'' of European Jattratuw ~?j~/ EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY VIII. THE AUGUSTAN AGES PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE, EDITED BY PKOFESSOB, SAINTSBUKY. "The criticism which alone can much help us fur the future is a criticism which regards Europe as teing, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result." MATTHEW ARNOLD. In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each. . Professor W. P. KER. The DARK AGES The FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. The FOURTEENTH CENTURY The TRANSITION PERIOD . The EARLIER RENAISSANCE The LATER RENAISSANCE . The FIRST HALF OF 17TH CENTURY . The AUGUSTAN AGES . . . . The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The ROMANTIC REVOLT The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH THE EDITOR. [Ready. F. J. SNELL. [Ready. G. GREGORY SMITH. THE EDITOR. DAVID HANNAY. [Ready. Professor H. J. C. GRIERSON OLIVER ELTON. [Ready. J. HEPBURN MILLAK. Professor C. E. VAUOHAN. T. S. OMOND. The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY. THE EDITOR. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON. THE AUGUSTAN AGES BY OLIVEE ELTON LECTURER ON ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCIX All Rights reserved PEE FACE. THE disabilities of a short essay like this are confessed in its aim, which is to review more than one literature of Western Europe during a period that opens in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The later limit varies in different cases. In France it is the death of Louis XIV. ; in England the story goes fur- ther with Pope and Swift, but is guided rather by schools and fashions than by strict chronology, which may be misleading. As for some other countries, which fought the same battles as France and England, only many years in their wake, I have tried to pack, into what must be regarded as an appendix, the be- ginnings of the great change, mental and formal, that overtook them also. This latter part has been pur- posely written on a rather more compressed scale. It was impracticable to go too far into the eigh- teenth century; and it may be added, with no wish to put off criticism, that the fitting of the countries, groups, and authors into this part of the series has been, as usual, carefully considered, and can he judged fairly when the companion volumes appear. VI PEEFACE. The literature of prose and thought has preceded in each case, without any ambition to outline the course of pure philosophy. For in this period, while poetry declined, nothing less than criticism began to be organised, as well as prose in its newer cast. The history of style by itself would have no sense, without some remark on the shapes that the intellectual and rational movement took in letters. " Les ide"es seules," says Buffon, "forment le fond du style." France formed her prose soonest; her writing was on the whole more noble and influential than that of any other land at the time ; and therefore France has been put first, although England did more for science, and perhaps ultimately more for thought. The two great countries fill three-quarters of this volume, and the sway of the French and English models upon other nations occupies much of the sequel. Hence it is hoped that, however the workmanship comes short, the general design may be right, and the emphasis. Everyone who would labour honestly over such a span of history must compromise in some clear way with his own ignorance, or the apologies for the task become too difficult. The bibliography of a few decades such as Clavell's list, in 500 folio pages, of the English books printed between 1660 and 1693 is enough to damp the freshest vanity. Much of the work cannot be done minutely, and many a portion has been better summed already. But the errors of an Englishman judging Racine or Bossuet, like the felicities of a Frenchman judging Milton or Words- worth, are instructive, and in any case will not show PEEFACE. Vll mere submission to the native estimates, however brilliant. Yet the real justification is rather that the grand si&cle, though much spoken of, is not too well known in England even to well -equipped readers, and that a sweeping view may still be of use. The same warrant holds yet more fully for the experi- ment in the seventh and eighth chapters. Holberg, and Filicaia, and Simplicissimus are apt to be shadows of names to us, and the question is only, What is the fairest method of presenting them ? Often have I wished for better store of the " literary " or " reading knowledge " which has had to serve, especially in the outlying tongues. It may not be intrusive to say that, apart from French and English, the chief work has been done at the section on the Germanic literatures, with the exception of the Dutch a language which has only been used with difficulty and labour. For that, as for the Spanish, the historians have been much relied on, and the story has also been cut short ; which may be excused, as these literatures enter least of any into the present period. I have not been able to read any of the Portuguese writing of the time, which is also admittedly of lesser rank ; and, but for being indebted to a skilled Portuguese scholar, Mr Edgar Prestage, M.A., for a revision, should hardly have inserted the few lines on the subject. Eastern Europe has not been touched. In general, wherever the originals have not been available, the rule has been kept of going back to the better native histories of literature ; and indeed the obligation to these is throughout vill PREFACE. too large and indefinite to acknowledge from point to point. But where they are not cited, in most cases all specific description, praise, or dispraise has to be taken as at first-hand. In this measure the survey is put forward as original. Nor has the period yet been described with just the same scope and purposes. Partly to mark the trail for any curi- ous reader, a fair allowance of bibliography has been given in the notes, and very little of it on hearsay. Much has been taken out unwillingly that it would have been a pleasure to set forth ; and, on the other hand, everything, in so wide a map, is very liable to expert amendment. For, apart from the ordinary certainty of errors, all has been done in England, and in great part away from the national library. But the book is much in debt to the acquisitions of the Owens College Library and the London Library: the authorities in either case have not spared their aid. Thanks are also offered to various friends and col- leagues ; and not least to Professor Eobert Adamson, LL.D., of Glasgow University, who has seen part of the sheets and has given encouragement to the ven- ture. The helpers have in no way to answer for the flaws. Lastly, whatever worth there may be in this brief chronicle of a greajb literary age, I would like to dedicate, though time has run by, to those teachers who gave the author inspiration of old in the Oxford courses of classics and philosophy. MANCHESTER, June 1899. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PROSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. : THOUGHT, LEARNING, AND ELOQUENCE. PAGE Unity of French classicism Classicism as a touchstone An- tiquity : Greek and Latin The kings and literature Cartesi- anism and literature Definition The abstract and universal " The proper study " Rationalism is stayed Malebranche His French Cross-firing in divinity Nicole Bayle First works ; learned reviews The Dictionary Rough summary of his thought Later works and position Classicism and the past Some few scholars Bossuet ; his career The greatest of preachers Obituaries The Discours Histoire des Varia- tions Bourdaloue ; logic and observation Decadence ; Flechier and Massillon French and English preaching com- pared The career of Fenelon Education of young women, and of the " petit Dauphin " His politics How far a Grecian ? or a religious metaphysician ? Protestants : Saurin . . 1 CHAPTER II. FRENCH CHRONICLE, FICTION, AND POETRY. Reason in the mundane literature What stood for histories Memoirs Flechier Court memoirs : feminine and masculine ; Choisy The "libertines": La Fare Bussy-Rabutin Mme. de Sevigne Mme. cle Maintenon Literary worth of the letters La Bruyere : The Caracteres Romancing memoirs The life- CONTENTS. la-death of the old romances Mme. de la Fayette La Prin- cesse de Cleves Romance : nos numerus sumus Realism : Furetiere Le Roman Bourgeois The Conte: Perrault La Fontaine's career His view of the social order and of life His interests The fable form His styles Substitutes for lyric poetry Verse and prose interchangeable . . .60 CHAPTER III. FRENCH DRAMA : BOILEAU AND CRITICISM. P. Corneille to Racine : Quinault Racine : training and begin- nings and culminations His genius and rules and style Later tragedy fails Comedy before Moliere Moliere : life, beginnings His prime Latter works Gassendism His greatness Comedy, contemporary and sequent : Dancourt Regnard Boileau-Despreaux 1661-74 : 1. Parisian satire ; 2. Iconoclasm ; Chapelain ; 3. Prophecy : the great classics ; 4. Art Pottique : Boileau's art 1674-1/11 : latter career Liter- ary criticism in the air Les RR. Peres The formulae : their meaning Antiquity again Clash of rationalism and human- ism No progress in art Ancients and moderns : 1. Boileau and Perrault ; 2. Fontenelle, his science ; 3. The epilogue The regulation of French after a contest Dictionaries ; the Academy ........ 99 CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH PROSE, 1660-1700. The mental change and the personal The Royal Society : letters ; science Newton and others Sociology Superstition : Glan- vill and T. Burnet Insularity of philosophy : Hobbes Political theory Cambridge and Plato H. More Cudworth Protestants Bunyan Anglican learning and preaching Barrow South Tillotson Importance and career of Locke : Mental character ; religion ; style History and antiquities Gilbert Burnet Secular personal literature Literary criticism Dryden as a critic Two little critics Modern prose fixed : its constituents . . . . . . .155 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER V. ENGLISH VERSE PROM 1660 TO 1700, AND ENGLISH DRAMA. Veteris vestigia jlammce Milton Change in treatment Nature; astronomy The verse Career of Dryden Nature and rank of Drydeu Fate and function of Dryden Samuel Butler : a critic Hudibras Marvell Oldham Satires of Dryden The "Franco-Roman" mob of gentlemen Rochester Lyric science and art Hymns Translations The drama Condi- tions and fates of tragedy and comedy Davenant and "res- torations" Phases: 1. Heroic plays Romance 2. Blank verse drama renewed Otway Lee and Southerne 3. Clas- sicism : Rowe and Addison A new comic scene France the creditor Phases : 1. Humours and instruction Drydeu, Shadwell, and others Etheredge and Wycherley 2. Style and detached wit : Congreve Vanbrugh and Farquhar The Puritan demurrer : debates The combat 3. Comedy of moral sensibility : Steele ...... 205 CHAPTER VI. THE ENGLISH AUGUSTAN WRITERS. Classicism ripe The philosophical melee Idealism Clarke Early deists Shaftesbury Mandeville Bentley and learning Swift Swift and his kind Later works Dr Arbuthnot Lady M. W. Montagu Bolingbroke New conditions : the fat years of literature Defoe Addison and. Steele Contrast Pope's position Earlier verse The Corner Theobald and The Dunciad Latter verse Pope's mental make and his art Pope as a metrist Gay Prior Anti-classicism Nature reappearing ....... 265 CHAPTER VII. THE DECAY OF LATIN : GERMANIA. The persistence of Latin Its decadence Gallicism in the litera- tures Germany : the arrears of thought Thought : Pufen- Xll CONTENTS. dorf and Thomasius The verdict on classicism Leibniz : Career Drift of bis system The Monads : general scope of Leibniz The arrears of literature Romance Simplicissimus Weise Religion and pietism Gerhardt and others Galli- cism and Anglicism : Haller The Spectators and criticism The one secular poet : Glinther. The Far North : Arrears Federal learning and science The Northern past Theology and hymnody: Pjetursson, Kingo, and Frese Sweden : Christina and Stjernhjelm The Epigoni and Triewald Olof von Dalin Dansk-Norsk: verse Jam- mersminde Holberg : career Peder Paars Other works Comedies. Holland : Antonides French classicism sterile Luykeii and Foot Two comedians Van Effen, the Spectator, and prose . 316 CHAPTER VIII. ITALY AND THE PENINSULA. Italy : Italian learning critical Science and letters : Magalotti and Redi Other prose : Dati and Segneri Verse : Antimarinism ; three kinds: 1, Mock-epics, Lippi 2, Satire, Menzini and others 3, Patriotic odes, Guidi and V. da Filicaia Metres and minor verse The Arcadia : its history, its aims and pat- terns Instances of Gallicism Literary theory : Gravina. Spain : The mental awakening late ; Feyjoo Decay of verse Molinos's Guide Gallicism after 1700 Reviewing ; satire and poetic : Luzan. Portugal : General note The Portuguese Nun Classicism . 