LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
Short Histories of the Literatures
of the World
Edited by Edmund Gosse
Literatures of the World,
EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE.
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE.
By GILBERT MURRAY, M. A.
FRENCH LITERATURE.
By EDWARD DOWDEN, D. C. L., LL. D.
ENGLISH LITERATURE.
By the EDITOR. [Shortly.]
ITALIAN LITERATURE.
By RICHARD GARNETT, C. B., LL. D. [Shortly.]
AMERICAN LITERATURE.
SPANISH LITERATURE.
By J. FITZMAURICE-KELLY.
JAPANESE LITERATURE.
By WILLIAM GEORGE ASTON, C. M. G., M. A.
MODERN SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE.
By Dr. GEORG BRANDES.
SANSKRIT LITERATURE.
By A. A. MACDONELL, M. A.
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE.
By Dr. ZOLTAN BEOTHY.
GERMAN LITERATURE.
By Dr. C. H. HERFORD.
LATIN LITERATURE.
By Dr. A. W. VERRALL.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
A HISTORY OF
FRENCH LITERATURE
BY
EDWARD DOWDEN
D. LITT., LL. D. (Due.), D. C. L. (Oxow.), LL. D. (EoiN.)
LL. D. (PRINCETON)
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
PREFACE
FRENCH prose and French poetry had interested me
during so many years that when Mr. Gosse invited me
to write this book I knew that I was qualified in one
particular the love of my subject. Qualified in know-
ledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend
to know the whole of a vast literature. He may have
opened many books and turned many pages ; he cannot
have penetrated to the soul of all books from the Song
of Roland to Toute la Lyre. Without reaching its spirit,
to read a book is little more than to amuse the eye with
printed type.
An adequate history of a great literature can be written
only by collaboration. Professor Petit de Julleville, in
the excellent Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature
Franqaise, at present in process of publication, has his
well -instructed specialist for each chapter. In this
small volume I too, while constantly exercising my own
judgment, have had my collaborators the ablest and
most learned students of French literature who have
written each a part of my book, while somehow it
seems that I have written the whole. My collaborators
are on my shelves. Without them I could not have
accomplished my task ; here I give them credit for
their assistance. Some have written general histories
vi PREFACE
of French literature ; some have written histories of
periods the Middle Ages, the sixteenth, seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth centuries ; some have studied
special literary fields or forms the novel, the drama,
tragedy, comedy, lyrical poetry, history, philosophy ;
many have written monographs on great authors ;
many have written short critical studies of books or
groups of books. I have accepted from each a gift.
But my assistants needed to be controlled ; they
brought me twenty thousand pages, and that was too
much. Some were accurate in statement of fact, but
lacked ideas ; some had ideas, but disregarded accuracy
of statement ; some unjustly depreciated the seventeenth
century, some the eighteenth. For my purposes their
work had to be rewritten ; and so it happens that this
book is mine as well as theirs.
The sketch of mediaeval literature follows the arrange-
ment of matter in the two large volumes of M. Petit
de Julleville and his fellow-labourers, to whom and to
the writings of M. Gaston Paris I am on almost every
page indebted. Many matters in dispute have here to
be briefly stated in one way ; there is no space for
discussion. Provencal literature does not appear in this
volume. It is omitted from the History of M. Petit de
Julleville and from that of M. Lanson. In truth, except
as an influence, it forms no part of literature in the
French language.
The reader who desires guidance in bibliography will
find it at the close of each chapter of the History edited
by M. Petit de Julleville, less fully in the notes to
PREFACE vii
M. Lanson's History, and an excellent table of critical
and biographical studies is appended to each volume
of M. Lintilhac's Histoire de la Literature Franc^aise.
M. Lintilhac, however, omits many important English
and German titles among others, if I am not mistaken,
those of Birsch-Hirschfeld's Geschichte der Franzosichen
Litteratur : die Zeit der Renaissance, of Lotheissen's im-
portant Geschichte der Franzosichen Litteratur im XVII,
fahrhundert, and of Professor Knight's learned Philo-
sophy of History (1893).
M. Lanson's work has been of great service in
guiding me in the arrangement of my subjects, and in
giving me courage to omit many names of the second
or third rank which might be expected to appear in
a history of French literature. In a volume like the
present, selection is important, and I have erred more
by inclusion than by exclusion. The limitation of space
has made me desire to say no word that does not tend
to bring out something essential or characteristic.
M. Lanson has ventured to trace French literature to
the present moment. I have thought it wiser to close
my survey with the decline of the romantic movement.
With the rise of naturalism a new period opens. The
literature of recent years is rather a subject for current
criticism than for historical study.
I cannot say how often I have been indebted to the
writings of M. Brunetiere, M. Faguet, M. Larroumet,
M. Paul Stapfer, and other living critics ; to each of the
volumes of Les Grands Ecrivains Franc^ais, and to many
of the volumes of the Classiqucs Populaires. M. Lintilhac's
viii PREFACE
edition of Merlet's Eludes Littfraires has also often served
me. But to name my aids to study would be to fill some
pages.
While not unmindful of historical and social influences,
I desire especially to fix my reader's attention on great
individuals, their ideas, their feelings, and their art. The
general history of ideas should, in the first instance, be
discerned by the student of literature through his obser-
vation of individual minds.
That errors must occur where so many statements are
made, I am aware from past experience; but I have taken
no slight pains to attain accuracy. It must not be hastily
assumed that dates here recorded are incorrect because
they sometimes differ from those given in other books.
For my errors I must myself bear the responsibility ;
but by the editorial care of Mr. Gosse, in reading the
proof-sheets of this book, the number of such errors
has been reduced.
EDWARD DOWDEN.
DUBLIN, June 1897.
CONTENTS
BOOK THE FIRST THE MIDDLE AGES
CHAPTER PAGE
I. NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY THE NATIONAL EPIC THE
EPIC OF ANTIQUITY ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY . 3
II. LYRICAL POETRY FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX FABLIAUX
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 24
III. .DIDACTIC LITERATURE SERMONS HISTORY .... 40
IV. .LATEST MEDIEVAL POETS THE DRAMA 58
BOOK THE SECOND THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
I. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 8 1
II. FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE 96
BOOK THE THIRD THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
I. LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER . . . -131
II. THE FRENCH ACADEMY PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES) RELIGION
(PASCAL) 147
III. THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE) . . . l6o
IV. SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS 173
V. BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE 183
VI. COMEDY AND TRAGEDY MOLIERE RACINE .... 196
VII. BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS FENELON 2ig
VIII. TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY .... 235
x CONTENTS
BOOK THE FOURTH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MEMOIRS AND HISTORY POETRY THE THEATRE THE NOVEL 251
II. MONTESQUIEU VAUVENARGUES VOLTAIRE .... 273
III. DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA PHILOSOPHERS, ECONO-
MISTS, CRITICS BUFFON 294
IV. ROUSSEAU BEAUMARCHAIS BERNARD! N DE SAINT-PIERRE
ANDRE CHENIER 3!!
BOOK THE FIFTH 1789-1850
I. THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE MADAME DE STAEL
CHATEAUBRIAND 335
II. THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 354
III. POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 363
IV. THE NOVEL 396
V. HISTORY LITERARY CRITICISM 4! I
BIBLIOGRAPHY 429
INDEX 437
BOOK THE FIRST
THE MIDDLE AGES
THE MIDDLE AGES
CHAPTER I
NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY THE NATIONAL
EPIC THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY ROMANCES
OF LOVE AND COURTESY
THE literature of the Middle Ages is an expression of the
spirit of feudalism and of the genius of the Church.
From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose
the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to
woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those
of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through alle-
gory into art. Against these high conceptions, and
the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the
positive intellect and the mocking temper of France
reacted ; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the
bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered
the chivalric ideals. At length the mediaeval concep-
tions were exhausted. Literature dwindled as its sources
were impoverished ; ingenuities and technical formalities
replaced imagination. The minds of men were prepared
to accept the new influences of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.
FRENCH LITERATURE
NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY
The oldest monument of the French language is found
in the Strasburg Oaths (842) ; the oldest French poem
possessing literary merit is the Vie de Saint Alexis, of
which a redaction belonging to the middle of the eleventh
century survives. The passion of piety and the passion
of combat, the religious and the warrior motives, found
early expression in literature ; from the first arose the
Lives of Saints and other devout writings, from the second
arose the chansons dc geste. They grew side by side, and
had a like manner of development. If one takes pre-
cedence of the other, it is only because by the chances of
time Saint Alexis remains to us, and the forerunners of
the Chanson de Roland are lost. With each species of
poetry cantilenes short lyrico - epic poems preceded
the narrative form. Both the profane and what may be
called the religious chanson de gcste were sung or recited
by the same jongleurs men of a class superior to the
vulgar purveyors of amusement. Gradually the poems
of both kinds expanded in length, and finally prose nar-
rative took the place of verse.
The Lives of Saints are in the main founded on Latin
originals ; the names of their authors are commonly
unknown. Saint Alexis, a tale of Syriac origin, possibly
the work of Tedbalt, a canon of Vernon, consists of 125
stanzas, each of five lines, which are bound together
by a single assonant rhyme. It tells of the chastity and
poverty of the saint, who flies from his virgin bride,
lives among beggars, returns unrecognised to his father's
LIVES OF SAINTS 5
house, endures the insults of the servants, and, dying
at Rome, receives high posthumous honours ; finally,
he is rejoined by his wife the poet here adding to the
legend in the presence of God, among the company
of the angels. Some of the sacred poems are derived
from the Bible, rhymed versions of which were part
of the jongleur's equipment ; some from the apocryphal
gospels, or legends of Judas, of Pilate, of the Cross, or,
again, from the life of the Blessed Virgin. The literary
value of these is inferior to that of the versified Lives of
the Saints. About the tenth century the marvels of
Eastern hagiography became known in France, and gave
a powerful stimulus to the devout imagination. A cer-
tain rivalry existed between the claims of profane and
religious literature, and a popular audience for narrative
poems designed for edification was secured by their re-
cital in churches. Wholly fabulous some of these are
as the legend of St. Margaret but they were not on
this account the less welcome or the less esteemed. In
certain instances the tale is dramatically placed in the
mouth of a narrator, and thus the way was in a measure
prepared for the future mystery-plays.
More than fifty of these Lives of Saints are known,
composed generally in octosyllabic verse, and varying in
length from some hundreds of lines to ten thousand. In
the group which treats of the national saints of France,
an element of history obscured by errors, extravagances,
and anachronisms may be found. The purely legendary
matter occupies a larger space in those derived from the
East, in which the religious ideal is that of the her-
mit life. The celebrated Barlaam et Joasaph, in which
Joasaph, son of a king of India, escaping from his
father's restraints, fulfils his allotted life as a Christian
6 FRENCH LITERATURE
ascetic, is traceable to a Buddhist source. The narra-
tives of Celtic origin such as those of the Purgatory
of St. Patrick and the voyages of St. Brendan are
coloured by a tender mysticism, and sometimes charm
us with a strangeness of adventure, in which a feeling
for external nature, at least in its aspects of wonder,
appears. The Celtic saints are not hermits of the
desert, but travellers or pilgrims. Among the lives of
contemporary saints, by far the most remarkable is that
of our English Becket by Gamier de Pont-Sainte-
Maxence. Gamier had himself known the archbishop ;
he obtained the testimony of witnesses in England ; he
visited the places associated with the events of Becket's
life ; his work has high value as an historical document ;
it possesses a personal accent, rare in such writings ; a
genuine dramatic vigour ; and great skill and harmonious
power in its stanzas of five rhyming lines.
A body of short poems, inspired by religious feeling,
and often telling of miracles obtained by the inter-
cession of the Virgin or the saints, is known as Contes
pieux. Many of these were the work of Gautier de
Coinci (1177-1236), a Benedictine monk; he translates
from Latin sources, but with freedom, adding matter of
his own, and in the course of his pious narratives gives
an image, far from flattering, of the life and manners of
his own time. It is he who tells of the robber who,
being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures
to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days
by her white hands, and received his pardon ; and of
the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew
no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was
proved a holy man by the five roses that came from
his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name;
PIOUS TALES 7
and of the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of
disorder, yet still addressed a daily prayer to the Virgin,
and who, returning after long years, found that the
Blessed Mary had filled her place, and that her absence
was unknown. The collection known as Vies des Peres
exhibits the same naivete of pious feeling and imagina-
tion. Man is weak and sinful ; but by supernatural aid
the humble are exalted, sinners are redeemed, and the
suffering innocent are avenged. Even Theophile, the
priest who sold his soul to the devil, on repentance
receives back from the Queen of Heaven the very docu-
ment by which he had put his salvation in pawn. The
sinner (Chevalier au barillef) who endeavours for a year
to fill the hermit's little cask at running streams, and
endeavours in vain, finds it brimming the moment one
tear of true penitence falls into the vessel. Most ex-
quisite in its feeling is the tale of the Tombeur de Notre-
Damc a poor acrobat a jongleur turned monk who
knows not even the Pater noster or the Credo, and can
only offer before our Lady's altar his tumbler's feats ; he
is observed, and as he sinks worn out and faint before
the shrine, the Virgin is seen to descend, with her angelic
attendants, and to wipe away the sweat from her poor
servant's forehead. If there be no other piety in such a
tale as this, there is at least the piety of human pity.
II
THE NATIONAL EPIC
Great events and persons, a religious and national
spirit, and a genius for heroic narrative being given,
epic literature arises, as it were, inevitably. Short poems,
8 FRENCH LITERATURE
partly narrative, partly lyrical, celebrate victories or
defeats, the achievements of conquerors or defenders,
and are sung to relieve or to sustain the passion of the
time. The French epopee had its origin in the national
songs of the Germanic invaders of Gaul, adopted from
their conquerors by the Gallo-Romans. With the bap-
tism of Clovis at Reims, and the acceptance of Chris-
tianity by the Franks (496), a national consciousness
began to exist a national and religious ideal arose.
Epic heroes Clovis, Clotaire, Dagobert, Charles Martel
became centres for the popular imagination ; an echo
of the Dagobert songs is found in Floovent, a poem of
the twelfth century ; eight Latin lines, given in the
Vie de Saint Faron by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux,
preserve, in their ninth-century rendering, a fragment of
the songs which celebrated Clotaire II. Doubtless
more and more in these lost cantilcncs the German
element yielded to the French, and finally the two
streams of literature French and German separated ;
gradually, also, the lyrical element yielded to the epic,
and the chanson de geste was developed from these
songs.
In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against
Islam, a great epic figure appeared ; on his person
converged the epic interest ; he may be said to have
absorbed into himself, for the imagination of the singers
and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and
even, at a later time, of his successors ; their deeds
became his deeds, their fame was merged in his ; he
stood forth as the representative of France. We may
perhaps regard the ninth century as the period of the
transformation of the cantilenes into the chansons de
gcste ; in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth
THE HISTORICAL BASIS 9
century reduced to prose from hexameters, but not
completely reduced discovered at La Haye (and
named after the place of its discovery), is found an
epic episode of Carlovingian war, probably derived
from a chanson de gcste of the preceding century. In
each chanson the gesta}- the deeds or achievements of a
heroic person, are glorified, and large as may be the
element of invention in these poems, a certain histori-
cal basis or historical germ may be found, with few
exceptions, in each. Roland was an actual person, and
a battle was fought at Roncevaux in 778. William of
Orange actually encountered the Saracens at Villedaigne
in 793. Renaud de Montauban lived and fought, not
indeed against Charlemagne, but against Charles Martel.
Ogier, Girard de Roussillon, Raoul de Cambrai, were not
mere creatures of the fancy. Even when the narrative
records no historical series of events, it may express their
general significance, and condense into itself something
of the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, how-
ever, fantasy made a conquest of the historical domain ;
a way for the triumph of fantasy had been opened by
the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its
wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth, its
conventional types of character, its endlessly -repeated
incidents of romance the child nourished by wild beasts,
the combat of unrecognised father and son, the hero
vulnerable only in one point, the vindication of the
calumniated wife or maiden ; and by the over-labour
of fantasy, removed far from nature and reality, the epic
material was at length exhausted.
The oldest surviving chanson de geste is the SONG
OF ROLAND, and it is also the best. The disaster of
1 Gestes meant (i) deeds, (2) their history, (3) the heroic family.
io FRENCH LITERATURE
Roncevaux, probably first sung in cantilcnes, gave rise
to other chansons, two of which, of earlier -date than
the surviving poem, can in a measure be reconstructed
from the Chronicle of Turpin and from a Latin Carmen
de proditione Guenonis. These, however, do not detract
from the originality of the noble work in our possession,
some of the most striking episodes of which are not else-
where found. The oldest manuscript is at Oxford, and
the last line has been supposed to give the author's name
Touroude (Latinised " Turoldus ") but this may have
been the name of the jongleur who sang, or the tran-
scriber who copied. The date of the poem lies between
that of the battle of Hastings, 1066, where the minstrel
Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland, and
the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and
he may have been one of the Norman William's followers
in the invasion of England.
More than any other poem, the Chanson de Roland
deserves to be named the Iliad of the Middle Ages. On
August 15, 778, the rearguard of Charlemagne's army,
returning from a successful expedition to the north of
Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque moun-
taineers in the valley of Roncevaux. Among those
who fell was Hrodland (Roland), Count of the march of
Brittany. For Basques, the singers substituted a host
of Saracens, who, after promise of peace, treacherously
attack the Franks, with the complicity of Roland's enemy,
the traitor Ganelon. By Roland's side is placed his com-
panion-in-arms, Olivier, brave but prudent, brother of
Roland's betrothed, la belle Atide, who learns her lover's
death, and drops dead at the feet of Charlemagne. In
fact but thirty-six years of age, Charlemagne is here a
majestic old man, a la barbe flcurie, still full of heroic
SONG OF ROLAND 11
vigour. Around him are his great lords Duke Naime,
the Nestor of this Iliad ; Archbishop Turpin, the warrior
prelate ; Oger the Dane ; the traitor Ganelon. And
overhead is God, who will send his angels to bear
heavenwards the soul of the gallant Roland. The idea
of the poem is at once national and religious the
struggle between France, as champion of Christendom,
and the enemies of France and of God. Its spirit is that
of the feudal aristocracy of the eleventh century. The
characters are in some degree representative of general
types, but that of Roland is clearly individualised ; the
excess of soldierly pride which will not permit him, until
too late, to sound his horn and recall Charlemagne to
his aid, is a glorious fault. When all his comrades have
fallen, he still continues the strife ; and when he dies, it
is with his face to the retreating foe. His fall is not
unavenged on the Saracens and on the traitor. The
poem is written in decasyllabic verse in all 4000 lines
divided into sections or laisses of varying length, the
lines of each laisse being held together by a. single
assonance. 1 And such is the form in which the best
chansons de geste are written. The decasyllabic line,
derived originally from popular Latin verse, rhythmical
rather than metrical, such as the Roman legionaries
sang, is the favourite verse of the older chansons. The
alexandrine, 2 first seen in the Pelerinage de Jerusalem of
the early years of the twelfth century, in general in-
dicates later and inferior work. The laisse, bound in
one by its identical assonance, might- contain five lines
1 Assonance, i. e. vowel-rhyme, without an agreement of consonants.
2 Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixth accented syllable.
In the decasyllabic line the cesura generally followed the fourth, but some-
times the sixth, tonic syllable.
12 FRENCH LITERATURE
or five hundred. In chansons of late date the full
rhyme often replaces assonance ; but inducing, as it
did in unskilled hands, artificial and feeble expansions
of the sense, rhyme was a cause which co-operated
with other causes in the decline of this form of narrative
poetry.
Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achieve-
ments of one epic personage or one heroic family fell
into a group, and the idea of cycles of songs having
arisen, the later poets forced many independent subjects
to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charle-
magne), or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon
of Mayence. The second of these had, indeed, a genuine
cyclic character : it told of the resistance of the south of
France to the Mussulmans. The last cycle to develop
was that of the Crusades. Certain poems or groups of
poems may be distinguished as gcstcs of the provinces,
including the Geste des Lorrains, that of the North
(Raoul de Cambrai), that of Burgundy, and others. 1
Among these may be placed the beautiful tale of Amis
et Amilcs, a glorification of friendship between man and
man, which endures all trials and self-sacrifices. Other
poems, again, are unconnected with any of these cycles ;
and, indeed, the cyclic division is more a convenience of
classification than a fact in the spontaneous development
of this form of art. The entire period of the evolution
of epic song extends from the tenth or eleventh to the
fifteenth century, or, we might say, from the Chanson de
Roland to the Chronique de Bertrand Duguesclin. The
eleventh century produced the most admirable work ;
1 The epopee composed in Provenfal, sung but not transcribed, is wholly
lost. The development of lyric poetry in the South probably checked the
development of the epic.
SPIRIT OF THE NATIONAL EPIC 13
in the twelfth century the chansons are more numerous,
but nothing was written of equal merit with the Song of
Ronald ; after the death of Louis VII. (i 180) the old epic
material was rehandled and beaten thin the decadence
was already in progress.
The style in which the chansons de geste are written
is something traditional, something common to the
people and to the time, rather than characteristic of the
individual authors. They show little of the art of ar-
ranging or composing the matter so as to produce an
unity of effect : the narrative straggles or condenses
itself as if by accident ; skill in transitions is unknown.
The study of character is rude and elementary : a man
is either heroic or dastard, loyal or a traitor ; wholly
noble, or absolutely base. Yet certain types of man-
hood and womanhood are presented with power and
beauty. The feeling for external nature, save in some
traditional formulae, hardly appears. The passion for
the marvellous is everywhere present : St. Maurice, St.
George, and a shining company, mounted on white
steeds, will of a sudden bear down the hordes of the
infidel ; an angel stands glorious behind the throne of
Charlemagne ; or in narrative of Celtic origin angels
may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to
whom even kings owe homage, rules over all ; Jesus and
Mary are watchful of the soldiers of the cross ; Paradise
receives the souls of the faithful. As for earth, there is
no land so gay or so dear as la douce France. The
Emperor is above all the servant and protector of the
Church. As the influence of the great feudal lords in-
creased, they are magnified often at the expense of the
monarchy ; yet even when in high rebellion, they secretly
feel the duty of loyalty. The recurring poetic epithet
14 FRENCH LITERATURE
and phrase of formula found in the chansons de gcste
often indicate rather than veil a defect of imagination.
Episodes and adventures are endlessly repeated from
poem to poem with varying circumstances the siege,
the assault, the capture, the duel of Christian hero and
Saracen giant, the Paynim princess amorous of a fair
French prisoner, the marriage, the massacre, and a score
of other favourite incidents.
The popularity of the French epopee extended be-
yond France. Every country of Europe translated or
imitated the chansons de geste. Germany made the
fortunate choice of Roland and Aliscans. In England
t o
two of trfe worst examples, Ficrabras and Otincl, were
special favourites. In Norway the chansons were
applied to the purpose of religious propaganda. Italy
made the tales of Roland, Ogier, Renaud, her own.
Meanwhile the national epopee declined in France ; a
breath of scepticism touched and withered the leafage
and blossom of imagination ; it even became possible
to parody as in Audigier the heroic manner. The
employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and of
the alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, en-
couraged what may be called poetical padding. The
influence of the Breton romances diverted the chansons
dc geste into ways of fantasy ; " We shall never know,"
writes M. Leon Gautier, " the harm which the Round
Table has done us." Finally, verse became a weariness,
and was replaced by prose. The decline has progressed
to a fall.
THEBES AND TROY 15
III
THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY
Later to develop than the national epopee was that
which formed the cycle of antiquity. Their romantic
matter made the works of the Greco-Roman decadence
even more attractive than the writings of the great
classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry
with the singers of the chansons de geste. These
poems, which mediasvalise ancient literature poems
often of portentous length have been classified in
three groups epic romances, historical or pseudo-
historical romances, and mythological tales, including
the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the
first group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF
THEBES, the work of an unknown author, founded
upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, pre-
ceded by the story of'CEdipus. It opened the way
for the vast ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten
years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chief
sources of Benoit were versions, probably more or
less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan
war, ascribed to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary
defender of the city, and the Cretan Dictys, one of
the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on
a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive
faculty to work, and among these by far the most
interesting and admirable is the story of Troilus and
Briseida, known better to us by her later name of
Cressida. Through Boccaccio's // Filostrato this tale
reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it
1 6 FRENCH LITERATURE
gave rise to the strange, half-heroic, half-satirical play of
Shakespeare.
Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting
Virgil to the taste of his contemporaries in his Eneas,
where the courtship of the Trojan hero and Lavinia is
related in the chivalric manner. All these poems are
composed in the swift octosyllabic verse ; the Troy
extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of
the personages are classical, the spirit and life of the
romances are wholly mediaeval : Troilus, and Hector,
and yEneas are conceived as if knights of the Middle
Ages ; their \vars and loves are those of gallant cheva-
liers. The Romance of Julius Cccsar (in alexandrine
verse), the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing
in the second half of the thirteenth century, versifies,
with some additions from the Commentaries of Caesar, an
earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin (about 1240)
of Lucan's Pharsalia the oldest translation in prose of
any secular work of antiquity. Caesar's passion for
Cleopatra in the Romance is the love prescribed to
good knights by the amorous code of the writer's day,
and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something of the
charm of Tristram's Iseult.
If Julius Cczsar may be styled historical, the ROMAN
D'ALEXANDRE, a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the
form of which this romance gave its name "alexan-
drine " verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and
Alexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legen-
dary. All or nearly all that was written during the
Middle Ages in French on the subject of Alexander
may be traced back to Latin versions of a Greek
compilation, perhaps of the first century, ascribed to
Callisthenes, the companion of Alexander on his Asiatic
ROMANCE OF ALEXANDER 17
expedition. 1 It is uncertain how much the Alexandra
may owe to a Provencal poem on the same subject,
written in the early years of the twelfth century, pro-
bably by Alberic de Briangon, of which only a short
fragment, but that of high merit, has been preserved.
From his birth, and his education by Aristotle and the
enchanter Nectanebus, to the division, as death ap-
proaches, of his empire between his twelve peers, the
story of Alexander is a series of marvellous adventures;
the imaginary wonders of the East, monstrous wild
beasts, water-women, flower-maidens, 'Amazons, rain of
fire, magic mountains, magic fountains, trees of the sun
and of the moon, are introduced with a liberal hand.
The hero is specially distinguished by the virtue of
liberality ; a jongleur who charms him by lays sung to
the flute, is rewarded with the lordship of Tarsus, a
worthy example for the twelfth-century patrons of the
poet. The romance had a resounding fame.
Of classical poets, Ovid ranked next to Virgil in the
esteem of the Middle Ages. The mythology of paganism
was sanctified by the assumption that it was an allegory
of Christian mysteries, and thus the stories might first be
enjoyed by the imagination, and then be expounded in
their spiritual meaning. The Metamorphoses supplied
Chretien de Troyes with the subject of his Philomena;
other W 7 riters gracefully dealt with the tales of Piramus
and of Narcissus. But the most important work founded
upon Ovid was a versified translation of the Metamor-
phoses (before 1305) by a Franciscan monk, Chretien
Legouais de Sainte - Maure, with appended interpreta-
1 Not quite all, for certain borrowings were made from the correspondence
of Alexander with Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, and from the Alexandri
magni tier ad Paraii.'sum.
1 8 FRENCH LITERATURE
tions, scientific, historical, moral, or religious, of the
mythological fables. Ovid's Art of Love, of which more
than one rendering was made, aided in the formation
or development of the mediaeval theory of love and the
amorous casuistry founded upon that theory.
IV
ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY
Under the gen'eral title of the Epopee courtoise the
Epopee of Courtesy may be grouped those romances
which are either works of pure imagination or of un-
certain origin, or which lead us back to Byzantine or
to Celtic sources. They include some of the most
beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages.
Appearing first about the opening of the twelfth cen-
tury, later in date than the early chansons de geste, and
contemporary with the courtly lyric poetry of love,
they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and graceful
aspect ; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often
surprises of beauty ; they are bright in colour, and varied
in the play of life ; the passions which they interpret, and
especially the passion of love, are felt with an exquisite
delicacy and a knowledge of the workings of the heart.
They move lightly in their rhymed or assonanced verse ;
even when they passed into the form of prose they
retained something of their charm. Breton harpers wan-
dering through France and England made Celtic themes
known through their lais , the fame of King Arthur was
spread abroad by these singers and by the History of
Geoffrey of Monmouth. French poets welcomed the
new matter of romance, infused into it their own chivalric
ROMANCES OF TRISTAN 19
spirit, made it a receptacle for their ideals of gallantry,
courtesy, honour, grace, and added their own beautiful
inventions. With the story of King Arthur was connected
that of the sacred vessel the graal in which Joseph of
Arimathea at the cross had received the Saviour's blood.
And thus the rude Breton lais were elevated not only to
a chivalric but to a religious purpose.
The romances of Tristan may certainly be named as
of Celtic origin. About 1150 an Anglo-Norman poet,
BROUL, brought together the scattered narrative of his
adventures in a romance, of which a large fragment
remains. The secret loves of Tristan and Iseut, their
woodland wanderings, their dangers and escapes, are
related with fine imaginative sympathy ; but in this ver-
sion of the tale the fatal love-philtre operates only for a
period of three years ; Iseut, with Tristan's consent, re-
turns to her husband, King Marc ; and then a second
passion is born in their hearts, a passion which is the
offspring not of magic but of natural attraction, and at
a critical moment of peril the fragment closes. About
twenty years later (1170) the tale was again sung by an
Anglo-Norman named THOMAS. Here again in a frag-
ment we read of Tristan's marriage, a marriage only in
name, to the white-handed Iseut of Brittany, his fidelity
of heart to his one first love, his mortal wound and deep
desire to see the Queen of Cornwall, the device of the
white or black sails to announce the result of his entreaty
that she should come, his deception, and the death of his
true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenth
century was composed a long prose romance, often re-
handled and expanded, upon the same subject, in which
Iseut and Tristan meet at the last moment and die in a
close embrace.
20 FRENCH LITERATURE
Le ChZvrefenille (The Honeysuckle), one of several
lais by a twelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in Eng-
land, but a native of France, tells gracefully of an assig-
nation of Tristan and Iseut, their meeting in the forest,
and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France wrote
with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy
of the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction
which was rare among the poets of her time. In Les
Deux Amants, the manly pride of passion, which in a trial
of strength declines the adventitious aid of a reviving
potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the lover
and his beloved. In Yonec and in Lanval tales of love
and chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in
which the element of wonder is subdued to beauty. But
the most admirable poem by Marie de France is unques-
tionably her Eliduc. The Breton knight Eliduc is pas-
sionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the
old King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle.
Her tokens of affection, girdle and ring, are received by
Eliduc in silence ; for, though her passion is returned, he
has left in Brittany, unknown to Guilliadon, a faithful
wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending love of the
wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and her-
self retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and
live in charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart
for the wrong that they have done. In the end they
part ; Eliduc embraces the religious life, and the two
loving women are united as sisters in the same abbey.
Wace, in his romance of the Brut (1155), which renders
into verse the Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes
the earliest mention of the Round Table. Whether the
Arthurian legends be of Celtic or of French origin and
the former seems probable the French romances of
CHRETIEN DE TROVES 21
King Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic
sources ; they may be said to begin with CHRETIEN DE
TROVES, whose lost poem on Tristan was composed
about 1160. Between that date and 1175 he wrote his
Erec et Enide (a tale known to us through Tennyson's
idyll of Geraint and Enid, derived from the Welsh
Mabinogiori], Cligcs, Le Chevalier de la CJiarrette, Le Che-
valier au Lion, and Perceval. In Cligcs the maidenhood
of his beloved Fenice, wedded in form to the Emperor
of Constantinople, is guarded by a magic potion ; like
Romeo's Juliet, she sleeps in apparent death, but, happier
than Juliet, she recovers from her trance to fly with her
lover to the court of Arthur. The CJievalier de la CJiarrette,
at first unknown by name, is discovered to be Lancelot,
who, losing his horse, has condescended, in order that
he may obtain sight of Queen Guenievre, and in pas-
sionate disregard of the conventions of knighthood, to
seat himself in a cart which a dwarf is leading. After
gallant adventures on the Queen's behalf, her indignant
resentment of his unknightly conduct, estrangement, and
rumours of death, he is at length restored to her favour. 1
While Perceval was still unfinished, Chretien de Troyes
died. It was continued by other poets, and through this
romance the quest of the holy graal became a portion of
the- Arthurian cycle. A Perceval by ROBERT DE BORON,
who wrote in the early part of the thirteenth century,
has been lost; but a prose redaction of the romance
exists, which closes with the death of King Arthur. The
great Lancelot in prose a vast compilation (about
1220) reduces the various adventures of its hero and of
other knights of the King to their definitive form; and
1 Chretien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the love of Lancelot for the
Queen.
22 FRENCH LITERATURE
here the achievement of the graal is assigned, not to
Perceval, but to the saintly knight Sir Galaad ; Arthur is
slain in combat with the revolter Mordret ; and Lancelot
and the Queen enter into the life of religion. Passion
and piety are alike celebrated ; the rude Celtic legends
have been sanctified. The earlier history of the sacred
vase was traced by Robert de Boron in his Joseph
d'AriinatJiie (or the Saint-Graal), soon to be rehandled
and developed in prose ; and he it was who, in his
Merlin also presently converted into prose on sugges-
tions derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, brought the
great enchanter into Arthurian romance. By the middle
of the thirteenth century the cycle had received its full
development. Towards the middle of the fourteenth
century, in Perceforest, an attempt was made to connect
the legend of Alexander the Great with that of King
Arthur.
Beside the so-called Breton romances, the Epopee
courtoise may be taken to include many poems of Greek,
of Byzantine, or of uncertain origin, such as the Roman
de la Violette, the tale of a wronged wife, having much in
common with that novel of Boccaccio with which Shake-
speare's Cymbeline is connected, the Floire et Blanche-
fteur; the Partenopeus de Blois, a kind of " Cupid and
Psyche " story, with the parts of the lovers transposed,
and others. In the early years of the thirteenth century
the prose romance rivalled in popularity the romance
in verse. The exquisite chante-fable of Aucassin et
Nicolette, of the twelfth century, is partly in prose, partly
in assonanced laisses of seven-syllable verse. It is a
story of the victory of love : the heir of Count Garin of
Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of un-
known birth, purchased from the Saracens, who proves
SPIRIT OF THE E~POPE"E COURTOISE 23
to be daughter of the King of Carthage, and in the
end the lovers are united. In one remarkable passage
unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the
peasant, whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with
the lighter troubles of the aristocratic class.
In general the poems of the popte courtoise exhibit
much of the brilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry
as idealised by the imagination ; dramatic situations are
ingeniously devised; the emotions of the chief actors are
expounded and analysed, sometimes with real delicacy ;
but in the conception of character, in the recurring inci-
dents, in the types of passion, in the creation of marvel
and surprise, a large conventional element is present.
Love is independent of marriage, or rather the relation
of wedlock excludes love in the accepted sense of the
word ; the passion is almost necessarily illegitimate, and
it comes as if it were an irresistible fate ; the first advance
is often made by the woman ; but, though at war with
the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennobling
influence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage
and self-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the
Spanish Amadis des Gaules, something of the spirit of the
mediaeval romances was carried into the chivalric and
pastoral romances of the seventeenth century.
CHAPTER II
LYRICAL POETRY FABLES, AND RENARD THE
FOX FABLIAUX THE ROMANCE OF THE
ROSE
I
LYRICAL POETRY
LONG before the date of any lyrical poems that have
come down to us, song and dance were a part of the
life of the people of the North as well as of the South
of France ; religious festivals were celebrated with a
gaiety which had its mundane side ; love and malicious
sport demanded an expression as well as pious joy.
But in tracing the forms of lyrical verse anterior to the
middle of the twelfth century, when the troubadour
influence from the South began to be felt, we must be
guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later
poetry, in which and especially in the refrains earlier
fragments have been preserved.
The common characteristic which distinguishes the
earlier lyrics is the presence in them of an objective
element : they do not merely render an emotion ; they
contain something of a story, or they suggest a situation.
In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imagined
singer is commonly a woman. The chanson d'histoire is
also known as chanson de toile, for the songs were such
84
VARIETIES OF SONG 25
as suited "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun."
Their inspiring motive was a girl's joy or grief in love ;
they lightly outline or suggest the facts of a miniature
drama of passion, and are aided by the repeated lyrical
cry of a refrain. As yet, love was an affair for the
woman ; it was she alone who made a confession of
the heart. None of these poems are later than the
close of the twelfth century. If the author be re-
presented as actor or witness, the poem is rather a
chanson a personnagcs than a chanson d'histoire ; most
frequently it is a wife who is supposed to utter to
husband, or lover, or to the poet, her complaint of the
grievous servitude of marriage. The aube is, again, a
woman's song, uttered as a parting cry when the lark
at daybreak, or the watcher from his tower, warns her
lover to depart. In the pastourelle a form much culti-
vated a knight and a shepherdess meet ; love proposals
are made, and find a response favourable or the reverse ;
witnesses or companions may be present, and take a
part in the action. The rondet is a dancing-song, in
which the refrain corresponds with one of the move-
ments of the dance ; a solo-singer is answered by the
response of a chorus; in the progress of time the
rondet assumed the precise form of the modern triolet ;
the theme was still love, at first treated seriously if not
tragically, but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It
is conjectured that all these lyrical forms had their
origin in the festivities of May, when the return of
spring was celebrated by dances in which women alone
took part, a survival from the pagan rites of Venus.
The poesie courtoise, moulded in form and inspired in
its sentiment by the Provencal lyrics, lies within the
compass of about one hundred and thirty years, from
26 FRENCH LITERATURE
1150 to 1280. The Crusade of 1147 served, doubtless, as
a point of meeting for men of the North and of the South ;
but, apart from this, we may bear in mind the fact that
the mediaeval poet wandered at will from country to
country and from court to court. In 1137, Louis VII.
married Eleonore of Aquitaine, who was an ardent ad-
mirer of the poetry of courtesy. Her daughters inherited
her taste, and themselves became patronesses of literature
at the courts of their husbands, Henri de Champagne
and Thibaut de Blois. From these courts, and that of
Paris, this poetry of culture spread, and the earlier singers
were persons of royal or noble rank and birth. The
chief period of its cultivation was probably from 1200 to
1240. During the half-century before its sudden cessa-
tion, while continuing to be a fashion in courts and high
society, it reached the wealthy bourgeoisie of the North.
At Arras, where Jacques Bretel and Adam de la Halle,
the hunchback, were eminent in song, it had its latest
moments of splendour.
It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the
imagination, dealing with an elaborated theory of love ;
the simple and spontaneous cry of passion is rarely
heard. According to the amorous doctrine, love exists
only between a married woman and the aspirant to her
heart, and the art of love is regulated by a stringent
code. Nothing can be claimed by the lover as a right ;
the grace of his lady, who is placed far above him, must
be sought as a favour ; for that favour he must qualify
himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as
the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and
patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration;
hence often the monotony of artificial passion ; hence,
also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, and sought-
METRICAL FORMS 27
out delicacies of style. In the earlier chansons some
outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally pre-
sent ; but, as the amorous metaphysics developed, what
came to be admired was the skill shown in manipulating
a conventional sentiment ; the lady became an abstrac-
tion of exalted beauty, the lover an interpreter of the
theory of love ; the most personal of passions lost the
character of individuality. Occasionally, as in the poems
of the Chatelain de Couci, of Conon de Bethune, of
Thibaut de Champagne, and of Adam de la Halie,
something personal to the writer may be discerned;
but in general the poetry is that of a doctrine and of
a school.
In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvere
was founded rather on his music than his verse. The
metrical forms were various, and were gradually reduced
to rule ; the ballette, of Provencal origin, was a more
elaborate rondet, consisting of stanzas and refrain ; the
cstampie (stampon, to beat the ground with the foot) was
a dancing-song ; the lyric /at, virtually identical with
the descort, consisted of stanzas which varied in struc-
ture ; the motet, a name originally applied to pieces
of church music, was freer in versification, and occa-
sionally dealt with popular themes. Among forms
which cannot be included under the general title
of chansons, are those in dialogue derived from the
Provencal literature ; in the tenson or debat the two
interlocutors put forth their opinions on what theme
they may please ; in the jeu parti one of the imagined
disputants proposes two contrary solutions of some
poetical or amorous question, and defends whichever
solution his associate refuses to accept; the earliest jeu
parti, attributed to Gace Bruld and Count Geoffroi of
28 FRENCH LITERATURE
Brittany, belongs to the second half of the twelfth
century. The serventois were historical poems, and
among them songs of the crusades, or moral, or re-
ligious, or satirical pieces, directed against woman and
the worship of woman. To these various species we
should add the songs in honour of the saints, the sor-
rows of the Virgin uttered at the foot of the cross, and
other devout lyrics which lie outside the po/sie courtoise.
With the close of the thirteenth century this fashion of
artificial love - lyric ceased : a change passed over the
modes of thought and feeling in aristocratic society,
and other forms took the place of those found in the
pofcie courtoise.
II
FABLES AND RENARD THE Fox
The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages
to give prominence to that part of classical literature
which seemed best suited to the purpose of edification
caused the fables of Phaedrus and Avianus to be re-
garded with special honour. Various renderings from
the thirteenth century onwards were made under the
title of Isopets, 1 a name appropriated to collections of
fables whether derived from ^sop or from other sources.
The twelfth-century fables in verse of Marie de France,
founded on an English collection, include apologues
derived not only from classical authors but from the
tales of popular tradition. A great collection made
about 1450 by Steinhcewel, a physician of Ulm, was
1 The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed author of the
fables of Phsedrus, while that of Phsedrus was still unknown.
RENARD THE FOX 29
translated into French, and became the chief source of
later collections, thus appearing in the remote ancestry
of the work of La Fontaine. The aesthetic value of the
mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is
small ; the didactic intention was strong, the literary art
was feeble.
It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the
ROMAN DE RENARD. The cycle consists of many
parts or "branches" connected by a common theme;
originating and obscurely developed in the North, in
Picardy, in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it
suddenly appeared in literature in the middle of the
twelfth century, and continued to receive additions
and variations during nearly two hundred years. The
spirit of the Renard poems is essentially bourgeois ; the
heroes of the chansons de geste achieve their wondrous
deeds by strength and valour ; Renard the fox is power-
ful by skill and cunning ; the greater beasts his chief
enemy the wolf, and others are no match for his
ingenuity and endless resources ; but he is power-
less against smaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the
sparrow. The names of the personages are either^ sig-
nificant names, such as Noble, the lion, and Chanticleer,
the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the wolf,
Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass ; and
as certain of these proper names are found in the eastern
district, it has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia
in the tenth century first told in Latin the wars of fox
and wolf, and that through translations the epic matter,
derived originally trom popular tradition, reached the
trouveres of the North. While in a certain degree
typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual ;
Renard is not the representative merely of a species ; he
30 FRENCH LITERATURE
is Renard, an individual, with a personality of his own ;
Isengrin is not merely a wolf, he is the particular wolf
Isengrin ; each is an epic individual, heroic and un-
dying. Classical^ fable remotely exerted an influence
on certain branches of the Romance ; but the vital
substance of the epic is derived from the stores of
popular tradition iii which material from all quarters
the North of Europe and the Eastern world had
been gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such
material the chief difficulty lies in preserving a just
measure between the beast-character and the imported
element of humanity. Little by little the anthropo-
morphic features were developed at the expense of veri-
similitude ; the beast forms became a mere masquerade ;
the romances were converted into a satire, and the satire
lost rather than gained by the inefficient disguise.
The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only
in a fragmentary way, but they can be in part recon-
structed from the Latin Isengrinus of Nivard of Ghent
(about 1150), and from the German Reinhart Fucks, a
rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri le
Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isen-
grin are here sung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries
against the lesser creatures ; the spirit of these early
branches is one of frank gaiety, untroubled by a didactic
or satirical intention. In the branches of the second
period the parody of human society is apparent ; some
of the episodes are fatiguing in their details ; some are
intolerably gross, but the poem known as the Branch of
the Judgment is masterly an ironical comedy, in which,
without sacrifice of the primitive character of the beast-
epic, the spirit of mediaeval life is transported into the
animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renard before
DECLINE OF RENARD ROMANCES 31
King Noble and his court, is for a moment worsted ; the
fox is vindicated, when suddenly enters a funeral cortege
Chanticleer and his four wives bear upon a litter the dead
body of one of their family, the victim of Renard's wiles.
The prayers for the dead are recited, the burial is cele-
brated with due honour, and Renard is summoned to
justice ; lie heaped upon lie will not save him ; at last he
humbles himself with pious repentance, and promising to
seek God's pardon over-sea, is permitted in his pilgrim's
habit to quit the court. It is this Judgment of Renard
which formed the basis of the Reineke Fuchs, known to
us through the modernisation of Goethe.
From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the
Renard Romances declined. The Judgment was imitated
by inferior hands, and the beasts were more and more
nearly transformed to men ; the spirit of gaiety was re-
placed by seriousness or gloom Renard ceased to be a
light-footed and ingenious rogue ; he became a type of
human fraud and cruelty ; whatever in society was false
and base and merciless became a form of "renardie,"
and by " renardie " the whole world seemed to be ruled.
Such is the temper expressed in Le Couronnement Renard,
written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed
chiefly against the mendicant orders, in which the fox,
turned friar for a season, ascends the throne. Renard
le Nouveau, the work of a poet of Lille, Jacquemart Gelee,
nearly half a century later, represents again the triumph
of the spirit of evil ; although far inferior in execution to
the Judgment, it had remarkable success, to which the
allegory, w r earying to a modern reader, no doubt contri-
buted at a time when allegory was a delight. The last
of the Renard romances, Renard le Contrefait, was com-
posed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiastic who had
32 FRENCH LITERATURE
renounced his profession and turned to trade. In his
leisure hours he spun, in discipleship to Jean de Meun,
,his interminable poem, which is less a romance than an
encyclopedia of all the knowledge and all the opinions
of the author. This latest Renard has a value akin to
that of the second part of Le Roman de la Rose ; it is
a presentation of the ideas and -manners of the time by
one who freely criticised and mocked the powers that be,
both secular and sacred, and who was in sympathy with
a certain movement or tendency towards social, political,
and intellectual reform.
Ill
FABLIAUX
The name fabliaux is applied to short versified talcs,
comic in character, and intended rather for recitation
than for song. Out of a far larger number about one
hundred and fifty have survived. The earliest Richeut
is of the year 1159. From the middle of the twelfth
century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry
of feudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic
observation ; and even in the chansons de geste, in occa-
sional comic episodes, something may be seen which is
in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous
stories, having much in common under their various dis-
guises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and
peoples. The theory which traces the French fabliaux
to Indian originals is unproved, and indeed is unneces-
sary. The East, doubtless, contributed its quota to the
common stock, but so did other quarters of the globe ;
such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only the
THE FABLIAUX 33
particular form which they assume being determined
by local conditions.
The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong espe-
cially to the north and north-east of France, and they
continued to be put forth by their rhymers until about
1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the
thirteenth century being the period of their greatest
popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise
a laugh among folk disposed to good humour ; by de-
grees something of art and skill was attained. The mis-
fortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible store
of merriment ; if woman and the love of woman were
idealised in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge,
and exhibited her as the pretty traitress of a shameless
comedy. If religion was honoured in the age of faith,
the bourgeois spirit found matter of mirth in the
adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks.
Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross ribald
but not voluptuous. To literary distinction they made
small pretence. It sufficed if the tale ran easily in the
current speech, thrown into rhyming octosyllables ; but
brevity, frankness, natural movement are no slight or
common merits in mediaeval poetry, and something of
the social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous
narratives.
To regard them as a satire of class against class, in-
spired by indignation, is to misconceive their true char-
acter ; they are rather miniature comedies or caricatures,
in which every class in turn provides material for mirth.
It may, however, be said that with the writers of the
fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article of
faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular
rank or dignified churchmen occasionally appeared ; but
34 FRENCH LITERATURE
what \ve may call the professional rhymers and reciters
were the humbler jongleurs addressing a bourgeois audi-
ence degraded clerics, unfrocked monks, wandering
students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternating
with misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century
these errant jongleurs ceased to be esteemed ; the great
lord attached a minstrel to his household, and poetry
grew more dignified, more elaborate in its forms, more
edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grew too often
dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written ; but the age
of the jongleurs was over. Virelais, rondeaux, ballades,
chants royaux were the newer fashion ; and the old versi-
fied tale of mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of
the century a thing of the past.
IV
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE
The most extraordinary production in verse of the
thirteenth century is undoubtedly Le Roman de la Rose.
It is indeed no single achievement, but two very re-
markable poems, written at two different periods, by
two authors whose characters and gifts were not only
alien, but opposed two poems which reflect two dif-
ferent conditions of society. Of its twenty-two thousand
octosyllabic lines, upwards of four thousand are the work
of GUILLAUME DE LORRIS ; the remainder is the work of
a later writer, JEAN DE MEUN.
Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and
Montargis. Here, about the year 1200, the earlier poet
was born. He was a scholar, at least as far as knowledge
of Latin extends, and learned above all in the lore of
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 35
love. He died young, probably before 1230, and during
the five years that preceded his death the first part of
Le Roman de la Rose was composed. Its subject is an
allegorised tale of love, his own or imagined, transferred
to the realm of dreams. The writer would fain win the
heart of his beloved, and at the same time he would
instruct all amorous spirits in the art of love. He is
twenty years of age, in the May-morn of youth. He
has beheld his beautiful lady, and been charmed by her
fairness, her grace, her courtesy ; she has received him
with gentleness, but when he declares his love she grows
alarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her
affection ; but her parents intervening, throw obstacles
between the lovers. Such, divested of ornament, alle-
gory, and personification, is the theme of the poem.
To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win
the maiden ; her fears, her virgin modesty and pride,
her kindness, her pity, are the company of friends or
foes by whom the rose is surrounded ; and to harmonise
the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed in the
setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by
the river-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the
walls of a fair orchard, owned by Deduit (Pleasure), of
which the portress is Oiseuse (Idleness) ; on the walls
are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness, Old Age,
Poverty, and other evil powers ; but unterrified by these,
he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf,
among whom is Beauty, led by the god of Love. Sur-
rounded by a thorny hedge is the rosebud on which
all his desire now centres. He is wounded by the
arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns
his commandments and the evils and the gains of love.
Invited by Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtoisie, to ap-
36 FRENCH LITERATURE
proach the rose, he is driven back by Danger and his
companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison
descends from a tower .and discourses against the
service of Love ; Ami offers his consolations ; at length
the lover is again admitted to the flowery precinct,
finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of
a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around
the rose ; the serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and
with a long lament of the lover, the poem (line 4068)
closes.
Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or
did he die while it was still but half composed ? We
may conjecture that it wanted liAle to reach some
denouement perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's
hopes ; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment
actually brought the love-tale to its issue. But even
if the story remained without an end, we possess in
Guillaume's poem a complete medieval Art of Love ;
and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold,
conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories,
pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and
something of ingenious analysis of human passion.
Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of
Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half
its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely
opposite spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun.
The contrast is striking : Guillaume de Lorris was a
refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doc-
trine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman,
an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas ; Jean de Meun
was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator,
in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared
nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn.
JEAN DE MEUN 37
Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued
with the sentiments of chivalry ; Jean was a bourgeois,
eager to instruct, to arouse, to inflame his fellows in a
multitude of matters which concerned the welfare of
their lives. He was little concerned for the lover and
his rose, but was deeply interested in the condition of
society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of know-
ledge. He turned from ideals which seemed spurious
to reason and to nature ; he had read widely in Latin
literature, and found' much that suited his mood and
mind in Boethius' De Consolations PhilosopJiia and in
the De Planctu Natures of the "universal doctor" of the
twelfth century, Alain de Lille, from each of which he
conveyed freely into his poem. Of his life we know
little ; Jean Clopinel was born at Meun on the Loire
about the year 1240 ; he died before the close of 1305 ;
his continuation of Guillaume's Roman was made about
1270. His later poems, a Testament, in which he warned
and exhorted his contemporaries of every class, the
Codicille, which incited to almsgiving, and his numerous
translations, prove the unabated energy of his mind in
his elder years.
The rose is plucked by the lover in the end ; but lover
and rose are almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting
forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopaedia
of the knowledge of his time. Reason discourses on the
dangers of passion, commends friendship or universal
philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the in-
stability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets
charity high above justice ; if love be commendable, it
is as the device of nature for the continuation of the
species. The way to win wqman and to keep her loyalty
is now the unhappy way of squandered largess; formerly
38 FRENCH LITERATURE
it was not so in the golden age of equality, before pri-
vate property was known, when all men held in common
the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of
the future. The god of Love and his barons, with the
hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant a bitter satirist of the
mendicant orders besiege the tower in which Bel-
Accueil is imprisoned, and by force and fraud an
entrance is effected. The old beldame, who watches
over the captive, is corrupted by promises and gifts, and
frankly exposes her own iniquities and those of her sex.
War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus,
sworn enemy of chastity, aiding the assailants. Nature,
devoted to the continuance of the race, mourns over
the violation of her laws by man, unburdens herself of
all her scientific lore in a confession to her chaplain
Ge'nius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover's
party with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity.
The triumph of the lover closes the poem.
The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded;
the love-story becomes a mere frame for setting forth the
views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric
ideal, his satire upon the monkish vices, his revolutionary
notions respecting property and government, his advanced
opinions in science, his frank realism as to the relations
of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his
time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature
which he had studied. He is a powerful satirist, and
passages of narrative and description show that he had a
poet's feeling for beauty ; he handles the language with
the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand,
he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an
imaginative plan ; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it
cannot be denied that as a moral reformer he some-
INFLUENCE OF THE ROMANCE 39
times topples into immorality. The success of the poem
was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France.
It was attacked and defended, and up to the time of
Ronsard its influence on the progress of literature en-
couraging, as it did, to excess the art of allegory and
personification if less than has commonly been alleged,
was unquestionably important
CHAPTER III
DIDACTIC LITERATURE SERMONS HISTORY
I
DIDACTIC LITERATURE
THE didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle
Ages is abundant, and possesses much curious interest,
but it is seldom original in substance, and seldom valu-
able from the point of view of literary style. In great
part it is translated or derived from Latin sources. The
writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned
from the vanities of youth fabliau or romance and
now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the
hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and
moralised ; there were sermons to be found in stones,
pious allegories in beast and bird ; mystic meanings in
the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney,
in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to
religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is
also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of
Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the
Latin Physiologus, itself a translation from the work of an
Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic
zoology the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ ;
the unicorn is God; the crocodile is the devil; the stones
" turrobolen," which blaze when they approach each
SCIENCE, MORALS, AND MANNERS 41
other, are representative of man and woman. A Bestiaire
d Amour was written by Richard de Fournival, in which
the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love.
A Lapidary, with a medical not a moral purpose, by
Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, was translated more than
once into French, and had, indeed, an European fame.
Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast ency-
clopaedias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which
were known by such names as Image du Monde, Mappe-
monde, Miroir du Monde. Of these encyclopaedias, the
only one which has a literary interest is the Trtsor (1265),
by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French
in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes
not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the
allegorising spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived
from Latin originals ; his politics are his own. The
Somme des Vices et des Vertus, compiled in 1279 by
Friar Lorens, is a well-composed tresor of religion and
morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us
through the Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson.
The moral experience of a man of the world is summed
up in the prose treatise on "The Four Ages of Man,"
by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With
this edifying work may be grouped the so-called C/ias-
tiementSj counsels on education and conduct, designed
for readers in general or for some special class
women, children, persons of knightly or of humble
rank ; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of
courtesy and of manners. 1 Other writings', the tats du
1 Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the history of manners
and ideas, may here be mentioned the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry
(1372), composed for the instruction of the writer's daughters, and the Menagier
de Paris, a treatise on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for
the use of his young wife.
42 FRENCH LITERATURE
Monde, present a view of the various classes of society
from a standpoint ethical, religious, or satirical, with
warnings and exhortations, which commonly conclude
with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of hell.
With such a scene of terror closes the interesting Pohne
Moral of Etienne de Fougeres, in which the life of St.
Moses, the converted robber, serves as an example to
monks, and that of the converted Thai's to ladies who
are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderation
contrasts with the bitter satire in the Bible by Guiot de
Provins, and with many shorter satirical pieces directed
against clerical vices or the infirmities of woman. The
Besant de Dieu, by Guillaume le Clerc, a Norman poet
(1227), preaches in verse, with eloquence and imaginative
power, the love of God and contempt of the world from
the texts of two Scripture parables that of the Talents
and that of the Bridegroom ; Guillaume anticipates the
approaching end of the world, foreshown by wars,
pestilence, and famine, condemns in the spirit of
Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, and
mourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy
Sepulchre.
Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century
the most interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF,
who towards the close of his gay though ragged life turned
to serious thoughts, and expressed his penitent feelings
with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed the Villon
of his age deployed his vivid and ardent powers in many
directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory,
of fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed
his own personality; the lyric note, imaginative fire,
colour, melody, these were gifts that compensated the
poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost eye, his
RELIGIOUS ALLEGORY 43
faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The per-
sonification of vices and virtues, occasional in the
Besant and other poems, becomes a system in the
Songe cFEnfer, a pilgrim's progress to hell, and the Vote
de Paradis, a pilgrim's progress to heaven, by Raoul
de Houdan (after 1200). The Pelerinage de la Vie
Humaine another "way to Paradise"; the Pelerinage
de I' Ame a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven;
and the Pelerinage de Jesus-Christ a narrative of the
Saviour's life, by Guillaume de Digulleville (fourteenth
century), have been imagined by some to have been
among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life
may be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage ;
in another it is a knightly encounter ; there is a great
strife between the powers of good and evil ; in Le
Tornoiement A ntecrist, by Huon de Meri, Jesus and the
Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael,
St. Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur,
Launcelot, and Gawain, contend against Antichrist and
the infernal barons Jupiter, Neptune, Beelzebub, and a
crowd of allegorical personages. But the battles and
debats of a chivalric age were not only religious ; there
are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting,
battles of the seven arts. A disputation between the
body and the soul, a favourite subject for separate treat-
ment by mediaeval poets, is found also in one of the many
sermons in verse ; the Debat des Trois Marts et des Trois
Vifs recalls the subject of the memorable painting in
the Campo Santo at Pisa.
44 FRENCH LITERATURE
II
SERMONS
The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were count-
less; but it is not until Gerson and the close of the
fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by
a known preacher written and pronounced in French.
It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though pre-
pared in the language of the Church, were delivered,
when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and
that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that
is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the
thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were
the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory.
On the other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French
sermons were pronounced as each might seem suitable,
before the laity, and that the macaronic style was actually
practised in the pulpit. Perhaps we may accept the
opinion that the short and simple homilies designed for
the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely
thought worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those
discourses which remain to us, if occasionally used
before an unlearned audience, seem to have been
specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of
St. Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in
a French translation of the thirteenth century, were cer-
tainly not his eloquent popular improvisations ; they
are doctrinal, with crude or curious allegorisings of
Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Arch-
bishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin,
are simpler in manner and more practical in their teach-
MEDIEVAL SERMONS 45
ing ; but in these characteristics they stand apart from
the other sermons of the twelfth century.
It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and
Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as pre-
served to us, was truly laicised and popularised. During
the thirteenth century the work of the pulpit came to be
conceived as an art which could be taught ; collections
of anecdotes and illustrations exempla for the enliven-
ing of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were
formed ; rules and precepts were set forth ; themes for
popular discourse were proposed and enlarged upon,
until at length original thought and invention ceased ;
the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade. The
effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery.
When GERSON preached at court or to the people towards
the close of the fourteenth century, gravely exhorting
high and low to practical duties, with tender or passionate
appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble excep-
tions to the common practice. And the descent from
Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and
steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse
from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors,
in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were
largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and
Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of
sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic
in their exhibition of learning, have at least an historical
value in presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth
century.
A word must be said of the humanism which preceded
the Renaissance. Scholars and students there were in
France two hundred years before the days of Erasmus
and of Bude" ; but they were not scholars inspired by
46 FRENCH LITERATURE
genius, and they contented themselves with the task of
translators, undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose.
If they failed to comprehend the spirit of antiquity,
none the less they did something towards quickening
the mind of their own time and rendering the French
language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a
later age. All that was then known of Livy's history
was rendered into French in 1356 by the friend of
Petrarch, Pierre Require. On the suggestion of Charles
V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics,
Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the
king that the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version
of St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, and Denis Foulechat,
with very scanty scholarship, set himself to render the
Polycraticus of John of Salisbury. The dukes of Bour-
bon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters
and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how
far this movement of scholarship might have progressed,
if external conditions had favoured its development. In
Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles VI., the devoted
student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an
example of the true humanist before the Renaissance.
But the seeming dawn was a deceptive aurora ; the early
humanism of France was clouded and lost in the tempests
of the Hundred Years' War.
Ill
HISTORY
While the mediaeval historians, compilers, and ab-
breviators from records of the past laboured under all
the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit,
HISTORY IN VERSE 4;
and produced works of little value either for their sub-
stance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told
the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville,
Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to
us, in living pictures or sagacious studies of events and
their causes, some of the chief treasures of the past.
History at first, as composed for readers who knew
no Latin, was comprised in those chansons de geste which
happened to deal with matter that was not wholly or
almost wholly the creation of fancy. Narrative poems
treating of contemporary events came into existence with
the Crusades, but of these the earliest have not survived,
and we possess only rehandlings of their matter in the
style of romance. What happened in France might be
supposed to be known to persons of intelligence ; what
happened in the East was new and strange. But Eng-
land, like the East, was foreign soil, and the Anglo-Nor-
man trouveres of the eleventh and twelfth centuries busied
themselves with copious narratives in rhyme, such as
Gaimar's Estorie des Engles (1151), Wace's Brut (1155) and
his Roman de Rou, which, if of small literary importance,
remain as monuments in the history of the language.
The murder of Becket called forth the admirable life
of the saint by Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, founded
upon original investigations ; Henry II.'s conquest of
Ireland was related by an anonymous writer ; his vic-
tories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly de-
scribed by Jordan Fantosme. But by far the most
remarkable piece of versified history of this period, re-
markable alike for its historical interest and its literary
merit, is the Vie de Guillaume le Marechal William,
Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III. a poem of
nearly twenty thousand octosyllabic lines by an un-
48 FRENCH LITERATURE
known writer, discovered by M. Paul Meyer in the
library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpiece of
Anglo-Norman historiography," writes M. Langlois, " is
assuredly this anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and
henceforth classic."
Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the
fitting medium for historical narrative, and verse was
given over to the extravagances of fantasy. Compilations
from the Latin, translations from the pseudo-Turpin,
from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust, Suetonius,
and Caesar were succeeded by original record and
testimony. GEOFFROY DE VILLEHARDOUIN, born be-
tween 1150 and 1164, Marshal of Champagne in
1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate
with the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders
to the East. He was probably a chief agent in
the intrigue which diverted the fourth Crusade from
its original destination the Holy Land to the assault
upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he
had a prominent part; before the close of 1213 Ville-
hardouin was dead. During his last years he dictated
the unfinished Memoirs known as the Conquete de Con-
stantinople, which relate the story of his life from 1198
to 1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who im-
presses his own personality on what he wrote : a brave
leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an
enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant ideas of
chivalry ; much more was he a politician and diplomatist,
with material interests well in view ; not, indeed, devoid
of a certain imaginative wonder at the marvels of the
East ; not without his moments of ardour and excite-
ment ; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal loyalty,
the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his
VILLEHARDOUIN 49
vassal ; deeply conscious of the need of discipline in
great adventures ; keeping in general a cool head, which
could calculate the sum of profit and loss.
It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of
affairs, and was too experienced a man of the world to
be quite frank as a historian : we can hardly believe,
as he would have us, that the diversion of the crusad-
ing host from its professed objects was unpremedi-
tated ; we can perceive that he composes his narrative
so as to form an apology ; his recital has been justly
described as, in part at least, "un memoire justificatif."
Nevertheless, there are passages, such as that which
describes the first view of Constantinople, where Ville-
hardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as
it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a
grave simplicity, sometimes with baldness, disdaining
ornament, little sensible to colour or grace of style ;
but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real
grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary
dignity, and when his words become vivid we know
that it is because he had seen with inquisitive eyes
and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for students of
history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an
aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same
extraordinary adventure can be seen, as they struck a
simple soldier, in the record of Robert de Clari, which
may serve as a complement and a counterpoise to the
chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The un-
finished Histoire de I ' Empereur Henri, which carries on
the narrative of events for some years subsequent to
those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de
Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had originally
formed a chanson de geste.
SO FRENCH LITERATURE
The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth cen-
tury declined among Anglo-Norman writers, but was
continued in Flanders and in France. Prose translations .
and adaptations of Latin chronicles, ancient and modern,
were numerous, but the literary value of many of these is
slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of national
history in Latin had for a long while been in process of for-
mation. Utilising this corpus and the works from which
it was constructed, one of the monks of the Abbey per-
haps a certain Primat compiled, in the second half of
the century, a History of France in the vernacular the
Grandes Chroniques de Saint- Denis with which later addi-
tions were from time to time incorporated, until under
Charles V. the Grandes Chroniques de France attained their
definitive form. 1 Far more interesting as a literary com-
position is the little work known as Rfcits d*un Menestrel
de Reims (1260), a lively, graceful, and often dramatic
collection of traditions, anecdotes, dialogues, made rather
for the purposes of popular entertainment than of formal
instruction, and expressing the ideas of the middle classes
on men and things. Forgotten during several centuries,
it remains to us as one of the happiest records of the
mediaeval spirit.
But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth
century gave birth, the Histoire de Saint Louis, by JEAN
DE JOINVILLE, stands pre-eminent. Joinville, born about
1224, possessed of such literary culture as could be gained
at the Court of Thibaut IV. of Champagne, became a
favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis
during his six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The
memory of the King remained the most precious pos-
1 The Chroniques were continued by lay writers to the accession of
Louis XI.
JOINVILLE 5 1
session of his follower's elder years. It is probable
that soon after 1272 Joinville prepared an autobio-
graphic fragment, dealing with that period of his youth
which had been his age of adventure. When he was
nearly eighty, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel,
invited the old seneschal to put on record the holy
words and good deeds of Saint Louis. Joinville willingly
acceded to the request, and incorporating the fragment
of autobiography, in which the writer appeared in close
connection with his King, he had probably almost com-
pleted his work at the date of Queen Jeanne's death
(April 2, 1305); to her son, afterwards Louis X., it was
dedicated. His purpose was to recite the pious words
and set forth the Christian virtues of the royal Saint in
one book of the History, and to relate his chivalric actions
in the other ; but Joinville had not the art of construc-
tion, he suffered from the feebleness of old age, and he
could not perfectly accomplish his design ; in 1317
Joinville died. Deriving some of his materials from
other memoirs of the King, especially those by Geoffrey
de Beaulieu and Guillaume de Nangis, he drew mainly
upon his own recollections. Unhappily the most autho-
ritative manuscripts of the Histoire de Saint Louis have
been lost ; we possess none earlier than the close of
the fourteenth century ; but by the learning and skill
of a modern editor the text has been substantially
established.
