, who shall decide on the priority of, say, Balzac, 
 Dumas pere and George Sand? Does Xavier de 
 Maistre take the pas of Prosper Merimee, and why? 
 Did Toeppfer, writing when he was forty -two, outshine 
 his master, Charles Nodier, born in 1780, and publish- 
 ing in the Thirties? In the above queries, too, I am 
 supposing the impossible, the comparison of disparates. 
 But the reader is provoked in this way every day. 
 
 140
 
 LACEPEDE, CUVIER, BALZAC, DUMAS 
 
 The begetter of the Comedie humaine can begin. 
 He was the Mark Twain of his time, as regards, not 
 humour extra sec, but unfortunate business specula- 
 tions. With Balzac and Sir Walter Scott and Mr. 
 Clemens everyone must have had and have every sym- 
 pathy. Honore" de Balzac (1799 1850) was thirty 
 when Les dernier s Chouans made him a little known. 
 La feau de chagrin made him a little more known. 
 Becoming more and more celebrated among his con- 
 temporaries, he thought out a scheme as impossible as 
 it was grandiose, a Vanity Fair, of Bunyan rather than 
 of Thackeray, an all-embracing " Human Comedy," a 
 comedy in the ordinary and in the Dantesque senses. 
 The dry bones of imagined peasants or peers, poor 
 parents or ladies of thirty summers, strainers after the 
 absolute or wrecks of lost illusions, of persons in every 
 phase of life Town and Country alike are clothed 
 with the warm literary flesh of probability, as if by 
 Defoe himself. Daniel and Honore, between them, 
 would almost cozen the elect, so near to us do they 
 make their puppets, so living, so breathing. Detail 
 abounds in Balzac. His pen anticipates all the latest 
 cinematographic wealth of self-deception apparatus. 
 By the very nature of things especially the shortness 
 of life the comedie humaine had to be and remains 
 unfinished. He were bold indeed who would essay to 
 complete it in the vein and composition of its " be- 
 getter," so far forth as it is not misbegotten. But 
 Honore's C antes drolatiques (1833) show a special 
 genius apart from his other work, a genius for assimi- 
 lating and making the reader inwardly digest the true 
 spirit of the XVI. Century. Who among us can write 
 
 141
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 in Biblical style, especially such Biblical English style 
 as is prior to the Jacobean Revision? I trow, few 
 indeed. And French a la Rabelais is surely as hard as 
 imitating, say, the oldest English in Job. Even Ruskin 
 could hardly have done it, for all his learning by heart 
 the Good Book itself as a child ; for all his being 
 steeped in Hooker and " those about Hooker " ; for all 
 Max Nordau's singing Placet on the prose of that 
 " Torquemada of ^Esthetics." 1 The gift of expression 
 Honore de Balzac had to a high point. Balzac's very 
 imperfections are signs of life. " All things are 
 " literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the im- 
 " perfections which have been divinely appointed, that 
 " the law of human life may be effort, and the law of 
 " human judgment Mercy." And Balzac's was real 
 effort : fifteen to eighteen hours a day ; eighty-five 
 novels in twenty years ; more labour on his " proof " 
 than on his original " copy." Like Charles Reade, he 
 was never enriched by his pen. Feuillet and Zola 
 claim him as their master. " Every one in Balzac 
 M to the very scullions has genius." So Baudelaire, 
 and his words need repeating on every occasion. 
 
 A " sapper " like Balzac, and worse, was the quad- 
 roon, Alexandre Dumas (Davy de la Pailleterie, 1803- 
 70). To give a list, only superficially exact, of the 
 works by a man who poured out books " like sparrow- 
 " bills," would perhaps have puzzled even his son. 
 Certain Germans know, perhaps. Adapting Hudibras, 
 one might say that for Dumas pere 
 
 Of books the writing was as facile 
 As for a blackbird 'tis to whistle. 
 
 142
 
 LACEPEDE, CUVIER, BALZAC, DUMAS 
 
 Of course, he stole like a Spartan boy. He dictated, 
 too, or vamped, or wrote what was illegible to all but a 
 Secretary, who put in the verbs or corrected the spell- 
 ing. Four score and ten amanuenses were left on the 
 road during Alexandre's life journey. He was as rough 
 with Gaillardet and Maquet, quilldrivers extraordinary, 
 as the great Gounod was with Mrs. Georgina Welldon. 
 Edmond About says Alexandre " took from everyone 
 " everywhere everything." All he signed was very far 
 from being his, but all he signed was full of his esprit. 
 In other words, he seems to have acted as the Mon- 
 tesquieu of the prose he fathered. Homer or a 
 Book of the Iliad, rather escaped the distinction of 
 being signed by Alexandre Dumas, whatever Alex- 
 ander Pope may have done with a certain "pretty 
 " poem." But Trelawney was swallowed up by the 
 collected works of de la Pailleterie. Starting in 1829 
 with Henri III., and finding that the Master of the 
 Mignons was a theatric success, Dumas scored again 
 with Antony (i 831). La tour de Nesle is still a French 
 sign on French sign-boards. Like the spider, he 
 seemed to spin all these plays of his, Mme. de Cham- 
 blay and her congeners, out of his (mental) viscera: 
 they grew from airy nothings and a tearing passion. 
 His impressions of travel must have been too much, 
 often. Why will people write of their travellings? 
 Voyages are as plentiful as French grammars (though 
 Max O'Rell once knew an emigre who had indited 
 none, in London). In 1842, 1843, Dumas discovered 
 the Mediterranean: Oscar Wilde, we all remember, 
 was only disappointed at the Atlantic. Some believe 
 the author of Le Caucase (1859) really went there, 
 
 H3
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 though we know where the " No. 5 John St." gentle- 
 man was when believed to be fishing the Caspian. His 
 ten years decennium mirabile of first-class novels 
 were 1844-1854. Monte Cristo, Les 3 Mousquetaires, 
 20 ans apres, Maison-Rouge are among them. Les 
 Mohicans de Paris closes a fine series. Besides, he 
 dramatised his best historical novels. Perhaps the 
 funniest incident in the Dumasian annals is his ap- 
 pointment by Giuseppe Garibaldi as Director of 
 Pompeii excavation. For the same reason that the 
 Iceland Snakes chapter was short, one's description of 
 Dumas' morals, veracity, literary conscience, modesty 
 and good taste is not unduly prolix. Prodigal, giving 
 away everything, humane he was never guilty of 
 striking below the belt. Trap souvent ivre de puis- 
 sance George Sand calls him, and says he was excellent 
 at heart. Like Sir Walter Scott in fertility and choice 
 of subject virtues of chivalry he got together and 
 welded in perfection all the trappings and trampings 
 of that joy for ever, Knight-errantry. A. Dumas fils 
 (1824-1895) touched fiction, drama, art, morals, politics, 
 religion with success. La Dame aux Camelias (1848) 
 is, perhaps, his best known piece. He dramatised in 
 part, it is understood, some of George Sand's novels. 
 His Parisian mother neutralised in him his father's 
 character to an appreciable degree. His paradoxes 
 and morality are too obtrusive. He is too exact. He 
 apparently believed in his own literary immortality, 
 when he was in the act of writing. His wit is bitter. 
 His style is chaste. 
 