381 CHAPTER IX. CONCLUSION. Thought : the new methods applied Mysticism lost or isolated Poetry failing Final recompense Science and federal effort in letters Secondary kinds ; and a common poetic . . 4.15 INDEX . . 423 THE AUGUSTAN AGES, CHAPTEE I. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. : THOUGHT, LEARNING, AND ELOQUENCE. UNITY OP FRENCH CLASSICISM CLASSICISM AS A TOUCHSTONE AN- TIQUITY : GREEK AND LATIN THE KINGS AND LITERATURE CARTESIANISM AND LITERATURE DEFINITION THE ABSTRACT AND UNIVERSAL "THE. PROPER STUD'Y" RATIONALISM is STAYED MALEBRANCHE HIS FRENCH CROSS-FIRING IN DIVINITY NICOLE BAYLE FIRST WORKS ; LEARNED REVIEWS THE DICTIONARY ROUGH SUMMARY OF HIS THOUGHT LATER WORKS AND POSITION CLASSICISM AND THE PAST SOME FEW SCHOLARS BOSSUET ; HIS CAREER THE GREATEST OF PREACHERS OBITUARIES THE " DISCOURS " " HISTOIRE DBS VARIATIONS " BOURDALOUE ; LOGIC AND OBSERVATION DECADENCE ; FLECHIER AND MASSILLON FRENCH AND ENGLISH PREACHING COMPARED THE CAREER OF FKNELON EDUCATION OF YOUNG WOMEN, AND OF THE " PETIT DAUPHIN " HIS POLITICS HOW FAR A GRECIAN ? OR A RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICIAN ? PROTESTANTS : 8AURIN. THE show of unity and concert, if one may use the word, that the classical French literature presents, is A 2 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. greater than in the literature of Augustan Rome, or unity of French tne precursors of Dante, or the Elizabethan dassidsm. poets, or the English romantics. It is not an illusion due to the line of skilful and distin- guished chroniclers from Voltaire onwards. 1 Neither is it prejudiced by the inward oppositions of which the record is full. The Cartesian and Jansenist dis- putes, the Quietist dispute, Bossuet pitted against Moliere on one side and Fenelon on the other, Male- 1 The following histories claim recommendation, and the free acknowledgments of the present sketch: (1) English: Q. Saints- bury, A Short History of French Literature, enlarged ed., 1898 (with parallel vol. of extracts). E. Dowden, A History of Fr. Lit., 1897. (2) Ferdinand Lotheissen's Gcschichte der franzosiscJien Litteratur im xvii. Jahrhundcrt, Vienna, 2 vols., 2nd. ed., 1897, the best elab- orate book on its period by any one man. (3) French : Desire" Nisard's Histoire de la Litt. fr., 1844, &c., is a study, by a master, of the ideas of classicism. F. Brunetiere's many essays and his ar- ticles in the Grande Encyclopedic ; and his Manuel, with bibliography (1898, and Eng. trans.), are indispensable. The Histoire generate de la Litt. fr. (vols. iv. to vi. ), by many hands, referred to post as " Petit de Julleville," after its general editor, is equally so. Of short histories, Eugene Lintilhac's Precis historique et critique de la Litt. fr. (2 vols., 2nd. ed., 1895); and Gustave Lanson's Histoire, &c. (1895), are admirable, and very cheap. Bibliographies are in Petit de Julleville and Lintilhac. Emile Faguet, (xvii e Siecle) Etudes litter - aires, llth ed., 1893, and Jules Lemaitre, Impressions de Theatre, &c., are too well known to specify again ; likewise Sainte-Beuve, Leasing, and others of the older judges. (4) The series called the Grands Ecrivains de la France (named post as " G. E. F.") is au- thoritative, and includes the whole of Moliere, Racine, La Bruyere, La Fontaine, and Mme. de SeVigue", with lives and lexica. These, and the two series of short critical monographs, Les Grands Ecri- vains franqais (Hachette), and in the Classiqucs populaircs (Lecene et Oudin) by various hands, which are often excellent, may be named here once for all. French works named in footnotes are published in Paris, and English ones in London, unless otherwise stated. PKOSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 3 brancne against Arnauld, Bayle and Boileau against different multitudes, the " ancients " against the " mod- erns," none of these schisms prevent that great gen- eration, when viewed afar off, from seeming to sink its differences and to march like a conquering army, in the pride of its discipline, covering Europe with its colonies. Our age of Dryden is full of confusion and transitions, and has no concert. Our age of Pope, besides being so brief, is lacking in dignity of posture ; it is soon re-invaded with confusions, and its best liter- ature does not express the essence, but only an incid- ent, of the English mind. French classicism expresses qualities that are not the very highest, but are prim- ary and indestructible, in the French mind. So that there is no sign of Frenchmen ever ceasing to arise who will go back to their classical age and repose upon it. For the same reason, though its European primacy is long over, it can never fail to hold out for achieve- ment certain literary ideals that are next to supreme. Form is the achievement of this literature ; form, of structure and of style, that is perfect under the lesser classicism as a law of definition before the intelligence, if tmu-hstone. no ^ O ften under the higher law of free genius and beauty. The Greeks and Dante go beyond classi- cism on its own lines, by virtue of a greater and more organic power of construction, a style profounder and equally infallible, and a weightier body of thought. But there are other literatures which cannot well be said to triumph through obedience to any law, whether higher or lower, at all. The romantic poetry of Shelley, or of Victor Hugo, moves in a world of 4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. expression as well as feeling to which classicism is deaf, and which arose out of its ashes. Our Eliza- bethan poets moved in a like world, out of whose ashes arose classicism in England. But classicism can be confronted, not only without shame, but to its eternal honour, with even these literatures, which are so much greater than classicism in their message to the world. Shelley and Victor Hugo nay, Spenser and Shakespeare are not surer masters of artistic construction than Bossuet and Eacine ; they are often less sure ; and they often master their style less steadily and completely. They often subsist, in spite of scheme or style, by their volume of poetic energy. It is not that they fall short because they covet something higher than classicism covets ; it is that their shaping instinct often fails them altogether. And if, when we are under the spell of poetic energy, and are being swept away by it, the Greeks and Dante are the highest correctives to our judgment, French classicism is only less of a corrective to it. Classicism is and always must be a beacon of this kind, because, as its name implies, it drew inspira- ^ on > powerful if limited, from the ancient k and Latin, writings. Antiquity thus fertilised modern letters for the third time. The first time was in the twelfth century, when the romantic matter and its literary moulds were forming and were strongly affected by the antique so far as it was known to the middle ages. The second time was after the revival of learning. Next, in the later seventeenth century, the French genius set the example of rejecting the PROSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 5 indiscriminate snatch at antiquity that had marked the revival of learning, and took to itself as much of the ancient art and style as it could at the moment truly absorb. By this restriction it escaped the failure that had attended, in the day of Eonsard, a wilder ambition. It is often said that French classicism means Latinism ; but the slackening, during the grand sidcle, of Hellenism as a literary influence, though undeniable, must never be overstated. Greek learn- ing and taste told deeply on Huet ; Eichard Simon, one of the fathers of rational scholarship, was erudite in Greek ; the work of the Daciers at Homer and the Stoics had its effect on educated taste. Aristotle sup- plied more than a convention to the literary critics, and Longinus an inspiration through Boileau's render- ing. By no far circuit Plato offered a literary form and many delicate graces to Malebranche and Fenelon, and Sophocles and Euripides (not ^Eschylus) must count for something durable in the plays of Eacine. La Bruyere went back to the original form of Theo- phrastian "character," and re-created it in his own way. 1 The truth was that classicism became so per- fect on its own lines that it instinctively reached out to something higher. But the check of the operation of the Hellenic spirit is seen in what may be strictly called the conceit of classicism, its pride in its own perfections, which it shows when it cannot see that it falls short of the ancients. In the dispute between 1 The matter cannot be laboured here ; but see E. Egger, L'HdUnisme en France, Paris, 1869 ; a work still illuminating, though not very clear in its proportions or conclusions. 6 EUKOPEAN LITEKATUKE AUGUSTAN AGES. the " ancients and moderns," to be sketched on a later page, the whole of this issue is involved. Still, in the main, classicism, in its relation with the antique, does mean Latinism ; it means Cicero working on the preachers, Plautus and Terence on the comedians, Horace on Boileau, Virgil on Fenelon, Tacitus on the makers of memoirs. These authors play on the French genius and help to call out its constructive powers and its style. It is true that similar influences were active in England about the same time. But our greatest writers, like Dryden and Swift, are ever ill at ease in the confines of Latinism, and full of some poetical or imaginative matter that it does not fully help them to express. French classicism, partly through finding a natural affinity in the Latin mind, was more thoroughgoing, and spread farther than English, and lasted longer. And, as will be seen, Latin itself paid for this power that it exerted upon French, by giving gradual way before it from the place of the universal language. It will be seen in later chapters how the prestige and conquests of the "great reign," as well as its The kings and achievements in art, began to spread the literature. empire of French over the map. But classicism itself was deeply shapen by the social rule under which it grew. The literary influence of the French king has never been ignored. Charles II. also had a taste for lucidity and good reasoning and ser- mons, for wit and epigram and theatrical shows, and he was the fountain, if a fitful and unwholesome one, of patronage. But Louis XIV. had his weight of will, PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 7 he had his dignity of style latterly a little ossified, but undeniable in his prime and he was the embodiment of the most despotic of all social governments working directly upon letters. There was really something universal and classic about his expression of his orders ; neither his selfish licence nor his pietistic reaction ever really went to his brain or prejudiced his sound if somewhat oppressive taste. The authors treated in this chapter are chosen much more by types than by strict dates, and consist mainly of those who fell more or less fully under the social rule inaugurated by Louis's assumption of power in 1661. That assumption coincides broadly with the departure of the larger, bitterer, and more virile stamp of writer formed during the day of Richelieu or the Fronde or in the first freshness of the great theological feuds. Thus the Memoirs of Retz, put together after 1671, like the Maximes of La Eochefoucauld (1665), and like the plays of Corneille (though he is found writing as late as 1674), are not really of the reign. Pascal died in 1662, though his Pensdes did not come out till 1670, and his Lettres Provinciates (1656-57) close a long battle. Moliere himself, who died in 1673, and inhaled so much of the air of the siede, was half formed before it, and is too free of spirit and too buoyant to be in affinity to its deepest traits. On the other hand, Saint-Simon, the commentator on the whole pageant after it was over, is a late reversion to the earlier and more audacious types of mind and style. Those qualities of classicism, its exquisite tempered elegance and rightness (justesse), its breeding and finish, which the king and court were 8 EUKOPEAN LITEKATUEE AUGUSTAN AGES. so powerful to evoke, one must doubtless be a French- man to taste completely. One need only be an Englishman to go backwards or onwards, not without relief, to the greater magnificence and initiative of Corneille or of Saint-Simon, or to fix at once on the survival of those qualities, through the heart of the reign, in Bossuet. But the subtlest leaven of classicism was neither Latin letters nor the social atmosphere ; it was the cartesianim, ra ^ional spirit in the shape inherited from and literature. Descartes, who died in 1650, and whose Discours de la Mdthode (1637) is in so many ways pro- phetic. It will be seen how this spirit was arrested in its workings on the higher philosophy ; but its colouring of society and literature, or the correspondences that it finds already present in them, are none the less dis- tinct for being, as M. Brunetiere has shown, somewhat delayed. 