iRUNETlERES ESSAYb in French Literature a selection Translated by D.Nichol Smith. r A a Brunetiere's Essays in French Literature BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE A SELECTION TRANSLATED BY D. NICHOL SMITH WITH A PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR Specially Written for this, the Authorised English Translation NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 153-157 FIFTH AVENUE MDCCCXCVIII PREFACE THE few essays, selected from many others to form the present volume, have this in common, that all aim more or less at the determina- tion of the ' essential character ' of French literature. I use this word in the sense it bears in natural history, and the ' essential character ' of a literature is that which separates it or distinguishes it from all other literatures. In truth, a great literature, such as the French or the English, so old, so rich, so diverse, and with each successive epoch show- ing such differences, cannot well accept a single formula and allow itself to be imprisoned, as it were, within its narrow bounds. We must always beware of formulae, and perhaps nowhere vii PREFACE more so than in history or in literature, in which we usually preserve the recollection only of what is the exception. The world knows only one Dante and one Shakespeare, and this is the very reason why they are Shakespeare and Dante. In the same way if certain traits suggest a definition of the genius of Bossuet, for example, this is the reason why they cannot express the genius of Moliere. And so at first sight nothing seems more futile than to try to include Moliere and Bossuet in a common definition. But when, instead of comparing them only among themselves, we compare them with others, and especially with foreigners, the author of the Ecole des Femmes with that of the Merry Wives of Windsor^ and Bossuet with the learned Tillotson, the family like- ness which had escaped us becomes evident. Facies non omnibus una Nee diversa tamen. Vlll PREFACE It is therefore in no wise futile to aim at detecting, at grasping, at fixing this family likeness. It becomes more definite, when, not content with having fixed it, we analyse it. And it is at last determined if we widen the field of comparison, and, instead of con- fining ourselves to the work of a few writers, apply ourselves to a whole epoch, a whole century, or the entire history of a whole literature. However much they differ, French writers resemble each other much more than they resemble English writers. This is what I have endeavoured to show in the following Essays. My object has been to point out that, of all the great modern literatures, French litera- ture, which is much nearer the Latin than the Greek, has had as its * essential character ' a constant tendency, an original aptitude, for sociability. Few Frenchmen have written for themselves, for themselves alone, to assume IX PREFACE the position of opposition, as the philosophers say ; but their ambition has been to please, in the noblest sense of the word, to contribute by their writing to the improvement or to the comfort of civil life, or to displease, when they have dared to do so, in a manner yet pleasant. Or, in other words, if literature has anywhere been the expression of society, it is in France ; and this is the reason of the fecundity, renewed from age to age by the very changes of society ; of the universality, the acknowledged clearness, since authors have endeavoured to make themselves accessible to everybody ; of some of the weaknesses too, on which in this Preface I may be allowed not to insist. No more need I insist on the interest of this investigation. Criticism and literary history are not sciences, nor even ' scientific,' but they may yet avail themselves of scientific methods, and in a certain measure they can, like science, PREFACE aim at discovering or formulating laws. If it is quite clear that they can succeed in this only by disengaging from the profound study of works the common elements which are always found in those of the most particular or indi- vidual nature, the determination of the * essen- tial character ' of schools, of epochs, of a whole literature, is one of the methods which are naturally suggested. This I hope will appear sufficiently clear in these Essays. And if, in addition, by reason of this sociability which seems to me to be the characteristic of French literature, I have provided English readers with new themes of interest, I hope they will not be disappointed, and I shall be exceedingly pleased. F. B. XI NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR THE following essays are selected from three of the series of M. Brunetiere's collected works Etudes critiques sur Fhistoire de la littfrrature fran^aise (Volumes III., IV., and V.), Questions de critique, and Essais sur la literature contem- poraine. As M. Brunetiere has kindly given his assistance in the selection of them, the volume may reasonably be considered the author's epitome of a portion of his best work. It is sometimes said that M. Brunetiere's work cannot be translated ; and, indeed, it is of so individual a nature, and derives so much of its value from its qualities of style, that it must lose considerably by being rendered in another language. Rhetorical Xlll NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR writing, and French rhetoric in particular, always runs the risk of losing its personal note in translation, and leaves the translator in the sorry dilemma of re-fashioning the original past recognition, or of alienating those readers who justly expect good English. It is the old problem ; only in the present case it is aggravated by special circumstances. The extreme importance of the Essays, however, and particularly their suggestiveness, have prompted the attempt to give them an English dress. And, if I am not mistaken, M. Brunetiere's translator will always succeed best by inclining to as close a rendering as idiom will permit. D. N. S. XIV CONTENTS THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF FRENCH LITERATURE i THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN FRENCH LITERATURE 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLIERE .... 