 144
 
 XXXVII. Edmond About, 
 de Banville, Baudelaire. 
 
 AN authority on Alexandra Dumas fere was 
 Edmond Francois Valentin About, born in Lorraine in 
 1828 and, as a "German subject," imprisoned by 
 Bismarck's people in 1872. He died in 1885, just after 
 his election and before his admission into the 
 Academic franchise. Cardinal Mezzofanti attacked 
 the Modern Greek as a language and Edmond About 
 wrote, about 1853, La Grhe contemporaire and, some 
 three years later, Le rot des montagnes, of which the 
 former is a satire on and the latter a description of the 
 then Hellenes. Les Grecs and Edmond made acquaint- 
 ance when he was archaeologising at Athens. Accused 
 of playing the grec with his Tolla Feraldi (alias, 
 perhaps, Vittoria Savor elli\ he lay low until his 
 Mariages de Paris in some sort rehabilitated him. 
 Germaine. came out in 1857 and La vieille roche in 
 1865. His fantastic tales of slit ears and notaries' 
 noses are very popular (1862). After the Old Guard 
 Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Guizot, Thiers, George 
 Sand, Sainte-Beuve, and a score or so beside About 
 is a mere mannikin ; but his Rot, if no more, will 
 probably live as a fresh and graphic description of 
 such exploits as now find their theatre in Macedonia 
 or on the mainland opposite the Island of Corfu. It is 
 not long since I was going to Constantinople by rail 
 through the Balkans and found the train had to be 
 freighted with Turkish troops at the frontier, owing 
 
 145 K
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 to the danger from brigands, Greeks, that were kinging 
 it in the neighbourhood. Often they hold Europeans 
 to ransom. They so held an Englishman lately at 
 Smyrna. And the Turks pay the money, because 
 these " Greeks of the slavery," as they call themselves, 
 are Turkish subjects. As for Edmond About, who, 
 except for purposes of Teuton imprisonment, was a 
 thorough Frenchman (of the pre-Entente days), his 
 Anglophobe malice is pretty enough. Speaking of 
 the Seven Greek Islands, of which Gladstone was the 
 last High Commissioner before they were " freed " 
 from us and handed over to the present Danish King 
 of Greece, About rails at Hellenic ingratitude. Greek 
 employes, he writes with all the eloquence of an admir- 
 able style, receive so much a month, and their English 
 equivalents in the bureaus only three or four times 
 more, and yet the miserable Hellenes are in no way 
 grateful. They even, it transpires, used to pick off a 
 British soldier nightly or so, for British autopsy next 
 day. But these are sad themes. I turn willingly to 
 Theodore de Banville and Baudelaire. Theodore is one 
 of the smaller or feebler folk among Romantic mighty 
 men. Caryatides, Stalactites, Rimes dorees, 36 
 ballades joyeuses, les exiles, les occidentals, odes fun- 
 ambulesques, comedies, esqnisses parisiennes t contes 
 pour les femmes, contes feeriques, mes souvenirs, petit 
 traite de poesie francaise, dans lafournaise such are 
 the chief jewels sparkling in the crown of this " roi 
 des rimes." This King of rhymes, that a wicked and 
 perverse generation (without the fear of Austin 
 Dobson before its dull eyes) would call a jingler, has 
 shown endless ingenuity. His rhyming is like perfect 
 
 146
 
 EDMOND ABOUT, DE BANVILLE. 
 
 skating, curves and turns and figures. Ballade or 
 rondeau or rondel the old world called what de 
 Banville has done of late once more. Dobson and 
 Andrew Lang have followed in his train and done 
 much the same or similar still more recently. They 
 have done it, too, in English (with a dash of Scots, it 
 may be). As a critic, de Banville has been more 
 praised for his abundantia than for his judicium. 
 
 On the contrary, subtle criticism is a forte of Charles 
 Baudelaire (1821-1867). Fleurs du Mai, Us paradis 
 artificiels, Opium et Haschisch, Part romantique 
 (occasional essays), petits poemes en prose, ceuvres 
 posthumes, correspondances intimes sum up most of 
 this sombre, keenly intellectual thinker's work. This 
 has, as its chief hall-mark, " finish," in the full sense 
 of the word. There is not much, but the little com- 
 paratively little prose and poetry is unique in its 
 way. At this point the reader may imagine that the 
 day of small things is upon him, but I must ask him to 
 read yet a little further. Certainly, in France, if we 
 outsiders, who proverbially see more keenly than those 
 in the game, may claim a hearing, decadence has set 
 in. The spirits of the Cynics and lewder Epicureans 
 dominate Gaul's latest literature. And literature has 
 gone back, accordingly. Similarly, in Italy, a healthy 
 and really national literature languishes from a refined 
 lack of Nature, a certain morbus virorum (non- 
 Horatian). The victorious Teuton is less successful 
 now than before : Goethe followed by Sudermann and 
 Hauptmann is a chronological sequence that makes, in 
 criticism, for laus temporis acti. Our own state is not, 
 
 147
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 of course, parlous, but far from satisfactory, at the 
 moment. The French literary decadence can be 
 readily explained on Ruskin's system : confusing art 
 with literature and both with morality. Moral and 
 spiritual beauty appealed to John Ruskin more than 
 cleverness. If then (which I do not allow) to write 
 well spiritual and moral loveliness is necessary, we have 
 the low state of French and other letters fully ex- 
 pounded. To show it, I take the case, still not treated, 
 of Prosper Merimee.
 
 XXXVIII. "Carmen" and 
 x " Mdlle. de Maupin." 
 
 SCEPTIC son of an unbelieving father and of 
 an unbelieving mother, Prosper Merimee (1803 
 1870) was melancholy with the constitutional 
 melancholy of absolute infidelity. His self-dis- 
 trust, his distrust of others deadened his action, 
 deadened his writing. To him, ex hypothesi sur- 
 rounded with Nothingness, the world could but make 
 parade of unsubstantiality. His days were but 
 dreams ; Hope was there none, but cynicism abound- 
 ing. And, in the meantime, the man's physical nature 
 was buoyant, even it may be enthusiastic. But he 
 killed the surging impulse, and, in killing it, was so far 
 suicidal. This way madness lies, or at least sad- 
 ness. And Prosper was very sad. How far are we 
 here from Ruskin's standpoint of living by loving 
 (Merimee did love children and the Inconnue, but 
 would not confess to it even to himself), by hope, by 
 admiration, by reverence for the glorious dead and 
 gracious living and grand immortals ! " All great art 
 " is praise," preached Ruskin. " The gods are dead, 
 " have never existed," lamented Merimee, and his 
 successors extol his saying. And as they extol, they 
 fall lower and lower in the scale of excellence in 
 writing. For such composition, good, nervous, rare 
 convictions are required, if religion can be omitted ; a 
 subject worthy of clothing with trappings that force 
 the attention to them. And it is a poor centre of a 
 
 149
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 man, Himself. If there is no Ideal, nothing but eating 
 and drinking to-day and dying to-morrow, let us die 
 by all means, but not write, prose or verse, French or 
 English. Let us, ere we put pen to paper, posit an 
 Ideal, or an Idea of Plato the Great Idea and write 
 up to it Writing down to dead levels of lowest con- 
 duct, to Zolaism in realism, is not the better part, even 
 if the writer's remains go eventually to the Pantheon. 
 Pornography and scatology weigh as dust in the 
 balance against printed lessons of justice and charity, 
 of responsibility realised and higher morality laws 
 applied to social questions. Merimee had nothing 
 outre. He was espiegle, he put his portrait of himself 
 dressed as a girl as frontispiece to his Clara Gazul, 
 which surnamie becomes Guzla, two years later, in 
 1827. He has exact and wide information, irony and 
 humour ; he is prosateur des prosateurs in the best 
 sense of the word prose. A dilettante or amateur, 
 real or pretended, he did write learned books as well 
 as others. But his tales are the best things he did, and 
 of these the best-known is Carmen. Is he his own 
 " Saint-Clair " in the Vase etrusque ? Lettres a une 
 Inconnue (1873) are curious and interesting. Here the 
 cynic melts into love, or into its substitute in the less 
 impressionable. An attempt to solve the fair one's 
 identity were useless, as were the endeavour to prove 
 to non-Spaniards that Carmen should read Carmencita. 
 With Prosper Merimee none but Theophile Gautier 
 (1811-1872) can dispute the palm of writing short 
 stories. In describing him I must be very exact and 
 serious, lest haply I be taken to have read any of him, 
 and so be thought foul scorn of by the sterner sort of 
 
 150
 
 " CARMEN " AND " MDLLE. DE MAUPIN." 
 