We must not expect from Joinville precision of chrono-
logy or exactitude in the details of military operations.
His recollections crowd upon him ; he does not marshal
them by power of intellect, but abandons himself to the
delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable, spirited
talker, who has much to tell ; he succeeds in giving us
52 FRENCH LITERATURE
two admirable portraits his own and that of the King ;
and unconsciously he conveys into his narrative both the
chivalric spirit of his time, and a sense of those prosaic
realities which tempered the ideals of chivalry. What
his eyes had rested on lives in his memory, with all its
picturesque features, all its lines and colours, undimmed
by time ; and his curious eyes had been open to things
great and small. He appears as a brave soldier, but, he
confesses, capable of mortal fear ; sincerely devout, but
not made for martyrdom ; zealous for his master's cause,
but not naturally a chaser of rainbow dreams ; one who
enjoys good cheer, who prefers his wine unallayed with
water, who loves splendid attire, who thinks longingly of
his pleasant chateau, and the children awaiting his return ;
one who will decline future crusading, and who believes
that a man of station may serve God well by remaining
in his own fields among his humble dependants. But
Joinville felt deeply the attraction of a nature more under
the control of high, ideal motives than was his own ; he
would not himself wash the feet of the poor ; he would
rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper ; but a
kingly saint may touch heights of piety which are un-
attainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes
us feel that Louis is not the less a man because he is a
saint. Certain human infirmities of temper are his ; yet
his magnanimity, his sense of justice, his ardent devotion,
his charity, his pure self-surrender are made so sensible
to us as we read the record of Joinville that we are willing
to subscribe to the sentence of Voltaire : " It is not given
to man to carry virtue to a higher point."
During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of
feudalism declined ; the old faith and the old chivalry
were suffering a decay ; the bourgeoisie grew in power
FROISSART 53
and sought for instruction ; it was an age of prose, in
which learning was passing to the laity, or was adapted
to their uses. Yet, while the inner life of chivalry failed
day by day, and self-interest took the place of heroic
self-surrender, the external pomp and decoration of the
feudal world became more brilliant than ever. War was
a trade practised from motives of vulgar cupidity ; but it
was adorned with splendour, and had a show of gallantry.
The presenter in literature of this glittering spectacle is
the historian JEAN FROISSART. Born in 1338, at Valen-
ciennes, of bourgeois parents, Froissart, at the age of
twenty-two, a disappointed lover, a tonsured clerk, and
already a poet, journeyed to London, with his manu-
script on the battle of Poitiers as an offering to his
countrywoman, Queen Philippa of Hainault. For nearly
five years he was the ditteur of the Queen, a sharer in the
life of the court, but attracted before all else to those
" ancient knights and squires who had taken part in
feats of arms, and could speak of them rightly." His
patroness encouraged Froissart's historical inquiries. In
the Chroniques of Jean le Bel, canon of Liege, he found
material ready to his hand, and freely appropriated it in
many of his most admirable pages ; but he also travelled
much through England and Scotland, noting everything
that impressed his imagination, and gathering with delight
the testimony of those who had themselves been actors in
the events of the past quarter of a century. He accom-
panied the Black Prince to Aquitaine, and, later, the
Duke of Clarence to Milan. The death of Queen Philippa,
in 1369, was ruinous to his prospects. For a time he
supported himself as a trader in his native place. Then
other patrons, kinsfolk of the Queen, came to his aid.
The first revised redaction of the first book of his
54 FRENCH LITERATURE
Chronicles was his chief occupation while curd of Les-
tinnes ; it is a record of events from 1325 to the^ death
of Edward III., and its brilliant narrative of events still
recent or contemporary insured its popularity with aris-
tocratic readers. Under the influence of Queen Philippa's
brother-in-law, Robert of Namur, it is English in its
sympathies and admirations. Unhappily Froissart was
afterwards moved by his patron, Gui de Blois, to rehandle
the book in the French interest ; and once again in his
old age his work was recast with a view to effacing the
large debt which he owed to his predecessor, Jean le Bel.
The first redaction is, however, that which won and re-
tained the general favour. If his patron induced Froissart
to wrong his earlier work, he made amends, for it is to
Gui de Blois that we owe the last three books of the
history, which bring the tale of events down to the
assassination of Richard II. Still the cure of Lestinnes
and the canon of Chimai pursued his early method of
travel to the court of Gaston, Count of Foix, to Flanders,
to England ever eager in his interrogation of witnesses.
It is believed that he lived to the close of 1404, but the
date of his death is uncertain.
Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional
modes of his time. His vast romance Meliador, to which
Wenceslas, Duke of Brabant, contributed the lyric part
famous in its day, long lost and recently recovered is
a construction of external marvels and splendours which
lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But as a brilliant
scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpassed.
His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted
as exact ; he is credulous rather than critical ; he does not
always test or control the statements of his informants;
he is misled by their prejudices and passions; he views
FROISSART 5 5
all things from the aristocratic standpoint; the life of the
common people does not interest him; he has no sense
of their wrongs, and little pity for their sufferings; he
does not study the deeper causes of events ; he is almost
incapable of reflection; he has little historical sagacity;
he accepts appearances without caring to interpret their
meanings. But what a vivid picture he presents of the
external aspects of fourteenth-century life ! What a joy
he has in adventure ! What an eye for the picturesque !
What movement, what colour! What a dramatic or
should we say theatrical ? feeling for life and action !
Much, indeed, of the vividness of Froissart's narrative
may be due to the eye-witnesses from whom he had
obtained information ; but genius was needed to preserve
perhaps to enhance the animation of their recitals.
If he understood r his own age imperfectly, he depicted
its outward appearance with incomparable skill ; and
though his moral sense was shallow, and his knowledge
of character far from profound, he painted portraits
which live in the imagination of his readers.
The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of
every kind compilations of general history, domestic
chronicles, such as the Livre des Fails du bon Messire
Jean le Maingre, dit Boudquaut, official chronicles both
of the French and Burgundian parties, journals and
memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet
was a lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of
documents, but without his predecessor's genius. On
the French side the so - called Chronique Scandaleuse,
by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of -the time of Louis XL,
to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers
of his party.
In PHILIPPE DE COMMIXES we meet the last chronicler
5
56 FRENCH LITERATURE
of the Middle Ages, and the first of modern historians.
Bonn about 1445, in Flanders, of the family of Van den
Clyte, Commines, whose parents died early, received a
scanty education ; but if he knew no Latin, his acquaint-
ance with modern languages served him- well. At first
in the service of Charles the Bold, in 1472 he passed
over to the cause of Louis XI. His treason to the Duke
may be almost described as inevitable ; for Commines
could not attach himself to violence and folly, and was
naturally drawn to the counsels of civil prudence. The
bargain was as profitable to his new master as to the
servant. On the King's death came a reverse of fortune
for Commines : for eight months he was cramped in the
iron cage ; during two years he remained a prisoner in
the Conciergerie (1487-89), with enforced leisure to
think of the preparation of his Memoires. 1 Again the
sunshine of royal favour returned ; he followed Charles
VIII. to Italy, and was engaged in diplomatic service at
Venice. In 1511 he died.
The Mtmoires of Commines were composed as a body
of material for a projected history of Louis XI. by Arch-
bishop Angelo Cato ; the writer, apparently in all sin-
cerity, hoped that his unlearned French might thus
be translated into Latin, the language of scholars ;
happily we possess the Memoirs as they left their
author's mind. And, though Commines rather hides
than thrusts to view his own personality, every page
betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was
no artist either in imaginative design or literary execu-
tion ; he was before all else a thinker, a student of poli-
tical phenomena, a searcher after the causes of events,
an analyst of motives, a psychologist of individual char-
1 Books I.-VI., written 1488-94 ; Books VII., VIIL, written 1494-95.
COMMINES 57
acter and of the temper of peoples, and, after a fashion, a
moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little,
or not at all, for the coloured surface of life ; his chief
concern is to seize the master motive by which men and
events are ruled, to comprehend the secret springs of
action. He is aristocratic in his politics, monarchical,
an advocate for the centralisation of power ; but he would
have the monarch enlightened, constitutional, and pacific.
He values solid gains more than showy magnificence ;
and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the
importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance
of European power, and anticipates Montesquieu in his
theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is
something of pity, something of irony, in the view which
he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth.
Having ascertained how few of the combinations of
events can be controlled by the wisest calculation, he
takes refuge in a faith in Providence ; he finds God
necessary to explain this entangled world ; and yet his
morality is in great part that which tries good and evil
by the test of success. By the intensity of his thought
Commines sometimes becomes striking in his expression;
occasionally he rises to a grave eloquence ; occasionally
his irony is touched by a bitter humour. But in general
he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty,
under the control of a dry and circumspect intelligence.
CHAPTER IV
LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS THE DRAMA
I
LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS
THE fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of
transition from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
The national epopee was dead ; the Arthurian tales were
rehandled in prose ; under the influence of the Roman de
la Rose, allegory was highly popular, and Jean de Meun
had shown how it could be applied to the secularisation
of learning ; the middle classes were seeking for instruc-
tion. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined,
but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced
to rule ; ballade, chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were
the established forms, and lyric verse was often used for
matter of a didactic, moral, or satirical tendency. Even
Ovid was tediously moralised (c. 1300) in some seventy
thousand lines by Chretien Legouais. Literary societies
orfluys 1 were, instituted, which maintained the rules of art,
and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry;
a formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration ; poetry
accepted proudly the name of " rhetoric." At the same
1 Pity, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat of the judges of the
artistic competition.
MACHAUT: DESCHAMPS 59
time there is gain in one respect the poets no longer
conceal their own personality behind their work : they
instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or simulated
passions in their own persons ; if their art is mechanical,
yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men
and manners of the age.
The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was
GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT. Born about 1300, he served
as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who fell at Cr6cy.
He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of Cham-
pagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of
his contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are
deployed at length in his Jugement du Roi de Navarre ;
he relates with dull prolixity the history of his patron,
Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in his Prise dAlex-
andrie ; the Voir dit relates in varying verse and prose
the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in
her teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her
coquetry with an old poet's adoration, and then wedded
his rival.
In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also
a native of Champagne (c. 1345-1405), was a disciple
of Machaut : if he was not a poet, he at least interests
a reader by rhymed journals of his own life and the life
of his time, written in the spirit of an honest bourgeois,
whom disappointed personal hopes and public mis-
fortune had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines,
twelve hundred ballades, nearly two hundred rondeaux,
a vast unfinished satire on woman, the Miroir de Manage,
fatigued even his own age, and the official court poet
of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the
conventional modes ; his historical poems, celebrating
events of the d?.y, have interest by virtue of their matter ;
60 FRENCH LITERATURE
as a moralist in verse he deplores the corruption of
high and low, the cupidity in Church and State, and,
above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infir-
mities of women. The earliest Poetic in French L'art
de dictier et de fere chancons, balades, virelats, et rondeaulx
(1392) is the work of Eustache Deschamps, in which
the poet, by no means himself a master of harmonies,
insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse.
The exhaustion of the mediaeval sources of inspiration
is still more apparent in the fifteenth-century successors
of Deschamps. But already something of the reviving
influence of Italian culture makes itself felt. CHRISTINE
DE PlSAN, Italian by her parentage and place of birth
(c. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at
the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is
a genuine lyric cry ; but when in her poverty she prac-
tised authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect
as a mother, the poetess is too often at once facile and
pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the
honour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun ;
in her prose Cite des Dames she celebrates the virtues
and heroism of women, with examples from ancient and
modern times ; in the Livre des Trots Vertus she instructs
women in their duties. When advanced in years, and
sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan -song in
honour of Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of
life, a patriot and a scholar, she only needed one thing
genius to be a poet of distinction.
A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of
Scotland, kissed the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest
man in France, because from that "precious mouth"
had issued so many "good words and virtuous sayings."
The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAIN
ALAIN CHARTIER 61
CHARTIER. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose
he must be remembered with honour, both for his patri-
otic ardour, and for the harmonious eloquence (modelled
on classical examples) in which that ardour found ex-
pression. His first work, the Livre des Quatre Dames,
is in verse : four ladies lament their husbands slain,
captured, lost, or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt.
Many of his other poems were composed .as a distraction
from the public troubles of the time j the title of one,
widely celebrated in its own day, La Belle Dame sans
Mercy, has obtained a new meaning of romance through
its appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose
Quadrilogue Invectif, in which suffering France implores
the nobles, the clergy, the people to show some pity for
her miserable state. If Froissart had not discerned the
evils of the feudal system, they were patent to the eyes
of Alain Chartier. His Livre de I'Esperance, where the
oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares
neither the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry,
who forget their duty to their country in wanton self-
indulgence ; yet his last word, written at the moment
when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures for battle,
is one of hope. His Curial ( The Courtier] is a satire on
the vices of the courtby one who had acquaintance with
its corruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain
Chartier was new to French prose, and is hardly heard
again until the seventeenth century.
The last grace and refinements of chivalric society
blossom in the poetry of CHARLES D'ORLE"ANS, " la grace
exquise des choses freles." He was born in 1391, son of
Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian mother, Valentine
of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard II.
of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother
62 FRENCH LITERATURE
by the stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the
battlefield of Agincourt he passed to England, where he
remained a prisoner, closely guarded, for twenty-five
years. It seems as if events should have made him a
tragic poet ; but for Charles d'Orleans poetry was the
brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder
years at the little court of Blois were a season of delicate
gaiety, when he enjoyed the recreations of age, and
smiled at the 'passions of youth. He died in 1465.
Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power of
feeling finds expression in his verse ; he does not con-
tribute new ideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but
he rendered the old material and made the accepted
moulds of verse charming by a gracious personality and
an exquisite sense. of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson,
each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting
his gems. He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter
joys of love, the pleasure of springtide, the song of
the birds, the gliding of a stream or a cloud ; or, as an
elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguing
ardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day
comes round, his good physician " Nonchaloir " advises
him to abstain from choosing a mistress, and recom-
mends an easy pillow. The influence of Charles
d'Orleans on French poetry was slight; it was not until
1734 that his forgotten poems were brought to light.
In the close of the mediaeval period, when old things
were passing away and new things were as yet unborn,
the minds of men inclined to fill the void with mockery
and satire. Martin Lefranc (c. 1410-61) in his CJiampion
des Dames a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, in
which there is much spirit and vigour of versification
balances one against another the censure and the praise
VILLON 63
of women. Coquillard, with his railleries assuming legal
forms and phrases, laughs at love and lovers, or at the
Droils Nouveaux of a happy time when licence had be-
come the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his
keen observation, satirises with direct, incisive force,
the manners and morals of his age. Martial d'Auvergne
(c. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his Vigiles de Charles
F//., a poem written according to the scheme of the
liturgical Vigils, is eloquent in his expression of the
wrongs of the poor, and in his condemnation of the
abuses of power and station. If the Amant rendu Cor-
delier be his, he too appears among those who jest at
the follies and extravagance of love. His prose Arrcts
d Amour are discussions and decisions of the imaginary
court which determines questions of gallantry.
Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death
was ever present to the mind of a generation from which
hope and faith seemed to fail ; it was the time of the
Danse Macabre ; the skeleton became a grim humourist
satirising human existence, and verses written for the
dance of women were ascribed in the manuscript which
preserves them to Martial d'Auvergne.
Passion and the idea of death mingle with a power
at once realistic and romantic in the poetry of FRANCOIS
VILLON. He was born in poverty, an obscure child of
the capital, in 1430 or 1431 ; he adopted the name of his
early protector, Villon ; obtained as a poor scholar his
bachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a
maitre es arts ; but already he was a master of arts less
creditable than those of the University. In 1455 Villon
or should we call him Monterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil,
Desloges, Mouton (aliases convenient for vagabondage) ?
quarrelled with a priest, and killed his adversary ; he
64 FRENCH LITERATURE
was condemned to death, and cheered his spirits with
the piteous ballade for those about to swing to the kites
and the crows ; but the capital punishment was com-
muted to banishment. Next winter, stung by the infi-
delity and insults of a woman to whom he had abandoned
himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding his friends a
jesting farewell in the bequests of his Petit Testament.
Betrayed by one who claimed him as an associate in
robbery, Villon is lost to view for three years ; and
when we rediscover him in 1461, it is as a prisoner,
whose six months' fare has been bread and water in
his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XL,
recently consecrated king, freed the unhappy captive.
Before the year closed he had composed his capital
work, the Grand Testament, and proved himself the
most original poet of his century. And then Villon
disappears ; whether he died soon after, whether he
lived for half a score of years, we do not know.
While he handles with masterly ease certain of the
fifteenth-century forms of verse in particular the bal-
lade Villon is a modern in his abandonment of the
traditional machinery of the imagination, its conven-
tion of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised
moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer ;
he is modern in the intensity of a personal quality which
is impressed upon his work, in the complexity of his
feelings, passing from mirth to despair, from beauty
to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories
or aspirations ; he is modern in his passion for the real,
and in those gleams of ideal light which are suddenly
dashed across the vulgar surroundings of his sorry
existence. While he flings out his scorn and indigna-
tion against those whom he regarded as his ill-users,
ANTOINE DE LA SALLE 65
or cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his
miserable past, he yet is a passionate lover of life ;
and shadowing beauty and youth and love and life, he
is constantly aware of the imminent and inexorable
tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are
few and simple ideas common to all men ; but they
take a special colour from his own feelings and ex-
periences, and he renders them with a poignancy which
is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate
imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in
itself that of the enfant perdu of genius and so typical
of a class, that the temptation to create a Villon legend
is great ; but to magnify his proportions to those of the
highest poets is to do him wrong. His passionate inten-
sity within a limited range is unsurpassed ; but Villon
wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth.
In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with
an admirable skill and science in literary form, Villon
stands alone. For others Georges Chastelain, Meschinot,
Molinet, Cretin poetry was a cumbrous form of rhetoric,
regulated by the rules of those arts of poetry which
during the fifteenth century appeared at not infrequent
intervals. The grands rhetoriqueurs with their compli-
cated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete alle-
gory, their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion
of the Middle Ages, and to the need of new creative
forces for the birth of a living literature.
There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable
prose-writer of the time ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His
residence in Rome (1422) had made him acquainted
with the tales of the Italian novellieri ; he was a friend
of the learned and witty Poggio ; Rene of Anjou en-
trusted to him the education of his son ; when advanced
66 FRENCH LITERATURE
in years he became the author certainly of one master-
piece, probably of three. If he was the writer of the
Quinze Joies de Mariage, he knew how to mask a rare
power of cynical observation under a smiling face : the
Church had celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed
Virgin ; he would ironically depict the fifteen afflictions
of wedded life, in scenes finely studied from the domestic
interior. How far the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles are to be
ascribed to him is doubtful ; it is certain that these licen-
tious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose,
the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models.
The Petit Jehan de Saintre is certainly the work of
Antoine de la Salle ; the irony of a realist, endowed with
subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric
exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not
insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but
he presents them only in the end to cover them with
disgrace. The anonymous farce of PatJielin, and the
Chronique de petit Jehan de Saintre, are perhaps the most
instructive documents which we possess with respect to
the moral temper of the close of the Middle Ages ; and
there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe
both works to the same hand.
II
THE DRAMA
The mediaeval drama in France, though of early origin,
attained its full development only when the Middle
Ages were approaching their term ; its popularity con-
tinued during the first half of the sixteenth century. It
waited for a public ; with the growth of industry, the
EARLY DRAMA 67
uprising of the middle classes, it secured its audience,
and in some measure filled the blank created by the
disappearance of the chansons de geste. The survivals of
the drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are
few; the stream, as we know, was flowing, but it ran
underground.
The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical
offices of the Church. At Christmas and at Easter the
birth and resurrection of the Saviour w r ere dramatically
recited to the people by the clergy, within the conse-
crated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text ;
but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as
actors in the drama. By degrees the vernacular en-
croached upon the Latin and displaced it ; the scene
passed from the church to the public place or street ;
the action developed ; and the actors were priests sup-
ported by lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone.
The oldest surviving drama written in French (but
with interspersed liturgical sentences of Latin) is of the
twelfth century the Representation d'Adam: the fall of
man, and the first great crime which followed the death
of Abel are succeeded by the procession of Messianic
prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and the
spectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who
darted to and fro amidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth
century, only two religious pieces remain. Jean Bodel,
of Arras, was the author of Saint Nicholas. The poet,
himself about to assume the cross, exhibits a handful of
Crusaders in combat with the Mussulmans ; all but one,
a supplicant of the saint, die gloriously, with angelic
applause and pity ; whereupon the feelings of the
audience are relieved by the mirth and quarrels of
drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of the
68 FRENCH LITERATURE
treasure entrusted to his safeguard; miracles, and general
conversion of the infidels, conclude the drama. The
miracle of Theophile, the ambitious priest who pawned
his soul to Satan, and through our Lady's intercession
recovered his written compact, is by the trouvere Rute-
beuf. These are scanty relics of a hundred years ; yet
their literary value outweighs that of the forty -two
Miracles de Notre Dame of the century which followed
rude pieces, often trivial, often absurd in their inci-
dents, with mystic extravagance sanctifying their vulgar
realism. They formed, with two exceptions, the dramatic
repertory of some mediaeval puy, an association half-
literary, half-religious, devoted to the Virgin's honour ;
their rhymed octosyllabic verse the special dramatic
form at times borders upon prose. One drama, and
only one, of the fourteenth century, chooses another
heroine than our Lady the Histoire de Gristfidis, which
presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those
marvels of wifely patience celebrated for other lands by
Boccaccio, by Petrarch, and by Chaucer.
The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination
of the mediaeval sacred drama. The word mysteref first
appropriated to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic
performances in the royal privilege which in 1402
conferred upon the association known as the Confrerie
de la Passion the right of performing the plays of our
Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and
the infant Jesus had appeared upon the scene. The
Mystery presents the course of sacred story, derived
from the Old and the New Testaments, together with
the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days
1 Derived from ministerium (metier], but doubtless often drawing to itself a
sense suggested by the mysteries of religion.
ARNOUL. GREBAN 69
of St. Dominic and St. Louis ; it even includes, in an
extended sense, subjects from profane history the siege
of Orleans, the destruction of Troy but such subjects
are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century.
For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded
enthusiasm for the stage possessed the people, not of
Paris merely, but of all France. The Confreres de la
Passion, needing a larger repertoire, found in young
ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose
vein was copious. His Passion] written about the middle
of the fifteenth century, embraces the entire earthly
life of Christ in its thirty-four thousand verses, which
required one hundred and fifty performers and four
crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an
unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The
work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean
Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given
at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone
either by his former self or by another dramatist ; in
collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed
the yet more enormous Actes des Apotrcs, in sixty-two
thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred
performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536,
the happiness of the spectators was extended over no
fewer than forty days. The Mystery of the Old Testa-
ment, selecting whatever was supposed to typify or
foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only less
vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the
Mysteries comprise over a million verses, and what
remains is but a portion of what was written.
Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight,
except in occasional passages of natural feeling or just
characterisation, their historical importance was great ;
70 FRENCH LITERATURE
they met a national demand they constituted an ani-
mated and moving spectacle of universal interest. A
certain unity they possessed in the fact that everything
revolved around the central figure of Christ and the
central theme of man's salvation ; but such unity is only
to be discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at
hand the confusion seems great. Their loose construction
and unwieldy length necessarily endangered their exist-
ence when a truer feeling for literary art was developed.
The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further
danger ; it demanded some relief, and that relief was
secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside
scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasion-
ally not without grace a passage of pastoral, a song, a
nai've piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was
more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the
furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris
thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred
dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and
even of common propriety. They had scandalised
serious Protestants ; the Catholics declined to defend
what was indefensible ; the humanists and lovers of
classical art in Renaissance days thought scorn of the
rude mediaeval drama. Though it died by violence, its
existence could hardly have been prolonged for many
years. But in the days of its popularity the performance
of a mystery set a whole city in motion ; carpenters,
painters, costumiers, machinists were busy in prepara-
tion ; priests, scholars, citizens rehearsed their parts ;
country folk crowded to every hostelry and place of
lodging. On the day preceding the first morning of
performance the personages, duly attired Christians,
Jews, Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests defiled
THE STAGE: ACTORS 71
through the streets on their way to the cathedral to
mass. The vast stage hard by the church presented,
with primitive properties, from right to left, the suc-
cession of places lake, mountain, manger, prison,
banquet - chamber in which the action should be
imagined; and from one station to another the actors
passed as the play proceeded. At one end of the stage
rose heaven, where God sat throned ; at the other,
hell-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged.
Music aided the action ; the drama was tragedy,
comedy, opera, pantomime in one. The actors were
amateurs from every class of society clergy, scholars,
tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the
noblesse. In Paris the Confraternity of the Passion had
almost an exclusive right to present these sacred plays ;
in the provinces associations were formed to carry out
the costly and elaborate performance. To the Confreres
de la Passion bourgeois folk and artisans belonged
the first theatre, and it was they who first presented
plays at regular intervals. From the Hospital of the
Trinity, originally a shelter for pilgrims, they migrated
in 1539 to the Hotel de Flandres, and thence in 1548 to
the Hotel de Bourgogne. Their famous place of per-
formance passed in time into the hands of professional
actors; but it was not until 1676 that the Confrerie ceased
to exist.
Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach
of continuity during its long history. The jongleurs
of the Middle Ages were the immediate descendants of
the Roman mirnes and histrions ; their declamations,
accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the
dramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly
forgotten in the schools ; the liturgical drama and the
72 FRENCH LITERATURE
sacred pieces developed from it had an indirect influence
as encouraging dramatic feeling, and providing models
which could be applied to other uses. The earliest
surviving jeux are of Arras, the work of ADAM DE LA
HALLE. In the Jeu d'Adam or de la FeuilUe (c. 1262)
satirical studies of real life mingle strangely with fairy
fantasy ; the poet himself, lamenting his griefs of wed-
lock, his father, his friends are humorously introduced ;
the fool and the physician play their laughable parts ;
and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens have pre-
pared a banquet under la fenillce, grant or refuse the
wishes of the mortal folk in the traditional manner of
enchantresses amiable or perverse. The Jeu de Robin et
Marion first performed at Naples in 1283 is a pastoral
comic opera, with music, song, and dance ; the good
Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival,
her cavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy
inventions happily executed ; but they stand alone. It
is not until we reach the fifteenth century that mediaeval
comedy, in various forms, attained its true evolution.
The Moralities, of which sixty -five survive, dating,
almost all, from 1450 to 1550, differed from the Myste-
ries in the fact that their purpose was rather didactic
than religious ; as a rule they handled neither historical
nor legendary matter; they freely employed allegorical
personification after the fashion of the Roman de la
Rose. The general type is well exemplified in Bien-
Avise, Mai-Avis^ a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Pro-
gress, with two pilgrims one who is instructed in
the better way by all the personified powers which
make for righteousness ; the other finding his com-
panions on the primrose path, and arriving at the
everlasting bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a par-
MORALITIES 73
ticular vice gluttony or blasphemy, or the dishonouring
of parents. From satirising the social vices of the time,
the transition was easy to political satire or invective.
In the sixteenth century both the partisans of the Re-
formation and the adherents to the traditional creed
employed the Morality as a medium for ecclesiastical
polemics. Sometimes treating of domestic manners and
morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama, presenting
the conditions under which character is formed. Some-
times again it approached the farce : two lazy mendicants,
one blind, the other lame, fear that they may suffer a cure
and lose their trade through the efficacy of the relics
of St. Martin ; the halt, mounted on the other's back,
directs his fellow in their flight ; by ill luck they encoun-
ter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb ;
the recovered cripple swears and rages ; but the man
born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks
forth in praise to God. The higher Morality naturally
selected types of character for satire or commendation.
It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of
Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval
drama. At a late period examples are found of the his-
torical Morality. The pathetic I'Empereur qui tua son
Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion
something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-
classical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development
of this species. The very name " Morality " disappears
from the theatre after 1550.
The sottte, like the Morality, was a creation of the
fifteenth century. Whether it had its origin in a laicis-
ing of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools,
or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a
Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which
74 FRENCH LITERATURE
the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-
eared cap, distributed between them the several roles of
human folly. Associations of sots, known in Paris as
Enfants sans Souci, known in other cities by other names,
presented the unwisdom or madness of the world in
parody. The sottie at times rose from a mere diversion
to satire ; like the Morality, it could readily adapt itself
to political criticism. The Gens Nonveaux, belonging
perhaps to the reign of Louis XL, mocks the hypocrisy
of those sanguine reformers who promise to create the
world anew on a better model, and yet, after all, have
no higher inspiration than that old greed for gold and
power and pleasure which possessed their predecessors.
Louis XI L, who permitted free comment on public affairs
from actors on the stage, himself employed the poet
Pierre Gringoire to satirise his adversary the Pope. In
1512 thejeu du Prince des Sots was given in Paris ; Grin-
goire, the Mere-Sotte, but wearing the Papal robes to
conceal for a time the garb of folly, discharged a prin-
cipal part. Such dangerous pleasantries as this were
vigorously restrained by Francois I.
A dramatic monologue or a sermon joyeux was com-
monly interposed between the sottie and the Morality or
miracle which followed. The sermon parodied in verse
the pulpit discourses of the time, with text duly an-
nounced, the customary scholastic divisions, and an
incredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the
dramatic monologues of the fifteenth century is found
at least one little masterpiece, which has been ascribed
on insufficient grounds to Villon, and which would do
no discredit to that poet's genius the Franc- Archer de
Bagnolet. The francs-archers of Charles VII. a rural
militia were not beloved of the people ; the miles
FARCES 75
gloriosus of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his
valour, encounters a stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the
wind ; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are
rendered in a monologue which expounds the action
of the piece with admirable spirit.
If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national
epopee, the farce may be regarded as to some extent the
dramatic inheritor of the spirit of the fabliau. It aims
at mirth and laughter for their own sakes, without any
purpose of edification ; it had, like the fabliau, the merit
of brevity, and not infrequently the fault of unabashed
grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of little
consequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an
audacity of political or ecclesiastical criticism which
transformed it into a dramatised pamphlet. In general
it chose its matter from the ludicrous misadventures of
private life : the priest, the monk, the husband, the
mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant
are the agents in broadly ludicrous intrigues ; the
young wife lords it over her dotard husband, and makes
mockery of his presumptive heirs, in La Cornette of Jean
d'Abondance ; in Le Cuvier, the husband, whose many
household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge
the list, which he deliberately recites while his wife
flounders helpless in the great washing-tub, does not
include the task of effecting her deliverance.
Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent,
one farce stands out pre-eminent, and may indeed be
called a comedy of manners and of character the
merry misfortunes of that learned advocate, Maitre
Pierre Pathdin. The date is doubtless about 1470 ;
the author, probably a Parisian and a member of the
Basoche, is unknown. With all his toiling and cheat-
76 FRENCH LITERATURE
ing, Pathelin is poor ; with infinite art and spirit he
beguiles the draper of the cloth which will make
himself a coat and his faithful Guillemette a gown ;
when the draper, losing no time, comes for his
money and an added dinner of roast goose, behold
Maitre Pathelin is in a raging fever, raving in every
dialect. Was the purchase of his cloth a dream, or
work of the devil ? To add to the worthy trades-
man's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wool and
eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly
appears in court to defend the accused, and having
previously advised his client to affect idiocy and reply
to all questions with the senseless utterance bee, he
triumphantly wins the case ; but the tables are turned
when Master Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain
no other response than bee from the instructed shepherd.
The triumph of rogue over rogue is the only moral of
the piece ; it is a satire on fair dealing and justice, and,
though the morals of a farce are not to be gravely in-
sisted on, such morals as Maitre Pathelin presents agree
well with the spirit of the age which first enjoyed this
masterpiece of caricature.
The actors in mediaeval comedy, as in the serious
drama, were amateurs. The members of the academic
puys were succeeded by the members of guilds, or con-
fre'ries, or societes joyeuses. Of these societies the most
celebrated was that of the Parisian Enfants sans Souci.
With this were closely associated the Basochiens, the cor-
poration of clerks to the procureurs of the Parlement of
Paris. 1 It may be that the sots of the capital were only
members of the basoche, assuming for the occasion the
1 This corporation, known as the Royanme de la Basoche (basi/ica), was
probably as old as the fourteenth century.
ACTORS OF COMEDY 77
motley garb. In colleges, scholars performed at first in
Latin plays, but from the fifteenth century in French. At
the same time, troupes of performers occasionally moved
from city to city, exhibiting a Mystery, but they did not
hold together when the occasion had passed. Profes-
sional comedians were brought from Italy to Lyons in
1548, for the entertainment of Henri II. and Catherine
de Medicis. From that date companies of French actors
appear to become numerous. New species of the drama
tragedy, comedy, pastoral replace the mediaeval
forms ; but much of the genius of French classical
comedy is a development from the Morality, the sottte,
and the farce. To present these newer forms the service
of trained actors was required. During the last quarter
of the sixteenth century the amateur performers of the
ancient drama finally disappear.
BOOK THE SECOND
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
BOOK THE SECOND
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
THE literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by
two chief influences that of the Renaissance and that of
the Reformation. When French armies under Charles
VIII. and Louis XII. made a descent on Italy, they found
everywhere a recognition of the importance of art, an
enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the aesthetic as
well as the scholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in
life, an universal curiosity, a new confidence in human
reason. To Latin culture a Greek culture had been
added ; and side by side with the mediaeval master of
the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imagina-
tive reason, Plato, was held in honour. Before the
first quarter of the sixteenth century closed, France
had received a great gift from Italy, which profoundly
modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristics of
her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery
of Christian antiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time
(.he religious movement made common cause with the
81
82 FRENCH LITERATURE
Renaissance ; but the grave morals, the opposition of
grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theology
after a time alienated the Reforming party from the
mere humanism of literature and art. An interest in
general ideas and a capacity for dealing with them were
fostered by the study of antiquity both classical and
Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, and by
the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas
in art under a presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise
thought and form, was the great work of the seventeenth
century ; but before this could be effected it was neces-
sary that France should enjoy tranquillity after the strife
of the civil wars.
Learning had received the distinction of court patron-
age when Louis XII. appointed the great scholar Budc
his secretary. Around Francis I., although he was him-
self rather a lover of the splendour and ornament of
the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learning
and poets gathered. On the suggestion of GUILLAUME
BUDE he endowed professorships of Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin, to which were added those of medicine,
mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in this
projected foundation of the College de France an im-
portant step was made towards the secularisation of
learned studies. The King's sister, MARGUERITE OF
NAVARRE (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplished
woman of her time, represents more admirably than
Francis the genius of the age. She studied Latin,
Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and, when forty,
occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent
as well as her intellect ; she was gay and mundane,
and at the same time she was serious (with even a
strain of mystical emotion) in her concern for religion.
MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE 83
Although not in communion with the Reformers, she
sympathised with them, and extended a generous pro-
tection to those who incurred danger through their liberal
opinions. Her poems, Marguerites de la Marguerite des
Princesses (1547), show the mediaeval influences forming
a junction with those of the Renaissance. Some are
religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mys-
teries and her eloquent Triomphe de I' Agneau appears
the Histoire des Satyres et NympJies de Diane, imitated
from the Italian of Sannazaro. Among her latest
poems, which remained in manuscript until 1896, are
a pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the
death of her brother Francis I. ; a second dramatic
poem, Comedie jouee au Mont de Marsan, in which love
(human or divine) triumphs over the spirit of the world,
over superstitious asceticism, and over the wiser temper
of religious mcderation. Les Prisons tells in allegory of
her servitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the
desire for human knowledge, until at last the divine
love brought her deliverance. The union of the mun-
dane and the moral spirit is singularly shown in Mar-
guerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of
Boccaccio, the Heptameron des Nouvelles (1558).
These tales were not an indiscretion of youth ; pro-
bably Marguerite composed them a few years before her
death ; perhaps their licence and wanton mirth were
meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her beloved
brother ; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting
edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise
edification. They are not so gross as other writings of
the time, and this is Marguerite's true defence ; to laugh
at the immoralities of monks and priests was a tradition
in literature which neither the spirit of the Renaissance
84 FRENCH LITERATURE
nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company
of ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their
return from the Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by
telling these tales, and the pious widow Dame Oisille
gives excellent assistance in showing how they tend to
a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in
number the tales of the Decameron, is incomplete.
Possibly Marguerite was aided by some one or more
of the authors of whom she was the patroness and pro-
tector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription
of the Heptamfo-on to Bonaventure des Periers.
Among the poets whom Marguerite received with
favour at her court was CLMENT MAROT, the versifier,
as characterised by Boileau, of "elegant badinage."
His predecessors and early contemporaries in the open-
ing years of the sixteenth century continued the manner
of the so-called rhetoriqueurs, who endeavoured to main-
tain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of
ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction ; or
else they carried on something of the more living tradi-
tion of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former,
Jean le Maire de Beiges deserves to be remembered
less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations
de Gaitle et Singularitez de Troie, in which the Trojan
origin of the French people is set forth with some
feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition.
Clement Marot, born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a
poet's son, was for a time in the service of Francis I.
as valet de chambre, and accompanied his master to
the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made
prisoner. Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and
afterwards by the Genevan Calvinists as a libertine,
he was protected as long as was possible by the King
CLEMENT MAROT 85
and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to
Italy, in 1544.
In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle
Ages ; he edited the Roman de la Rose and the works
of Villon ; his immediate masters were the grands rheto-
riqueurs ; but the spirit of the Renaissance and his
own genius delivered him from the oppression of their
authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt
and the promise of freedom found in the Reforming
party. A light and pleasure -loving nature, a temper
which made the prudent conduct of life impossible,
exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors
whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace,
he glided without fatal mishap. He did not bring
to poetry depth of passion or solidity of thought ;
he brought what was needed a bright intelligence, a
sense of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, esprit.
Escaping, after his early Temple de Cupido, from the
allegorising style, he learned to express his personal
sentiments, and something of the gay, bourgeois spirit
of France, with aristocratic distinction. His poetry of
the court and of occasion has lost its savour ; but when
he writes familiarly (as in the Epitre au Roi pour avoir
ete derobe], or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat
and the lion), he is charmingly bright and natural. None
of his poems elegies, epistles, satires, songs, epigrams,
rondeaux, pastorals, ballades overwhelm us by their
length ; he was not a writer of vast imaginative ambi-
tions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their kind,
with happy turns of thought and expression in which
art seems to have the ease of nature. The satirical
epistle supposed to be sent, not by Marot, but by his
valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is spirited in its
86 FRENCH LITERATURE
insolence. L'Enfer is a satiric outbreak of indignation
suggested by his imprisonment in the Chatelet on the
charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine
Psalms added to his glory, and brought him the honour
of personal danger from the hostility of the Sorbonne ;
but to attempt such a translation is to aim at what is
impossible. His gift to French poetry is especially a
gift of finer art firm and delicate expression, felicity in
rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and grace
in poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic
line. A great poet Marot was not, and could not be ;
but, coming at a fortunate moment, his work served
literature in important ways ; it was a return from
laboured rhetoric to nature. In the classical age his
merit was recognised by La Bruyere, and the author
of the Fables and the Contes in some respects a kindred
spirit acknowledged a debt to Marot.
From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite
of Navarre. Of his contemporaries, who were also dis-
ciples, the most distinguished was MELIN DE SAINT-
GELAIS, and on the master's death Melin passed for
an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly,
as one who in slender work sought for elegance, and fell
into a mannered prettiness. While preserving something
of the French spirit, he suffered from the frigid ingenui-
ties which an imitation of Italian models suggested to
him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais brought
the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school
of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the
blason, which celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom,
a jewel, a flower, a precious stone ; lyrical inspiration
was slender, but clearness and grace were worth at-
taining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art
RABELAIS 87
served to lead the way towards Ronsard and the
Pleiade.
The most powerful personality in literature of the
first half of the sixteenth century was not a poet, though
he wrote verses, but a great creator in imaginative prose,
great partly by virtue of his native genius, partly because
the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science and
learning was thronging in his veins FRANgois RABELAIS.
Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of
parents in a modest station, he received his education
in the village of Seuille and at the convent of La Bau-
mette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and
longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury.
For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the
cell and cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte.
In books, but not those of a monastic library, he found
salvation ; mathematics, astronomy, law, Latin, Greek
consoled him during his period of uncongenial seclu-
sion. His criminal companions books which might be
suspected of heresy were sequestrated. The young
Bishop of Maillezais his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac,
who had aided his studies and the great scholar Bude
came to his rescue, and passing first, by favour of the
Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais, before
long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest,
began his wanderings of a scholar in search of universal
knowledge. In 1530-31 he was at Montpellier, study-
ing medicine and lecturing on medical works of Hippo-
crates and Galen ; next year, at Lyons, one of the learned
group gathered around the great printers of that city,
he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and
was known as a scientific author. Towards the close of
1532 he re-edited the popular romance Chroniques Gar-
7
88 FRENCH LITERATURE
gantuincs, which tells the adventures of the " enormous
giant Gargantua." It was eagerly read, and brought
laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients. Learn-
ing, he held, was good, but few things in this world are
wholesomer than laughter. The success of the Chro-
niques seems to have moved him to write a continuation,
and in 1533 appeared Pantagruel t the story of the deeds
and prowess of Gargantua's giant son, newly composed
by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealed the
name of Francois Rabelais. It forms the second of the
five books which make up its author's famous work. A
recast or rather a new creation of the Chronicles of
Gargantua, replacing the original Chroniqucs, followed
in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 that the second
and in its complete form the third books of Pantagruel
appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The
last book was posthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full),
and the inferiority of style, together with the more bitter
spirit of its satire, have led many critics to the opinion
that it is only in part from the hand of the great and wise
humourist.
Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as
physician to the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay,
Bishop of Paris. He pursued his scientific studies in
medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic, and had
all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains of
antiquity. Some years of his life were passed in wan-
dering from one French university to another. Fearing
the hostility of the Sorbonne, during the last illness of
his protector Francis L, he fled to the imperial city of
Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal du
Bellay, in 1549. Next year the author of Pantagruel
was appointed cure of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps
RABELAIS 89
as a concession to publio opinion, he resigned his clerical
charges on the eve of the publication of his fourth book.
Rabelais died probably in 1552 or 1553, aged about sixty
years.
On his death it might well have been said that the
gaiety of nations was eclipsed ; but to his contemporaries
Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the
buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of
science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation
w r ere in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound
judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus
that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay
wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality;
below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equi-
librium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was
in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all
dikes and dams ; and laughter for him needed no justifi-
cation, it was a part of this abounding life. After the
medieval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of
scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and
explosion ; he would be no fragment of humanity, but
a complete man. He would enjoy the world to the full,
and yet at the same time there is something of stoicism
in his philosophy of life ; while gaily accepting the good
things of the earth, he would hold himself detached from
the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous
sanity. Let us return such is his teaching to nature,
honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the
intellect and to the moral feeling ; let us take life seri-
ously, and therefore gaily ; let us face death cheerfully,
knowing that we do not wholly die ; with light in the
understanding and love in the heart, we can confront all
dangers and defy all doubts.
90 FRENCH LITERATURE
He is the creator of characters which are types. His
giants Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel are giants
of good sense and large benevolence. The education of
Pantagruel presents the ideal pedagogy of the Renais-
sance, an education of the whole man mind and body
in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and word-
spinning of the effete mediaeval schools. Friar John is
the monk whose passion for a life of activity cannot be
restrained ; his violence is the overflow of wholesome
energy. It is to his care that the Abbey of Thelema is
confided, where young men and maidens are to be occu-
pied with every noble toil and every high delight, an
abbey whose rule has but a single clause (since goodness
has no rule save freedom), " Do what you will." Of such
a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest out-
come. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived
from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shake-
speare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his
inexhaustible wit ; he is the worst and best of company.
We would dispense with such a disreputable associate
if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd
rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world,"
and we cannot part with him. Panurge would marry,
but fears lest he may be the victim of a faithless wife ;
every mode of divination, every source of prediction
except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs
threatening ; it only remains to consult the oracle of
La Dive Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and
perilous ; in each island at which the adventurers
touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse is exhibited
for ridicule ; the word of the oracle is in the end
the mysterious " Drink " drink, that is, if one may
venture to interpret an oracle, of the pure water
BONAVENTURE DES PERIERS 91
of wisdom and knowledge, and let the unknown
future rest.
The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste
of his time ; his severer censures of Church and State
were disguised by his buffoonery ; flinging out his good
sense and wise counsels with a liberal hand, he also
wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If he is gross
beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the
evil of such grossness, a cofrupter of morals, unless
morals be corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the
natural man. The graver wrongs of his age wars of
ambition, the abuse of public justice, the hypocrisies,
cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics, distrust of the
intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life are vigor-
ously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity,
truth ; he pleads for the right of manhood to a full and
free development of all its powers ; and if questions of
original sin and divine grace trouble him little, and his
creed has some of the hardihood of the Renaissance, he
is full of filial gratitude to le bon Dieu for His gift of life,
and of a world in which to live strongly should be to
live joyously.
The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of
prose tales who were his contemporaries and successors ;
but they want his broad good sense and real tem-
perance. BONAVENTURE DES PERIERS, whom Marguerite
of Navarre favoured, and whose Nouvelles Recreations,
with more of the tradition of the French fabliaux and
farces and less of the Italian manner, have something
in common with the stories of the Heptameron, died in
desperation by his own hand about 1543. His Lucianic
dialogues which compose the Cymbalum Mmidi show
the audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the
9 2 FRENCH LITERATURE
Renaissance engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With
all his boldness and ardour Rabelais exercised a certain
discretion, and in revising his own text clearly exhibited
a desire to temper valour with prudence.
It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais
published the second and best book of his Pantagruel, in
which the ideality and the realism of the Renaissance
blossom to the full, there was a certain revival of the
chivalric romance. The Spanish Amadis des Gaules
(1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a
distant echo of the Romances of the Round Table. The
gallant achievements of courtly knights, their mystical
and platonic loves, were a delight to Francis I., and
charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first time,
the literature of Spain reached France, and the influ-
ence of Amadis reappears in the seventeenth century in
the romances of d'Urfe and Mdlle. de Scudery.
If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently
and amply in the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the
Reformation finds its highest and most characteristic
utterance through one whom Rabelais describes as the
"demoniacle" of Geneva JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). The
pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer,
whose life was a long disease, yet whose indomitable
will sustained him amid bodily infirmities, present a
striking contrast to the sanguine health and overflow-
ing animal spirits of the good physician who reckoned
laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not
merely a Reformer : he was also a humanist, who, in
his own way, made a profound study of man, and who
applied the learning of a master to the determination
of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly
legal ; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the
CALVIN 93
rigour, the severity, and the formal procedures of the
law. Indignation against the imprisonment and burning
of Protestants, under the pretence that they were rebel-
lious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity ; silence,
he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King
an eloquent letter, in which he maintained that the
Reformed faith was neither new nor tending towards
schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid
and logical exposition of Protestant doctrine the
Christiana; Religionis Institutio. It placed him, at the
age of twenty-seven, as leader in the forefront of the
new religious movement.
But the movement was not merely learned, it was
popular, and Calvin was resolved to present his work to
French readers in their own tongue. His translation
the Institution appeared probably in 1541. Perhaps no
work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so great
an influence. It consists of four books of God, of Jesus
as a Mediator, of the effects of His mediatorial work,
and of the exterior forms of the Church. The generous
illusion of Rabelais, that human nature is essentially
good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallen
and condemned under the law ; all his righteousness
is as filthy rags ; God, of His mere good pleasure, from
all eternity predestinated some men to eternal life and
others to eternal death ; the Son of God came to earth
to redeem the elect ; through the operation of the Holy
Spirit in the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are
justified through His righteousness imputed to them,
and are sanctified in their hearts ; the Church is the
body of the faithful in every land ; the officers of the
Church are chosen by the people ; the sacraments are
two baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of
94 FRENCH LITERATURE
system, his clearness, and the logical enchainment of
his ideas, Calvin is eminently French. On the one side
he saw the Church of Rome, with as he held its
human tradition, its mass of human superstitions, in-
tervening between the soul and God ; on the other
side were the scepticism, the worldliness, the religious
indifference of the Renaissance. Within the Reforming
party there was the conflict of private opinions. Calvin
desired to establish once for all, on the basis of the
Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which should
impose itself upon the minds of men as of divine autho-
rity, which should be at once a barrier against the
dangers of superstition and the dangers of libertine
speculation. As the leaders of the French Revolution
propounded political constitutions founded on the idea
of the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth
a creed proceeding, if we may so put it, from a con-
ception of the absolute rights of God. Through the
mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, we
are what we are.
It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the
greatest writer of the sixteenth century. He learned
much from the prose of Latin antiquity. Clearness,
precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual energy are
compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensi-
bility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to
impress his ideas upon other minds, and his austere
purpose was attained. In the days of the pagan Re-
naissance, it was well for France that there should also
be a Renaissance of moral rigour ; if freedom was
needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it
may be admitted that Calvin's reason is sometimes the
dupe of Calvin's reasoning.
BF.ZE 95
His Life was written in French by his fellow-worker in
the Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded
the history of the Reformed Churches in France (1580).
Beze and Viret, together with their leader Calvin, were
eminent in pulpit exposition and exhortation, and in
Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At
Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the
Psalms, to complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his
sacred drama the Tragedie Franqaise du sacrifice d' Abra-
ham, designed to inculcate the duty of entire surrender
to the divine will, and written with a grave and
restrained ardour, was presented at the University of
Lausanne.
CHAPTER II
FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE
THE classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed
to high ethical ideals ; it was not wholly an affair of the
sensuous imagination ; it brought with it the conception
of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we
see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among
the many translators of the sixteenth century was Mon-
taigne's early friend the friend in memory of all his
life ETIENNE DE LA BOETIE (1530-63). It is not,
however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful
rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him
the Mesnagerie) that we remember La Boetie ; it is
rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom
in the Discours de la Servitude Volontaire or Contrun,
written at sixteen revised later in which, with the
rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective against tyranny.
Before La Boetie's premature death the morals of anti-
quity as seen in action had been exhibited to French
readers in the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of
Plutarch's Lives (1559), to be followed, some years later,
by his (Euvres Morales de Plutarque. JACQUES AMYOT
(1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the
Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in
his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the Daphnis et Chloe
of Longus, and other works, was exquisite ; but still
AMYOT'S PLUTARCH 97
more admirable was his sense of the capacities of French
prose. He divined with a rare instinct the genius of the
language; he felt the affinities between his Greek original
and the idioms of his own countrymen ; he rather re-
created than translated Plutarch. " We dunces," wrote
Montaigne, "would have been lost, had not this book
raised us from the mire ; thanks to it, we now venture to
speak and write ; ... it is our breviary." The life and
the ideas of the ancient world became the possession,
not of scholars only, but of all French readers. The
book was a school of manners and of thought, an in-
spirer of heroic deeds. "To love Plutarch," said the
greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of Navarre,
"is to love me, for he was long the master of my
youth."
It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity
as Amyot conveyed to the general mind of France that
was wanting to Ronsard and the group of poets sur-
rounding him. Their work was concerned primarily
with literary form ; of the life of the world and general
ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The
transition from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly
through the school of Lyons. In that city of the South,
letters flourished side by side with industry and com-
merce ; Maurice Sceve celebrated his mistress Delie,
"object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenui-
ties ; and his pupil LOUISE LAB , " la belle Cordiere,"
sang in her sonnets of a true passion felt, as she declares,
" en ses os, en son sang, en son ame." The Lyonese
poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas, rather carry
on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pleiade.
PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a chateau a few leagues
from Vendome, in the year 1524, was in the service of
98 FRENCH LITERATURE
the sons of Francis I. as page, was in Scotland with
James V., and later had the prospect of a distinguished
diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a
serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public
life. He threw himself ardently into the study of
letters; in company with the boy Antoine de Ba'ff he
received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean
Daurat, soon to be principal of the College Coqueret.
At the College a group of students Ronsard, Ba'if,
Joachim du Bellay, Remi Belleau gathered about the
master. The " Brigade " was formed, which, by-and-
by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard,
and including Daurat, became the constellation of the
Pleiade. The seven associates read together, translated
and imitated the classics ; a common doctrine of art
banded them in unity ; they thought scorn of the vulgar
ways of popular verse ; poetry for them was an arduous
and exquisite toil ; its service was a religion. At length,
in 1549, they flung out their manifesto the Defense
et Illustration de la Langne Franqaise by Du Bellay,
the most important study in literary criticism of the
century. With this should be considered, as less im-
portant manifestoes, the later Art Podtique of Ronsard,
and his prefaces to the Franciade. To formulate prin-
ciples is not always to the advantage of a movement
in literature ; but champions need a banner, reformers
can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against the
popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade main-
tained that poetry was a high and difficult form of
art ; against the pedantry of humanism they main-
tained that the native tongue of France admitted of
literary art worthy to take its place beside that of
Greece or Rome. The French 'literary vocabulary, they
DOCTRINE OF THE PLEIADE 99
declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to
be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dia-
lects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin,
by judicious developments of the existing families of
words, by the recovery of words that have fallen into
disuse.
It is unjust to the Pleiade to say that they aimed at
overloading poetic diction with neologisms of classical
origin ; they sought to innovate with discretion ; but
they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic
diction distinct from that of prose ; they turned away
from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis ;
they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service
of verse ; they recommended a special syntax in imita-
tion of the Latin*; for the elder forms of French poetry
they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of
classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants
royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as tpiceries ; and
their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar
or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by
newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters.
Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated,
with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine
rhymes ; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the
meaning. Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, per-
mits, on the ground of classical example, the gliding
from couplet to couplet without a pause. "The alex-
andrine holds in our language the place of heroic
verse among the Greeks and Romans" in this state-
ment is indicated the chief service rendered to French
poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the Pleiade ; they it
was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on
later writers that majestic line, possessing the most
ioo FRENCH LITERATURE
varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which
has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and
to those of Victor Hugo.
Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of
the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French classical
school ; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to
reform the reformation of the Plciade, and to win for
himself the glory which properly belongs to his pre-
decessors. Unfortunately from its origin the French
classical school had in it the spirit of an intellectual
aristocracy, which removed it from popular sympathies ;
unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pleiade failed to
perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are
admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but
because they are founded on the imitation of nature
and on ideas of the reason. They were regarded as
authorities equal with nature or independent of it ; and
thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew
literary art, its teaching involved an error which even-
tually tended to the sterilisation of art. That error
found its correction in the literature of the seventeenth
century, and expressly in the doctrine set forth by
Boileau ; yet under the correction some of the con-
sequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his
followers, on the other hand, never made the assump-
tion, common enough in the seventeenth century, that
poetry could be manufactured by observance of the
rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of
emotion must be rationalised by the understanding ;
they left a place for the instinctive movements of poetic
sensibility.
During forty years Ronsard remained the " Prince of
Poets." Tasso sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel
RONSARD 10 i
de 1'Hospital wrote in his praise; Brantome placed him
above Petrarch ; Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart sent
him gifts ; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to sit
beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied
with his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a
national calamity, and pompous honours were awarded
to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary
distinction, did not lose his true self in a noisy fame.
His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness
perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement;
we think of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as
" the priest of Flora."
His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550
to 1554 he was a humanist without discretion or reserve
In the first three books of the Odes he attempted to rival
Pindar ; in the Amours de Cassandre he emulates the
glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning
his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon l and
Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes
found in the fourth and fifth books, the period of the
Amours de Marie and the Hymnes. From 1560 to 1574
he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an
eloquent declaimer on public events in the Discours des
Aliseres de ce Temps, and the unfortunate epic poet of his
unfinished Frandade. During the last ten years of his
life he gave freer expression to his personal feelings,
his sadness, his gladness ; and to these years belong the
admirable sonnets to Helene de Surgeres, his autumnal
love.
Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tenden-
cies of a time when the great affair was the organisation
1 i.e. the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in I554> ky Henri
Estienne.
102 FRENCH LITERATURE
of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of
individual and personal passions, were not favourable
to the development of lyrical poetry. In his imitations
of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song,
and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated
attempt to reproduce the passionate fluctuations and
supposed disorder of his model. The study of Pindar,
however, trained Ronsard in the handling of sustained
periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyri-
cal combinations. His Anacreontic and HoratLan odes
are far happier ; among these some of his most de-
lightful work is found. If he was deficient in great
ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an exquisite
sense of metrical harmony. The power which he
possessed as a narrative poet appears best in episodes
or epic fragments. His ambitious attempt to trace
the origin of the French monarchy from the ima-
ginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject,
and equally unfortunate in its form the rhyming
decasyllabic verse.
In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit
eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contem-
poraries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot
and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry
as the Discours dcs Misercs de ce Temps and the Institution
pour I' Adolescence du Rot, Charles IX., Ronsard is original
and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the
seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling
for external nature, touched at times by a tender sadness.
When he escapes from the curiosities and the strain of
his less happy Petrarchism, he is an admirable poet of
love in song and sonnet ; no more beautiful variation on
the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists
BAlF: BELLE AU 103
than his sonnet Quand vous serez bien vieille, unless it be
his dainty ode Mignonne, allons voirsi la Rose. Passionate
in the deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not ; but it was
much to be sincere and tender, to observe just measure,
to render a subtle phase of emotion. In the fine melan-
choly of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern. Before
all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor of
new effects and movements of the lyre ; in his hands the
entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified.
His dexterity in various metres was that of a great vir-
tuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers
difficulties, it was a skill inspired and sustained by the
sentiment of metre.
Of the other members of the Pleiade, one Jodelle
is remembered chiefly in connection with the history
of the drama. Bai'f (1532-89), son of the French
ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles and
Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took
from Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his Me'tfores,
was guided by the Anacreontic poems in his Passe-
Temps, and would fain rival Theognis in his most
original work Les Mimes, where a moral or satiric
meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He
desired to connect poetry more closely with music, and
with this end in view thought to reform the spelling of
words and to revive the quantitative metrical system
of classical verse. 1 REMI BELLEAU (1528-77) practised
the Horatian ode and the sonnet ; translated Anacreon ;
followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his Bergerie of
connected prose and verse, where the shepherds are
persons of distinction arrayed in a pastoral disguise ;
1 The " Baffin verse," French not classical, is of fifteen syllables, divided
into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables.
8
104 FRENCH LITERATURE
and adapted the mediaeval lapidary (with imitations of
the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the Renaissance in
his Amours et Nouveaux Jischanges des Pier res Precieuses,
These little myths and metamorphoses of gems are
ingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for
nature which Belleau possessed is seen at its best
in the charming song Avril, included in his some-
what incoherent Bergerie. Among his papers was
found, after his death, a comedy, La Reconnue, which,
if it has little dramatic power, shows a certain instinct
for satire.
These are minor lights in the poetical constellation ;
but the star of JOACHIM DU BELLAY shines with a ray
which, if less brilliant than that of Ronsard, has a finer
and more penetrating influence. Du Bellay was born
about 1525, at Lire 1 , near Angers, of an illustrious family.
His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy
haunts his verse. Like Ronsard he suffered from deaf-
ness, and he has humorously sung its praises. Olive,
fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic or Petrarchan
mistress, Mdlle. de Viole (the letters of whose name
are transposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same
moment as the earliest Odes of Ronsard; but before
long he could mock in sprightly stanzas the fantasies
and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It was not until
his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousin
Cardinal du Bellay, the French ambassador, that he
found his real self. In his Antiquites de Rome he ex-
presses the sentiment of ruins, the pathos of fallen
greatness, as it had never been expressed before. The
intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his
broken health, an unfortunate passion for the Faustina
of his Latin verses, and the longing for his beloved
DU BELLAY 105
province and little Lire depressed his spirits ; in the
sonnets of his Regrets he embodied his intimate feelings,
and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of the
Pontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein
had, indeed, already shown itself in his mocking counsel
to le Poete courtisan : the courtier poet is to be a gentle-
man who writes at ease ; he is not to trouble himself
with study of the ancients ; he is to produce only pieces
of occasion, and these in a negligent style ; the rarer and
the smaller they are the better ; and happily at last he
may cease to bring forth even these. Possibly his poete
courtisan was Melin de Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet
Du Bellay is charming ; his Jeux Rustiques, while owing
much to the Lusus of the Venetian poet Navagero, have
in them the true breath of the fields ; it is his douce
province of Anjou which inspires him ; the song to
Venus in its happiest stanzas is only less admirable
than the Vanneur de Bit, with which more than any
other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is associ-
ated. The personal note, which is in general absent
from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and ex-
quisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He
did not live long enough to witness the complete
triumph of the master ; in 1560 he died exhausted, at
the age of thirty-five.
The Pleiade served literature by their attention to
form, by their skill in poetic instrumentation ; but they
were incapable of interpreting life in any large and
original way. In the hands of their successors poetry
languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPE
DESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his
reproduction and imitation of Italian models ; as a
courtier poet he reduced literary flattery to a fine art ;
106 FRENCH LITERATURE
but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of
passion is a laboured kind of esprit. A copy of his
works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives ;
the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished,
probably because the writer was unwilling to pursue
an adversary whom death had removed from his way.
Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire
was developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and
to him we owe an Art Pottique (1575) which adapts to
his own time the teaching of Aristotle and Horace.
More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT (1534-
1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth
and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the
patriotism of French citizenship ; his field was small,
but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The
villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterdle and the ode on May-
day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments.
The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in
some degree prepared by plays of the sixteenth century,
written in Latin the work of Buchanan, Muret, and
others by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euri-
pides, translations from Italian comedy, and renderings
of one Spanish model, the highly-popular Celestina of
Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in
schools. The first performance of a play in French
belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's
translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by
his friends of the College de Coqueret. It was only by
amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spec-
tators, that the new classical tragedies could be presented.
Gradually both tragedy and comedy came to be written
solely with a view to publication in print. The mediaeval
drama still held the stage.
CLASSICAL TRAGEDY 107
JODELLE'S Cleoptitre (1552), performed with enthusiasm
by amateurs, was therefore a false start ; it was essen-
tially literary, and not theatrical. Greek models were
crudely imitated, with a lack of almost everything that
gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was
more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy
to imitate his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his
excess of emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic
canons, formulated by Scaliger in his Poetic, were
rigorously applied. Unity of place is preserved in Cleo-
pdtre ; the time of the action is reduced to twelve hours ;
there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a
ghost (in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's
death ; of action there is none, the stage stands still.
If Jodelle's Didon has some literary merit, it has little
dramatic vitality. The oratorical energy of Grevin's
Jules Cesar, the studies of history in La Mort de Daire
and La Mort d' Alexandre, by Jacques de La Taille,
do not compensate their deficiency in the qualities re-
quired by the theatre. One tragedy alone, 'La Sultane,
by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its violences and ex-
travagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and
scenic effect.
Could the mediaeval mystery and classical tragedy
be reconciled ? The Protestant Reformer Beze, in his
Sacrifice d'A braham, attempted something of the kind ;
his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy
in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the
life of David one of them admirable in its rendering of
the love of Michol, daughter of Saul were published in
1556 by Loys Des-Masures : the stage arrangements are
those of the mediaeval drama, but the unity of time is
observed, and chorus and semi- chorus respond in alter-
io8 FRENCH LITERATURE
nate strains. No junction of dramatic systems essen-
tially opposed proved in the end possible. When Jean
de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject in his Saul le
Furieux, a play remarkable for its impressive concep-
tion and development of the character of Saul, he com-
posed it selon Fart, and in the manner of "the old
tragic authors." He is uncompromising in his classical
method ; the mediaeval drama seemed inartificial to him
in the large concessions granted by the spectators to
the authors and actors; he would have what passes on
the stage approximate, at least, to reality ; the unities
were accepted not merely on the supposed authority
of Aristotle, but because they were an aid in attaining
verisimilitude.
The most eminent name in the history of French
tragedy of the sixteenth century is that of ROBERT
GARNIER (1534-90). His discipleship to Seneca was at
first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggeration
his master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement
in his scenes, he proceeded in later plays to accumulate
action upon action without reducing the action to unity.
At length, in Les Juives (1583), which exhibits the revolt
of the Jewish King and his punishment by Nabucho-
donosor, he attained something of true pity and terror,
beauty of characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in
the plaintive songs of the chorus. Gamier was assuredly
a poet ; but even in Les Juives, the best tragedy of his
century, he was not a master of dramatic art. If any-
where he is in a true sense dramatic, it is in his example
of the new form of tragi-comedy. Bradamante, derived
from the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, shows not only
poetic imagination, but a certain feeling for the require-
ments of the theatre.
COMEDY 109
Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's
Eugene, is either a development of the mediaeval farce,
indicated in point of form by the retention of octo-
syllabic verse, or an importation from the drama of
Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, of
Plautus were translated ; but, in truth, classical models .
had little influence. Grevin, while professing originality,
really follows the traditions of the farce. Jean de La
Taille, in his prose comedy Les Corrivaux, prepared
the way for the easy and natural dialogue of the comic
stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-century
comedies are those translated in prose from the Italian,
with such obvious adaptations as might suit them to
French readers, by PIERRE DE LARIVEY (1540 to after
1611). Of the family of the Giunti, he had gallicised
his own name (Giunti, i.e. Arrives) ; and the originality
of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name ;
they served at least to establish an Italian tradition
for comedy, which was not without an influence in
the seventeenth century ; they served to advance the
art of dialogue. If any comedy of the period stands
out as superior to its fellows, it is Les Contents (1584),
by Odet de Turnebe, a free imitation of Italian models
united with something imported from the Spanish
Cclestina. Its intrigue is an Italian imbroglio ; but
there are lively and natural scenes, such as can but
rarely be found among the predecessors of Moliere. In
general the comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly
confused in plot, conventional in its types of character,
and too often as grossly indecent as the elder farces.
Before the century closed, the pastoral drama had been
discovered, and received influences from both Italy and
Spain; the soil was being prepared for that delicate
no FRENCH LITERATURE
flower of poetry, but as yet its nurture was little under-
stood, nor indeed can it be said to have ever taken kindly
to the climate of France.
While on the one hand the tendencies of the
Pleiade may be described as exotic, going forth, as
they did, to capture the gifts of classical and Italian
literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenu-
ously that thus only could French literature attain its
highest possibilities. In the scholarship of the time,
side by side with the humanism which revived and
restored the culture of Greece and Rome, was an-
other humanism which was essentially national. The
historical origins of France were studied for the first
time with something of a critical spirit by CLAUDE
FAUCHET in his Antiquitcs Gauloises et Francoises
(1579 1601). His Recueil de I ' Origine de la Langue et
Poesie Fran$oise, in spite of its errors, was an effort
towards French philology; and in calling attention to
the trouveres and their works, Fauchet may be con-
sidered a remote master of the school of modern literary
research. ESTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615), the jurist
who maintained in a famous action the cause of the
University against the Jesuits, in his Recherches de la
France treated with learning and vigour various im-
portant points in French history civil and ecclesiastical
language, literary history, and the foundation of uni-
versities. HENRI ESTIENNE (1531-98), who entered to
the full into the intoxication of classical humanism,
was patriotic in his reverence for his native tongue.