1 It is only what we should surmise, that in England the pressure upon letters should come from the side of physical science, with its needs of accumulation and induction, and its Eoyal Society ; 2 while in France there should be much more play of 1 Manuel, p. 141. M. Brunetiere is ill to differ with on such a question ; but he brings scant evidence for his opinion that Moliere, Boileau, and Bossuet were all decisively formed by reading Les Pro- vinciales. On the other hand, the Cartesian spirit leaves its distinct traces on the last two. For a modified view see Lintilhac, Precis, ii. 21. 2 The Acade'mie des Sciences was founded, it is true, in 1666 ; but its scope was far narrower than that of the Royal Society : it owed some- thing to its foreign savants, and its prosperity did not begin till much later. See s.v. " Academies " in Grande Encyclopedia; J. Bertrand, L' 'Academic des Sciences de 1666 a 1793 (1869) ; E. Maindron, Les Fondations de Prix a VAcad. des Sciences, 1711-1780 (1881) ; also Brunetiere, Manuel, pp. 234-236. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 9 abstract principle, and much more formulation. This contrast need not be embarrassed by the interchange of mental influences between the two lands. Certainly Dryden and his countrymen have some of the Cartes- ian traits, such as the spirit of logic and order ; but that spirit had long been everywhere, and the im- mediate influence of its formulator Descartes upon English thought was scanty. The Cartesian philos- ophy, as distinct from its method, does not work upon the Cambridge divines or even Locke in such a way as to affect letters generally. In France, there are three main correspondences (besides one which we reserve, see p. 29) between the tone of literature and the- Cartesian principles, and it is unsafe to define where correspondence implies direct influence. 1. Every proposition must satisfy the rigours of the intelligence : it is also enough that it should do so. Truth is reached by clearing the mind of Definition. * presumptions, and advancing through a chain of ideas that approve themselves as clear, dis- tinct, and valid. This programme, which summarises part of the Discours, makes readily for logic in com- position and lucidity in detail ; which are ruling traits of classicism. For these rigours come to press their claim not only on the matters that are the monopoly of the intelligence, but on poetry and eloquence ; and here too must be satisfied, whatever be the pitch of feeling, whatever the desire for inwardness and for escape from the rule of logic. Bourdaloue evolving a sermon, Malebranche a chapter, La Fontaine a fable, or Bussy the relation of an intrigue, all look to firm- ness in the ligaments, wholeness of the impression, and 10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. clearness in the items: they look, in a word, if one word there be, to definition. Definition which is something between beauty and mere geometrical or mechanical arrangement is the summum bonum; and the tribunal is the pure intelligence, not the imagina- tion and its shaping spirit, not the higher law. Male- branche, the " French Plato," has a passage odder than anything that Plato himself says about poetry. He not only forbids reason ever to be perturbed by the fancy (Recherche de la Ve'rite', bk. ii. pt. iii.), but he ex- pressly reduces beauty to a kind of geometrical order. His own illustration is the ugliness of the tortuous streets of old cities, compared with the charm of a neat geometrical pattern; he would have preferred New York to Nuremberg. All this answers to the Cartesian love of the deductive or geometrical method, and of a rigid orderly development. No great French writer of the time is without these instincts. 2. Logic, lucidity, and definition all make for the type of expression that is universally valid and under- The abstract s tood - Truth, it would appear, is a thing and universal, that the average mind can reach, or at least receive, if only it is sufficiently rational. There is no preserve-ground in truth; nothing depends on tem- perament, prejudice, passion, or personal bent. And the style which answers to this conception is such as to be current coin for all the great king's subjects, with no mysteries or ciphers in the inscription. All this is essentially the Cartesian attitude, and some- thing like it is actually the character of the classical writers, who circulate far and wide in translation or PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 11 in their originals. It is easy to see the gain and the sacrifice ; the gain of scope and the sure acceptance by the vast public, as well as the sacrifice of the personal, autobiographical tone, whether it be in lyric or in prose like that of Montaigne. 3. Lastly, Cartesian theory tallies with the inclin- ation of classicism to thrust the whole natural, non- " The proper human world, out of art. Man, or the study." sou i th a k thinks, is on the right side of a great gulf, over which there is no bridge. On the other side is the whole kingdom of matter, which can be analysed into modifications of space, and which includes everything that is not man. We are severed from the earth and the brutes out of which we spring, from "our brother the ass." The famous Cartesian theorem that animals are "machines" without feel- ing nearer to dead matter than to men has a literature of its own. But the view, if not dogmati- cally held, is in consonance with the whole classical position that " the proper study of mankind is man." La Fontaine, who has more direct vision of the earth and of living creatures than any one of his time, again and again repudiates the fantasy of automatism. Like our naturalist Ray, he knew the truth too well; and in a charming and well-known sally, he proposes for the beasts a kind of imperfect soul, not equal to ours, not capable of chains of reasoning, but able to feel and in a measure to judge ; a soul drawn from a very subtilised matter, " a distilment of light, livelier and quicker than flame." Many other writers resent the mechanical theory of animals. But La Fontaine, as 12 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. will be seen, is the greatest exception to that divorce of the literary class from outward nature, which meets us on either side of the Channel. This divorce is much less evident in France, where the preceding age was not highly poetical, than in England, where it was. But in both lands, though in France chiefly, the Cartesian formula loosely fit and illuminate the mundane, urban, gregarious character imprinted upon literature. The assemblage of the writing class in London or Paris made for the same restrictions ; for man must be alone with Nature if he is not to lose her. And, in another less definable way, the Cartesian attitude extends to the manner in which man himself is judged ; judged, that is, by analysis, method, lucid decomposition of character into its elements. The rule of "clearness and distinctness," says La Bruyere, is " assez belle et assez juste pour devoir s'etendre au jugernent que Ton fait des per- sonnes." This answers to that lucid lack of mystery in presenting character, even complex character, which was to be a bequest of classicism to Voltaire and the philosophes. 1 French classicism, therefore, much more than Eng- lish, has its roots or at least its formulation in Rational^ philosophy laid bare. And still it remains is stayed. no p ara dox that the movement of classi- cism in France is chiefly literary, while in England it is chiefly intellectual. In England, after all, the main affair was to advance the rational spirit; in 1 See E. Krantz, L' Esthetique de Descartes, Paris, 1882, for a close and original scrutiny of this whole matter. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 13 the doing of this a literature of power and interest sprang up ; the progress from Hobbes through Locke is on the great lines of speculation ; nay, the centre of European thought is more steadily fixed in England than elsewhere, though it may pause now in Holland with Spinoza, or in Germany with Leibniz. But between Descartes and Bayle the philosophical centre is not in France. For Cartesianism was arrested in France as a philosophy, while it struck wider and deeper into society and letters than elsewhere. Eation- alism and philosophy at large stand marking time in France for half a century, though they beat up much dust in doing so. The more direct of the decocters and opponents of Descartes, whether in France or in Holland (where the battle was fought earlier), are numerous, but do not much concern us ; their thought is not original, and their form is seldom notable. 1 They act as middlemen between philosophy and lettered society. Such are the Cartesians Geraud de Cordemoy (1662), and Sylvain Kegis, whose Systime de Philosophic (1690) is a complete course of logic, metaphysics, physics, and morals, ostensibly starting from philosophic doubt, and built up by "clear and distinct" stages. Such, on the opposition side, is Bishop Huet, who will be 1 Bouillier's Ifistoire de la Philosophic carte'siennc, Paris, 1854 and 1868, 2 vols., is still the fullest summary of these forgotten wars; and add of course the articles on Descartes and his school in Petit de Julleville, vol. iv., as well .is those in the histories of philosophy ; and art. " Cartosianisme " by Ch. Adam in Gratule Encyclopedic, for history of the civil and papal prohibitions of the doctrine. Geulincx (died 1669) must be omitted hero. 14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. noticed below. His Censura, however, appeared when the issue was no longer between the pure Cartesians and their scholastic opponents. Very soon the debate had become embarrassed in the great quarrel between the Jesuits, who held to the official creed of Aquinas, and the Jansenists, whose headquarters, the cloistered retreat of Port-Royal, so deeply coloured and ennobled all French thought. 1 The earlier phases of this debate, turning partly on the question of nature and grace, and partly on the ethical finesse of the Jesuits, had been closed by the decisive Provinciates of Pascal (1656-57). The attendant literature falls before our scope, and the next entrance of philosophy into the higher walks of letters may be dated 1674-75, when the treatise of Nicolas Malebranche, De la Recherche de la V trite, was published. This great effort to edit Descartes in the service of faith through the mediation of Platonic conceptions, and the resistance that it met with from other theologians, fill the remainder of the century, and lead up directly to the sceptical solvent administered by Bayle. Malebranche (1638-1715), a priest of the Oratory, with its traditions at once humanist and Malebranche. austere, is the French analogue to our Cambridge divines ; but he is a greater writer than 1 The play of Jansenism on French literature and character has been realised ever since the famous Port- Royal (1830-60), the most congenial and perfect of Sainte-Beuve's writings. His judgments and presentments of the Jansenists have not been seriously qualified. In this chapter the attempt to summarise that potent influence is renounced, partly because its origins fall to an earlier volume of the PROSE OF THE EEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 15 any of them, and he is more significant in his thought than them all. The French still call him their Plato, and he has, besides his gracious and sinuous style, some of that insuppressible subtlety of intellect that goes with the true Platonist in his farthest excursions of fancy. Also, in the Meditations chrttiennes (1683) and in the Entretiens sur la Mttcuphysiqiie, (1688) he has the mystical unction, if not of Plato, at least of his English Christianisers like John Smith and Henry More. But Malebranche accepts the modern spirit far more frankly than they do : it is the very frank- ness with which he accepts it, and lets it play upon his theology and his Platonism, that makes his thought so significant. It was his convinced, thorough-going enthusiasm that awakened the prescient, scared the official orthodox, and advanced philosophy far more by the clear revelation of what was impossible than by any success in the attempt itself. Malebranche hovers between two poles of thought, which he is ever trying, for as much