 moralists. For there are regarding Gautier two great 
 schools of thought, one praising him unduly and one 
 very hard on him for his supposed lack of manliness 
 and religion. Truth, as usual, lies between. That is, 
 such truth as we can get at. He is not an idol, he is 
 not a devil. Nobody need worship him, none need 
 cross himself when he is mentioned. On the " Art for 
 : ' Art " principle, Theophile has no beliefs, no religion, 
 no faith. His ideal is, probably, peccare not fortiter 
 but Txvi/cws- One cannot always be sparkling and 
 naughty, but Theophile Gautier was always trying. 
 If he was ever good and not flippant, it was in con- 
 nexion with Victor Hugo. Before he put on that half- 
 belief in the great Romanticist, he had made Sainte- 
 Beuve notice him. Emaux et Camees (1856) is one oi 
 his good sets of poems. Especially, perhaps, Nostal* 
 gies d'Obelisques, Le monde est meckant, Les 
 Nereides, Le chdteau du souvenir, L'Art. The famous 
 novel, Mile, de Maupin, defied the World and its 
 wife in 1835. Le Capitaine Fracasse appeared in 
 1863. His voyages are what such books should be, 
 unless they are out-and-out Baedekers. They should 
 tell nothing, know nothing about the Spirit of Laws 
 in places like Stamboul. Or they should omit nothing 
 absolutely, whatever be the department of knowledge, 
 to an exhibition of which the country may lend itself. 
 " Doing " a continent, or any part thereof, with a 
 German guide-book is pain (and one's duty to oneself), 
 the same with Gautier is pleasure (and self-deception). 
 A work should evidently be praised for its omissions, 
 especially a work calling itself literary. On the same 
 principle a friend of mine took care to reach Persepolis
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 after nightfall, and left the ruins before sunrise. Ever 
 after, he could discourse impartially and at any length 
 on what he thus visited. We know, too, how true to 
 life Moore was on Persia, which he never saw, in his 
 Lalla Rookh. [Only Pierre Loti, possibly, can fill 350 
 pages with a description of seen sun, sand, moon and 
 shrubs (in Le Desert}.] To take Gautier's feuilletons 
 on the theatre seriously would be not well. Recently 
 Catulle Mendes had the Gautier mantle, and 
 prophesied (retrospectively) with eclat. Still that 
 was not his genre. And Gautier's His to ire de 
 VArt dramatique en France bears but a relation 
 infinitesimal to the huge promise in the title. 
 Gautier, furthermore, discussed in his own vein 
 the XVI. and XVII. Century writers, besides 
 Honor e. de Balzac (1858). This seems a priori a large 
 order, but he was equal to anything, that man of 
 Tarbes, not so far from Toulouse ; and we know what 
 is a Gascon's Gasconing. We know, too, what is their 
 courage the bravery of those same men touching 
 whom that same H. de Balzac, in his Contrat de 
 mariage, writes : " ce courage physique qui semble 
 " etre dans 1'air de la Gascogne." 
 
 '52
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 A. Daudet and Flaubert. 
 
 AFTER the Gascon, the Meridional Type. Tartarin 
 dc Tarascon (18/4), Tartarin sur Us Alpes (1886) 
 and Port Tarascon (1890), in the comic vein, as Numa 
 Roumestan (1882), in the serious style, make ever 
 known among us the name of Alphonse Daudet, of 
 Nimes and not of the Academic, which his L'Immortel 
 (1888) attacks powerfully under the thinnest of dis- 
 guises. His Le Petit Chose shows up the French lycee 
 pion, who had been partly abolished, it seemed, by the 
 Education Department, but has again been resusci- 
 tated in his primal misery under another name. 
 Alphonse Daudet was pion t or surveillant or ripeti- 
 teur at a school at Alais. We know the lashing Paul 
 Bourget in Andre Cornells (1887) gives the system 
 of repititeurs, or whatever pions were called in his 
 (already distant) schooldays. We know Daudet's 
 sufferings. The sufferings of the French boys under 
 pions, to-day even, are not small. British ideas of 
 freedom and amour propre and straightforwardness 
 and openness are absolutely unknown in the lycees 
 and the colleges, where boys are more watched night 
 and day than any British young girl in any boarding 
 school. The Daudets, Alphonse and Ernest (his 
 brother), on going up to Paris, were made secretaries 
 to Le Nabab (M. le due de Morny). Alphonse pub- 
 lished poetry in 1858, Les Amoureuses ; did theatrical 
 work, e.g., I'Arlesienne (1872); wrote in the Figaro. 
 
 'S3
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 In 1873 he made an onslaught on that feeble folk and 
 defenceless, the rates, in Jack, as sad in its way as is 
 Ouida's Signa. At least, in my memory they assort 
 themselves strangely and sadly. One pities Jack's 
 mother, though one should not (for " the sin forgiven 
 " by Christ in Heaven by man is cursed alway," Willis 
 tells us). One is wild with Bruno for spoiling Signa 
 and himself reaping his due reward, ingratitude. In 
 1883, rEvangeliste presents us with what was then 
 new or newish, the Salvation Army. Sapko (1884) 
 was different from the usual run of Alphonse's books. 
 T rente ans de Paris was published in 1887 and, two 
 years later, Souvenirs a"un homtne de lettres. His 
 son, Leon, a novelist, has written a memoir of him. 
 His brother, Ernest, was also a novelist and journalist 
 Alphonse, for some time, was member of a famous 
 literary coterie which included also Turgenief, 
 Flaubert and the brothers Goncourt. (Turgenief was 
 Russian, and may be left out in these Notes). The 
 coterie was, say some, realistic (Flaubert was not 
 realistic). The coterie, say others, affected naturalism 
 (Flaubert was not naturalistic). Flaubert's detail 
 (and full description) was never an end-in-itself to him. 
 Minuteness was subordinated to his general plan. 
 Flaubert was a romanticist He was born out of due 
 time. On him, as on the Glaucus of Plato, were 
 certain accretions, caught from later writers, as Balzac, 
 as Stendhal. The chamceleon is blue, you swear 
 now ; now you are sure it is green. A. asseverates that 
 Madame Bovary or Salammbo is of one school, B. that 
 Salantntbo or Madame Bovary is of another. Flaubert 
 is competently esteemed the most remarkable novelist 
 
 154
 
 A. DAUDET AND FLAUBERT. 
 
 of his epoch (1821-1880). Madame Bovary was pub- 
 lished in 1857; its style, being Flaubert's, is impec- 
 cable ; and impeccable, according to the judges, are 
 its morals. Others had thought the contrary. 
 Salammbo (1862), now playing in Paris, has been 
 threshed out in every accent, in every clime, in every 
 lady's chamber. How can a man decide upon it ? An 
 Irishman of my former acquaintance solved the diffi- 
 culty in this wise. He read a Magazine article on this 
 tale of old Carthage, and fairly assimilated the views 
 written therein. He then went to a Dublin lady's, 
 where local light and leading were literarily engaged. 
 And the Dublin Hotel Rambouillet was astonished 
 at his learning. Howbeit, later, certain ladies knew 
 him for what he was, a blaguetir not unspotted of the 
 sin of plagiarism. In Gustave Flaubert has been 
 remarked " a strong and somewhat morbid " cast cf 
 thought He is known, also, to have been very late in 
 life a producer. Probably there is causality between 
 these two facts (assuming their truth). A child born 
 to old parents, or to a married couple of whom the 
 husband is old, is often lacking in health or good 
 temper. A kind of weird, eerie feeling, a shadow of 
 a great terror, so to say, permeates or overspreads 
 Salammbo. Flaubert, by his " wrestled " expression, 
 seems to the impartial reader like him who walks a 
 lonely road, nor durst turn back his head, aware as he 
 is of the " fearsome fiend" The author of this study 
 of Punic waning days had learned his lesson too well 
 His topography, his knowledge of the times were too 
 perfect How much better is the Koran, describing 
 as in this same Tunis country (perhaps) Alexander 
 
 155
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 the Great (if it was he) seeing the Sun setting near 
 black mud (supposing the Arabic to mean that). The 
 Philosophy of Doubt, a la Montaigne or Mr. Arthur 
 Balfour, is preferable generally to the accurate, the 
 painfully accurate, man that insists on knowing Dido's 
 exact relationship to Jezebel. And when this kind 
 of information multiplies itself Flaubert is prolific in 
 such merciless facts your joy in the story evaporates 
 in disgust at fullest detail. Of his Trots Contes one 
 deals with the daughter of Herodias. We have had 
 her quite lately, also, from the pen of Oscar Wilde, and 
 with the music of Strauss : Catulle Mendes, the Par- 
 nassien and author of Mephistophela, has praised her. 
 Flaubert's way of depicting her depicts his own man- 
 nerisms. Our Walter Pater has been for style 
 mentioned together with Flaubert. 
 
 One way of judging Flaubert's work is that of 
 Emerson, when he has Goethe before him for judg- 
 ment. "It is so crammed with wisdom, with know- 
 " ledge of the world . . . ; the persons so truly 
 " and subtly drawn .... the book remains ever 
 " so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it 
 " go its way, and be willing to get what good from it 
 " we can, assured that it has only begun its office, and 
 " has millions of readers yet to serve." Flaubert has 
 what most French have, that on which they pique 
 themselves, intellectual brilliancy, valuable per se\ 
 sprightliness ; talent almost overloaded, but not so as 
 to conceal the possessor's wisdom. His correspondence 
 with George Sand has been noticed before. Its pub- 
 lication was a boon to literature, and made for a juster 
 appreciation of both writers. 
 