66 VOLTAIRE AND JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU . . . 1 34 THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC . . . .168 IMPRESSIONIST CRITICISM ..... 207 AN APOLOGY FOR RHETORIC 235 Brunetiere's Essays in French Literature THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF FRENCH LITERATURE I ONE is certainly open to the charge of rashness, if not of useless endeavour, in proposing to describe or sum up in a word the essential character of a literature so great, so rich, above all so varied, as the French. What connection, indeed, can be found between a story of the Round Table, as Le Chevalier au Lion by Crestien de Troyes, for example, and Le Maitre de Forges^ or Doit-on le dire ? or some other vaudeville, by Eugene Labiche or by Edmond Gondinet ? They differ in every respect, even in the language ; and there is a still greater difference between the authors themselves, to say nothing of the times and places. But if, on the plea of defining the essential character of a literature, we began by omitting all its eccentricities, what would be left as the insignificant remainder ? What would we have of literary or even of historic BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS value ? And would we not, by analysis on analysis, have but reduced the very material of our observa- tions, till we lost it, as it were, by evaporation ? This objection can be easily answered. If it is not absolutely true, a constant and mathematical truth which may be verified on every occasion, that a great literature is the adequate expression of the genius of a race, and its history the faithful abridg- ment of that of a whole civilisation, the contrary is undoubtedly even less true ; and though an interval of six or seven hundred years may have made a difference between a trouvere of the twelfth century and a vaudevillist of the Third Republic of our days, there is bound to be, all the same, some connection between them. May we not add that in a Europe, in which, during the last thousand years alone, so many races have mingled and blended, and so many treaties have been made and unmade it is rather in their literatures than within their frontiers that the great nations of history have awakened to a sense of their individuality ? There would be no Italy were there not something com- mon to Dante and Alfieri, no more than there would be a Germany, were there not innate in every Ger- man something, even at this day, of Luther. But what decides the question and justifies the search after the essential character of a literature, is the consequences which seem to result from it, the light which this character, once it is defined, throws in IN FRENCH LITERATURE some way or other on the inmost history of a litera- ture, and the knowledge which it gives of the gradual development of the national spirit. Let us suppose, by way of example, that the es- sential character of Italian literature is that of being what may be called an artistic literature. This characteristic alone distinguishes it and separates it at once from all the great modern literatures, from the French as well as the German, from the English as well as the Spanish. Works of art are certainly in abundance in these literatures, but there are few which are artistic in motive and by design, few in which their author, like Ariosto or Tasso, aimed only at following poetic caprice or realising a dream of beauty. In this same characteristic, too, are in- cluded the secret affinities which Italian literature has always had, as is well known, with the other arts, and notably with painting and music : there is something of Orcagna in the poem of Dante, and when we read the Jerusalem or the Amlnta do we not really feel that we are present at the transformation of the epic into a grand opera ? This likewise explains the spell which the same literature wrought on the imaginations of the time of the Renaissance. It was from the Italians that Frenchmen living under Francis I and Henry II, and Englishmen of the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, obtained their first feeling for art ; and if the appreciation of the personal and intrinsic value 3 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS of form is not the whole Renaissance, is it not at least its most important part ? Who can fail to see also the bearing of this idea of a purely artistic literature on what the Italians once called by the name of virtu which is not virtue^ which may even be its opposite, but which in any case is, as a natur- alist or a logician would say, the genus of which virtuosity is only a particular species? And who consequently can fail to see in what manner, and how quickly, the definition of the essential character of the literature leads us insensibly to the knowledge of the Italian character itself? Let us take another example and say that the essential character of Spanish literature is that of being a literature of chivalry. Is it not true that its whole history is illuminated by it as by a ray of light ? The epic songs of the Romancero y stories of adventure in the style of the Amadis or of the Diana of Montemayor,, the dramas of Calderon or Lope de Vega, the Physician of His Honour or Mudarra the