as his life is worth, to bring closer. By temperament and meditation he starts from a vision, from something that is poetry, that can only be expressed in emotional or figured terms, but which he insists on stating philosophically: the " vision of all things in God." God is not merely a maker of a world naively taken to exist by itself, nor yet the detached watcher of the human struggle, nor again a Mind that serves to give permanence to phenomena in the gaps of human consciousness. The God of Malebranche is the actual and ever- operant mode of communication between mind and 16 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. matter (or thought and space) which Descartes had left practically severed by a gulf. God is the source, almost the sphere, certainly the condition, of all the ideas which the thinking subject has of matter. The exposition of this theory (Recherche, book iii. pt. ii. ch. vi., vii.) is as subtle a piece of dialectic as the Latin genius has achieved after Pascal. Yet the piquancy lies in the contrast between this conclusion and the starting-point. Malebranche accepts implicitly the rational method of Descartes: indeed he applies the acid of doubt much more fully in many ways than his master. He forges a chain joining the extremes of universal doubt and the " vision in God." This he does by a series of very subtle shiftings between poetical and logical transitions. The great work, De la Re- cherche de la Ve'rite', which attempts this reasoning, is in plan an exhaustive psychology of error, leading up to counsels for the conduct of the understanding in its mission after truth. The senses, the imagina- tion, the intelligence, the inclinations, the passions each is defined by Malebranche with strange shades of his own are analysed from the side of their fallibility. There is everything in the book, geometry, science, metaphysic, eloquence ; and there are a mun- dane observant wit and sudden torpedo - like irony that remind us of Bossuet. Malebranche extends the form of the " character," which La Bruyere pinned on to special names, to mental types, the false savant, the vain man, the effeminate man; and he gives a whole chapter of dissection to Montaigne, the general enemy of the religious. The chief supplements to PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 17 this great treatise are the curious TraiU de Morale (1684) (which should be compared with Descartes' TraiU des Passions) and the TraiU de la Nature et de la Grrdce (1680), where the same kind of method is applied, though with less real brilliance, to the central matters of theology. Malebranche's other works are mostly defences or expansions, sometimes in devotional form, sometimes in dialogue, of his radical ideas. The form of Malebranche, which gives him his primacy amongst philosophical French writers, is a perfect harmony of opposites, which on their intellectual side are really past re- conciling. His vision and his tide of rapt devotion, his reference of all things and thoughts to a central fountain of light and warmth that bathes them, give him his glow and ease, and wing his ample and beautiful rhythms, perhaps the most poetical in French before Eousseau, yet never, like those of another prose Platonist, Giordano Bruno, foaming over with a tide of unmastered emotion. New and unsurmised powers are shapen for philosophical French. At the same time, he is a Cartesian in his spirit of orderly and almost geometrical conduct, in his logic and clearness and incessant appeal to the intellect. Hence his style, though not pronounced ideally correct, is intensely luminous, and by its beauty carries off much dubious matter. The general effect of Malebranche x was to provoke philosophical 1 (Euvrcs completes, ed. Genoude et Lourdoueix, 2 vols., 1837; and the chief of them, ed. Jules Simon. 1842 (2 vols.) and 1859. See, besides Bouillier, the section on Malebranche, under the chapter on B 18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. thought forward in a direction counter to his wish. He had scholars in France, decocters (like Norris) and early translators in England ; but his style and skill only served at last to widen the fissure between his conclusions and his method. He had tried to show that faith, interpreted in his Platonising way, not only could sustain the Cartesian dialectic, but grew out of it. But the first result of his effort was the keen-scented protest of fellow-theologians, while the second was the scepticism of Bayle. The heat of opposition came not so much from the old-fashioned scholastics as from the orthodox Cartesians them- selves, who by now included most of the more powerful divines. Bossuet parted company with Malebranche, fulminated against him, and inspired Fenelon to write a refutation of his TraiU de la Nature, et de la Grace. This skirmish was only shelved by the Quietist debate and Bossuet's own rupture with Fenelon. But from Port-Royal, the fortress of the Cartesian Jansenists, the assault was sounded. The debate that now arose wavers on strange frontier-lands between psychology and theology, and cross-firing engendered many tomes that are not in divinity, unduly forgotten. The weightiest of the stricter Cartesians was " the great Arnauld," Antoine Arnauld 1 (1612-1694), the incarnation of a rational, Descartes, by A. Hannequin and R. Thamin, in Petit de Julleville's Histoire, &c., vol. iv. Also Bruneti6re, Etudes critiques, vols. iii. and iv. ; and L. Olld-Laprune, La Philosophic de Malebranche, 1870 ; and s.v. " Occasionalism " in the histories of Philosophy. 1 (Euvres, 50 vols., 1775, &c. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 19 serried, noble - spirited theologian, who can reason much better than he can write, but who writes enormously ; the last and most powerful voice of a great family of founders and combatants. Arnauld, long since scored with his wars against Jesuits and Protestants, would have none of the new perilous concordat between faith and reason. A formidable fray was opened in 1683 with his treatise Des vraies et des fausses Iddes, and drifted into an endless exchange of letters and replications. The " vision in God " was misprized as a reflection on the detachment and majesty of God himself, and as leading to pantheism. The assumption that God wrought only by " general ways" (voies gtfndrales), which to Malebranche ab- solved God from the irregularities and thwart courses of the world, was scented with suspicion as telling against miracle and special providence. " Intel- ligible space " and other abstruse assumptions were stamped as figments. The Jansenists suspected Male- branche of tampering with their central theorems, in which they would not allow that they came too near the Calvinists, namely, that man is impotent to have a voice in his own salvation, and that the sin of Adam was necessary. In short, almost every speculative issue of the time was raised. The Platonist of the Oratory, the greatest philosophical pen of France, had endangered faith by trying to extend to it the calculus of reason. This schism among the Cartesians only added to the perplexity and cross -firing, a precise account of which must be left to those competent to write the history of theology. But a literary chronicle 20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. may pass from artist to artist, noting perhaps how thought has shifted in the interval. Amongst the subaltern moralists and disputants Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) was ranked very high; this was one of the indulgences of classi- Nicole. cism to the lucid and orderly second- rate. But Nicole, most of whose works are now wreckage, has some worth and a significant history. As the ally and theorist of militant Jansenism he aided Arnauld in the famed Port-Royal Logic * (L'Art de Penser, 1662), which is a popular adjustment of the austere attitude of the school to Cartesian prin- ciple. He had already put all the Provindales into Latin for foreign readers. He had uncommon scholar- ship and debating subtlety, which he displayed in a mass of treatises, chiefly against Protestantism, that need never be collected. Still, in his life of singu- lar shifts and aliases, he managed, despite an absorb- ent and impressionable mind, to run a course of his own. Les Imaginaires and Les Visionnaires (1664-67) are letters in form studio copies of Pascal's tending to show that the conclusions charged on Jansenism are a pure bogey of its clerical enemies. This, to Nicole's associates, was disproving too much. He also flung out, in the character of an austere censor, against the corrupting effects of the comic drama and of innocent amusement generally. In Nicole can be read some 1 Translated and annotated by T. S. Baynes, 1872. The rest of Nicole has been little reprinted, except for his Pcnsces, which are sometimes bound up with Pascal's ; and his works were never fully collected. PKOSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 21 of the iusanest ascetical rhetoric ever vented by an apostle of reason. His account of a ball as " un massacre horrible d'aines qui s'entre-tuent les uns les autres" is unworthy of a Frenchman and a gentleman. He had no humour, and wrote a whole chapter on the " means of profiting by bad sermons." Still he has at his best a serious dignity, which raises him into style and force. His Essais dc Morale, which began to appear in 1671, are on high subjects the rights and frailties of greatness, the weak fearfulness of man- kind, which may sometimes (as is also true of Addison) find him out; but often we can almost understand Mine, de Sevigue reading him again and again. The best of the Essais are the TraiU called Moyens de conserver la Paix avec des Homines, and the Traite" de la Grandeur. Here he sometimes recalls the solemnity of Pascal, but, as Joubert said, not his style. He is a bridge between the polemical theologians and the makers of maxim. He was popular in England, for of the Essais there was a trans- lation " by a Person of Quality," of which two editions were printed by 1696. We may catch the contemporary thrill and zest, passing into satiety, by following these wars as they suffer the scrutiny of Pierre Bayle (1647- 1706), who rehearses some of the career of Gibbon. After a youthful sally into Eomanism, he returned ostensibly to his Protestant rearing, but really to a detached point of view, which he preached and screened with matchless if often shifty dexterity. Like Gibbon he laid up a vast and orderly learning 22 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. which was ever at hand ; and he can, like Gibbon, abstract a speculative theorem with the keenest precision, isolated from its emotional source or effect. Though he has more inward fire than our historian, he puts the same restraint, if with less pose, on his pervading irony. Both writers can be taxed with an unhappy cold complaisance at times part of a policy for the scabrous matter of history or myth. But Bayle never bent himself on a single work that should be masterly in its form, and his writing is lavish and scattered. After many journeys, mental as well as bodily, he found himself in Rotterdam, a State- endowed professor of philosophy, and opened fire in 1682 with a strange, trailing, unsigned work, a Letter on the comet of 1680. His drift is to question the penal or prophetic character of meteors, to qualify the horrors of atheism by contrast with those of pagan idolatry, and to plead for the reality of the noble and virtuous sceptic. The insinuation was seized at once ; Bayle meant that morals were not staked upon doctrine at all, and could well survive it. How much later polemic may here be studied in its very sources ! He went on with a plea for universal tolerance of opinions. This appeared in his Critique ge'ne'rale of Maimbourg's hostile Histoire du Calvin- isme, and he now proved altogether too much for his Protestant friends. The fray thickened when Bayle spent the fulness of his eloquence and pungent scorn in two pamphlets l (1686) inspired by the Kevo- 1 (1) Ce que c'est quc la France toutc catholique sous le Rkgne de Louis le Grand. (2) Cormnentaire philosophique sur le " cwnpdle in- PEOSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 23 cation of the Edict of Nantes. He made none of the Lockian reservations against atheists or catholics, and he faced with pleasure the fire of the bigots on all hands. His passages with the savage Protestant disputant Jurieu (see p. 57 below) ended in his being driven from his chair for heterodoxy. Nor had he meanwhile mended his case by his single-handed venture, the first of genuine monthly reviews, Nouvelles de la R6puUique des Lettres (1684-86). Each number is a series of summaries and judgments at length, together with shorter bulletins on works of erudition, history, and especially theology. The first works; exchange of volleys between Malebranche learned reviews. an( j Arnauld can be well surveyed from this vantage-ground. The manner is studiously impersonal, but is suffused with a certain still hesitating ironic light. The effete learning, for in- stance, in the odd Atland of Olof Eudbeck, the Swede (see our seventh chapter), was taken very seriously by the time ; Bayle Analyses it at length, and dismisses it with the compliment, " If the author could do this, what would he not do if he had worked at his books of medicine ? " Once he inserts a little defence, against the charge of libertinism, of Malebranche's suspect theory that all pleasure is for the moment a real trare." The Avis aux Rtfugies (1690) (a violent attack on the Protest- ants by a supposed Catholic), whose authorship and motive are much disputed, is not quite like Bayle's ordinary style ; but what other living man could or would have written it ? See Sayous, Histoire de la, Litt. franfaise d, VEtramgcr, ed. 1853, vol. i. p. 305, and Bruneti- ere's classical articles on Bayle, Etudes critiques, series v. p. 120. Also Picavet in Grande Eiwycl., s.v. "Bayle." 