In a trilogy of little treatises (1565-79), written with
much spirit, he maintained that of modern languages
the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek,
attempted to establish its superiority to Italian, and
JEAN BODIN in
much more to Spanish, and mocked the contemporary
fashion of Italianised French.
The study of history is supported on the one hand b)!
such erudite research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier;
on the other hand it is supported by political philosophy
and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense
of the word, the sixteenth century made no large and
coherent contribution ; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism,
Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and
clashed together ; the rival theologies of the Roman and
Reformed Churches contended in a struggle for life.
PIERRE DE LA RAMEE (1515-72) expressed the revolt
of rationalism against the methods of the schoolmen
and the authority of Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote
in Latin, and his Dialectique, the first philosophical work
in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls within the province of
literary history.
The philosophy of politics is represented by one
great name, that of JEAN BODIN (1529-96), whose R<?-
publique may entitle him to be styled the Montesquieu
of the Renaissance. In an age which tended towards
the formation of great monarchies he was vigorously
monarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign
might well be thought needful, in the second half of
the century, as a barrier against anarchy ; but Bodin
was no advocate of tyranny ; he condemned slavery,
and held that religious persecution can only lead to a
dissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by
Bodin as a free man under the supreme government of
another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the
adaptation of government to the varieties of race and
climate. The attempts at a general history of France
in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved
112 FRENCH LITERATURE
the arid methods and unilluminated style of the medi-
aeval chronicles ; 1 in the second half of the century
they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity.
Histories of contemporary events in Europe were
written with conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de
la Popeliniere, and with personal and party passion,
struggling against his well-meant resolves, by Agrippa
d'Aubign6. The great Historia met Temporis of De
Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was a
highly- important contribution to literature, but it is
written in Latin.
With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have
been long pre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and
already in the sixteenth century such personal recitals
are numerous. The wars of Frangois I. and of Henri
II. gave abundant scope for the display of individual
enterprise and energy ; the civil wars breathed into the
deeds of men an intensity of passion ; the actors had
much to tell, and a motive for telling it each in his own
interest.
The Commentaires of BLAISE DE MONLUC (1502-77)
are said to have been named by Henri IV. "the
soldier's Bible " ; the Bible is one which does not
always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon of
honourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the
instinct of battle in his blood ; from a soldier he rose
through every rank to be the King's lieutenant of
Guyenne and a Marshal of France ; during fifty years
he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great
general, amorous of danger, and at length, terribly
1 The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the
name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirable for its clearness, grace,
and simplicity.
MONLUC 113
disfigured by wounds, he sat down, not to rest, but
to wield his pen as if it were a sword of steel. His
Commentaircs were meant to be a manual for hardy
combatants, and what model could he set before the
young aspirant so animating as himself ? In his earlier
wars against the foreign foes of his country, Monluc was
indeed a model of military prowess; the civil wars added
cruelty to his courage ; after a fashion he was religious,
and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for
heretics and adversaries of his King. An unlettered
soldier, Monluc, by virtue of his energy of character
and directness of speech, became a most impressive and
spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for
stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean
rocks he had formerly observed a lonely monastery, in
view at once of Spain and France ; there it was his wish
to end his days.
From the opposite party in the great religious and
political strife came the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue,
the simple and beautiful record of her husband's life by
Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career, written
in an old age of gloom and passion,by D'Aubigne". The
ideas of Henri IV. himself a royal author in his Lettres
missives are embodied in the (Economies Royales of the
statesman Sully, whose secretaries were employed for
the occasion in laboriously reciting his words and deeds
as they had learnt them from their chief. The superficial
aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals
or lack of morals of the time, are lightly and brightly
exhibited by PIERRE DE BOURDEILLE, lord of BRAN-
TOME, Catholic abbe", soldier and courtier, observer of
the great world, gossip of amorous secrets. His Vies des
Homines Illustres et des Grands Capitaines, his Vies des
II 4 FRENCH LITERATURE
Dames Illustres et des Dames Galantes, and his Mtmoires
contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication
during his lifetime, but the author cherished the thought
of his posthumous renown. Brantome, wholly indifferent
to good and evil, had a vivid interest in life ; virtue and
vice concerned him alike and equally, if only they
had vivacity, movement, colour; and although, as with
Monluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn
to authorship, he wrote with a nai've art, an easy grace,
and abundant spirit. To correct and complete Bran-
tome's narrative as it related to herself, Marguerite,
Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., prepared her
unfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series
of autobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her
account of the night of St. Bartholomew is justly
celebrated ; the whole record, indeed, is full of interest;
but there were passages of her life which it was natural
that she should pass over in silence ; her sins of
omission, as Bayle has observed, are many. 1
The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant
literature, in which the extreme parties contended with
passion, while between these a middle party, the aspirants
to conciliation, pleaded for the ways of prudence, and,
if possible, of peace. FRANCOIS HOTMAN, the effect of
whose Latin Franco-Gallia, a political treatise presenting
the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that of
Rousseau's Contrat Social, launched his eloquent invective
against the Cardinal de Lorraine, in the Epistre envoy fo au
Tigre de la France. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend
1 The Memoires-Journeaux of Pierre de 1'Estoile are a great magazine of
the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity. The Lettres of D'Ossat and
the Negotiations of the President Jeannin are of importance in the records
of diplomacy.
MILITANT LITERATURE 115
of Philip Sidney, in his Vindicia contra Tyrannos,
justified rebellion against princes who violate by their
commands the laws of God. D'Aubigne, in his Con-
fession de Sancy, attacked with characteristic ardour the
apostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that
threefold recanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix
de Sainte-Aldegonde, in his Tableau des Differands de la
Religion, mingles theological erudition with his raillery
against the Roman communion. Henri Estienne applied
the spirit and learning of a great humanist to religious
controversy in the second part of his Apologie pour
Herodote ; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian
may well be true, he sarcastically maintains, when in
this sixteenth century the abuses of the Roman Church
seem to pass all belief. On the other hand, Du Perron,
a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and cita-
tions of the heretics. As the century drew towards its
close, violence declined ; the struggle was in a measure
appeased. In earlier days the Chancellor, Michel de
1' Hospital, had hoped to establish harmony between
the rival parties ; grief for the massacre of St. Bar-
tholomew hastened his death. The learned Duplessis-
Mornay, leader and guide of the Reformed Churches
of France, a devoted servant of Henri of Navarre, while
fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attached to
the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme
partisan. The reconciliation of Henri IV. with the
Church of Rome, which delivered France from anarchy,
was, however, a grief to some of his most loyal sup-
porters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most
eminent.
The cause of Henri against the League was served by
the manuscript circulation of a prose satire, with inter-
n6 FRENCH LITERATURE
spersed pieces of verse, the work of a group of writers,
moderate Catholics or converted Protestants, who loved
their country and their King, the Satire Menipttel- When
it appeared in print (1594; dated on the title-page 1593)
the cause was won ; the satire rose upon a wave of suc-
cess, like a gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody
of the Estates of the League which had been ineffectually
convoked to make choice of a king. Two Rabelaisian
charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine, offer their
drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre ; the virtues
of the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are mani-
fold it will change the blackest criminal into a spotless
lamb, it will transform a vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's
hat, and at need can accomplish a score of other miracles.
Presently the buffoon Estates file past to their assembly ;
the hall in which they meet is tapestried with grotesque
scenes from history ; the order of the sitting is deter-
mined, and the harangues begin, harangues in which
each speaker exposes his own ambitions, greeds, hypcv-
crisies, and egoism, until Monsieur d'Aubray, the orator
of the tiers Mat, closes the debate with a speech in
turn indignant, ironical, or gravs in its commisera-
tion for the popular wrongs an ut'.erance of bourgeois
honesty and good sense. The writers Canon Pierre
Leroy ; Gillot, clerk-advocate of the Parliament of Paris ;
Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry ; Jean Passerat, poet
and commentator on Rabelais ; Chrestien and Pithou,
two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events
met in a room of Gillot's house, where, according to
the legend, Boileau was afterwards born, and there con-
cocted the venom of their pamphlet. Its wit, in spite of
1 Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the Gadarene, had
called his satires Saturtz Menippea ; hence the title.
DU BARTAS 117
some extravagances and the tedium of certain pages, is
admirable ; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral pru-
dence alternate ; and it had the great good fortune of a
satire, that of coming at the lucky moment.
The French Huguenots were not without their poets.
Two of these Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas,
and Agrippa d'Aubigne are eminent. The fame of Du
BARTAS (1544-90) was indeed European. Ronsard sent
him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time the rivalry
of his renown ; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse ;
the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the
rendering by Sylvester ; long afterwards Goethe hon-
oured him with praise beyond his deserts. To read his
poems now, notwithstanding passages of vivid descrip-
tion and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would
need rare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the
fact that while he was a disciple of the Pleiade, a disciple
crude, intemperate, and provincial, he deserted Greece
and Rome, and drew his subjects from Hebraic sources.
His Judith (1573), composed by the command of Jeanne
d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-em-
phatic style. La Sepmaine,ou la Creation en Sept Journ&s,
appeared in 1578, and within a few years had passed
through thirty editions. Du Bartas is always copious,
sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic ; but laboured
and rhetorical description, never ending and still be-
ginning, fatigues the mind ; an encyclopaedia of the
works of creation weighs heavily upon the imagination ;
we sigh for the arrival of the day of rest.
THODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGN (1550-1630) was not
among the admirers of Du Bartas. His natural temper was
framed for pleasure ; at another time he might have been
known only as a poet of the court, of lighter satire, and of
n8 FRENCH LITERATURE
love ; the passions of the age transformed him into an
ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical
culture was wide and exact ; at ten years old he translated
the Crito ; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were
at his command. He might, had France been at peace
with herself, have appeared in literature as a somewhat
belated Ronsardist ; but his hereditary cause became his
own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in
presence of the withering heads of the conspirators of
Amboise, the oath of immitigable vengeance. Pursuits,
escapes, the camp, the battle-field, the prison, the court
made up no small part of his life of vicissitude and of
unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from
the lethargy of pleasure ; he warned the King against
the crime of apostasy ; he dreadled the mass, but could
cheerfully have accepted the stake. Extreme in his rage
of party, he yet in private affairs could show good sense
and generosity. His elder years were darkened by what
he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling
away from the faith of that son who, by an irony of
fate, became the father of Madame de Maintenon. Four
times condemned to death, he died in exile at the age of
eighty.
D'Aubigne's satirical tale, Les Aventures du Baron de
F&neste, contrasts the man who appears spreading his
plumes in the sunshine of the court with the man who
is, the man who lives upon his estate, among his rustic
neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people and his
native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubign6 is little more
than a degenerate issue from the Pleiade. It is in his
vehement poem of mourning and indignation and woe,
Les Tragiques, begun in 1577 but not published till 1616,
that his power is fully manifested. To D'Aubigne, as
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE 119
its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve exactly
applies : " Juvenal du xvi. siecle, apre, austere, inexor-
able, herisse d'hyperboles, e"tincelant de beautes, rache-
tant une rudesse grossiere par une sublime e"nergie."
In seven books it tells of the misery of France, the
treachery of princes, the abuse of public law and justice,
the fires and chains of religious persecution, the venge-
ance of God against the enemies of the saints, and
the final judgment of sinners, when air and fire and
water become the accusers of those who have per-
verted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty.
The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained
or hard and metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress
the heart ; but the cry of true passion is heard in
its finer pages ; from amid the turmoil and smoke,
living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which
illuminate the gloom. The influence of Les Tragiques
may still be felt in passages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant
eloquence.
In the midst of strife, however, there were men who
pursued the disinterested service of humanity and whose
work made for peace. The great surgeon Ambroise Pare",
full of tolerance and deeply pious, advanced his healing
art on the battle-field or amid the ravages of pestilence,
and left a large contribution to the literature of science
Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the
inventor of "rustic figulines," the designer of enamelled
cups and platters, but a true student of nature, who would
substitute the faithful observation of phenomena for
vain and ambitious theory. Olivier de Serres, another
disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helped to enrich
France by supporting Henri IV. in the introduction of
the industry in silk, and amassed his knowledge and
120 FRENCH LITERATURE
experience in his admirably-written Theatre d' Agricul-
ture. At a later date Antoine de Montchrestien, adven-
turous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal, the writer of
tragedies which connect the sixteenth century \vith the
classical school of later years, became the advocate of
a protectionist and a colonial policy in his Traicte 1 de
rCEconomie Politique; the style of his essay towards eco-
nomic reform has some of the passion and enthusiasm of
a poet.
A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time
was sought by some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guil-
laume du Vair (1556-1621), eminent as a magistrate, did
not desert his post of duty; he pleaded eloquently, as
chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, on behalf
of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on
French eloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of
public speaking above laboured pedantry to true human
discourse. But while taking part in the contentious pro-
gress of events, he saw the flow of human affairs as from
an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends
which form his treatise De la Constance et Consolation
es Calamit^s Publiques, Du Vair's counsels are those of
courage and resignation, not unmingled with hope. He
rendered into French the stoical morals of Epictetus;
and in his own Sainte Philosophie and Philosophie Morale
des Sto'iques he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather
than \vith genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to
show how human reason can lead the way to those ethical
truths which are the guiding lights of conduct.
Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be
found by limitation ; a few established truths will, after
all, carry us from the cradle to the grave ; and beyond
the bounds of certitude lies a limitless and fascinating
MONTAIGNE 1 2 1
field for observation and dubious conjecture. Amid the
multitude of new ideas which the revival of antiquity
brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival
churches, amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how
delightful to possess one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied
with the needful knowledge, small though it be, which is
vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with every
opinion and every varying humour of that curious and
wayward creature man ! And who so wayward, who so
wavering as one's self in all those parts of our composite
being which are subject to the play of time and circum-
stance ? Such, in an age of confusion working towards
clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards con-
cord, were the reflections of a moralist, the most original
of his century Michel de Montaigne.
MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was
born at a chateau in Perigord, in the year 1533. His
father, whom Montaigne always remembered with affec-
tionate reverence, was a man of original ideas. He
entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to
attach him to the people ; educated him in Latin as if
his native tongue ; roused him at morning from sleep
to the sound of music. From his sixth to his thirteenth
year Montaigne was at the College de Guyenne, where
he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by
Muret and Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father
as councillor in the court des aides of Perigueux, the
members of which were soon afterwards incorporated
in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not
destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy ;
he saw too many sides of every question ; he chose
rather to fail in justice than in humanity. In 1565 he
acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having lost
122 FRENCH LITERATURE
his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to
enjoy a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling
through books. He had published, a year before, in
fulfilment of his father's desire, a translation of the
Theologia Naturalis of Raimond de Sebonde, a Spanish
philosopher of the fifteenth century ; and now he occu-
pied himself in preparing for the press the writings of
his dead friend La Boe"tie. Love for his father and
love for his friend were the two passions of Montaigne's
life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat, in company
with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour for
tranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to
enrich tfte margins of his books with notes, and his
earliest essays may be regarded as an extension of
such notes ; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, his
favourites ; afterwards, the volume which he read with
most enjoyment, and annotated most curiously, was that
of his own life.
And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward
monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscel-
lany on which to comment. He was of a middle tem-
perament, "between the jovial and the melancholic";
a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose ; choosing
bright companions rather than sad ; able to be silent,
as the mood took him, or to gossip ; loyal and frank ;
a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood ; a despiser of empty
ceremony ; disposed to interpret all things to the best ;
cheerful among his children ; careless of exercising
authority ; incapable of household management ; trust-
ful and kind towards his neighbours ; indulgent in his
judgments, yet warm in his admiration of old, heroic
virtue. His health, which in boyhood had been robust,
was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. He
THE ESSAIS 123
travelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Ger-
many, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a
serious amusement, the varieties of men and manners.
While still absent from France, in 1581, he learned that
he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux ; he hesitated
in accepting an honourable but irksome public office ;
the King permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed.
Two years later the mayor was re-elected ; it was a period
of difficulty ; a Catholic and a Royalist, he had a heretic
brother, and himself yielded to the charm of Henri of
Navarre ; " for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, for the
Guelph a Ghibelline." When, in 1585, pestilence raged
in Bordeaux, Montaigne's second period of office had
almost expired ; he quitted the city, and the election of
his successor took place in his absence. His last years
were brightened by the friendship almost filial of
Mdlle. de Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards
editor, of the Essais. In 1592 Montaigne died, when
midway in his sixtieth year.
The first two books of the Essais were published by
their author in 1580 ; in 1588 they appeared in an
augmented text, with the addition of the third book.
The text superintended by Mdlle. de Gournay, based
upon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is
of the year 1595.
The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to
unity, may be found in the fact that all its topics
are concerned with a- common subject the nature of
man ; that the writer accepts himself as the example of
humanity most open to his observation ; and that the
same tranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere pre-
sent. Man, as conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures
the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species
124 FRENCH LITERATURE
includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven,
while between the extremes lies the average man, who
may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances
make him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so
each individual varies endlessly from himself : his con-
science controls his temperament ; his temperament
betrays his conscience ; external events transform him
from what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral
being upon the rock of philosophical dogma ? The rock
gives way under our feet, and scatters as if sand. Such
truth as we can attain by reason is relative truth ; let
us pass through knowledge to a wise acceptance of our
ignorance ; let us be contented with the probabilities
which are all that our reason can attain. The truths
of conduct, as far as they are ascertainable, were known
long since to the ancient moralists. Can any virtue
surpass the old Roman virtue ? We believe in God,
although we know little about His nature or His opera-
tions ; and why should we disbelieve in Christianity,
which happens to be part of the system of things under
which we are born ? But why, also, should we pay such
a compliment to opinions different from our own as to
burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva
to the Pope of Rome ? Let each of us ask himself,
"Que sais-je?" "What do I really know?" and the
answer will serve to temper our zeal.
While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the
conclusions of the intellect, when they pass beyond a
narrow bound, he pays a homage to the force of will ;
his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch is ardent.
An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through
his imagination ; but for us and for himself, who are
no heroes, the appropriate form of Stoical virtue is
TEACHING OF MONTAIGNE 125
moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference,
or at most a disinterested curiosity, in matters which
lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life,
such as it is ; let us resign ourselves to death ; and let
the resignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend
ourselves in attempted reforms of the world, of society,
of governments, is vain. The world will go its own
way ; it is for us to accept things as they are, to observe
the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile
at them if we please, and to extract our private gains
from a view of the reformers, the enthusiasts, the dog-
matists, the credulous, the combatants ; there is one
heroism possible for us the heroism of good sense.
" It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine,"
so we read on the last page of Florio's translation of
the Essais, " for a man to know how to enjoy his being
loyally. We seek for other conditions because we
understand not the use of ours ; and go out of ourselves,
forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We
may long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them,
yet must we go with our legs. And sit we upon the
highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own
tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best
pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order
are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common
mould and human model ; but without wonder or ex-
travagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more
tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is
the protector of health and fountain of all wisdom ;
but blithe and social." And with a stanza of Epicurean
optimism from Horace the Essay closes.
Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of
Montaigne. It is conveyed to the reader without system,
126 FRENCH LITERATURE
in the most informal manner, in a series of discourses
which seem to wander at their own will, resembling a
bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery, en-
livened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from
history, observations of curious manners and customs,
offering constantly to view the person of Montaigne
himself in the easiest undress. The style, although
really carefully studied and superintended, has an air of
light facility, hardly interposing between the author and
his reader ; the book is of all books the most sociable,
a living companion rather than a book, playful and
humorous, amiable and well bred, learned without pedan-
try, and wise without severity.
During the last three years of his life Montaigne
enjoyed the friendship of a disciple who was already
celebrated for his eloquence as a preacher. PIERRE
CHARRON (1541-1603), legist and theologian, under the
influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philo-
sopher. It was as a theologian that he wrote his book
of the Trots Verites, which attempts to demonstrate the
existence of God, the truth of Christianity, and the
exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion. It was
as a philosopher, in the Traiti de la Sagesse, that he
systematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. In-
stead of putting the question, "Que sais-je ?" Charron
ventures the assertion, "Je ne sais." He exhibits man's
weakness, misery, and bondage to the passions ; gives
counsel for the enfranchisement of the mind ; and
studies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance,
and valiance. God has created man, says Charron, to
know the truth; never can he know it of himself or
by human means, and one who despairs of reason is
in the best position for accepting divine instruction ;
CHARRON 127
a Pyrrhonist at least will never be a heretic ; even if
religion be regarded as an invention of man, it is an
invention which has its uses. Not a few passages of
the Sagesse are directly borrowed, with slight rehand-
ling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair ; but, instead of
Montaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and
formal indictment of humanity ; we miss the genial
humour and kindly temper of the master ; we miss the
amiable egotism and the play of a versatile spirit ; we
miss the charm of an incomparable literary style.
BOOK THE THIRD
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BOOK THE THIRD
TPIE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER
WITH the restoration of order under Henri IV. the
delights of peace began to be felt ; a mundane society,
polished and pleasure-loving, began to be constituted,
and before many years had passed the influence of
women and of the salon appeared in literature. Should
such a society be permitted to remain oblivious to
spiritual truth, or to repose on the pillow of scepticism
provided by Charron and Montaigne ? Might it not be
captured for religion, if religion were presented in its
most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy, a
gentle discipline of the heart ? If one who wore the
Christian armour should throw over his steel some robe
of courtly silk, with floral adornments, might he not
prove a persuasive champion of the Cross ? Such was
the hope of FRANCOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop
of Geneva, when, in 1608, he published his Introduction
d la Vie Devote. The angelic doctor charmed by his
mere presence, his grace of person, his winning smile,
131
132 FRENCH LITERATURE
his dove's eyes ; he showed how amiable piety might
be ; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms ; he
strewed the path to heaven with roses; he conquered
by docility ; yet under his sweetness lay strength, and
to methodise and popularise moral self-superintendence
was to achieve much. The Traite de I Amour de Dieu
(1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical
devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every
child of God. With his tender and ardent devotion,
something of a poet's sentiment for nature was united ;
but mysticism and poetry were both subservient to his
aim of regulating the conduct of the heart ; he desired
to show how one may remain in the world, and yet not
be of the world ; by personal converse and by his
spiritual letters he became the director of courtiers and
of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which
he founded at Annecy expresses his spirit -flores fruc-
tusque perennes flowers for their own sake, but chiefly
for the sake of fruit. Much of the genius for holiness
of the courtly saint has passed into the volume of
reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and
disciple I' Esprit de Saint Francois de Sales.
A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen
and ladies meet to admire and be admired, needs other
outlets for its imagination than that of the primrose
way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had inspired
Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his Theatre
d 'Agriculture, a work directed towards utility; the romance
of the fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a
French Arcady, were the inspiration of the endless prose
bucolics found in the Astree of HONOR o'URFfi. The
Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passed from Italy
to Spain ; through the Diana of the Spanish Montemayor
THE ASTRE 133
it passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife
there was a fascination in visions of a peace, into which,
if warfare entered, the strange irruption only enhanced
an habitual calm. A whole generation waited long to
learn the issue of the passion of Celadon and Astre"e.
The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610,
or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when
its author was no longer living. The scene is laid in the
fields of d'Urfe's familiar Forez and on the banks of
the Lignon ; the time is of Merovingian antiquity. The
shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicion of faithless-
ness from the presence of his beloved Astr6e, seeks
death beneath the stream ; he is s:ived by the nymphs,
escapes the amorous pursuit of Galatea, assumes a femi-
nine garb, and, protected by the Druid Adamas, has
the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess. At length
he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches;
true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the
devouring lions of the Fountain of Love, the beasts
refuse their prey ; the venerable Druid discreetly guides
events ; Celadon's fidelity receives its reward in marriage,
and the banks of the Lignon become a scene of universal
joy. The colours of the Astre'e are faded now as those
of some ancient tapestry, but during many years its
success was prodigious. D'Urfe's highest honour, of
many, is the confession of La Fontaine:
" Etant petit gar^onje lisais son roman,
Et je le Us encore ayant la barbe grise."
The Astree won its popularity, in part because it united
the old attraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that
of the newer pastoral ; in part because it idealised the
gallantries and developed the amorous casuistry of the
134 FRENCH LITERATURE
day, not without a real sense of the power of love ; in
part because it was supposed to exhibit ideal portraits of
distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of a
numerous progeny ; and as the heroic romance of the
seventeenth century is derived in direct succession from
the loves of Celadon and Astree, so the comic romance,
beside all that it owes to the tradition of the esprit gaulois,
owes something to the mocking gaiety with which d'Urfe
exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of his
inconstant shepherd Hylas.
In the political and social reconstruction which fol-
lowed the civil and religious wars, the need of discipline
and order in literature was felt ; in this province, also,
unity under a law was seen to be desirable. The work
of the Pleiade had in a great measure failed ; they had
attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry
was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice
and fantasy to obedience to law was the work of FRAN-
COIS DE MALHERBE. Born at Caen in 1555, he had
published in 1587 his Larmes de Saint Pierre, an imitation
of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his
maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not
until about his fortieth year that he found his true
direction. Du Vair, with whom he was acquainted,
probably led him to a true conception of the 'nature of
eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understand-
ing, with no affluence of imagination and no excess of
sensibility, Malherbe was well qualified for establishing
lyrical poetry upon the basis of reason, and of general
rather than individual sentiment. He chose the themes
of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded
them on those commonplaces of emotion which are
part of the possession of all men who think and feel.
MALHERBE 135
If he composed his verses for some great occasion, he
sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but
considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be
regarded by the community at large ; if he consoled a
friend for losses caused by death, he held his personal
passion under restraint ; he generalised, and was con-
tent to utter more admirably than others the accepted
truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the
inevitable doom of death. What he gained by such a
process of abstraction, he lost in vivid characterisation ;
his imagery lacks colour ; the movement of his verse
is deliberate and calculated ; his ideas are rigorously
enchained one to another.
It has been said that poetry the overflow of indi-
vidual emotion is overheard ; while oratory the appeal
to an audience is heard. The processes of Malherbe's
art were essentially oratorical ; the lyrical cry is seldom
audible in his verse ; it is the poetry of eloquence
thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of
the seventeenth century in France its odes, its satires,
its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes and much of its
prose literature are of the nature of oratory ; and for
the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose,
Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reforma-
tion of the language, which, rejecting all words either
base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and
over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure
and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In
his hands language became too exclusively an instru-
ment of the intelligence ; yet with this instrument great
things were achieved by his successors. He methodised
and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact
rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of .structure,
136 FRENCH LITERATURE
condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, neg-
ligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the
free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that
he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrange-
ment which he prescribed, admirable effects were attain-
able by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word,
weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if
only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a
sustained harmony were at length secured ; and until
the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can
be perceived.
Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but
in the history of seventeenth-century classicism, in the
effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his
name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he
founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD
and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he
had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse
with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse
is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight.
Racan had genuine inspiration ; a true feeling for nature
appears in his dramatic pastoral, the Bergeries (1625) ;
unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience
needed for perfect execution ; he was rather an admir-
able amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded
no school, he gave an eminent example, and the
argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic
art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by
Boileau.
Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposi-
tion. While he pleaded for the supremacy of order,
regularity, law, the voice of MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-
1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew of the
MATHURIN REGNIER 137
poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame
and to the memory of the Pleiade ; if Malherbe spoke
slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of
the school of Ronsard, the retort was speedy and telling
against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words and syl-
lables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than
proser de la rime et rimer de la prose. Unawares, indeed,
Regnier, to a certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe,
who recognised the genius of his younger adversary ;
he turned away from languid elegances to observation
of life and truth of feeling ; if he imitated his masters
Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose
writings he had become acquainted during two periods
of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious,
like those of the Pleiade, but vigorous and original, like
those of Boileau ; in his sense of comedy he anticipates
some of Moliere's feeling for the humorous perversities
of human character ; his language is vivid, plain, and
popular. The classical school of later years could not
reject Regnier. Boileau declared that no poet before
Moliere was so well acquainted with the manners and
characters of men ; through his impersonal study of life
he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled
against formal rule ; he trusted to the native force of
genius, and let his ideas and passions lead him where
they would. His satires are those of a painter whose
eye is on his object, and who handles his brush with a
vigorous discretion ; they are criticisms of society and
its types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet
general in their intention, for, except at the poet who
had affronted his uncle, " le bon Regnier " struck at no
individual. Most admirable, amid much that is admir-
able, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose
138 FRENCH LITERATURE
veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she dis-
courses with growing wantonness to the maiden whom
she would lead in the way she should not go : Macette
is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe. Regnier
confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life ;
had it been wisely conducted, his genius might have
carried him far ; as it was, he passed away prematurely
at the age of forty, the victim of his own intemperate
pursuit of pleasure.
Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet,
who, while honouring the genius of Malherbe, pro-
nounced, like Regnier, for freedom rather than order,
and maintained that each writer of genius should be a law
to himself a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed
too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau,
unjustly depreciated THEOPHILE DE VIAU. A Hugue-
not who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a
libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, Theophile was
hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and
died exhausted in 1626, when only six -and -thirty years
old. He has been described as the last lyrical poet of
his age, and the first of the poetical exponents of the
new preciosity. His dramatic Pyrame et Thisbe, though
disfigured by those concetti which the Italian Marini an
honoured guest at the French court and the invasion
of Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without
touches of genuine pathos. The odes of Theophile are
of free and musical movement, his descriptions of natural
beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment in literary
matters was sound and original ; but he lacked the
patient workmanship which art demands, and in pro-
claiming himself on the side of freedom as against
order, he was retrograding from the position which
THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 139
had been secured for poetry under the leadership of
Malherbe.
With social order came the desire for social refinement,
and following the desire for refinement came the pretti-
nesses and affectations of over-curious elegance. Peace
returned to France with the monarchy of Henri IV., but
the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherine
de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother
was a great Roman lady, and whose father had been
French ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately
nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years
later opened her salon of the Hotel de Rambouillet to
such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be
the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The
rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of
pleasure ; the chambre bleue became the sanctuary of polite
society, where Arthenice (an anagram for " Catherine ")
was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the
lute was well ; to converse with wit and refinement was
something more admirable ; the salon became a mart for
the exchange of ideas ; the fashion of Spain was added
to the fashion of Italy ; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism,
Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of
learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came
Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas ; at a later time
Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau ; and again, towards
the mid-years of the century, Saint-Evremond and La
Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the
Cid to Rodogune ; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, im-
provised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he
had never heard one preach so early or so late.
As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angdlique attained
an age to divide their mother's authority in the salon, its
140 FRENCH LITERATURE
sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised
well-nigh to inanity. They censured Polyeucte ; they
found Chapelain's unhappy epic " perfectly beautiful, but
excessively tiresome " ; they laid their heads together over
Descartes' Discours de la Mcthode, and profoundly admired
the philosopher ; they were enraptured by the madrigals
on flowers, more than three score in number, offered
as the Guirlande de Julie on Mademoiselle's fete ; they
gravely debated the question which should be the ap-
proved spelling, muscadin or muscardin. In 1649 they
were sundered into rival parties Uranistes and Jobelins
tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective merits
of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The
word precuux is said to date from 1650. The Marquise
de Rambouillet survived Moliere's satiric comedy Les
Prdcieuses Ridicules (1659) by several years. Mme. de
Sevigne, Mine, de la Fayette, Flechier, the preacher of
fashion, were among the illustrious personages of the
decline of her salon. We smile at its follies and affecta-
tions ; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying
things that were petty, it did something to refine man-
ners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness and grace
of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue
to social distinction. Through the Hotel de Rambouillet,
and the salons which both in Paris and the provinces
imitated its modes, and pushed them to extravagance,
the influence of women on literature became a power
for good and for evil.
The "Works," as they were styled, of VINCENT
VOITURE (1598-1648) posthumously published re-
present one side of the spirit of the salon. Capable of
something higher, he lived to exhibit his ingenuity and
wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned verse, now
PSEUDO-EPICS 141
by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin,
he was for long a presiding genius in the cJiambre bleue
of Arthenice. His play of mind was unhappily without
a subject, and to be witty on nothings puts a strain on
wit. Voiture expends much labour on being light, much
serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were
admired as models of ingenious elegance ; the life has
long since passed from their raillery and badinage, but
Voiture may be credited with having helped to render
French prose pliant for the uses of pleasure.
The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered
at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious
epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in
their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real
life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging
platitudes with points. The Saint Louis of Lemoyne,
the Clovis of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the Alaric of
Scudery, the Charlemagne of Louis le Laboureur remain
only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition.
During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean
ability in other fields, was occupied with his La Pucelle
d Orleans ; twelve cantos at length appeared magnifi-
cently in 1656, and won a brief applause ; the remaining
twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history
was too humble for Chapelain's genius ; history is en-
nobled by an allegorical intention ; France becomes the
soul of man ; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is
tlie human will ; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace.
The satire of .Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly
needed to slay the slain.
In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated
from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality,
Bishop Camus, the friend of Francois de Sales, had
142 FRENCH LITERATURE
attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfe" had
initiated ; but the spirit of the Astree would not unite in
a single stream with the spirit of the Introduction a la Vie
Devote. Gomberville is remembered rather for the re-
morseless war which he waged against the innocent con-
junction car, never to be admitted into polite literature,
than for his encyclopaedic romance Polexandre, in which
geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is
fantastic ; yet it was something to annex for the first
time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of
adventure. Gombauld, the Bean Tencbreux of the Hotel
cle Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable
Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions
to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved
the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time
of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of
comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers
thick in ancient libraries.
But the romances of LA CALPRENEDE and of GEORGES
and MADELEINE DE SCUDERY might well be taken
down by any lover of literature who possesses the
virtue of fortitude. Since d'Urfe's day the taste for
pastoral had declined ; the newer romance was gallant
and heroic. Legend or history supplied its framework ;
but the central motive was ideal love at odds with circum-
stance, love the inspirer of limitless devotion and daring.
The art of construction was imperfectly understood ; the
narratives are of portentous length ; ten, twelve, twenty
volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the
adventures. In Cassandre, in Clcopdtre, in Pharamond,
La Calprenede exhibits a kind of universal history ;
the dissolution of the Macedonian empire, the decline
of the empire of Rome, the beginnings of the French
PROSE ROMANCES 143
monarchy are successively presented. But the chief
personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society
of the author's time. The spirit of the Hotel de Ram-
bouillet is transferred to the period when the Scythian
Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius ;
the Prince de Conde masks in Cleopatre as Coriolan ;
Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwith-
standing the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of
La Calprenede's interminable romances, a certain spirit of
real heroism, offspring of the writer's ardent imagination
and bright southern temper, breathes through them.
They were the delight of Mine, de Sevigne and of La
Fontaine ; even in the eighteenth century they were the
companions of Crebillon, and were not forgotten by
Rousseau.
Still more popular was Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus.
Mdlle. de Scude"ry, the " Sapho " of her Saturday salon, a
true jpr/aeuse, as good of heart and quick of wit as she
was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment
and metaphysics of love to match the gasconading ex-
ploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not
only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent
adventures and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of
Medes and Persians could be discovered the adventurers,
the gallants, the fine ladies of the seventeenth century.
In Cliiie an attempt is made to study the curiosities of
passion ; it is a manual of polite love and elegant man-
ners ; in its carte de Tendre we can examine the topog-
raphy of love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of
" Tendre," and learn the dangers of the way. Thus the
heroic romance reached its term ; its finer spirit became
the possession of the tragic drama, where it was purified
and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered
144 FRENCH LITERATURE
in search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the
quest. When Gil Bias appeared, it was seen that the
novel of incident must also be the novel of character,
and that in its imitation of real life it could appropriate
some of the possessions which by that time comedy
had lost.
The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural
reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the Hotel de
Kambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine
manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying
jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial,
burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were,
a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Ainand
(1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini,
the admired " Sapurnius " of the safon, author of at
least one beautiful ode La Solitude breathing a gentle
melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Des-
marets de Saint- Sorlin, in his comedy Les Visionnaires
(1637), mocked the predeuses, and was applauded by
the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is
hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is
enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material
for the stage ; and the third is enamoured of her own
beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of
men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOKEL expressed, in
his Histoire Comiqne de Francion, a Rabelaisian and
picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the esprit
gaulois against the homage of the imagination to courtly
shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted
more than sixty times. In Le Berger Extravagant (1628)
he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day
an "anti-romance" which recounts the pastoral follies
of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set
SCARRON : FURETIERE 145
wandering by such dreams as the Astree had inspired ;
its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry.
The master of this school of seventeenth -century
realism was PAUL SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little
abbe, unconcerned with ecclesiastical scruples or good
manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured
by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigne's grand-
daughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become
the most influential woman in all the history of France.
In his Virgile Travesti he produced a vulgar counterpart
to the heroic epics, which their own dead-weight would
have speedily enough borne downwards to oblivion.
His Roman Comique (1651), a short and lively narrative
of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling
in the provinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the
heroisms, the delicate distresses of the ideal romance.
The Roman Bourgeois (1666) of ANTOINE FURETIERE is
a belated example of the group to which Francion
belongs. The great event of its author's life was his
exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a mem-
ber, on the ground that he had appropriated for the
advantage of his Dictionary the results of his fellow-
members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress,
of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable
study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often
animated, exact, effective in its satire ; but the analysis
of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of
beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable,
and such relief Furetiere will not afford.
Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet
with a certain kinship to them, lie the more fantastic
satires of that fiery swashbuckler "demon des braves"
CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), Histoir.e Comique
146 FRENCH LITERATURE
des Etats et Empire de la Lune, and Histoire Comique des
Etats et Empire du SoleiL Cyrano's taste, caught by the
mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was
execrable. To his violences of temper he added a
reputation for irreligion. His comedy Le Pedant Joue
has the honour of having furnished Moliere with the
most laughable scene of the Fourberies de Scapin. The
voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the in-
habitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are
presented, mingle audacities and caprices of invention
with a portion of satiric truth ; they lived in the
memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of
Micromegas.
CHAPTER II
THE FRENCH ACADEMY PHILOSOPHY
(DESCARTES) RELIGION (PASCAL)
THE French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters,
expressed the growing sense that anarchy in literature
must end, and that discipline and law must be recog-
nised in things of the mind. It is one of the glories of
RICHELIEU that he perceived that literature has a public
function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair of the
State. His own writings, or those composed under his
direction memoirs; letters; the Succincte Narration,
which sets forth his policy ; the Testament, which em-
bodies his counsel in statecraft belong less to literature
than to French history. But he honoured the literary
art ; he enjoyed the drama ; he devised plots for plays,
and found docile poets his Society of five to carry out
his designs.
In 1629 Valentin Conrart, secretary to the King, and
one of the frequenters of the Hotel de Rambouillet, was
accustomed to receive weekly a group of distinguished
men of letters and literary amateurs, who read their
manuscripts aloud, discussed the merits of new works,
and considered questions of criticism, grammar, and
language. Tidings of these reunions having reached
Richelieu, he proposed that the society should receive
an official status. By the influence of Chapelain the
147
I 4 8 FRENCH LITERATURE
objections of certain members were overcome. The
Academic Fran^aise held its first sitting on March 13,
1634; three years later the letters patent were regis-
tered ; the number of members was fixed at forty ;
when vacancies occurred, new members were co-opted
for life. Its history to the year 1652 was published
in the following year by Pellisson, and obtained him
admission to a chair. The functions of the learned
company were to ascertain, as far as possible, the
French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as
a literary tribunal if members consented to submit their
works to its examination. There were hopes that autho-
ritative treatises on rhetoric and .poetics might be issued
with its sanction ; but these hopes were not fulfilled. A
dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in
1638, was, however, undertaken ; progressing by slow
degrees, the first edition appeared in 1694. Its aim was
not to record every word of which an example could
be found, but to select those approved by the usage of
cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent
authors. Thus it tended to establish for literary use an
aristocracy of words ; and while literary expression gained
in dignity and intellectual precision, gained as an instru-
ment of reason and analysis, such regulation created a
danger that it might lose in elements that have affinities
with the popular mind vivacity, colour, picturesqueness,
variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply
interested in the dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650),
a gentleman of Savoie, whose concern for the purity
of the language, as determined by the best usage, led
him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreign
phraseology. His Remarques sur la Langue Fran^aise
served as a guide to his fellow-members of the Academy.
BALZAC 149
Unhappily he was wholly ignorant of the history of the
language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediated
between the scholarship and the polite society of the
time. But while Vaugelas was almost wholly occupied
with the vocabulary and grammar, Chapelain did much
to enforce the principles of the classical school upon
literary art. The Academy took up the work which
the salons had begun ; its spirit was more robust and
masculine than theirs; it was freer from passing fashions,
affectations, prettinesses ; it leaned on the side of intellect
rather than of sentiment.
In what may be called the regulation of French prose
the influence of JEAN-LOUIS GUEZ DE BALZAC (1594-
1654) was considerable. He had learnt from Malherbe
that a literary craftsman should leave nothing to chance,
that every effect should be exactly calculated. It was
his task to apply to prose the principles which had
guided his master in verse. His Lettres, of which a
first series appeared in 1624, and a second twelve years
later, are not the spontaneous intercourse of friend with
friend, but rather studious compositions which deal with
matters of learning, literature, morals, religion, politics,
events, and persons of the time. Their contents are of
little importance ; Balzac was not an original thinker,
but he had the art of arranging his ideas, and of ex-
pressing them in chosen words marshalled in ample
and sonorous sentences. A certain fire he had, a
limited power of imagination, a cultivated judgment, a
taste, which suffered from bad workmanship ; a true
affection for rural life. These hardly furnished him
with matter adequate to support his elevated style.
His letters were regarded as models of eloquence ; but
it is eloquence manufactured artificially and applied to
150 FRENCH LITERATURE
subjects, not proceeding from them. His Prince, a
treatise on the virtues of kings, with a special refer-
ence to Louis XIII., was received coldly. His Aristippe,
which dealt with the manners and morals of a court,
and his Socrate Chretien, a study in ethics and theology,
were efforts beyond his powers. His gift to literature
was a gift of method and of style ; others who worked
in marble learned something from his studious model-
lings in clay.
To regulate thought required an intellect of a different
order from that of Balzac, " emperor of orators." It was
the task of RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650). A child of
delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became,
under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both in lan-
guages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the
demand and the necessity of his mind. Solitary investi-
gations in mathematics were for a time succeeded by
the life of a soldier in the Netherlands and Holland. The
stream of thought was flowing, however, underground.
Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young
volunteer was in winter quarters at Neuburg, on the
Danube, on a memorable day the first principles of a
new philosophical method presented themselves to his
intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter.
After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and
a period of studious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland
for his place of abode (1629), and though often shifting
his residence, little disturbed save by the controversies of
philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutch theologians,
he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought.
An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court
was accepted in 1649. The change in his habits and the
severity of a northern winter proved fatal to the health
DESCARTES i 5 i
which Descartes had carefully cherished ; in February
of 1650 he was dead.
The mathematical cycle in the development of Des-
cartes' system of thought preceded the metaphysical.
His great achievements in analytical geometry, in optics,
in physical research, his explanation of the laws of nature,
and their application in his theory of the material universe^
belong to the history of science. Algebra and geometry
led him towards his method in metaphysical speculation.
How do all primary truths verify themselves to the human
mind ? By the fact that an object is clearly and distinctly
conceived. The objects of knowledge fall into certain
groups or series ; in each series there is some simple
and dominant element which may be immediately ap-
prehended, and in relation to which the subordinate
elements become intelligible. Let us accept nothing on
hearsay or authority ; let us start with doubt in order to
arrive at certitude ; let us test the criterion of certitude to
the uttermost. There is one fact which I cannot doubt,
even in doubting all I think, and if I think, I exist "Je
pense, done je suis." No other evidence of this is needed
than that our conception is clear and distinct; in this
clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certi-
tude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking
substance. But the idea of an infinite, perfect Being is
also present to our intellect ; we, finite, imperfect beings,
could not have made it ; unmake it we cannot ; and in
the conception of perfection that of existence is involved.
Therefore God exists, and therefore the laws of our
consciousness, which are His laws, cannot deceive us.
We have seen what mind or spirit signifies a thinking
substance. Reduce our idea of matter to clearness and
distinctness, and what do w-e find ? The idea of an
152 FRENCH LITERATURE
extended substance. Our complex humanity, made up
of soul and body, comprises both kinds of substance.
But thought and extension have nothing in common ;
their union can only be conceived as the collocation
at a single point of a machine with that which raises it
above a mere machine. As for the lower animals, they
are no more than automata.
Descartes' Principia and his Meditationes were written
in Latin. The Discours de la Methode (1637) anc ^ the
later Traite des Passions showed how the French lan-
guage could be adapted to the purposes of the reason.
Such eloquence as is found in Descartes is that of
thought illuminating style. The theory of the passions
anticipates some of the tendencies of modern psycho-
logy in its physical investigations. No one, however,
affirmed more absolutely than Descartes the freedom of
the will unless, indeed, we regard it as determined by
God : it cannot directly control the passions, but it can
indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination ; it
is the supreme mistress of action, however the passions
may oppose its fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes
was not disposed to be the martyr of thought. Warned
by the example of Galileo, he did not desire to expose
himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions. He
separated the province of faith from that of reason : " I
revere our theology," he said ; but he held that theology
demanded other lights than those of the unaided powers
of man. In its own province, he made the reason his
absolute guide, and with results which theologians might
regard as dangerous.
The spirit of Descartes' work was in harmony w r ith
that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought
for general truths by the light of reason ; he made clear-
MALEBRANCHE 153
ness a criterion of truth ; he proclaimed man a spirit ;
he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the
classical period sought also for general truths, and sub-
ordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from
ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries ; it was essentially
spiritualist ; it represented the crises and heroic victories
of the will.
Descartes' opponent, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655),
epicurean in his physics, an empiricist, though an in-
consistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language
as the vehicle for his ideas. A group of writers whose
tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed
him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le
Vayer in prose, may serve as representatives of art sur-
rendering itself to vulgar pleasures, and thought doubting
even its doubts, and finding repose in indifference.
The true successor of Descartes in French philosophy,
eminent in the second half of the century, was NICOLAS
DE MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715). Soul and body, Des-
cartes had shown, are in their very nature alien each
from the other. How then does the soul attain a know-
ledge of the external world ? In God, the absolute
substance, are the ideas of all things ; in God we behold
those ideas which matter could never convey to us, and
which we could never ourselves originate ; in God we
see and know all things. The Recherche de la Verite
(1674-75) was admirably written and was widely read.
The theologians found it dangerous ; and when six years
later Malebranche published his Traite de la Nature et de
la Grace, characterised briefly and decidedly by Bossuet as
" pulchra, nova, falsa," at Bossuet's request both Arnauld
and Fenelon attempted to refute "the extravagant Ora-
torian." His place in the evolution of philosophy lies
154 FRENCH LITERATURE
between Descartes and Spinoza, who developed and com-
pleted the doctrine of Descartes. In the transition from
dualism to monism Malebranche served as a mediator.
Religious thought in the seventeenth century, wedded
to an austere morality, is expressed by the writers of
Port-Royal, and those who were in sympathy with them.
They could not follow the flowery path of piety not the
less the narrow path because it was cheerful pointed
out by St. Francois de Sales. Between nature and grace
they saw a deep and wide abyss. In closest connection
with them was one man of the highest genius author
of the Provinciales and the Pensees whose spiritual
history was more dramatic than any miracle-play or
morality of the Middle Ages.
BLAISE PASCAL was born at Clermont-Ferrand in
1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at
Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his
education in languages, natural science, and mathematics.
The boy's precocity was extraordinary ; at sixteen he had
written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited the
astonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study,
preying upon a nervous constitution, consumed his
health and strength ; at an early age he suffered from
temporary paralysis. When about twenty-three he fell
under the religious influences of certain disciples of St.
Cyran, read eagerly in the ' writings of Jansen and
Arnauld, and resolved to live for God alone. But to
restore his health he was urged to seek recreation, and
by degrees the interests and pleasures of the world
took hold upon him ; the master of his mind was the
sceptical Montaigne ; he moved in the mundane society
of the capital ; and it has been conjectured from hints
in his Discours sur ks Passions dc I' Amour that he loved
PASCAL i 5 5
the sister of his friend, the Due de Roannez, and had
the vain hope of making her his wife.
The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart,
and needed only to be reawakened. The reawakening
came in 1654 through the persuasions of his sister,
Jacqueline, who had abandoned the world two years
previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal.
The abbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight
miles from Versailles, was presided over by Jacqueline
Arnauld, the Mere Angelique, and a brotherhood of
solitaries, among whom were several of the Arnauld
family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637. With
this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually
a solitary, associated himself at the close of 1654. An
escape from sudden danger in a carriage accident,
and a vision or ecstasy which came to him, co-operated
in his conversion. After his death, copies of a frag-
mentary and passionate writing referring to this period
the so-called "amulet" of Pascal were found upon
his person ; its words, " renonciation totale et douce,"
and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie," express something
of his resolution and his rapture.
The affair of the Provinciates, and the design of an
apology for Christianity with which his Pensees are
connected, together with certain scientific studies and
the deepening passion of religion, make up what re-
mained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but in
his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted
by his ascetic practices and the inward flame of his
soul, Pascal died on August 19, 1662. " May God never
leave me " were his last words.
With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist
we are not here concerned. In it "we see," writes a
156 FRENCH LITERATURE
scientific authority, "the strongest marks of a great
original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon,
mastering, and pursuing further everything that was
fresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of
more than two hundred years, we can still point to
much in exact science that is absolutely his ; and we
can indicate infinitely more which is due to his in-
spiration."
Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have
this in common, that both were movements in that
revival of Roman Catholicism which was stimulated by
the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But the
Jesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art
of piety, in which a system of accommodation was
recognised as a means of drawing worldlings to the
Church ; the Jansenists held up a severe moral ideal,
and humbled human nature in presence of the absolute
need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like
the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists
devoted themselves much to the task of education. They
honoured classical studies ; they honoured science, dia-
lectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry
were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy.
Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and
annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and
controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of
Essais de Morale (1671), if not profound or brilliant, was
the possessor of learning, good sense, good feeling, and
religious faith. Under the influence of St. Cyran, the
Port-Royalists were in close sympathy with the teaching
of Jansen, Bishop of Ypres ; the writings of their great
theologian Antoine Arnauld were vigorously anti-Jesu-
itical. In 1653 five propositions, professedly extracted
THE "LETTRES PROVINCIALES " 157
from Jansen's Augustinus, were condemned by a Papal
bull. The insulting triumph of the Jesuits drew Arnauld
again into controversy ; and on a question concerning
divine grace he was condemned in January 1656 by the
Sorbonne. "You who are clever and inquiring" (curieux),
said Arnauld to Pascal, " you ought to do something."
Next day was written the first of Pascal's Lettres a un
Provincial, and on 23rd January it was issued to the
public ; a second followed within a week ; the success
was immense. The writer concealed his identity under
the pseudonym " Louis de Montalte."
The Lettres Provinciates are eighteen in number. The
first three and the last three deal with the affair of
Arnauld and the Sorbonne, and the questions under
discussion as to the nature and the need of divine
grace. In the opening letters the clearest intellectual
insight and the deepest seriousness of spirit are united
with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper
of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking
theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds
only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents
of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel
with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between
the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive,
and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral
theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a
stricter morality, but for the lax their casuistry supplies
a pliable code of morals, which, by the aid of ingenious
distinctions, can find excuses for the worst of crimes.
With force of logic, with fineness of irony, with energy
of moral indignation, with a literary style combining
strength and lightness, Pascal presses his irresistible
assault. The effect of the " Provincial Letters " was to
158 FRENCH LITERATURE
carry the discussion of morals and theology before a
new court of appeal not the Sorbonne, but the public
intelligence and the unsophisticated conscience of men.
To French prose they added a masterpiece and a
model.
The subject of the Provinciates is in part a thing of the
past ; the Pensfos deal with problems which can never
lose their interest. Among Pascal's papers were found,
after his early death, many fragments which his sister,
Madame Perier, and his friends recognised as of rare
value ; but the editors of the little volume which ap-
peared in 1670, imagining that they could safeguard its
orthodoxy, and even amend its style, freely omitted and
altered what Pascal had written. It was not until 1844
that a complete and genuine text was established in the
edition of M. Faugere, We can hardly hope to arrange
the fragments so as to exhibit the design of that apology
for Christianity, with which many of them were doubt-
less connected, but the main outlines of Pascal's body of
thought can be clearly discerned.
The intellect of Pascal, so powerful in its grasp of
scientific truth, could find by its own researches no
certitude in the sphere of philosophy and religion. He
had been deeply influenced by the sceptical mind of
Montaigne. He found within him a passionate craving
for certitude ; man is so constituted that he can never
be at rest until he rests in knowledge of the truth ; but
man, as he now exists, is incapable of ascertaining truth;
he is weak and miserable, and yet the very consciousness
of his misery is evidence of his greatness ; " Nature
confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;"
" Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things, but
a reed which thinks." How is this riddle of human
PASCAL'S "PENSEES" 159
nature to be explained ? Only in one way by a recog-
nition of the truth taught by religion, that human nature
is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethroned
king. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be
overcome ? Only in one way through union with God
made man ; with Jesus Christ, the centre in which alone
we find bur weakness and the divine strength. Through
Christ man is abased and lifted up abased without de-
spair, and lifted up without pride ; in Him all contradic-
tions are reconciled. Such, in brief, is the vital thought
from which Pascal's apologetic proceeds. It does not
ignore any of the external evidences of Christianity; but
the irresistible evidence is that derived from the problem
of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit
a problem which religion alone can solve, and needs
which Christ alone can satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts"
are those of an eminent intelligence. But they are more
than thoughts ; they are passionate lyrical cries of a
heart which had suffered, and which had found more
than consolation ; they are the interpretation of the
words of his amulet "Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie."
The union of the ardour of a poet or a saint with the
scientific rigour of a great geometer, of wit and brilliance
with a sublime pathos, is among the rarest phenomena
in literature ; all this and more is found in Pascal.
CHAPTER III
THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE)
THE classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century
was literary, oratorical, lyrical ; it was anything but
dramatic. Its last representative, ANTOINE DE MONT-
CHRESTIEN (1575-1621), a true poet, and one whose life
was a series of strange adventures, wrote, like his pre-
decessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for the
theatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen
not only in the chants of the chorus, but in the general
character of his dramas, he had little feeling for life
and movement ; his personages expound their feelings
in admirable verse ; they do not act. He attempted a
tragedy L Ecossaise on the story of Mary, Queen of
Scots, a theme beyond his powers. In essentials he
belonged rather to the past, whose traditions he in-
herited, than to the future of the stage. But his feeling
for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for the
pathetic founded on admiration, and together with these
the firm structure of his verse, seem to warrant one in
thinking of him as in some respects a forerunner of
Corneille.
At the Hotel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confreres
de la Passion still exhibited the mediaeval drama. It-
passed away when their theatre was occupied by the
company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his pay a
160
ALEXANDRE HARDY 161
dramatist of inexhaustible fertility ALEXAXDRE HARDY
(c. 1560 to c. 1630). During thirty years, from the open-
ing of the seventeenth century onwards, Hardy, author
of some six or seven hundred pieces, of which forty-one
remain, reigned as master of the stage. 1 A skilful impro-
visor, devoid of genius, devoid of taste, he is the founder
of the French theatre ; he first made a true appeal to
the people ; he first showed a true feeling for theatrical
effects. Wherever material suitable for his purposes
could be caught at ancient or modern, French, Italian,
or Spanish Hardy made it his own. Whatever form
seemed likely to win the popular favour, this he accepted
or divined. The Astree had made pastoral the fashion ;
Hardy was ready with his pastoral dramas. The Italian
and Spanish novels were little tragi-comedies waiting
to be dramatised ; forthwith Hardy cast them into a
theatrical mould. Writing for the people, he was not
trammelled by the unities of time and place ; the medi-
aeval stage arrangements favoured romantic freedom.
In his desire to please a public which demanded anima-
tion, action, variety, Hardy allowed romantic incident
to predominate over character ; hence, though he pro-
duced tragedies founded on legendary or historical sub-
jects, his special talent is seen rather in tragi-comedy.
He complicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he
shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced
the chorus in a word, the drama in his hands ceased
to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic.
The advance was great ; and it was achieved by a hack
playwright scrambling for his crusts of bread.
But to dramatic life and movement it was necessary
that order, discipline, regulation should be added. The
1 Or thirty-four pieces, if Thcagene et Cariclee be reckoned as only one.
1 62 FRENCH LITERATURE
rules of the unities were not observed by Hardy were
perhaps unknown to him. But they were known to
others. Jean de Schelandre (the pseudonym formed
from the letters of his name being Daniel d'Ancheres),
in his vast drama in two parts, Tyr et Sidon, claimed all
the freedom of the mysteries in varying the scene, in
mingling heroic matter with buffoonery. In the edition
of 1628 a preface appears by Francois Ogier, a learned
churchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in ac-
cordance with altered circumstances, should maintain its
rights to complete imaginative liberty against the autho-
rity of the Greeks, who presented their works before
different spectators under different conditions. Ogier's
protest was without effect. Almost immediately after its
appearance the Sophonisbe of Jean de Mairet was given,
and the classical tragedy of France was inaugurated on
a popular stage. In the preface to his pastoral tragi-
comedy Sylvanire, Mairet in 1631 formulated the doctrine
of the unities. The adhesion of Richelieu and the advo-
cacy of Chapelain insured their triumph. The "rules"
came to be regarded as the laws of a literary species.
The influence of the Spanish drama, seen in the writ-
ings of Rotrou and others, might be supposed to make
for freedom. It encouraged romantic inventions and
ambitious extravagances of style. Much that is rude
and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and
laboured ingenuity in the dramatic work of Scudery,
Du Ryer, Tristan 1'Hermite. A greater dramatist than
these showed how Spanish romance could coalesce with
French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch
the Cid ; and the Cid, calling forth the judgment of the
Academy, served to establish the supremacy of the so-
called rules of Aristotle.
PIERRE CORNEILLE 163
PIERRE CORNEILLE, son of a legal official, was born
at Rouen in 1606. His high promise as a pupil of the
Jesuits was not confirmed when he attempted to practise
at the bar ; he was retiring, and spoke with difficulty.
At twenty-three his first dramatic piece, Melite, a comedy,
suggested, it is told, by an adventure of his youth, was
given with applause in Paris ; it glitters with points, and
is of a complicated intrigue, but to contemporaries the
plot appeared less entangled and the style more natural
than they seem to modern readers. The tragi-comedy,
Clitandre, which followed (1632), was a romantic drama,
crowded with extravagant incidents, after the manner of
Hardy. In La Veuve he returned to the style of Me'life,
but with less artificial brilliance and more real vivacity ;
it was published with laudatory verses prefixed, in one of
which Scudery bids the stars retire for the sun has risen.
The scene is laid in Paris, and some presentation of con-
temporary manners is made in La Galerie du Palais and
La Place Roy ale. It was something to replace the nurse
of elder comedy by the. soubrette. The attention of
Richelieu was attracted to the new dramatic author ;
he \vas numbered among the five gardens poetes who
worked upon the dramatic plans of the Cardinal ; but
he displeased his patron by his imaginative independ-
ence. Providing himself with a convenient excuse,
Corneille retired to Rouen.
These early works were ventures among which the
poet was groping for his true way. He can hardly be
said to have found it in Medce (1635), but it was an
advance to have attempted tragedy; the grandiose style
of Seneca was a challenge to his genius ; and in the
famous line
"Dans un si grand revcrs, que vous reste-t-il? Mot /"
1 64 FRENCH LITERATURE
we see the flash of his indomitable pride of will, we
hear the sudden thunder of his verse. An acquaint-
ance, M. de Chalon, who had been one of the household
of Marie de Medicis, directed Corneille to the Spanish
drama. The Illusion Comique, the latest of his tentative
plays, is a step towards the Cid ; its plot is fantastical,
but in some of the fanfaronades of the braggart Mata-
more, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which
only needed a certain transposition to become the lan-
guage of chivalric heroism. The piece closes with a
lofty eulogy of the French stage.
The sun had indeed risen and the stars might dis-
appear when in the closing days of 1636 the Cid was
given in Paris at the Theatre du Marais ; the eulogy of
the stage was speedily justified by its author. His subject
was found by Corneille in a Spanish drama, Las Moce-
dades del Cid, by Guilhem de Castro ; the treatment was
his own ; he reduced the action from that of a chronicle-
history to that of a tragedy ; he centralised it around
the leading personages ; he transferred it in its essen-
tial causes from the external world of accident to the
inner world of character ; the critical events are moral
events, victories of the soul, triumphs not of fortune
but of the will. And thus, though there are epic epi-
sodes and lyric outbreaks in the play, the Cid defi-
nitely fixed, for the first time in France, the type of
tragedy. The central tragic strife here is not one of
rival houses. Rodrigue, to avenge his father's wrong,
has slain the father of his beloved Chimene ; Chimene
demands from the King the head of her beloved
Rodrigue. In the end Rodrigue's valour atones for
his offence. The struggle is one of passion with
honour or duty ; the fortunes of the hero and heroine
THE CID: HORACE 165
are affected by circumstance, but their fate lies in their
own high hearts.
The triumph of Corneille's play was immense. The
Cardinal, however, did not join in it. Richelieu's in-
tractable poet had glorified Spain at an inconvenient
moment ; he had offered an apology for the code of
honour when edicts had been issued to check the rage
of the duel ; yet worse, he had not been crushed by
the great man's censure. The quarrel of the Cid, in
which Mairet and Scudery took an embittered part, was
encouraged by Richelieu. He pressed the Academy,
of which Corneille was not a member until 1647,
for a judgment upon the piece, and at length he was
partially satisfied by a pronouncement, drawn up by
Chapelain, which condemned its ethics and its violation
of dramatic proprieties, yet could not deny the author's
genius. Corneille was deeply discouraged, but prepared
himself for future victories.
Until 1640 he remained silent. In that illustrious
year Horace and Cinna were presented in rapid succes-
sion. From Spain, the land of chivalric honour, the
dramatist passed to antique Rome, the mother and the
nurse of heroic virtue. In the Cid the dramatic con-
flict is between love and filial duty ; in Horace it is
between love, on the one side, united with the domestic
affections, and, on the other, devotion to country. In
both plays the inviolable will is arbiter of the conten-
tion. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, as told by
Livy, is complicated by the union of the families through
love and marriage; but patriotism requires the sacrifice
of the tenderer passions. It must be admitted that the
interest declines after the third act, and that our sym-
pathies are alienated from the younger Horace by the
1 66 FRENCH LITERATURE
murder of a sister ; we are required to feel that a private
crime, the offence of overstrained patriotism, is obliterated
in the glory of the country. In Cinna we pass from regal
to imperial Rome ; the commonwealth is represented by
Augustus; a great monarchy is glorified, but in the noblest
way, for the highest act of empire is to wield supreme
power under the sway of magnanimity, and to remain
the master of all self-regarding passions. The con-
spiracy of Cinna is discovered ; it is a prince's part to
pardon, and Augustus rises to a higher empire than that
of Rome by the conquest of himself. In both Horace
and Cinna there are at times a certain overstrain, an
excess of emphasis, a resolve to pursue heroism to all
extremities ; but the conception of moral grandeur is
genuine and lofty ; the error of Corneille was the error
of an imagination enamoured of the sublime.
But are there not heroisms of religion as pure as those
of patriotism ? And must we go back to pagan days
to find the highest virtue ? Or can divine grace effect
no miracles above those of the natural will ? Corneille
gives his answer to such a challenge in the tragedy
of Polyeucte (1643). It is the story of Christian mar-
tyrdom ; a homage rendered to absolute self-devotion
to the ideal; a canticle intoned in celebration of heavenly
grace. Polyeucte, the martyr, sacrifices to his faith not
only life, but love ; his wife, who, while she knew him
imperfectly, gave him an imperfect love, is won both
for God and for her husband by his heroism ; she is
caught away from her tenderness for Severe into the
flame of Polyeucte's devout rapture ; and through her
Severe himself is elevated to an unexpected magnanimity.
The family, the country, the monarchy, religion these
in turn were honoured by the genius of Corneille. He
LE MENTEUR 167
had lifted the drama from a form of loose diversion
to be a great art ; he had recreated it as that noblest
pastime whose function is to exercise and invigorate
the soul.
The transition from Polyeucte to Le Menteur, of the
same year, is among the most surprising in literature. 1
From the most elevated of tragedies we pass to a
comedy, which, while not belonging to the great comedy
of character, is charmingly gay. We expect no grave
moralities here, nor do we find them. The play is a
free and original adaptation from a work of the Spanish
dramatist Alarcon, but in Corneille's hands it becomes
characteristically French. Young Dorante, the liar,
invents his fictions through an irresistible genius for
romancing. His indignant father may justly ask, Has
he a heart ? Is he a gentleman ? But how can a youth
with such a pretty wit resist the fascination of his own
lies ? He is sufficiently punished by the fact that they
do not assist, but rather trouble, the course of his love
adventure, and we demand no further poetical justice.
In Corneille's art, tragedy had defined itself, and comedy
was free to be purely comic ; but it is also literary
light, yet solid in structure ; easy, yet exact in style.
The Suite du Menteur, founded on a comedy by Lope
de Vega, has a curious attraction of its own, half-fantastic
as it is, and half-realistic ; yet it has shared the fate of
all continuations, and could not attain the popularity
of its predecessor. It lacks gaiety ; the liar has sunk
into a rascal, and we can hardly lend credence to the
amendment in his mendacious habit when he applies
the art of dissimulation to generous purposes.
These are the masterpieces of Corneille. Already in
1 Polyeucte may possibly be as early as 1641.
1 68 FRENCH LITERATURE
Pompee, although its date is that of Polyeucte, while the
great dramatist is present throughout, he is not always
present at his best. It should not surprise us that
Corneille preferred Lucan to Virgil. Something of the
over-emphasis of the Pharsalia, his original, has entered
into the play; but the pomp of the verse is no vulgar
pomp. A graver fault is the want of a dramatic centre
for the action, which tends too much towards the epic.
Pompey is the presiding power of the tragedy ; his spirit
dominates the lesser characters ; but he does not appear
in person. The political interest develops somewhat to
the subordination of the personal interest. Corneille's
unhappy theory of later years, that love is unworthy of
a place in high tragedy, save as an episode, is here
exemplified in the passion of Cresar for Cleopatra ; but,
in truth, love is too sovereign a power to admit of its
being tagged to tragedy as an ornament.