 156
 
 XL. Paul Bourget, A. France, 
 E Zola. 
 
 THIS time a living prose writer, who has also written 
 good verse. Paul Bourget was born in 1852, brought 
 up at Clermont-Ferrand lycee, where his father was 
 professor of Mathematics, and took highest honours. 
 La vie inquiete came out in 1875, Edel in 1878, Us 
 aveux in 1881. His Essais (first series), in 1883, and 
 nouveaux essais (2nd series) in 1886 search the 
 very hearts and reins of Pessimism in the France of 
 to-day. " Have We created the heavens and the earth, 
 " and what between them is, in jest ? " cries God, in 
 the Koran. Bourget, in the above and in his novels, 
 e.g., r Irreparable (1884), Cruelle enigme (1885), un 
 crime d' amour (1886), Andre Cornells (1887), Men- 
 songes (1887), probes human nature and taps its 
 springs of motive, clearly and with refinement analys- 
 ing our very souls, as it would seem. His brother-in- 
 law a Professor, like his father, but at a University 
 confessed to me that he found Bourget very dull read- 
 ing and had given up perusing him. This dullness 
 exists. Since his " conversion," especially, he is won- 
 drous High and Dry in his Catholicism. Besides, his 
 Professor critic is entirely literary and, almost more 
 English than the English, is now busy on " John Lyly 
 and his times," soon to appear, in French. Bourget 
 is responsible for much more than the above among 
 others, Sensations d'ltalie (1891), Cosmopolis (1892), 
 Le disciple, Notre cceur, La terre promise, Un Saint,
 
 THE STUDY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Un scrupule, Une idylle tragique, Un Divorce Like 
 his sister and her husband, Paul Bourget knows 
 England well and Italy intimately. He has travelled 
 in America, Spain, Morocco, etc. His U.S.A. impres- 
 sions were printed in 1 894, when he was admitted into 
 the Academic. Bourget did not commit the error of 
 S. T. Coleridge, that of "wearing away his youth in 
 " contemplation, with the end of poetising in his man- 
 " hood." He got his poetry off his chest before he 
 was 30. As Poe combated the corruption of Poetry 
 by " the heresy of the Didactic," so perhaps that of the 
 novel by the same may be justly attacked. We also 
 nowadays can feel the deepest reverence for the True, 
 but wish to limit, only to enforce, its modes of inculca- 
 tion. " The demands of Truth are severe. She has 
 " no sympathy with the myrtles." The Ancients 
 placed her in a well. Is Bourget justified in dragging 
 her out, and again thrusting her into a novel, however 
 didactic? If he is justified, he certainly has no right 
 to be heavy. That, like mediocrity, which he is the 
 last to be thought to have, is permitted by neither 
 Gods nor men nor editors. 
 
 Another living force in poetry, novel-writing and 
 miscellaneous authorship to-day is Anatole France, 
 born in 1844. In 1868, he gave the world his views 
 of Alfred de Vigny, followed by his pobmes dores 
 (1873). Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard made him 
 well known in 1881, since when he has continued with 
 stories, sketches, satires. La rotisserie de la reine 
 Pedauque is much spoken of : so is his last work or 
 almost his last on Jeanne D'Arc. France's attack on 
 the Pticelle, under his pretence of being documente, 
 
 I 5 8
 
 PAUL BOURGET, A. FRANCE, E. ZOLA. 
 
 is exceedingly clever, but deceives nobody who has 
 watched French literature and its trend during the last 
 few years, as has, for instance, Andrew Lang. Style 
 clair, nuance, ironique is that of Anatole France, ne 
 Thibaut. 
 
 Professor Satntsbury considers Emile Zola 
 " the most celebrated, if not the best, French 
 " novelist of the last quarter of the XIX. 
 " Century," and esteems " La Terre the beast- 
 liest of the whole [of his books], unless that 
 " proud pre-eminence be allotted to Germinal" Nana 
 is the " success of scandal." Apart, however, from 
 Zola's " Naturalism " and beastliness, matters of 
 taste and, as such, incapable of dispute, his books are 
 overloaded with encyclopaedic knowledge, surfeited 
 with technicality, stiff, inartistic. This, then, is a crime 
 against aesthetics, and hoc habet! Immorality, besti- 
 ality, lubricity what not? are small things, perhaps. 
 But the moment the aesthetic and artistic are touched, 
 it is a home thrust : Zola has offended against the 
 canons of writing. Like Piron, he was not an Acade- 
 mician. His Contcs a Ninon (1864) and Nouveaux 
 Contes a Ninon (1874) belong to his earlier and better 
 style. Some consider these quite his best work. 
 Accidentally asphyxiated in 1902, Zola was lately 
 canonised laically and his remains transferred to the 
 Pantheon. But this, presumably, had nothing to do 
 with Zola, the writer; Zola, the politician, was thus 
 treated, in all probability a probability accentuated 
 by the riots. 
 
 159
 
 INDEX.
 
 Index. 
 
 Abbey of Thelema, 20 
 
 Aboard, P., 126 
 
 Abencerrages, 95 
 
 Aberdeen, 24 
 
 About, E., 145-146 
 
 absmther, s', 115 
 
 Academic, 28-30, 31, 37, 45, 51, 74, 
 
 83, 86, 119 
 
 Academy, British want of, 29 
 Academy, American, 30 
 Accademia della Crusca, 30 
 Adroste, 60 
 ./Eschylus, 35, 36 
 Alcibiades, 70, 125 
 " Alcofribas Nasier," n 
 Alembert, d', 71, 83 
 Alencon, Duchess of, 13 
 Alexandre, roman cC , 2 
 Alexandria, Egypt, 14 
 Allemagne, 98, 99, 101 
 Amadis de Gaule, 12 
 Amsterdam, 83 
 Amyot, 20, 21, 77 
 Anct'mt Marwer, the, 99 
 Andromaqve, 39, 41, 66 
 Anglaises, lettres, 69 
 Annales Rabelaisiennes, n 
 Annunzio, d', G., 115 
 Antioche, chanson d', 2 
 Antoine de Bourbon, 1 1 
 Anti-romanticism, 106 
 Apologie pour Herodote, 17 
 Apuleius, 73 
 Aquinas, S. Thomas, 33 
 Arabic, 18, 54 
 Arc, d' (Dare.) 
 Archie, the Fool, 46 
 Archilochus, 94 
 Ariosto, 54, 73 
 
 Aristotle, 18-21, 33, 43, 47, 63, 87 
 Aristophanes, 24, 46, 99 
 Arnault, u, 108 
 Arouet (Voltaire) 
 " Arthenice," 28 
 Articles, the XXXIX., 20 
 Art poetique, V, 51 
 Assyriology, 124, 125 
 
 AtaJa, 95 
 Athalie, 40, 41, 59 
 Aubigne, d. d', 18, 19 
 Aubigne, Francoise d', 67 
 Ausonius, 122 
 Avare, I', 49 
 Avril, 15 
 Avenir, V, 124 
 aveugle, /', 93 
 
 Babrius, 52 
 
 Bacon, F., u, 19 
 
 balade, ballades, 5, 8, 105 
 
 Balzac, 21, 141142 
 
 Balzac, de Guez de, 25, 26 
 
 Banville, 146, 147 
 
 Barbier de Seville, go 
 
 Bardd Cwsg, 92 
 
 Basils, 91 
 
 Baudelaire, Ch., 147-148 
 
 Bayle, P., 78 
 
 Beaumarchais, 8992 
 
 Bellay, du, 14, 17 
 
 Belleau, 15 
 
 Bentley, 16 
 
 Beranger, 106-109 
 
 Berenice, 39 
 
 Bernard, Saint, 125, 126 
 
 Bertheaux g. p., 2 
 
 Berthelot, Senator, n 
 
 bibliotheque bleue, 4 
 
 big spectacles of Villon, 5 
 
 Biran, Maine de, 127 
 
 bleue, la chambre, 28 
 
 " Brigade, the," 14 
 
 Boccaccio, 13, 54 
 
 Boetie, E. de la, 21 
 
 Boileau, 14, 15, 23, 35, 39, 40 49. 
 