Bastard, mystic treatises and picaresque novels, the Castle of the Soul or Lazarillo de Tormes^ we recognise the bond of connection between all these diverse works, their family characteristic, the hereditary trait which testifies their common origin, this Castilian pundonor^ whose exaggeration, now sublime and now grotesque, moves with almost pleasing unconcern, as in the story of the Knight of the Sorrowful Coun- tenance^ to the extremes of devotion and folly. If 4 IN FRENCH LITERATURE in our modern Europe, political and industrial, utili- tarian and positivist, we have not yet entirely lost the sense of chivalry, we are for this indebted to Spanish literature : and it would not be difficult to prove that it is this literature which has preserved for us all that deserved to survive of the spirit of the Middle Ages. I cannot believe that this remark would be useless to a closer knowledge and fuller understanding of Spanish literature, of its historic role, and of the genius of Spain itself. The essential character of French literature is more difficult to determine. Not that in itself our literature is more original than any other, nor richer in great works or in great men. Nothing more im- pertinent could be asserted ; and if the Spaniards have no Moliere and the English no Voltaire, we, in our turn, have no Cervantes and no Shakespeare. But French literature is undoubtedly the most abundant and the most voluminous, not to say the most fertile, of all modern literatures. It is the oldest of them, and we can recall, without vanity, that neither Dante in Italy nor Chaucer in England concealed what they owed, the one to our troubadours and the other to the anonymous authors of our old fabliaux. Is it not also the most industrious, the most receptive, one might say the literature which has always been, no matter what may be said, the most inquisitive about foreign literatures, the most largely inspired by them, the least scrupulous in u turning them into blood and nourish- 5 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS ment " ? Ronsard is almost an Italian poet ; and Corneille, with the nature of a Norman, is almost a Spanish tragedian, for when it is neither Calderon nor Lope de Vega that he follows, it is Seneca or Lucan, and both of these were from Cordova. We have also prose writers, such as Diderot, who have been discussed for the last hundred years and more, as " the most German " or " the most English " of our countrymen. And in a short time, if we are not careful, we, in Paris, will be reading only Russian novelists, like Goncharoff or Chedrine, as we shall be going to see only absurdly Scandinavian melo- dramas, like The Wild Duck or The Lady from the Sea. Let us add that whether international or cosmopolitan in such a sense, French literature is also so in this, that no other has had the honour of attracting more strangers : Italians, from Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, to Galiani, the friend of our encyclo- paedists ; Englishmen, such as Hamilton and Chester- field; Germans above all, such as Leibnitz and the great Frederick. It is all this that makes French literature so diverse ; but it is all this too that makes it so difficult to characterise in a single word. IN FRENCH LITERATURE II IF, however, rather than defining our literature by its qualities of order and clearness, of logic and precision, of elegance and good breeding, the enumeration of which is now almost a commonplace, we were to say that it is essentially sociable or social, we would not perhaps express the whole truth, but, if I am not mistaken, we would not be far from it. Prose writers, and even poets, from Crestien de Troyes, whom we have just mentioned, to the author of Les Humbles and Les Intimites^ M. Francois Coppee ; from Froissart or Commynes to the author of the Esprit des Lois or of the Essai sur les Maeurs, scarcely one in France has written but under the eye of society, and without distinguishing the expression of his thought from a consideration of the public to whom he appeals, and, consequently, the art of writing from that of pleasing, persuading, and con- vincing. " Even the poets of Greece," said Bossuet, somewhere, "who were in the hands of the whole people, instructed rather than diverted. The most renowned of heroes looked on Homer as a master who taught him how to reign well. This great poet taught no less how to obey well and to be a good citizen. He and so many other poets, whose works are no less grave than pleasing, celebrated only the arts that are useful to human life, and proclaimed only the public goody fatherland, society, and that admirable 7 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS civility which we have just explained" May we not think that in so defining the essential character of Greek literature though he viewed it from too high a standpoint, and without adequate regard of the comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of the Anthology Bossuet unconsciously defined at the same time his own literary ideal ? In any case, what he says of ./Eschylus and Sophocles is no less true of Corneille and Voltaire Voltaire, who may be justly said to have spoiled the drama by this very desire to " celebrate the arts that are useful to human life " ; and if I had any doubts that this desire was the soul of our literature, the number and diversity of the facts explained thereby would suffice to convince me. In this way, then, the qualities above mentioned order and clearness, logic and precision, severity in composition and good-breeding in style are all connected with it, or rather depend on it, as so many effects of one and the same cause. If what is not clear is not French, the reason for it is not to