Until 1636 Corneille was seeking his way. From 1636
to 1644 his genius soared on steady pinions. During
the eight years that followed he triumphed, but he also
faltered. Rodogune (1644), which he preferred to all his
other plays, is certainly, by virtue of the enormity of the
characters, the violence of the passions, the vastness of
its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies ; it is con-
structed with the most skilful industry ; from scene to
scene the emotion is intensified and heightened until
the great fifth act is reached ; but if by incompar-
able audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, it is an
ideal of horror. T/teodore, a second play of martyr-
dom, fell far below Polyeucte. Heraclius is obscure
through the complication of its intrigue. Don Sanche
d'Aragon, a romantic tragi-comedy, is less admirable as
a whole than in the more brilliant scenes. In the his-
CORNEILLE'S DECLINE 169
torical drama Nicomcde (1651), side by side with tragic
solemnities appears matter of a familiar kind. It was
the last great effort of its author's genius. The failure
of Pertharite, in 1652, led to the withdrawal of Corneille
from the theatre during seven years. He completed
during his seclusion a rendering into verse of the
Imitation of Jesus Christ. When he returned to the
stage it was with enfeebled powers, which were over-
strained by the effort of his will ; yet he could still write
noble lines, and in the tragedy-ballet of Psyche, in which
Quinault and Moliere were his collaborators, the most
charming verses are those of Corneille. His young
rival Racine spoke to the hearts of a generation less
heroic and swayed by tenderer passion, and the old
man resented the change. Domestic sorrows were
added to the grief of ill success in his art. Living
simply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last
ten years of his life were years of silence. He died in
1684, at the age of seventy-eight.
The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordi-
nary, but in what is extraordinary it seeks for truth.
He finds the marvellous in the triumphs of the human
will. His great inventive powers were applied to creat-
ing situations for the manifestation of heroic energy.
History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed
to justify what otherwise could not be accepted as pro-
bable. Great personages suited his purpose, because they
can deploy their powers on the amplest scale. His char-
acters, men and women, act not through blind, instinc-
tive passion, but with deliberate and intelligent force ;
they reason, and too often with casuistical subtlety,
about their emotions. At length he came to glorify
the will apart from its aims and ends, when tending
1 70 FRENCH LITERATURE
even to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He
thought much of the principles of his art, and embodied
his conclusions in critical dissertations and studies of his
own works. He accepted the rule of the unities of place
and time (of which at first he was ignorant) as far as his
themes permitted, as far as the rules served to concen-
trate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in
verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed ; his
dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a
combat with Roman short swords ; in memorable single
lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent
energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his
action. His faults, like his virtues, are great ; and
though faults and virtues may be travestied, both are
in reality alike inimitable.
Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they de-
serve that name Du Ryer, Tristan, Scudery, Boisrobert,
and others JEAN ROTROU (1609-50) had the magna-
nimity to render homage to the master of his art.
While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that
he would live for the dramatic art. His facility was
great, and he had the faults of a facile writer, who started
on his career at the age of nineteen. He could not
easily submit to the regulation of the classical drama, and
squandered his talents in extravagant tragi- comedies;
but his work grew sounder and stronger towards the
close. Saint Genest (1646), which is derived, but in no
servile fashion, from Lope de Vega, recalls Polyeucte ;
an actor of the time of Diocletian, in performing the
part of a Christian martyr, is penetrated by the heroic
passion which he represents, confesses his faith, and
receives its crown in martyrdom. The tragi-comedy
Don Bernard de Cabrere and the tragedy Venceslas of
ROTROU: THOMAS CORNEILLE 171
the following year exhibit the romantic and passionate
sides of Rotrou's genius. The intemperate yet noble
Ladislas has rashly and in error slain his brother ; he
is condemned to death by his father Venceslas, King
of Poland, and he accepts his doom. The situation is
such as Corneille might have imagined ; but Rotrou's
young hero in the end is pardoned and receives the
kingdom. If their careless construction and unequal
style in general forbade the dramas of Rotrou to hold
the stage, they remained as a store from which greater
artists than he could draw their material. His death
was noble : the plague having broken out at Dreux, he
hastened frpm Paris to the stricken town, disregarding
all affectionate warnings, there to perform his duty as a
magistrate ; within a few days the inhabitants followed
Rotrou's coffin to the parish church.
THOMAS CORNEILLE, the faithful and tender brother
of " le grand Corneille," and his successor in the
Academy, belongs to a younger generation. He was
born in 1625, and did not die until near the close
of the first decade of the eighteenth century. As
an industrious playwright he imitated his brother's
manner, and reproduced his situations with a feebler
hand. Many of his dramas are of Spanish origin,
comic imbroglios, tragic extravagances ; they rather
diverted dramatic art from its true way than aided its
advance. Perhaps for this reason they were the more
popular. His Timocrate (1656), drawn from the romance
of Cleopdtre, and itself a romance written for the stage,
had a success rarely equalled during the century. The
hero is at once the enemy and the lover of the Queen
of Argos ; under one name he besieges her, under
another he repels his own attack ; he is hated and
i;2 FRENCH LITERATURE
adored, the conquered and the conqueror. The lan-
guors of conventional love and the plaintive accents
of conventional grief suited the powers of the younger
Corneille. His Ariane (1672) presents a heroine,
Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, who reminds us of
one of Racine's women, drawn with less certain lines
and fainter colours. In Le Comte d Essex history is
transformed to a romance. Perhaps the greatest glory
of Thomas Corneille is that his reception as an Acade-
mician became the occasion for a just and eloquent
tribute to the genius of his brother uttered by Racirie,
when the bitterness of rivalry was forgotten and the
offences of Racine's earlier years were nobly repaired.
CHAPTER IV
SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS
BEFORE noticing the theories of classical poetry in the
writings of its master critic, Boileau, we must glance at
certain writers who belonged rather to the world of
public life and of society than to the world of art, but
who became each a master in literary craft, as it were,
by an irresistible instinct. Memoirs, maxims, epistolary
correspondence, the novel, in their hands took a dis-
tinguished place in the hierarchy of literary art.
FRANCOIS VI., Due DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Prince
de Marsillac, was born in 1613, of one of the greatest
families of France. His life is divided into two periods
one of passionate activity, when with romantic
ardour he threw himself into the struggles of the
Fronde, only to be foiled and disillusioned ; and the
other of bitter reflection, consoled by certain social
successes, loyal friendships, and an unique literary
distinction. His Maximes are the brief confession of
his experience of life, an utterance of the pessimism
of an aristocratic spirit, moulded into a form proper
to the little world of the salon each maxim a drop
of the attar not of roses but of some more poignant and
bitterly aromatic blossom. In the circle of Mme. de
Sable, now an elderly pre'cieuse, a circle half-Epicurean,
half-Jansenist, frivolously serious and morosely gay, the
173
174 FRENCH LITERATURE
composition of maxims and "sentences" became a
fashion. Those of La Rochefoucauld were submitted
to her as to an oracle ; five years were given to shaping
a tiny volume ; fifteen years to rehandling and polishing
every phrase. They are like a collection of medals struck
in honour of the conquests of cynicism. The first sur-
reptitious edition, printed in Holland in 1664, was
followed by an authorised edition in 1665 ; the number
of maxims, at first 317, rose finally in 1678 to 504 ; some
were omitted ; many were reduced to the extreme of
concision ; under the influence of Mme. de la Fayette,
in the later texts the indictment of humanity was slightly
attenuated. " II m'a donne de 1' esprit," said Mme. de la
Fayette, "mais j'ai reforme son coeur."
The motto of the book, "Our virtues are commonly
vices in disguise," expresses its central idea. La Roche-
foucauld does not absolutely deny disinterested good-
ness ; there may be some such instinctive virtue lying
below all passions which submit to be analysed ; he does
not consider the love of God, the parental or the filial
affections ; but wherever he applies analysis, it is to
reduce each apparently disinterested feeling to self-love.
"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes
of another ; " " When vices desert us, we flatter ourselves
with the belief that it is we who desert them;" "With
true love it is as with apparitions every one talks of
them, but few persons have seen them ; " " Virtues lose
themselves in self-interest as rivers lose themselves in
the sea ; " " In the adversity of our best friends we always
find something which does not displease us " such are
the moral comments on life graven in ineffaceable lines
by La Rochefoucauld. He is not a philosophic thinker,
but he is a penetrating and remorseless critic, who re-
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 175
mains at one fixed point of view; self-interest is assuredly
a large factor in human conduct, and he exposes much
that is real in the heart of man ; much also that is not
universally true was true of the world in which he had
moved ; whether we accept or reject his doctrine, we are
instructed by a statement so implacable and so precise
of the case against human nature as he saw it. Pitiless
he was not himself ; perhaps his artistic instinct led him
to exclude concessions which would have marred the
unity of his conception ; possibly his vanity co-operated
in producing phrases which live and circulate by virtue
of the shock they communicate to our self-esteem. The
merit of his Maximes as examples of style a style which
may be described as lapidary is incomparable; it is
impossible to say more, or to say it more adequately,
in little ; but one wearies in the end of the monotony of
an idea unalterably applied, of unqualified brilliance, of
unrelieved concision ; we anticipate our surprise, and
its purpose is defeated. Traces of preciosity are found
in some of the earliest sentences; that infirmity was
soon overcome by La Rochefoucauld, and his utterances
become as clear and as hard as diamond.
He died at the age of sixty-seven, in the arms of
Bossuet. His MemoiresJ- relating to the period of
the Fronde, are written with an air of studied histori-
cal coldness, which presents a striking contrast to the
brilliant vivacity of Retz.
The most interesting figure of the Fronde, its portrait-
painter, its analyst, its historian, is CARDINAL DE RETZ
(1614-1679). Italian by his family, and Italian in some
features of his character, he had, on a scale of grandeur,
the very genius of conspiracy. When his first work,
1 Ed. 1662, surreptitious and incomplete ; best ed. 1817.
1 76 FRENCH LITERATURE
La Conjuration de Ftesque, was read by Richelieu, the
judgment which that great statesman pronounced was
penetrating " Voila un dangereux esprit." Low of
stature, ugly, ill-made, short-sighted, Retz played the
part of a gallant and a duellist. Never had any one
less vocation for the spiritual duties of an ecclesiastic ;
but, being a churchman, he would be an illustrious
actor on the ecclesiastical stage. There was something
demoniac in his audacity, and with the spirit of tur-
bulence and intrigue was united a certain power of
self-restraint. When fallen, he still tried to be mag-
nificent, though in disgrace : he would resign his arch-
bishopric, pay his enormous debts, resign his cardinalate,
exhibit himself as the hero in misfortune. "Having lived
as a Catiline," said Voltaire, "he lived as an Atticus."
In retirement, as his adventurous life drew towards its
close, he wrote, at the request of Madame de Caumartin,
those Memoirs which remained unpublished until 1717,
and which have insured him a place in literature only
second to Saint-Simon.
It was an age remarkable for its memoirs ; those
of Mdlle. de Montpensier, of Mrne. de Motteville, of
Bussy-Rabutin are only a few of many. The Memoires
of Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historical
interest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging
facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the
drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the
literal truth of things ; but he lays bare the inner truth
of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mas-
tery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early
years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde
are expounded in pages of profound sagacity. His
narrative has all the impetuosity, all the warmth and
RETZ: MME. DE SE*VIGNE 177
hues of life, all the tumult and rumour of action ; he
paints, but in painting he explains ; he touches the
hidden springs of passion ; his portraits of contem-
poraries are not more vivid in their colours than they
are searching in their psychology : and in his style
there is that negligent grandeur which belongs rather
to the days of Louis XIII. than to the age of his
successor, when language grew more exact for the
intelligence, but lost much of its passion and untamed
energy.
The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature,
may be said to have reached perfection, with scarcely
an historical development, in the letters of MME. DE
SEVIGNE. The letters of Balzac are rhetorical exer-
cises ; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of
Shakespeare, "heavy lightness, serious vanity." Mme.
de Sevigne entered into the gains of a cultivated society,
in which graceful converse had become a necessity of
existence. She wrote delightfully, because she con-
veyed herself into her letters, and because she con-
versed freely and naturally by means of her pen. Marie
de Rabutin - Chantal, born in 1626, deprived of both
parents in her earliest years, was carefully trained in
literary studies Latin, Italian, French under the
superintendence of her uncle, "le bien bon," the Abbe
de Coulanges. Among her teachers were the scholar
Menage and the poet Chapelain. Married at eighteen
to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri de Sevigne,
she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children,
the daughter whom she loved with excess of devotion,
and a son, who received from his mother a calmer
affection. She saw the life of the court, she was
acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented the
FRENCH LITERATURE
Hotel dc Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of
preciosity, "one superfluous ribbon," says Nisard, "in
a simple and elegant toilet"), she knew and loved the
country and its rural joys, she read with excellent
judgment and eager delight the great books of past
and present times.
When her daughter, " the prettiest girl in France," was
married in 1669 to M. de Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant-
General of Provence, Mme. de Sevigne, desiring to be
constantly one with her, at least in thought, transferred
into letters her whole life from day to day, together
with much of the social life of the time during a
period of nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen
to trot, throwing the reins, as she says, upon its neck ;
but if her letters are improvisations, they are impro-
visations regulated by an exquisite artistic instinct. Her
imagination is alert in discovering, combining, and pre-
senting the happiest meanings of reality. She is gay,
witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace
of malignity ; amiable rather than passionate, .except
in the ardour of her maternal devotion, which some-
times proved oppressive to a daughter w r ho, though
not unloving, loved with a temperate heart ; faithful to
friends, loyal to those who had fallen into misfortune,
but neither sentimental nor romantic, nor disposed to
the generosities of a universal humanity ; a woman of
spirit, energy, and good sense ; capable of serious re-
flection, though not of profound thought ; endowed
with an exquisite sense of the power of words, and,
indeed, the creator of a literary style. While her interests
were in the main of a mundane kind, she was in sympathy
with Port-Royal ; admired the writings of Pascal, and
deeply reverenced Nicole. Domestic affairs, business
MME. DE MAINTENON 179
(concern for her children having involved her in finan-
cial troubles), the aristocratic life of Paris and Versailles,
literature, the pleasures and tedium of the country, the
dulness or gaiety of a health-resort, the rise and fall
of those in power, the petty intrigues and spites and
follies of the day these, and much besides, enter into
Mme. de Sevigne's records, records made upon the
moment, with all the animation of an immediate im-
pression, but remaining with us as one of the chief
documents for the social history of the second half of
the seventeenth century. In April 1696 Mme. de
Sevigne died.
Beside the letters addressed to her daughter are
others far fewer in. number to her cousin Bussy-
Rabutin, to her cousin Mme. de Coulanges, to Pom-
ponne, and other correspondents. In Bussy's Memoires
et Correspondence (1696-97) first appeared certain of her
letters ; a collection, very defective and inaccurate, was
published in 1726 ; eight years later the first portion of
an authorised text was issued under the sanction of the
writer's grand-daughter ; gradually the material was re-
covered, until it became of vast extent; even since
the appearance of the edition among the Grands cri-
vains de la France two volumes of Lettres inedites have
been published.
Among the other letter-writers of the period, perhaps
the most distinguished were Mme. de Sevigne's old and
attached friend Mme. de la Fayette, and the woman of
supreme authority with the King, Mme. de Maintenon.
A just view of Mme. de Maintenon's character has
been long obscured by the letters forged under her
name by La Beaumelle, and by the bitter hostility
of Saint-Simon. On a basis of ardour and sensibility
i8o FRENCH LITERATURE
she built up a character of unalterable reason and good
sense. Her letters are not creations of genius, unless
practical wisdom and integrity of purpose be forms
of genius. She does not gossip delightfully ; at times
she may seem a little hard or dry ; but her reason is
really guided by human kindness. " Her style/' wrote
a high authority, Dollinger, "is clear, terse, refined,
often sententious ; her business letters are patterns of
simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be char-
acterised as womanly yet manly, so well do they com-
bine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with
the strength and lucidity of a masculine mind." The
foundation of Saint-Cyr, for the education of girls well-
born but poor, was the object of her constant solici-
tude ; there she put out her talents as a teacher and
guide of youth to the best interest ; there she found
play for her best affections : " C'est le lieu," she said,
"de delices pour moi.'"'
The friend of Madame de Sevigne, the truest woman
whom La Rochefoucauld had ever known, MADAME DE
LA FAYETTE was the author of two historical works,
of which one is exquisite a memorial of her friend
the Duchess of Orleans, and of two perhaps three
romances, the latest of which, in the order of chronology,
is the masterpiece of seventeenth-century fiction. Marie
de la Vergne, born in 1634, a pupil of Menage, married
at twenty-one to M. de la Fayette, became the trusted
companion of the bright and gracious Henrietta of
England. It is not that part of Madame's life, when
she acted as intermediary between Louis XIV. and her
brother, Charles II., that is recorded by her friend : it
is the history of her heart. Nothing is more touching
in its simplicity than the narrative of Madame's last
MME. DE LA FAYETTE 181
moments ; it serves as the best possible comment on
the pathetic Funeral Oration of Bossuet. We have no
grounds for asserting that the married life of Madame de
la Fayette was unhappy, except through the inadequacy
of a husband whose best qualities seem to have been of
a negative kind. During the fifteen years which preceded
the death of La Rochefoucauld her friendship for him
was the centre of her existence. She seemed to bear
about with her some secret grief ; something remained
veiled from other friends than he, and they named
her le Brouillard. She outlived her friend by thirteen
years, and during ten was widowed. In 1693 she died.
Her earliest novel, La Princesse de Montpensier (1662),
a tale of the days of the Valois and of St. Bartholomew,
is remarkable for its truthful pictures of the manners
of the court, its rendering of natural and unexaggerated
feeling, and for the fact that it treats of married life,
occupying itself with such themes as have been dealt with
in many of its modern successors. The Zayde, of eight
years later, was written in collaboration with Segrais.
It is in La Princesse de Cleves (1678) that the genius and
the heart of Madame de la Fayette find a perfect expres-
sion. The Princess, married to a husband who loves
her devotedly, and whom she honours, but whose feel-
ings she cannot return, is tempted by the brilliant Due
de Nemours and by the weakness of her own passion,
to infidelity. She resolves to confide her struggle to her
husband, and seek in him a protector against herself.
The hard confession is made, but a grievous and in-
evitable change has passed over their lives. Believing
himself deceived, M. de Cleves is seized by a fever
and dies, not without the consolation of learning his
error. Nemours renews his vows and entreaties; the
1 82 FRENCH LITERATURE
Princess refuses his hand, and atones for her error
in cloistered seclusion. The tale has lost none of its
beauty and pathos after a lapse of two centuries. Does
it reveal the hidden grief of the writer's life ? And was
her friend, the Due de la Rochefoucauld, delivered from
his gout and more than a score of years, transformed
by Madame de la Fayette into the foiled lover of her
tale?
CHAPTER V
BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE
THE great name in criticism of the second half of the
seventeenth century is that of Boileau. But one of
whom Boileau spoke harshly, a soldier, a man of the
world, the friend of Ninon de 1'Enclos, a sceptical Epicu-
rean, an amateur in letters, Saint-Evremond (1613-1703),
among his various writings, aided the cause of criticism
by the intuition which he had of what is excellent,
by a fineness of judgment as far removed from mere
licence as from the pedantry of rules. Fallen into
disfavour with the King, Saint-Evremond was received
into the literary society of London. His criticism is
that of a fastidious taste, of balance and moderation,
guided by tradition, yet open to new views if they
approved themselves to his culture and good sense.
Had his studies been more serious, had his feelings
been more generous and ardent, had his moral sense
been less shallow, he might have made important con-
tributions to literature. As it was, to be a man of the
world was his trade, to be a writer was only an admir-
able foible.
NICOLAS BOILEAU, named DESPREAUX, from a field
(pre] of his father's property at Crosne, was born in Paris,
1636, son of the registrar of the Grand'Chambre du
Palais. His choice of a profession lay between the
13 l8 *
1 84 FRENCH LITERATURE
Church and that with which his father was connected
the law ; but though he made some study of theology,
and was called to the bar, his inclination for literature
could not be resisted. His whole life, indeed, was that
of a man of letters upright, honourable, serious, digni-
fied, simple ; generous to the friends whose genius he
could justly applaud ; merciless to books and authors
condemned by his reason, his good sense, his excellent
judgment. He was allied by an ardent admiration to
Racine, and less intimately to Moliere, La Fontaine, and
Chapelle ; Jansenist through his religious sympathies,
and closely attached to the venerable Arnauld; appointed
historiographer to the King (1677) together with Racine;
an Academician by the King's desire, notwithstanding
the opposition of his literary enemies. In his elder
years his great position of authority in the world of
letters was assured, but he suffered from infirmities of
body, and from an increasing severity of temper. In
1711 he died, bequeathing a large sum of money to the
poor.
Boileau's literary career falls into three periods the
first, militant and destructive, in which he waged suc-
cessful war against all that seemed to him false and
despicable in art ; the second, reconstructive, in which
he declared the doctrine of what may be termed literary
rationalism, and legislated for the French Parnassus ;
the third, dating from his appointment as historiogra-
pher, a period of comparative repose and, to some
extent, of decline, but one in which the principles of
his literary faith were maintained and pressed to new
conclusions. His writings include twelve satires (of
which the ninth, "A son Esprit," is the chief master-
piece) ; twelve epistles (that to Racine being pre-
BOILEAU AS POET 185
eminent); the literary -didactic poem, L'Art Po/tique ;
a heroi-comical epic, Le Lutrin ; miscellaneous shorter
poems (among which may be noted the admirable
epitaph on Arnauld, and an unhappy ode, Sur la Prise
de Namur, 1693) ; and various critical studies in prose,
his Lucianic dialogue Les Heros de Roman, satirising
the extravagant novels not yet dismissed to oblivion,
and his somewhat truculent Reflexions sur Longin being
specially deserving of attention. The satires preceded
in date the epistles ; of the former, the first nine belong
to the years 1660-67 5 ^ ne nrs * mne f the epistles to
the years 1669-77 > three satires and three epistles may
be described as belated. The year 1674 is memorable
as that in which were published L'Art Poetique and
the first four chants of Le Lutrin.
The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intel-
lectual, animated by ideas ; but it is an error to suppose
that a sensuous element is absent from his verse. It
is verse of the classical school, firm and clear, but it
addresses the ear with a studied harmony, and what
Boileau saw he could render into exact, definite, and
vivid expression. His imagination was not in a large
sense creative ; he was wholly lacking in tenderness and
sensibility ; his feeling for external nature was no more
than that of a Parisian bourgeois who enjoys for a day
the repose of the fields ; but for Paris itself, its various
aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye
and the precise rendering of a realist in art ; his faithful
objective touch is like that of a Dutch painter. As a
moralist, he is not searching or profound ; he saw too
little of the inner world of the heart, and knew too im-
perfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals with
literature and a just judgment in letters may almost be
1 86 FRENCH LITERATURE
called an element in morals all his penetration and
power become apparent.
To clear the ground for the new school of nature,
truth and reason was Boileau's first task. It was a
task which called for courage and skill. The public
taste was still uncertain. Laboured and lifeless epics
like Chapelain's La Pucelle, petty ingenuities in metre
like those of Cotin, violence and over-emphasis, ex-
travagances of sentiment, faded preciosities, inane
pastoralisms, gross or vulgar burlesques, tragedies
languorous and insipid, lyrics of pretended passion,
affectations from the degenerate Italian literature, super-
subtleties from Spain these had still their votaries.
And the conduct of life and characters of men of
letters were often unworthy of the vocation they pro-
fessed. "La haine d'un sot livre" was an inspiration for
Boileau, as it afterwards was for our English satirist
Pope ; and he felt deeply that dignity of art is connected
with dignity of character and rectitude of life " Le vers
se senttoujours des bassesses de cceur." He struck at the
follies and affectations of the world of letters, and he
struck with force : it was a needful duty, and one most
effectively performed. Certain of the Epistles, which
are written with less pitiless severity and with a more
accomplished mastery of verse, continue the work of the
Satires. From Horace he derived much, something
from Juvenal, and something from his predecessor Reg-
nier ; but he had not the lightness nor the bonhomie of
Horace, nor his easy and amiable wisdom.
In the Art Poetique Boileau is constructive ; he exhibits
the true doctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted
genius, fire, imagination the gifts of heaven what should
be the self-imposed discipline of a poet ? Above all,
BOILEAU AS CRITIC 187
the cultivation of that power which distinguishes false
from true, and aids every other faculty the reason.
" Nothing," declares Boileau, " is beautiful save what is
true ; " nature is the model, the aim and end of art ;
reason and good sense discern reality ; they test the
fidelity of the artistic imitation of nature ; they alone
can vouch for the correspondence of the idea with
its object, and the adequacy of the expression to the
idea. What is permanent and universal in litera-
ture lives by the aid of no fashion of the day, but by
virtue of its truth to nature. And hence is derived
the authority of the ancient classics, which have been
tried by time and have endured ; these we do not
accept as tyrants, but we may safely follow as guides.
To study nature is, however, before all else to study
man that is, human nature and to distinguish in
human nature what is universal and abiding from what
is transitory and accidental ; we cannot be expected to
discover things absolutely new ; it suffices to give to
what is true a perfect expression. Unhappily, human
nature, as understood by Boileau, included little beyond
the court and the town. Unhappily his appreciation of
classical literature was defective ; to justify as true and
natural the mythology of Greece he has to regard it as
a body of symbols or a moral allegory. Unhappily his
survey of literature was too narrow to include the truths
and the splendours of Mediaeval poetry and art. For
historical truth, indeed, he had little sense ; seeking for
what is permanent and universal, he had little regard
for local colour and the truth of manners. To secure
assent from contemporary minds truth must assume
what they take to be its image, and a Greek or Roman
on the stage must not shock the demand for verisimili-
1 88 FRENCH LITERATURE
hide made by the courtly imagination of the days of
Louis Quatorze. Art which fails to please is no longer
art.
To the workmanship, the technique of poetry, Boileau
attaches a high importance. Its several species idyl,
elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, rondeau, ballade, madrigal,
satire, epic, tragedy, comedy are separated from one
another by fixed boundaries, and each is subject to its
own rules ; but genius, on occasion, may transcend those
rules, and snatch an unauthorised grace. It is difficult
to understand why from among the genres of poetry
Boileau omitted the fable ; perhaps he did not regard
its form, now in verse and now in prose, as denned ;
possibly he was insensible of the perfection to which
the fable in verse had been carried by La Fontaine.
The fourth chant of the Art Poetique is remarkable for
its lofty conception of the position of the poet ; its
counsels express the dignity of the writer's own literary
life. He has been charged not only with cruelty as a
satirist, but with the baseness of a flatterer of the great.
It would be more just to notice the honourable in-
dependence which he maintained, notwithstanding his
poetical homage to the King, which' was an inevitable
requisition. Boileau's influence as a critic of literature
can hardly be overrated ; it has much in common with
the influence of Pope on English literature beneficial
as regards his own time, somewhat restrictive and even
tyrannical upon later generations.
Le Lutrin (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque
which degrades a noble theme, but, like Pope's far
more admirable Rape of the Lock, a heroi-comic poem
humorously exalting humble matter of the day. It tells
of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position
LA FONTAINE 189
of a lectern, combats in which the books of a neigh-
bouring publisher serve as formidable projectiles. The
scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice.
Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation of visible detail,
and his skill in versification, served him here better than
did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of
him less as a poet than as the classical guardian and
legislator of poetry. He was an emancipator by direct-
ing art towards reason and truth ; when larger inter-
pretations of truth and reason than his became possible,
his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint.
All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by
the most easy and natural of the singers of his time
one whose art is like nature in its freedom, while yet
it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art. JEAN DE
LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at Chateau-Thierry, in
Champagne, son of the " maitre des eaux et forets."
His education was less of a scholastic kind than an
education derived from books read for his own plea-
sure, and especially from observation or reverie among
the woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast,
and insect, so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slip-
ping away from theology and law, he passed ten years,
from twenty-three to thirty-three, in seeming indolence, a
"bon garden," irreclaimably wayward as regards worldly
affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his
genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of
old poets, story-tellers, translators, and already practising
his art of verse. Nothing that was not natural to him,
and wholly to his liking, would he or could he do ; but
happily he was born to write perfect verses, and the
labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a
delight. He allowed himself to be married to a pretty
1 9 o FRENCH LITERATURE
girl of fifteen, and presently forgot that he had a wife
and child, drifted away, and agreed in 1659 to a divi-
sion of goods ; but his carelessness and egoism were
without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child
rather than of a man.
In 1654 he published a translation of the Eunuch of
Terence of small worth, and not long after was favoured
with the patronage of Fouquet, the superintendant of
finance. To him La Fontaine presented his Adonis, a
narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious, ex-
pressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to
be found in poetry of the time^ and reviving some of
the bright Renaissance sense of antiquity. The genius
of France is united in La Fontaine's writings with the
genius of Greece. But the verses written by command
for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-con-
structed and unfinished Songe de Vaux, partly in prose,
partly in verse, was designed to celebrate his patron's
Chateau de Vaux.
Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue Clymcne,
a dramatic fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus
learns by the aid of the Muses the loves of Acante (La
Fontaine) and Clymene (Madame X . . .), a rural beauty,
whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of
Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La
Fontaine did not desert him, pleading in his JiLlcgie aux
Nymphes de Vaux on behalf of the disgraced minister. As
a consequence, the poet retired for a time from Paris to
banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again in
Paris or at Chateau-Thierry, his native place, where the
Duchesse de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, plea-
sure-loving, bestowed on him a kind protection. His
tedious paraphrase of Psyche, and the poem Quinquina,
LA FONTAINE'S CONTES 191
in which he celebrates the recovery from illness of 'the
Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather
than of native impulse ; but the tendencies of her salon,
restrained neither by the proprieties of the classical doc-
trine in literature nor those of religious strictness, may
have encouraged him to the production of his Contes.
In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place
in Boileau's rooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distin-
guished group, which included Moliere, Chapelle, Racine,
and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the bonhomme^^Q escaped
from the toil of conversation which did not interest
him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charm-
ing talker with companions of his choice. Probably to
Boileau's urgency is due the first original publication
of La Fontaine, a little volume of Nouvelles en Vers (1664-
1665), containing the Joconde, a tale from Ariosto, and a
comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost imme-
diately there followed a collection of ten Contes, with the
author's name upon the title-page, and at various later
dates were published added tales, until five parts com-
pleted the series. The success was great, but great also
was the scandal, for the bonhomme, drawing from Boc-
caccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles,
Rabelais, Petronius, Athenaeus, and other sources, had
exhibited no more regard for decency than that which
bestows the graces of lightness, brightness, wit, and
gaiety upon indecency. His unabashed apology was
that the artistic laws of the conte obliged him to decline
the laws of modesty ; and among those who applauded
his tales were the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. de
Sevigne. It is indeed impossible not to applaud their
skill in rapid and easy narrative, and the grace, freedom,
and spontaneity of the verse.
192 FRENCH LITERATURE
The first six books of the Fables appeared in 1668 ; the
next five in two parts, in 1678 and 1679 ; the twelfth and
last book in 1694. When the Psyche was published, soon
after the first group of the Fables, the prose and verse
were placed in a graceful setting, which tells of the con-
verse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and
Moliere (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the un-
finished gar dens of Versailles, where the author of Psyche,
named happily Polyphile (for he loved many things, and
among them his friends), will read his romance for his
literary comrades.
" faime lejcu, ? amour, les livres, la imisique,
La ville et la campagne, enfin tout : il n'est rieh
Qui ne me soit souverain bien
Jusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un cccur melancolique?
Some of his friends before long had passed away,
but others came to fill their places. For many years
he was cared for and caressed by the . amiable and cul-
tivated Mme. de Sabliere, and when she dismissed other
acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her
La Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its
doors to him sooner than to Boileau, but the King
would not have it so, and he was admitted (1684) only
when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be
sage. When Mme. de Sabliere died, Hervart, maitre des
requetes, one day offered La Fontaine the hospitality
of his splendid house. " I was on my way there," re-
plied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which
he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of
Contes, the bonhomme tranquilly died in April 1693.
"He is so simple," said his nurse, "that God will not
have courage to damn him." " He was the most sincere
and candid soul/' wrote his friend Maucroix, who had
LA FONTAINE'S FABLES 193
been intimate with him for more than fifty years, " that
I have ever known ; never a disguise ; I don't know
that he spoke an untruth in all his life."
All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be
found in his Fables. The comedies in which he col-
laborated, the Captivite de Saint Male, written on the
suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the miscellaneous
poems, though some of these are admirable, even the
Conies, exhibit only a fragment of his mind ; in the
Fables the play of his faculties is exquisite, and is com-
plete. His imagination was unfitted for large and
sustained creation ; it operated most happily in a nar-
row compass. The Fables, however, contain much in
little ; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with
narrative ; they give scope to his feeling for nature, and
to his gift for the observation of human character and
society ; they form, as he himself has said
" Une ample come'die a cents actes divers
Et dont la scene est Funtvers"
He had not to invent his subjects ; he found them in
all the fabulists who had preceded him Greek, Latin,
Oriental, elder French writers "j'en lis qui sont du
Nord et qui sont du Midi ; " but he may be said to have
recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to an
express moral, he converted the fable into a co-nte, in
which narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue
have an independent value, and the moral is little more
than an accident. This is especially true of the midmost
portion of the collection Books vii.-ix. which appeared
ten years after the earliest group. He does not impose
new and great ideas on the reader ; he does not interpret
the deepest passions ; he takes life as he sees it, as an en-
I 9 4 FRENCH LITERATURE
tertaining comedy, touched at times with serious thought,
with pathos, even with melancholy, but in the main a
comedy, which teaches us to smile at the vanities, the
follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the same
time something of tenderness and pity for all that is
gentle or weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat
epicurean, a morality of indulgence, of moderation, of
good sense. His eye for what is characteristic and pic-
turesque in animal life is infallible ; but his humanised
wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical
presentation of mankind and of the society of his own
day, from the grand monarch to the bourgeois or the
lackey.
La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations
of the classical school of the seventeenth century ; his
manifold reading in elder French literature enriched
his vocabulary ; he seems to light by instinct upon the
most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the
perfection of his art was attained only as the result of
untiring diligence ; indolent and careless as he was in
worldly affairs, he was an indefatigable craftsman in
poetry. His verse is as free as it is fine ; it can accom-
plish whatever it intends ; now it is light and swift, but
when needful it can be grave and even magnificent :
" Aurait-il imprime sur le front des e"toiles
Ce que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles ? "
It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules im-
posed from without ; its life and movement come from
within, and the lines vary, like a breeze straying among
blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of the writer's
mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity,
he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other
LA FONTAINE'S ART 195
writer of his century the genius of France, exquisite in
the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling
to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with
some of his- admirers, " the French Homer," we may at
least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne,
" mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naTf que le premier,"
and with all the charm of verse superadded.
CHAPTER VI
COMEDY AND TRAGEDY MOLIERE RACINE
I
THE history of comedy, from Larivey to Moliere, is one
of arrested development, followed by hasty and ill-
regulated growth. During the first twenty-five years
of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardly be said
to have existed ; whatever tended to beauty or elevation,
took the form of tragi-comedy or pastoral ; what was
rude and popular became a farce. From the farce
Moliere's early work takes its origin, but of the reper-
tory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed,
in these performances was left to the improvisation of
the burlesque actors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Gar-
guille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the popu-
lace ; but the farces tabariniques can hardly be dignified
with the name of literature.
In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by
Mairet in his Galanteries du Due (fOssone. The genius
of Rotrou, follower though he was of Plautus, tended
towards the tragic; if he is really gay, it is in La Soeur
(1645), a Bright tangle of extravagant incidents. For
Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material ; the way
to the Spanish drama was opened by d'Ouville, the
only writer of the time devoted specially to comedy, in
196
COMEDY BEFORE MOLIERE 197
L' 'E 'sprit Follet (1641); once opened, it became a common
highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in
Jodelet and Don Japhet d'Armenie his own burlesque
humour. The comedy of contemporary manners appears
with grace and charm in Corneille's early plays ; the
comedy of character, in his admirable Le Menteur. Saint-
Evremond satirised literary affectations in La Comedie
des Academistes ; these and other follies of the time are
presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy,
Les Visionnaires . If we add, for sake of its study of
the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the
farcical Pedant Joue of Cyrano, we have named the
most notable comedies of the years which preceded
Les Prfaieuses Ridicules.
Their general character is extravagance of resources
in the plot, extravagance of conception in the char-
acters. Yet in both intrigue and characters there is a
certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and
humorous, are variously mingled to produce the im-
broglio ; the same typical characters the braggart, the
parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous
old man, the designing woman, the knavish valet, the
garrulous nurse play their mirthful parts. If the types
are studied from real life rather than adopted from
Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to ab-
surdity. Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy
of imagination and the finer touch of a dexterous
artist.
JEAN-BAPTISTE PoQUELiN, who, when connected with
the stage, named himself MOLIERE, was born in January
1622, in Paris, the son of a prosperous upholsterer, Jean
Poquelin, and Marie Cresse, his wife. Educated at the
College de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupils the
198 FRENCH LITERATURE
Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the
future traveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient
reason to doubt that he and some of his friends after-
wards received lessons in philosophy from Gassendi,
whose influence must have tended to loosen him from
the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence
of thought. A translation by Moliere of the great poem
of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from
it appears in the second act of the Misanthrope. Legal
studies followed those of philosophy. But Moliere had
other ends in view than either those of an advocate
or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King.
In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to throw
in his lot with the theatrical company in which Madeleine
Bjart and her brothers were leading members. The
Illustre Theatre was constituted, but Paris looked askance
at the illustrious actors ; debt, imprisonment, and release
through friendly aid, formed the net result of Moliere's
first experiment.
The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early
days of the following year to try their fortune in the
provinces. It is needless to follow in detail their move-
ments during twelve years twelve years fruitful in
experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes,
years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were
laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a
comedy, founded on the Italian of Nicolo Barbieri,
L'Etonrdi, saw the light, and Moliere revealed himself
as a poet. Young Lelie, the tourdi, is enamoured of
the beautiful Celie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old
and rich, has purchased from corsairs. Lelie's valet Mas-
carille, who is the life of the play, invents stratagem on
stratagem to aid the lover, and is for ever foiled by his
LES PRECIEUSES RIDICULES 199
master's indiscretions, until the inevitable happy denoue-
ment arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional ;
the charm is in the vivacity and colour of the style.
In 1656 Le De'pit Amoureux was given with applause at
B^ziers ; much is derived from the Italian of Secchi,
something perhaps from Terence ; the tender scenes
of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrasting
with the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid
and valet, still live, if the rest of the play be little re-
membered.
The years of apprenticeship were over when, in 1658,
Moliere and his company once more in Paris presented,
by command, before the King, Corneille's Nicomede, and,
leave being granted, gave his farce in the Italian style,
the Docteur Amoureux, before pleased spectators. The
company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's
brother, with the Petit-Bourbon as theatre, and there,
in November 1659, was enacted Moliere's first satiric play
on contemporary manners, Les Precieuses Ridicules. We
do not need the legendary old man crying from the pit
" Courage, Moliere ! voila la bonne com^die " to assure
us that the comic stage possessed at length a master-
piece. The dramatist had himself known the precieuses
of the provinces ; through them he might with less
danger exhibit the follies of the Hotel de Rambouillet
and the ruelles of the capital. The good bourgeois
Gorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two
precieuses, to establish himself in Paris. Their aspirant
lovers, unversed in the affectations of the salon, are
slighted and repelled ; in revenge they employ their
valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts of men
of fashion and of taste. The exposure and confusion
of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus,
14
200 FRENCH LITERATURE
close the piece. It was a farce raised to the dignity of
comedy. Moliere's triumph was the triumph of good
sense.
After a success in Sganarelle (1660), a broad comedy
of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check the only one
in his dramatic career in the somewhat colourless tragi-
comedy Don Garde de Navarre (1661), Moliere found a
theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was
happily suited to his genius. L'Jzcole des Marts (1661)
contrasts two methods of education one suspicious and
severe, the other wisely indulgent. Two brothers, Ariste
and Sganarelle, seek the hands of their wards, the orphan
sisters Isabelle and Leonor ; the amiable Ariste, aided
by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded with
happiness ; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion.
The drama is a plea, expressing the writer's personal
thoughts, for nature and for freedom. The comedy of
manners is here replaced by the comedy of character.
Its success suggested to Fouquet that Moliere might
contribute to the amusement of the King at the fetes
of the Chateau de Vaux ; in fifteen days the dramatist
had his bright improvisation Les Facheux ready, a series
of character sketches in scenes rather than a comedy.
.The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hinted
to Moliere that another bore might with advantage be
added to the collection the sportsman whose talk shall
be of sport. At Fontainebleau he duly appeared before
his Majesty, and unkind spectators recognised a portrait
of the Marquis de Soyecourt.
Next February (1662) Moliere, aged forty, was married
to the actress Armande Bejart, whose age* was half his
own a disastrous union, which caused him inexpres-
sible anxiety and unhappiness. In L'fccole des Femmes
AFFAIR OF TARTUFE 201
of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself
in actual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from
childhood by the method of jealous seclusion and in
infantile ignorance ; but love, in the person of young
Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos in the anguish
of Arnolphe ; yet it is not the order of nature that
middle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon
innocent affections. The charming Agnes belongs of
right to Horace, and the over-wise, and therefore foolish,
Arnolphe must quit the scene with his despairing cry.
Some matter of offence was found by the devout in
Moliere's play ; it was the opening of a long campaign ;
the pr/deuses, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples
of Aristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms.
Moliere for the occasion ignored the devout ; upon the
others he made brilliant reprisals in La Critique de
I ' Ecole des Femmes (1663) and U Impromptu de Versailles
(1663).
Among those who war against nature and human
happiness, not the least dangerous foe is the religious
hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, Moliere presented before
the King the first three acts of his great character-
comedy Tartufe. Instantly Anne of Austria and the
King's confessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to
work ; the public performance of " The Hypocrite "
was inhibited ; a savage pamphlet was directed against
its author by the cure of Saint-Barthelemy. Private
representations, however, were given ; Tartufe, in five
acts, was played in November in presence of the great
Conde". In 1665 Moliere's company was named the
servants of the King ; two years later a verbal permis-
sion was granted for the public performance of the
play. It appeared under the title of L'Imposteur ; the
202 FRENCH LITERATURE
victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the
blow fell ; by order of the President, M. de Lamoignon,
the theatre was closed. Moliere bore up courageously.
The King was besieging Lille ; Moliere despatched two
of his comrades to the camp, declaring that if the Tar-
tufes of France should carry all before them he must
cease to write. The King was friendly, but the Arch-
bishop fulminated threats of excommunication against
any one who should even read the play. At length
in 1669, when circumstances were more favourable,
Louis XIV. granted the desired permission ; in its
proper name Moliere's play obtained complete free-
dom. Bourdaloue might still pronounce condemnation ;
Bossuet might draw terrible morals from the author's
sudden death ; an actor, armed with the sword of the
comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theolo-
gians were not wholly wrong ; the tendency of Moliere's
teaching, like that of Rabelais and like that of Montaigne,
is to detach morals from religion, to vindicate whatever
is natural, to regard good sense and good feeling as
sufficient guides of conduct.
There is an accent of indignation in the play ; the
follies of men and women may be subjects of sport ;
base egoism assuming the garb of religion deserves a
lash that draws the blood. Is it no act of natural piety
to defend the household against the designs of greedy
and sensual imposture ; no service to society to quicken
the penetration of those who may be made the dupes of
selfish craft ? While Orgon and his mother are besotted
by the gross pretensions of the hypocrite, while the
young people contend for the honest joy of life, the
voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the saga-
cious Cleante, and that of frank good sense through
DON JUAN : LE MISANTHROPE 203
the waiting-maid, Dorine. Suddenly a providence, not
divine but human, intervenes in the representative of the
monarch and the law, and the criminal at the moment of
triumph is captured in his own snare.
When the affair of Tartufe was in its first tangle,
Moliere produced a kind of dramatic counterpart Don
Juan, on le Fesiiu de Pierre (1665). In Don Juan whose
valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master the
dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and
scorn of all religion are united with the most complete
moral licence ; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day,
and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for
an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as
he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about
the figure of his hero, recreated by Moliere from a
favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while
a vigorous study of character, is touched with the light
of romance.
These are masterpieces ; but neither Tartufe nor Don
Juan expresses so much of the mind of Moliere as does
Le Misanthrope (1666). His private griefs, his public
warfare, had doubtless a little hardened and a little em-
bittered his spirit. In many respects it is a sorry world ;
and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misan-
thropist Alceste is nobly fanatical on behalf of sincerity
and rectitude. How does his sincerity serve the world
or serve himself ? And he, too, has his dose of human
folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartless coquette ?
Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for
what it is ; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more
settled misanthropy in such cynical acquiescence than
there is in the intractable virtue of Alceste ? Alone of
Moliere's plays, Le Misanthrope has that Shakespearean
204 FRENCH LITERATURE
obscurity which leaves it open to various interpretations.
It is idle to try to discover actual originals for the charac-
ters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried to
Celimene, " C'est pour mes peche"s que je vous aime," the
actors who stood face to face were Moliere and the wife
whom he now met only on the stage.
Moliere's genius could achieve nothing higher than
Tartufe and the Misanthrope. His powers suffered no
decline, but he did not again put them to such strenuous
uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of Amphitryon, freely
derived from Plautus, was succeeded by an admirable
comedy in prose, Georges Dandin, in which the folly of
unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and
the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the
year closed Moliere, continuing to write in prose, returned
to Plautus, and surpassed him in L'Avare. To be rich
and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity ; but Harpagon
is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling passion
will admit one of subordinate influence. Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who
suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper
rank, is wholly original ; it mounts in the close from
comedy to the extravagance of farce, and perhaps in the
uproarious laughter of the play we may discover a touch
of effort or even of spasm. The operatic Psyche (1671)
is memorable as having combined the talents of Moliere,
Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of
Lulli.
In Les Femmcs Savantes (1672) Moliere returned to an
early theme, with variations suited to the times. The Hotel
de Rambouillet was closed ; the new tribe of pr^cieuses
had learnt the Cartesian philosophy, affected the sciences,
were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Some-
LES FEMMES SAVANTES 205
thing of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled
strangely with the pretensions to science and the pedan-
tries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait in
caricature from the Abbe Cotin) is the Tartufe of spu-
rious culture ; Vadius (a possible satire of Menage) is a
pedant, arrogant and brutal. Shall the charming Hen-
riette be sacrificed to gratify her mother's domineering
temper and the base designs of an impostor ? The
forces are arrayed on either side ; the varieties of
learned and elegant folly in woman are finely distin-
guished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois
father with his rude common - sense ; the sage Ariste ;
the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be
faulty, but whose wit is sound and clear ; and Henriette
herself, the adorable, whom to know is more of a
liberal education than to have explored all the Greek
and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final
issue of the encounter between good sense, good
nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot
be uncertain.
Le Malade Imaginaire was written when Moliere was
suffering from illness ; but his energy remained indomi-
table. The comedy continued that long polemic against
the medical faculty which he had sustained in L' Amour
Medicin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and other plays.
Moliere had little faith in any art which professes to
mend nature ; the physicians were the impostors of a
learned hygiene. It was the dramatist's last jest at the
profession. While playing the part of Argan on Feb-
ruary 17, 1673, the "Malade Imaginaire" fell dying on
the stage ; he forced a laugh, but could not continue
his part ; at ten o'clock he was no more. Through the
exertions of his widow a religious funeral was permitted
206 FRENCH LITERATURE
to an actor who had died unfortified by the rites of the
Church.
Many admirable though slighter pieces served as the
relief of his mind between the effort of his chief works.
In all, gaiety and good sense interpenetrate each other.
Kindly natured and generous, Moliere, a great observer,
who looked through the deeds of men, was often taci-
turn le contemplateur of Boileau and seemingly self-
absorbed. Like many persons of artistic tempera-
ment, he loved splendour of life ; but he was liberal
in his largess to those who claimed his help. He
brought comedy to nature, and made it a study of
human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal
and unnatural. He preached the worth of human
happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous toler-
ance. He does not indulge in heroics, and yet there
is heroism in his courageous outlook upon things. The
disciple of Moliere cannot idealise the world into a scene
of fairyland ; he will conceive man as far from perfect,
perhaps as far from perfectible ; but the world is our
habitation ; let us make it a cheerful one with the aid
of a sane temper and an energetic will. As a writer,
Moliere is not free from faults ; but his defects of style
are like the accidents that happen within the bounds
of a wide empire. His stature is not diminished when
he is placed among the greatest European figures. " I
read some pieces of Moliere's every year," said Goethe,
"just as from time to time I contemplate the engravings
after the great Italian masters. For we little men are
not able to retain the greatness of such things within
ourselves."
To study the contemporaries and immediate successors
of Moliere in comedy Thomas Corneille, Quinault,
PHILIPPE QUINAULT 207
Montfleury, Boursault, Baron would be to show how
his genius dominates that of all his fellows. The reader
may well take this fact for granted. 1
II
With the close of the sanguinary follies of the Fronde,
with the inauguration of the personal government of Louis
XIV. and the triumph of an absolute monarchy, a period
of social and political reorganisation began. The court
became the centre for literature ; to please courtiers and
great ladies was to secure prosperity and fame ; the arts
of peace were magnificently ordered ; the conditions
were favourable to ideals of grace and beauty rather
than of proud sublimity ; to isolate one's self was impos-
sible ; literature became the pastime of a cultivated
society ; it might be a trivial pastime, but in fitting hands
it might become a noble pleasure.
The easier part was chosen by PHILIPPE QUINAULT,
the more arduous by Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had
given his first comedy as early as 1653 ; in tragedies
and tragi - comedies which followed, he heaped up
melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon
characters strongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A
frigid sentimentality replaces passion, and this is expressed
with languorous monotony. Love reigns supreme in his
theatre ; but love, as interpreted by Quinault, is a kind
of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy Astrate (1663) was not
the less popular because its sentiment was in the con-
ventional mode. One comedy by Quinault, La Mere
1 An excellent guide will be found in Victor Fournel's Le Thcdtre au xvii.
Sihle, La Comedie.
208 FRENCH LITERATURE
Coquette, is happy in its plot and in its easy style. But
he did not find his true direction until he declined or
should we rather say, until he rose ? into the librettist
for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were consider-
able ; he could manipulate his light and fragile material
with extraordinary skill. The tests of truth and reality
were not applied to such verse ; if it was decorative,
the listeners were satisfied. The opera flourished, and
literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. But the
libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade are
representative of the time, and in his mythological or
chivalric inventions Benserade sometimes could attain
to the poetry of graceful fantasy.
Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the
moment when Racine appeared. Born at La Ferte-Milon
in 1639, son of a procureur and comptroller of salt, JEAN
RACINE lost both parents while a child. His widowed
grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After six
years' schooling at Beauvais the boy passed into the
tutelage of the Jansenists, and among his instructors
was the devout and learned Nicole. Solitude, religion,
the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides these
were the powers that fostered his genius. Already he
was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued
his studies in Paris, where the little abbe Le Vasseur,
who knew the salons and haunted the theatre, introduced
him to mundane pleasures. Racine's sensitive, mobile
character could easily adapt itself to the world. His
ode on the marriage of the King, La Nymphe de la Seine,
corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river
was highly improper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But
might not the world corrupt the young Port-Royalist's
innocence ? The company of ladies of the Marais
RACINE'S EARLY PLAYS 209
Theatre and that of La Fontaine might not tend to
edification. So thought Racine's aunts ; and, with the
expectation that he would take orders, he was exiled to
Uzes, where his uncle was vicar-general, and w r here the
nephew could study the Summa of theology, but also
the Odyssey, the odes of Pindar, Petrarch, and the pretty
damsels who prayed in the cathedral church.
In 1663 he was again in Paris, was present at royal
levees, and in Boileau's chambers renewed his acquaint-
ance with La Fontaine, and became a companion of
Moliere. His vocation was not that of an ecclesiastic.
Two dramatic works of earlier date are lost ; his first
piece that appeared before the public, La Thebaide, was
presented in 1664 by Moliere's company. It is a tragedy
written in discipleship to Rotrou and to Corneille, and
the pupil was rather an imitator of Corneille's infirmities
than of his excellences. Alexandra followed towards the
close of the ensuing year a feeble play, in which the
mannered gallantry of the time was liberally transferred
to the kings of India and their Macedonian conqueror.
But amorous sighs were the mode, and there was a
young grand monarch who might discover himself in
the person of the magnanimous hero. The success was
great, though Saint-Evremond pronounced his censures,
and Corneille found ridiculous the trophies erected upon
the imagined ruins of his own. Discontented with the
performers at the Palais-Royal, Racine offered his play
to the Hotel de Bourgogne ; Moliere's best actress
seceded to the rival house. Racine's ambition may
excuse, but cannot justify an injurious act; a breach
between the friends was inevitable.
Boileau remained now, as ever, loyal loyal for warn-
ing as well as for encouragement. Nicole, the former
210 FRENCH LITERATURE
*
guide of Racine's studies, in his Visionnaires, had spoken
of dramatic poets as " public poisoners." The reproach
was taken to himself by Racine, and in two letters, written
with some of the spirit of the Provinciates, he turned his
wit against his Jansenist friends. Thanks to Boileau's
wise and firm counsel, the second of these remained
unpublished.
Madame de Sevigne was the devoted admirer of the
great Corneille, but when she witnessed his young rival's
Andromaque she yielded to its pathos six reluctant tears.
On its first appearance in 1667 a triumph almost equal
to that of the Cid was secured. Never before had grace
and passion, art and nature, ideality and truth, been so
united in the theatre of France. Racine did not seek
for novelty in the choice of a subject ; Euripides had
made Andromache familiar to the Greek stage. The
invention of Racine was of a subtler kind than that
which manufactures incidents and constructs a plot.
Like Raphael in the art of painting, he could accept a
well-known theme and renew it by the finest processes
of genius. He did not need an extraordinary action, or
personages of giant proportions ; the simpler the intrigue,
the better could he concentrate the interest on the states
of a soul ; the more truly and deeply human the char-
acters, the more apt were they for betraying the history
of a passion. In its purity of outline, its harmony of
proportions, Andromaque was Greek; in its sentiment,
it gained something from Christian culture ; in its
manners, there was a certain reflection of the Versailles
of Louis XIV. It was at once classical and modern,
and there was no discordance between qualities which
had been rendered, to borrow a word from Shakespeare,
"harmonious charmingly." With Andromaque French
LES PLAIDEURS 21 r
tragedy ceased to be oratorical, and became essentially
poetic.
Adversaries there were, such as success calls forth ;
the irritable poet retorted with epigrams of a kind which
multiply and perpetuate enmities. His true reprisal
was another work, Britannicus, establishing his fame
in another province of tragedy. But before Britannicus
appeared he had turned aside, as if his genius needed
recreation, to produce the comedy, or farce, or buffoonery,
or badinage, or mockery (for it is all these), Les Plaideurs.
It may be that his failure in a lawsuit moved Racine to
have his jest at the gentlemen of the Palais ; he and his
friends of the tavern of the Mouton Blanc Furetiere
among them may have put their wits together to de-
vise material for laughter, and discussed how far The
Wasps of Aristophanes could be acclimatised in Paris.
At first the burlesque was meant for an Italian troupe,
but Scaramouche left the town, and something more
carefully developed would be expected at the Hotel
de Bourgogne. The play was received with hisses, but
Moliere did not fear to laugh at what was comic, whether
he laughed according to the rules or against them. A
month later, at a court performance, Louis XIV. laughed
loudly ; the courtiers quickly discovered Racine's wit,
and the laughter was echoed by all loyal citizens. In
truth, there is laughing matter in the play ; the pro-
fessional enthusiasm of Dandin, the judge, who wears
his robe and cap even in bed, the rage and rapture
of litigation in Chicanneau and the Countess, have in
them something of nature beneath the caricature ; in
the buffoonery there is a certain extravagant grace.
Les Plaideurs, however, was only an interlude be-
tween graver efforts. Britannicus (1669), founded on the
212 FRENCH LITERATURE
Annals of Tacitus, exhibits with masterly power Nero's
adolescence in crime ; the young tiger has grace and
strength, but the instinct of blood needs only to be
awakened within him. Agrippine is a superb incarnation
of womanly ambition, a Roman sister of Athalie. The
play was at first coldly received ; Corneille and his cabal
did not spare their censures. In a preface Racine struck
back, but afterwards repented of his bitter words and
withdrew them. The critics, as he says in a later pre-
face, disappeared ; the piece remained. His conception
of tragedy in contrast with that of Corneille was defined
by him in memorable words what is natural should
be sought rather than what is extraordinary ; the action
should be simple, " charged de peu de matiere " ; it should
advance gradually towards the close, sustained by the
interests, sentiments, and passions of the personages.
The sprightly Henrietta of England, Duchess of
Orleans, seems to have conceived the idea of bringing
the rivalry between the old dramatic poet and his young
successor to a decisive test. She proposed to each,
without the other's knowledge, a subject for a tragedy
the parting, for reasons of State policy, of two royal
lovers, Titus, Emperor of Rome, and Berenice, Queen
of Palestine. Perhaps Henrietta mischievously thought
of the relations of her friend Marie de Mancini with
Louis XIV. The plays appeared almost simultaneously
in November 1670 ; Corneille's was before long with-
drawn ; Racine's Berenice, in which the penetrating voice
of La Champmesle interpreted the sorrows of the heroine,
obtained a triumph. Yet the elegiac subject is hardly
suited to tragedy ; a situation rather than an action is
presented ; it needed all the poet's resources to prevent
the scenes from being stationary. In Berenice there is
BAJAZET: MITHRIDATE: IPHIGENIE 213
a suavity in grief which gives a grace to her passion ; the
play, if not a drama of power, is the most charming of
elegiac tragedies.
Bajazet (1672), a tragedy of the seraglio, although the
role of the hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury
of Eastern passion, a love resembling hate, is represented
in the Sultana Roxane. In the Vizier Acomat, deliberate
in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved
by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomed
to fail in his characters of men. The historical events
were comparatively recent ; but in the perspective of
the theatre, distance may produce the idealising effect
of time. The story was perhaps found by Racine in
Floridon, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of Mithridate
(1673), the noble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queen
and slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chastity, fidelity,
sacrifice ; gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty
courage. The play unites the passions of romance with
a study of large political interests hardly surpassed by
Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against Baja-
zet could only whisper its malignities when Mithridate
appeared.
Iphigenie, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was
given at the fetes of Versailles in the summer of 1674.
The French Iphigenia is enamoured of Achilles, and
death means for her not only departure from the joy
of youth and the light of the sun, but the Idss of love.
Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situa-
tion with cross and counter loves: Eriphile is created to
be the jealous rival of Iphigenie, and to be her substitute
in the sacrifice of death. The ingenious transpositions,
which were necessary to adapt a Greek play to Versailles
in the second half of the seventeenth century, called forth
214 FRENCH LITERATURE
hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a com-
peting Iphigenie, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was
produced in the spring of 1675 ; it was born dead, and
five days later it was buried.
The hostilities culminated two years later. It is com-
monly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and
courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation
of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked
the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He
was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered
and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on
l^hedre. The Duchesse de Bouillon and her brother the
Due de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature,
and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the same
subject was ordered from Pradon ; and to insure her
victory the Duchess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as
Boileau declares, engaged the front seats of two theatres
for six successive evenings the one to be packed with
applauding spectators, the other to exhibit empty benches,
diversified with creatures who could hiss. Nothing could
dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degrade
that of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree
sensitive, and such a desperate plot against his fame
might well make him pause and reflect.
Phedre, like Iphigenie, is a new creation from Euripides.
Its singular beauty has been accurately defined as a
mingling of horror and compassion, of terror and curio-
sity. It is less a drama than one great part, and that part
consists of a diseased state of the soul, a morbid conflict
of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch a study
in the pathology of passion. The greatness of the role
of the heroine constitutes the infirmity of the play as a
whole ; the other characters seem to exist only for the
RACINE'S RETIREMENT 215
sake of deploying the inward struggle of which Phedre
is the victim. Love and jealousy rage within her ;
remorse follows, fo? something of Christian sentiment
is conveyed by Racine into his classical fable. Never
had his power as a psychologist in art been so won-
derfully exhibited ; yet he had elsewhere attained more
completely the ideal of the drama. In the succession
of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last
that it is lesser than the first and greater. Phedre lacks
the balance and proportion of Andromaque ; but never
had Racine exhibited the tempest and ravage of passion
in a woman's soul on so great a scale or with force so
terrible.
The cabal might make him pause ; his own play, pro-
foundly moralised as it was, might cause him to consider.
Events of the day, crimes of passion, adulteries, poison-
ings, nameless horrors, might agitate his spirit. Had he
not fed the full-blown passions of the time ? What if
Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners
should be true ? Probably various causes operated on
the mobile spirit of Racine ; certainly the Christian, of
Jansenist education, who had slumbered within him, now
awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adopt the
Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that
he should regulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded,
and found his contentment in a wife who was ignorant of
his plays, and in children whose inclinations and training
were religious. The penitent was happy in his house-
hold, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicole and
Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he
did not renounce the court. Was not the King the
anointed vicegerent of God, who could not be too much
honoured ? He accepted, with Boileau as fellow-labourer,
15
216 FRENCH LITERATURE
the position of the King's historiographer, and endea-
voured to fulfil its duties.
Twelve years after his withdrawal from the theatre,
Racine, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, com-
posed his Biblical tragedy of Esther (1688-89) f r ner
cherished schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr. The subject was not
unaptly chosen a prudent and devout Esther now helped
to guide the fortunes of France, and she was surrounded
at Saint-Cyr by her chorus of young daughters of Sion.
Esther was rendered by the pupils, with graceful splen-
dours, before the King, and the delight was great. The
confidante of the Persian Queen indeed forgot her words ;
at Racine's hasty complaint the young actress wept, and
the poet, weeping with her, wiped away her tears.
Esther is a melodious play, exquisite in its refined style
and delicate versification ; but the characters are faintly
drawn. Its novelty lay in its lyrical movements and in
the poetical uses of its finely-imagined spectacle. Madame
de Maintenpn or her directors feared that the excitement
and ambitions of another play in costume might derange
the spirits of her girls, and when Athalie was recited at
Versailles, in January 1691, it was little of an event ; the
play passed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed,
would have been no fitting tribute to its solemn beauty.
All Racine's religious feeling, all his domestic tenderness
are united in Athalie with his matured feeling for Greek
art. The great protagonist is the Divine Being ; Provi-
dence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child
(for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre)
was the centre of the action ; the interests were political,
or rather national, in the highest sense ; the events were,
as formerly, the developments of inward character ; but
events and characters were under the presiding care of
ATHALIE 217
God. The tragedy is lyrical, not merely through the
chorus, which expresses common emotions of devout joy
and fear, indignation', praise, and rapture. The chorus is
less developed here, and its chants are less impressive
than in Esther. There is, however, a lyrism, personal
and modern, in the prophetic inspiration of the High
Priest, and Racine anticipated that his boldness in pre-
senting this might be censured by his contemporaries.
The unity of place, which had been disregarded in Esther,
is here preserved ; the scene is the temple at Jerusalem ;
and by its impressive grandeur, and the awful associations
of the place, the spectacle may be said to take part in the
action of the play. Perhaps it would be no exaggera-
tion to assert that grandeur and beauty are nowhere else
so united in French dramatic art as in Athalie ; perhaps
it might truly be described as flawless in majesty and
grace.
A light disfavour of the King saddened, and perhaps
hastened, the close of Racine's life. Port-Royal was
regarded as a centre of rebellious heresy ; and Racine's
piety to his early masters was humble and devout. He
had further offended by drawing up a memorandum on
the sufferings of the French people resulting from the
wars. Madame de Maintenon assured him that the cloud
would pass ; but the favour of death, accepted with
tranquillity, came before the returning favour of the
poet's master. He died in April 1699, soon after he had
entered his sixtieth year.
The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its
truth to nature truth, that is, in its interpretation and
rendering of human passion. Historical accuracy and
local colour concerned him as tar as they were needful
with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude. The flue-
218 FRENCH LITERATURE
tuations of passion he studies to most advantage in his
characters of women. Love, in all its varieties, from the
passion of Roxane or Phedre to the pure devotion of
Berenice, Iphigenie, or Monime ; maternal tenderness
or the tenderness of the foster-mother (Andromaque,
Clytemnestre, Josabeth) ; female ambition (Agrippine,
Athalie) these are the themes of his exposition. His
style has been justly characterised as a continual crea-
tion ; its audacity underlies its suavity ; its miracles are
accomplished with the simplest means. His vocabulary
is singularly small, yet with such a vocabulary he can
attain the rarest effects. From sustained dignity he can
pass suddenly, when the need arises, to the most direct
familiarity. The music of his verse is seldom rich or
sonorous ; it is at once a pure vehicle for the idea and a
delicate caress to the senses.
CHAPTER VII
BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS FENELON
I
"A MAN set under authority" these words, better than
any other, define Bossuet. Above him was God, repre-
sented in things spiritual by the Catholic Church, in
things temporal by the French monarchy ; below him
were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who
would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedi-
ence and tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty
to those placed under him, made up the whole of
Bossuet's life. ' To maintain, to defend, to - extend the
tradition he had received, was the first of duties. All
his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator
were directed to this object. He wrote and spoke to
dominate the intellects of men and to subdue their
wills, not for the sake of personal power, but for the
truth as he had received it from the Church and from
the monarchy.
JACQUES - BENIGNE BOSSUET was born in 1627, at
Dijon, of a middle-class family, distinguished in the
magistracy. In his education, pursued with resolute
ardour, the two traditions of Hellenism and Hebraism
were fused together : Homer and Virgil were much to
him ; but the Bible, above all, nourished his imagination,
219
220 FRENCH LITERATURE
his conscience, and his will. The celebrity of his scholar-
ship and the flatteries of Parisian salons did not divert
him from his course. At twenty-five he was a priest
and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent
at Metz, a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants
and Jews, where Bossuet fortified himself with theo-
logical studies, preached, panegyrised the saints, and
confuted heretics. His fame drew him to Paris, where,
during ten years, his sermons were among the great
events of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of
Condom, but, being appointed preceptor to the Dauphin,
he resigned his bishopric, and devoted himself to form-
ing the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull, who might
one day be the vicegerent of God for his country.
Bishop of Meaux in 1681, he opened the assembly of
French clergy next year with his memorable sermon
on the unity of the Church, and by his authority carried,
in a form decisive for freedom while respectful towards
Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties
of the Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese,
controversy against Protestantism, the controversy
against Quietism, in which Fenelon was his antagonist,
devotional writings, strictures upon the stage, contro-
versy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of
Richard Simon, filled his energetic elder years. He
ceased from a life of glorious labour and resolute
combat in April 1704.