 5i 52> 53. 61, 96, 101, 102, 105, 
 
 117 
 
 Bonald, de, i 
 Bonaparte, L., 108 
 Bordeaux, Mayor of, the, 20 ; the 
 
 Parliament of, 74 ; the Academy 
 
 of ,74 
 Borgia, Lucrtce, 106 
 
 l62
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bossuet, 10, 23, 37, 44, 45, 56-59, 
 60, 61, 63, 65, 71, 99, 104 
 
 Boston, Mass., 30, 31 
 
 Bourbon, d. de, n 
 
 Bourdaloue, 58 
 
 Bourgeois, le, gentilhomme, 49 
 
 Bourget, Paul, 39, 157, 158 
 
 Bourgogne, 9 ; due de, 60 
 
 Bouillon, Lettre an Card, du, 40 
 
 Bretons, Breton, 4, 67, 95, 107, 140, 
 141 
 
 Brissac, de, 65 
 
 Brueys, 50 
 
 Brutus, 69 
 
 Buffon, 44, 85-88 
 
 Bunbury, Lydia, 119 
 
 Bussy-Rabotin, 65 
 
 Bur graves, the, 105, 106 
 
 Burke, Father Tom, 125 
 
 Burns, R., 108 
 
 Byron, 2, 5, 96, 115, 117 ; "the 
 French Byron, "116 
 
 Byzantinism, 96 
 
 caillette, 65 
 
 Calais, 8 
 
 Galas, 70 
 
 Calvin, 10, 20 
 
 Callinachus, 24, roi 
 
 Cambrai, Abp. of (Fenelon) 
 
 Campanella, 127 
 
 Carol, Prince, 121 
 
 Carron (Beaumarchais) 
 
 caprices de Mariamne, 114 
 
 captive, la jeune, 93 
 
 car act ires, 61 
 
 Cartesian, 33 
 
 Carton, 50 
 
 Catilina, 71, 72 
 
 Castro, G. de, 37 
 
 Catholics, the, 19 
 
 causerie, 130 
 
 causes of Roman greatness, 76 
 
 Celtic, 2 
 
 Cavaignac, 128 
 
 " Celtomanes, les," 4 
 
 " Cnacle," 114 
 
 " Century, the Great," 59 
 
 Certaldo, 54 
 
 Chambers' Cyclop&dia, 84 
 
 Chambre bleue, 28 
 
 chant, chanson, 2, 4, 14, 105, 106, 108 
 
 Chateaubriand, 95, 99, 101 
 
 Chatelet, 28, 29 
 
 " Charente, Hermit of the," 25 
 
 Charlemagne, 14, 30 
 
 Charles VIII., 9 ; d'Orlean?, 4 
 
 Charron, P., 21 
 
 Chartres, 14 
 
 Chateaubriand, 95, 99, 101 
 
 Chatelet, 28, 29 
 
 Chdtiments, les, 19, 106 
 
 Chatterton, 119 
 
 Chaumont, 98 
 
 Chenier, 87, 93, 94, n8 
 
 Chesterfield, 75, 86 
 
 Chimay, 9 
 
 Chinon, cure de, 20 
 
 Chopin, 121 
 
 Cid, le, 35-37 
 
 Cimmerian Britain, 86 
 
 Collections, in 
 
 Comedie francaise, 50 
 
 Comines, P. de, 9 
 
 Conan Doyle, 91 
 
 concordat, the, 99 
 
 conditions (Rousseau J. J.), 78 
 
 confessions (Rousseau, J. J.), 78, 82 
 
 confidences, in (S. Augustine), 8z 
 
 Conde, 57, 58, 64 
 
 Consuelo, 122 
 
 considerations (de Stae'l), 98 ; 
 
 (Montesquieu), 74 
 contemplations, 106 
 control social, le, 78, 81 
 Condorcet, 84 
 Conrart, 28 
 contes, 4, 54 ; d'Espagne et d'ltalif, 
 
 114 ; Balzac's, 141 
 Coppee, Fr., i, 2 
 Coppet (Suisse), 98 
 Cotin, 51 
 Cotton, Fr., 44 
 Corneille, P., 23, 25, 26, 3438, 39, 
 
 41, 42, 46, 51, 53, 66, 71, 102 
 Credo of de Joinville, 6 
 Critique de Vtcole des femmes, 47 
 Crusca, Accademia della, 30 
 Classicism, 99 
 Cleves, Princesse de, 64 
 Clodius, Publius, 98 
 Clopinel, 5 
 Coffee, 70 
 Corinne, 98 
 
 Coulanges, Mme. de, 67 
 Cousin, V., 34, 43, 127, 128 
 
 163
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Cxijas, 75 
 
 Curiosity Shop, the Old, 40 
 
 Cuvier, 139 
 
 D 
 
 Dacier, 60 
 
 Dancourt, 50 
 
 Dante, 5 
 
 Dare, Blessed Jehanne, the, 43 
 
 Darwin, 32 
 
 Daubenton, 84 
 
 Daudet, A., 13, 153, 154 
 
 Decameron, the, 13 
 
 decadence, 76 
 
 defense (V. du Bellay), 17; (V. 
 Montesquieu); 74 ; (V. Lamen- 
 nais), 123 
 
 Defoe, 91 
 
 Deism, 57, 70 
 
 Delorme, 106, 130 
 
 Deltour 52 
 
 Delphine, 98 
 
 " demi-poet," 52 
 
 democratic en Amerique, 134 
 
 Demosthenes, 56 
 
 Descartes, 23, 32, 45 
 
 Despartes, 23 
 
 Despreaux (Boileau) 
 
 dtstinees, 119 
 
 Diable, la mare au, 122 
 
 Holbach, d', 85 
 
 dialogue sur les heros de roman, 51 
 
 Dialogues o/ the Dead, 60 
 
 Dialogues on Quietism, 61 
 
 Dickens, C., 39, 40, 48, 92 
 
 Dictionary of Philosophy, the, 70 ; 
 Dictionaire raisonne, 83 
 
 Diderot, D., 83, 89, 90, 104 
 
 Dieu, espoir en, 116 
 
 Dijon Academy, 78 
 
 Dimanche, M., 48 
 
 Dinant (Namur), 67 
 
 Directory, the, 98 
 
 discours (Descartes), 32 ; (Bos- 
 suet), 76 ; (d'Alembert), 85 ; 
 (Buffon), 86 ; (Diderot), 104 ; 
 (Lamartine), in ; (Cuvier), 140 
 
 discours sur I'Histoire universelle, 57 
 
 Disraeli, Ben., 6 
 
 dix annees d'exil, 98 
 
 doctrinaires, les, 98 
 
 Domat, 75 
 
 Dominicans, 125 
 
 Don Juan, 49, 50 
 
 Dorinc, 48 
 
 Doubt, Philosophy of, 20 
 
 Doyle, Sir A. Conan, 91 
 
 drames bourgeois, 90 
 
 droit politique, 81 
 
 " due, le bon," 63 
 
 Ducis, 89 
 
 Dudevant, 'Mme. " la] baronne, ' 
 
 121 
 
 Duguesclin, B., 8 
 Dumarsais, 84 
 Dumas, A., pere, 142-144 
 Duperrier, 25 
 Dupin, 121 
 
 Eckhardt, 127 
 
 Ecole des Femmes, Critique de V , 47 
 
 Education of Girls, 60 ; Rousseau 
 on Education, 80 
 
 " egoisme, 1'," 64 
 
 elegies, 93 
 
 Elle et Lui, 114 
 
 Eloa, Tig 
 
 Electra (Euripides), 39 
 
 Entile, 78, 80 
 
 Emilie du Chdtelet, 69 
 
 Empires, 58 
 
 en f ants trouves, 80 
 
 English Revolution, the, 136 
 
 Encyclopedic, I', 75, 83-85 
 
 entretiens, 59, in 
 
 tpiceries, 14 
 
 Erasmus, 40 
 
 Esop, 53 
 
 Espoir en Dieu, 116, 117 
 
 Esther, 40, 41 
 
 Estienne, Henri, 12, 17 ; Robert, 17 
 
 Essais (Montaigne), 20, 21 ; Vol- 
 taire), 71 ; (Montesquieu), 74 ; 
 (de Stae'l), 98 ; (Lamennais), 123 
 
 ipitres, 51 
 
 epoiues de la Nature, 86 
 
 Eucharis, 59 
 
 Euripides, 35, 39, 40, 51 
 
 exil, diz annees d", 98 
 
 existence of God, 60 
 
 Eyquem, M., 20 
 
 Fables, 53, 59, 60 
 
 Fabliaux, 54 
 
 " Fabulist, the," 53 
 
 164
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Fadette, la petite, 122 
 
 Fagnet, Emile, 118 
 
 farce gaulnise, 47 
 
 fauteuil, spectacle dans un, 1 14 
 
 filibriges, 9 
 
 femmes, I'ecole des, 47 
 
 femmes scavantes, 49 
 
 Fenelon, 23, 45, 56, 58-61 
 
 " Ferney, the Philosopher of " 
 