24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. present good ; and he infers, disconcertingly, that " Dieu a uni le Men et le bonheur avec le p6che pour un certain temps." But all these sallies, and the countless comptes rendus that Bayle poured out in his review, only helped him to range the batteries for his Dictionnaire liistorique et critique. The first edition came in two volumes in 1697 ; he produced the second which is fuller and the last that he revised in 1702, with little matter removed, but much (e.g., art. Zoroaster) added, including four important Uclaircissements. Three English versions, one (1710) with ample garnish by our own theologians, preceded the fifth French edition of 1740. 1 Bayle had at first only wished to mend the blunders of a huge compilation, the biographical dictionary of Moreri; but he went on to make an ar- The Dictionary. . moury of all his own knowledge, so far as it did not repeat previous dictionaries, and of his own opinions. The result is a scientific scrutiny, on a great scale, of certain lines of history (especially the politi- cal biography of the last two centuries), of clerical controversy, of many matters of classical lore and exegesis, and of the biographies of the great human- ists. He left out most of those thinkers, except Spin- oza, who were alien to his point of view, and probed deeply for present use the early heresies which he liked. His brief and rather juiceless text stands above 1 The standard modern edition of the Dictionnaire is Beuchot's, 16 vols., Paris, 1820-24. The other works of Bayle (CEuvres divcrscs, The Hague, 1727-31 (again 1737), 4 vols.) have, neglectfully enough, never been reprinted. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 25 the army of notes that contain his erudite and dis- solvent criticism, his opinions, and his best writing. These notes form one of the chief works of the seventeenth century. On one side Bayle is a founder of scientific biography, which could never be quite so purely traditional or superstitious afterwards. He also insinuated the subjection of the Bible narrative to the natural canons of inquiry. None could miss the parallel handling of the articles Jupiter or Hercules, and of Adam, Cain, or Abraham as masses of legend equally miscellaneous, absurd, or (as in the treatment of David) immoral. The comparison of creeds in Mahomet is equally incisive and more candid. To us it often seems a barren line ; but religion and thought had to be purged by the destructive intellect, and emptied for the time, by a sort of abstraction, of their poetical beauty or historical warrant, only to receive these elements again, long afterwards, when the reg- ulative intellect has done its work. But Bayle's view of the world is still of interest, and requires a colla- tion of many passages to be appreciated. " En parcouraut 1'histoire nous ne trouvons que peu de triornphes de J.-Christ apparent rari nantes in itaugh summary (/urgite vasto et nous reiicontrons partout of us thought. les trophees du Demon." Man is by no means wholly amiss, but the evil and misery revealed by history are incurable and constant (art. Macon, note C). Man is fated to remain irrational, for he tortures himself with religious wars over matters of insoluble speculation. On these matters little truth or assur- ance is possible. The disputes are further a perpetual 26 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. source of bad faith. " There are no groundless dis- tinctions that have not served to shirk the disagree- able consequences that were foreseen if the Thomists admitted any affinity with the Calvinists or with the Jansenists ; and there is no sophism that the Molinists have not used to prove that St Augustine did not preach Jansenism." The exhausted spectator of these feuds is landed provisionally in a state, so to speak, of stable suspense equidistant from all creeds (art. Pyrrhori). But if it is asked what theory, after all, best explains, or restates, these facts of man, history, and thought, then Bayle has his preferences. The God of Spinoza, the general substance of which things good and ill are alike modes, is too much burdened with such incongruities, and he is even a little absurd. One of the hardest theories of all to refute is the opposite theory to Spinozism, Manicheism. 1 The world might seem to point, not to an Evil One the creature of God, but to " une nature eternelle et increee, distincte de Dieu, et ennemie de Dieu, et mechante essentiellernent." Bayle glosses this theory in various airy ways, imagining a kind of prophetic contract, struck in chaos before the creation, between the two parties, in order to save an undignified struggle afterwards. And when he was pressed about his orthodoxy, he executed a bewildering crab -like retreat, half-sincere, half-politic. For the mass of his fellow-men he offers no creed but the minimum of doctrine and the rule of plain tolerant sense, without 1 See arts. Manicheens, Paulicicns, the 2nd Eclair cisscmcnt, and aux Questions, &c. (1703), chap. xcii. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 27 any finessing or Jesuitry in matters of conduct (art. Loyola, note G). The mystery of free-will, he holds, is ultimate, whether it engage the philosophical question Am I free ? or the theological question Was Adam free to sin ? l As to faith, Bayle took an irritating line that was quite transparent but not easy to force through. The mysteries of theology, he says with his tongue in his cheek, are insoluble by reason. But they are matters of faith, and we must swallow them ; what more would the theologians have ? Thus, pro- fessing for religion's sake to revert to something like the old Cartesian schism between faith and reason, Bayle, as all could see, really applied the Cartesian acid to all the forbidden matter, and left very little of it sound. By virtue of all this he is the parent of the Encyclopedists and their source of wisdom : although, as has often been rioted, he remains, unlike Voltaire or Rousseau, a recluse and disinterested critic, bent on sifting truth rather than on improving man and the world, and doubting their power ever to improve as heartily as any Calvinist. Bayle had to write volumes in self-defence, and always found new tactics and new stores of knowledge. Later works His Rdponse aux Questions d'un Provincial ami position. - lg a bundle of discursive essays. His En- tretiens, where Maxinie and Themiste vie in refuting Origen and Jean Leclerc, and his Continuations of the Pens^es sur la Comdte, are the chief of the remainder. His private letters are to be counted among his liter- 1 Sea art. Jamseniuu, notes G and //, for Bayle's logic al its raciest. 28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. ary works (1672-1706). They reflect his absorbed life, lived wholly in books and polemic, quite free from the scandal attached by the preachers to " liber- tine " theory, and warmed, if ever, by the two passions for critical exactitude and for general toleration. The higher kind of brooding is blankly absent. The quality in his writings that lures soonest and wears longest is a steady, minutely flashing play of intellect, perhaps habitans in sicco, but animating his bulk of matter with a piquant lightness. He writes without much revision or construction of wholes, but soundly and subtly. The Dictionnaire is simply " thoughts scattered haphazard," where he " runs at a loose rein up hill and down dale." Still he takes some pains to use efficiently the style lie linked, and periodic, and difficult, but re- warding in preference to the style coupd, what we might call the atomic style, where all the sentences are pellets. His speech anticipates that of Yoltaire in its absence of the exalted, or of the divine element ; but it is to be honoured for its tenacious expression of whatever truth may be won without those ingredients. He stands far above Locke as a writer, and was in the field before him. He argued for toleration on really wider grounds than Locke, and remained his chief associate in the eyes of the eighteenth century. The essence of his task implied the lack of Locke's con- structive power in dealing with first principles. But his real achievement was to release the Cartesian doubt from its worst limitation, the ignoring of the past, and to give it free play upon wide areas of human history and speculation. PEOSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 29 The attitude taken by the classical literature, with its Cartesian leaven, towards history, scholarship, and classic and learning at large towards the past, in the past. f ac ^ as a m eans of culture is worth discrimination. Eationalism begins, in England only less than in France, by slighting these things. The programme of the Discours de la Mtthode nourishes the contempt of them. Truth is won by discarding experience and all the furniture of prejudice; the thinker works up by self -scrutiny from a compre- hensive doubt. What then avails the past, what the salvage of truth that is washed up by history, what avail the hoary conclusions of thought, that are recorded in literature ? Malebranche may be cited once more: he is full of tirades against the learned and what they know ; he regards them as dreadful examples of the maltreatment of the reason by mere brute memory, and his high language on this matter is barely exceeded by that of the Scriblerus coterie in England half a century later. Another turn was given to this impulse in the critical debate " between the ancients and the moderns," which will be noted in our next chapter. The conceit, as we have dared to call it, of the classical age, also told powerfully, though by no means quite triumphantly, for the severance of scholarship from letters, and for the pursuit of it, if at all, as a thing out of relation to art and culture. Both historical research and, as we have remarked, Greek, took a lower rank in the courses of education. The Academic des Inscriptions, which was to grow from limited beginnings into an organisation for 30 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. promoting scholarship, did not begin to publish trans- actions till after the end of the reign. But in Bayle, and even before Bayle, there is the counter-impulse namely, not to think the quest of learning irrational, but to make learning itself rational and critical. Neither France, nor England, nor any other land, was lightly to sacrifice what the great Een- aissance scholars had disclosed of the life and facts of antiquity. Everywhere, during the classical triumph, the invasion of scholarship by the critical spirit is apparent. The succeeding chapters of this book will supply some further information. The changes from Eudbeck to Holberg in Scandinavia, from Theophilus Gale to Arbuthnot in England, and the later work of Muratori in Italy, all tell the same story. In the next century, while the contempt of minute learning was to become a formula with the pkilosophes, learning itself was to be silently purged and guided until it regained its due rank, and its union with the rational spirit was crowned in the history of Gibbon. Pierre - Daniel Huet (1630-1721), the Bishop of Avranches, the learned controller of the classics some few edited in usum Ddphini, the interpreter sciioiars. o f Qrigen, versed in mathematics, science, and philosophy, the friend of Heinsius and Christina of Sweden, a multifarious author both in Latin and English, might alone save the name of French learn- ing in the period. 