The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries
on Holy Scripture, devotional treatises, and letters, fall
into three chief groups : the eloquence of the pulpit,
controversial writings, and writings designed for the
instruction of the Dauphin.
Political eloquence could not exist where power was
BOSSUET'S SERMONS 221
grasped by the hands of one great ruler. Judicial elo-
quence lacked the breadth and elevation which come
with political freedom ; it contented itself with subtleties
of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The
pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul
had preached with unction and a grave simplicity, and
Bossuet, his disciple, felt his influence. But the offering
which Bossuet laid upon the altar must needs be costly,
an offering of all his powers. While an unalterable good
sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his intellect
demanded plenitude of expression ; his imagination, if it
dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at
times in the way of magnificence, which was natural to
it ; and his lyrical enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic
poetry of the Old Testament, could not but find an
escape in words. He sought no literary fame ; his ser-
mons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast
mass of his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public
importance that on the unity of the Church.
At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations
were published. These, with his address on the profes-
sion of Louise de La Valliere, were all that could be
read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his contemporaries.
His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared, but
he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by
following the words of a manuscript. After his death his
papers had perilous adventures. By the devotion of his
first editor, Deforis, nearly two hundred sermons were
after many years recovered ; later students have presented
them with as close an approximation as is possible to
their original form. Bossuet's first manner that of
the years at Metz is sometimes marred by scholastic
subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too curious imagery,
222 FRENCH LITERATURE
and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating. During
the period when he preached in Paris he was master of
all his powers, which move with freedom and at the
same time with a majestic order ; his grandeur grows
out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he exhorted his
flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without the
intermediary of written preparation.
He is primarily a doctor of the faith : dogma first, de-
termined by authority, and commending itself to human
reason ; morality, not independent, but proceeding from
or connected with dogma, and while truly human yet
resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogma
nor morals are presented in the manner of the schools ;
both are made living powers by the preacher's awe,
adoration, joy, charity, indignation, pity ; in the large
ordonnance of his discourse each passion finds its
natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme ;
his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas ; he is
lucid, rapid, energetic ; then suddenly some aspect of
his subject awakens a lyrical emotion, and the preacher
rises into the prophet.
Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in
which doctrine and morals are enforced by great
examples. His Oraisons Funebres preach, for the uses of
the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else does he
so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the
glory of life as when he stands beside the bier and re-
views the achievements or presents the characters of the
illustrious deceased. Observing as he did all the decorum
of the occasion, his discourses do not degenerate into
mere adulation ; some are historic surveys, magnificent
in their breadth of view and mastery of events. He pre-
sents things as he saw them, and he did not always see
BOSSUET IN CONTROVERSY 223
aright. Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor ; the
revocation of the edict of Nantes is the laudable act of a
king who is a defender of the faith. The intolerance of
Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart as from
the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tender-
ness which breaks forth in many places, and signally in
the discourse occasioned by the death of the Duchess
of Orleans. This, and the eloquent memorials of her
mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of the Prince
de Conde, touch the heights and depths of the passions
proper to the grave.
Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently
represented by his Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique
(published 1671) and the Histoire des Variations des Eglises
Protestantes (1688). The latter, in its fifteen books, is an
attempt to overwhelm the contending Protestant com-
munions by one irresistible attack. Their diversities of
error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faith of
the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans,
the Albigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed
and slain, as opponents are slain in theological warfare
to rise again. History and theology co-operate in
the result. The characters of the Protestant Reformers
are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, and an art
which can bri'ng into relief what the work of art re-
quires. Why the children of the infallible Church
rose up in disobedience against their mother is left un-
explained. The great heresy, Bossuet was persuaded,
had almost reached its term ; the intellectual chaos
would soon be restored to universal order under the
successors of Innocent XI.
In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop
of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular
224 FRENCH LITERATURE
autobiography of Madame Guyon 1 throws much light,
Bossuet remained the victor. It was a contention
between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emo-
tional religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the
writings of the Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-
formed will, watchful and armed for obedience and
command the "man under authority" he rightly
divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self-
abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate
structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour
of a personal emotion ; it seemed to him another form
of the individualism which he condemned. The Church
was a great objective reality ; it had laid down a system
of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of
God, was but a spurious love, leading to destruction.
Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion these
were in turn met by the champion of tradition, and, as
he trusted, were subdued. Another danger he perceived,
not in the unregenerate will or wandering heart, but in
the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in view-
ing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon.
But his scholarship was here defective. He succeeded
in suppressing an edition of the Histoire Critique du Vieux
Testament. There were printers in Holland beyond the
reach of Bossuet's arm ; and Simon continued the work
which others have carried further with the aids of more
exact science.
To doubt the government of His w r orld by the Divine
Ruler, who assigns us our duty and our place, is to
sap the principles of authority and of obedience. The
doctrine of God's providence is at the centre of all
Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal
1 Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897, by T. T. Allen.
BOSSUET ON UNIVERSAL HISTORY 225
passions. On earth, the powers that be ; in France,
the monarch ; in heaven, a greater Monarch (we will
not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding over all the
affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate
his indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how God
is above man, as man is above the brute. Monarchy
as he showed in his Politique Tiree de FEcriture Sainte is
hereditary and absolute ; but absolute power is not arbi-
trary power ; the King is God's subject, and his laws
must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The Discours
sur FHistoire Universelle (1681) was written in the first
instance for the Dauphin ; but its purpose was partly
apologetic, and Bossuet, especially in the second part
of the book, had the errors of free-thinkers Spinoza
and Simon before his mind.
The seventeenth century had not contributed largely
to historical literature, save in the form of memoirs.
Mezeray, in the first half of the century, Fleury, in the
second, cannct be ranked among those writers who
illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesian
philosophy viewed historical studies with haughty in-
difference. B:s:u3t's Discours is a vindication of the
ways of God in history, a theology of human progress.
He would exhibit the nations and generations of
human-kind bound each to each under the Providen-
tial government. The life of humanity, from Adam
to Charlemagne, is mapped into epochs, ages, periods
the periods of nature, of the law, and of grace. In
religion is found the unity of human history. By reli-
gion is meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity
is meant the Catholicism of Rome.
Having expounded the Divine policy in the govern-
ment of the world, Bossuet is free to study those
226 FRENCH LITERATURE
secondary causes which have determined the rise and
fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and with
majestic skill, he presents the movements of races and
peoples. His sympathy with the genius of ancient
Rome proceeds not only from his comprehensive grasp
of facts, but from a kinship between his own and the
Roman type of character. The magnificent design of
Bossuet was magnificently accomplished. He hoped
to extend his studies, and apply his method to other
parts of his vast subject, but the hope was not to be
fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of
history he is not ; he is the theologian who marshals
facts under an accepted dogma. A conception of Pro-
vidence may indeed emerge from the researches of a
devout investigator of the life of humanity as their last
result; but towards that conception the secular life and
the various religions of the world will contribute ; the
ways of the Divine Spirit will appear other than those
of the anthropomorphic Ruler of Bossuet's imagination.
He was not an original thinker ; he would have scorned
such a distinction " 1'heretique est celui qui a une
opinion " ; he had received the truth, and only gave
it extended applications. He is "le sublime orateur des
idees communes."
More than an orator, before all else he was a com-
batant. Falling at his post as the eighteenth century
opened, he is like some majestic, white-haired paladin
of old romances which tell of the strife between French
chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell ; the
age of growing incredulity and novel faiths was in-
augurated ; the infidels passed over the body of the
champion of conservative tradition.
BOURDALOUE 227
II
Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher
less highly than they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue.
The life of Louis BOURDALOUE (1632-1704) is told in
the words of Vinet : " He preached, confessed, consoled,
and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that
they valued him aright a modest man of simple probity.
He spoke, with downcast eyes and full harmonious voice,
as a soul to souls ; his eloquence was not that of the
rhetorician ; his words were grave and plain and living,
and were pressed home with the force of their reality.
He aimed never at display, but always at conviction.
When the crowd at St. Sulpice was moved as he
entered the church and ascended the pulpit, " Silence ! "
cried the Prince de Conde, " there is our enemy ! "
Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions
with the elaborate skill of a tactician ; he sought to
capture the judgment ; he reached the heart through a
wise director's knowledge of its inmost processes. When
his words were touched with emotion, it was the in-
voluntary manifestation of the life within him. His
studies of character sometimes tended to the form of
portraits of moral types, features in which could be
identified with actual persons ; but in these he was
the moralist, not the satirist. During, four-and-thirty
years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take
it, the bread of life plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully
and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness
and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or
dazzle a reader ; he does what is better he nourishes.
Bourdaloue pronounced only two Oraisons. Funebres,
228 FRENCH LITERATURE
and those under the constraint of duty. He thought
the Christian pulpit was meant for less worldly uses
than the eulogy of mortal men. The Oraison Funebre
was more to the taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose
unequal rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of
Turenne; more to the taste of the elegant FLECHIER,
Bishop of Nimes. All the literary graces were cultivated
by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence is unquestion-
able ; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit.
He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed
in the school of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de
Rambouillet ; knowing the surface of society, he knew
as a moralist how to depict its manners and the evil
that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life
like Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's
serious zeal ; to save souls was indeed important ; to
exhibit his talents before the King was also important.
But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper springs
than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the
decadence has begun.
Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN
(1677-1730), clear, logical, energetic, with negligences
of style and sudden flashes of genius. But he belongs
to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps than
to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abund-
ant, yet indicative of the decline, is displayed in the
discourses of the latest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-
BAPTISTE MASSILLON (1663-1742), who belongs more
to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth century.
" He must increase," said Bourdaloue, " but I must
decrease." Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural
grace, sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the
rhetorical art, sincerely devout, yet with waverings
MASSILLON 229
towards the world, had something in his genius that
resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling for
human passions, give his sermons qualities which con-
trast with the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They
are simple in plan ; the preacher's art lay in deploying
and developing a few ideas, and infusing into them an
imaginative sensibility ; he is facile and abundant ; fault-
less in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet the
opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.
" God alone is great, my brethren " are noble in their
simplicity; and the thought of Jesus suddenly appearing
in "the most august assembly of the world" in the
chapel at Versailles startled the hearers of the sermon
on the " small number of the elect." " There is an
orator !" cried the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;"
but no actor would have instituted a comparison between
himself and Bourdaloue. " When one enters the avenue
at Versailles," said Massillon, "one feels an enervating air."
He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice
around him ; he tried to meet it, tracing the scepticism
of the time to its ill-regulated passions; but he met
scepticism by morality detached from dogma. The
Petit Careme, preached before Louis XV. when a child
of eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment :
the young King would grow into the father of his people ;
the days of peace would return. Great and beneficent
kings are not effeminately amiable ; it were better if
Massillon had preached " Be strong " than " Be tender."
Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Massillon, and
loved to hear the musical periods of the Petit Careme
read aloud at meal-time. To be the favourite preacher
of eighteenth-century philosophers is a distinction some-
what compromising to an exponent of the faith..
230 FRENCH LITERATURE
III
Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy con-
cerning Quietism might have found the approval of
the philosophers for some of his political opinions.
His religious writings would have spoken to them in
an unknown tongue.
FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FENELON was
born in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious
family. Of one whose intellect and character were in-
finitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites,
it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions,
and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus.
Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every
contrary quality was expressed, and how all were har-
monised : " II fallait faire effort pour cesser de le re-
garder." During the early years of his clerical career
he acted as superior to female converts from Pro-
testantism, and as missionary among the unconverted
Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointed tutor to the King's
grandson, the Due de Bourgogne, and from a passionate
boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindly
docile. Fenelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of
Cambrai (1695), which removed him from the court, was
in fact a check to his ambition. His religious and his
political views were regarded by Louis XIV. as dangerous
for the Church and the monarchy.
Through his personal interest in Mine. Guyon, and
his sympathy with her mystical doctrine in religion
one which inculcated complete abnegation of the will,
and its replacement by absolute surrender to the Divine
love he came into conflict with Bossuet, and after a
FENELON 231
fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which
Fenelon displayed the utmost skill and energy as tac-
tician and dialectician, he received a temperate con-
demnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of
the Dauphin (1711), which left his former pupil heir
to the throne, revived Fenelon's hopes of political in-
fluence, but in the next year these hopes disappeared
with the decease of the young Due de Bourgogne. At
Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like
a saint and a grand seigneur, Fenelon died six months
before Louis XIV., in 1715.
1 "The most original intellect if we set Pascal aside
of the seventeenth century" so Fenelon is described
by one excellent critic. " Antique and modern," writes
his biographer, M. Paul Janet, "Christian and profane,
mystical and diplomatic, familiar and noble, gentle and
headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating the eighteenth
century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believing
like a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fenelon is one of
the most original figures which the Catholic Church
has produced." His first publication was the treatise
De I' Education des Filles (written 1681, published 1687),
composed at the request of his friends the Due and
Duchesse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition
of the dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort
to form her mind. It honours the reason, opposes
severity, would make instruction, as far as possible, a
delight, and would exhibit goodness in a gracious aspect ;
commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning,
indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness
of disposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts
to a dignified simplicity in dress. The range of studies
recommended is narrow, but for Fenelon's time it was
16
232 FRENCH LITERATURE
liberal ; the book marks an epoch in the history of
female education.
For his pupil the Due de Bourgogne, Fenelon wrote
his graceful prose Fables (which also include under that
title short tales, allegories, and fairy stories), the Dialogues
des Morts, aiming at the application of moral principles
to politics, and his Telemaque, named in the first (incom-
plete) edition Suite du IV e Livre de I'Odyssee (1699). In
this, for long the most popular of tales for the young,
Fenelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ample
expression ; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in
search of his father Ulysses, under the warning guid-
ance and guardianship of Minerva disguised as Mentor.
Imitations and borrowings from classical authors are
freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose, a
romance of education, designed at once to charm the
imagination and to inculcate truths of morals, politics,
and religion. The didactic purpose is evident, yet it
remains a true work of art, full of grace and colour,
occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid ' and
forcible.
Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic
as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy
which should submit to the control of righteousness ;
he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the
court ; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition ;
he desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should
mediate between the crown and the people ; he con-
ceived a system of decentralisation which should give
the whole nation an interest in public affairs ; in his
ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than
Gallican. These ideas are put forth in his Direction pour
la Conscience dun Rot and the Plan de Gouvernement.
FENELON 233
Louis XIV. suspected the political tendency of Tele-
maque, and caused the printing of the first edition to
be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded
as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement ; but
he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved,
there may have been something chimerical, have ren-
dered revolution impossible.
Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself
with a combative energy and a skill in defence and
attack that surprise one who knows him, only through
his Lettres Spirituelles, which tend towards the efface-
ment of the will in a union with God through love.
Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for
theology of a false mysticism ; Fenelon, against con-
founding true mysticism with what is false. In his
Traite de I Existence de Dieu he shows himself a bold
and subtle thinker : the first part, which is of a popular
character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity
by the argument from design in nature and from the
reason in man ; the second part of a later date
follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from
our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his
other distinctions Fenelon added that of a literary critic,
unsurpassed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His
Dialogues sur I'Eloquence seek to replace the elaborate
methods of logical address, crowded with divisions and
subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of quota-
tions, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its
fervency.
The admirable Lettre a F Academic, Fenelon's latest
gift to literature, states the case of the ancients against
the moderns, and of the moderns against the ancients,
with an attempt at impartiality, but it is evident that the
234 FRENCH LITERATURE
writer's love was chiefly given to his favourite classical
authors ; simplicity and natural beauty attracted him
more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He
feared that the language was losing some of its richness
and flexibility ; he condemns the use of rhyme ; he is
hardly just to Racine, but honours himself by his ad-
miration of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings
he recognises the importance of the study of govern-
ments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time
values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a
feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his
rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an
inexpressible personal charm, in which something that
was almost feminine was united with the reserved power
and authority of a man.
CHAPTER VIII
TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THE spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fenelon.
The facts of the moral world, as seen in society, were
studied, analysed, and portrayed by La Bruyere and
Saint-Simon.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE (1645-96), a Parisian of the
bourgeoisie, appointed preceptor in history to the grand-
son of the great Conde, saw with the keen eyes of
a disenchanted observer the spectacle of seventeenth-
century society. In 1688, appended to his translation
of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only
important work, Les Caracteres ou les Mceurs de ce
Siecle; revised and enlarged editions followed, until
the ninth was published in 1696. "I restore to the
public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a
series of sixteen chapters, each consisting of detached
paragraphs, his studies of human life and of the social
environment are presented in the form of maxims, reflec-
tions, observations, portraits. For the maxims a recent
model lay before him in the little volume of La Roche-
foucauld ; portraits, for which the romances of Mdlle.
de Scudery had created a taste, had been exhibited in a
collection formed by Mdlle. de Montpensier the growth
of her salon in collaboration with Segrais {Divers Por-
traits, 1659). Aware of his mastery as a painter of
236 FRENCH LITERATURE
character, La Bruyere added largely to the number of
his portraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to
identify his character-sketches with living persons, en-
hanced the interest excited by the work ; but in many
instances La Bruyere aims at presenting a type rather
than an individual, a type which had been individualised
by his observation of actual persons.
A profound or an original thinker he was not. In-
capable of employing base means to attain worldly suc-
cess, his honourable failure left a certain bitterness in
his spirit ; he regarded the life around him as a looker-
on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note
the infirmities of those who took part in the game which
he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist,
nor did he see realities through a roseate veil; he neither
thinks basely of human nature nor in a heroic fashion :
he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to refor-
mation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way of an
observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all
else a "naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field
for investigation, though the life of the provinces and
that of the fields (save in their more obvious aspect
of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value of
his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from
the fact that he is not pledged to a system, that he
can take up various points of view, and express the
results of many moods of mind. Now he is severe,
and again he is indulgent ; now he appears almost a
cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender ;
now he is grave, and in a moment mirthful ; while
for every purpose and in every mood he has irony at
his command. He divines the working of the passions
with a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every
LA BRUYERE 237
outward betrayal or indication of the hidden processes
of the heart.
The successive chapters deal with the intellect and
authorship, personal merit, women, the heart, society
and conversation, the gifts of fortune, the town, the
court, men in high station, the King and commonwealth,
the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion,
customs, the pulpit ; and under each head are grouped,
without formal system, those notes on life and studies
of society that had gradually accumulated in the author's
mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses
a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not
insincere, and which at least served to commend the
mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The
special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A
volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid,
too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La
Bruyere. " Different things," he says, " are thought
out by different methods, and explained by diverse
expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument,
a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple
comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by
description, or by portraiture." His book contains
all these, and his style corresponds with the variety
of matter and method a style, as Voltaire justly
characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque.
"Among all the different modes in which a single
thought may be expressed," wrote La Bruyere, " only
one is correct." To find this exact expression he
sometimes over -labours his style, and searches the
vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word.
In his desire for animation the periodic structure of
sentence yields to one of interruptions, suspensions, and
238 FRENCH LITERATURE
surprises. He is at once a moralist and a virtuoso in
the literary art.
The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the com-
position of his Memoires belong to the eighteenth cen-
tury; but his mind was moulded during his early years,
and retained its form and lineaments. He may be re-
garded as a belated representative of the great age of
Louis XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer
age by virtue of his sense that political reform was needed,
his designs of political reform were derived from the
past rather than pointed towards the future. Louis DE
ROUVRAY, Due DE SAiNT-SiMON, was born at Versailles
in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could
be traced to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis
XIII., had been named a duke and peer of France in
1635 ; from his father descended to the son a devotion
to the memory of Louis XIII., and a passionate attach-
ment to the dignity of his own order.
Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired
some Latin, and was a diligent reader of French history.
In 1691 he was presented to the King and was enrolled
as a soldier in the musketeers. He purchased by-and-by
what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry regi-
ment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had
transformed a feudal army into one where birth and
rank were subjected to official control ; and in 1702,
when others received promotion and he was passed over,
he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate
and happy marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly
at Versailles until the death of the King, and obtained
the most intimate acquaintance with what he terms the
mechanics of the court. He had many grievances against
Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the
SAINT-SIMON ,239
nobility in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring;
and he justly regarded Madame de Maintenon as his
enemy.
The death of the Due de Bourgogne, to whose party
he belonged, was a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the
Regent remained his friend. He helped, on a diplomatic
mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage of Louis XV.;
yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the wrongs
of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled
on historical grounds to form the great council of
the monarchy, and almost as rightful partners in the
supreme power. His political life closed in 1723 with
the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement at his
chateau of La Ferte-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his
wife and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755),
Saint-Simon died.
When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's
Memoires in a soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived
the idea of recording his own experiences, and the
Meinoires of Saint- Simon were begun. During later
years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated
in his hands, but the definitive form which they took
was not determined until, in his retirement at La Ferte-
Vidame, the Journal of Dangeau came into his hands.
Dangeau's Journal is dry, colourless, passionless, without
insight and without art ; but it is a well-informed and
an exact chronicle, extending over the years from 1684
to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur a faire
vomir " ; its servility towards the King and Madame de
Maintenon enraged him ; but it exhibited facts in an
orderly sequence ; it might serve as a guide and a clue
among his own reminiscences ; on the basis of Dangeau's
literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own
240 FRENCH LITERATURE
brilliant recitals and passionate presentations of charac-
ter. Thus Saint-Simon's Memoires came to be written.
He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic
power of observation ; nothing escaped his vision, and
his passions enabled him to penetrate through what he
saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered informa-
tion from those who knew the mysteries of the palace
and the court ; great persons, court ladies, even valets
and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to
satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is true that the pas-
sions which often lit up the truth sometimes obscured it ;
any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was
welcome to him ; he confesses that he did not pique
himself on his impartiality, and it is certain that he did
not always verify details. Nevertheless he did not con-
sciously falsify facts ; he had a sense of the honour of
a gentleman ; his spirit was serious, and his feeling of
duty and of religion was sincere. Without his im-
petuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not
have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incom-
parable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than
by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the
phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical
outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His
style is the large style of seventeenth -century prose,
but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words
sometimes created by himself to express the intensity
of his imagination.
The Memoires, the final preparation of which was the
work of his elder years, cover the period from 1691 to
1723. His manuscripts were bequeathed to his cousin,
the Bishop of Metz ; a lawsuit arose with Saint-Simon's
creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 241
the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the
light before the close of the eighteenth century, but it
was not until 1829-31 that a true editio princeps, sub-
stantially correct, was published. The violences and
irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no obstacle
to the admiration of readers at a time when the
romantic movement was dominant. He was hailed as
the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner
something more of habitual concentration the com-
parison would not be unjust.
The eighteenth century may be said to have begun
before the year 1701 with the quarrel of the Ancients
and the Moderns. If we can speak of any one idea as
dominant during the age of the philosophers, it is the
idea of human progress. Through an academic dis-
putation that idea emerged to the light. At first a
religious question was complicated with a question re-
lating to art ; afterwards the religious question was
replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657,
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth
of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the ex-
amples of his unreadable epic poems, that Christian
heroism and Christian faith afforded material for ima-
ginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet thn
the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the
third chant of his Art Poetique, replied the mysteries
of the Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be
tricked out to gratify the fancy.
Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES
PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the ALneid,
written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied
himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies.
In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on
242 FRENCH LITERATURE
either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The
King had recovered after a painful operation ; it was a
moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the
Academy, read his poem Le Siecle de Louis le Grand,
in which the revolt against the classical tyranny was
formulated, and contemporary authors were glorified at
the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau mur-
mured, indignant ; Racine offered ironical commenda-
tions ; other Academicians patriotically applauded their
own praises. Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro.
Fontenelle, in his Discours sur FEglogue and a Digres-
sion sur les Anciens et les Modernes, widened the field
of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those
in our own fields ? If not, why may not modern men
equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes ? " Nothing
checks the progress of things, nothing confines the
intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients."
Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but know-
ledge grows from generation to generation. In his dia-
logues entitled the Parallcle des Anciens et des Modernes
(1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science,
in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of
progress ; that we are the true ancients of the earth,
wise with inherited science, more exact in reasoning,
more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a
higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of print-
ing, and by the favour of a -great monarch. La Fontaine
in his charming Epitre to Huet, La Bruyere in his
CaractereSj Boileau in his ill - tempered Reflexions sur
Longin, rallied the supporters of classicism. Gradually
the fires smouldered or were assuaged ; Boileau and
Perrault were reconciled.
Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 243
forms, paid a homage to popular tradition in his de-
lightful Contes de ma Mre fOie (if, indeed, the tales be
his), which have been a joy to generations of children.
With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added to the golden
treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years
after the earlier war, a new campaign began between
the Ancients and the Moderns, the philosophical dis-
cussion of the idea of progress had separated itself
from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings of Lamotte-
Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a well-
equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier -
indignant at Lamotte's Iliade, recast in the eighteenth-
century taste a new question was raised, and one of
significance for the eighteenth century that of the
relative merits of prose and verse.
Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables,
eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form
is prose, and he versified none the less. The age was
indeed an age of prose an age when the salons dis-
cussed the latest discovery in science, the latest doctrine
in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm
passed over from art to speculation, and what may be
called the poetry of the eighteenth century is to be
found less in its odes or dramas or elegies than in the
hopes and visions which gathered about that idea of
human progress emerging from a literary discussion,
idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance
no unfitting inauguration of an era which looked to the
future rather than to the past.
BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757),
a son of Corneille's sister, whose intervention in the
quarrel of Ancients and Moderns turned the discussion
in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both the
244 FRENCH LITERATURE
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hun-
dred years which made up his life, there was indeed
time for a second Fontenelle to develop from the first.
The first Fontenelle, satirised as the Cydias of La
Bruyere, "un compose du pedant et du precieux," was
an aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who
tried to compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances
of style. The origin of hissing is maliciously dated by
Racine from his tragedy Aspar. His operas fluttered
before they fell ; his J-Lglogues had not life enough to
flutter. The Dialogues des Marts (1683) is a young
writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show
his wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical
levelling of great reputations. But there was another
Fontenelle, the untrammelled disciple of Descartes, a
man of universal interests, passionless, but curious for
all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a dissolver
of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the
world of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who
smiled but never condescended to laugh, an intelligence
supple, subtle, and untiring.
In 1686 he published his Entretiens sur la Pluralite des
Mondes, evening conversations between an astronomer
and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned
coquetries with science, for which he asked no more
serious attention than a novel might require, while he
communicated the theories of Descartes and the dis-
coveries of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest
way to truth, and that truth at best is not absolute but
relative to the human understanding. The Histoire dcs
Oracles, in which the cargo of Dutch erudition that
loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened,
glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle
FONTENELLE 245
would show that the pagan oracles were not delivered
by demons, and did not cease at the coming of Jesus
Christ ; innocent opinions, but apt to illustrate the
origins and growth of superstitions, from which we too
may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of
true religion and sound philosophy. Of course God's
chosen people are not like unguided Greeks or Romans ;
and yet human beings are much the same in all times
and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and
Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was
a prophet, since Father Baltus wished it so to be, and
held the opinion to be orthodox.
Appointed perpetual secretary of the Academie des
Sciences in 1697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty
years the panegyrics of those who had been its mem-
bers. These JiLloges des Academicians are masterpieces
in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without
ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expres-
sion. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity " If I
had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before
I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two
prudent maxims, " Everything is possible," and " Every
one is right." " It is not a heart," said Madame de
Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain."
It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment
courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter
his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil
and alert.
A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth -century
philosophy was constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE
(1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, of
which the first edition was published in 1697. Science,
which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was
246 FRENCH LITERATURE
a region hardly entered by Bayle ; the general history
of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and
especially the records in every age of mythologies, reli-
gions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and
it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Pro-
testant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them
and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a
fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and
philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox
opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil,
but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably
and endlessly pursued.
His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired.
In its place came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating
sagacity. His vast accumulations of knowledge were
like those of the students of the Renaissance. The tend-
encies of his intellect anticipate the tendencies of the
eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had not
become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly
where reason and research led, and saw no cause why
religion and morals more than any other subjects should
not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational inquiry.
Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone
to error than apt to find the truth, why should any
opinions be held sacred ? Let us ascertain and expose
the facts. In doing so, we shall learn the lesson of uni-
'versal tolerance ; and if the principle of authority in
matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be con-
sidered an evil ? Morals, which have their foundation in
the human understanding, remain, though all theologies
may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a super-
stition, why should not man guide his life by good sense
and moderation ? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs
PIERRE BAYLE 247
with the battering-ram : he quietly removed a stone here
and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggres-
sive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of
human-kind are full of curious interest ; the disputes
of theologians are both curious and amusing ; the moral
licences of men and women are singular and often
diverting. Why not instruct and entertain our minds
with the facts of the world ?
The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and
sometimes heavy columns of his text ; the entertainment
will be found in the rambling gossip, interspersed with
illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost every eminent
writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's
Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all
that was added to knowledge in his periodical publica-
tion, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (begun in 1684).
He called himself a cloud-compeller: "My gift is to
create doubts ; but they are no more than doubts."
Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius for
criticism as his ; and it was light not only for France,
but for Europe.
BOOK THE FOURTH
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
BOOK THE FOURTH
CHAPTER I
MEMOIRS AND HISTORY POETRY THE
THEATRE THE NOVEL
I
THE literature of the second half of the seventeenth
century was monarchical, Christian, classical. The
eighteenth century was to lose the spirit of classical
art while retaining many of its forms, to overthrow the
domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy.
It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas,
which more and more came to utilise art as their
vehicle. Political speculation, criticism, science, sceptical
philosophy invaded literature. The influence of Eng-
land of English free-thinkers, political writers, men
of science, essayists, novelists, poets replaced the in-
fluence of Italy and Spain, and for long that of the
models of ancient Greece and Rome. The century of
the philosophers was eminently social and mundane ;
the salons revived ; a new preciosity came into fashion ;
but as time went on the salons became rather the mart
252 FRENCH LITERATURE
of ideas philosophical and scientific than of the dainti-
nesses of letters and of art. Journalism developed, and
thought tended to action, applied itself directly to public
life. While the work of destructive criticism proceeded,
the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid ; the free
play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchise-
ment of the passions ; the work of Voltaire was followed
by the work of Rousseau.
Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the old
order of things had suffered a decline. War, famine,
public debt, oppressive taxation had discredited the
monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised the gross
licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict
of Nantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a
substantial part of the moral conscience of France. The
bitter feud of brother-bishops, Bossuet and Fenelon,
hurling defiance against each other for the love of God,
had made religion a theme for mockery. Port-Royal,
once the refuge of serious faith and strict morals, was
destroyed. The bull Unigenitus expelled the spiritual
element from French Christianity, reduced the clergy
to a state of intellectual impotence, and made a lasting
breach between them and the better part of the laity.
Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving
its power. Science had come to fill the place left void
by religion. The period of the Regency (1715-23) is
one of transition from the past to the newer age,
shameless in morals, degraded in art ; the period of
Voltaire followed, when intellect sapped and mined the
old beliefs ; with Rousseau came the explosion of senti-
ment and an effort towards reconstruction. A great
political and social revolution closed the century.
The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in
MEMOIRS AND LETTERS 253
the correspondence of many distinguished persons, both
men and women. Among the former the Mfrnoires of
Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. de Staal (1684-1750)
are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued by
irony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear
exactness. The Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting,
daughter of a poor painter, but educated with care, drew
delicately in her literary art with an etcher's tool, and
her hand was controlled by a spirit which had in it
something of the Stoic. The Souvenirs of Mme. de
Caylus (1673-1729), niece of Mme. de Maintenon
"jamais de creature plus seduisante," says Saint-Simon
give pictures of the court, charming in their naivete,
grace, and mirth. Mme. d'Epinay, designing to tell the
story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction,
became in her Memoires the chronicler of the manners
of her time. The society of the salons and the men of
letters is depicted in the Memoirs of Marmontel. These
are but examples from an abundant literature constantly
augmented to the days of Mme. de Campan and Mme.
Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the
mid-century is presented by the historian Duclos (1704-
1772) in his Considerations sur les Mceurs de ce Siecle, and
with reparation for his previous neglect of the part
played in society by women in his Memoires pour servir
a I'Histoire du X VIII e Siecle.
As much or more may be learnt from the letter-
writers as from the writers of memoirs. If Voltaire
did not take the first place by his correspondence,
so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it might justly
be assigned to his friend Mme. du Deffand (1697-
1780), w r hose lucid intelligence perceived everything,
whose disabused heart seemed detached until old age
254 FRENCH LITERATURE
from all that most interested her understanding. For
clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert,
for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoffrin,
for passion which kindles the page to Mdlle. de Lespi-
nasse, for sensibility and romance ripening to political
ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland.
Among the philosophers Diderot pours the torrent,
clear or turbid, of his genius into his correspondence
with affluent improvisation ; D'Alembert is grave, tem-
perate, lucid ; the Abbe Galiani, the little Machiavel "a
pantomime from head to foot," said Diderot the gay
Neapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris,
that " capital of curiosity," is at once wit, cynic, thinker,
scholar, and buffoon. These, again, are but examples
from an epistolary swarm.
While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in
memoirs and letters, it did not forget the life of past
centuries. The studious Benedictines, who had already
accomplished much, continued their erudite labours.
Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), taking all antiquity for his
province, illuminated the study of chronology, geogra-
phy, sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly
narrated the history of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with
little of the spirit of historical fidelity, displayed certain
gifts of an historical artist. The school of scepticism
was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, who doubted
the authenticity of all records of the past except those
of his own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the
principles of historical certitude occupied the Academy
of Inscriptions during many sittings from 1720 onwards,
and produced a body of important studies. While the
Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate that
there is a natural order in social circumstances, a philo-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 255
sophy of history, which bound the ages together, was
developed in the writings of Montesquieu and Turgot,
if not of Voltaire. The Esprit des Lois, the Essai sur les
Mceurs, and Turgot's discourses, delivered in 1750 at the
Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways
towards a new and profounder conception of the life of
societies or of humanity. By Turgot for the first time
the idea of progress was accepted as the ruling principle
of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the
sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed
Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysi-
cal, and positive, through which the mind of humanity is
alleged to have travelled.
In the second half of the century, history tended to
become doctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory a pamphlet
in the form of treatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in
the interest of socialistic ideas, which correspond to
those of modern collectivism. Mably, inspired at first
by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advanced to a
communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew
towards a close, bringing together the ideas of econo-
mists and historians, traced human progress through the
past, and uttered ardent prophecies of human perfecti-
bility in the future.
II
Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth
century upon a shallow soil. The more serious and the
more ardent mind of the time was occupied with science,
the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical
speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and
of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon
2 $6 FRENCH LITERATURE
which reposed the great art of the preceding century had
given way. The analytic intellect distrusted the imagina-
tion. The conventions of a brilliant society were un-
favourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry.
The tyranny of the " rules " remained when the enthu-
siasm which found guidance and a safeguard in the rules
had departed. The language itself had lost in richness,
variety, harmony, and colour ; it was an admirable in-
strument for the intellect, but was less apt to render
sensations and passions ; when employed for the loftier
purposes of art it tended to the oratorical, with something
of over-emphasis and strain. The contention of La
Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalises and deforms ideas,
expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte's own cold
and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory.
Chaulieu (1639-1720), the " poete de la bonne com-
pagnie," an anacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, sur-
vived the classical century, and sang his songs of facile,
epicurean delights ; his friend La Fare (16441712) sur-
vived, but slept and ate more than a songster should.
Anthony Hamilton (16467-1720) wrote graceful verses,
and in his brilliant Me moires de la Vie du Comte de
Gramont became the historian of the amorous intrigues
of the court of Charles II. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
(1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de Maintenon's
authority had in his sacred Cantates been pious by com-
mand, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming
epigrams and for epigram he had a genuine gift to
the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with
skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the
fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious
enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory.
When Rousseau died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned
DESCRIPTIVE POETRY 257
for "le premier chantre du monde," reborn as the Orpheus
of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc's numerous
productions and by virtue of two stanzas has not that
sanctity ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanctity which
forbids any one to touch them. Why name their fellows
and successors in the eighteenth-century art of writing
poems without poetry ?
Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of Athalie,
in his versified discourses on La Grace and La Religion
was devout and edifying, but w r ith an edification which
promotes slumber. If a poet in sympathy with the
philosophers desired to edify, he described the pheno-
mena of nature as Saint- Lambert (1716-1803) did in
his Saisons "the only work of our century," Voltaire
assured the author, "which will reach posterity." To
describe meant to draw out the inventory of nature's
charms with an eye not on the object but on the page
of the Encyclopaedia, and to avoid the indecency of
naming anything in direct and simple speech. The
Seasons of Saint-Lambert were followed by the Months
(Mois) of Roucher (1745-94) "the most beautiful poetic
shipwreck of the century," said the malicious Rivarol
and by the Jardins of Delille (1738-1813). When
Delille translated the Georgics he was saluted by Voltaire
as the Abbe Virgil. 1 The salons heard him with rapture
recite his verses as from the tripod of inspiration. He
was the favourite of Marie-Antoinette. Aged and blind,
he was a third with Homer and Milton. In death they
crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning
crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet.
And yet Delille's Jardins is no better than a patchwork
of carpet-gardening, in which the flowers are theatrical
1 Or was this Rivarol's ironical jest?
258 FRENCH LITERATURE
paper-flowers. If anything lives from the descriptive
poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached
lines from the writings of Lemierre.
The successor of J.-B. Rousseau in the grand ode was
Ecouchard Lebrun (1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he
wanted to equal Pindar was some forgetfulness of self,
some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, some harmony,
a touch of genius ; a certain dignity of imagination he
exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured
Buffon and was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have
said in his praise that which gives him the highest dis-
tinction ; yet it may be added that if he often falsified
the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It was
not the great lyric but le petit lyrisme which blossomed
and ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of
fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and
as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved.
Grecourt ; Piron ; Bernard, the curled and powdered
Anacreon ; Bernis, Voltaire's " Babet la Bouquetiere,"
King Frederick's poet of " sterile abundance " ; Dorat,
who could flutter at times with an airy grace ; Bertin,
born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in
his verse ; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and
fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the " dear Tibiillus " of
Voltaire what a swarm of butterflies, soiled or shining !
If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from
the rest, one is surely jEAN-BAPTiSTE-Louis CRESSET
(1709-77), whose parrot Vert-Vert, instructed by the
pious Sisters, demoralised by the boatmen of the Loire,
still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy badinage
in verse ; one is the young and unfortunate NICOLAS-
JOSEPH- LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate
and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless
TRAGEDY AFTER RACINE 259
enough and embittered enough to become the satirist
of Academicians and philosophers and the society which
had scorned his muse; and the third is jEAN-PlERRE
CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist,
who, lacking La Fontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies,
and penetrating good sense, yet can tell a story with
pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle propriety.
In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted,
Voltaire stands high among his contemporaries ; they
give us a measure of his range and excellence. But
the two greatest poets of the eighteenth century wrote
in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist
Buffon ; its supreme lyrist was the author of La Nouvelle
Helo'ise.
Ill
In the history of French tragedy only one name of
importance that of Crebillon is to be found in the
interval between Racine and Voltaire. Campistron
feebly, Daachet formally and awkwardly, imitated
Racine ; Duche followed him in sacred tragedy ; La
Grange -Chancel (author of the Philippiques, directed
against the Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical
subjects. If any piece deserves to be distinguished
above the rest, it is the Manlius (1698) of La Fosse, a
work suggestive rather of Corneille than of Racine
which was founded on the Venice Preserved of Otway.
The art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The
eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought
to reanimate it by the provocatives of scenic decoration
and more rapid and more convulsive action.
PROSPER JOLYOT DE CREBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent
260 FRENCH LITERATURE
reader of seventeenth-century romances, transported the
devices of romance, its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its
disguises, its surprises, its discoveries, into the theatre,
and substituted a tragedy of violent situations for the
tragedy of character. His Rhadamiste et Zenobie (1711),
which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism,
notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult
to follow, was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To
be atrocious within the rules was to create a new and
thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears flowed for the
unhappy heroine of La Motte's Ines de Castro (1723),
secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned
only when the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's
effort to renovate classical tragedy was that of a writer
who loved the theatre, first for its own sake, afterwards
as an instrument for influencing public opinion, who
conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of character
and passion seen in action. His art suffered from his
extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in Zaire)
to attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to
conquer his spectators in the readiest ways,' by striking
situations, or, at a later date, by the rhetoric of philo-
sophical doctrine and sentiment.
There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside
Voltaire. Piron and Cresset are remembered, not by
their tragedies, but each by a single comedy. Mar-
montel's Memoirs live ; his tales have a faded glory ; as
for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed
as the curtain fell on his Clcopatre, was a sound critic of
their mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent,
wrote ill ; as the love of spectacle grew, he permitted
his William Tell to shoot the apple, and his widow of
Malabar to die in flames upon the stage.
DUCIS AND SHAKESPEARE 261
Saurin in Spartacus (1760) declaimed and dissertated
in the manner of Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky
moment showed, in his Siege de Calais (1765), that rhe-
torical patriotism had survived the Seven Years' War ;
he was supposed to have founded that national, historic
drama which the President Renault had projected ; but
with the Siege de Calais the national drama rose and
fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) was the latest writer who
compounded classical tragedy according to the approved
recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare
became known to the French public through the transla-
tion of Letourneur. Before that translation began to
appear, JEAN-FRANCOIS DUCIS (1733-1816), the patron
of whose imagination was his " Saint Guillaume " of
Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion
presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his
countrymen ; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello
(1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too
soon for a true Shakespearian rendering ; simple and
heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an
age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of
"virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's translation is
as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is the
daughter of King Claudius ; the Queen dies by her own
hand ; old Montague is a Montague-Ugolino who has
devoured his sons ; Malcolm is believed to be a
mountaineer's child ; Lear is borne on the stage, sleep-
ing on a bed of roses, that he may beheld a sunrise ;
Hedelmone (Desdemona) is no longer Othello's wife ;
lago disappears ; Desdemona's handkerchief is not
among the properties; and Juliet's lark is voiceless.
Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs.
Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance
262 FRENCH LITERATURE
of Regnard, the actor Baron, Moliere's favourite pupil,
had given a lively play UHomme a bonne Fortune (1686).
JEAN-FRANCOIS REGNARD (1655-1709) escaped from his
corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry
company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of
inexhaustible gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest
of comic styles. His Joueur (1696) is a scapegrace,
possessed by the passion of gaming, whose love of
Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will con-
sole himself for lost love by another throw of the dice.
His Le'gataire Universel, greedy, old, and ailing, is sur-
rounded by pitiless rogues, yet the curtain falls on a
general reconciliation. Regnard's morals may be doubt-
ful, but his mirth is unquestionable.
Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had
a truer power of observation, and as quick an instinct
for theatrical effects ; he exhibits in the Chevalier a la
Mode and the Bourgeoises a la Mode, if not with exact
fidelity, at least in telling caricature, the struggle of
classes in the society around him, wealth ambitious for
rank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same
spirit of cynical gaiety inspires the Double Veuvage of
Charles Riviere Dufresny (1655 7-1724), where husband
and wife, each disappointed in false tidings of the other's
death, exhibit transports of feigned joy on meeting, and
assist in the marriage of their respective lovers, each to
accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such
plays as these the Turcaret (1709) of Lesage appears as
the creation of a type, and a type which verifies itself
as drawn with a realism powerful and unfaltering.
In striking contrast with Lesage's bold and bitter satire
are the comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observa-
tion of life and character, skilled in their exploration of
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COMEDY 263
the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in
sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day.
Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the am-
bition to revive the comedy of character, and by its
means to read moral lessons on the stage ; unfortunately
what he lacked was comic power. In his most cele-
brated piece, Le Glorieux, he returns to the theme
treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined
noblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and
something of romance are added to comedy.
Already those tendencies which were to produce the
so-called comedie larmoyante were at work. Piron
(1689-1773), who regarded it with hostility, unde-
signedly assisted in its creation ; Les Fits Ingrats, named
afterwards LEcole des Peres, given in 1728, the story
of a too generous father of ungrateful children, a play
designed for mirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than
to excite laughter. Piron's special gift, however, was
for satire. In La Metromanie he smiles at the folly of
the aspirant poet with all his cherished illusions ; yet
young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of a
generous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller
representatives of good sense can make no claim. It
is satire also which gives whatever comic force it pos-
sesses to the one comedy of Cresset that is not forgotten :
Le Mechant (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal the
heart of his friend's beloved ; soubrette and valet con-
spire to expose the traitor ; but Cleon, who loves mis-
chief in the spirit of sport, though unmasked, is little
disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and speeches, Le Mechant
is defective in its composition as a whole.
The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the
severity of outline, was accompanied by a development of
zS
264 FRENCH LITERATURE
the emotional or sentimental element in drama. As sen-
sibility was quickened, and wealth and ease increased,
little things came to be felt as important. The middle
class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should
emperors and kings, queens and princesses occupy the
stage? Why neglect the joys and griefs of every-day
domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue" were to be
honoured, why not seek them here ? Man, the new
philosophy taught, is essentially good ; human nature
is of itself inclined to virtue ; if it strays through
force of circumstance into vice or folly, should not
its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness ?
Thus comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its
exalted airs ; the genius of tragedy and the genius of
comedy were wedded, and the comddie larmoyante, which
might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama,
was born of this union.
In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSEE (1692-1754)
the new type is already formed. The relations of wife
and husband, of father and child, form the theme of
all his plays. In Mttanide, father and son, unrecognised,
are rivals in love ; the wife and mother, supposed to
be dead, is discovered ; the husband returns to her
arms, and is reconciled to his son. It is the victory
of nature and of innate goodness ; comic intention and
comic power are wholly absent. La Chausee's morals are
those of an optimist ; but those modern domestic tragedies,
the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views
of human nature, may trace their ancestry to Melanide.
For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the
appropriate vehicle, so Diderot maintained, is prose.
Diderot, among his many gifts, did not possess a talent
for dramatic writing. But as a critic his influence was
THE COMEDIE LARMOYANTE 265
considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy
he perceived a place for the serious drama ; to right
and left, on either side of the centre, were spaces for
forms approximating, the one to tragedy, the other to
comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he wholly
condemned ; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity
containing its own principle of life. The function of
the theatre is less to represent character fully formed
than to study the natural history of character, to exhibit
the environments which determine character. Its pur-
pose is to moralise life, and the chief means of morali-
sation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow
of the inherent goodness of human nature.
Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples,
and only proved his own incapacity as a writer for the
stage. His friend SEDAINE (1719-97) was more fortunate.
Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, Le
Philosophe sans le savoir alone survives. It is little more
than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has
life and reality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is
to be married ; but on the same day his son, resenting
an insult to his father, must expose his life in a duel.
Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young master's
place of danger ; Antoine's daughter, Victorine, half-
unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist.
Hopes and fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk
habitation. Sedaine made a true capture of a little pro-
vince of nature. When Mercier (1740-1814) tried to
write in the same vein, his " nature " was that of^ de-
clamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents.
Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and
romantic ; happily he repented him of his lugubrious
sentiment, and restored to France its old gaiety in the
266 FRENCH LITERATURE
Barbier de Seville and the inimitable Mariage de Figaro ;
but amid the mirth of Figaro can be heard the detona-
tion of approaching revolutionary conflict.
IV
The history of the novel in the eighteenth century cor-
responds with the general movement of ideas ; the novel
begins as art, and proceeds to propagandism. ALAIN-
RENE LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, in 1668,
belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth
century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was
the honourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man
of genius, and who maintained his own independence
and that of his wife and children by the steadfast dili-
gence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer, no
preacher of ideas ; he observed life and human nature
with shrewd common-sense, seeing men in general as
creatures in whom good and evil are mixed ; his imagi-
nation combined and vivified all he had observed ; and
he recorded the results of his study of the world in a
style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these
were not attained without the careful practice of literary
art.
From translations for the readers of fiction and for
the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from
these to work which may be called truly original.
Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish literature,
he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was
brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish drama-
tists, and to avoid what was strained and extravagant.
In his Crispin Rival de son Maitre (1707), in which the
LESAGE 267
roguish valet aspires to carry off his master's betrothed
and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of Mendoza's
play ; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the char-
acters are his own. His prose story of the same year,
Le Diable Boiteux, owes but little to the suggestion
derived from Guevara ; it is, in fact, more nearly re-
lated to the Caracteres of La Brnyere ; when Asmodeus
discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofs
of the city, a succession of various human types are
presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyere, contem-
poraries attempted to identify these with actual living
persons.
In his remarkable satiric comedy 7'urcaret, and in his
realistic novel Gil Bias, Lesage enters into full pos-
session of his own genius. Turcaret, ou le Financier, was
completed early in 1708 ; the efforts of the financiers
to hinder its performance served in the end to enhance
its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser of
wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette,
who in her turn is the victim of a more contemptible
swindler. Lesage, presenting a fragment of the man-
ners and morals of his day, keeps us in exceedingly
ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens
the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the
first masterpiece of the eighteenth -century comedie de
mceurs*
Much of Lesage's dramatic work was produced only
for the hour or the moment pieces thrown off, some-
times with brilliance and wit, for the Theatres de la Foire,
where farces, vaudevilles, and comic opera were popular.
They served to pay for the bread of his household. His
great comedy, however, a comedy in a hundred acts, is
the story of Gil Bias. Its composition was part of his
268 FRENCH LITERATURE
employment during many years; the first volumes ap-
peared in 1715, the last volume in 1735. The question
of a Spanish original for the story is settled there was
none ; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history
Lesage borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any
way compromising his originality. To the picaresque
tales (ancj among these may be noted a distant precursor
of Gil Bias in the Francion of Charles Sorel) he added his
own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar adven-
tures we are given a broad picture of social life ; the
comedy of manners and intrigue grows, as the author
proceeds, into a comedy of character, and to this some-
thing of the historical novel is added. The unity of the
book is found in the person of Gil Bias himself : he is far
from being a hero, but he is capable of receiving all im-
pressions ; he is an excellent observer of life, his temper
is bright, he is free from ill-nature ; we meet in him a
pleasant companion, and accompany him with sympathy
through the amusing Odyssey of his varied career.
As a moralist Lesage is the reverse of severe, but he is
far from being base. " All is easy and good-humoured,"
wrote Sir Walter Scott, " gay, light, and lively ; even the
cavern of the robbers is illuminated with a ray of that wit
with which Lesage enlightens his whole narrative. It is
a work which renders the reader pleased with himself
and with mankind, where faults are placed before him in
the light of follies rather than vices, and where misfor-
tunes are so interwoven with the ludicrous that we laugh
in the very act of sympathising with them." In the earlier
portion incidents preponderate over character ; in the
close, some signs of the writer's fatigue appear. Of
Lesage's other tales and translations, Le Bachelier de
Salamanque (1736) takes deservedly the highest rank.
MARIVAUX 269
With PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX
(1688-1763) the novel ceases to be primarily a study of
manners or a romance of adventures; it becomes an
analysis of passions to which manners and adventures
are subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have
proceeded from Addison ; by his novels he prepared the
way for Richardson and for Rousseau. His early tra-
vesties of Homer and of Fenelon's Telemaque seem to
indicate a tendency towards realism, but Marivaux's
realism took the form not so much of observation of
society in its breadth and variety as of psychological
analysis. If he did not know the broad highway of
the heart, he traversed many of its secret paths. His
was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious, uncon-
cerned about general ideas ; and yet, while untiring in
his anatomy of the passions, he was not truly passionate ;
his heart may be said to have been in his head.
In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a
revival of preciosity, which Moliere had never really
killed, and in the salon of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux
may have learned something of his metaphysics of love
and something of his subtleties or affectations of style.
He anticipates the sensibility of the later part of the
century ; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound,
and it is relieved by intellectual vivacity. His con-
ception of love has in it not a little of mere gallantry.
Like later eighteenth-century writers, he at once exalts
"virtue," and indulges his fancy in a licence which does
not tend towards good morals or manners. His Vie de
Marianne (1731-41), which occupied him during many
years, is a picture of social life, and a study, sometimes
infinitely subtle, of the emotions of his heroine ; her
genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maiden pride ;
270 FRENCH LITERATURE
the hypocrite, M. de Climal old angel fallen is a new
variety of the family of Tartufe. Le Paysan Parvenu
(1735-36), which tells of the successes of one whom
women favour, is on a lower level of art and of morals.
Both novels were left unfinished ; and while both attract,
they also repel, and finally weary the reader. 1 Their
influence was considerable in converting the romance
of adventures into the romance of emotional incident
and analysis.
The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important
than his work in prose fiction. His comedy has been
described as the tragedy of Racine transposed, with love
leading to marriage, not to death. Love is his central
theme sometimes in conflict with self-love and women
are his protagonists. He discovers passion in its germ,
and traces it through its shy developments. His plays are
little romances handled in dramatic fashion ; each records
some delicate adventure of the heart. He wrote much for
the Comedie-Italienne, where he did not suffer from the
tyranny of rules and models, and where his graceful
fancy had free play. Of his Urge repertoire, the most
admirable pieces are Le Jeu de I 1 Amour et du Hasard
(1730) and Les Fausses Confidences (1732). In the former
the heroine and her chambermaid exchange costumes ;
the hero and his valet make a like exchange ; yet love
is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other
through their disguises. In Les Fausses Confidences the
young widow Araminte is won to a second love in spite
of her resolve, and becomes the- happy victim of her
own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants.
The " marivaudage " of Marivaux is sometimes a refined
1 The twelfth part of Marianne is by Madam Riccoboni. Only five parts
of the Paysan are by Marivaux.
THE ABBE PREVOST 271
and novel mode of expressing delicate shades and half-
shades of feeling ; sometimes an over-refined or over-
subtle attempt to express ingenuities of sentiment, and
the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic. No
one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of
weighing flies' eggs in gossamer scales.
The Abbe A.-F. PRVOST D'EXILES (1697-1763) is
remembered by a single tale of rare power and beauty,
Manon Lescaut, but his work in literature was voluminous
and varied. Having deserted his Benedictine monastery
in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and wandering life
in England and Holland ; then returning to Paris, he
gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the
booksellers. In his journal, Le Pour et le Contre, he did
much to inform his countrymen respecting English
literature, and among his translations are those of Rich-
ardson's Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Clarissa
Harlowe. Many of his novels are melodramatic narra-
tives of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship
to our later romances of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew
Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity, blood and
tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of
passion, w r e feel that he is engaged in no sport of the
imagination, but transcribing the impulsive speech of his
own tumultuous heart. The Memoires d'un Homme de
Qualite, Cleveland, Le Doyen de Killerine are tragic narra-
tives, in which love is the presiding power.
Manon Lescaut, which appeared in 1731, as an episode
of the first of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible
passion. The heroine is divided in heart between her
mundane tastes for luxury and her love for the Cheva-
lier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and in-
firmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell
272 FRENCH LITERATURE
which has subdued him ; his whole life is absorbed and
lost in his devotion to Manon, and he is with her in
the American wilds at the moment of her piteous death.
The admirable literary style of Manon Lescaut is unfelt
and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact
with the motions of a human heart.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy,
on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale ;
on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment.
An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate
itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's
tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion
which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Mar-
montel, would "render virtue amiable" in his Contes
Moraux (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a
canary's song. His more ambitious Belisaire seems to
a modern reader a masterpiece in the genre ennuyeux.
His Incas is exotic without colour or credibility. Florian,
with little skill, imitated the Incas and Telemaque, or was
feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of
the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross,
corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns
or all together. Three names are eminent that of
Diderot, who flung his good and evil powers, mingling
and fermenting, into his novels as into all else ; that of
Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its re-
straints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior,
and presented the glories of external nature in La Nou-
velle Heloise ; that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who
reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and on the
other to Chateaubriand.
CHAPTER II
MONTESQUIEU VAUVENARGUES VOLTAIRE
I
THE author of De I 'Esprit des Lois was as important in
the history of European speculation as in that of French
literature ; but inevitable changes of circumstances and
ideas have caused his influence to wane. His life was
one in which the great events were thoughts. Charles-
Louis de Secondat, Baron de MONTESQUIEU, was born
in 1689 at La Brede, near Bordeaux. After his years of
education by the Oratorians, which left him with some-
thing of scepticism in his intellect, and something of
stoicism in his character, he pursued legal studies, and in
1716 became President of the Parliament of Bordeaux.
The scientific researches of his day attracted him ;
investigating anatomy, botany, natural philosophy, the
history of the earth, he came to see man as a portion of
nature, or at least as a creature whose life is largely
determined by natural laws. With a temper of happy
serenity, and an admirable balance of faculties, he was
possessed by an eager intellectual curiosity. " I spend
my life," he said, "in examining; everything interests,
everything surprises me."
Nothing, however, interested him so much as the
phenomena of human society ; he had no aptitude for
273
274 FRENCH LITERATURE
metaphysical speculations ; his feeling for literature and
art was defective ; he honoured the antique world, but it
was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals of
Roman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved
him. At the same time he was a man of his own genera-
tion, and while essentially serious, he explored the frivo-
lous side of life, and yielded his imagination to the licence
of the day.
With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a
multitude of readers, the Lettres Persanes (1721) contain a
serious criticism of French society in the years of the
Regency. It matters little that the idea of the book may
have been suggested by the Siamese travellers of Du-
fresny's Amusements ; the treatment is essentially original.
Things Oriental were in fashion Galland had translated
the Arabian Nights (1704-1708) and Montesquieu de-
lighted in books of travel which told of the manners,
customs, religions, governments of distant lands. His
Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical,
the other the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their
friends by letter of all the aspects of European and espe-
cially of French life, and receive tidings from Persia of
affairs of the East, including the troubles and intrigues
of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. The spirit of the
reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. is expressed
in Montesquieu's pages ; the spirit also of religious free-
thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny.
A sense of the dangers impending over society is present,
and of the need of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring,
ironical, licentious as the Persian Letters are, the pre-
vailing tone is that of judicious moderation ; and already
something can be discerned of the large views and wise
liberality of the Esprit des Lois. The book is valuable
MONTESQUIEU 275
to us still as a document in the social history of the
eighteenth century.
In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished ac-
quaintances, among others that of Mdlle. de Clermont,
sister of the Duke de Bourbon. Perhaps it was in
homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, which
pretends to be a translation from the Greek, Le Temple
de Guide (1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by
the artificialities, long since faded, of his own day
" naught remains," writes M. Sorel, " but the faint and
subtle perfume of a sachet long hidden in a rococo
cabinet." Although his publications were anonymous,
Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy
in 1728, and almost immediately after this he quitted
France for a long course of travel throughout Europe,
undertaken with the purpose of studying the manners,
institutions, and governments of foreign lands. At
Venice he gained the friendship of Lord Chesterfield,
and they arrived together in England, where for nearly
two years Montesquieu remained, frequently hearing the
parliamentary debates, and studying the principles of
English politics in the writings of Locke. His thoughts
on government were deeply influenced by his admira-
tion of the British constitution with its union of freedom
and order attained by a balance of the various political
powers of the State. On Montesquieu's return to La
Brede he occupied himself with that great work which
resumes the observations and meditations of twenty
years, the Esprit des Lois. In the history of Rome,
which impressed his imagination with its vast moral,
social, and political significance, he found a signal
example of the causes which lead a nation to greatness
and the causes which contribute to its decline. The
276 FRENCH LITERATURE
study made at this point of view detached itself from the
more comprehensive work which he had undertaken, and
in 1734 appeared his Considerations sur les Causes de la
Grandeur et de la Decadence des Remains.
Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but
in the spirit of a theologian expounding the course
of Divine Providence in human affairs. Montesquieu
studied the operation of natural causes. His know-
ledge, indeed, was incomplete, but it was the knowledge
afforded by the scholarship of his own time. The love
of liberty, the patriotic pride, the military discipline, the
education in public spirit attained by discussion, the
national fortitude under reverses, the support given to
peoples against their rulers, the respect for the religion
of conquered tribes and races, the practice of dealing
at one time with only a single hostile power, are pointed
out as contributing to the supremacy of Rome in the
ancient world. Its decadence is explained as the gradual
re. suit of its vast overgrowth, its civil wars, the loss of
patriotism among the soldiery engaged in remote pro-
vinces, the inroads of luxury, the proscription of citizens,
the succession of 'unworthy rulers, the division of the
Empire, the incursion of the barbarians; and in treating
this portion of his subject Montesquieu may be said to
be wholly original. A short Dialogue de Sylla et dEucrate
may be viewed as a pendant to the Considerations, dis-
cussing a fragment of the subject in dramatic form.
Montesquieu's desire to arrive at general truths some-
times led him to large conclusions resting on too slender
a basis of fact ; but the errors in applying his method
detract only a little from the service which he rendered
to thought in a treatment of history at least tending in
the direction of philosophic truth.
THE ESPRIT DES LOIS 277
The whole of his mind almost the whole of his exist-
ence is embodied in the Esprit des Lois (1748). It lacks
the unity of a ruling idea ; it is deficient in construction,
in continuity, in cohesion ; much that it contains has
grown obsolete or is obsolescent ; yet in the literature of
eighteenth-century thought it takes, perhaps, the highest
place ; and it must always be precious as the self-reveal-
ment of a great intellect swift yet patient, ardent yet
temperate, liberal yet the reverse of revolutionary an
intellect that before all else loved the light. It lacks
unity, because its author's mind was many-sided, and
he would not suppress a portion of himself to secure a
factitious unity. Montesquieu was a student of science,
who believed in the potency of the laws of nature, and
he saw that human society is the product of, or at least
is largely modified by, natural law ; he was also a be-
liever in the power of human reason and human will,
an admirer of Roman virtue, a citizen, a patriot, and a
reformer. He would write the natural history of humajn
laws, exhibit the invariable principles from which they
proceed, and reduce the study of governments to a
science ; but at the same time he would exhibit how
society acts upon itself; he would warn and he would
exhort ; he would help, if possible, to create intelligent
and patriotic citizens. To these intentions we may
add another that of a criticism, touched with satire, of
the contemporary political and social arrangements of
France.
And yet again, Montesquieu was a legist, with some of
the curiosity of an antiquary, not without a pride in his
rank, interested in its origins, and desirous to trace the
history of feudal laws and privileges. The Esprit des
Lois is not a doctrinaire exposition of a theory, but the
278 FRENCH LITERATURE
record of a varied life of thought, in which there are
certain dominant tendencies, but no single absolute idea.
The forms of government, according to Montesquieu,
are three republic (including both the oligarchical
republic and the democratic), monarchy, despotism.
Each of these structural arrangements requires a prin-
ciple, a moral spring, to give it force and action : the
popular republic lives by virtue of patriotism, public
spirit, the love of equality ; the aristocratic republic lives
by the spirit of moderation among the members of the
ruling class ; monarchy lives by the stimulus of honour,
the desire of superiority and distinction ; despotism draws
its vital force from fear ; but each of these principles
may perish through its corruption or excess. The laws
of each country, its criminal and civil codes, its system
of education, its sumptuary regulations, its treatment of
the relation of the sexes, are intimately connected with
the form of government, or rather with the principle
which animates that form.
Laws, under the several forms of government, are next
considered in reference to the power of the State for
purposes of defence and of attack. The nature of poli-
tical liberty is investigated, and the requisite separation
of the legislative, judicial, and administrative powers is
exhibited m the example set forth in the British con-
stitution. But political freedom must include the liberty
of the individual ; the rights of the citizen must be
respected and guaranteed ; and, as part of the regulation
of individual freedom, the levying and collection of taxes
must be studied.
From this subject Montesquieu passes to his theory,
once celebrated, of the influence of climate and the soil
upon the various systems of legislation, and especially
THE ESPRIT DES LOIS 279
the influence of climate upon the slave system, the virtual
servitude of woman, and the growth of political despotism.
Over against the fatalism of climate and natural condi-
tions he sets the duty of applying the reason to modify
the influences of external nature by wise institutions,
National character, and the manners and customs which
are its direct expression, if they cannot be altered by
laws, must be respected, and something even of direc-
tion or regulation may be attained. Laws in relation to
commerce, to money, to population, to religion, are dealt
with in successive books.
The duty of religious toleration is urged from the point
of view of a statesman, while the discussions of theology
are declined. Very noteworthy is the humble remon-
strance to the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal ascribed
to a Jew of eighteen, who is supposed to have perished in
the last auto-da-fe. The facts of the civil order are not to
be judged by the laws of the religious order, any more
than the facts of the religious order are to be judged
by civil laws. Here the great treatise might have closed,
but Montesquieu adds what may be styled an historical
appendix in his study of the origin and development of
feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was little re-
garded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity ; at a time
when mediaeval history was ignored, he was a student of
the forgotten centuries.
Such in outline is the great work which in large
measure modified the course of eighteenth - century
thought. Many of its views have been superseded ;
its collections of facts are not critically dealt with ; its
ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence ;
but Montesquieu may be said to have created a method,
if not a science ; he brought the study of jurisprudence
19
280 FRENCH LITERATURE
and politics, in the widest sense, into literature, laicising
and popularising the whole subject ; he directed history
to the investigation of causes ; he led men to feel the
greatness of the social institution ; and, while retiring
from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, for
his own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind
operating over a vast field in the interests of truth, the
spectacle of a great nature that loved the light, hating
despotism, but fearing revolution, sane, temperate, wisely
benevolent. In years tyrannised over by abstract ideas,
his work remained to plead for the concrete and the his-
torical ; among men devoted to the absolute in theory
and the extreme in practice, it remained to justify the
relative, to demand a consideration of circumstances and
conditions, to teach men how large a field of reform lay
within the bounds of moderation and good sense.
The Esprit des Lois was denounced by Jansenists and
Jesuits; it was placed in the Index, but in less than two
years twenty-two editions had appeared, and it was trans-
lated into many languages. The author justified it bril-
liantly in his Defense of 1750. His later writings are of
small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining
years, he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumi-
nation of his great fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at
the age of sixty-six, in the spirit of a Christian Stoic.
II
The life of society was studied by Montesquieu ; the
inward life of the heart was studied by a young moralist,
whose premature loss was lamented with tender passion
by Voltaire.
VAUVENARGUES 281
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de VAUVENARGUES, though
neither a thinker nor a writer of the highest order,
attaches us by the beauty of his character as seen through
his half-finished work, more than any other author of the
earlier part of the eighteenth century. He was born
(1715) at Aix, in Provence, received a scanty education,
served in the army during more than ten years, retired
with broken health and found no other employment,
lived on modest resources, enjoyed the acquaintance of
the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and high
esteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of
thirty-two. His knowledge of literature hardly extended
beyond that of his French predecessors of the seven-
teenth century. The chief influences that reached him
came from Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon. His learning
was derived from action, from the observation of men,
and from acquaintance with his own heart.