 (Voltaire) 
 
 feuilles d'Automne, 105 
 Figaro, go 
 
 fourberies de Scapin, 49 
 " fox and the crow, the," 54 
 Flaubert, 122, 154156 
 Flechier, 66 
 rioraux Jeux, 14, 30 
 Florestan, 12 
 Floriani, Liter ezia, 121 
 France, Anatole, 43, 73, 158-159 
 Francis I., n, 13 
 Francois, S. (de Sales), 14 ; 
 
 Champi, 122 
 Franklin, B., 30, 31 
 Francueil, Dupin de, 121 
 Frederic II., le Grand, 85 
 Free Agency, 20 
 Froissart, 6, 8, 9 
 Froude, J. A., 109 
 fuoco, il (of G. d'Annunzio), 115 
 Furetiere, 55 
 
 " Gallic Juvenal, the," 19 
 
 Gambetta, L., 58 
 
 Garasse, Father, S. J., 43 
 
 Gargantua, u 
 
 Gasconing (Montaigne), 21 
 
 (court), 28 
 Gautier, Th., 119 
 gauloise farce, 47 
 Geneva, 99 
 Genevieve, 111 
 
 Genie du Christianisme, 95, 96 
 Germany, the, 98, 99, 101 
 Geruzez, 4, 15, 53, 73 
 geste, chansons de, 4 
 Gibbon, E., 98 
 Gilbert, 94 
 Gil Bias, 79, 91, 92 
 i>irk>' education, 60 
 Girondins, les, no 
 Grand Testament, le, 4 
 
 Greek (the Thesaurus), 17 ; (the 
 language), 145 ; (the country of 
 Greece), 94, 109, 145 
 
 Grignan, Mme. de. 67 
 
 Grandeur, le, 50 
 
 Gruget, 13 
 
 Gnide, temple de, 74 
 
 Goethe, 88, 99 
 
 Goldsmith, 78 
 
 Gospels, the, 81 
 
 gout, essai sur le, 74 
 
 gout (disease), 67 
 
 Guizot, i, 98, 128, 135, 136 
 
 Guy on, Mme., 59 
 
 H 
 
 Hainaut, 9 
 
 harem, the, in Corneille, 35 
 Harley, 91 
 
 harmonies poettques, 109 
 . Harpagon, 48 
 e Hastie, Prof., 75 
 Hebrew, 18, 19 
 Hegel, 128 
 
 Helolse, 126 ; nouvelle Heloise, 78 
 Hellenics, the, 81 
 Helvetius, 85 
 Henley W. E., 108 
 Henri IV., 23, 28 
 Henry VIII., 37, 46 
 Henrtade, 69, 71 
 Henriette, 49 
 Heplameron, the, 13 
 Heraclius, 41 
 
 " Hermit of Holland, the," 34 
 Hernani, 104-106 
 Hermes, 93 
 
 Herodotus, the Apology lor, 17, 105 
 heros de toman, 51 
 hisio-re (de Joinville), 67 ; (univer- 
 
 selle), 28, 57 ; (d'un crime), 106 ; 
 
 (de ma vie), 121 ; (Guizot), 135, 
 
 136 ; (naturelle), 85 
 Holbach, d', 85 
 Holland (and Beaumarchais), 91 ; 
 
 (" the Hermit of "), 34 
 Homer, 8, 93 
 homme qui rit, I', 106 
 Horace, 37 
 Horatius, Q. Flaccus, 14, 16, 35, 49, 
 
 5i, 52, 54, 84, 90, 92 
 " Horace, the French, 51 
 Horn, Comtesse de, 121 
 " Hdtel de Rambouillet," 28 
 
 I6 5
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Huguenots, the, 19 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 19, 66, 101, 118 
 
 Hudtbras, 36 
 
 hymnes, 93 
 
 iambes, 93, 94 
 
 idiome anglais, 86 
 
 Idomenee, 60 
 
 idylles, 93 
 
 il fuoco, 115 
 
 " Immortals, the Forty," 28-32 
 
 Indiana, 122 
 
 inegalite des conditions, 78 
 
 institution (chretienne), 10 ; (des 
 
 enfants), 79 ; les institutions 
 
 sociales, 98 
 invention, V, 93 
 Iphigenie, /', 14, 39 
 7r^n, 1', 69 
 
 Irish mother of Lamennais, the, 123 
 Isaiah, 81 
 
 Italian sonnet, 14 ; " free verse," 55 
 Italy, travels in, 20 ; exodus of 
 
 Italians in 1697, 50 
 
 Jacques Maitre, 48 
 
 Japan and the British Censor of 
 Plays, 38 
 
 jargon, 20 
 
 Jehanne Dare, the Blessed, 43, 73 
 
 Jersey, The Isle of, 106 
 
 Jerusalem, itineraire d, 96 
 
 Jesuits, the, 44, 58 
 
 jeune captive, la, 93 
 
 Jeux Floraux, les, 14, 30 
 
 Job, 34 ; (of Quevedo), 8 
 
 Jocelyn, 109 
 
 Johnson, Dr., 34 
 
 Joinville, le Sire de, 6, 7 
 
 Jomini, le general, 130 
 
 Joubert, 52, 55 
 
 Joufiroy, 127 
 
 Journey to Jerusalem, the, 96 
 
 Julie, 79 
 
 Juvenal, 94 ; " the Gallic Juve- 
 nal," 19 
 
 K 
 
 Keats, John, 8, 93 
 Kenealy, Dr., 50 
 Kingsley, Charles, 60 
 " Kitty, Mistress," 120 
 
 La Bruyere, n, 23, 34. 4<>, 45, 49. 
 61-62 
 
 Lac, L. du, 2 ; le lac, in 
 
 Lacepede, 139 
 
 Lacordaire, 124-126 
 
 " Lady of Christ's, the," 16 
 
 Lally-Tollendal, 16 70 
 
 La Fayette, Mme. de, 63, 64, 65 
 
 La Fontaine, J., de6, n, 13, 23, 49, 
 51,53-55,63,93,99, "7 
 
 Lamartine, i, 98, 107, 109-113, no 
 
 Lamennais, 122-124 
 
 Lancelot, 2 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 43, 73 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, due de, 23, 34 
 62-64 
 
 " Laurent, Jacques," 115 
 
 Lausanne, 98 
 
 Lazare, Saint, prison de, 93 
 
 Le Bel, Canon Jean, 8 
 
 Le Braz, Anatole, Prof., 95 
 
 Legends des Siecles, la, 106 
 
 Legouve, 101 
 
 Lelia, 122 
 
 Lemercier, N., i 
 
 Lesage, 89, 91, 92 
 
 Lessing, 54 
 
 Letters o) S6vigne, 23 ; of Fenelon, 
 60 ; of Voltaire, 69 ; of Mon- 
 tesquieu, 74 ; of Rousseau, 79 
 of de Stael, 98 ; of Musset, 114 
 
 Lexicon, the, of Stephanus, 17 
 
 Liege, 8 
 
 Life of Beranger, 108 
 
 Linnaeus, 87 
 
 Liszt, 121 
 
 Livre du peuple, le, 124 
 
 Locke, John, 75 
 
 lois, V esprit des, 74 
 
 Longepierre, 40 
 
 Longinus, 51 ; reflexions sur 
 
 Longin, 51 
 
 Longueville, Mme., 63, 127 
 Lope de Vega, 89 
 Louis, Saint, vie de, 6 ; at Man- 
 
 sourah, 7 ; in Voltaire, 71 
 Louis XL, 4, 9 ! XII., 9 ! XIII. , 
 32 ; XIV., 45, 46, 49, 5, 51, 59, 
 65, 7.i ; XV., 70, 83 ; XVI., 98 
 Louvois, 65 
 Lorenzaccio, 117 
 Lucian, of Samosata, 66 
 Lutetia (Paris), 98 
 
 166
 
 INDEX. 
 
 lui et elle, 114 
 
 Luther, Martin, 51 
 
 lundis, 130 ; nouveaux lundis, 118 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 24, 25 
 