1 He has the capacities of the old 1 Works never collected, hardly in any case reprinted (except the Traite de FOrigine des Romans, 1671, which we note below under Fiction). See too his Memoirs, tr. J. Aikin (from the Latin), London, 1810, 2 vols. ; a?id Pattison's Essays, Oxford, 1889, for a full study of the Dcnionstratio Evangdica and Huet generally. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 31 types of polyhistor without their lumbering, their superstition, and their detachment from letters. His Latin alcaics and his cordial and amusing biography are very good of their kind. His specula- tive works, besides the Censura already named, included a curious Traitt philosophique de la Faiblesse de V Esprit humain (1723), which is not unlike certain modern pleas for the frailty of reason as an argument for orthodoxy. The Greek stoics, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, were translated by Andre Dacier soundly if without grace : they left little imprint on the French mind; there was no Sir Thomas North, and perhaps the Jansenists absorbed most of the stoical sentiment. Dacier also translated (1692) the Poetics of Aristotle, bits of which were early commented on and diluted. Homer was popularised in the prose of Mme. Dacier, born Anne Le Fevre (1654-1720), the Iliad being finished in 1699 and the Odyssey in 1708. Her preface to the former compares her version to the mummy of Helen of Troy, with the life and colour lost, but with certain lines and features rescued to mark "how she who keeps fairness even in the arms of death must in life have been truly like the immortals." Mme. Dacier's equipment was good, and most of her French is plain and direct : she and her husband were among the chief helpers in the Delphin editions. Though there was no notable historian, apart from the makers of memoirs and the letter- writers, the bases for mediaeval and modern history were strengthened in many ways. Charles Dufresne, usually known as Ducange, produced, in his Glossarium ad scriptores 32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. mediae et infimce Latinitatis (1678), which was only the chief of many erudite works, a mass of medi- aeval illustrations as well as a dictionary. The vast and noble energies of the Benedictine congrega- tion of Saint-Maur, led by Mabillon (died 1707), Luc d'Achery, Montfaucon, and others, continued unper- turbed by modish contempt. Organised and minute labour explored annals of all kinds and Ada Sanctorum, and promoted the science of diplomatic. French learning, towards the end of the reign, founded a journalism of its own, not only in Bayle, but in the Amsterdam professor Jean Leclerc (1657- 1736), who continued the plan of Bayle's Nouvellcs without his style or insight, but with knowledge and tenacity. Leclerc was Arminian in his views, and an ally of Locke in his political and religious attitude. He conducted, with a thoroughness that few modern journalists dare remember, three distinct JBibliotMques, one " universal and historical," one choisie, and one ancient and modern. Leclerc himself wrote most of these hundreds of little tomes, which are scarcely now to be read, but are an index to most of the erudite disputes current from 1696 to 1725. Lastly, from the Oratory, which bred Malebranche, the scorner of scholars, came also Eichard Simon (1638-1712), whose Paris edition (1678) of his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament was suppressed at the instance of Bossuet, and who, though now seldom named, was a father of biblical exegesis, and one of the deepest Hebraists of his time. He was driven to Holland, and brought out in 1685 a complete edition of his book, which was PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV 33 followed by similar treatises on the text and versions, and at last by a fresh translation, of the New Testa- ment. No contemporary so well saw and stated the linguistic difficulties of translating the Bible, or attacked them with so pure a veneration for the real text and meaning. Simon applied the same critical methods to patristic tradition, and faced the same great assailant. It was long before the patient and fundamental work of Simon was continued. In all these ways and only a few types have been named learning silently rose in caste by becoming critical. But the doctors of theology and eloquence have now to be mentioned. The modern spirit that quickened in Descartes had few nobler or more prescient enemies than the puis- Bossuet; his sant champion of the Gallican Church and the greatest preacher of France, Jacques- Benigne Bossuet 1 (1627-1704), whose voice, at once sword and trumpet, is heard in the m6l6e of most of the battles fought during that day within the Chris- tian pale; and who, nourishing in the courtly age, keeps the bearing and temper, the vehemence and masculine trenchancy, of the preceding. This prince of religious debaters and orators sprang from a legal and professional stock, and was the seventh son of Benigne Bossuet, of Dijon, " avocat au Parlement." 1 (Euvres, 43 vols., Versailles, 1815, and 31 vols., ed. Lachat, 1862 ; a fair selection, 4 vols., Firmin - Didot, 1870, &c. ; Floquet's Etudes sur la Vie de Bossuet (1855) supplement the old and very full life by Bausset (1815). The able studies by Bruneticre, and by G. Lanson (Rossuct, 1891), seein touched with the present neo-Christian reaction in France. C 34 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. At Dijon he was born in September 1627, and learnt Latin and Greek at the Jesuit school. Thence he left for Paris in 1642, to be trained at the College of Navarre. No Frenchman has caught like Bossuet what he calls "the genius and turn of the sacred language"; and it was early that he began to form his most glorious attribute, his diction ; by study, as he tells us, of the Vulgate as corrected by the other Latin text of the so-called Vatable version. He also became precocious in dispute and harangue. His theses are lost, but we have many of the sermons that he preached at Metz, whither he went in 1648, becoming four years later priest and doctor. Thefe, amidst a mixed people of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, Bossuet was moulded, and there he preached and converted for many years. There, in 1655, came out his Refutation of Ferry's catechism ; there he began to stock his arsenal for his great onslaught on the Eeformed Churches; and there also began his long career, so essentially public, played in full robes upon the stage of history ; and so free from any real hint of the mystical or intimate elements (despite his use of these as of other dialects), or of the retiredness and soliloquy of the saints. Whatever was in him, Bos- suet was impelled to throw into words that he could confide only to the multitude, to the sheep and inferiors who were thus to be led. Sainte-Beuve and others have shown that for ten years Bossuet's pulpit eloquence was often too violent and Oriental in colour, and that he had not yet, through contact with king and court, learnt the keep- PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 35 ing and measure which to an Englishman coming fresh from South or Taylor stamp him as " Augustan." But when he began to preach at Paris in 1659, he was already in advance of Mascaron by six years, and of Bourdaloue and of Massillon by more. He preached his first sermon at court in 1661 ; the next eight years mark his partial acclimatisation in its air, his slow but undisputed rise to the headship of the Gallicans, his energy as a director of souls in a wider field than Metz. It was late before his preaching was recognised as supreme. His crowning capture was that of Tur- enne (1668); the Exposition de la Foi catholique was printed 1671. In that year he resigned the distant see of Condom, which he had held since his in- stallation as tutor to the Dauphin in 1670. The works written during the next nine years for that stony prince show Bossuet's master-gift of organising, for instructive ends, matter given to him. He mixed a cautious dose of Descartes, Aquinas, and common- sense in his religious handbook founded on psychology, the Traitt de la Connoissance de Dieu et de Soi-me'me ; his Politique tirfo de VEcriture Sainte draws up a policy for the earthly, who is to answer to the heavenly, despot, and brings out some of the despotic conclusions of the Leviathan (which he probably knew) by some of the literal methods of Milton's Christian Doctrine ; while the Discours sur I'Histoire universelle (1681) presents more thoroughly than any other book the providential reading of history. In 1681 Bossuet became Bishop of Meaux, and he was the spokesman of the Gallicans against Rome in their 36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. famous Declaration ; but his Defensio Cleri Gallicani (printed 1745), and his other Latin writings composed in the same interest, 1 are of far less moment than his controversial triumph, the Histdre des Variations des Eglises protestantes (1688), the chief of many works in the same campaign : and here, though published as late as 1753, may be named the far less able and urbane Defense de la Tradition et des Saints P&res, directed in name against Simon, but really against the whole con- ception of interpreting Scripture and weighing tradition by the free and trained reason. From 1694-99, besides continuing to rule and preaching in his see, and to enforce, though with moderation, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and besides keeping up his vast correspondence so lucid, imperious, unbetraying, and inhuman Bossuet waged his victorious debate with Fe*nelon in the matter of Quietism. Of secondary note in the history of thought, this battle is a great exhibi- tion of character. Bossuet spoke for the logical and positive spirit of his race ; he believed in hard moral effort and discipline, and in keeping the mind clear, within the pale of the articles : he was revolted by the passive soul that remains a mere conduit for divine grace, and by the mystic Mme. Guyon and her beati- fications. Thus, under his frigid forms, he becomes, in his formidable Relation sur le Quittisme, 1698, which was the harshest blow in the whole war, somewhat brutal, like an eagle that rends its prey without 1 For the moderation of Bossuet's Gallicanism, see A. Rebelliau in Petit de Julleville, vol. v. p. 274 ; and for his theology, see Rebelliau 's exhaustive work, Bossuet Historien du Protestantisme, Paris, 1891. PROSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 37 dignity. In his latter years Bossuet did not draw in his talons : and he was busy with more controversies than need here be named, and he also gave himself, though with more sympathy and unction than of old, to his work as confessor and administrator of souls. His Meditations sur VEvangile and his much inferior Elevations a Dieu sur tons les Mysteres de la Religion chrttienne are among the later of his works : they are pastoral, benignant, glowing, and perhaps rather ob- vious ; the devotions of our Bishop Joseph Hall might be named in the same breath with the Elevations. They chiefly prove his great adaptiveness. Bossuet died at Paris in 1704. " Mon sermon est fait, ne me restant plus a trouver que les paroles." Bossuet's discourses, apart from his The greatest of elegiac and panegyrical pieces, are hard to preacher*. date, were very seldom published l by him- self, and do not remain to us as he spoke them. But the constant sacrifice of petty finish only restores the sound of the living and improvising voice. These vast collections of sermons are enough to establish the greatness of the writer. His images and comparisons alone, drawn from the breadth of human life, from the pangs of childbirth, from the rival love of parents for the child, from the Virgilian picture of the upright orator swaying the people, from the storm and ocean, would attest him for a prose poet ; and continually can be heard the strain peculiar to a great spirit living in a time of show and misery. " This life will go very 1 Lebartj, Ilistoirc critique de la Predication dc Honsuct, 1891. The sermon, Sur UUnitt de VEylixe, 1681, is an exception. 