The writings of Vauvenargues are the fragmentary
Introduction a la Connaissance de r Esprit Humain, followed
by Reflexions et Maximes (1746), and a few short pieces
of posthumous publication. He is a moralist, who
studies those elements of character which tend to action,
and turns away from metaphysical speculations. His
early faith in Christianity insensibly declined and dis-
appeared, but his spirit remained religious ; he believed
in God and immortality, and he never became a militant
philosopher. He thought generously of human nature,
but without extravagant optimism. The reason, acting
alone, he distrusted ; he found the source of our
highest convictions and our noblest practice in the
emotions, in the heart, in the obscure depths of char-
acter and of nature. Here, indeed, is Vauvenargues'
originality. In an age of ill living, he conceived a
282 FRENCH LITERATURE
worthy ideal of conduct ; in an age tending towards
an exaggerated homage to reason, he honoured the
passions : " Great thoughts come from the heart " ; " We
owe, perhaps, to the passions the greatest gains of the
intellect " ; " The passions have taught men reason."
Vauvenargues, with none of the violences of Rousseau's
temperament, none of the excess of his sensibility, by
virtue of his recognition of the potency of nature, of
the heart, may be called a precursor of Rousseau. Into
his literary criticism he carries the same tendencies : it
is far from judicial criticism ; its merit is that it is per-
sonal and touched with emotion. His total work seems
but a fragment, yet his life had a certain completeness ;
he knew how to act, to think, to feel, and after great
sufferings, borne with serenity, he knew how to die.
Ill
The movement of Voltaire's mind went with that of
the general mind of France. During the first half of the
century he was primarily a man of letters ; from about
1750 onwards he was the aggressive philosopher, the
social reformer, using letters as the vehicle of militant
ideas.
Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary of good
family, FRANCOIS - MARIE AROUET, who assumed the
name VOLTAIRE (probably an anagram formed from the
letters of Arouet l.j., that is le jeune), was educated by
the Jesuits, and became a precocious versifier of little
pieces in the taste of the time. At an early age he was
introduced to the company of the wits and fine gentle-
men who formed the sceptical and licentious Society of
VOLTAIRE'S YOUTH 283
the Temple. Old Arouet despaired of his son, who was
eager for pleasure, and a reluctant student of the law.
A short service in Holland, in the household of the
French ambassador, produced no better result than a
fruitless love-intrigue.
Again in Paris, where he ill endured the tedium of an
attorney's office, Voltaire haunted the theatres and the
salons, wrote light verse and indecorous tales, planned
his tragedy CEdipe, and, inspired by old M. de Caumar-
tin's enthusiasm for Henri IV., conceived the idea of
his Hcnriade. Suspected of having written defamatory
verses against the Regent, he was banished from the
capital, and when readmitted was for eleven months, on
the suspicion of more atrocious libels, a prisoner in the
Bastille. Here he composed according to his own
declaration, in sleep the second canto of the Henriadc,
and completed his CEdipe, which was presented with
success before the close of 1718. The prisoner of the
Bastille became the favourite of society, and repaid
his aristocratic hosts by the brilliant sallies of his
conversation.
A second tragedy, A rtemire, afterwards recast as Mari-
amne, was ill received in its earlier form. Court pensions,
the death of his father, and lucky financial speculations
brought Voltaire independence. He travelled in 1722 to
Holland, met Jean-Baptiste Rousseau on the way, and
read aloud for his new acquaintance Le Pour et le Contre,
a poem of faith and unfaith faith in Deism, disbelief
in Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely
wit at Rousseau's expense and mutual hostility. Unable
to obtain the approbation for printing his epic, after-
wards named La Henriade, Voltaire arranged for a secret
impression, under the title La Ligue, at Rouen (1723),
284 FRENCH LITERATURE
whence many copies were smuggled into Paris. The
young Queen, Marie Lecszinska, before whom his
Mariamne and the comedy L Indiscrct were presented,
favoured Voltaire. His prospects were bright, when
sudden disaster fell. A quarrel in the theatre with the
Chevalier de Rohan, followed by personal violence at
the hands of the Chevalier's bullies, ended for Voltaire,
not with the justice which he demanded, but with his
own lodgment in the Bastille. When released, with
orders to quit Paris, he thought of his acquaintance
and admirer Bolingbroke, and lost no time in taking
refuge on English soil.
Voltaire's residence in England extended over three
years (1726-29). Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Chester-
field, Pope, Swift, Gay, Thomson, Young, Samuel Clarke
were among his acquaintances. He discovered the
genius of that semi -barbarian Shakespeare, but found
the only reasonable English tragedy in Addison's " Cato."
He admired the epic power of Milton, and scorned
Milton's allegory of Sin and Death. He found a
master of philosophy in Locke. He effected a partial
entrance into the scientific system of Newton. He read
with zeal the writings of those pupils of Bayle, the
English Deists. He honoured English freedom and
the spirit of religious toleration. In 1728 the Henriade
was published by subscription in London, and brought
the author prodigious praise and not a little pelf. He
collected material for his Histoire de Charles XII., and,
observing English life and manners, prepared the Lettres
Philosophiques, which were to make the mind of England
favourably known to his countrymen.
Charles XII., like La Ligne, was printed at Rouen, and
smuggled into Paris. The tragedies Brutus and riphyle,
VOLTAIRE AT CIREY 285
both of which show the influence of the English drama,
were coldly received. Voltaire rose from his fall, and
produced Zaire (1732), a kind of eighteenth-century
French " Othello/' which proved a triumph ; it was
held that Corneille and Racine had been surpassed. In
1733 a little work of mingled verse and prose, the Temple
du Gotit, in which recent and contemporary writers were
criticised, gratified the self-esteem of some, and wounded
the vanity of a larger number of his fellow-authors. The
Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which followed,
were condemned by the Parliament to be burnt by
the public executioner. With other audacities of his
pen, the storm increased. Voltaire took shelter (1734)
in Champagne, at Cirey, the chateau of Madame du
Chatelet.
Voltaire was forty years of age ; Madame, a woman of
intellect and varied culture, was twelve years younger.
During fifteen years, when he was not wandering
abroad, Cirey was the home of Voltaire, and Madame
du Chatelet his sympathetic, if sometimes his exacting
companion. To this period belong the dramas Alzire,
Zulime, L' Enfant Prodigue, Mahomet, Merope, Nanine.
The divine Emilie was devoted to science, and Voltaire
interpreted the Newtonian philosophy to France or dis-
cussed questions of physics. Many admirable pieces of
verse ethical essays in the manner of Pope, lighter poems
of occasion, Le Mondain, which contrasts the golden age of
simplicity with the much more agreeable age of luxury,
and many besides were written. Progress was made with
the shameless burlesque on Joan of Arc, La Pucelle. In
Zadig Voltaire gave the first example of his sparkling tales
in prose. Serious historical labours occupied him after-
wards to be published the Siecle de Louis XIV. and the
286 FRENCH LITERATURE
great Essai sur les Maurs. In 1746, with the support of
Madame de Pompadour, he entered the French Academy.
The death of Madame du Chatelet, in 1749, was a cruel
blow to Voltaire. He endeavoured in Paris to find con-
solation in dramatic efforts, entering into rivalry with the
aged Crebillon.
Among Voltaire's correspondents, when he dwelt at
Cirey, was the Crown Prince of Prussia, a royal pJiilo-
sophe and aspirant French poet. Royal flatteries were
not more grateful to Voltaire than philosophic and lite-
rary flatteries were to Frederick. Personal acquaintance
followed ; but Fredefick would not receive Madame du
Chatelet, and Voltaire would not desert his companion.
Now when Madame was dead, when the Pompadour
ceased from her favours to the poet, when Louis turned
his back in response to a compliment, Frederick was to
secure his philosopher. In July 1750 Voltaire was in-
stalled at Berlin. For a time that city was " the paradise
of philosophes"
The Siecle de Louis XIV. was published next year.
Voltaire's insatiable cupidity, his tricks, his tempers, his
vindictiveness, shown in the Diatribe du Docteur Akakia
(an embittered attack on Maupertuis), alienated the King;
when "the orange" of Voltaire's genius "was sucked"
he would " throw away the rind." With unwilling delays,
and the humiliation of an arrest at Frankfort, Voltaire
escaped from the territory of the royal " Solomon " (1753),
and attracted to Switzerland by its spirit of toleration,
found himself in 1755 tenant of the chateau which he
named Les Delices, near Geneva, his " summer palace,"
and that of Monrion, his "winter palace," in the neigh-
bourhood of Lausanne. His pen was busy : the tragedy
L'Orphelin de la Chine, tales, fugitive verses, the poem on
THE PATRIARCH OF FERNEY 287
the earthquake at Lisbon, with its doubtful assertion of
Providence as a slender counterpoise to the certainty of
innumerable evils in the world, pursued one another in
varied succession. Still keeping in his hands Les Delices,
he purchased in 1758 the chateau and demesne of Ferney
on French soil, and became a kind of prince and patriarch,
a territorial lord, wisely benevolent to the little com-
munity which he made to flourish around him, and at
the same time the intellectual potentate of Europe.
Never had his brain been more alert and indefatigable.
The years from 1760 to 1778 were years of incessant
activity. Tragedy, comedy, opera, epistles, satires, tales
in verse, La PucelleJ- Le Pauvre Diable (admirable in its
malignity), literary criticism, a commentary on Corneille
(published for the benefit of the great dramatist's grand-
niece), brilliant tales in prose, the Essdi sur les Mceurs et
F Esprit des Nations, the Histoire de I' Empire de Russie sous
Pierre le Grand, with other voluminous historical works,
innumerable writings in philosophy, in religious polemics,
including many articles of the Dictionnaire Philosophique,
in politics, in jurisprudence, a vast correspondence which
extended his influence over the whole of Europe these
are but a part of the achievement of a sexagenarian
progressing to become an octogenarian.
His work was before all else a warfare against in-
tolerance and in favour of free thought. The grand
enemy of intellectual liberty Voltaire saw in the super-
stition of the Church ; his word of command was
short and uncompromising Ecrasez I'Infdme. Jean
Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, falsely accused of the
murder of his son, who was alleged to have been converted
to the Roman communion, was tortured and broken on
1 First authorised edition, 1762; surreptitiously printed, 1755.
288 FRENCH LITERATURE
the wheel. Voltaire, with incredible zeal, took up the
victim's cause, and finally established the dead man's
innocence. Sirven, a Protestant, declared guilty of the
murder of his Roman Catholic daughter, was beggared
and banished ; Voltaire succeeded, after eight years, in
effecting the reversal of the sentence. La Barre was
tortured and decapitated for alleged impiety. Voltaire
was not strong enough to overpower the French magis-
tracy supported now by the French monarch. He
turned to Frederick with a request that he would
give shelter to a colony of pkilosophes, who should
through the printing-press make a united assault upon
FInfdme.
In the early days of 1778, Voltaire, urged by friends,
imprudently consented to visit Paris. His journey was
like a regal progress; his reception in the capital was an
overwhelming ovation. In March he was ailing, but he
rose from his bed, was present at a performance of his
Irene, and became the hero and the victim of extravagant
popular enthusiasm. In April he eagerly pleaded at the
French Academy for a new dictionary, and undertook
himself to superintend the letter A. In May he was
dangerously ill; on the 26th he had the joy of learning
that his efforts to vindicate the memory of the unfor-
tunate Count Lally were crowned with success. It was
Voltaire's last triumph ; four days later, unshriven and
unhouseled, he expired. Seldom had such a coil of elec-
trical energy been lodged within a human brain. His
desire for intellectual activity was a consuming passion.
His love of influence, his love of glory were boundless.
Subject to spasms of intensest rage, capable of malig-
nant trickery to gain his ends, jealous, mean, irreverent,
mendacious, he had yet a heart open to charity and pity,
VOLTAIRE'S RULING IDEAS 289
a zeal for human welfare, a loyalty to his ruling ideas,
and a saving good sense founded upon his swift and
clear perception of reality.
Voltaire's mind has been described as "a chaos of
clear ideas." It is easy to point out the inconsistencies
of his opinions, yet certain dominant thoughts can be
distinguished amid the chaos. He believed in a God ;
the arrangements of the universe require a designer ;
the idea of God is a benefit to society if He did not
exist, He must be invented. But to suppose that the
Deity intervenes in the affairs of the world is super-
stition ; He rules through general laws His executive;
He is represented in the heart of man by His viceroy
conscience. The soul is immortal, and God is just ;
therefore let wrong-doers beware. In L' Histoire de Jenni
the youthful hero is perverted by his atheistic associates,
and does not fear to murder his creditor ; he is recon-
verted to theism, and becomes one of the best men in
England. As to the evil which darkens the world, we
cannot understand it ; let us not make it worse by vain
perplexities ; let us hope that a future life will right the
balance of things ; and, meanwhile, let us attend to the
counsels of moderation and good sense ; let the narrow
bounds of our knowledge at least teach us the lesson
of toleration.
Applied to history, such ideas lead Voltaire, in striking
contrast with Bossuet, to ignore the supernatural, to
eliminate the Providential order, and to seek the expla-
nation of events in human opinion, in human sentiments,
in the influence of great men, even in the influence of
petty accident, the caprice of sa Majeste le Hasard. In
the epoch of classical antiquity which Voltaire under-
stood ill man had advanced from barbarism to a con-
290 FRENCH LITERATURE
dition of comparative well-being and good sense ; in the
Christian and mediaeval period there was a recoil and
retrogression ; in modern times has begun a renewed
advance. In fixing attention on the esprit et moeurs
of nations their manners, opinions, institutions, senti-
ments, prejudices Voltaire was original, and rendered
most important service to the study of history. Although
his blindness to the significance of religious phenomena
is a grave defect, his historical scepticism had its uses.
As a writer of historical narrative he is admirably lucid
and rapid ; nor should the ease of his narration conceal
the fact that he worked laboriously and carefully among
original sources. With his Charles XII., his Pierre le
Grand, his Sicde de Louis XIV., we may class the Hcn-
riade as a piece of history ; its imaginative power is not
that of an epic, but it is an interpretation of a fragment
of French history in the light of one generous idea
that of religious toleration.
Filled with destructive passion against the Church,
Voltaire, in affairs of the State, was a conservative. His
ideal for France was an intelligent despotism. But if a
conservative, he was one of a reforming spirit. He
pleaded for freedom in the internal trade of province
with province, for legal and administrative uniformity
throughout the whole country, for a reform of the magis-
tracy, for a milder code of criminal jurisprudence, for
attention to public hygiene. His programme was not
ambitious, but it was reasonable, and his efforts for the
general welfare have been justified by time.
As a literary critic he was again conservative. He
belonged to the classical school, and to its least liberal
section. He regarded literary forms as imposed from
without on the content of poetry, not as growing from
VOLTAIRE'S DRAMATIC WORK 291
within ; passion and imagination he would reduce to
the strict bounds of uninspired good sense ; he placed
Virgil above Homer, and preferred French tragedy to
that of ancient Greece ; from his involuntary admiration
of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm ; if he admired Cor-
neille, it was with many reservations. Yet his taste was
less narrow than that of some of his contemporaries ; he
had a true feeling for the genius of the French language;
he possessed, after the manner of his nation and his
time, le grand goilt ; he honoured Boileau ; he exalted
Racine in the highest degree ; and, to the praise of his
discernment, it may be said that he discovered Athalie.
The spectacular effects of Athalie impressed Voltaire's
imagination. In his own tragedies, while continuing the
seventeenth-century tradition, he desired to exhibit more
striking situations, to develop more rapid action, to
enhance the dramatic spectacle, to add local colour.
His style and speech in the theatre have the conven-
tional monotonous pomp, the conventional monotonous
grace, without poetic charm, imaginative vision, or those
flashes which spring from passionate genius. When, as
was frequently the case, he wrote for the stage to ad-
vocate the cause of an idea, to preach tolerance or pity,
he attained a certain height of eloquence. Whatever
sensibility there was in Voltaire's heart may be dis-
covered in Za'ire. Merope has the distinction of being
a tragedy from which the passion of love is absent ; its
interest rests wholly on maternal affection. Tancrede is
remarkable as an eighteenth -century treatment of the
chivalric life and spirit. The Christian temper of
tolerance and humanity is honoured in Alzire.
Voltaire's incomparable gift of satirical wit did not
make him a writer of high comedy : he could be gro-
292 FRENCH LITERATURE
tesque without lightness or brightness. But when a
sentimental element mingles with the comic, and almost
obscures it, as in Nanine (a dramatised tale derived
from Richardson's Pamela), the verse acquires a grace,
and certain scenes an amiable charm. Nanine, indeed,
though in dramatic form, lies close to those tales in verse
in which Voltaire mingled happily his wisdom and his
wit. "The philosophy of Horace in the language of
La Fontaine, this," writes a critic, "is what we find
from time to time in Voltaire." In his lighter verses
of occasion, epigram, compliment, light mockery, half-
playful, half-serious sentiment, he is often exquisite.
No part of Voltaire's work has suffered so little at the
hands of time as his tales in prose. In his contributions
to the satire of human-kind he learned something from
Rabelais, something from Swift. It is the satire of good
sense impatient against folly, and armed with the darts
of wit. Voltaire does not esteem highly the wisdom of
human creatures : they pretend to knowledge beyond
their powers ; they kill one another for an hypothesis ;
they find ingenious reasons for indulging their base or
petty passions ; their lives are under the rule of sa
Majeste le Hasard. But let us not rage in Timon's
manner against the human race ; if the world is not
the best of all possible worlds, it is not wholly evil. Let
us be content to mock at the absurdity of the universe,
and at the diverting, if irritating, follies of its inhabitants.
Above all, let us find support in work, even though
we do not see to what it tends ; " II faut cultiver
notre jardin" such is Voltaire's word, and the final
word of Candide. With light yet effective irony, Vol-
taire preaches the lesson of good sense. When bitter,
he is still gay ; his sad little philosophy of existence is
VOLTAIRE'S CORRESPONDENCE 293
uttered with an accent of mirth ; his art in satirical
narrative is perfect ; he is not resigned ; he is not
enraged ; he is indignant, but at the same time he
smiles ; there is always the last resource of blindly
cultivating our garden.
In Voltaire's myriad-minded correspondence the whole
man may be found his fire, his sense, his universal
curiosity, his wit, his malignity, his goodness, his Protean
versatility, his ruling ideas ; and one may say that the
whole of eighteenth-century Europe presses into the
pages. He is not only the man of letters, the student of
science, the philosopher ; he is equally interested in
politics, in social reform, in industry, in agriculture, in
political economy, in philology, and, together with these,
in the thousand incidents of private life.
CHAPTER III
DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA-
PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS, CRITICS BUFFON
"WHEN I recall Diderot," wrote his friend Meister, "the
immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of
his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the im-
petuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all
the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his
character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to con-
ceive her rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort
. . . without any dominating principle, without a master,
and without a God." No image more suitable could be
found ; and his works resemble the man, in their rich-
ness, their fertility, their variety, and their disorder. A
great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left no
body of coherent thought, no piece of finished art ; but
he was the greatest of literary improvisators.
DENIS DIDEROT, son of a worthy cutler of Langres,
was born in 1713. Educated by the Jesuits, he turned
away from the regular professions, and supported him-
self and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for the Paris
booksellers translations, philosophical essays directed
against revealed religion, stories written to suit the appe-
tite for garbage. From deism he advanced to atheism.
294
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 295
Arguing in favour of the relativity of human knowledge
in his Lettre stir les Avcugles (1749), he puts his plea for
atheism into the lips of an English man of science, but
the device did not save him from an imprisonment of
three months.
In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of
the English "Cyclopaedia" of Chambers, appliedto Diderot
for assistance. He readily undertook the task, but could
not be satisfied with a mere translation. In a Prospectus
(1750) he indicated the design of the "Encyclopaedia"
as he conceived it : the order and connection of the
various branches of knowledge should be set forth, and
in dictionary form the several sciences, liberal arts, and
mechanical arts should be dealt with by experts. The
homage which he rendered to science expressed the mind
of his time ; in the honour paid to mechanical toil and
industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called
an organiser of modern democracy. At his request
JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT (1717-83) undertook the
direction of the mathematical articles, and wrote the
Discours Preliminaire, which classified the departments
of human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's concep-
tions, and gave a survey of intellectual progress. It was
welcomed with warm applause. The aid of Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and
a host of less illustrious writers was secured ; but the
vast enterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical
party; the Jesuits were active in rivalry and opposition ;
Rousseau deserted and became an enemy ; D'Alembert,
timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew. In 1759 the
privilege of publication was revoked, but the Govern-
ment did not enforce its own decree. Through all
difficulties and dangers Diderot held his ground. One
296 FRENCH LITERATURE
day he wrote a fragment of the history of philosophy ;
the next he was in a workshop examining the con-
struction of some machine : nothing was too great
or too small for his audacity or his patience. To
achieve the work, tact was needed as well as courage ;
at times he condescended to disguise his real opinions,
striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765
his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished,
though the last plates of the Encyclopedic were not issued
until 1772. When all was finished, the scientific move-
ment of the century was methodised and popularised;
a barrier against the invasion of the past was erected ;
the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths and all its
errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained its
Summa.
But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much,
and in many directions, single-handed, flinging out his
thoughts with ardent haste, and often leaving what he
had written to the mercies of chance ; a prodigal sower
of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable
pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long
after his death. His novel La Religieuse influenced
to some extent by Richardson, whom he supersti-
tiously admired is a repulsive exposure of conventual
life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder.
Jacques le Fataliste, in which the manner is coarsely
imitated from Sterne, a book ill- composed and often
malodorous, contains, among its heterogeneous tales, one
celebrated narrative, the Histoire de Mme. de la Pom-
meraye, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless
lover. If anything of Diderot's can ba named a master-
piece, it is certainly Le Neveu de Rameau, a satire and
a character-study of the parasite, thrown into the form
DIDEROT AS A CRITIC 297
of dialogue, which he handled with brilliant success ;
it remained unknown until the appearance of a German
version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript
copy.
In his Salons, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criti-
cism of the pictorial art in France. His eye for colour
and for contour was admirable ; but it is less the
technique of paintings that he studies than the sub-
jects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such
criticism may be condemned as literary rather than
artistic ; it was, however, new and instructive, and did
much to quicken the public taste. Diderot pleaded
for a return to nature in the theatre ; for a bourgeois
drama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched
with pathos, studied from real life, and inspired by a
moral purpose ; for the presentation on the stage of
"conditions" rather than individual types that is, of
character as modified by social environments and the
habits which they produce. He maintained that the
actor should rather possess than be possessed by his
theme, should be the master rather than the slave of
his sensibility.
The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in
his own plays ; the Pere de Famille and the Fils Naturel,
are poor affectations of a style supposed to be natural,
and are patently doctrinaire in their design, laboured
developments of a moral thesis. One piece in which
he paints himself, Est-il bon ? Est-il mechant ? and this
alone, falls little short of being admirable, and yet it
fails of true success.
A coherent system of thought cannot be found in
Diderot's writings, but they are pregnant with ideas.
He is deist, pantheist, atheist ; he is a materialist one,
298 FRENCH LITERATURE
however, who conceives matter not as inert, but quick
with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality;
and presently his morals become the doctrines of an
anarchical licence. All the ideas of his age struggle
within him, and are never reduced to unity or har-
mony ; light is never separate in his nature from heat,
and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts
which are sometimes the anticipations of scientific
genius ; he almost leaps forward to some of the con-
clusions of Darwin. His great powers and his inces-
sant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity.
Diderot was never rich. The Empress Catherine of
Russia magnificently purchased his library, and en-
trusted him with the books, as her librarian, providing
a salary which to him was wealth. He travelled to St.
Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous
and delicate gift. But her imperial generosity was not
greater than his own ; he was always ready to lavish
the treasures of his knowledge and thought in the
service of others ; no small fragment of his work was
a free gift to his friends, and passed under their name ;
Holbach and Raynal were among his debtors.
His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man
and of the group of philosophers to which he belonged ;
the letters addressed to Mdlle. Volland, to whom he was
devotedly attached during many years, are frank be-
trayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened
his last days, but the days of sorrow were few. In
July 1784, Diderot died. His reputation and influence
were from time to time enhanced by posthumous pub-
lications. Other writers of his century impressed their
own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon
society ; no other writer mingled his genius so com-
THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT 299
pletely with external things, or responded so fully and
variously to the stimulus of the spirit of his age.
II
The French philosophical movement the " Illumina-
tion " of the eighteenth century, proceeds in part from
the empiricism of Locke, in part from the remarkable
development of physical and natural science ; it incor-
porated the conclusions of English deism, and advanced
from deism to atheism. An intellectual centre for the
movement was provided by the Encyclopedic; a social
centre was found in Parisian salons. It was sustained
and invigorated by the passion for freedom and for
justice asserting itself against the despotism and abuses
of government and against the oppressions and abuses
of the Church. The opposing forces were feeble, incom-
petent, disorganised. The methods of government were,
in truth, indefensible ; religion had surrendered dogma,
and lost the austerity of morals ; within the citadel of
the Church were many professed and many secret allies
of the philosophers.
While in England an apologetic literature arose, pro-
found in thought and adequate in learning, in France no
sustained resistance was offered to the inroad of free
thought. Episcopal fulminations rolled like stage thun-
der; the Bastille and Vincennes were holiday retreats
for fatigued combatants ; imprisonment was tempered
with cajoleries ; the censors of the press connived with
their victims. The Chancellor D'AGUESSEAU (1668-1751),
an estimable magistrate, a dignified orator, maintained
the old seriousness of life and morals, and received the
300 FRENCH LITERATURE
reward of exile. The good ROLLIN (1661-1741) dictated
lessons to youth drawn from antiquity and Christianity,
narrated ancient history, and discoursed admirably on a
plan of studies with a view to form the heart and mind ;
an amiable Christian Nestor, he was not a man-at-arms.
The Abbe Guenee replied to Voltaire with judgment,
\vit ; and erudition, in his Lettres de quelques Juifs (1769),
but it was a single victory in a campaign of many battles.
The satire of Gilbert, Le Dix-huitieme Siecle, is rudely
vigorous ; but Gilbert was only an angry youth, disap-
pointed of his fame. Freron, the "Wasp" (frclori) of
Voltaire's UEcossaise, might sting in his Annc'e Littc'raire,
but there were sharper stings in satire and epigram
which he must endure. Palissot might amuse the thea-
trical spectators of 1760 with his ridiculous philosophers;
the Philosopher was taken smilingly by Voltaire, and was
sufficiently answered by Morellet's pamphlet end the
bouts-rimes of Marmontel or Piron. The Voltairomanie
of Desfontaines is only the outbreak of resentment of
the accomplished and disreputable Abbe against a bene-
factor whose offence was to have saved him from the
galleys.
The sensationalist philosophy is inaugurated by JULIEN
OFFRAY DE LA METTRIE (1709-51) rather than by Con-
dillac. A physician, making observations on his own
case during an attack of fever, he arrived at the con-
clusion that thought is but a result of the mechanism
of the body. Man is a machine more ingeniously
organised than the brute. All ideas have their origin
in sensation. As for morals, they are not absolute, but
relative to society and the State. As for God, perhaps
He exists, but why should we worship this existence
more than any other ? The law of our being is to
THE SENSATIONALIST SCHOOL 301
seek happiness ; the law of society is that we should
not interfere with the happiness of others. The pleasure
of the senses is not the only pleasure, but it has the
distinction of being universal to our species.
La Mettrie, while opposing the spiritualism of Des-
cartes, is more closely connected with that great thinker,
through his doctrine that brutes are but machines, than
with Locke. It is from Locke though from Locke muti-
latedthat ETIENNE BONNOT DE CONDILLAC (1715-80)
proceeds. All ideas are sensations, but sensations trans-
formed. Imagine a marble statue endowed successively
with the several human senses ; it will be seen how
perceptions, consciousness, memory, ideas, comparison,
judgment, association, abstraction, pleasure, desire are
developed. The ego is but the bundle of sensations
experienced or transformed and held in recollection.
Yet the unity of the ego seems to argue that it is not
composed of material particles. Condillac's doctrine is
sensationalist, but not materialistic. Condillac's disciple,
the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), proceeded to investi-
gate the nature of sensibility itself, and to develop the
physiological method of psychology. The unnecessary
soul which Condillac preserved was suppressed by
Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) ; his ideology was no
more than a province of zoology.
The morals of the sensationalist school were expressed
by CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVETIUS (1715-71), a worthy
and benevolent farmer-general. The motive of all our
actions is self-love, that tendency which leads us to seek
for pleasure and avoid pain ; but, by education and
legislation, self-love can be guided and trained so that
it shall harmonise with the public good. It remained
for a German acclimatised to Paris to compile the full
302 FRENCH LITERATURE
manifesto of atheistic materialism. At Holbach's hos-
pitable table the philosophers met, and the air was
charged with ideas. To condense these into a system
was Holbach's task. Diderot, Lagrange, Naigeon may
have lent their assistance, but PAUL-HEXRY THIRY,
BARON D'HOLBACH (1723-89) must be regarded as sub-
stantially the author of the Systeme de la Nature (1770),
which the title-page prudently attributed to the deceased
Mirabaud. What do we desire but that men should be
happy, just, benevolent ? That they may become so, it
is necessary to deliver them from those errors on which
political and spiritual despotism is founded, from the
chains of tyrants and the chimeras of priests, and to
lead them back from illusions to nature, of which man
is a part. We find everywhere matter and motion, a
chain of material causes and effects, nor can we find
aught beside these. An ever - circulating system of
motions connects inorganic and organic nature, fire
and air and plant and animal ; free-will is as much
excluded as God and His miraculous providence. The
soul is nothing but the brain receiving and transmitting
motions j morals form a department of physiology.
Religions and governments, as they exist, are based on
error, and drive men into crime. But though Holbach
" accommodated atheism," as Grimm puts it, " to cham-
bermaids and hairdressers," he would not hurry forward
a revolution. All will come in good time ; in some
happier day Nature and her daughters Virtue, Reason,
and Truth will alone receive the adoration of mankind. 1
Among the friends of Holbach and Helvetius was
1 The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (i7 2O ~93) endeavoured to recon-
cile his sensationalism with a religious faith and a private interpretation of
Christianity.
VOLNEY: CONDORCET 303
C.-F. de Chassebceuf, Count de VOLNEY (1757-1820),
who modified and developed the ethics of Helvetius.
An Orientalist by his studies, he travelled in Egypt and
Syria, desiring to investigate the origins of ancient reli-
gions, and reported what he had seen in colourless but
exact description. In Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les
Revolutions des Empires, he recalls the past like " an Arab
Ossian," monotonous and grandiose, and expounds the
history of humanity with cold and superficial analysis
clothed in a pomp of words. His faith in human
progress, founded on nature, reason, and justice, sus-
tained Volney during the rise and fall of the Girondin
party.
A higher and nobler spirit, who perished in the Revolu-
tion, but ceased not till his last moment to hope and
labour for the good of men, was J.-A.-N. de Caritat,
Marquis de CONDORCET (^743-94). Illustrious in mathe-
matical science, he was interested by Turgot in political
economy, and took a part in the polemics of theology.
While lying concealed from the emissaries of Robespierre
he wrote his Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres
de F Esprit. Humain. It is a philosophy of the past, and
almost a hymn in honour of human perfectibility. The
man-statue of Condillac, receiving, retaining, distinguish-
ing, and combining sensations, has gradually developed,
through nine successive epochs, from that of the hunter
and fisher to the citizen of 1789, who comprehends the
physical universe with Newton, human nature with Locke
and Condillac, and society with Turgot and Rousseau. In
the vision of the future, with its progress in knowledge
and in morals, its individual and social improvement, its
lessening inequalities between nations and classes, the
philosopher finds his consolation for all the calamities of
304 FRENCH LITERATURE
the present age. Condorcet died in prison, poisoned, it
is believed, by his own hand.
The economists, or, as Dupont de Nemours named
them, the physiocrats, formed a not unimportant wing
of the philosophic phalanx, now in harmony with the
Encyclopaedic party, now in hostility. The sense of the
misery of France was present to many minds in the
opening of the century, and with the death of Louis
XIV. came illusive hopes of amelioration. The Abb6
de Saint- Pierre (1658-1743), filled with ardent zeal for
human happiness, condemned the government of the
departed Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual
peace ; among his dreams arose projects for the im-
provement of society which were justified by time. Bois-
guillebert, and Vauban, marshal of France and military
engineer, were no visionary spirits ; they pleaded for a
serious consideration of the general welfare, and espe-
cially the welfare of the agricultural class, the wealth-
producers of the community. To violate economic laws,
Boisguillebert declared, is to violate nature ; let govern-
ments restrain their meddling, and permit natural forces
to operate with freedom.
Such was the doctrine of the physiocratic school, of
which FRANCOIS QUESNAY (1694-1774) was the chief.
Let human institutions conform to nature ; enlarge the
bounds of freedom ; give play to the spirit of individual-
ism ; diminish the interference of government " laissez
faire, laissez passer." l Agriculture is productive, let its
burdens be alleviated ; manufactures are useful but
" sterile " : honour, therefore, above all, to the tiller of the
1 This phrase had been used by Boisguillebert and by the Marquis d'Ar-
genson before Gournay made it a power. On D'Argenson (1694-1757), whose
Considerations surlt Gouvernement de la France were not published until 1764,
see the study by Mr. Arthur Ogle (1893).
THE PHYSIOCRATS 305
fields, who hugs nature close, and who enriches human-
kind ! The elder Mirabeau "ami des hommes"
who had anticipated Quesnay in some of his views, and
himself had learnt from Cantillon, met Quesnay in 1757,
and thenceforth subordinated his own fiery spirit, as far
as that was possible, to the spirit of the master. From the
physiocrats Gournay and Quesnay the noble-minded
and illustrious TURGOT (1727-81) derived many of those
ideas of reform which he endeavoured to put into
action when intendant of Limoges, and later, when
Minister of Finance. By his Reflexions sur la Formation
et la Distribution des Richesses, Turgot prepared the way
for Adam Smith.
In 1770 the Abbe Galiani, as alert of brain as he was
diminutive of stature, attacked the physiocratic doctrines
in \ws>*Dialogues sur le Commerce des Ble's, which Plato and
Moliere so Voltaire pronounced had combined to
write. The refutation of the Dialogues by Morellet was
the result of no such brilliant collaboration, and Galiani,
proposed that his own unstatuesque person should be
honoured by a statue above an inscription, declaring
that he had wiped out the economists, who were sending
the nation to sleep. The fame of his Dialogues was
perhaps in large measure due to the party-spirit of the
Encyclopaedists, animated by a vivacious attack upon
the physiocrats. The book was applauded, but reached
no second edition.
An important body of articles on literature was
contributed to the Encyclope'die by JEAN - FRANCOIS
MARMOXTEL. As early as 1719 a remarkable study
in aesthetics had appeared the Reflexions Critiques sur
la Poesie et la Peinture, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is
conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid
306 FRENCH LITERATURE
sensations and emotions apart from the painful con-
sequences which commonly attend these in actual
life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats of
"physical causes in the progress of art and literature,"
anticipates the views of Montesquieu on the influence of
climate, and studies the action of environment on the
products of the imagination. In 1746 Charles Batteux,
in his treatise Les Beaux-Arts re"duits a un meme Principe,
defined the end of art as the imitation of nature not
indeed of reality, but of nature in its actual or possible
beauty ; of nature not as it is, but as it may be. The
articles of Marmontel, revised and collected in the six
volumes of his Elements de Literature (1787), were full
of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in
observation, as they often were, if not penetrating or
profound. In his earlier Pottique Fran^aise "a petard,"
said Mairan, " laid at the doors of the Academy to blow
them up if they should not open " he had shown him-
self strangely disrespectful towards the fame of Racine,
Boileau, and the poet Rousseau.
The friend of Marmontel, Antoine-Leonard Thomas
(1732-85), honourably distinguished by the dignity of
his character and conduct, a composer of Eloges on
great men, somewhat marred by strain and oratorical
emphasis, put his best work into an Essai sur les
Eloges. At a time when Bossuet was esteemed below
his great deserts, Thomas almost alone recognised his
supremacy in eloquence. As the century advanced, and
philosophy developed its attack on religion and govern-
ments, the classical tradition in literature not only
remained unshaken, but seemed to gain in authority.
The first lieutenant of Voltaire, his literary "son,"
LAHARPE (1739-1803) represents the critical temper of
LAHARPE: GRIMM 307
the time. In 1786 he began his courses of lectures at
the Lycee, before a brilliant audience composed of
both sexes. For the first time in France, instruction
in literature, not trivial and not erudite, but suited to
persons of general culture, was made an intellectual
pleasure. For the first time the history of 'literature
was treated, in its sequence from Homer to modern
times, as a totality. Laharpe's judgments of his con-
temporaries were often misled by his bitterness of
spirit ; his mind was not capacious, his sympathies were
not liberal ; his knowledge, especially of Greek letters,
was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV.,
and he felt the beauty of its art. No one has written
with finer intelligence of Racine than he in his Lycc'e, ou
Cours de Litter ature. As the Revolution approached he
sympathised with its hopes and fears ; the professor
donned the bonnet rouge. The storm which burst
silenced his voice for a time ; in 1793 he suffered im-
prisonment ; and when he occupied his chair again,
it was a converted Laharpe who declaimed against
philosophers, republicans, and atheists, the tyrants of
reason, morals, art and letters.
The finest and surest judgment in contemporary litera-
ture was that of a gallicised German MELCHIOR GRIMM
(1723-1807). As Laharpe was bound in filial loyalty-to
Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternal attachment to the
least French of eighteenth-century French authors
Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was
a measure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his
intellect rose clear, light, and sure, with no mists of sen-
timent about it, and no clouds of fancy. During thirty-
seven years, as a kind of private journalist, he furnished
princely and royal persons of Germany, Russia, Sweden,
308 FRENCH LITERATURE
Poland, with " Correspondence/' which reflected as from
a mirror all the lights of Paris to the remote North and
East. His own philosophy, his political views, were
cheerless and arid; but he could judge the work of
others generously as well as severely. No one of his
generation so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare ; no
one more happily interpreted Montaigne. By swift
aperqu, by criticism, by anecdote, by caustic raillery, or
serious record, he makes the intellectual world of his
day pass before us and expound its meanings. The
Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early,
drove him from Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished
that he were in his grave.
Ill
Buffon, whose power f wing was great, and who did
not love the heat and dust of combat, soared smoothly
above the philosophic strife. Born in 1707, at Mont-
bard, in Burgundy, GEORGE - Louis LECLERC, created
Comte de BUFFON by Louis XV., fortunate in the
possession of riches, health, and serenity of heart and
brain, lived in his domestic circle, apart from the coteries
of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinite patience his
proper ends. The legend describes him as a pompous
Olympian even in his home ; in truth, if he was
majestic like a marshal of France, as Hume describes
him he was also natural, genial, and at times gay. His
appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the Royal Garden,
now the Jardin des Plantes, turned his studies from
mathematical science to natural history.
The first volumes of his vast Histoire Naturelle ap-
BUFFON 309
peared in 1749 ; aided by Daubenton and others, he
was occupied with the succeeding volumes during forty
years, until death terminated his labours in 1788. The
defects of his work are obvious its want of method,
its disdain of classification, its abuse of hypotheses, its
humanising of the animal world, its pomp of style. But
the progress of science, which lowered the reputation
of Buffon, has again re-established his fame. Not a few
of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have been the
divinations of genius ; and if he wrote often in the
ornate, classical manner, he could also write with a
grave simplicity.
In his Discours de Reception, pronounced before the
French Academy in 1753, he formulated his doctrine of
literary style, insisting that it is, before all else, the mani-
festation of order in the evolution of ideas ; ideas alone
form the basis and inward substance of style. Rejecting
merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of natural
phenomena, viewing classifications as no more than a
convenience of the human intellect, refusing to regard
final causes as a subject of science, he envisaged nature
with a tranquil and comprehensive gaze, and with some-
thing of a poet's imagination. He perceived that the
globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long
series of changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to
sound geological study ; he expounded the geography
of species, and almost divined the theory of their trans-
formation or variability ; he recognised in some degree
the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest;
he regarded man as a part of nature, but as its noblest
part, capable of an intellectual and moral progress which
is not the mere result of physical laws.
Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as . a thinker,
3io FRENCH LITERATURE
he enlarged the bounds of literature by annexing the
province of natural history as Montesquieu had annexed
that of political science. His vision of the universe was
unclouded by passion, and part of its grandeur is derived
from this serenity. He studied and speculated with
absolute freedom, prepared to advance from his own
ideas to others more in accordance with observed pheno-
mena. " He desired to be," writes a critic, " and almost
became, a pure intelligence in presence of eternal things."
How could he concern himself with the strifes and passions
of a day to whom the centuries were moments in the
vast process of evolving change ? In Andr6 Chenier he
found a disciple who would fain have been the Lucretius
of the new system of nature.
CHAPTER IV
ROUSSEAU BE AUMARCHAIS BE RNARDIN DE
SAINT-PIERREANDRE CHENIER
I
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU the man is inseparable from
Rousseau the writer ; his works proceed directly from
his character and his life. Born at Geneva in 1712, he
died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhood was fol-
lowed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of
his third residence with Madame de Warens, until 1741,
though his vagabondage did not wholly cease, he was
collecting his powers and educating his mind with studies
ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years in
Paris, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way
towards the light ; it was the period of his gayer writings,
ballet, opera, comedy, and of the articles on music con-
tributed to the Encyclopedic : he had not yet begun to
preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourth period
of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his master-
pieces except the Confessions. From 1762 until his death,
while his temper grew darker and his reason was dis-
turbed, Rousseau was occupied with apologetic and
autobiographic writings.
His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His
father, a watchmaker, filled the child's head with the
21 3"
312 FRENCH LITERATURE
follies of romances, which they read together, and gave
him through Plutarch's Lives a sense of the exaltations
of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature was quickened
and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. From
a notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he
passed under the harsh rule of an engraver of watches,
learning the vices that grow from fear. At sixteen he
fled, and found protection at Annecy, under Madame de
Warens, a young and comely lady, recently converted
to the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as
devoid of moral principles as any creature in the Natural
History. Sent to Turin for instruction, Rousseau re-
nounced his Protestant faith, and soon after found in
the good Abbe Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard
vicar. Some experience of domestic service was fol-
lowed by a year at Annecy, during which Rousseau's
talent as a musician was developed. From eighteen to
twenty he led a wandering life "starved, feasted, de-
spaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens
at Chambery in 1732, he interested himself in music,
physics, botany, and was more and more drawn to-
wards the study of letters. He methodised his reading
(1738-41), and passionately pursued a liberal system of
self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical.
Rousseau's relations with his bonne maman, Madame de
Warens, had been troubled by the latest of her other loves.
In 1741 he set off for Paris, bearing with him the manu-
script of a new system of musical notation, which was
offered to the Academic des Sciences, and was declared
neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experi-
ment in life as secretary to the French Ambassador at
Venice closed, after fourteen months, with his abrupt dis-
missal. Again in Paris, Rousseau obtained celebrity by
ROUSSEAU'S EARLY WRITINGS 313
his operas and comedies, was received in the salons, and
associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm.
He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and
vulgar drudge, Therese Le Vasseur, for his companion ;
their children were abandoned to the care of the Found-
ling Hospital.
In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rous-
seau, on the road to visit his friend, read in the Mercure
de France that the Academy of Dijon had proposed as
the subject for a prize to be awarded next year the ques-
tion, " Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed
to purify morals ? " Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in
his brain and overwhelmed him ; it was an ecstasy of the
intellect and the passions. With Diderot's encourage-
ment he undertook his indictment of civilisation; in 1750
the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts was crowned. In
accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify his
own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singu-
larities of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not
wholly a fictitious one) of a moral reformer. Famous
as author of the Discours and the opera Le Devin de
Village, presented before the King, he returned to his
native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant
communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize
at Dijon, on the question, "What is the origin of in-
equality among men, and is it authorised by the law of
nature ? " Rousseau failed to obtain the prize, but the
Discours sur I Inegalite was published (1755) with a
dedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had dis-
covered in private property the source of all the evils
of society.
In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of
his political treatise, the Contrat Social, and filled his
314 FRENCH LITERATURE
heart with the beauty of those prospects which form an
environment for the lovers in his Helo'ise. In 1756 he was
established, through the kindness of Madame d'Epinay,
in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest of Mont-
morency. His delight in the woods and fields was great;
his delight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his
hostess, was a more troubled passion. Quarrels with
Madame d'Epinay, quarrels with Grimm and Diderot,
estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the scene
at the Hermitage.
Authorship, however, had its joys and consolations.
The Lettre a D'Alembert, a censure of the theatre (1758),
was succeeded by La Nouvelle Helo'ise (1761), by the
Contrat Social (1762), and mile (1762). The days at
Montmorency which followed his departure from the
Hermitage passed in calm. With the publication of
Jennie the storms began again. The book, condemned
by the Sorbonne, was ordered by the Parliament to be
burnt by the common executioner. Rousseau escaped
imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not
settle near Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a
providential order of the world, an enemy of the stage
especially in republican Geneva Rousseau had flung
indignant words against Voltaire, and Voltaire had tossed
back w r ords of bitter scorn. Geneva had followed Paris
in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications ;
whose doing could it be except Voltaire's ? He fled from
his persecutors to Metiers, where the King of Prussia's
governor afforded him protection. Renewed quarrels
with his countrymen, clerical intolerance, mob violence,
an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, once more drove
him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of
Bienne, only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne.
ROUSSEAU'S CHARACTER
315
Encouraged by Hume "le bon David" he arrived in
January 1766 in London.
At Wootton, in the Peak of Derbyshire, Rousseau pre-
pared the first five books of his Confessions. Within a little
time he had assured himself that Hume was joined with
D Alembert and Voltaire in a triumvirate of persecutors
to defame his character and render him an outcast ; the
whole human race had conspired to destroy him. Again
Rousseau fled, sojourned a year at Trye-Chateau under
an assumed name, and after wanderings hither and
thither, took refuge in Paris, where, living meanly, he
completed his Confessions, wrote other eloquent pieces
of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebral
excitement by music and botanising rambles. The hos-
pitality of M. de Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly
accepted in May 1778 ; and there, on July 2, he suddenly
died ; suicide was surmised ; the seizure was probably
apoplectic.
Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist
whose dreams and visions were inspired by the play
of his sensibility upon his intellect and imagination,
and therefore he was the least impersonal of thinkers.
Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions;
inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid
realities; cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he
sank deep in the mire of imaginative sensuality; effemi-
nate, he was also indomitable; an uncompromising opti-
mist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness ; a
passionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establishing
the most unqualified of tyrannies ; among the devout
he was a free-thinker, among the philosophers he was the
sentimentalist of theopathy. He stands apart from his
contemporaries : they did homage to the understand-
316 FRENCH LITERATURE
ing ; he was the devotee of the heart : they belonged
to a brilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded,
dreamed in solitude : they were aristocratic, at least
by virtue of the intellectual culture which they repre-
sented ; he was plebeian in his origin, and popular in
his sympathies.
He became a great writer comparatively late in life,
under the compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the
centre of all his more important works, excepting such
as are apologetic and autobiographical : Nature has
made man good and happy ; society has made him evil
and miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of
primitive savagery ? No : society cannot retrograde.
But in many ways we can ameliorate human life by
approximating to a natural condition.
In the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, the Discours
sur I' Inegalite, and the Lettre a D' Alernbert sur les Spec-
tacles, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality,
the insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the
factitious passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern
society. " You make one wish," wrote Voltaire, " to
walk on all fours." By nature all men are born free
and equal ; society has rendered them slaves, and im-
pounded them in classes of rich and poor, powerful and
weak, master and servant, peasant and peer. Rousseau's
conception of the primitive state of nature, and the origin
of society by a contract, may not be historically exact
this he admits ; nevertheless, it serves well, he urges, as
a working hypothesis to explain the present state of
things, and to point the way to a happier state. It
exhibits property as the confiscation of natural rights ;
it justifies the sacred cause of insurrection ; it teaches
us to honour man as man, and the simple citizen more
THE CONTRAT SOCIAL 317
than the noble, the scientific student, or the artist. Plain
morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the
theatre is a school of manners, purifying the passions;
on the contrary, it irritates and perverts them ; or it
offers to ridicule the man of straightforward virtue, as
Moliere was not ashamed to do in his Misanthrope.
Having developed his destructive criticism against
society as it is, Rousseau would build up. In the Contrat
Social he would show how freedom and government may
be conciliated ; how, through the arrangements of society,
man may in a certain sense return to the law of nature.
" Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains ; " yet
social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having re-
signed his individual liberty by the social pact, how may
man recover that liberty ? By yielding his individual
rights absolutely to a self-governing community of which
he forms a part. The volonte generate, expressing itself
by a plurality* of votes, resumes the free-will of every
individual. If any person should resist the general will,
he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be
" forced to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty
of the people is formulated by Rousseau. Government
is merely a delegation of power made by the people as
sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects. In
Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority
be established without check or qualification, at least
equality is secured, for, in the presence of the sove-
reign people and its manifested will, each individual is
reduced to the level of all his fellows.
La Nouvelle Helotse, in the form of a romance, con-
siders the purification of domestic manners. Richard-
son's novels are followed in the epistolary style of
narration, which lends itself to the exposition of senti-
318 FRENCH LITERATURE
ment. The story is simple in its incidents. Saint-
Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie
resembles that of Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like
Eloisa, has been a consenting party. Obedient to her
father's will, 'Julie marries Wolmar. In despair Saint-
Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friend-
ship and a home. The lovers meet, are tried, and do
not yield to the temptation. Julie dies a victim to her
maternal devotion, and not too soon "Another day,
perhaps, and I were guilty ! "
In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance.
It might have been coldly edifying had not the writer's
consuming passion for Madame d'Houdetot, awakening
all that he had felt as the lover of Madame de Warens,
filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part of the
romance, passion asserts the primitive rights of nature;
in the second part, those rights are shown to be no longer
rights in an organised society. But the idfeal of domestic
life exhibited is one far removed from the artificialities
of the world of fashion : it is a life of plain duties, patri-
archal manners, and gracious beneficence. Rousseau
the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau the senti-
mentalist ; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive
power. The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the
penetrating influences of the beauty of external nature ;
and both are interpreted with incomparable harmonies
of style and poignant lyrical cries, in which the violin
note outsoars the orchestra.
A reform of domestic life must result in a reform of
education. Rousseau's ideal of education, capable of
adaptations and modifications according to circumstances,
is presented in his mile. How shall a child be formed
in accordance, not with the vicious code of an artificial
ROUSSEAU ON EDUCATION 319
society, but in harmony with nature ? Rousseau traces
the course of Smile's development from birth to adult
years. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by
his mother, the child enjoys the freedom of nature, and
at five years old passes into the care of his father or
his tutor. During the earlier years his education is to
be negative: let him be preserved from all that is false
or artificial, and enter upon the heritage of childhood,
the gladness of animal life, vigorous delights in sun-
shine and open air ; at twelve he will hardly have
opened a book, but he will have been in vital relation
with real things, he will unconsciously have laid the
foundations of wisdom. When the time for study
comes, that study should be simple and sound no
Babel of words, but a wholesome knowledge of things ;
he may have learnt little, but he will know that little
aright ; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography ;
he may watch the workman in his workshop ; he may
practise the carpenter's trade ; he may read Robin-
son Crusoe, and learn the lesson of self-help. Let him
ask at every moment, " What is the good of this ? "
Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history,
he will have grown up laborious, temperate, patient,
firm, courageous.
At fifteen the passions are awake ; let them be gently
and wisely guided. Let pity, gratitude, benevolence be
formed within the boy's heart, so that the self-regarding
passions may fall into a subordinate place. To read
Plutarch is to commune with noble spirits ; to read
Thucydides is almost to come into immediate contact
with facts. The fables of La Fontaine will serve as a
criticism of the errors of the passions.
And now Emile, at eighteen, may learn the sublime
320
FRENCH LITERATURE
mysteries of that faith which is professed by Rousseau's
Savoyard vicar. A Will moves the universe and animates
nature ; that Will, acting through general laws, is guided
by supreme intelligence ; if the order of Providence be
disturbed, it is only through the abuse of man's free-
will ; the soul is immaterial and survives the body ; con-
science is the voice of God within the soul ; " dare to
confess God before the philosophers, dare to preach
humanity before the intolerant ; " God demands no other
worship than that of the heart. With such a preparation
as this. Emile may at length proceed to aesthetic culture,
and find his chief delight in those writers whose genius
has the closest kinship to nature. Finally, in Sophie,
formed to be the amiable companion and helpmate of
man, Emile should find a resting-place for his heart.
Alas, if she should ever betray his confidence !
The Confessions, \vith its sequels in the Dialogues, ou
Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, and the Reveries du Pro-
meneur Solitaire, constitute an autobiographical romance.
The sombre colours of the last six Books throw out the
livelier lights and shades of the preceding Books. While
often falsifying facts and dates, Rousseau writes with all
the sincerity of one who was capable of boundless self-
deception. He will reserve no record of shame and vice
and humiliation, confident that in the end he must appear
the most virtuous of men. As the utterance of a soul
touched and thrilled by all the influences of nature and
of human life, the Confessions affects the reader like a
musical symphony in which various movements are in-
terpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If
Rousseau here is less of the prophet than in his other
writings, he is more of the great enchanter. Should a
moral be drawn from the book, the author would have
INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU 321
us learn that nature has made man good, that society
has the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his
power to refashion himself to such virtue as the world
most needs and most impatiently rejects.
The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-esti-
mated. He restored the sentiment of religion in an age
of abstract deism or turbid materialism. He inaugurated
a moral reform. He tyrannised over France in the
person of his disciple Robespierre. He emancipated the
passions from the domination of the understanding. He
liberated the imagination. He caught the harmonies of
external nature, and gave them a new interpretation. 1
He restored to French prose, colour, warmth, and the
large utterance which it had lost. He created a literature
in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical asserted
its rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew
the classical ideal of art, and enthroned the ego in its
room.
II
The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the
new life of passion passion social and democratic as the
days of Revolution approached ; passion also personal
and private, which, welcomed as a sacred fire, too often
made the inmost being of the individual a scene of
agitating and desolating conflict.
The Abbe Raynal (1713-96) made his Histoire des Deux
Indes a receptacle not only for just views and useful
1 Among writers who fostered the new feeling for external nature, Ramond
(1755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partly scientific, partly imaginative,
from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees, deserves special mention.
322 FRENCH LITERATURE
information, but for every extravagance of thought and
sentiment. " Insert into my book," he said to his brother
philosophers, " everything that you choose against God,
against religion, and against government." In the third
edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatri-
cally, with the inscription, "To the defender of humanity,
of truth, of liberty ! " The salons caught the temper of
the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down
Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they could
not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It
mingled with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave
them a new intensity of life. The incessant play of
intellect flashed and glittered for many spirits over a
moral void ; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper
of Chamfort's maxims and pensees may testify to the
vacuity of faith and joy ; sentiment and passion came
to fill the void; to desire, to love, to pity, to suffer, to
weep, was to live the true life of the heart.
Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the
demon of ennui with the aid of a cool temperament
and a brilliant wit ; at sixty -eight, whatever ardour
had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped to
lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her
young companion and reader, who became a rival and
robbed her salon of its brilliance, Mdlle. de Lespinasse
(17327-76) might cherish a calm friendship for D'Alem-
bert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de
Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent
of passion in those Letters which have given her a place
beside Sappho and beside Eloisa. Madame Roland in
her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of Rousseau,
whose Nouvelle Httoise was to her as a revelation from
heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame
BEAUMARCHAIS 323
Necker's amazing daughter was as the eulogist of
Rousseau.
The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristo-
cratic ; passion and sentiment have popular and demo-
cratic instincts. " The Revolution was already in action,"
said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's Manage
de Figaro appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's
words overstate the fact, we may at least name that
masterpiece of comedy a symptom of the coming ex-
plosion, or even, in Sainte-BeuVe's words, an armed
Fronde.
Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAU-
MARCHAIS (1732-99), son of a watchmaker of Paris, was
born under a merry star, with a true genius for comedy,
yet his theatrical pieces were only the recreations of a
man of affairs a demon of intrigue determined to build
up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial
enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame.
Defeated in a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand
livres was disputed, Beaumarchais, in desperate circum-
stances, made his appeal to public opinion in four
Memoires, which admirably united seriousness, gaiety,
argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. " I
am a citizen," he cried " that is to say, something wholly
new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen
that is to say, what you should have been two hundred
years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty years hence."
The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was
soon to become familiar.
Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two
dramas, Eugenie and Les Deux Amis, of the tearful, senti-
mental, bourgeois type, yet with a romantic tendency,
which distinguishes at least Eugenie from the bourgeois
324 FRENCH LITERATURE
drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure of the
second may have taught their author the wisdom of
mirth ; he abandoned his high dramatic principles to
laugh and to evoke laughter. Le Barbier de Seville, de-
veloped from a comic opera to a comedy in five acts,
was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectators
manifested fatigue ; instantly the play reappeared in four
acts, Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the
fifth wheel from his carriage. It delighted the public
by the novelty of its abounding gaiety, a gaiety full and
free, yet pointed with wit, a revolving firework scattering
its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of the amorous
tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with
the prestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was
renewed by a dialogue which was alive with scintillating
lights.
From the success of the Barbier sprang Le Mariage
de Figaro. Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its
performance was not overcome until six years afterwards.
By force of public opinion the watchmaker's son had
triumphed over the King. The subject of the play is of
a good tradition a daring valet disputes the claim of a
libertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish
colour and Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of
France. From Regnard the author had learnt to en-
tangle a varied intrigue ; from Lesage he borrowed his
Spanish costumes and decoration Figaro himself is a
Gil Bias upon the stage ; in Marivaux he saw how women
may assert themselves in comic action with a bright
audacity. The Mariage de Figaro resumes the past ; it
depicts the present, as a social satire, and a painting of
manners ; it conveys into art the experience, the spirit,
the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO 325
of the world ; it creates characters Almaviva, Suzanne,
Figaro himself, the budding Che'rubin. It is at the same
time or, rather, became through its public reception
a pamphlet in comedy which announces the future ;
it ridicules the established order with a sprightly in-
solence ; it pleads for social equality ; it exposes the
iniquity of aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice,
the greed of courtiers, the chicanery of politicians.
Figaro, since he appeared in " The Barber of Seville," has
grown somewhat of a moralist and a pedant; he must
play the part of censor of society, he must represent the
spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the
cause of intelligence against the authority of rank and
station. Beaumarchais may have lacked elevation and
delicacy, but he knew his craft as a dramatist, and left a
model of prose comedy from which in later years others
of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He
restored mirth to the stage ; he rediscovered theatrical
intrigue ; he created a type, which was Beaumarchais
himself, and was also the lighter genius of France ; he
was the satirist of society ; he was the nimble-feathered
bird that foretells the storm.
Ill
BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with
Chateaubriand and the romantic school of the nine-
teenth century. The new feeling for external nature
attained through him a wider range, embracing the
romance of tropic lands ; it acquired an element of the
exotic ; at the same time, descriptive writing became
more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the
326 FRENCH LITERATURE
purposes of description was enlarged. He added to
French literature a tale in which human passion and
the sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic
of genius ; he created two figures which live in the
popular imagination, encircled with a halo of love and
sorrow.
Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his ima-
gination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer ;
through his temper, an angry disputant with society.
His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having
read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the
heroic record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit
missionaries, his fancy caught fire ; he would seek some
undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some
colony of the true children of nature, far from a corrupt
civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.
In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging
his extravagant designs upon persons of influence.
When the French Government in 1767 commissioned
him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream
was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accus-
tomed quarrels followed. He landed on the Isle of
France, purposing to work as an engineer, and there
spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the
mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours
and sounds and scents impressed themselves on his
brain, and were transferred to his collection of notes.
When, on returning to Paris, he published (1773) his
Voyage a I 1 lie de France, the literature of picturesque
description may be said to have been founded. Already
in this volume his feeling for nature is inspired by an
emotional theism, and is burdened by his sentimental
science, which would exhibit a fantastic array of evi-
BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE 327
dences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable
and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book
appeared, Bernardin had made the acquaintance of
Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his
diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his
new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they
rambled together, botanising in the environs of Paris.
For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bor-
dering upon insanity ; but the crisis passed, and he
employed himself on the Etudes de la Nature, which
appeared in three volumes in 1784. The tale of Paul
et Virginie was not included; for when the author had
read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had
been contemptuous ; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon
called for his carriage. The Etudes accumulate the
grotesque notions of Bernardin with reference to final
causes in nature : nature is benevolent and harmo-
nious ; society is corrupt and harsh ; scientific truth
is to be discovered by sentiment, and not by reason ;
the whole universe is planned for the happiness of
man ; the melon is large because it was designed for
the family ; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence
intended that it should be shared with our neighbours.
Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking gene-
ration, suffered cruelly at the hands of its advocate.
Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a feeling of the
rich and obscure life and energy of nature ; his de-
scriptive power is admirable. " He desired," says M.
Barine, " to open the door for Providence to enter ; in
fact he opened the door for the great Pan," and in
this he was a precursor of much that followed in
literature.
Bernardin's fame was now established. In .the senti-
22
328 FRENCH LITERATURE
mental reaction against the dryness of sceptical philo-
sophy, in the return to a feeling for the poetical aspect
of things, he was looked upon as a leader. In the
fourth volume of Etudes (1788) he had courage to print
the tale of Paul et Virginie. It is an idyll of the tropics,
written with the moral purpose of contrasting the bene-
ficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers
and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The
children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and
purest companionship ; then passion makes its invasion
of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the
faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot
hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the
modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama
mingles with the tragic close. Throughout we do more
than see the landscape of the tropics : we feel the life
of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human
emotion. Something was gained by Bernardin from the
Daphnis and Chloe of Longus in the motives and the
details of his story, but it is essentially his own. It had
a resounding success, and among its most ardent admirers
was Napoleon.
Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father
of a Paul and a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom
he regarded as a faithful housekeeper, he married again,
and his life was divided between the devotion of an old
man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues of
the Institut. His later writings added nothing to his
fame. La Chaumiere Indienne the story of a pariah
who learns wisdom from nature and from the heart
has a certain charm, but it lacks the power of the better
portions of Paul et Virginie. The Harmonies de la Nature
is a feeble reflection of the Etudes. Chateaubriand, to
THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY 329
whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging
recognition of the genius of his precursor. Lamartine,
in after years, was a more generous disciple. In January
1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name of God;
among the great events of the time his death was almost
unnoticed.
IV
In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by
the labours of the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-
Lettres, came a revival of the study of antiquity and of
the sentiment for classical art. The Count de Caylus
(1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East with the
enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings
an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors
and painters of the time. The discovery of Pompeii fol-
lowed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum.
The Abbe BARTHLEMY (1716-95) embodied the erudite
delights of a lifetime in his Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis
en Grhe (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius
of Hellenism as it existed four centuries prior to the
Christian era. It was an ideal Greece the Greece of
Winckelmann and Goethe unalterably gracious, radi-
antly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth
century ; but it served the imaginative needs of the age.
We trace its influence in the harmonious forms of
Bernardin's and Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the
marbles of Canova. A poet, the offspring of a Greek
mother and a French father Andre" Chenier a latter-
day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man
of his own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary
art.
330 FRENCH LITERATURE
Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDR CHNIER was
educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy,
resided as secretary to the French Ambassador for three
weary years in England land of mists, land of dull aris-
tocrats returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause
of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and
his friends as a journalist. The violences of the Revolu-
tion drove him into opposition to the Jacobin party. In
March 1794 he was arrested ; on the 25th July, two days
before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre Chenier's
head fell on the scaffold.
Only two poems, the Jen de Paume and the Hymne
aux Suisses, were published by Chenier ; after his death
appeared in journals the Jeune Captive and the Jeune
Tarentine ; his collected poems, already known in manu-
script to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary,
were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come
into existence without his aid ; but under Sainte-Beuve's
influence it chose to regard him as a predecessor, and
during the years about 1830 he was studied and imitated
as a master.
He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth
century, to its graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity,
its faith in human reason, its comprehensive science of
nature and of society. In certain of his poems suggested
by public occasions he is little more than a disciple of
Lebrun. His Elegies are rather Franco-Roman than
Greek ; these, together with beauties of their own, have
the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the
mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philo-
sophical poem Hermes, of which we have designs and
fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natura of an
admiring student of Buffon.
ANDRE CHENIER 331
In his fcglogues and his epic fragments he is a Greek or
a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from
the pastoral and idyllic poets of antiquity, and from the
Anthology. The Greece of Chenier's imagination is the
ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more deli-
cately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than was
possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. " It
is the landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. Faguet, "the
Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of
comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of har-
monious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing
choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue
heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light
breathing of the Cyclades."
In the lambeSf inspired by the emotions of the Revolu-
tion during his months of imprisonment, Chenier united
* modern passion with the beauty of classic form ; satire
in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly
lyrical. In his versification he attained new and alluring
harmonies ; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity
of eighteenth- century verse, gliding sinuously from line
to line and from strophe to strophe. He did over again
for French poetry the work of the Pleiade, but he did
this as one who was a careful student and a critic of
Malherbe.
BOOK THE FIFTH
1789-1850
BOOK THE FIFTH
1789-1850
CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE MADAME
DE STAEL CHATEAUBRIAND
I
THE literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that
of a period of transition. Madame de Stael and Chateau-
briand announce the future ; the writers of an inferior
rank represent with declining power the past, and give
some faint presentiment of things to come. The great
political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract
ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry
which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet.
Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but
their literary value is insignificant.
Marie-Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of the great
poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inau-
gurate a school of national tragedy in his Charles IX. ;
neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the
historical sentiment his tragedy was a revolutionary
" school of kings." Arnault, Legouve, Neppmucene,
335
336 FRENCH LITERATURE
Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or
their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of lan-
guage. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the
streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days
of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew
mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le
Vieux Celibataire (1792) ; Fabre d'Eglantine moralised
Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante
debased by egoism and accommodations with the world ;
Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the
pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped
the vengeance of the Jacobins.
Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemer-
cier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to
petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically
viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe
Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time
and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the
spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime.
Baour-Lormian, the translator of Ossian (1801), converted
the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy ;
Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II.
(with scenes of Spanish history transported to Assyria)
diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of
Raynouard's Les Templiers (1805) ; the learned author
wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philo-
logy. Among the writers of comedy Andrieux, Etienne,
Duval, and others Picard has the merit of reproducing
the life of the day, satirising social classes and conditions
with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixere-
court contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for
the romantic stage. Desaugiers, with his gift for gay
plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville.