 Machiavelli, N., 99 
 
 Macpherson, J., 95 
 
 mat, la nuit de, i, 16 
 
 Maintenon, Mme. de, 50, 66, 67 
 
 mattresses, deux, 117 
 
 Major que, hiver a, 121 
 
 Malebranche, 23 
 
 Malade imaginaire, le, 49 
 
 Malesherbes, 83 
 
 Malherbe, 15, 20, 23-26, 28 
 
 Malibran, I' ode d la, 116 
 
 manchettes de Buffon, 88 
 
 Mousourah, 7 
 
 Marat, 82 
 
 Marguerite de Valois, 13 
 
 mariage de Figaro, 90 ; manages de 
 
 Paris, 145 
 Mariamne, 71 
 Marianne, caprices de, 114 
 Marie-Th6rese, 57 
 Marie Tudor, 106 
 Mariner Ancient, the, 99 
 Marion Delorme, 106 
 " Mark Twain," 97 
 Marmontel, 84 
 Marot, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 
 Marsillas, Prince de, 63 
 Marsy, Abbe de, n 
 Martialis, 52 
 Marline, 48 
 Martyrs, les, 95, 96 
 Mascaron. 66 
 Massillon, 58, 59 
 Mazzini, 115 
 Mazeppa, 25 
 Maxims, 60, 63 
 medecin malgre lui, 49 
 Mtdte, 35 
 
 meditations, 105, 109 
 melanges, 136 
 memoires, 9, 19, 63, 91, 95 
 mendiant, le, 93 
 Mentor, 60 
 Mercier, 104 
 Merim6e, 140, 149152 
 merle blanc, le, 117 
 M6rope, 71 
 Messinople, 7 
 
 methode, discours sur la, 32, 33 
 
 Mendon, cure de, 4, n 
 
 Meung-sur- Loire, 5 ; Jean de M., 5 
 
 Michelet, 137-138 
 
 Mikado, the, 38 
 
 Milan, Valentine of, 4 
 
 Mill, James, 81 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 81 
 
 Mills, 84 
 
 militaires, servitude et grandeur, 118 
 
 Millevoye, 101 
 
 Milton, 16, 96 
 
 M imi Pinson, 117 
 
 Ministry of Pastors, 60 
 
 minuet, 65 
 
 miracles, 4 
 
 Misanthrope, 49 
 
 Miserables, Les, 106 
 
 Moliere, n, 23, 46~5i> 53, 55 ( 6r, 
 
 90-92, 99 
 Monica, Saint, 82 
 Montagnini, Mgr., 98 
 Montaigne, 20, 21, 22, 28, 74, 79, 88 
 Montalembert, 124 
 " Montalte, Louis de," 43 
 Montesquieu, 58, 74-77, 78, 81, 86 
 Moralities, 4 
 mort de Cesar, 71 
 Mozart, 90 
 Moyne, Le, 43 
 Muretus, 16 
 Murray, J., 98, 101 
 Musset, A. de, 114118 
 Musset, P. de, 114 
 Musulmans, 50 
 Mysteries, 4 
 
 N 
 
 Namouna, 14 
 
 Namur, taking of, 67 ; Ode on, 51 
 
 Nantes, 126 
 
 Napoleon I., i, 97, 99 ; N. III., in 
 
 Naso, P. Ovidius, 5 
 
 Nature, epoques de la, 86 
 
 Natural History, 85, 86, 97, 139, 140 
 
 Necker, 97 98 
 
 neologisms 103 
 
 " Nero " of Racine, 41 
 
 Neufchateau, F. de, 101 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, 39, 60 
 
 Newton, Isaac, 75 
 
 Nicole, 48 
 
 Nicomede, 47 
 
 Nisard, D., 5, 12, 21, 26, 51, 53 
 
 167
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Nodier, Ch., 140 
 
 North French letters, 9 
 
 Notre Dame de Paris, 106 
 
 Nouvelles, les, 117 
 
 Nuit, la, de mat, d'Octobre, 116, 117 
 
 octobre, la nuit d" , 116 
 
 odes, 51, 93, 94, 105, 116, 118 
 
 Oedipe, 69 
 
 Oeuvres, 134 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, the, 40 
 
 Olivet, M. 1'Abbe d', 62 
 
 ombres, ravons et, 106 
 
 on ne badine pas avec V Amour, 117 
 
 opium, 70 
 
 Oratorian, Louis XIV.'s Preacher, 
 
 5 
 
 Orientates, les, 105 
 
 Origen, 127 
 
 Othello, 119 
 
 outre-tombe, memoires d 1 , 95 
 
 Ovidius, P., Naso, 5 
 
 Pagliacci, 47 
 
 Palaprat, 50 
 
 Palestine, 109 
 
 Palissy, 18 
 
 Pano3tius, 127 
 
 Pantagruel, n 
 
 Panurge, n 
 
 paroles d'un croyant, 123 
 
 Paris, Gaston, 6 
 
 Paris, Parliament of, 70 
 
 Pasquier, 10, n, 14 
 
 pastors, ministry of, 60 
 
 Pascal, 21, 23, 24, 34, 42-45. 58, 
 
 71, 80, 99 
 
 Paul et Virginie, 95 
 Paulus, 52 
 Pavia, 13 
 pedantes, les, 48 
 pensees, 43, 58 ; d'aout, 130 
 Penseroso, II, 117 
 Pere-la-chaise, 124 
 Perron, Cardinal du, 22, 77 
 Pertharitt., 35 
 persanes lettres, 74 
 Peter's, Saint, tears, 24 
 Peter the Great, 70 
 petites lettres, les, 43 
 Petronius, 47, 89 
 Phaedra, 39 
 
 Phedre, 39 
 
 Phoedrus, 52 
 
 Philadelphus, Ptolemy, 14 
 
 Philaminte, 49 
 
 Philo, 127 
 
 Philocope, 12 
 
 Philosophic Dictionary, 70 
 
 Philosophy of Doubt, 20 
 
 picaresque, 92 
 
 Pilatus, Pontius, 127 
 
 Pindar, 8, 51, 103 
 
 Plautus, 49, 51 
 
 " Pleiade, la," 14, 15, 23 
 
 Poe, E. A., 2, 32, 93, 109, in, 112, 
 
 117 
 
 poele, 32 
 poemes, 93 ; antiques et modernes, 
 
 119 
 
 poetique, la, 30 
 Poitiers, 8 
 
 politique des Remains, 74 
 Polyeucte, 35, 37 
 Pompadour, Mme. de, 83 
 Poor Richard, 31 
 Pope, A., 16, 26 
 Poquelin, J. B., dit Moliere, 90-92, 
 
 etc. 
 
 Porcheres, 28 
 
 Port Royal, 21, 42, 43, 45, 132 
 portraits, 118, 132 
 Posidonius, 127 
 Potsdam, 69 
 Prades, de, 84 
 preccllence, 17 
 precie ises ridicules, 46, 48 
 " prestes " (de Joinville's), 7 
 " Prince of Buffoonery, the," 10 
 Principe, II, 99 
 
 pr ogres de la Revolution, le, 123 
 Protestantism and Renaissance, 18 
 " Protestants of Verse," 101 
 proverbes, 117 
 provincial, lettres au, 43 
 Provencal song, 8 
 Proudhon, 132 
 Psyche, 36 
 Pucelle, la, 73, 95 
 Pyrrhonists, 20 
 Pygmalion, 60 
 
 Q 
 
 Quatre-vingt-treize, 106 
 Quevedo y Villegas, 8, 92 
 Quietism, 59, 60 
 
 168
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Rabelais, 4, 10, n, 12, 20 
 Rabutin-Chantal, Marie de, 66 
 Racine, J., 14, 25, 39-42, 46, 51, 53, 
 
 66, 72, 93, 102, 104 
 Rambouillet, 1' Hotel de, 28 
 Raphael, in 
 rayons et ombres, 106 
 " reactionnaire, ' 100 
 recueillements poetiques, no 
 " r6gime ancien," 132 
 Reynard, 50, 91 
 Regnier, 16, 24 
 
 remarques sur la I. franfaise, 28 
 Renaissance and Protestantism, 18 
 Renan, Ernest, 77, 122 
 " Rene," 95, 96 
 Rennes (Renes, in Villon), 4, 5, 33, 
 
 66 
 Reflexions, sur Longin, 51 ; (de 
 
 Stael), 98 ; (Lamennais), 123 
 Restauration, in 
 Retz, Cardinal de, 65 
 reveries, 78 
 