38 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. fast : it will melt like a day of winter, when evening and morning come close together. It is but a day, a moment, which irksomeness and infirmity make us think long. When it has faded, you will see how short it has all been." The man who wrote this had read his Pascal though his precise debt to Pascal is most uncertain and was at least a kindred spirit : and it is the constant murmur of such a refrain that raises him in grandeur above all his French contemporaries. But in Bossuet the perception of the free and sceptical standpoint is never, as it is in Pascal, sympathetic. His scheme of the world is unwavering, like his tone of authority. Few writers could begin an address to the Eternal, "II vous sied bien, 6 Eoi des siecles!" And the tone is the same when he addresses Louis, the viceroy who is given unlimited powers to enforce divine truth, and expected to act up to his position. There is to be no doubt who is the common enemy : it is not so much vice as curiosity, the libertine and damnable spirit of criticism, the " freedom of the natural soul," concentrated above all, to Bossuet's apprehension, in the miscreant Montaigne, so long dead in the flesh, but a parent of many sceptics. For the whole tribe of men who are the ultimate enemies of the Church, the men who do without, or who dare to judge, the dogmatic conception of life, Bossuet has an infallible instinct ; his whole order's sense of self-pre- servation seems to collect in him. It was the same penetration that guided his venomous arrows against the dead Moliere in the Maximes et Reflexions sur la Comddie, which are full of nice observation of the PKOSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 39 enemy's plans. He is not a flexible judge of men, and is never at one with the society in which he lived ; but he has a broad strategy, an intuition of the world which reminds us, in its fearless concise phrasing, of La Rochefoucauld and the classics of the bitter old stamp. His dissection, deeper than Barrow's, of evil- speaking and the heart inflamed by anger, and of the "ambitieux qui ne se connait pas," are of the same order. And there remains the background upon which these reflections are cast up; the constant vanity of life, interrupted as it is by offences, death, and trouble. " II ne reste plus a I'homme que le pesche et le neant : " from this high vantage-ground Bossuet sees beneath him clear, far, and contemptible, the vagaries of the insect man. The panegyrics, of which the most celebrated is on Paul, and the Oraisons fundbres, number some compositions which the French are fond Obituaries. . , of comparing to the greatest or Cicero s. They are indeed great ; but they are also full of false beauties, which doubtless, as Pascal says of Cicero's, have " a multitude of admirers." The falsity is not in the form ; that is perfect, and reminds us of the best speeches of antiquity. But the court atmosphere which gives some classic qualities to Bossuet's utterance also helps to exaggerate if not pervert his report. He himself saves us comment when, in his sermon on Henrietta Maria (1669), he approves the remark that "queens cannot drown," and when he wonders at Cromwell and other persons so rootedly suspicious of " all that pertains to author- 40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. ity" being permitted to survive. More touching, despite a certain grandiloquence, is the earlier ora- tion (1663) on his old master, Cornet ; while the greatest is perhaps the last, on Cond^ 1 (1687), where Bossuet bids the pulpit farewell and lays down the trumpet for ever. In the Discours sur I'Histoire universelle the point of view is this: the peoples of old, Assyria, Greece, and Eome, as well as Palestine, are shown The Discours. . to be blindly laying the foundations of the Roman Church. Or, this should be said rather of the princes of old than of the peoples. For Bos- suet is full of the traditional idea that history should be written down in the form of a manual for princes, having been chiefly made by their doings. On the other hand, princes are fragile things, pawns which the divine hand moves about for its own ends (much as the half-pagan mediaeval goddess of Fortune moved them about for no end at all). The lesson, therefore, for the Dauphin who reads the plan of history is, that he must work in the line of the divine purposes on pain of frustration and disappearance. And these purposes embrace, on the spiritual side, righteousness, which again supposes right doctrine ; and, materially, the reign of the true Church. Bossuet is never greater than when, to enforce these ideas, he impetuously leaves detail and sweeps over all history. Sainte - Beuve has noted how the divisions into chapter and section 1 The chief among the rest are those 011 "Madame," Duchess of Orleans (1670), on Maria Theresa (1683), and on Michel Le Tellier (1686). PROSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 41 have slipped in from the margin of the first edition, where the text ran in a single stream. The first book, La Suite des Temps, begins with the Old Tes- tament, and ends with Charlemagne, including twelve epochs in all for the whole of the record. The second and greatest, La Suite de la Religion, retells the history from the theological point of view. The third, Les Empires, retraces the secular history to show how the empires of this world "have subserved religion and the survival of the people of God," seeing that they all ended in something counter to the conceit of their braggart founders. Subject to these precon- ceptions, Bossuet treats certain sides of antiquity with a large sympathy. He is moved by the grandi- osity of Egypt and Persia and the great realms that came to nothing, and of Alexander, " plein des tristes images de la confusion qui devait suivre sa mort." Contrariwise, the sentence passed by Milton's Christ upon the arts of Athens is more intelligent than that of Bossuet, who sees in them only an anticipation of the fatal modern spirit. In the last resort, his argu- ment for the mission of the French Church or Crown is an appeal to the established fact of their survival amid the wrecks of history, and is destroyed with them. But no universal chronicle was ever so broadly conceived or conducted. The Histoire des Variations to which may be added the various defences and Avertissements that Histoire des followed it embodies controversially the variations, doctrines that appear in set form in the Exposition de la Foi catholique. In the preface of the 42 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. Histoire is the famous argument which the whole book enforces namely, that the Protestant sects are internecine in their articles, and therefore erroneous, while the Catholic Church is consistent, and therefore infallible. Bossuet's dialectical advantage is that, unlike his adversaries, he can use the full strength of his position. Jurieu (whom Bossuet battered in his Avertissements aux Protestants), or Basnage, or Burnet, remaining within the reformed doctrines, could not, any more than all others who remain there, state the full service of Protestantism to the world. They could not vindicate reason or personal judgment to the utmost without giving up more than they dared or wished. They could not represent the strifes con- cerning sacraments or covenants as so many sallies and struggles of the human mind fain to come to terms with its own reason. Bossuet could and did go the whole length of his own principles, and say that variety of belief proved nothing but the futility of individual thought : see the chaos in which your reason lands you, if it be once rebellious ! His ultimate aim is always to restore unity, by recover- ing Protestantism, whose enduring essence he did not understand, to the Church. (See p. 330 post.} The lasting fascination of the Histoire is due to its erudition, which has been shown to be singularly fair and sound, to its intellectual mastery and iron grasp of subtleties, to its tone of freedom from vulgar modes of dispute, and to its command of Pascal's weapon, " grave and temperate irony." Luther's vio- lences are exhibited as absurd and vulgar rather than PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 43 criminal, in the eyes of urbane and judicious persons. Calvin is saluted as one who " wrote French as well as any man in his generation," and heresies are by no means always the work of the profligate and impious. But Bossuet is most formidable in dealing with the half-minded, with the compromises of the logical Calvin himself, and his real esteem is kept for the most thorough - going, and therefore most thoroughly damned, of heretics, Zwingli, who makes the communion a mere memento. Bossuet is the chief embodiment in modern times of a certain side of the Latin spirit. From the first his mind, with its hardness, clearness, and grip, its inclination to stately second-hand exposition, and its sovereign sense of composition and structure, is Latin. It is in this sense only that we may understand his " humanism " and the " union of the two antiquities," sacred and profane, in his person, for which he has been overpraised. He has all the qualities of a jurist or advocate, and uses them to the end of bringing truth into clearness; if souls are to be lost, it shall not be his fault. This union of an almost legal attitude and gifts with the poetical spirit and a style winged and exalted by the passion of the Cross, is hard to match. Bossuet felt at least in others the pressure of the doubt, melancholy, and explor- ing temper of the Renaissance, and nothing but the Christian system, realised in a special polity, seemed able to cope with such dangers. Of the intellectual movement without the Christian order, of the advance of science, of Spinoza, he had a fierce mistrust but 44 EUltOPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. no definite knowledge, while of variations within that order, as we have seen, he has the eye possessed by a great commander for the operations of deserters. Always an orator or pleader, Bossuet is also, by a coincidence quite rare in modern times, always a great writer. Burke, of whom the same is to be said, is in style not so surely great. After his early efforts, Bossuet writes in a manner that by second nature is nearly perfect. He has many languages, but only one voice ; he always goes to the height of his subject, and seldom beyond it. He is simple and natural and bare, but across his bareness flit streaks of gorgeous light and colour. He has some virtues both of the heroic and of the urbane generations of French literature. " The Father," Massillon called him, " of the seventeenth century ; " have the causes of human freedom and knowledge, which he spent his life in retarding, ever enlisted such a prose as his? Like Barrow and South in England, but in his own vaster measure, Bossuet reminded his courtly audiences of a spacious utterance to which Bourdaloue ; *- logic and their fathers were better used than they. But in each land there was a preacher, contemporary in years with these great men, but of a younger style; younger partly by the lack of that heroic echo, and partly by a profounder community with the temper of the new public. Tillotson, we shall see, has the intellectual virtues of his moment and no more. Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704) might be called a French Tillotson, so much is he one of those PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 45 whom he addresses, so radical a trait is the rational conduct of his oratory, so plain is the disappearance of poetry. But he is a classic, while Tillotson is not ; he speaks from a greater weight of soul and observa- tion, he satisfied a finer taste. Bourdaloue was born at Bourges, became a Jesuit very early, and for many years led the formidable life of hard work and humility which informs the nobler Jesuit discipline. His talent was sifted and discovered ; he appeared as a preacher in Paris nearly ten years after Bossuet, in 1669; and his vogue in the pulpit became prob- ably at least as great as Bossuet's for he was less alarming, there was less in him that the generation could not follow, and the excellences of his discours- ing were those for which it thirsted. 1 His days were undisturbed by ambition, which the rule of his Order excludes. His works consist of the sermons that he preached during a long life, in- cluding conspicuously twelve Avents and eighteen CarSmes. These are preserved either as memoranda, or in forms more or less completely revised under his eye, 2 and include all the varieties of exhortation, panegyric, and funeral speech the two latter kinds being sparse and inferior in comparison as well as a collection of ethical and religious maxims, that tell us much of his private thought. At first, to a foreigner, Bourdaloue seems a little 1 On the relative vogue of the two orators see F. Brunetiore's article on Bourdaloue in the Grande Encyclopedic. 2 First issued collectively, 1707-34. Modern edd., 1822, and Gucnn's, 1864. Selections (Firmin-Didot), 3 vols., 1877. 