POETRY OF THE EMPIRE 337
Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice
during the Revolution. The lesser Chenier's Chanson du
Depart has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Re-
public sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and
wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-
Pindare, in his ode Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur, does not
quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of
classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse
and music, La Marseillaise (1792), was an inspiration
which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory
and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and
the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and
lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser, in his Chevaliers de la
Table-Ronde (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian,
in his Poe'sies Ossianiques, widened the horizons of litera-
ture. The Panhypocrisiade of Lemercier, published in
1819, but written several years earlisr an "infernal
comedy of the sixteenth century " is an amazing chaos
of extravagance, incompetence, and genius ; it bears to
Hugo's Legende des Stides the relation which the mega-
therium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous
analogues.
If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's
poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of
Chenedolle, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the
timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special charac-
ter of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination
of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century,
with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to
be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative
sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly * by
the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications.
The preceding century had lost the large feeling for
338 FRENCH LITERATURE
composition, for beauty and severity of form ; attention
was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create,
it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in
ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the
eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and
had become a social and political weapon ; under the
imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn ;
what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or
petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once
again recovered ?
The Revolution closed the salons and weakened the
influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journal-
ism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by
the salons. The Decade Philosophique was the organ of
the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac
and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism.
In 1789 the Journal dcs Dcbats was founded. Much
ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was ex-
pended in the columns of the public press. Among
the contributors were Andre Chenier, Mallet du Pin,
Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine,
Camiile Desmoulins hoped to render France happy,
prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-
loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity
and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem
his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy
in his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, and died, with Danton
as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and
despair.
The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire
abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity,
and decorated their harangues with heroic examples of
Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and aca-
MIRABEAU 339
demic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the " Supreme
Being" under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid
spirit of the Girondins found its highest expression in
Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and
a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating
speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was
richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagina-
tion thundered in words which tended to action ; but in
general the Mountain cared more for deeds, than words.
The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy
apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like
the fall of the knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper,
was clear and measured in discourse, and once in opposi-
tion to Mirabeau, defending the royal prerogative, rose
beyond himself to the height of a great occasion.
But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who pos-
sessed the genius of a great statesman united with the
gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the
old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear
of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a
student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his
conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate
lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived,
and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long
before the explosion came. Already he was a copious
author on political subjects. He knew that France
needed individual liberty and individual responsibility;
he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He
hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris
by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the
whole country; he desired to balance the constitution
by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the
Assembly against the Kirg, and to control the action of
340 FRENCH LITERATURE
each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu
he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the
executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred of
aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment
at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might
have assisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator
his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of
logic ; slow and embarrassed as he began to speak, he
warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correct-
ness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations,
magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery,
and passion. His speech, said Madame de Stael, was
"like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist,
and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the
Assembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced,
amid murmurs, " Ah ! il est mort," which anticipated his
words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was dead.
"The 1 8th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced
the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard,
imperious but eloquent. . . . Napoleon was the last of
the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in
power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric,
and condensed his summons to action into direct, effec-
tive words, now simple and going straight at some motive
of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination
to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of
government, and he knew the temper of the men whom
he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched
with sentimentality ; Ossian and Werther were among
his favourite books ; but what may be styled the official
literature of the Empire was of the decaying classical or
neo-classical tradition.
Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct
SCHOLARSHIP AND PHILOSOPHY 341
offspring of the Revolution with its social contract and
its rights of man, it was necessary to combat eighteenth-
century ideas and defend the throne and the altar. Great
scientific names Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck-
testify to the fact that a movement which made the
eighteenth century illustrious had not spent its force.
Scholarship was laying the bases for future construc-
tions ; Ginguene published in 1811 the first volumes
of his Histoire Litteraire de I'ltalie ; Fauriel and Ray-
nouard accumulated the materials for their historical,
literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turn-
ing away from sensationalism, which seemed to have
said its final word, towards spiritualist conceptions.
Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the primitive
fact of consciousness the nisus of the will and in
the self-recognition of the ego as a cause, an escape
from materialism. Royer - Collard (1763-1845), after-
wards more distinguished in politics than he was in
speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne from
the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his
commentary as a siege-train against the positions of
Condillac.
The germs of new literary growths were in the soil ;
but the spring came slowly, and after the storms of
Revolution were spent, a chill was in the air. Measure-
less hopes, and what had come of them ? infinite desire,
and so poor an attainment ! A disciple of Rousseau,
who shared in his sentiment without his optimistic faith,
and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature
without Rousseau's sense of its joy, Etienne Pivert de
SNANCOURT published in 1799 his Reveries, a book of
disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance to
sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain.
342 FRENCH LITERATURE
It was followed in 1804 by Obennann, a romance in
epistolary form, in which the writer, disguised in the
character of his hero, expresses a fixed and sterile grief,
knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor what
he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without
an object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken
his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in
his soul ; yet perhaps in old age if ever it come he
may resign himself to the infinite illusion of life. It is
an indication of the current of the time that fifteen
years later, when the Libres Meditations appeared, Senan-
court had found his way through a vague theopathy to
autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil recon-
cilement w r ith existence.
The work of the professional critics of the time
Geoff roy, De Feletz, Dussault, Hoffman counts now
for less than the words of one who was only an amateur
of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in public.
JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and
of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity
for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty
of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence
needful in a literary career. He read everything ; he
published nothing ; but the Pensees, wiiich were col-
lected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his
letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious
dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented
by the passion to put a volume in a page, a page in a
phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil
in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement
of style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away,
offended by their lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of
wisdom, of delicacy. A man of the eighteenth century,
MADAME DE STAEL 343
Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear heights of
middle air, where he saw much of the past and some-
thing of the future ; but the middle air is better suited
for speculation than for action.
II
The movement towards the romantic theory and prac-
tice of art was fostered in the early years of the nine-
teenth century by two eminent writers one a woman
with a virile intellect, the other a man with more than a
woman's imaginative sensibility by GERMAINE DE STAEL
and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth
century passing into the nineteenth, receiving new de-
velopments, yet without a breach of continuity ; the
other represents a reaction against the ideas of the age
of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons one,
by the divinations of her ardent intelligence ; the other,
by his creative genius. Madame de Stael interpreted
new ideas and denned a new theory of art. Chateau-
briand was himself an extraordinary literary artist. The
style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator,
a brilliant and incessant converser ; that of the other
is at its best a miracle of studied invention, a harmony
of colour and of sound. The genius of the one was
quickened in brilliant social gatherings ; a Parisian salon
was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other
was nursed in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on
the w 7 ild and melancholy moors.
Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the cele-
brated Swiss banker and future minister of France, a
child of precocious intelligence and eager sympathies,
23
344 FRENCH LITERATURE
reared amid the brilliant society of her mother's salon,
a girl whose demands on life were large demands of
the intellect, demands of the heart enamoured of the
writings of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish
Ambassador, the Baron de Stael-Holstein, herself a light
and an inspirer of the constitutional party of reform in
the early days of the Revolution, in her literary work
opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century thought.
She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but
rather carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution,
as a social upheaval, she failed to understand ; her ideal
was liberty, not equality ; and Necker's daughter was
assured that all would be -well were liberty established
in constitutional forms of government. A republican
among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among republi-
cans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the
years of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions,
and retreats, she was sustained by her zeal for justice,
her pity for the oppressed, and her unquenchable faith
in human progress.
A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political
pamphlets, an Essai sur les Fictions, a treatise on the
Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Indi-
viduals and Nations (1796), were followed in 1800 by
her elaborate study, De la Litt<-rature consideree dans ses
Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales. Its central idea
is that of human progress : freedom, incarnated in
republican institutions, will assure the natural develop-
ment of the spirit of man ; a great literature will be
the offspring of progress and of freedom ; and each
nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate
the general advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast
the spell of her intellect over the young conqueror
ADOLPHE: DELPHINE 345
Bonaparte ; Bonaparte regarded a political meteor in
feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In
1802 the husband, whom she had never loved, was
dead. Her passion for Benjamin Constant had passed
through various crises in its troubled career a series
of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions lead-
ing to attractions, such as may be discovered in Con-
stant's remarkable novel Adolphe. They could neither
decide to unite their lives, nor to part for ever. Adolphe,
in Constant's novel, after a youth of pleasure-seeking,
is disenchanted with life ; his love of Ellenore is that
of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for
vanity or a new indulgence of egoism ; but Ellenore,
whose youth is past, will abandon all for him, and she
imposes on him the tyranny of her devotion. Each is
the other's torturer, each is the other's consolation. In
the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant anticipates
Balzac.
Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm
by writing Delphine, the story of a woman of genius,
whose heroic follies bring her into warfare with the
world. The lover of Delphine, violent and feeble, sen-
timental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in
doing her wrong, and Delphine has n<a refuge but death
in the wilds of America. 1
In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble
Paris with her torrent of ideas and of speech no longer.
The illustrious victim of Napoleon's persecution has-
tened to display her ideas at Weimar, where Goethe
protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from
the storm of her approach, and Schiller endured her
literary enthusiasm with a sense of prostration. August
1 In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand.
346 FRENCH LITERATURE
Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her sons, became the
interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive
mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she
advanced to the conquest of Italy, and had her Roman
triumph. England, which she had visited in her Re-
volutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the creation
of her novel Corinne (1807). It is again the history of a
woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom
the world understands imperfectly, and whom her Eng-
lish lover, after his fit of Italian romance, discards with
the characteristic British phlegm. The paintings of
Italian nature are rhetorical exercises ; the writer's sym-
pathy with art and history is of more value ; the inter-
pretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal
feeling. Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which
means that they once were young, and for her own
generation they had the freshness and charm of
youth.
Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards
religion. A Protestant and a liberal, her spiritualist
faith now found support in the moral strength of Chris-
tianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand, an epicurean
and a Catholic ; she did not care to decorate religion
with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense ; it
spoke to her not through the senses, but directly to
the conscience, the affections, and the will. In the
chapters of her book on Germany which treat of "the
religion of enthusiasm," her devout latitudinarianism
finds expression.
The bookDe t'AMemagne, published in London in 1813,
after the confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition
by the imperial police, prepared the way by criticism
for the romantic movement. It treats of manners, letters,
DE L'ALLEMAGNE 347
art, philosophy, religion, interpreting with astonishing
insight, however it may have erred in important details,
the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was
a Germany of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians,
loyal and sincere, but incapable of patriotic passion,
disqualified for action and for freedom, which she in
1804 had discovered. The life of society produces lite-
rature in France ; the genius of inward meditation and
sentiment produces literature in Germany. The litera-
ture and art of the South are classical, those of the
North are romantic ; and since the life of our own
race and the spirit of our own religion are infused
into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite
growth. Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her
sense that art and literature are relative to ages, races,
governments, environments. She dreamed of an Euro-
pean or cosmopolitan literature, in which each nation,
while retaining its special characteristics, should be in
fruitful communication with its fellows.
In 1811 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the
wife of Albert de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more
than twenty years her junior. Their courage was re-
warded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland,
Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall
of Napoleon Madame de Stael was once more in Paris,
and there in 1817 she died. The Dix Annees d'Exil, pos-
thumously published, records a portion of her agitated
life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial
persecutor. The unfinished Considerations sur la Revolu-
tion Fran^aise, designed originally as an apology for
Necker, defends the Revolution while admitting its
crimes and errors ; its true object, as the writer con-
ceived political liberty had been in the end attained ;
348 FRENCH LITERATURE
her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a revolu-
tionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with
a system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country
in which she saw her political aspirations most nearly
realised.
Ill
FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND Was born in 1768,
at St.-Malo, of an ancient Breton family. Except for the
companionship of an elder sister, of fragile health and
romantic temper, his childhood was solitary. The pre-
sence of the old count his father inspired terror. The
boy's society was with the waves and winds, or at the
old chateau of Combourg, with lonely woods and wilds.
Horace, Tibullus, Tettmaque, the sermons of Massillon,
nourished his imagination or stimulated his religious
sentiment ; but solitude and nature were his chief in-
spirers.
At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue
of unsatisfied dreaming, before he had begun to know
life. A commission in the army was procured for him.
He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something of literary
life in Paris ; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted
France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-
West Passage, set sail to America. If he did not make
any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his
own genius in the western world. The news of the
execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton
and a royalist should show himself among the ranks of
the emigrants. To gratify the wish of his family, he mar-
ried before crossing the frontier. Madame de Chateau-
CHATEAUBRIAND 349
briand had the dignity to veil her sorrow caused by an
imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion
of her husband's regard as he could devote to another
than himself.
The episode of war having soon closed not without
a wound and a serious illness he found a refuge in
London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the con-
solation of friendship with Joubert and Fontanes, and
there he published in 1797 his first work, the Essai sur
les Revolutions. The doctrine of human progress had been
part of the religion of the eighteenth century ; Chateau-
briand in 1797 had faith neither in social, nor political,
nor religious progress. Why be deceived by the hopes
of revolution, since humanity can only circle for ever
through an exhausting round of illusions ? The death
of his mother and words of a dying sister awakened him
from his melancholy mood ; he resolved to write a second
book, which should correct the errors of the first, and
exhibit a sourqe of hope and joy in religion. To the
eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross
and barbarous superstition ; he would show that it was a
religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of
art, a spring of poetic thought and feeling alike through
its dogma and its ritual ; he would convert literature from
its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honour the
despised Middle Ages.
The Genie du Christianisme, begun during its author's
residence in London, was not completed until four years
later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic
apology for religion, he published his Atala, ou les Amours
de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert. It is a romance, or
rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the
enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for
350 FRENCH LITERATURE
nature, the sensibility to human passion, conceal many
infirmities of design and of feeling. Chateaubriand
suddenly entered into his fame.
On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with
high solemnities ; the Archbishop of Paris received the
First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was
the fitting moment for the publication of the Ge'nie du
CJiristianisme. Its value as an argumentative defence
of Christianity may not be great ; but it was the restora-
tion of religion to art, it contained or implied a new
system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout
sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism,
it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to
Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients,
while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national,
let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, de-
clared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition
in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution in art
for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half
of the nineteenth century the revolution was in active
progress.
The episode of Rene, which was included in the Genie,
and afterwards published separately, has been described
as a Christianised Werther; its passion is less frank, and
even more remote from sanity of feeling, than that of
Goethe's novel, but the sadness of the hero is more mag-
nificently posed. A sprightly English lady described
Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he
did so during his whole life ; and through Rene we
divine the inventor of Ren6 carrying his wounded heart,
as in the heroine we can discern some features of his
sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings centre in
himself : he is a pure egoist through his sensibility ; but
CHATEAUBRIAND 3 5 I
around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its
expansive power, can deploy boundless perspectives.
Both Atala and Rene, though brought into connection
with the Genie du Christianisme, are in fact more closely
related to the prose epic Les Natchez, written early, but
held in reserve until the publication of his collected works
in 1826-31. Les Natchez, inspired by Chateaubriand's
American travels, idealises the life of the Red Indian
tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the
pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of
his early years, his splendour and delicacy of descrip-
tion, his wealth of imaginative reverie. Famous as the
author of the Genie, Chateaubriand was appointed secre-
tary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Due
d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside
the Martyrs, on which he had been engaged, he sought
for fresh imagery and local colour to enrich his work,
in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record of which was
published in his (1811) Itincraire de Paris a Jerusalem.
The Martyrs appeared in 1809. It was designed as a
great example of that art, inspired by Christianity, on
behalf of which he had contended in the Genie; the
religion of Christ, he would prove, can create passions
and types of character better suited for noble imagina-
tive treatment than those of paganism ; its supernatural
marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of
pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in
prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian ; Rome
and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the
deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form
only portions of the scene ; heaven and hell are open
to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather
a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed in making
352 FRENCH LITERATURE
his supernatural habitations and personages credible
even to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of
the terrestrial scenes and narrations, and among these,
in particular the story of Eudore.
In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem,
Chateaubriand had visited Spain, and it was his recollec-
tions of the Alhambra that moved him to write, about
1809, the Aventures du Dernier des Abencerages, published
many years later. It shows a tendency towards self-
restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in har-
mony with his effusive imagination. With this work
Chateaubriand's inventive period of authorship closed ;
the rest of his life was in the main that of a politician.
From the position of an unqualified royalist (1814-24)
he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may
be described as both royalist and republican. His
pamphlet of 1814, De Bonaparte et des Bourbons, was
declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth an army to his
cause.
In his later years he published an Essai sur la Lit-
terature Anglaise and a translation of " Paradise Lost."
But his chief task was the revision of the Mcmoires
d' Outre- Tombe, an autobiography designed for posthu-
mous publication, and actually issued in the pages of
the Presse, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers,
while Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its
vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those
whom the writer regarded as his enemies, its many
beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of
all that was worst and much of what was best in his
character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme.
Recamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely
attached, Chateaubriand died in the summer of 1848.
CHATEAUBRIAND'S INFLUENCE 353
His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the coast
of Brittany.
Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character
cannot be admired without grave reserves. But an
unique genius, developed at a fortunate time, enabled
him to play a most significant part in the history of
literature. He was the greatest of landscape painters ;
he restored to art the sentiment of religion ; he inter-
preted the romantic melancholy of the age. If he posed
magnificently, there were native impulses which sug-
gested the pose ; and at times, as in the Itineraire, the
pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is not
extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion
which makes the imaginative power its instrument, were
his in a supereminent degree.
CHAPTER II
THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS
WHILE the imagination of France was turning towards
the romance^of the Middle Ages and the art of Chris-
tianity, Hellenic scholarship was maintained by Jean-
Francois Boissonade. The representative of Hellenism
in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined
artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of
a Greek manuscript better than he loved a victory. PAUL-
Louis COURIER DE MERE (1772-1825) counts for nothing
in the history of French thought ; in the history of French
letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces of Attic
grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in
dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable
in measure and in malice. The translator of Daphnis
and Chloe, wearied by war and wanderings in Italy,
lived under the Restoration among his vines at Veretz,
in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of pro-
vincial popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist
reaction. He is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, oc-
cupied with affairs of the parish. Shall Chambord be
purchased for the Duke of Burgundy ? shall an in-
tolerant young cure forbid the villagers to dance ? shall
magistrates harass the humble folk ? Such are the ques-
tions agitating the country-side, which the vine-dresser
Courier will resolve. The questions have been replaced
354
THEOCRATIC SCHOOL: MAISTRE 355
to-day by others ; but nothing has quite replaced the
Simple Discours, the Petition pour les Villageois, the
Pamphlet des Pamphlets, in which the ease of the best
sixteenth and seventeenth century prose is united with
a deft rapier-play like that of Voltaire, and with the
lucidity of the writer's classical models.
Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism
was the satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1753-1821) revolted against the
eighteenth century, it was a revolt of the soul ; when
he assailed the authority of the individual-reason, it was
in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of
the Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the
French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to
Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary
aggression in his Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien ; in-
spired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his Considerations
sur la France, he interpreted the meaning of the great
political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France
- assigned by God the place of the leader of Christendom,
the eldest daughter of the Church for her faithlessness
and proud self-will. The sacred chastisement accom-
plished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored to
an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years
Maistre served the King of Sardinia as envoy and pleni-
potentiary at the Russian Court, maintaining his dignity
in cruel distress upon the salary of a clerk. Amiable in
his private life, he was remorseless with the stern charity
of an inquisitor in dogma. In a style of extraordinary
clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas,
logically connected, on which to base a complete re-
organisation of European society. Those ideas are set
forth most powerfully in the dialogues entitled Les Soirees
356 FRENCH LITERATURE
de Saint- Pttersbourg and the treatises Du Pape and De
PEglise Gallicane.
He honours reason ; not the individual reason, source
of innumerable errors, but the general reason, which,
emanating from God, reveals universal and immutable
truth quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. To
commence philosophising we should despise the philo-
sophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre de-
votes a special study, is the most dangerous ; Locke is
the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke
of nature ; Maistre speaks of God, the Grand Monarch
who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His
hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority ; the
great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending
race of men ; there is no government without an exe-
cutioner. But God is pitiful, and allows us the refuge
of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no
society ; without the Catholic Church there is no reli-
gion ; without the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic
Church. The sovereignty of the Pope is therefore the
keystone of civilisation ; his it is to give and take away
the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over the
people, the Pontiff absolute over governments such
is the earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in
heaven. To suppose that men can begin the world
anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the folly of
private reason ; society is an organism which grows
under providential laws ; revolutions are the expiation
for sins. Such are the ideas which Maistre bound
together in serried logic, and deployed with the mas-
tery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from in-
dividualism to authority could not have found a more
absolute expression.
LAMENNAIS 357
The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic
views have much in common with those of Maistre, and
of his teacher Saint - Martin, dwelt on the necessity
of language as a condition of thought, and maintained
that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776-
1847), h a ^ poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic
ideas with a theory of human progress a social and
political palingenesis which had in it the elements of
political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalism met in
the genius of FELiciTE-RoBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782-
1854) ; they engaged after a time in conflict, and in
the end the victory lay with his democratic sympathies.
A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowed with ima-
gination, passion, and eloquence, was more a prophet
than a priest. He saw the world around him perishing
through lack of faith ; religion alone could give it life
and health ; a Church, freed from political shackles,
in harmony with popular tendencies, governed by the
sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The
voice of the Catholic Church is the voice of humanity,
uttering the general reason of mankind. When the
Essai sur I' Indifference en Matiere de Religion appeared,
another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But was a
democratic Catholicism possible ? Lamennais trusted
that it might be so, and as the motto of the journal
L Avenir (1830), in which Lacordaire and Montalembert
were his fellow-labourers, he chose the words Dieu et
Liberte.
The orthodoxy of the Avenir was suspected. Lamen-
nais, with his friends, journeyed to Rome "to consult
the Lord in Shiloh," and in the Affaires de Rome recorded
his experiences. The Encyclical of 1832 pronounced
against the doctrines dearest to his heart and conscience ;
358 FRENCH LITERATURE
he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon his
inmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theo-
cracy failing, he still trusted in the peoples. But the
democracy of his desire and faith was one not devoted
to material interests; to spiritualise the democracy be-
came henceforth his aim. In the Paroles d'uu Croyant he
announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions.
" It is," said a contemporary, "a bonnet rouge planted on
a cross." In his elder years Lamennais believed in a
spiritual power, a common thought, a common will direct-
ing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul,
invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attempted to
give a scientific interpretation and application to the
doctrine of the Trinity, are set forth in the Esquisse dune
Philosophic. His former associates, Lacordaire, the elo-
quent Dominican, and Montalembert, the historian,
learned and romantic, of Western monasticism, remained
faithful children of the Church. Lamennais, no less
devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above
his grave, among the poor of Pere-Lachaise, no cross was
erected.
The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought assumed
other forms than those of the theocratic school. VICTOR
COUSIN (1792-1867), a pupil of Maine de Biran and
Royer-Collard, became at the age of twenty-three a
lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was enthu-
siastic, ambitious, eloquent ; with scanty knowledge he
spoke as one having authority, and impressed his hearers
with the force of a ruling personality. Led on from
Scotch to German philosophy, and having the advantage
of personal acquaintance with Hegel, he advanced
through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses
but in the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity,
ECLECTIC SCHOOL: SOCIALISM 359
he recognised the source of absolute truth ; in the first
act of consciousness are disclosed the finite, the infinite,
and their mutual relations. In the history of philosophy,
in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism,
scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of
philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution :
each system is true in what it affirms, false in what it
denies. With psychology as a starting-point, and eclec-
ticism as a method, Cousin attempted to establish a
spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domain of
thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler.
In the writings of his disciple and friend THEODORE
JOUFFROY (1796-1842) there is a deeper accent of reality.
Doubting, and contending with his doubts, Jouffroy
brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisition into
the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental
science with physiology, and applied his remarkable
powers of patient and searching thought to the solution
of questions in morals and aesthetics. The school of
Cousin has been named eclectic ; it should rather be
named spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its
origin extended beyond philosophy, and are apparent
in the literary art of Cousin's contemporaries.
As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist
philosophy was ineffectual. Another school of thought
issuing from the Revolution, yet opposing ts anarchic in-
dividualism, aspired to regenerate society by the applica-
tion of the principles of positive science. CLAUDE-HENRI
DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANCOIS-CHARLES
FOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions,
have a common distinction as the founders of modern
socialism. Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State con-
trolled in things of the mind by men of science, and in
24
360 FRENCH LITERATURE
material affairs by the captains of industry. The aim of
society should be the exploitation of the globe by associa-
tive effort. In his Nouveau Christianisme he thought to
deliver the Christian religion from the outworn supersti-
tion, as he regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Pro-
testantism, and to point out its true principle as adapted
to our nineteenth century that of human charity, the
united effort of men towards the well-being of the
poorest class.
Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the
scientific spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his
results, yet struck out suggestive ideas. A great and sys-
tematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857), who was
associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived
the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by
them to researches properly his own. The positivism of
Conite consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a
religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional
nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde
de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his
earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction ; he felt
the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy
proceeds from the theory that all human conceptions
advance from the primitive theological state, through
the metaphysical when abstract forces, occult causes,
scholastic entities are invented to explain the phenomena
of nature to the positive, when at length it is recog-
nised that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the
region of phenomena. With these stages corresponds
the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or
defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract sciences
those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than
with the application of laws are so arranged by Comte
POSITIVISM 361
as to exhibit each more complex science resting on a
simpler, to which it adds a new order of truths ; the
whole erection, ascending to the science of sociology,
which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine
of human society a doctrine of the laws of progress as
well as of the laws of order is crowned by morals.
In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power
is entrusted to a priesthood of science. Their moral
influence will be chiefly directed to reinforcing the social
feeling, altruism, as against the predominance of self-love.
The object of religious reverence is not God, but the
"Great Being" Humanity, the society of the noble living
and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity,
of all those who contribute to the better life of man.
To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude,
we render our homage, we direct our aspirations ; for
Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination
of egoistic desire. Women the mother, the wife, the
daughter purifying through affection the energies of
man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians,
accomplishing a moral providence.
Comte's theory of the three states, theological, meta-
physical, and positive, was accepted by PIERRE JOSEPH
PROUDHON (1809-65), a far more brilliant writer, a
far less constructive thinker, and aided him in arriving
at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte.
Son of a cooper at Besan^on, Proudhon had the virtues
of a true child of the people integrity, affection, courage,
zeal, untiring energy. Religion he would replace by
morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Free associations of
workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporal authority,
should arise over all the land. Qu'est-ce que la Propriety?
he asked in the title of a work published in 1840; and
362 FRENCH LITERATURE
his answer was, La Propriete c'est le Vol. Property, seiz-
ing upon the products of labour in the form of rent or
interest, and rendering no equivalent, is theft. Justice
demands that service should be repaid by an equal ser-
vice. Society, freely organising itself on the principles
of liberty and justice, requires no government ; only
through such anarchy as this can true order be at-
tained. An apostle of modern communism, Proudhon,
by ideas leavening the popular mind, became no in-
significant influence in practical politics.
CHAPTER III
POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL
I
THE eighteenth century did homage to the reason; it
sought for general truths, scientific, social, political ; its
art was in the main an inheritance, diminished with lapse
of time, from the classical art of the preceding century.
With Rousseau came an outburst of the personal element
in literature, an overflow of sensibility, an enfranchise-
ment of the passions, and of imagination as connected
with the passions ; his eloquence has in it the lyrical
note. The romantic movement was an assertion of
freedom for the imagination, and an assertion of the
rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measure-
less desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment
of nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew.
Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to
the rules of classic art. Why should the several literary
species be impounded each in its separate paddock ?
Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's genius ;
let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the
lyric cry ; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why
remain in servitude to the models of Greece and Rome ?
Let all epochs and every clime contribute to the enrich-
ment of art. The primitive age was above all others the
363
364 FRENCH LITERATURE
age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were the
centuries of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation
and transcendent passion. Honour, therefore, to our
mediaeval forefathers ! It is the part of reason to trust
the imagination in the imaginative sphere. Through
what is most personal and intimate we reach the truths
of the universal heart of man. An image may at the same
time be a symbol ; behind a historical tableau may lie a
philosophical idea.
At first the romantic movement was Christian and
monarchical. Its assertion of freedom, its claims on
behalf of the ego, its licence of the imagination, were
in reality revolutionary. The intellect is more aristo-
cratic than the passions. The great spectacle of modern
democracy deploying its forces is more moving than any
pallid ideals of the past ; it has the grandeur and breadth
of the large phenomena of nature ; it is wide as a sun-
rise ; its advance is as the onset of the sea, and has like
rumours of victory and defeat. The romantic move-
ment, with no infidelity to its central principle, became
modern and democratic.
Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the roman-
tic movement in France the passion and mystery of the
East; the struggle for freedom in Greece; the old ballads
of Spain; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the
pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudal splendours of
Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred ;
Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility,
his seeker for the fountains of living knowledge ; Schiller's
revolters against social law, and his adventurers of the
court and camp.
With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came
a renewal of language and of metre. The poetical
POETIC DICTION: ROMANTIC VERSE 365
diction of the eighteenth century had grown colourless
and abstract ; general terms had been preferred to parti-
cular ; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced
by periphrases the cock was "the domestic bird that
announces the day." The romantic poets sought for
words whether noble or vulgar that were coloured,
concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with
Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for
their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost
treasures of the language were recovered ; at a later
date new verbal inventions were made. By degrees, also,
grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity ; sentences
and periods grew rather than were built ; phrases were
alive, and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound.
Verse was moulded by the feeling that inspired it ; the
melodies were like those of an Eolian harp, long-drawn
or retracted as the wind swept or touched the strings.
Symmetry was slighted ; harmony was valued for its
own sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes
satisfied or surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes
suffered through his curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal
licences the mobile cesura, new variations and com-
binations the power of the alexandrine was marvel-
lously enlarged ; it lost its monotony and became
capable of every achievement ; its external restraints
were lightened ; verse glided into verse as wave over-
taking wave. The accomplishment of these changes
was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve
were the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years,
Hugo contributed to the later evolution of romantic
verse. The influence on poetical form of Lamartine,
Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance.
The year 1822 is memorable ; it saw the appearance
366 FRENCH LITERATURE
of Vigny's Poemes, the Odes of Hugo, which announced
a new power in literature, though the direction of that
power was not yet defined, and almost to the same
moment belongs the indictment of classical literature
by Henri Beyle (" Stendhal ") in his study entitled
Racine ct Shakespeare. Around Charles Nodier, in the
library of the Arsenal, gathered the young revolters
among them Vigny, tSainte-Beuve, Emile Deschamps,
afterwards the translator of Romeo and Juliet and Mac-
beth, his brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the
Divine Comedy. The first Cenacle was formed ; in the
Muse Franqaise and in the Globe the principles of the
new literary school were expounded and illustrated.
Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but
still held aloof.
JEAN-PIERRE DE BERANGER (1780-1857) was not One
of this company of poets. A child of Paris, of humble
parentage, he discovered, after various experiments, that
his part was not that of a singer of large ambitions. In
1815 his first collection of Chansons appeared ; the fourth
appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and
the people, he mediated between the popular and the
middle-class sentiment. His songs flew like town spar-
rows from garret to garden ; impudent or discreet, they
nested everywhere. They seemed to be the embodied
wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love
without its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism
without its fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the
Dieu des bonnes gens. In his elder years a Beranger
legend had evolved itself ; he was the sage of democracy,
the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom pil-
grims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and
benevolent philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in
BERANGER: LAMARTINE 367
the pseudo-classic taste, Beranger was skilled in the art
of popular song ; he knew- the virtue of concision ; he
knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama ; he knew
how to wing his verses with a volent refrain ; he could
catch the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude ;
he could be gay with touches of tenderness, and smile
through a tear reminiscent of departed youth and plea-
sure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal
in politics and religion ; for the people he was a democrat
who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than
liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, repre-
sentative of democratic absolutism. In the history of
politics the songs of Beranger count for much ; in the
history of literature the poet has a little niche of his
own, with which one may be content who, if he had not
in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary
revolution, might be called modest.
II
Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a
poet already famous, their elder by several years, who
might have been the master of a school had he not
preferred to dwell apart ; one who, born for poetry,
chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of
his existence. In the year 1820 had appeared a slender
volume entitled Meditations Poctiques. The soul, long
departed, returned in this volume to French poetry.
Its publication was an event hardly less important than
that of the Genie du Christianismc. The well-springs of
pure inspiration once more flowed. The critics, indeed,
were not all enthusiastic ; the public, with a surer instinct,
368 FRENCH LITERATURE
recognised in Lamartine the singer they had for many
years desired, and despaired to find.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Macon in 1790, of
royalist parents, had passed his childhood among the
tranquil fields and little hills around his homestead at
Milly. From his mother he learned to love the Bible,
Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the
Savoyard Vicar's faith ; at a later time he read Chateau-
briand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by
the wandering gleams and glooms of Ossian. From
the melancholy of youth he was roused by Italian travel,
and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the cir-
cumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of
idealised autobiography. A deeper passion of love and
grief followed; Madame Charles, the "Julie" of Lamar-
tine's Raphael, the " Elvire " of his Meditations, died.
Lamartine had versified already in a manner which has
affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets
and elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to
banish from public regard. Love and grief evoked finer
and purer strains ; his deepest feelings flowed into verse
with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity. Without
an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious
poet of France.
Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldiers post
in the body-guard of Louis XVIII. He now accepted
the position of attache to the embassy at Naples ; pub-
lished in 1823 his Nouvelles Meditations, and two years
later Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d' Harold (Byron's
Childe Harold) ; after which followed a long silence.
Secretary in 1824 to the legation at Florence, he aban-
doned after a time the diplomatic career, and on the
eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again as a
LAMARTINE 369
poet in his Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses ; travelled
in the East in company with his wife, and recorded
his impressions in the Voyage en Orient ; entered into
political life, at first a solitary in politics as he had been
in literature, but by degrees finding himself drawn more
and more towards democratic ideas. " Where will you
sit ?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber.
His smiling reply, "On the ceiling," was symbolical of
the fact; but from "the ceiling" his exalted oratory,
generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed,
descended with influence. Jocelyn (1836), La Chute dun
Ange (1838), the Recueillements Poetiques (1839), closed
the series of his poetical w r orks, though he did not wholly
cease from song.
In 1847 Lamartine's idealising Histoire des Girondins,
brilliant in its romantic portraiture, had the importance
of a political event. The Revolution of February placed
him for a little time at the head of affairs ; as he had
been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief hour
he was the soul of the political life of France. With
the victory of imperialism Lamartine retired into the
shade. He w r as more than sixty years of age ; he had
lost his fortune and was burdened with debt. His elder
years were occupied with incessant improvisations for
the booksellers histories, biographies, tales, criticism,
autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was
a gallant struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate
generosity of Napoleon III. he was at length relieved
without humiliating concessions. In 1869 Lamartine
died in his eightieth year.
He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just
ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made
him an irreclaimable optimist ; all that is base and ugly
370 FRENCH LITERATURE
in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his
luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew,
but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there
were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in reli-
gious faith and adoration. His power of vision was not
intense or keen ; his descriptions are commonly vague
or pale ; but no one could mirror more faithfully a state
of feeling divested of all material circumstance. The
pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack
the ear, but they penetrate to the soul. All the great
lyric themes God, nature, death, glory, melancholy,
solitude, regret, desire, hope, love he interpreted on
his instrument with a musician's inspiration. Unhappily
he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible
patience, which go to make a complete artist ; he impro-
vised admirably ; he refused to labour as a master of
technique ; hence his diffuseness, his negligences ; hence
the decline of his powers after the first spontaneous
inspiration was exhausted.
Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed
the best poems of his earliest volume. But the elegiac
singer aspired to be a philosophic poet, and, infusing his
ideas into sentiment and narrative, became the author of
Jocelyn and La Chute d'un Ange. Recalling and idealis-
ing an episode in the life of his friend the Abbe Dumont,
he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents not
yet a priest takes shelter among the mountains from
the Revolutionary terror ; how a proscribed youth,
Laurence, becomes his companion ; how Laurence is
found to be a girl ; how friendship passes into love ;
how, in order that he may receive the condemned
bishop's last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a
priest ; how the lovers part ; how Laurence wanders
LAMARTINE 371
into piteous ways of passion ; how Jocelyn attends her
in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills
and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who
chronicles events and feelings in his journal of joy and
of sorrow. Lamartine acknowledges that he had before
him as a model the idyl dear to him in childhood
Bernardin's Paul et Virginie.
The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed
as a fragment of that vast modern epopee, with humanity
for the hero, of which La Chute d'un Ange was another
fragment. The later poem, vast in dimensions, fantastic
in subject, negligent in style, is a work of Lamar-
tine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains
of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain.
The angel, enamoured of the maiden Dai'dha, becomes
human. Through gigantic and incoherent inventions
looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by
subjugation to the senses, as in Jocelyn we had seen
the type of humanity which ascends by virtue of aspira-
tions of the soul. It was a poor jest to say that the
title of his poem La CJiute d'un Ange described its
author. Lamartine had failed ; he could not handle so
vast a subject with plastic power ; but in earlier years
he had accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding
a late failure he had brought back the soul to poetry.
Ill
Among the romantic poets who made themselves
known between 1820 and 1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is
distinguished by the special character of his genius,
and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived
372 FRENCH LITERATURE
from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at
a later date, Musset, found models or suggestions in
his writings. He, though for a time closely connected
with the romantic school, really stands apart and alone.
Born in 1797, he followed the profession of his father,
that of arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the
disappointments of military service at the time of the
fall of the Empire and the Bourbon restoration. He
read eagerly in Greek literature, in the Old Testament,
and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early
as 1815 he wrote his admirable poem La Dryade, in which,
before Andre Chenier's verse had appeared, Chenier's
fresh and delicate feeling for antiquity was anticipated.
In 1822 his first volume, Pocmes, was published, includ-
ing the Helena, afterwards suppressed, and groups of
pieces classified as Antiques, Judaiques, and Modernes.
Already his Moise, majestic in its sobriety, was written,
though it waited four years for publication in the volume
of Poemes Antiques et Modernes (1826). Moses climbing
the slopes of Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy
burden of genius ; his one aspiration now is for the
sleep of death ; and it is the lesser leader Joshua who
will conduct the people into the promised land. The
same volume included Eloa, a romance of love which
abandons joy through an impulse of divine pity : the
radiant spirit Eloa, born from a tear of Christ, resigns
the happiness of heaven to bring consolation to the great
lost angel suffering under the malediction of God. Other
pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southern violence
of passion, and by the pass of Roncesvalles, with its
chivalric associations.
The novel of Cinq-Mars, which had a great success, is
a free treatment of history ; but Vigny's best work is
ALFRED DE VIGNY 373
rather the embodiment of ideas than the rendering of
historical matter. His Stello in its conception has some-
thing of kinship with Mo'ise ; in three prose tales relating
the sufferings of Chatterton, Chenier, and Gilbert, it illus-
trates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny's
military experience suggested another group of tales, the
Servitude et Grandeur Militaires ; the soldier in accepting
servitude finds his consolation in the duty at all costs of
strenuous obedience.
In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took
place his marriage one not unhappy, but of imperfect
sympathy to an English lady, Lydia Bunbury. His
interest in English literature was shown by translations
of Othello and the Merchant of Venice. The former was
acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who
worshipped Shakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who
bore the shock of hearing the unclassical word moucJioir
valiantly pronounced on the French stage. The triumph
of his drama of Chatterton (1835) "was overwhelming,
though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts.
Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy.
But with the representation of Chatterton, and at the
moment of his highest fame, he suddenly ceased from
creative activity. Never was his mind more energetic,
never was his power as an artist so mature ; but, ex-
cept a few wonderful poems contributed to the Revue
des Deux Mondes, and posthumously collected, nothing
was given by him to the world from 1835 to 1863, the
year of his death.
He had always been a secluded spirit ; external com-
panionship left him inwardly solitary; secret so Sainte-
Beuve puts it in his " tower of ivory " ; touching some
mountain-summit for a moment so Dumas describes
374 FRENCH LITERATURE
him if he folded his wings, as a concession to humanity.
A great disillusion of passion had befallen him ; but,
apart from this, he must have retreated into his own
sphere of ideas and of images, which seemed to him
to be almost wronged by an attempt at literary expres-
sion. He looked upon the world with a disenchanted
eye ; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself
and for all men ; without declamation or display, he re-
signed himself to a silent and stoical acceptance of the
lot of man ; but out of this calm despair arose a pas-
sionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for things evil,
such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. La Colere de
Samson gives majestic utterance to his despair of human
love ; his Mont des Oliviers, where Jesus seeks God in
vain, and where Judas lurks near, expresses his religious
despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, says Vigny, is
no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour
against the heavens or the earth ; he would meet death
silently when it comes, like the dying wolf of his poem
(La Mort du Loup), suffering but voiceless. Wealth and
versatility of imagination were not Vigny's gifts. His
dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them ; for
them he found apt imagery or symbol ; and in verse
which has the dignity of reserve and of passion con-
trolled to sobriety, he let them as it were involuntarily
escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the thinker
among the poets of his time, and when splendours of
colour and opulence of sound have passed away, the
idea remains. In fragments from his papers, published
in 1867, with the title Journal d'un Poete, the inner history
of Vigny's spirit can be traced.
VICTOR HUGO 375
IV
To present VICTOR HUGO in a few pages is to carve a
colossus on a cherry-stone. His work dominates half a
century. In the years of exile he began a new and
greater career. During the closing ten years his powers
had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even
with death he did not retire ; posthumous publications
astonished and perhaps fatigued the world.
Victor-Marie Hugo was born at Besangon on February
26, 1802, son of a distinguished military officer
" Mon pi;re vieux soldaf, nta mtre Vendeenne"
Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to
Italy in 1807 ; in Spain they halted at Ernani and at
Torquemada names remembered by the poet ; at
Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant,
alarmed the brothers Eugene and Victor. A schoolboy
in Paris, Victor Hugo rhymed his chivalric epic, his
tragedy, his melodrama "les betises que je faisais avant
ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his manuscript book
the words, " I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing."
At fifteen he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the
"enfant sublime" of Chateaubriand's or of Soumet's
praise.
Founder, with his brothers, of the Conservateur Litte-
raire, he entered into the society of those young aspirants
who hoped to renew the literature of France. In 1822
he published his Odes et Poesies Diverses, and, obtaining a
pension from Louis XVIII., he married his early play-
fellow Adele Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramas followed
in sw r ift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, his
25
376 FRENCH LITERATURE
domineering temper, his incessant activity, became the
acknowledged leader of the romantic school. In 1841
he was a member of the Academy ; four years later he
was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in 1848, the
year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Con-
stituant, on the Left in the Legislative Assembly, tending
more and more towards socialistic democracy. The
Empire drove him into exile exile first at Brussels,
then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in his
own imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued
demi-god on his sea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall
of the Empire, he returned to Paris, witnessed the siege,
was elected to the National Assembly, urged a con-
tinuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognising
Garibaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted
by the Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels
in the interests of his orphaned grandchildren, he was
requested to leave, on the ground of his zeal on behalf of
the fallen Communists ; he returned to Paris, and pleaded
in the Rappel for amnesty. In 1875 he was elected a
senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with
enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor
Hugo died. His funeral pomps were such that one
might suppose the genius of France itself was about to
be received at the Pantheon.
In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast
force of will operated amid inferior faculties. His
character was less eminent than his genius. If it is
vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for one's self
and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist,- never
was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied
than his. He was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend,
and did not perceive when the sublime became the
THE GENIUS OF HUGO 377
ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable
to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate
vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his
self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was neces-
sarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest
rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect,
the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination.
Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric,
could pass with him for ideas ; but his visions are some-
times thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was
leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His
laughter was rather boisterous thjan fine. He is a poet
who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle
psychology of lovers' hearts ; there was in him a vein of
robust sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he
knew their pretty ways ; a cynical critic might allege
that he exploited overmuch the tender domesticities.
His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined or
vague ; his feeling for colour was rather strong than
delicate ; his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of
light and shade ; his ear was awake to every utterance
of wind or wave ; phantoms of sound attacked his imagi-
nation ; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his own
sentiments, to material objects ; he took and gave back
the soul of things. Words for him were living powers;
language was a moving mass of significant myths, from
which he chose and which he aggrandised ; sensations
created images and words, and images and words created
ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now
a solitary breather through pipe or flute ; more often the
conductor of an orchestra.
To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France
is to say too little; the claim that he was the greatest
378 FRENCH LITERATURE
lyric poet of all literature might be urged. The power
and magnitude of his song result from the fact that in it
what is personal and what is impersonal are fused in one;
his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature
and of humanity
" Son dme aux miilc voix, que le Dieu gu'i7 adore
Mit an centre de tout comme un tcho sonore."
And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own
ideas, it becomes great as a reverberation of the sensa-
tions, the passions, and the thoughts of the world. He
did not soar tranquilly aloft and alone ; he was always
a combatant in the world and wave of men, or borne
joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius
was a long process. The Odes of 1822 and 1824, the
Odes et Ballades of 1826, Catholic and royalist in their
feeling, show in their form a struggling originality op-
pressed by the literary methods of his predecessors
J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This origin-
ality asserts itself chiefly in the Ballades. His early prose
romances, Han d Islande (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826)
the one a tale of the seventeenth-cent iry man-beast of
Norway, the other a tale of the generous St. Domingo
slave are challenges of youthful and extravagant roman-
ticism. Le Dernier Jour d'un Condauine '(1829) is a prose
study in the pathology of passion. The same year which
saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of
Les Orientales. These poems are also studies amazing
studies in colour, in form, in all the secrets of poetic
art. The East was popular Hugo was ever passionate
for popularity and Spain, which he had seen, is half-
Oriental. But of what concern is the East ? he had
seen a sunset last summer, and the fancy took him ; the
HUGO'S EARLY WORK 379
East becomes an occasion for marvellous combinations
of harmony and lustrous tinctures ; art for its own sake
is precious.
From 1827, when Cromwell appeared, to 1843, when
the epic in drama Les Burgraves failed, Hugo was a
writer for the stage, diverting tragedy from its true
direction towards lyrical melodrama. 1 In the operatic
libretto La Esmeralda (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was
free to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form.
The libretto was founded on his own romance Notre-
Danie de Paris (1831), an evocation, more imaginative
than historical, of the old city of the fifteenth century,
its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its
beauty ; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black
and white; things live in it more truly than persons;
the cathedral, by its tyrannous power and intenser life,
seems to overshadow the other actors. The tale is a
juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an antithesis of dark-
ness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted humanity
appeals for pity.
In the volume of verse which followed Les Orientales
after an interval of two years, Les Feuilles d' Autom'ne
(1831), Hugo is a master of his instrument, and does not
need to display his miracles of skill ; he is freer from
faults than in the poetry of later years, but not there-
fore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were
almost inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his
audacity. Here the lyrism is that of memory and of
the heart intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the
hearth and home, a sensibility to the tranquillising in-
fluences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a faith in
God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in
1 See pp. 391-393-
380 FRENCH LITERATURE
the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks
forth
" Etfajoute d ma lyre une corde tfairain?
The spirit of the Chants du Cre'spuscule (1835) is one of
doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the
bourgeois monarchy is already waning ; he is a satirist
of the present ; he sees two things that are majestic the
figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular flood-tide in
the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings.
But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness
of weltering mist. Les Voix Intericurcs (1837) resumes
the tendencies of the two preceding volumes ; the dead
Charles X. is reverently saluted ; the legendary Napoleon
is magnified ; the faith in the people grows clearer ; the
inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear;
the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry ;
Nature, in the symbolic La Vache, is the mother and
the exuberant nurse of all living things. In Les Rayons
et les Ombres (1840), Nature is not only the nurse, but the
instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with
spirit. Lamartine's Le Lac and Musset's Souvenir find a
companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in
the Tristesse d' Olympio ; reminiscences of childhood are
magically preserved in the poem of the Feuillantines.
From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent.
Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics.
A private grief oppressed his spirits. In 1843 his daughter
Leopoldine and her husband of a few short months were
drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much to
magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination
was the exile who launched his prose invective Napoleon
le Petit. A year later appeared Les Chatiments, in which
HUGO'S LATER WORK 381
satire, with some loss of critical discernment, is infused
with a passionate lyrical quality, unsurpassed in litera-
ture, and is touched at times with epic grandeur. The
Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France,
restored him to himself with all his superb power and
all his violences and errors of genius.
The volumes of Les Contemplations (1856) mark the
culmination of Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The
earlier pieces are of the past, from 1830 to 1843, and
resemble the poems of the past. A group of poems,
sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which
beauty and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling
faith in humanity, in nature, and in God. The concluding
pieces are in a greater manner. The visionary Hugo lives
and moves amid a drama of darkness and of light; gloom
is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom ;
and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in
song.
But a further development lay before him. The great
lyric poet was to carry all his lyric passion into an epic
presentation, in detached scenes, of the life of humanity.
The first part of La Legende des Siecles was published in
1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the birth of Eve
to ihe tiumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and
events unrolls before us ; gracious episodes relieve the
gloom ; beauty and sublimity go hand in hand ; in the
shadow the great criminals are pursued by the great
avengers. The spirit of Les Ch&timents is conveyed into
a view of universal history ; if kings are tyrants and
priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This
poem is the epopee of democratic passions.
The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's
romance Les Miscrables (1862). The subject now is
382 FRENCH LITERATURE
modern ; the book is rather the chaos of a prose epic
than a novel ; the hero is the high-souled outcast of
society ; everything presses into the pages ; they are turn
by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical
(with such philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humani-
tarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic ; a vast inven-
tion, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in
its interest, a nightmare in its tedium.
We have passed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is
not to be presented as a torso. In the tale Les Travail-
leurs de la Mer (1866) the choral voices of the sea cover
the thinness and strain of the human voices ; if the
writer's genius is present in L'Honune qui Rit (1869),
it often chooses to display its most preposterous atti-
tudes ; the better scenes of Quatre-vingt Treize (1874)
beguile our judgment into the generous concessions
necessary to secure an undisturbed delight. These are
Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the
feelings of youth with a difference, and performed happy
caprices of style in the Chansons des Rues et des Bois
(1865) ; sang the incidents and emotions of his country's
sorrow and glory in L' Annee Terrible (1872); and strange
contrast the poetry of baby land in L' Art d'etre Grand-
pere (1877). Volume still followed volume Le Pape, La
Pitie Supreme, Religions et Religion, L'Ane, Les Quatre
Vents de Esprit, the drama Torquemada. The best pages
in these volumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of
their author's writings ; the pages which force antithesis,
pile up synonyms, develop commonplaces in endless
variations, the pages which are hieratic, prophetic, apo-
calyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of our admiration.
The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo
legend : if theism was his faith, autotheism was his
ALFRED DE MUSSET 383
superstition. Yet it is easy to restore our loyalty, and
to rediscover the greatest lyric poet, the greatest master
of poetic counterpoint that France has known.
V
ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having
isolated himself from the general interests and affairs
of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth
or love, and the young of two generations were his
advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of
Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment
and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impres-
sionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around
him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire,
the void left by the passing away of religious faiths.
One thing was new and living poetry. Chenier's re-
mains had appeared ; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had
opened the avenues for the imagination ; Byron was
dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived.
Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ven-
tures ; he had been introduced, while still a boy, to the
Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of romance ;
at nineteen he published his first collection of poems,
Conies d' Espagne et d' Italic, and an adolescent Cherubin-
Don Juan of song found himself famous.
He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather
with the light effrontery of youth than with depth of
conviction ; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous,
blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant Byron
minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of
the pieces were well composed ; all had the " form and
384 FRENCH LITERATURE
feature of blown youth " ; the echoes of southern lands
had the fidelity and strangeness of echoes tossed from
Paris backwards ; certain passages and lines had a
classic grace ; it might even be questioned whether the
Ballade a la Lime was a challenge to the school of tradi-
tion, or a jest at the expense of his own associates.
A season of hesitation and of transition followed.
Musset was not disposed to play the part of the small
drummer-boy inciting the romantic battalion to the
double-quick. He began to be aware of his own in-
dependence. He was romantic, but he had wit and
a certain intellectual good-sense ; he honoured Racine
together with Hugo ; he could not merge his individu-
ality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity characteristic
of him, Musset was discourarged. It was not in him
to write great poetry of an impersonal kind ; his Nuit
Veniticnne had been hissed at the Odeon ; and what had
he to sing out of his own heart ? He resolved to make
the experiment. Three years after his first volume a
second appeared, which announced by its title that,
while still a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage ;
the Spectacle dans un Fauteuit declared that, though his
glass was small, it was from his own glass that he would
drink.
The glass contained the wine of love and youth
mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama La Coupe
et les Levres he exhibited libertine passion seeking
alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of
attaining self-recovery ; in Namouna, hastily written to
fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit
of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the
lures of sensual desire ; the comedy A quoi revent les
jeunes Filles, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's
MUSSET'S GREATER POETRY 385
device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of
wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset
had emancipated himself from the Cenacle, and would
neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local
colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes.
Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared
Rolla,i\\Q poem which marks the culmination of Musset's
early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius ;
the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulg-
ence, is not quite a disbeliever in love ; through passion
he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of
death.
At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in
Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months
of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagi-
nation, but in his own experience. After a time calm
gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue
of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivo-
lously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In Les Nuits
two of these (Mai, Octobre) inspired by the Italian joy and
pain he speaks simply and directly from the heart in
accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant
friend, the Muse, and love risfng from the grave of love,
shall be his consolers
" Aprls avoir souffert, ilfaut souffrir encore ;
Ilfaut aimer sans cesse, aprds avoir aim<f."
Musset's powers had matured through suffering ; the
Lettre a Lamartine, the Espoir en Dieu, the Souvenir, the
elegy A la Malibran, the later stanzas Apres une Lecture
(1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset the Musset
who will live.
At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came
3 86 FRENCH LITERATURE
the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind ; but the years
were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, Le RJiin
Allemand, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received
him. " Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academi-
cian ; the ungracious reply, " II s'absinthe trop," told
the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended
by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died.
Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of
beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful
converse these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas;
he lacked the constructive imagination ; with great capa-
cities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion
for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Con-
fession (fun Enfant du Siecle, has borne the lapse of time
ill. " J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest
way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book,
that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset
to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm
of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings
of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-
Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-
dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the pre-
sence of the relenting grandfather " Bonjour, papa," has
a pretty innocence. Le Fils de Titien returns to the theme
of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. Frederic et Ber-
nerette and Mimi Pinson may be said to have created
the poetic literature of the grisette gay and good, or
erring and despairful making a flower of what had
blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed.
Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac
poems, Musset's best Comedies and Proverbes (proverbial
sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place.
Written in prose for readers of the Revue dcs Deux Mondcs,
MUSSET'S DRAMATIC WORK 387
their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when
the actress Madame Allan presented Un Caprice and 11
faut quun Porte soit ouverte ou ferine e at St. Petersburg.
The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political con-
spiracy, Lorenzaccio, was an effort beyond the province
and the powers of Musset. His Andre del Sarto, a tragic
representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife
and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier
fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of
romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring,
as On ne badine pas avec I' Amour, Les Caprices de Mari-
anne, Le Chandelier, II ne faut jurer de rien^ that Musset
showed how romantic art could become in a high sense
classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of
fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame
de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces
of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance
of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the
artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love,
and still repeated love ; sentiment is relieved by the play
of gaiety ; the grotesque approaches the beautiful ; we
sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not
very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest
of our own great enchanter.
VI
Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry
of Musset. Detachment from self and complete sur-
render to the object is the law of Gautier's most char-
acteristic work ; he is an eye that sees, a hand that
moulds and colours that is all. A child of the South,
388 FRENCH LITERATURE
born at Tarbes in i8n,THEOPHiLE GAUTIER was a pupil
in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend
the poet Gerard de Nerval having summoned him to
take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the
skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a
defaulter. His first volume, Poesies, appeared in 1830,
and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic
manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sor-
cery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Come'die de la
Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust,
Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and
glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm
was genuine and ardent. The Orientates was his poetic
gospel ; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in
which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most
exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in
these early poems of Gautier are themes into which
he works coloured and picturesque details ; sentiment,
ideas are of value to him so far as they can be ren-
dered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured
with vivid pigments.
It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he
believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day,
year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-
exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like
fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than
to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of
literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier
seventeenth -century poets Theophile, Cyrano, Saint-
Amant, Scarron, and others published in 1844, together
with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and
the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the
request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les
GAUTIER'S PROSE 389
Progres de la Poesie Fran^aise depuis i8jo. A reader of
that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary
reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and
softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays
aloft.
In 1840 Gautier visited Spain ; afterwards he saw
Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He
travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic
sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in
colour ; the world was for him so much booty for the
eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied
searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual
impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown
dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which
he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was
in the manner of some admired painter ; he looked on
nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau.
The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that
flashed or glowed ; he chose and set them with the skill
and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At
Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in pre-
sence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek
who had strayed into the Middle Ages ; on the faith of
Notre-Dame de Paris he had loved the old cathedrals ;
"the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the
Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe."
Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of
astonishing the bourgeois ; yet if he condescended to
ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value
than those of the philistine. Mademoiselle de Maupin has
lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immor-
ality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth; such
purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid
390 FRENCH LITERATURE
grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved
life and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously
constructs strangeness the sense of mystery he did not
in truth possess on a basis of exactly carved and exactly
placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors
strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the
old days of Louis XIII., Le Capitaine Fracasse, suggested
doubtless by Scarron's Roman Comiqtic, and patiently
retouched during a quarter of a century.
Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces
of the Emaux et Camees. He is not without sensibility,
but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or
ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of
the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-
engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into
coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is
much. He values words as sounds, and can combine
them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on
around him ; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the
colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering
hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the
city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier,
Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets
and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weak-
ness ? His work survives and will survive by virtue of
its beauty beauty somewhat hard and material, but
such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By
directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way
for the Parnassien school, and may even be recognised
as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.
These Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier are
the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-cen-
tury romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA 391
enormous cometary apparition. There was also a via
lactea, from which a well-directed glass can easily dis-
entangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery : Sainte-Beuve, a
critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment
in the Vie, Poesies et Penstfes de Joseph Delorme; a singer
of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and
tender memories in the Consolations and the Pense'es
(TAoiit; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches ;
Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the
lambes, lover of Italian art and nature in // Pianto ;
Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his Marie, of Breton
wilds and provincial works and ways ; Gerard de Nerval,
Hegesippe Moreau, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and
paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for
the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.
VII
The weaker side of -the romantic school is apparent in
the theatre. It put forth a magnificent programme of
dramatic reform, which it was unable to carry out. The
preface to Victor Hugo's Cromwell (1827) is the earliest
and the most important of its manifestoes. The poetry
of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical ; that
of its youth was epic ; the poetry of its maturity is
dramatic. The drama aims at truth before all else ;
it seeks to represent complete manhood, beautiful and
revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever is found
in nature should be found in art ; from multiple ele-
ments an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sove-
reignty of imagination ; unity of time, unity of place
are worthless conventions ; unity of action remains, and
26
392 FRENCH LITERATURE
must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify the
principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, in-
capable of presentation on the stage ; the large painting
of life for which he pleaded, and which he did not attain,
is of a kind more suitable to the novel than to the drama.
Cromwell, which departs little from the old rules respect-
ing time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of
speeches in place of action, with the question of the
hero's ambition for kingship as a centre ; its personages
are lay figures draped in the costumes of historical
romance.
The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical ; the
movement to which he belonged was also essentially
lyrical, a movement for the emancipation of the personal
element in art ; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic
that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When,
in 1830, his Hernani was presented at the Theatre Fran-
c^ais, a strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired
brigade of young supporters engaged in a melee with
those spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition.
" Kill him ! he is an Academician," was heard above
the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed in the
thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of Gautier's party
was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory ;
but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are
beings of a fantastic world. In Marion Delorme, in Le
Rot s amuse, in the prose-tragedy Lucrece Borgia, Victor
Hugo develops a favourite theme by a favourite method
the moral antithesis of some purity of passion surviving
amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue dis-
covered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in
violent contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice
of whatever remains to her of honour ; the moral de-
HUGO'S DRAMATIC WORK 393
formity of Lucrece is purified by her instinct of maternal
love ; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his
devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character
is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Bias,
like Marion Delonne and Hernani, has extraordinary
beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its
lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is
an incredible phantasmagoria. Angela is pure melo-
drama; Marie Tudor is the melodrama of history. Les
Burgraves rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from
poetry to declamation ; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the
reader please, symbolic ; it is much that it ought not
to be, much that is admirable and out of place ; failing
in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain sublimity. The
logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in tragic
creation are essentials ; no heights or depths of poetry
which is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which
do not accept the conditions proper to their kind.
The tragedy of Torquemada, strange in conception,
wonderful and wonderfully unequal in imaginative
power, was an inspiration of Hugo's period of exile,
wrought into form in his latest years. The dramas of
the earlier period, opening with an historical play too
enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with Les Bur-
graves, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to re-
volutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the
bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and
mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired
harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages
were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evoca-
tion possessed too often neither historic nor human
truth ; it consisted in " local colour," and local colour
meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac.
394 FRENCH LITERATURE
Yet a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing
of unity in coherent action and well-studied character,
can a centre be provided by some philosophical or
pseudo - philosophical idea ? Victor Hugo, wealthy in
imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas ; in grandiose
prefaces he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodi-
ment of certain abstract conceptions. A great poet is
not necessarily a philosophical poet. Hugo's interpreta-
tions of his own art are only evidence of the fact that
a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity.
Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But
it is not by its philosophical symbolism that his Chatter-
ton lives ; it is by virtue of its comparative strength of
construction, by what is sincere in its passion, what is
genuine in its pathos, and by the character of its heroine,
Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both
Vigny and Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS
(1803-70). Before the battle of Hernani he had unfolded
the romantic banner in his Henri III. et sa Cour (1829)" ; it
dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations,
its ever-changing display of the stage properties of his-
torical romance. His Antony, of two years later, parent
of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern
life, exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with
a bastard, a seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for
its ornaments all those atrocities which fascinate a crowd
whose nerves can bear to be agreeably shattered. Some-
thing of abounding vitality, of tingling energy, of im-
petuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for Antony, the
Tour de Nesle, and his other plays. The trade in horrors
lost its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously
commercial in the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in
1843 the year of Hugo's unsuccessful Les Burgraves
DELAVIGNE: SCRIBE 395
a pseudo-classical tragedy, the Lucrece of Ponsard, was
presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was great ; youth
and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant
than in the days of Hernani ; it seemed as if good sense
had returned to the theatre. 1
Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric
poetry by his patriotic odes, Les Messe'niennes, suggested
by the military disasters of France. His dramatic work
is noteworthy, less for the writer's talent than as indi-
cating the influence of the romantic movement in check-
ing the development of classical art. Had he been free
to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have
remained a creditable disciple of Racine ; he yielded to
the stream, and timidly approached the romantic leaders
in historical tragedy. Once in comedy he achieved suc-
cess ; UEcoU des Vieillards has the originality of present-
ing an old husband who is generous in heart, and a
young wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity.
Comedy during the second quarter of the century had
a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene Scribe, an
incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811
onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems
to recall that of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His
art was not all commerce ; he knew and he loved the
stage ; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared
little for truth of character, for beauty of form ; the
theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves ; of
these he was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in
another art when he tosses his bewildering balls, or
smiles at the triumph of his inexplicable surprises.
1 The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to restore to favour the
classical theatre of Racine and Corneille.
CHAPTER IV
THE NOVEL
I
THE novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself
to every tendency of the age ; it has endeavoured to
revive the past, to paint the present, to embody a social
or political doctrine, to express private and personal
sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart, to
idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination.
The literature of prose fiction produced by writers who
felt the influence of the romantic movement tended on
the one hand towards lyrism, the passionate utterance
of individual emotion George Sand's early tales are
conspicuous examples ; on the other hand it turned to
history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evoca-
tion of former ages. The most impressive of these
evocations was assuredly Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.
It was not the earliest ; Vigny's Cinq-Mars preceded
Notre-Dame by five years. The writer had laboriously
mastered those details which help to make up the
romantic wise en scene ; but he sought less to interpret
historical truth by the imagination than to employ the
material of history as a vehicle for what he conceived
to be ideal truth. In Merimee's Chronique de Charles IX.
(1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the histori-
396
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 397
cal, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present ; it
skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of
history.
Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his ima-
gination as a poet ; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic ;
as a reconstitution of history their value is little or
is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of
Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the
animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible
invention of Les Trots Mousquetaires and its high-spirited
fellows. There were times when no company was so
inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos,
and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas'
history is untrue, his characters superficial, his action
incredible ; we admit it, and we are caught again by
the flash of life, the fanfaronade of adventure. We
throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save
Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster
than his hand or any human hand could obey its
orders ; the mine of his inventive faculty needed a com-
mercial company and an army of diggers for its ex-
ploitation. He constituted himself the managing director
of this company ; twelve hundred volumes are said to
have been the output of the chief and his subordinates ;
the work ceased to be literature, and became mere com-
merce. The money that Dumas accumulated he reck-
lessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius
decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous propor-
tions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid
the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war.
398 FRENCH LITERATURE
II
HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of
Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though
winning the admiration of Merimee and the praise of
Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about
1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood,
the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him
the greatest psychologist of the century ; M.-Zola, doing
violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor ;
M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth-
century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters.
During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride
in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt,
during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural
sensibility ; in later years this reserve was pushed to
affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness
and energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of
Italian manners and Italian music, he chose Milan for
his place of abode. The eighteenth-century materialists
were the masters of his intellect ; " the only excuse for
God," he declared, " is that he does not exist " ; in man
he saw a being whose end is pleasure, w r hose law is
egoism, and who affords a curious field for studying
the dynamics of the passions. He honoured Napoleon
as an incarnation of force, the greatest of the condottieri.
He loved the Italian character because the passions in
Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks of
nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from
ennui, and turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon
every operation of his heart. Fearing to be duped, he
became the dupe of his own philosophy. He aided the
romantic movement by the paradox that all the true
HENRI BEYLE 399
classical writers were romantic in their own day they
sought to please their time ; the pseudo-classical writers
attempt to maintain a lifeless tradition. But he had little
in common with the romantic school, except a love for
Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local colour, and an
interest in the study of passion ; the effusion and exalta-
tion of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry,"
and often succeeded to perfection.
His analytical study De I' Amour, resting on a sensual
basis, has all the depth and penetration which is possible
to a shallow philosophy. His notes on travel and art
anticipate in an informal way the 'method of criticism
which became a system in the hands of Taine ; in a
line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the resultant
of environing forces. His novels are studies in the
mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy,
which had a happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must
seek a new career in Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the
low-born hero of Le Rouge et le Noin, rinding the red
coat impossible, must don the priestly black as a cloak
for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he
ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. La
Chartreuse de Parme exhibits the manners, characters,
intrigues of nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable
episode which gives a soldier's experiences of the field
of Waterloo. In the artist's plastic power Beyle was
wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious observations
in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not
constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone
for the intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to
its use, else it will grind down or break the blade. In
1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate his expatriation by
the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.