 Revolution francaise, la, 137 
 rhetorique, la, 30 
 
 Richard II., 9 ; Poor Rickard, 31 
 Richelet, 32 
 
 Richelieu, 23, 26, 28, 30, 36, 37 
 Robespierre, M., 82 
 " Rochers, los," 66 
 roi, le, s' amuse, 106 
 Roland, 2 
 Romans, 2 ; (de la rose, de renard), 
 
 Romanticism, 97, 98, 101, 104, 105, 
 
 122 
 
 Rome, aftaires de, 124 
 
 rondeaux, 8, 14 
 
 Ronsard, 15, 16, 23-25 
 
 Rossini, 90 
 
 Rousseau, J. J., 13, 78-80, 88, 95, 
 
 97.98 
 Royal, Port, 21, 42, 43, 45 
 
 Sable, Mme. de, 63, 127 
 
 Saint-Evrempnd, 86 
 
 Saint Francois de Sales, 14 
 
 Saint- Gelais, 14 
 
 Saint Lazare, prison of, 93 
 
 Saint Monica, 82 
 
 Saint Pelagic, prison of, 124 
 
 Saint Pierre (Saint Peter), 24 
 Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, 95 
 Saint-Simon, 67, 68 
 Saints, Maxims of the, 60 
 Sainte-Beuve, 15, 95, 115, 118, 130- 
 
 133 
 
 Salammbd, 135 
 
 Sales, Saint Francois de, 14 
 
 Salian Chant, The, 8 
 
 " Salon d'Arthenice, le," 28 
 
 Sand, George, 114, 121-122 
 
 Sapho, 13 
 
 Sarto, A. del, 114, 117 
 
 satires, 51 
 
 Satyric Drama, 47 
 
 Savary, 98 
 
 Savoyard, vicaire, 81 
 
 Scarron, 67 
 
 Scapin, 91 
 
 Schiel, F., 124 
 
 Schiller, 99 
 
 Sceptics, 20 
 
 Scholia of Bentley, 16 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 8, 109 
 
 Scudery, 37 
 
 Scullions of Richelieu, 37 
 
 Semirans, 71 
 
 Senechal de Joinville, 6 
 
 Seneca, 21, 24 35, 36, 41, 78 
 
 Sens, Abp of, 87 
 
 sentences et maximes, 63 
 
 Servetus, The Burner of, 10 
 
 servitude et grandeur, 118 
 
 Sesostris, 60 
 
 " Set, the Smart," 58 
 
 Sevigne, Mme. de, 23, 40, 58, 63- 
 66, 107 
 
 Seville, 90, 91 
 
 Sganarelle, 48 
 
 Shakespeare, 54, 89, 106, 136 
 
 Shandy, Tristram, 20 
 
 Shaw, G. Bernard, 117 
 
 Sherlock Holmes, Moliere antici- 
 pates, 48 
 
 siecle de Louis XIV., 69 
 
 Simon, Jules, 128 
 
 Skepsis, 43 
 
 Smollett, T., 80, 92 
 
 social, control, 78, 81 
 
 Socrates, 40, 125 
 
 Sonnets, 14 
 
 Sophocles, 35, 39, 40, 97 
 
 Sareze, 125 
 
 Soulacroix, n 
 
 169
 
 INDEX 
 
 Spain and the (French) Theatre, 37 
 
 Spectacles of Villon, 5 
 
 spectacles, 78 ; Musset's, A. de, 114 
 
 Spinoza, B., 113 
 
 Sta61, Mme. de, 97, 101 
 
 Stagirite, The, 19 
 
 Statius, 122 
 
 Stella, ng 
 
 Stephanus, 17, 1 8 
 
 Sterne, Z., 20 
 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, 14 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 4, 36, 139 
 
 Style, Buffon on, 86 
 
 Suard, 65 
 
 sublime, traite du, 51 
 
 suite de la religion, 58 
 
 Suffragettes, The, 97 
 
 supplements, les, 83 
 
 Suson, 67 
 
 Suzanne, 93 
 
 Swift, 91 
 
 Swinburne, 25, 113 
 
 " symposium," 51 
 
 Syria, 109 
 
 Tocqueville, de, 134-135 
 Toeppfer, 140 
 Tolla Feralda, 145 
 Toulouse, 30 
 tournoi, 8 
 
 traditions, les (Lamennais), 123 
 travailleurs de la mer, les, 106 
 " Tract, the, Controversy," 59 
 les tragiques (of d'Aubigne), 19 
 traite du sublime, 51 
 translateur Amyot, 22 
 Treasure Island, 36 
 Trimalchio, Banquet of, 46 
 Tristram Shandy, 20 
 Troie, Roman de, 2 
 Tudor, Marie. 106 
 Turgot, 84 
 
 " Twm o'r Naut " (Thomas Wil- 
 liams), 92 
 
 U 
 
 " Unities, The Three," 8, 35, 41, 
 
 102, 104 105 
 Universal Historv, 28 
 
 tableau (St. Beude), 130 
 
 tailleurs de pierres, 1 1 1 
 
 Taine, H., 39 
 
 Talleyrand, 130 
 
 Tancrede, 71 
 
 Tansillo, 24 
 
 Tartufe, 47, 48, 66, 91 
 
 Telemagne, 59, 60 
 
 Tennyson, 99 
 
 Terre, theorie de la, 87 
 
 Terreur, la, 82 
 
 " Terrible l'Ann6e," 106 
 
 Testament, Grand, 4 
 
 Teutons, 99 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 141 
 
 Thalamas, 43, 73 
 
 Theatre, Mercier on the, 104 
 
 Thebais, 122 
 
 " Thelema, Abbey of," 20 
 
 Theocritus, 93 
 
 Theodore, 35 
 
 Theophrasti, Caracteres de. 61 
 
 Theophrastus, the, of France, 61 
 
 theorie de la Terre, 87 
 
 Thesauras, the, 17 
 
 Thiers, 136-137 
 
 Thou, de, 28 
 
 Thucydides, 81 
 
 Valentin, 117 
 
 Valentine, 4, 122 
 
 Valois, Marguerite de, 13 
 
 Valliere, de la, 57 
 
 "vapours," 67 
 
 variations histoire des, 10 
 
 Vaugelas, 28 
 
 Vaughan, Father Bernard, S. J., 
 
 58, 125, 126 
 
 Vega, Zope Felix de, 89 
 Veilhan, Madame de, 67 
 Venetian Night, the, of de Musset, 
 
 114 
 
 Venice, 14, 114 
 " Venusine, The, Zamp " (V. Hora- 
 
 tius) 
 
 Versailles, 93 
 Verulam (Bacon), n 
 vicaire Savoyard, le, 81 
 Vico, J. B., 75 
 vieille roche, la, 145 
 Vigny, A. de, 118120 
 village, devin de, 78 
 Villegas, Quevedo y, 8 
 Villehardouin, 6, 7, 8 
 Villemain, 60, 87, 133 
 Villemarque, 95
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Villon, F., 4, 5 ; Villon Society, the, 
 
 4 
 
 virclais, 9, 14 
 Virgilius, Maro P., 130 
 " Vitrc," 23 ; The Lady of," 58, 66 
 " Vitruviuses of ruin," 80 
 Vivonne, Andree de, 63 
 " Voila 1'ennemi ! " 58 
 Voiture, 26 
 voix interieures, 106 
 voix de prison, une, 124 
 Voltaire, i, n, 35, 43, 45, 50, 54, 
 
 59, 60, 69-73, 84, 86, 87, 91, 95 
 volumes de tables raisonnees, 83 
 volupte, 130, 132 
 " Vopiscus, the Villa of," 122 
 du Vrai, du Beau, el du Bien, 128 
 
 W 
 
 Walton, Izaak, 2 
 Warens, Madame de, 78 
 Washington, George, 136 
 
 Washington, Rev. Booker, 46 
 Weimar, 99 
 Welsh Interludes, 92 
 Will, The, of Villon, 4 
 Wonderland, Alice in, 75 
 Wordsworth, W., i, 122 
 Wyndham, George, 15 
 
 Xavier de Maistre, 140 
 
 " Yorick," 20 
 
 Zaide, 64 
 
 Zaire, 59 
 
 Zens (Jupiter) and revolution, 99 
 
 Zoar, 118 
 
 Zoilus, 105 
 
 Zola, Emile, 32, 83, 105 
 
 171
 
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