46 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. trite and scholastic. Trite in substance he often remains ; he is not a great religious thinker ; the most original parts of his preaching are his observations of the world, which he knew very well, and from which he is yet detached. His analysis of False Ambition, for instance, though without the personal pungency that distinguishes La Bruyere, ranks him with that school of observers of the mid-reign, not very hardy or outspoken in allusion, but critics, inwardly un- subdued, of the court-world and its comedy. But most of Bourdaloue's preaching is strongly ethical and practical. His deeper affinity with Barrow and the Anglican Arminians is certainly to be seen in his acceptance of freewill as a practical base of operations for moral instruction. He is, no doubt, as has been said by a French critic, often as severe in tone as a Jansenist. But the difference is this, that the severe creeds, Calvinism and Jansenism, which deny and humiliate in various ways man's initiative, have ever marked down man's imagination as their prey, and have imposed a rigid life more as a sign of his littleness than as a means of his safety. The humaner, suppler, more inconsistent forms represented in the Anglican compromise, or in some kinds of Catholicism, reflect the inconsequence of the humanity that they recognise, and have numbered many a systematic, solid moralist who is apt perhaps to press too strongly on what Bourdaloue himself calls La Prudence du Salut, or other- worldliness, but who is also noble and dis- interested. Of these is Bourdaloue : not that he fails of authority. His voice, reported to have been sweet PEOSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 47 and monotonous, sometimes rises : his eyes, which, as they are shown in his best portrait, he kept closed in preaching, seem to gaze austerely, as he urges the im- mitigable fatality of sin, the lot of the lost, and as he pictures, with the refrain illic reptilia quorum non est numerus, the social world of hidden passions, ramifying calumnies, and embittered aims, which he has seen. But his usual strength and here we put our finger on what charmed his contemporaries is in the perfect exposition of a religious, preferably an ethical, idea that lends itself to the quotation of the preacher's ex- perience. The ordering, that seems at first scholastic, with its exordium, its two or three points announced, subdivided, summed, and accomplished, soon becomes impressive for its endless skill and flawless rigour. It is like fine close chainwork of strong if not precious metal, a little dulled with the centuries, but sound in all its junctures and fringes. The scope and the various manners of Bourdaloue might be fairly illustrated from his sermons on Ambition (sixth after Pentecost) ; on L'fiternite malheureuse (a title hard to translate); on the conversion of the Magdalen (so artfully riveted, after the orator's favourite fashion, with the key-phrase dilexit, elle aima) ; on The ^Estate of Marriage ; and on St Ignatius Loyola. In all of these there is the same sure linking of parts, the same abundant, unbroken, ample speech, seldom precisely great and commanding, but always naturally at a high pitch, and impressed with the speaker's fine temper, which is witnessed by all contemporaries. As a mental document, his discourse On Hypocrisy should 48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. be bound up with the Tartuffe, to which it is a rejoinder; and Bourdaloue is more dignified than Bossuet in his attacks on Moliere as the pattern of the "libertins." The strength of Fle"chier l and Massillon lies in lyric eloquence, and not in composition, in consequence, or __. in analysis. Esprit Flechier, at first a Decadence ; J and somewhat mundane abbe, reputed for his trifles in French and Latin verse, and more justly for his Grand Jours d'Auvergne, the most instructive provincial chronicle of the time (see p. 63), emerged from the society of the prdcieuses, spoke the funeral elegy of Mme. de Eambouillet, and gained great repute for this kind of composition. He has not the intellect or span of his great precursors; but in his sermons on the Due de Montausier, on the first president de Lamoignon, and notably in that on Turenne (1676), his prose has the rhythms of a poetical soul; and though he did not much excel in the usual kinds of preaching, he has a chanting passage on the phantasmal unreality of the world and its personages, that nearly recalls the Apologia of Newman. 2 In 1687 Flechier became Bishop of Nimes, and died in 1710. Another oration on Turenne, delivered by Jules Mascaron, Bishop of Tulle, is more sober and concrete in its treatment. 1 Fldchier, (Euvrcs completes, 10 vols., Nimes, 1782. Massillon, fEuvres completes, 1865-68 ; choisics (Gamier), 1868. Both often reprinted in selections. 2 Pancgyriques et autrcs Sermons, Brussels, 1696, vol. ii. p. 521 : "Le monde . . . cette foule de figures qui se pre"sentent a mes yeux et B'eVanouissent. " PROSE OF THE KEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 49 Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1663-1742) did not begin to preach at Paris till the end of the century, and in his elegiac discourse on Louis XIV. the pulpit eloquence of the reign is heard beating up for a last fitful flight. Massillon (who only became Bishop of Clermont in 1717) began as a professor of rhetoric : he has no deep instruction in divinity, he is too intent on the pleasure that he receives from his own antitheses and balanced clauses, and the decadence of classicism is also sharply felt in the poverty of his co-ordinating powers and of his intellectual basis. But he has too much sincerity and too much passionate sensibility to be, as he is often called, a declaimer, and he keeps alive the tradition of magnificence. The history of pulpit oratory in France and England will show many affinities during this period. In both French and lands the best preachers addressed the court English an( j soc j e ty an( j took from or shared with preaching compared, their audience the liking for ethical rather than doctrinal discoursing. In both there is the con- stant use of worldly experience for spiritual illustra- tion, the dislike of false wit and effusive excess, the taste for structure and clearness, and all the other tastes that follow from the tacit appeal that is made on every hand to reason and intelligence. But the English pulpit had a deeper original fund of fantasy and poetry a fund therefore not so soon exhausted. Its greatness, as will be seen hereafter, cannot be said to have grown in the measure that reason came to penetrate its eloquence. Nay, its close, in and after Tillotson, is really a decadence, for poetry has gone, D 50 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. while the reason that has come is not of a high quality, and tends merely to the organisation of com- promises and commonplaces. But in France, as we have seen, reason perfected the Catholic preaching, the decay of which consists in the corrosion of the rational structure, the re-invasion of rhetoric, and the loss of measure and taste. Of the greater Catholic spirits that reigned during this period, the strangest is Fenelon, 1 who lapses far The career of from the sincerity of masculine reason Ftneion. that does honour to Bossuet or Bourdaloue, but who by power of temperament prefigures some of the sensibility, the liberalism, the expansiveness, of eighteenth-century France. Francois de Salignac (or Salagnac) de la Mothe-Fenelon (1651-1715) was born in Pe*rigord at the chateau of his family, which, as he never forgot, was noble; and after a priestly educa- tion at Saint- Sulpice and elsewhere, at once revealed himself a born converter and missionary. Two instincts and gifts co-operate within him from the first and always. One is that of mastering, by a mixture of supple adaptiveness and stony will, diffi- cult and valuable souls in behalf of himself and the Church. The converted Protestants in the house of the Nouvdles Catholiques, and those who might be won in the Huguenot region of Saintonge, where Fenelon went after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were 1 CEuvres, ed. Lebel, 22 vols., 1820-30, and 12 vols. of Corrcspon- dancc. Many reprints of the educational, critical, and fabulous works e.g., in Gamier 's vols. See Brunetiere in Grande Encycl., and Mahrenholtz, Fenelon, Erzbischof von Cambrai, Leipzig, 1896. PROSE OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 51 his natural quarry ; and the mass of his large corre- spondence reveals him as a marvellous and adaptive "director," ready and able to intrude, to control, and to spare no personal rights or secrets. But, secondly, he is a humane lover of his kind, full of a high-bred, inexhaustible goodwill to them. Love and charity are always on his lips, and he also wrought in their service. His ultima ratio is not intellectual at all, but a very complex kind of feeling, wherein the active sympathy with man blends with a strangely purged and subtilised love of God, the famous " pur amour " about which he wrote, and we must add chicaned, so profusely. Such a temper can only be crudely figured within our limits. But, thirdly, Fe"nelon is led by Christian philanthropy to be, though at first not overtly, a political idealist, formed by revulsion against the aims and system of Louis XIV. Here the educator and " director " reappears ; for it was the baffled aim of his career to form the king who should be the antidote. Fenelon became known through the interest of Mme. de Maintenon, of Bossuet, and of various noble Education of protectors ; through his preaching; and young women, through his TrcdW de I' Education des Miles, published in 1687. Saint-Cyr, the famous training- school for girls of the gentle or high-born class, was founded a little later, and Fenelon is a pioneer in educational doctrine. He gives instructions for the schooling of a young wife of the educated ranks a kind of Gallic, if sometimes a comic, mate for the creditable gentleman and citizen contemplated by 52 EUROPEAN LITERATURE AUGUSTAN AGES. Locke. His counsels of simplicity in life, rational training without pedantry, avoidance of bel esprit, volatility, and vanity, are fresh for their day in theory and statement, though the product may strike us as a little dull and overtrained, and the theories as marred by the illusion that women are as plastic material to the educator as men. It is significant and amusing that he discourages Italian and Spanish as fitting languages for women, and upholds Latin as more reasonable, and as withal the tongue of mother Church. The work is that of a priest; it has its touch of tyranny and inquisition. The " suave and youthful gravity " for which it is praised rather rises in the English gorge ; but it is remarkable and beyond its time. In 1689 Fenelon was made preceptor of the "children of France," and in particular of the Due and of the de Bourgogne, who was the grandson of < petu Dauph**."^ king> and> after Bossuet's pupil the Dauphin, the heir -presumptive. This appointment determined Fenelon's chief ambition, and it produced some of the best of his writings. His pupil he con- trolled and civilised perhaps too well. Fenelon's real nature, or one of his natures, appears in some of the harsh letters that he afterwards administered to the Due de Bourgogne as a tonic to undo his own dis- cipline. The books that he wrote while actually tutor fall into two classes, political and inventive, and have but one purpose, which may be crudely summarised as that of forming a monarch in all respects contrary to Louis XIV. and subject to Fenelon. PROSE OF THE EEIGN OF LOUIS XIV. 53 His expressly political writings are considerable. The Examen de Conscience sur les Devoirs de la Royautd is from his own hand ; and the Essai poli- tique sur le Gfouvernement civil, which goes much deeper, purports to be his conversations held with " James III.," and edited by their friend the " Chevalier de Eamsai." There are also sundry memoranda on the Spanish war, and the plan of government usually entitled the Tables de Cliaulnes, made up by Fenelon and others during the hopeful interval between the death of the Dauphin and that of the Due de Bour- gogne. Lastly, there is the surprising Lettre a Louis XIV., seemingly written about 1699, and proved to be genuine, but not known to have been ever published or presented at the time. This is Fenelon's most superb composition, formidable, commanding, rhetori- cal but not incorrect, a text fit for Michelet, the first daring sound of the reaction. Fdnelon's ideal king abominates war and injustice only less than luxury and corruption; he is sober, humane, friendly, acces- sible, the master of a brotherhood of subjects ; yet and we may remember that the modeller was convers- ing with James III. he is still an absolute king, ir- removable by inherited right, and by divine authority pitiless to rebels. Most of these ideas recur also in Fenelon's works of art, designed to divert his pupil into a discreet and n