be sought in the native character of the language or in any other secret virtue. Our vocabulary and syntax, reduced to their essential elements and considered in themselves, do not differ so much from the syntax and vocabulary of Spanish and Italian. They have the same origin, and, in more than one respect, the same evolution. But while in Spain and Italy, writers, and poets above all, have endeavoured to make their language more voluptuous and tender, or more 8 IN FRENCH LITERATURE sounding and beautiful, not even shrinking from the extremes of Gongorism or Marinism, but rather throwing themselves into these with all their soul, in France, on the other hand, our writers in general, and our prose writers in particular, have aimed only at making themselves the more easily understood, and at becoming accordingly, with each successive work, more simple, clear, and lucid. On this point, Rivarol, in his celebrated Discours sur Funiversalite de la langue franfaise makes an ingenious and profound remark. "Study the trans- lation of the ancient authors into modern tongues. Thanks to the facility which almost all the other languages have of modelling or moulding themselves on Latin or Greek, they give a faithful rendering, even of the obscurities of their original, and the meaning is at last fully recovered, but at the outset it was lost with the original. On the contrary, a French translation is always an explanation" This could not be better said, and the only criticism that I here pass on Rivarol is that he tries to find in the character of our language a reason which seems to me rather to be implied in our authors' conception of their art. It is out of regard to the reader, and, as Bossuet said, from " civility," if it is from a desire to render themselves accessible to all, and not merely to compatriots, but even to foreigners, that our writers of the seventeenth century disencumbered French phraseology of the learned Greek and Latin mannerisms, 9 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS by which it was embarrassed, burdened, and fettered. Similarly, in the following century, if the quicker and smarter and simpler phrase of Voltaire is generally substituted for the fuller and richer and more organic phrase of Pascal and Bossuet, it is still by way of " civility," in order to reach, as could easily be shown, new and less educated classes of readers and to instruct them. And similarly still, in our day, if romanticists have vindicated the right of using, in prose as in verse, a vocabulary less "noble " and "select," and accordingly more popular, than that of the classicists, where is the reason to be found but in this "civility," which they sometimes seem to have violated only to appeal in their turn to a public less " select " and " noble," and consequently more numerous, than that of Voltaire and Pascal. The first and principal object, then, of our great writers, in all times, has been to make themselves be read. It is not the universality of the French language that has brought about, or merely prepared, the uni- versality of the literature, but, on the contrary, it is the universality of the literature that has caused the universality of the French language. Civilised Europe has not read Rabelais and Montaigne, Voltaire and Rousseau because they were French ; it has rather studied French to be able to read Montaigne's Essays and Rousseau's Contrat social. The consequence is plain enough. If the French language has become clearer and more logical, preciser and more polished 10 IN FRENCH LITERATURE than any other, it was not so originally, and had no innate reason for becoming so. All honour in this belongs to our great writers. It is they who have made it such, and they have done so only to make it more fitting to the social role or function which they have from all time assigned to literature. In this manner likewise is to be explained the superiority of our literature in the forms which may be called common. I speak of those which can exist only with the participation of the public, and with what may be called the favour of its collaboration. There can be no orator without an audience ; no theatre without a pit ; two, at least, are necessary for letter- writing ; and the moralist must have his salon. Let us consider in this connection the eloquence of the pulpit. If there has never been, in any lan- guage, a preacher more eloquent than Bossuet or more solid than Bourdaloue, the reason of it is that, inde- pendent of their personal qualities, none have better understood or developed in their sermons the political and social virtue of Christianity. In quite another department of thought, among our dramatic authors, I can think of only Racine and Regnard who did not pique themselves on correcting or directing manners ; but all the rest, on the other hand, made that their whole aim Corneille and Moliere, Voltaire and Destouches, Marivaux and Beaumarchais, Diderot and Mercier, Dumas and Hugo, the author of the Lionnes pauvres and the author of the Demi-Monde. Consider, 1 1 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS also, the masterpieces of the French novel, from Honore d'Urfe's Astr'ee, to go no further back, to M. Zola's Germinal, to descend no further. There are no analyses of states of mind, as in the novels of Richardson or George Eliot. What is depicted is the manners of the society of the time. The good French novels with the exception of Adolphe or Rene, which are not novels are all social pictures. And what shall I say in turn of our great letter-writers, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Maintenon, Madame du Deffand and Voltaire ? How preoccupied they are with society and, as a result, with their neighbours ! How they strain to amuse, to instruct, and to please ! So far is this carried that a truly private correspond- ence like that of Mdlle. de Lespinasse, where the writer thinks only of the interests of her own enthusiasm surprises us and jars in the history of our epistolary literature. And without their society, without their continual curiosity, without the unmis- takeable pleasure they have always had in noting the smallest customs, what would our moralists be La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, Vauvenargues and Duclos, Chamfort and Rivarol, Stendhal and Joubert ? If ever writers could say that they only " give back to the public what they had borrowed from it," it is they ; and this, too, is the reason of their superiority over all those who, in other literatures, have vainly endeavoured to compete with them. Take Addison or Shaftesbury as an illustration. 12 IN FRENCH LITERATURE From this method of understanding and treating literature, it has also come about that the purely literary qualities have insensibly widened, so as to include those subjects which from their nature seem the least suitable. From the very fact that our great writers have never separated the idea of their art from that of the interest, the real profit, and the pleasure of the reader, it has happened that everything which may amuse or instruct lies with us within the domain of literature. Thus questions the most abstract, and, by definition, the most remote from common experience, have become, in French, the occasion of masterpieces which may be equalled, in their kind, to the tragedies of Racine or the fables of La Fontaine. Need any examples be given ? The Provinciates are only a collection of theological pamphlets. The Histoire des Variations des Eglises protestantes is only controversial; The Entretiem sur la Pluralite des Mondes is only a treatise on Cartesian astronomy. The Esprit des Lois is only a compilation of universal and comparative jurisprudence. Emile is only a novel on education. I say nothing of the Histoire naturelle or the Contrat social. Yet what tragedies, by Cor- neille even, or Hugo, what novels, by Le Sage or Prevost, Gil Bias or Manon Lescaut, what odes or what elegies have done more, or as much, for the diffusion of French literature and the glory of its name ? No, indeed, Buffon said nothing so ridicul- ous, as some would seem to think, when he advised '3 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS the writer to " name things only in the most general terms"; and those who still laugh at the precept and the master understand neither. Buffbn meant to say that as long as geometricians and physicians, theologians and lawyers, scholars and philologers, in one word, all the specialists, employed only the technical language of their science or their art, so long would they lack that intelligent curiosity, that interest, and that general sympathy which to them are none the less necessary. In other words, he advised them to be men rather than embryologists or Hebraists, and though the advice may cause some inconvenience, who can deny that it is good ? Let us here also touch on the great reasons of the universality of the French language and literature. Twice, at least, in their long history French litera- ture and language have exercised on the whole of Europe a universality of influence which other lan- guages, more harmonious perhaps, like the Italian, and other literatures, more original in certain respects, like the English, have all the same never possessed. It was under a purely French form that our Chansons de Geste, our Stories of the Round Table^ our very fabliaux whatever be their origin, German or Tuscan, English or Breton, Eastern or Greek conquered and fas- cinated and charmed, from one end of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The amorous languor and subtlety of our love poetry breathe no less in the madrigals of Shakespeare him- IN FRENCH LITERATURE self than in the sonnets of Petrarch ; and after the lapse of so long a time, we still recognise something of ourselves even in the Wagnerian drama, as in Parsifal or Tristan and Isolde. Much later, in an entirely classical Europe, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, right on for a hundred and fifty years or even more, French literature held sovereign sway in Italy, Spain, England, and Germany. Are not Algarotti, Betti- nelli, Beccaria, Filangieri almost French names ? What of the famous Gottsched ? If Lessing triumphed over Voltaire, was it not with the aid of Diderot ? And can Rivarol be accused of national vanity in writing his Discours sur Funiversalite de la langue franfaise, considering that he was half Italian, and that the subject was proposed by the Academy of Berlin ? All sorts of reasons have been urged for this uni- versality of French literature : we have had statistics, if I may say so, geographical, political, and linguistic. But the true and real reason lies elsewhere : and it is to be found in the eminently social character of the literature. If our great writers are understood and admired by everybody, it is because they address themselves to everybody, or rather because they speak to everybody about everybody's interests. They pay no attention to exceptions or particularities : they wish to treat only of man in general, or, as is still said, of the universal man, held in the bonds of the society of the human being : and 15 BRUNETI^RE'S ESSAYS their very success is a proof that beneath all that dis- tinguishes an Italian from a German, this universal man, whose reality has been so often doubted, con- tinues to be and to live, and, despite modifications, to remain the same. Need any proofs be given ? How is it that