400 FRENCH LITERATURE
HI
Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is
tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand ; but from
her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic
narrative ; and while she idealised,, she observed, incor-
porating in her best work the results of a patient and
faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied
to whatever she wrote ; offspring of her idealism or her
realism, it is always in a true sense poetic.
LuciLE-AuRORE DUPIN,. a descendant of Marshal
Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieu-
tenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin a child
at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early
years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her
grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in
temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent
imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral
heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little
peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes
of life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions
made up her earliest education. Already endless stories
shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was
sent to be educated in a Paris convent ; from the bois-
terous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of
a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to
heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten
when afterwards she wrote Spiridion. The country
cooled her devout ardour ; she read widely, poets, his-
torians, philosophers, without method and with bound-
less delight ; the Genie du Christianisme replaced the
Imitation; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand,
GEORGE SAND 401
and romance in her heart put on the form of melan-
choly. At eighteen the passive Aurore was married to
M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of
those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded
union a happiness. Two children were born ; and
having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance,
Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and
daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in
the capital.
Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-
cases and snuff-boxes ; happily her hopes received
small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in
journalism under her friend Delatouche ; she proved
wholly wanting in cleverness; her' imagination had
wings ; it could not hop on the perch ; before she had
begun the beginning of an article the column must
end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted
a novel Rose et Blanche. " Sand " and Sandeau were
fraternal names ; a countryman of Berri was tradition-
ally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who
traversed the quais and streets in masculine garb, should
be GEORGE SAND.
To write novels was to her only a process of nature ;
she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with
scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with
her characters ; until five in the evening, while her hand
guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the
next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written
itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she
composed mechanically ; her stories were not manu-
factured; they grew grew with facility and in free
abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and
Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance -of love.
402 FRENCH LITERATURE
In Indiana, Valentine, Leila, Jacques, she vindicated the
supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical
cries of a heart that had been wounded ; protests
against the crime of loveless marriage, against the
tyranny of man, the servitude of woman ; pleas for
the individualism of the soul superficial in thought,
ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to
passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in
descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had
translated her private experiences into romance ; yet she,
the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund
of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius,
while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen
with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and
blameful in conduct she might be for a season ; she
wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of
Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years ;
but w r hen the inevitable rupture came she could return
to her better self.
Through Andre, Simon, Mauprat the last a tale of love
subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man her
art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly
accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of
ideas, the full significance and relations of which she
failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences
stronger than her own of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin,
of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious
sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled
in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism.
From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of
nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of
social reform. Her novels Consuelo, Jeanne, Le Meunier
d'Angibault, Le Pech<? de M. Antoine, become expositions
IDYLLIC TALES 403
of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development
to advocate a cause. The art suffers. Jeanne, so admir-
able in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humani-
tarian symbolism; Consuelo, in which the writer studies
so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself
in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious de-
clamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of
passion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire,
view of life was great. George Sand was finding her
way.
Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner,
she had found her way ; her third manner was attained
before the second had lost its attraction. La Mare au
Diable belongs to the year 1846 ; La Petite Fadette, to
the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever
an optimist, hailed with joy ; Francois le Champi is but
two years later. In these delightful tales she returns
from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to
humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie.
The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to
French literature; the better soul of rural France, George
Sand found deep within herself ; she had read the ex-
ternal circumstances and incidents of country life with
an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student
who dignifies his collection of human documents with
the style and title of realism in art ; with a sense of
beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself
in what she saw ; her feeling for nature is realised in
gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature.
In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri
to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic
together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely
good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren,
404 FRENCH LITERATURE
and romances Jean de la Roche, Le Marquis de Villemer,
and the rest for her other grandchildren the public. The
soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must
lean upon a stronger, woman's arm, of the girl neither
child nor fully adult she entered into with deepest and
truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic
man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best,
flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without com-
motion, harmonious without complex involutions, can
mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland
river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent
utterance of her declining years. " Ne detruisez pas la
verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand
died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us
intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous,
and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season
of old age.
IV
George Sand may be described as an " idealist," if we
add the words " with a remarkable gift for observation."
Her great contemporary HONORS DE BALZAC is named
a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by
phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799
at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commis-
sariat-agent, Honore de Balzac, after some training in
the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve.
With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a
face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large
egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might
shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to
HONORS DE BALZAC 405
fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at.
His tragedy Cromwell was condemned by all who saw
the manuscript ; his novels were published, and lie deep
in their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried
the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and suc-
ceeded in encumbering himself with debt. At length in
1829 Le Dernier Chouan, a half-historical tale of Brittany
in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a
measure of favour.
Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with
journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing,
in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, Le Maison du Chat-
qui-pelote, which relates the sorrows of the draper's
daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by
an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to
wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he
died, exhausted by the passion of his brain, his own life
was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagina-
tion. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of
them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Some-
times for a little while he wandered away from his desk.
More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth
by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were
adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence
itself is summed up in the volumes of his Human Comedy.
He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagi-
nation ; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude
material on which to work. At six in the evening he re-
tired to sleep ; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his
brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page
of manuscript, until the noon of day released him. So
it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intem-
perance of toil had worn the strong man out.
406 FRENCH LITERATURE
There is something gross in Balzac's genius ; he has
little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine
self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into
the life of refined society, an imperfect sense of natural
beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equi-
valent of spiritual mysteries ; he is monarchical without
the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without
the sentiment of religion ; he piles sentence on sentence,
hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn.
Did. he love his art for its own sake ? It must have been
so ; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power,
as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.
Within the gross body of his genius, however, an in-
tense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a
perception of all that can be ssen and handled, an
eager interest in reality, .a vast passion for things, an in-
exhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a
feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of
the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and
defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of
the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its
meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its
pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a
desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the
vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his
vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic
illumination sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, some-
times gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder
to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the
eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could
evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and
could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision
from which escape is impossible.
BALZAC'S GENIUS 407
The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace
and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded
Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady;
still harder though he tried and half succeeded to con-
ceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the
airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bour-
geois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler
was his special sphere. He studied its various elements
in their environment ; a street, a house, a chamber is as
much to him as a human being, for it is part of the
creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its
nature, limiting its action. He has created a population
of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac
does not fail, each of these is a complete individual ; in
the prominent figures a controlling passion is the centre
of moral life the greed of money, the desire for distinc-
tion, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal
affection. The individual exists in a group ; power cir-
culates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his
tale ; the environment is an accomplice in the action ;
power circulates from member to member of the group;
finally, group and group enter into correspondence or
conflict ; and still above the turmoil is heard the ground-
swell of the tide of Paris.
The change from the Renes and Obermanns of melan-
choly romance was great. But in the government of
Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed ; and Balzac
hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his
greatest years, which include the Peau de Chagrin, Eugenie
Grandet, La Recherche del' Absolu, LePere Goriot, and other
masterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a
Homeric catalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived
the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired
27
408 FRENCH LITERATURE
their collective title, La Com^die Humaine, in 1842. He
would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole
social life of his time ; " the administration, the church,
the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie,
the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists,
the men of letters, the actors, . . . the shopkeepers of
every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his
vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes
from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, politi-
cal, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in nar-
rative and analytic treatises on the passions. The spirit
of system took hold upon Balzac ; he had, in common
with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with
the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas ; to observe, to analyse,
to evoke with his imagination was not enough ; he also
would be among the philosophers and Balzac's philo-
sophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal.
Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie
his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes
Drolatiques, in which the pseudo- antique Rabelaisian
manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone
for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the
sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.
V
Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical ?
Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserv-
ing one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience
only with an occasional look of superior irony ? Such
was the task essayed by PROSPER MERIMEE (1803-70).
With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle,
PROSPER ME*RIMEE 409
whose ideas were influential on his mind, Merimee pos-
sessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill,
in which Beyle was deficient. " He is a gentleman,"
said Cousin, and the words might serve for Merimee's
epitaph ; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God
Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing
according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray
no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge
no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be
superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity
of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness ;
he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from
emphasis ; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently
disguised ; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the
pleasure of mystification for his private amusement.
Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to
be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and
yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous.
Such a gentleman was Prosper Merimee. He had
the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's
shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth
as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comedienne. His
Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary
Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merime'e could smile gently
at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the
short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known
how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and
Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful
fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced
fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced
such works as Carmen and Colombo., each one a little
masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local
colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art.
410 FRENCH LITERATURE
The public must not suppose that he cares for his
characters or what befell them ; he is an archaeologist,
a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Merimee
had more sensibility than he would confess ; it shows
itself for moments in the posthumous Lettres d une
Inconnue ; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical
pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism
of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted ; it
is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve. 1
1 It is one of Merimee's merits that he awakened in France an interest in
Russian literature.
CHAPTER V
HISTORY LITERARY CRITICISM
I
THE progress of historical literature in the nineteenth
century was aided by the change which had taken place
in philosophical opinion ; instead of a rigid system of
abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages
as superstition, had come an eclecticism guided by
spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and
various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest ;
the breach of continuity from mediaeval to modern
times was repaired ; the revolutionary spirit of in-
dividualism gave way before a broader concern for
society ; the temper in politics grew more cautious
and less dogmatic ; the great events of recent years en-
gendered historical reflection ; literary art was renewed
by the awakening of the romantic imagination.
The historical learning of the Empire is represented by
Daunou, an explorer in French literature ; by Ginguene,
the literary historian of Italy ; by Michaud, who devoted
his best years to a History of the Crusades. In his De la
Religion (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration
days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment,
cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a
free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in
412 FRENCH LITERATURE
his Histoire des Franqais, investigated such sources as
were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in
a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not
merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of states-
men. His wide, though not profound, erudition com-
prehended Italy as well as ' France ; the Histoire des
Republiques Italiennes is the chart of a difficult labyrinth.
The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains
from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims
at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante
in his Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne. The precept of
Quintilian expresses his rule : " Scribitur ad narrandum,
non ad probandum."
Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its
historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented
by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie ; socialism, by
Louis Blanc; a patriotic Caesarism, by Thiers; the de-
mocratic school, by Michelet and Quinet ; philosophic
liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.
AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way.
Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of
the past, were his first inspiration ; at a later time the
influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott,
"the master of historical divination," confirmed him in
his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the
scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary
to Saint- Simon, and under his influence proposed a
scheme for a community of European peoples which
should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he
parted from his master, to pursue his way in inde-
pendence. It seemed to him that the social condition
and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins
in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman
AUGUSTIN THIERRY 413
Conquest of England. As he read the great collection
of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew
indignant against the modern travesties named history,
indignant against writers without erudition, who could
not see, and writers without imagination, who could not
depict. The conflict of races Saxons and Normans in
England, Gauls and Franks in his own country re-
mained with him as a dominant idea, but. he would not
lose himself in generalisations ; he would involve the
abstract in concrete details ; he would see, and he
would depict. There was much philosophy in abstain-
ing from philosophy overmuch. The Lettres sur I'His-
toire de France were followed in 1825 by the Histoire de
la Conquete de I' Angleterre, in which the art of histo-
riography attained a perfection previously unknown.
Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached
the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the
dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived.
As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary
politics. His political ardour had given him that his-
torical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the
soul behind an ancient text.
In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies,
suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his
distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries above
all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his
wife, he pursued his work. The Re'cits des Temps Me'ro-
vingiens and the Essai sur V Histoire de la Formation du
Tiers Etat were the labours of a sightless scholar. His
passion for perfection was greater than ever ; twenty,
fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was ren-
dered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis
made its steady advance ; still he kept his intellect above
4 i4 FRENCH LITERATURE
his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22,
1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and
dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase
for the revised Conquete. On the same day, " insatiable
of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in sub-
stance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French
historians ; but, more than any other, he was an
initiator.
The life of FRANCOIS GUIZOT great and venerable
name is a portion of the history of his country. Born
at Nimes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family,
he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of
Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity,
simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage,
imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the
liberality and the narrowness of the middle classes, which
he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he
conceived, lies before the historian : he must ascertain
facts ; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, study-
ing the anatomy and the physiology of society ; finally,
he must present the external physiognomy of the facts.
Guizot was not endo\ved with the artist's imagination ;
he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style ; he
was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the
medium of ideas ; he does not in his pages evoke a
world of animated forms, of passionate hearts, of vivid
incidents ; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to
arrive at principles ; he considers those forces in their
play one upon another.
The Histoire Generate de la Civilisation en Europe and
the Histoire de la Civilisation en France consist of lectures
delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne. 1 Guizot
1 The History of Civilisation in France closes with the fourteenth century.
FRANCOIS GUIZOT 415
recognised that the study of institutions must be pre-
ceded by a study of the society which has given
them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not
merely the development of communities, but also that
of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held,
was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France,
where, more than in other countries, intellectual and
social development have moved hand in hand, where
general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied
great events and public revolutions. The "key to the
meaning of French history he found in the tendency
towards national and political unity. From the tenth
to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-
operation or in conflict royalty, the feudal system,
the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell ; a great
monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind
asserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant
reformation. The tiers etat \vas constantly advancing
in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant
in the seventeenth century, declined in the century
that followed ; the power of the people increased. In
modern society the elements of national life are reduced
to two the government on the one hand, the people
on the other ; how to harmonise these elements is the
problem of modern politics. As a capital example for
the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early
work, made a special study of the great English revolu-
tion of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the
preceding century, the revolution was religious and not
political. In France, of the succeeding century, the
revolution was political and not religious. The rare
good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit
of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom
416 FRENCH LITERATURE
ruled together, and co-operated towards a common
result.
The work of FRANCOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent
for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has
been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality
Mignet's mind was too studious of facts to be'dominated
by a theory. He recognised the great forces which
guide and control events ; he recognised also the power
and freedom of the individual will. His early Histoire
de la Revolution Fran^aise is a sane and lucid arrange-
ment of material that came to his hands in chaotic
masses. His later and more important writings deal
with his special province, the sixteenth century ; his
method, as he advanced, grew more completely ob-
jective ; we discern his ideas through the lines of a
well-proportioned architecture.
The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method
of patient induction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUE-
VILLE (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon
of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investiga-
tion to America, which he had visited on a public
mission, he investigated the political organisation, the
manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought
and feeling of the United States as influenced by the
democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal
in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He re-
garded the progress of democracy in the modern world
as inevitable ; he perceived the dangers formidable for
society and for individual character which accompany
that progress ; he believed that by foresight and wise
ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The
fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in
Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from
TOCQUEVILLE: TRIERS 417
America to France, he designed to disengage from the
tangle of events the true historical significance of the
Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancien Regime et la
Revolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a
work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he
saw that all was not progress ; the centralisation of
power under the old regime remained, and was rendered
even more formidable than before ; the sentiment of
equality continued to advance in its inevitable career ;
unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its com-
panion, its moderator, or its guide.
ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same
time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the
French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal prin-
ciples were held in common by the young authors. Their
methods differed widely : Mignet's orderly and compact
narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement ;
Thiers' Histoire was copious, facile, brilliant, more just
in its general conception than exact in statement, a
plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist
reaction of the day, and not without influence in pre-
paring the spirit of the country for the approaching Re-
volution of July. His Histoire du Consulat et de I' Empire
(1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity;
journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the
chief of stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be
remembered was this vast record of his country's glory.
He had an appetite for facts ; no detail the price of
bread, of soap, of candles was a matter of indifference
to him ; he could not show too many things, or show
them too clearly ; his supreme quality was intelligence ;
his passion was the pride of patriotism ; his foible was the
vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He
418 FRENCH LITERATURE
was a liberal ; but Napoleon summed up France, and
won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain,
who ''made war with his genius and politics with his
passions," must be for ever magnified. The coup d'etat
of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal his-
torian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend.
The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsur-
passed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile,
abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing
seems to intervene between the object and the reader
who has become a spectator ; a style negligent at times,
and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a
lucid presentation of things.
JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of
the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul
of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant
seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His
early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of
the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful
printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire
for his household ; but he resolved that his son should
receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive
organisation, knew cold and hunger ; he watched his
mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health.
Two sources of consolation he found the Imitation,
which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the
Museum of French monuments, which made him forget
all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries.
Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never
lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents
with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy
country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales,
and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's
-MICHELET 419
vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was
irresistible.
In 1827 he published his earliest works, the Precis de
I' Histoire Moderne, a modest survey of a wide field, in
which genius illuminated scholarship, and a translation
of the Scienza Nuova of Vico, the master who impressed
him with the thought that humanity is in a constant pro-
cess of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas.
The Histoire Romaine and the Introduction a I' Histoire
Universelle followed ; the latter a little book, written with
incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of
July. His friend Quinet had taught him to see in his-
tory an ever-broadening combat for freedom in Miche-
let's words, "an eternal July," and the exposition of this
idea was of the nature of a philosophical entrancement.
A teacher at the Ecole Normale, appointed chief of
the historical section of the National Archives in 1831,
Guizot's substitute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor
of history and morals at the College de France in 1838,
Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of
his land. The Histoire de France, begun in 1830, was
completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of
the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author
resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an
appendix on the nineteenth century.
A passionate searcher among original sources, pub-
lished and unpublished, handling documents as if they
were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms
of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through
these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by
an immense pity for the obscure generations of human
toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer,
Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in
420 FRENCH LITERATURE
indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and
emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to
resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that his
eminent predecessors Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry
had each envisaged history from some special point of
view. Each had too little of the outward body or too
little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to
hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead
centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word.
It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an
act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea
of the race : the race is much, but the people does not
march in the air ; it has a geographical basis ; it draws
its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the
moment of his narrative when France began to have a
life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its
geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius
of each region are studied as if each were a separate
living creature, and the character of France itself is dis-
covered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts.
Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the
sadness of their torpor and their violence ; ye't humanity
was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and
the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of
the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the
mediaeval period everything seems to droop and decay :
no ! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that
the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was
incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people.
By the thirteenth year of his labours 1843 Michelet
had traversed the mediaeval epoch, and reached the close
of the reign of Louis XI. There he paused. Seeing one
day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which
MICHELET 421
the kings of France received their consecration, a group
or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in
stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith
of the people should be confirmed within his own soul
before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the
great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening
centuries, and was at work during eight years from
1845 to 1853 on the French Revolution. He found a
hero for his revolutionary epic in the people.
The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in
which, the earlier Revolution could be judiciously in-
vestigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their
democratic zeal the passions connected with an anti-
clerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was dis-
played in Des Jesuites, and Du Pretre, de la Femme et de la
Famille. When the historian returned to the sixteenth
century his spirit had undergone a change : he adored
the Middle Ages ; but was it not the period of the domi-
nation of the Church, and how could it be other than
evil ? He could no longer be a mere historian ; he
must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of
the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion,
are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less
balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between
Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his
ideas and his passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.
Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the
College de France, lost also his post in the Archives
upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the
Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home,
near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched
the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon
his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people ; he
422 FRENCH LITERATURE
would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk the
bird, the insect ; he would interpret the inarticulate soul
of the mountain and the sea. He studied other docu-
ments the documents of nature with a passion of love,
read their meanings, and mingled as before his own
spirit with theirs. L'Ozseau, L' Insecte, La Mer, La Mon-
tagne, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the
external world, rather than essays in science ; often ex-
travagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and un-
controlled in imagination, but always the betrayals of
genius.
Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such
as readily strike an English reader. His rash generali-
sations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement,
his verbiage assuming the place of ideas, his romantic
excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility
to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality,
his insistence on physiological details, his quick and
irregular utterance these trouble at times his imagi-
native insight, and mar his profound science in docu-
ments. He died at Hyeres in 1874, hoping that God
would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the
joys promised to those who have sought and loved.
EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-
in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born
at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother,
approached the study of literature and history with that
tendency to large vues d' ensemble which was natural to
his mind, and which had been strengthened by disciple-
ship to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience,
generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and
was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty inten-
tions, in his Ahasverus (1833) the wandering Jew, type
EDGAR QUINET 423
of humanity in its endless Odyssey in his Napoleon, his
Promethee, his vast encyclopaedic allegory Merlin I'En-
chanteur (1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself
to the rhetoric of the intellect.
In the Genie des Religions Quinet endeavoured to
exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of
civilisation, giving its special character to the political
and social idea. La Revolution, which is perhaps his
most important work, attempts to replace the Revolu-
tionary hero-worship, the- Girondin and Jacobin legends,
by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events.
The principles of modern society and the principles of
the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incap-
able of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders
to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of
their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed,
the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes
of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades ; the
Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like
Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature.
La Creation (1870) exhibits the science of nature and
that of human history as presenting the same laws and
requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy
of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and
that a nobler race will enter into the heritage of our
humanity.
II
Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been
the criticism of taste or the criticism of dogma ; in
the nineteenth century it became naturalistic a natural
history of individual minds and their products, a natural
28
424 FRENCH LITERATURE
history of works of art as formed or modified by social,
political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies
of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed
the growth of the comparative study of literatures in an
age dominated by the scientific spirit. If we are to name
any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. de
Stae'l. The French nation, she explained in L ' Allemagne,
inclines towards what is classical ; the Teutonic nations
incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say
whether classical or romantic art should be preferred; it
is enough to show that the difference of taste results not
from accidental causes, but from the primitive sources of
imagination and of thought.
The historical tendency, proceeding from the eigh-
teenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy,
of politics, and of literature. While Cousin gave an his-
torical interpretation of philosophy, and Guizot applied
history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent
professor, ABEL-FRANCOIS VILLEMAIN (1790-1870) was
illuminating literature with the light of history. An ac-
complished classical scholar, a student of English, Italian,
and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his Tableau de la Lit-
terature au Moyen Age, and his more admirable Tableau de
la Litte"rature au X VIII e Siecle, viewed a wide prospect,
and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurement
of all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of
criticism ; but instinctively he directed criticism towards
history. He perceived the correspondence between
literary products and the other phenomena of the age;
he observed the movement in the spirit of a period ; he
passed from country to country ; he made use of biog-
raphy as an aid in the study of letters. His learning was at
times defective ; his views often superficial ; he suffered
DSIR NISARD 425
from his desire to entertain his audience or to capture
them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain served letters well, and,
accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he
prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve.
While such criticism as that of Villemain was main-
tained by Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73), professor of
French poetry at the Sorbonne, the dogmatic or doc-
trinaire school of criticism was represented with rare
ability by Dsm NISARD (1806-88). His capital work,
the Histoire. de la Litterature Fran^aise, the labour of
many years, is distinguished by a magisterial application
of ideas to the decision of literary questions. Criticism
with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a
study of historical developments, so much as the judg-
ment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts
each book on which he pronounces judgment with that
ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind :
he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France,
which attains its highest ends rather through discipline
than through freedom ; he compares it with the ideal of
the French language ; finally, he compares it with the
ideal of humanity as seen in the best" literature of the
world. According to the result of the comparison he
delivers condemnation or awards the crown. In French
literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellous equi-
librium of the faculties under the control of reason ;
it applies general ideas to life ; it avoids individual
caprice ; it dreads the chimeras of imagination ; it
is eminently rational ; it embodies ideas in just and
measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the
great age of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have
been in the eighteenth century, but these gains were
more than counterbalanced by losses. To disprove the
426 FRENCH LITERATURE
saying that there is no disputing about tastes, to estab-
lish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate
intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim ; but in attempt-
ing to constitute an exact science founded upon general
principles, he too often derived those principles from
the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste.
Criticism retrograded in his hands ; yet, in retrograding,
it took up a strong position : the influence of such a
teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies re-
quired the guidance or the check of a director.
The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-
AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time
went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method.
In his Tableau de la Poesie Franqaise au XVI e Siecle he
found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older
than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsard
is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from
author to author in his Portraits Littt'raires and Por-
traits Contemporains, he studied in all its details what
we may term the physiology of each. The long research
of spirits connected with his most sustained work, Port-
Royal, led him to recognise certain types or families
under which the various minds of men can be grouped
and classified. During a quarter of a century he inves-
tigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of
little monographs which form the Causerics du Liindi
and the Nouveaux Lundis. They formed, as it were, a
natural history of intellects and temperaments ; they
established a new method, and illustrated that method
by a multitude of examples.
Never was there a more mobile spirit ; but he was as
exact and sure-footed as he was mobile. When we have
allowed for certain personal jealousies or hostilities, and
SAINTE-BEUVE 427
for an excessive attraction towards what may be called
the morbid anatomy of minds, we may give our con-
fidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist critic
Sainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, scep-
tic, believer, socialist, imperialist he traversed every
region of ideas ; as soon as he understood each posi-
tion he was free to leave it behind. He did not pretend
to reduce criticism to a science ; he hoped that at length,
as the result of numberless observations, something like
a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he
would cultivate the relative and distrust the absolute.
He would study literary products through the persons
of their authors ; he would examine each detail ; he
would inquire into the physical characteristics of the
subject of his investigation ; view him through his an-
cestry and among his kinsfolk ; observe him in the
process of education ; discover him among his friends
and contemporaries ; note the moment when his genius
first unfolded itself ; note the moment when it was first
touched with decay ; approach him through admirers
and disciples ; approach him through his antagonists or
those whom he repelled ; and at last, if that were pos-
sible, find some illuminating word which resumes the
results of a completed study. There is no " code Sainte-
Beuve" by which off-hand to pronounce literary judg-
ments ; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the
method which has best served the study of literature in
the nineteenth century.
Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The
course of French literature since 1850 may be studied in
current criticism ; it does not yet come within the scope
428 FRENCH LITERATURE
of literary history. The product of these years has been
manifold and great ; their literary importance is attested
by the names among many others of Leconte de Lisle,
Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non - dramatic poetry ;
of Augier and the younger Dumas in the theatre ; of
Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet,
Bonrget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, in fiction ; of Taine
and Renan in historical study and criticism ; of Fromentin
in the criticism of art ; of Scherer, Brunetiere, Faguet,
Lemaitre, in the criticism of literature.
The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been
the scientific influence, turning poetry from romantic
egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the
drama to naturalism and to the study of social environ-
ments, informing history and criticism with the spirit
of curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolu-
tion. Whether the spiritualist tendency observable at
the present moment be a symptom of languor and fatigue,
or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will
determine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE following notes are designed as an indication of some books
which may be useful to students.
Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and most
trustworthy is that at present in course of publication under the
editorship of M-. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la
Litterature franc^aise (A. Colin et Cie.). M. Lanson's Histoire de
la Litterature fran$aise should be in the hands of every student,
and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's Litterature
fratifaise (2 vols.).
The works of Mr. Saintsbury, Ge*ruzez, Demogeot, are widely
known, and have proved useful during many years. Much may
be learnt and learnt pleasantly from Paul Albert's volumes on the
literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine-
teenth centuries. Two volumes out of five of M. Charles Gidel's
Histoire de la Litterature fran$aise (Lemerre) are occupied with
literature from 1815 to 1886. M. Hermann Pergamini's Histoire
generate de la Litterature francaise (Alcan) sometimes gives fresh
and interesting views. For a short school history by an accom-
plished scholar, none is better than M. Petit de Julleville's Histoire
de la Litterature franfatse, which, in 555 pages, packs a great deal
of information. The Histoire elementaire de la Litterature fran-
(aise, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular ; it tells much of the
contents of great books, and makes no assumption that the reader is
already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's A Primer of French
Literature (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well
arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and
the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's Modern French Litera-
ture (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French .literature to
430 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chateaubriand, and treats with considerable fulness the literature
from Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael to the present time. For
the present century M. G. Pellissier's Le Mouvement litteraire au
XIX' Stick is valuable.
Of elder histories that by Nisard is by far the most distinguished,
the work of a scholar and a thinker. (See p. 425 of the present
volume.)
The student will find Merlet's Etudes littcraircs sur les
Classiques francais (2 vols.), revised and enlarged by M. Lintilhac,
highly instructive ; the second volume is wholly occupied with
Corneille, Racine, and Moliere.
For the history of the French theatre the best introduction is
M. Petit de Julleville's Le Theatre en France ; it may be sup-
plemented by M. Brunetiere's Les Epoques du Theatre francais.
Learning wide and exact, and original thought, characterise all the
work of M. Brunetiere; each of his many volumes should be
searched by the student for what he may need. The studies of
M. Faguet on the writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries are the work of a critic who is penetrat-
ing in his psychological study of authors, and who, just or unjust,
is always suggestive. For numberless little monographs the student
may turn to Sainte-Beuve. Monographs on a larger scale will be
found in the admirable series of Grands Ecrivains francais
(Hachette); the Classiques populaires (Lecene, Oudin et Cie.)
are in some instances no less scholarly. The writings of Scherer,
of M. Jules Lemaitre, and of M. Anatole France are especially
valuable on nineteenth-century literature. The best study of
French historical literature is Professor Flint's The PhilosopJiy of
History (1893).
Provided with such books as these the student will hardly need
the general histories of French literature by German writers. I
may name Prof. Bornhak's Geschichte der Franzosischen Literafur,
and the more popular history by Engel (4th ed., 1 897). Lotheissen's
Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur im XVII. JalirJiundert
seems to me the best book on the period. The monographs in
German are numberless.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 431
The editions of authors in the Grands Ecrivains de la France
are of the highest authority. The best anthology of French poetry
is Crepet's Les Poetes francais (4 vols.). Small anthologies of
French poetry since the fifteenth century, and of French lyrical
poets of the nineteenth century, are published by Lemerre.
The list which follows is taken partly from books which I have
used in writing this volume, partly from the Bibliography in M.
Lintilhac's Histoire de la Littcrature francaisc. To name English
writers and books seems unnecessary.
THE MIDDLE AGES
Histoire litterairc de la France (a vast repertory on mediaeval
literature).
GASTON PARIS. La Literature fran^aise an moyen Age. 1890.
AUBERTIN. Hist, de la Langue et de la Lift, fran^aises au moyen
Age. 2 vols. 1883.
G. PARIS. La Poc'sie du moyen Age. 2 vols. 1887.
LEON GAUTIER. Les Epopees francaises. 2nd edition. 4 vols.
1878-94.
J. BEDIER. Les Fabliaux, Etudes de Lilt, populaire et d^ Histoire lilt.
du moyen Age. 1895.
L. SUDRE. Les Sources du Roman de Renart. 1893.
LENIENT. La Satire en France au moyen Age. 1883.
E. LANGLOIS. Origincs et Sources du Roman de la Rose. 1890.
A. DEBIDOUR. Les Chroniqueurs. 2 vols. 1893. (Classiques
populaire s.}
A. JEAN ROY. Les Origines de la Poesie lyrique en France. 1889.
C LED AT. Rutebcuf. 1891. (Granas Ecrivains fr.}
MARY DARMESTETER. Froissart. 1894. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
A. SARRADIN. Eustache Dcschamps. 1879.
C. BEAUFILS. Etude sur la Vie et les Ponies de Charles d ^ Orleans.
1861.
A. CAMPAUX. Franqois Villon. 1859.
A. LONGNON. Etude biographique sur. Fr. Villon. 1877.
LECOY DE LA MARCHE. La Chairefr. au moyen Age. 1886.
PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Les Mystires. 2 vols. 1880.
Les Come'diens en Fr. au moyen Age. 1885.
La Come'die et les Mceurs en France au
moyen Age. 1886.
432 BIBLIOGRAPHY
PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Repertoire du Theatre comique en France au
moyen Age. 1885.
FAGUET. XVI* Siecle. 1894. (On Commines.)
MERLET. Etudes litt. (On Villehardouin, Froissart, Commines.)
Edited by Lintilhac. 1894.
L. CLEDAT. La Potsie du moyen Age. 1893. (Classiques popu-
laires.}
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
A. DARMESTETER ET A. HATZFEI.D. Le XVI e Siccle en France.
1878.
FAGUET. XVI e Siccle. 1894.
SAINTE-BEUVE. Tableau historique et critique de la Pocsie ft: au
XVP Siccle.
L. FEUGERE. Caracteres et Portraits lilt, du XVI' Siecle. 1859.
EGGER. L'Helle'nisme en France. 1 869.
FAGUET. La Tragtdie fr. au XVI* Siecle. 1883.
E. CHASLES. La Comddie en France au XVI* Siccle, 1862.
E. BOURCIEZ. Les Mceurs polies et la Litt. de Cour sous Henri If.
1886.
P. STAFFER. Rabelais. 1889.
R. MILLET. Rabelais. 1892. (Grands Ecrivainsfr.}
E. GEBHART. Rabelais, la Renaissance et la Reforme. 1895.
HAAG ET BORDIER. La France protestante. 2nd edition. (Vols.
i.-vi. have appeared.)
F. BuNGENER. Calvin, sa Vie, son (Euvre et ses Ecrits. 1862.
A. BiRSCH-HlRSCHFELD. Gcsckichte der Franzbsischen Littcratur,
seit Anfang des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Erster Band : Das Zeitalter
der Renaissance. 1 889.
EDERT. Entivickelungs-Geschichte der Fr. Tragodie, vornlimlich ii
X VI. Jahrhundert. 1856.
F. GODEFROY. Histoire de la Litt.fr. depuis le XVI 6 Siecle jusqu'a
nos Jours. 1878.
G. MERLET. Les grands Ecri-vains du XVI* Sticle. 1875.
C. LENIENT. La Satire en France, ou la Litt. militanle au XVI* Siecle.
1886.
E. COUGNY. Guillaume du Vair. 1857.
A. SAYOUS. Etudes litt. sur les Ecrivains fr. de la Reformation.
1854.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 433
A. VINET. Moralities des X VP et XVIP Slides. 1 859.
P. STAFFER. Montaigne. 1895. (Grands Ecrivains fr.~)
P. BONNEFON. Montaigne, V Homme et PCEuvre. 1893.
SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. Tableau de la Lift. //-. au XVI* Sticle.
1862.
CH. NORMAND. Monhtc. (Classiques populaires.}
G. Bizos. Ronsard. (Classiques populaircs.}
GERUZEZ. Essais d> Histoire I iff. 1853.
P. MORILLOT. Discourssurla Vie et les CEuvres d'Agrippa d'A ubigne".
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H. PERGAMINI. La Satire au XVI* Siecle et les Tragiques d'Agrippa
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SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
F. LOTHEISSEN. Geschichte der Franzosischen Litteratur im XV II.
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A. DUPUY. Histoire de la Litt.fr. au XVIP Siecle. 1892.
LE R. PERE G. LONGHAYE. Histoire de la Litt.fr. au XVII* S tide.
1895.
J. DEMOGEOT. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVIP Siecle avant Cor-
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LE Due DE BROGLIE. Malherbe. 1897. (Grands Ecrivains fr}
V. COUSIN. La Socittt fr. au XVIP Sihle. 1858.
Mme. de Sable. 1882.
Jacqueline Pascal. 1878.
Lajeunesse de Mmc. de Longueville. 1853.
At me. de Longiieville et la Fronde. 1859.
G. LA ROUMET. Introduction to edition of Les Predcus&s ridLulcs.
1884.
A. LE BRETON. Le Roman au XVIP Siecle. 1890.
SAINTE-BEUVE. Portraits de Femmes. 1855.
A. BOURGOIN. Valentin Conrart. 1883.
Les Maitres de la Critique au X VIP Sihle. \ 889.
PELLISSON ET D'OLIVET. Histoire de P Acddemie fr. 2 vols. 1858.
E. ROY. Etude sur Charles Sorel. \ 893.
P. MORILLOT. Scarron et le Genre burlesque. 1888.
lt Le Roman en France depuis 1610 jusqu'a nos
Jours.
A. FOUILLEE. Descartes. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
434 BIBLIOGRAPHY
F. BOUII.LIER. Histoire de la Philosophic cartisienne. 2 vols.
1868.
E. RlGAL. Alexandre Hardy ct le Thddtre fr. 1889.
Esquisse d'une Histoire des Theatres de Paris de 1548 a
1635. 1887.
GUIZOT. Co rncille et so n Temps. 1880.
G. REYNIER. Thomas Corneillc, sa Vie ct son Theatre. 1892.
P. MONCEAUX. Racine. (Classiques poptilaircs,}
SAINTE-BEUVE. Port-Royal. 7 vols. 1888.
E. DESCHANEL. Le Romantisme des Classiqucs. 1883.
P. STAFFER. l\acine et Victor Hugo. 1 887.
G. LARROUMET. La Comcdie de Molicre. 1889.
H. DURAND. Moliere. 1889. (Classiqucs populaircs.}
MAHRENHOLTZ. Molieres Leben und Werke. 1881.
V. FOURNEL. Le Theatre au XVII* Siecle: la Comcdie. 1888.
H. RIGAULT. Hist, de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.
1856.
P. MORILLOT. Boileau. (Classiqucs populaires.}
G. LANSON. Boileau. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
G. LAFENESTRE. La Fontaine. 1895. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
H. TAINE. La Fontaine et ses Fables. 1879.
PREVOST-PARADOL. Les Moralistes fr. 1865.
P. JANET. Les Passions et les Caracteres dans la Litt. du XVII*
Siecle. 1888.
PELLISSON. La Bruytre. 1892. (Classiques populaircs^)
JACQUINET. Des Predicateurs du XVII* Siecle avant Bossuet.
1863.
G. LANSON. Bosstiet. 1891. (Classiques populaires.}
A. FEUGERE. Botirdaloue^sa Predication et son Temps. 1874.
LEHANNEUR. Mascaron. 1878.
L'ABBE FABRE. Flcchier oratcur. 1885.
L'ABUE BAYLE. Massillon. 1867.
G. Bizos. Fenelon. 1887. (Classiqucs populaircs.}
P. JANET. Fc'nclon. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
R. VALLERY RADOT. Mine, de Sfyigne". 1888. (Classiqucs popu-
laires.}
G. BOISSIER. Mme. de Sc-vigne". 1887. (Grands Ecrivainsfr.} ^
CTE. D'HAUSSONVILLE. Mme.de la Fayctte. 1891. (Grands Ecri-
vainsfr.)
G. BOISSIER. Saint- Simon. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
J. BOURDEAU. La Rochefoucauld. 1895. (Grands Ecri-vains fr.}
BIBLIOGRAPHY 435
H. HETTNER. Literaturgeschiclite des achtzehnien Jahrhunderts :
Ziveiter Theil. 1872.
VlLLEMAIN. Tableau de la Lift, au XVIII* Sihh'. 4 vols. 1841.
DE BARANTE. Tableau de la Litt.fr. au XVIII* Siede. 1856.
BERSOT. Etudes sur le XVIII* Siede. 1852.
VIN ET. Hist, de la Litt. fr. au X VIII* Siede. 1853.
J. BARNI. Hist, des Idees morales et politiques en France an XVIIP
Siede. 1865.
CARO. La Fin du XVIII* Siede. 1881.
TAINE. Les Origines de la France contemporaine. 1882. (Vol. i.).
A. SOREL. Montesquieu. 1889. {Grands Ecrivains fr.)
H. LEBASTEUR. Buffon. 1888. (Classiques populaires.)
M. PALEOLOGUE. Vauvenargues. 1890. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
G. DESNOIRESTERRES. Voltaire et la Social/ au XVIII* Siede.
8 vols. 1871-76.
E. FAGUET. Voltaire. 1895. (Classiques poptdaires)
A. CHUQUET. J.-J. Rousseau. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr!)
H. BEAUDOUIN. La Vie et les CEuvres de J.-J. Rousseau. 1871.
SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. J.-J. Rousseau, sa Vie et ses Outrages.
2 vols. 1875.
CH. LENIENT. La Comedie en France au XVIII* Siede. 2 vols.
1888.
E. LINTILHAC. Lcsage. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
,, Bcaumarchais et ses Ouvres. 1887.
A. HALLAYS. Bcaumarchais. 1897. (Grands Ecrivains fr^]
LEO CLARETIE. Essai sur Lesage romancier. 1890.
Florian. 1888. ( Classiques populatres.)
G. LARROUMET. Marivaux, sa Vie et ses CEuvres. 1882.
J. REINACH. Diderot. 1894.' (Grands Ecrivains fr)
J. BERTRAND. UAlembert. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr!)
L. SAY. Turgot. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
REVOLUTION AND NINETEENTH CENTURY
E. GERUZEZ. Hist, de la Litt.fr. pendant la Revolution. 1881.
E. ROUSSE. Mirabeau. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
DE LESCURE. Rivarol et la Societe" fr. pendant la Revolution ct
F Emigration. 1883.
436 BIBLIOGRAPHY
DE LESCURE. Bemardin de Saint-Pierre. (Classiques populaires)
,, Chateaubriand. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr)
G. MERLET. Tableau de la Litt.fr. 1800-1815. 1883.
ARVEDE BARINE. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. 1892. (Grands
Ecrivains fr. )
SAINTE-BEUVE. Chateaubriand et son Croupe litt. 2 vols. 1889.
A. BARDOUX. Chateaubriand. 1893. (Classiques populaires)
A. SOREL. Mine, de Stael. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr?)
G. BRANDES. Die Hauptstromungen der Litteralur des 19 Jahr-
hundert. Vol. v. 1894.
E. FAGUET. Politiques et Moralistes du XIX* Siecle. 1891.
G. PELLISSIER. Le Mouvement litteraire au XIX* Siecle. 1893.
TH. GAUTIER. Histoire de Romantisme. 1874.
E. ROD. Lamartine. 1893. (Classiques populaires)
E. DESCHANEL. Lamartine. 2 vols. 1893.
E. EIRE. Victor Hugo avant 1830. 1883.
E. DUPUY. V. Hugo, FHomme et le Poete. 1887.
M. PALEOLOGUE. Alfred de Vigny. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
DORISON. Alfred de Vigny, Poete et Philosophe. 1892.
A. BARINE. Alfred de Musset. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.}
A. CLAVEAU. Alfred de Musset. (Classiques populaires.)
M. DU CAMP. Thtophile Gaulier. 1890. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
G. COGORDAN. Joseph de Mais/re. 1894. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
E. SPULLER. Lamennais,sa Vie et ses CEuvres. 1893.
J.SlMON.' Victor Cousin. 1887. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
E. CARO. George Sand. 1887. {Grands Ecrivains fr.)
E. ROD. Stendhal. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)
F. CORREARD. Michelet. 1887. (Classiques populaires.)
P. DE REMUSAT. Thiers. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr)
E. ZEVORT. Thiers. 1892. (Classiques populaires.)
A. FILON. Merime"e et ses Amis. 1894.
BRUNETIERE. JJ Evolution de la Poesie lyrique en France au XIX*
Sihle. 2 vols. 1894.
INDEX
ABONDANCE, Jean d', 75
Adam de la Halle, 26, 27, 72
Alarcon, 167
AlbeYic de Briancon, 17
Alexis, Vie de Saint, 4
Amadis des Gaules, 23, 92
Amis et Amiles, 12
Amyot, Jacques, 96-97
Andrieux, 336
Anne of Austria, 201
Argenson, Marquis d', 304 note
Armentieres, Peronne d', 59
Arnauld, Antoine, 153, 156-157, 184,
185,215
Arnauld, Jacqueline, 155
Arnault, 335
Arouet, see Voltaire
Aubigne 1 , Agrippa d', 112, 113, 115,
117-119
Aucassin et Nicolette, 22
Aulnoy, Mme. d', 243
Auvergne, Martial d', 63
BAIF, Antoine de, 98, 103
Ballanche, 357
Baltus, 245
Balzac, Guez de, 149-150, 177
Balzac, Honor6 de, 404-408
Baour-Lormian, 336, 337
Barante, 412
Barbier, Auguste, 391
Barbieri, Nicolo, 198
Barlaam etjoasaph, 5
Barnave, 339
Baron, 207, 229, 262
Bartas, Du, 117
Barthele"my, Abbe", 329
Basoche, La, 76
Bassompierre, 239
Batteux, Charles, 306
Baude, Henri, 63
Bayle, Pierre, 243-245
Beaulieu, Geoffrey de, 51
Beaumarchais, 265, 323-325
Bejart, Armande, 200
B6jart, Madeleine, 198
Bellay, Jean du, 88
Bellay, Joachim du, 98, 99, 100, 104-
iS
Belleau, Remi, 98, 103-104^-
Benedictines, the, 254
Benoit de Sainte-More, 15
Benserade, 140, 208
Be'ranger, J.-P. de, 366-367
Ber9uire, Pierre, 46
Bernard, 258
Bernard, Saint, 44
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 272, 325-
329
Bernay, Alexandre de, 16
Bern is, 258
Bcioul, 19
Bertaut, Jean, 106
Berlin, 258
Beyle, Henri, 366, 398-399
Beze, Theodore de, 94, 107
Bichat, 341
Dien-Avisd, Mal-Avisd, 72
Blanc, Louis, 412
Blois, Gui de, 54
Bodel, Jean, 67
Bodin, Jean, in
438
INDEX
Bottle, La, 96, 122
Boileau, Nicolas, 183-189, 241, 242
Boisguillebert, 304
Boissonade, J.-F. , 354
Bolingbroke, 284
Bonald, Vicomte de, 357
Bonnet, Charles, 302 note
Bossuet, Jacques-Be'nigne, 139, 153,
202, 219-226, 233, 276
Bouillon, Duchesse de, 190, 191, 214
Bounin, Gabriel, 107
Bourdaloue, 202, 227
Boursault, 207
Brantome, 113-114
Bretel, Jacques, 26
Brjzeux, Auguste, 391
Buchanan, 106
Bud, Guillaume, 82, 87
Buffon, 308-310, 327
Bunbury, Lydia, 373
Bussy-Rabutin, 176, 179
CABANIS, 301
Galas, Jean, 287
Calvin, Jean, 92-94
Cam pan, Mme. de, 253
Campistron, 259
Camus, Bishop, 132, 141
Cantillon, 305
Cato, Angelo, 56
Caumartin, de, 283
Caumartin, Mme. de, 176
Caylus, Count de, 329
Caylus, Mme. de, 253
Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, 66
Chamfort, 322
Chapelain, Jean, 141, 147, 149, 162,
177, 186
Chapelle, 153, 184, 192
Charles, Mme., 368
Charron, Pierre, 126-127
Chartier, Alain, 60- 61
Chastelain, Georges, 65
Chateaubriand, 328, 343, 348-353
Chatelain de Couci, the, 27
Chatelet, Mme. du, 285, 286
Chaulieu, 256
Ch6nedolle', 337
Che'nier, Andre', 329-331, 338
Che'nier, Marie-Joseph, 335, 337
Chesterfield, Lord, 275
Chrestien, 116
Chretien de Troyes, 17, 21
Christine de Pisan, 60
Clari, Robert de, 49
Clermont, Mdlle. de, 275
Collin d'Harleville, 336
Commines, Philippe de, 55-57
Comte, Auguste, 255, 360-361
Condillac, 301
Condorcet, 255, 303-304
Confre'rie de la Passion, 68, 71, 160
Conon de Re'thune, 27
Conrart, Valentin, 147
Constant, Benjamin, 345, 411
Coquillard, 63
Coras, 214
Corneille, Pierre, 139, 163-170, 204
Corneille, Thomas, 171-172, 206
Cotin, 186, 205
Coulanges, Abbe" de, 177
Coulanges, Mme. de, 179
Courier, Paul-Louis, 354-355
Cousin, Victor, 358-359
Crebillon, P. J. de, 259-260
Cretin, 65
Creus^ de Lesser, 337
Cuvier, 341
Cuvier, Le, 75
Cyrano de Bergerac, 145-146, 197
DACIER, Mme., 243
D'Aguesseau, 299
D'Alembert, 254, 295
Danchet, 259
Dancourt, 262
Dangeau, 239
Daniel, 254
Danse Macabrf, 63
Danton, 338, 339
Daubenton, 309
Daunou, 411
Daurat, Jean, 98
Dc'bats, Journal dc, 338
INDEX
439
De Belloy, 261
De Broglie, 412
D2ca.de Philosophiqve, 338
De Fe'letz, 342
Deffand, Mme. du, 253, 322
DeToris, 221
Delatouche, 401
Delavigne, Casimir, 395
Delille, 257-258
Ddsaugiers, 336
De'sbordes-Valmore, Mme., 391
Descartes, Ren^, 150-153
Deschamps, Antony, 366
Deschamps, Emile, 366
Desfontaines, 300
De'smarets de St.-Sorlin, 141, 142, 144,
197, 241
Des-Masures, Loys, 107
Desmoulins, Camille, 338
Desportes, Philippe, 105-106, 137
Despr6aux, see Boileau
Destouches, 263
Diderot, Denis, 254, 265, 272, 294-
299, 302, 313
Digulleville, Guillaume de, 43
Dollinger, 180
Dorat, 258
Dubos, Abb6, 305
Duche 1 , 259
Ducis, 261
Duclos, 253
Dudevant, Mme., see Sand, George
Dufresny, 262, 274
Dumas, Alexandre, 394, 397
Dumont, Abbd, 370
Dupont de Nemours, 304
Duplessis-Mornay, 115
Du Ryer, 162, 170
Dassault, 342
Duval, 336
Eneas, 16
Enfants san Souci, 74, 76
Epinay, Mme. d', 253, 314
Estienne, Henri, 101 note, no, 115
Estissac, Geoffrey d' , 7
2Q
Estoile, Pierre de 1', 114 note
Etienne, 336
FABRE D'EGLANTIXK, 336
Fantosme, Jordan, 47
Fauchet, Claude, no
Fauriel, 341
Fayette, Mme. de la, 174, 179, 180-182
Feiielon, 153, 230-234
Fle'chier, 140, 228
Fleury, 225
Floovent, 8
Florian, 259, 272
Fontanes, 337, 349
Fontenelle, 242, 243-245
Foucher, AcLle, 375
Fougeres, Etienne de, 42
Foulechat, Denis, 46
Fouquet, 190, 200
Fourier, 359
Fournival, Richard de, 41
Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, 74
Francis I., 82
Frederick the Great, 286, 238
FreYon, 300
Froissart, Jean, 53-55
Furetiere, Antoine, 145, 211
GACE BRULK, 27
Gaimar, 47
Gaime, Abbe", 312
Galiani, 254, 305
Gailand, 274
Gamier, Robert, 108
Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 6,
47
Gassendi, Pierre, 153
Gautier, TMophile, 365, 387-390, 392
Gautier de Coinci, 6
Gel6e, Jacquemart, 31
Gens Nouveaux, 74
Geoffrin, Mme., 254
Geoffroi of Brittany, 28
Geoffrey, 342
Gerson, 44, 45
Gilbert, 258-259, 300
Gillot, 116
440
INDEX
Ginguene\ 341, 411
Girardin, M. de, 315
Girardin, Saint-Marc, 425
Godeau, 139
Goethe, 297, 345
Gombault, 142
Gomberville, 142
Gournay, 305
Gournay, Mdlle. de, 123
Grandes Ckronique^, 50
Greban, Arnoul, 69
Greban, Simon, 69
Grecourt, 258
Cresset, 258, 260, 263
Gre'vin, 107
Grignan, Mme. de, 178
Grimm, Melchior, 307
Gringoire, Pierre, 74
Griselidis, Histoire de, 68
Guene'e, Abb6, 300
Guevara, 267
Guillaume le Cl.-rc, 42
Guillaume le Mardchal, Vie de, 47
Guirlande de Julie, 140
Guizot, Frar^ois, 412, 414-416
Guyon, Mme., 224,230
HAMILTON, Anthony, 256
Hardouin, 254
Hardy, Alexandra, 161
Helgaire, 8
Helve'tius, 301
He'nault, 261
Henri le Glichezare, 30
Herberay des Essarts, 92
Hoffman, 3^2
Holbach, Baron d 1 , 302
Hospital, Michel de 1', ico, 115
Hot man, Fran 90)5, 114
Houdetot, Mme. d', 314, 318
Huet, 242
Hugo, Victor, 365, 375-383, 391-393,
39 6
Hume, David, 315
JACOT DE FOREST, 16
Jansen, 156
Jeannin, President, 114 note
Jehah de Thuin, 16
Jobelins, 140
Jodelle, 98, 103, 107
Joinville, Jean de, 50-52
Joubert, Joseph, 342-343, 349
Jouffroy, Theodore, 359
LA BARRE, 288
Lab6, Louise, 97
La Beaumelle, 179
Laboureur, Louis le, 141
La Bruyere, 235-238, 242
La Calprenede, 142, 143
Lacordaire, 357, 358
La Fare, 256
La Fontaine, Jean d^, 189-195
La Fosse, 259
Lagrange, 302
La Grange-Chancel, 259
Laharpe, 261, 306-307
La Have, Fragment of, 9
Lally, Count, 288
Lamarck, 341
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 329, 367-
37i
Lambert, Marquise de, 254, 269
Lambert le Tort, 16
Lamennais, 357-358
La Mettrie, 300-301
Lamoignon, de, 202
La Motte-Houdart, 243, 256, 260
Languet, Hubert, 114
Lanoue, 113
Laplace, 341
Larivey, Pierre de, 109
La Rochefoucauld, 173-175, 181, 182
La'.ini, Brunetto, 41
Laya, Louis, 336
Le Bel, Jean, 53
Lebrun, Ecouchard, 258, 337
Le Clerc, 214
Lecomte, Valleran, 160
Lefranc de Pompignan, 256
Lefranc, Martin, 62
Legouais, Chretien, 17, 58
Legouv(?, 335
INDEX
441
Le Maire de Beiges, Jean, 84
Lemercier, Nepomucene, 336, 337
Lemierre, 258, 260
Lemoyne, 141
L Empereur qui tua son Neveu, 73
Leroy, Pierre, 116
Lesage, 262, 266-268
Lespinasse, Mdlle. de, 254, 322
Letourneur, 261
Le Vasseur, TheYese, 313
Lille, Alain de, 37
Lorens, Friar, 41
Lorris, Gtiillaume de, 34-36
Lyonne, Abbe" de, 266
MABLY, 255
Machaut, Guillaume de, 59
Maillard, Olivier, 45
Maine de Biran, 341
Maintenon, Mme. de, 118, 145, 179-
180, 216, 217
Mairet, Jean de, 162, 165, 196
Maistre, Joseph de, 355-356
Maistre, Xavier de, 409
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 153
Malherbe, Fra^ois de, 100, 106, 134-
136, 33i
Mallet du Pin, 338
Marbode, Bishop, 41
Marguerite of Navarre, 82-84
Marguerite of Navarre (wife of Henri
IV.), 114
Marie de France, 20, 28
Marivaux, 262, 269-271
Marmontel, 253, 260, 272, 300, 305-
306
Marnix de Ste. Aldegonde, 115
Mascaron, 228
Massillon, J.-B. , 228, 229
Maupertuis, 286
Maynard, 136
Melin de Saint-Gelais, 86, 105
Manage, 177, 205
Mdnagier de Paris, 41 note
Mendoza, 267
Menot, Michel, 45
Mercier, 265
Me"ri, Huon de, 43
Me'rim^e, Prosper, 396, 408-410
Meschinot, 65
Meun, Jean de, 36-39
M5zeray, 225
Michaud, 411
Michel, Jean, 69
Michelet, Jules, 412, 418-422
Mignet, Fra^ois, 412, 416
Millevoye, 337
Mirabeau, 339-340
Mirabeau (the elder), 281, 305
Miracles de Notre-Dame, 68
Moliere, Jean-Baptiste, 146, 169, 197-
206
Molinet, 65
Monluc, Blaize de, 112-113
Monstrelet, 55
Montaigne, Michel de, 121-126
Montalembert, 357, 358, 412
Montchrestien, Antoine de, 120, 160
Montesquieu, 57, in, 255, 273-280
Montfleury, 207
Montpensier, Mdlle. de, 176, 235
Montreuil, Jean de, 46
Moreau, H6g6sippe, 391
Morellet, 300, 305
Morelly, 255
Mornay, Mme. de, 113
Mothe le Vayer, la, 153
Motteville, Mme. de, 176
Muret, 106
Musset, Alfred de, 383-387
NAIGEON, 302
Namur, Robert of, 54
Nangis, Guillaume de, 51
Napoleon I. , 340
Napoleon III., 369
Navagero, 105
Nerval, Gerard de, 388, 391
Nevers, Due de, 214
Nicole, 156, 178, 208, 209, 215
Ninon, 183
Nisard, Desire 1 , 425-426
Nivart of Ghent, 30
Nivelle de la Chausse'e,'264
442
INDEX
Nodier, Charles, 366, 409
Novare, Philippe de, 41
OGIER, Frar^ois, 162
Oresme, Nicole, 46
Orleans, Charles d', 61-62
Orleans, Duchess of, 180, 212
Ossat, d', 114 note
Ouville, d', 196
Ozanam, 412
PALISSOT, 300
Palissy, Barnard, 119
Par6, Ambroise, 119
Parny, 258
Partenoptus de Blois, 22
Pascal, Blaise, 154-159
Pasquier, Estienne, no
Passerat, Jean, 106, 116
Pathelin, La Farce de, 66, 75-76
Pelerinage de Jerusalem, n
Pellisson, 148
P^rier, Mme. , 158
PeYiers, Bonaventure des, 84, 91
Perrault, Charles, 241-242, 243
Perron, du, 115
Physiocrats, the, 304
Picard, 336
Piron, 258, 260, 263, 300
Pithou, 116
Pixe're'court, 336
Pomponne, 179
Ponsard, 395
Popeliniere, L. de la, 112
Poquelin. See Moliere
Port-Royal, 155, 252
Pradon, 214
Presles, Raoul de, 46
Pr6vost, Abb6, 271-272
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 361-362
Provins, Guiot de, 42
QUESNAY, Fran9ois, 304, 305
Quinault, Philippe, 169, 204, 2o5,
207-208
Quinet, Edgar, 412, 422-423
Quinse Joies de Mariage, 66
RABELAIS, Franqois, 87-91
Racan, 136
Racine, Jean, 172, 208-218
Racine, Louis, 257
Rambouillet, Hotel de, 139
Rame'e, Pierre de la, in
Ramond, 321 note
Raoul de Houdan, 43
Rapin, 116
Raynal, Abbe 1 , 321-322
Rayounard, 336, 341
Re'camier, Mme., 352
Rtcits d" un Mfnestrel de Reini:, 50
Regnard, 262
Regnier, Mathurin, 136-138
Kenard, Roman de, 29
Representation d' Adam, 67
Restif de la Bretonne, 272
Retz, Cardinal de, 175-176
Riccoboni, Mme., 270 note
Richelieu, 147, 162, 176
Rivarol, 338
Robert de Boron, 21, 22
Rocca, Albert rie, 347
Rohan, Chevalier de, 284
Rojas, 1 06
Roland, Mm3. , 253, 254, 322
Roland, Song of , 9-11
Rollin, 300
Romulus, 28 note
Ronsard, Pierre de, 97-103
Rotrou, Jean, 162, 170-171, 196
Roucher, 257
Rouget de Lisle, 337
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, 256, 283
Rousseau, Jcan-Jacqu?s, 272, 311-
3 21 . 3 2 7
Roye, Jean de, 55
Royer-Collard, 341
Rutebeuf, 42, 43
SABLE, Mine, dc, 173
Sabliere, Mme. de, 192
Sacy, de, 156
Sagon, 85
Saint-Amand, 144
Saint-Cyran, 156
INDEX
443
Sainte-Beuve, 330, 365, 366, 391, 426-
427 f
Saint-Evremond, 139, 183, 197, 209
Saint-Just, 339
Saint-Lambert, 257
Saint-Martin, 355, 357
Saint-Pierre, Abbe 1 de, 304
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 359-
360
Saint-Simon, Due de, 238-241
Sales, Fran9ois de, 131-132
Salle, Antoine de la, 65-66
Sand, George, 400-404
Sandeau, Jules, 401
Sannazaro, 103
Saurin, Bernard-Joseph, 261
Saurin, Jacques, 228
Scarron, Paul, 145, 197
Sceve, Maurice, 97
Schelandre, Jean de, 162
Schiller, 345
Schlegel, A. W. von, 346
Scribe, Eugene, 395
ScudeYy, Georges de, 142, 162, 163,
165, 170
ScudeYy, Mdlle. de, 92, 142, 143
Sebonde, Raimond de, 122
Secchi, 199
Sedaine, 265
Segrais, 181, 213, 235
Se'nancourt, 341-342
Serres, Olivier de, 119, 132
Serviteur, Le Loyal, 112 note
Se'vigne', Mme. ds, 143, 177-179, 191,
210
Simon, Richard, 220, 224, 225
Sirven, 288
Sismondi, 411-412
Sorel, Charles, 144, 268
Soulie', Fre'deYic, 394
Soyecourt, Marquis de, 200
Staal-Delaunay, Mme. de, 253
Stael, Mme. de, 343-348 -
Steinhcewel , 28
Stendhal. See Beyle
Strasburg Oaths, 4
Suard, 338
Sue, Eugene, 397
Sully, Maurice de, 44
Surgeres, Helene de, 101
TABARIN, 196
Taille, Jacques de la, 107
Taille, Jean de la, 108, 109
Tedbalt, 4
Tencin, Mme. de, 245
Thaon, Philippe de, 40
Thebes, Romance of, 15
Thtophile, 68
Thibaut de Champagne, 27
Thierry, Augustin, 412-414
Thiers, Adolphe, 412, 417-418
Thomas (Anglo-Norman poet), 19
Thomas, A.-L. , 306, 327
Thou, De, 112
Thyard, Pontus de, 98
Tocqueville, A. de, 412, 416-417
Tour-Landry, Livre du Chevalier de
la, 41 note
Touroude, 10
Tracy, Destutt de, 301
Tristan 1'Hermite, 162, 170
Turgot, 255
Turnebe, Odet de, 109
URANISTES, 140
Urfe, Honors' d', 92, 132-134
VAIR, Guillaume de, 120, 127, 134
Valenciennes, Henri de, 49
Valliere, Louise de la, 221
Van Dale, 244
Vauban, 304
Vaugelas, 148
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jean, ic6
Vauvenargues, 281-282
Vaux, Mme. Clothilde de, 360
Velly, 254
Vergniaud, 339
Vertot, 254
Viau, Theophile de, 138
Vigny, Alfred de, 365, 371-374, 394,
396
Villehardouin, Geoffroy de, 48
444 INDEX
Villemain, 424 Volney, 303
Villon, Frar^ois, 63-65, 74 Voltaire, 229, 253, 255, 260, 272, 282-
Vincent de Paul, St., 221 293, 314
Viole, Mdlle. de, 104
Violette, Roman de la, 22
Viret, 94 WAGE, 20, 47
Vivonne, Catherine de, 139 Walpole, Horace, 322
Voiture, Vincent, 139, 140-141 Warens, Mme. de, 311, 312, 318
Volland, Mdlle., 298 Wenceslas, Duke, 54
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" It is noticeable that Mr. Eggleston has followed no beaten track, but has drawn
his own conclusions as to the early period, and they differ from the generally received
version not a little. The book is stimulating and will prove of great value to the stu-
dent of history." Minneapolis "Journal.
" A very interesting as well as a valuable book. ... A distinct advance upon most
that has been written, particularly of the settlement of New England." Newark
Advertiser.
" One of the most important books of the year. It is a work of art as well as ot
historical science, and its distinctive purpose is to give an insight into the real life and
character of people. . . . The author's style is charming, and the history is fully as inter-
esting as a novel." Brooklyn Standard-Union.
" The value of Mr. Eggleston's work is in that it is really a history of ' life,' not
merely a record of events. . . . The comprehensive purpose of his volume has been
excellently performed. The book is eminently readable." Philadelphia Times.
New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
/JPPLETONS' CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN
*i BIOGRAPHY. Complete in six volumes, royal 8vo, contain-
ing about 800 pages each. With sixty-one fine steel portraits
and some two thousand smaller vignette portraits and views of
birthplaces, residences, statues, etc.
APPLETONS' CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY, edited by Gen-
eral JAMES GRANT WILSON, President of the New York Genealogical and
Biographical Society, and Professor JOHN FISKE, formerly of Harvard Uni-
versity, assisted by over two hundred special contributors, contains a
biographical sketch of every person eminent in American civil and military
history, in law and politics, in divinity, in literature and art, in science and
in invention. Its plan embraces all the countries of North and South
America, and includes distinguished persons born abroad, but related to
American history. As events are always connected with persons, it affords
a complete compendium of American history in every branch of human
achievement. An exhaustive topical and analytical Index enables the reader
to follow^the history of any subject with great readiness.
" It is the most complete work that exists on the subject. The tone and guiding
spirit of the book are certainly very fair, and show a mind bent on a discriminate, just,
and proper treatment of its subject." From the Hon. GEORGE BANCROFT.
" The portraits are remarkably good. To anyone interested in Amercan history
or literature, the Cyclopsedia will be indispensable." Ftom the Hon. JAMES RUSSELL
LOWELL.
"The selection of names seems to be liberal and just. The portraits, so far as I can
judge, are faithful, and the biographies trustworthy." From NOAH PORTER, D. D.,
LL. D., ex-President of Yale College.
"A most valuable and interesting work." From the Hon. WM. E. GLADSTONE.
" I have examined it with great interest and great gratification. It is a noble work,
and does enviable credit to its editors z>nd publishers." From the Hon. ROBERT C.
WINTHROP.
" I have carefully examined ' Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography,' and
do not hesitate to commend it to favor. It is admirably adapted to use in the family
and the schools, and is so cheap as to come within the reach of all classes of readers
and students." From J. B. FORAKER, ex-Governor of Ohio.
" This book of American biography has come to me with a most unusual charm. It
sets before us the faces of great Americans, both men and women, and gives us a per-
spective view of their lives. Where so many noble and great have lived and wrought,
one is encouraged to believe the soil from which they sprang, the air they breathed, and
the sky over their heads, to be the best this world affords, and one says, ' Thank God,
I also am an American ! ' We have many books of biography, but I have seen none
so ample, so clear-cut, and breathing so strongly the best spirit of our native land. No
young man or woman can fail to find among these ample pages some model worthy of
imitation." From FRANCES E. WILLARD, President N. W. C. T. U.
"I congratulate you on the beauty of the volume, and the thoroughness of the
ivork." From Bishop PHILLIPS BROOKS.
" Every day's use of this admirable work confirms me in regard to its comprehen-
siveness and accuracy." From CHARLES DUDLEY WAUNER.
Price, per volume, (loth or buckram, $5.00; sheep, $6.00; half calf or hilf mo-
rocco, $7.00. Sold only by subscription. Descriptive circular, with specimen pages ,
sent on application. Agents -wanted for districts not yet assigned.
New York : D. APPLETON & CO.. 72 Fifth Avenue.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY'S PUBLICATIONS.
THE SUCCESSOR TO "LOOKING BACKWARD."
IPQUALITY. 'By EDWARD BELLAMY. i2mo. Cloth,
^ $1.25.
" The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects., so rich
in quotable parts, as to form an arsenal of argument for apostles of the new
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ity ' is to approach it with reverence. The book will raise many discussions.
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