the Old of Guillen de Castro, although it is a fine drama, and it would not be a difficult matter to praise it for certain qualities which are not to be found in the drama of Corneille, has not met with the same European success. The reason is that Guillen de Castro, like a true Spaniard, saw in his subject only its purely heroic side. He did not see what Corneille, on the contrary, brought into such fine prominence the struggle of Rodrigue's passion with the social law ; he exhausted its picturesque interest, but its purely human interest escaped him. How again, in his PKedre, did Racine change the material of the Greek Hippolytus? And what is it that Voltaire endea- voured to add in his Zaire by his ill-advised treat- ment of Shakespeare's Othello ? As with Corneille, it is a social conflict the conflict of love and religion, the eminently human drama of Zaire's hesitations, perplexities, and tortures between what on the one hand she owes to her birth, and what on the other she cannot refrain from giving to her passion. Therein lies the reason of their world-wide wel- come. In the questions they discuss, it is the essential interests of " civility " or of humanity itself which are 16 IN FRENCH LITERATURE at stake. As they consider the social institution perhaps the most admirable thing in the world, all their thoughts bear on it, and thus their expression of these thoughts cannot be a matter of indifference to anybody. Who would not be curious to know the extent of a country's duty to its citizens, or a father's to his children, or a husband's to his wife ; how the many conflicts that arise every day between our different duties are decided ; what bias reconciles, or what superior principle unites and blends, instead of opposing or contradicting, the needs of the individual and the rights of society ? It is from being not forced, but consecrated in its entirety, to the examination of these questions that French literature has won univers- ality. It is well to recall this fact to certain Frenchmen who forget it, and to remind them that while there may even be other reasons, this remains the chief. For I do not deny, let it be understood, that the character of the language may also partly conduce to it, and I have already said so in definite terms. It may reasonably be held that neither the number of a popula- tion, which in the seventeenth century was a fifth of the total population of civilised Europe ; nor the privileged situation of France in the centre of the Europe of that time and at the confluence, as it were, of the literatures of the North and South ; nor, in short, its good luck under Louis XIV, and even under Louis XV, to be the model in everything to the court of Charles II of England and to that of Catherine of BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS Russia, failed to favour the diffusion of French ideas and French literature. But these are secondary or rather derived reasons, which would not have acted of themselves, and none of which would have assured the universality of French literature, since none of them at other times assured the universality of Spanish or German literature. Though the Germans now number almost fifty millions, is their literature thereby more widely diffused ? Are German novels more read ? Are German dramas more acted ? Is it not always French novels that are shown in the book- sellers' windows of Vienna and Berlin, of Rome and Naples ? One might as well seek the reasons of the universality of French literature in the political action of France, as the reasons of Voltaire's popularity in his incredulity, or of Hugo's glory in his political opinions. And again, even this would still lead us back to the same conclusion, for it would still lead us back to the eminently practical or pragmatical^ and consequently social character of their prose and verse. And may not that very character, which explains the rarest qualities of French literature, be held like- wise to account for its faults or its defects ? The long inferiority of our lyric poetry is undoubtedly an eloquent example. If the Pleiade failed in its generous enterprise ; if Ronsard and his friends left behind them only a reputation which, from a literary point of view, is dubious and always contested ; if for two hundred and fifty or three hundred vears there 18 IN FRENCH LITERATURE was nothing more inane than a French ode or elegy, nothing more meagre under the false brilliance of its mythological adornment, and nothing more cold, it is not Boileau or Malherbe who is to be blamed for it, but only the force of events : and the truth is that in obliging literature to fulfil, so to speak, a social function, in requiring the poet to conform his manner of thinking and feeling to the ordinary manner, in refusing him the right to put himself into his work, or merely to let himself appear in it, the living springs of lyricism had been dried up or shut off. French literature has thus paid by its too manifest inferiority in the forms which may be called " personal " for its superiority in the forms which are " common." To make itself accessible to everybody, it had to submit to the principle of depriving itself of the expression of sentiments, not merely too rare, but only too particular. It likewise denied itself all that local detail or special accent could give to the expression of the general sentiments of the most private and individual being, for fear of including in its descriptions or analyses some elements which were not the same in all time and in every place. The predominance of the social character, and the subordination to it of all the others, reduced the personal manifestation to what could be contained in the proprie communia dicere of the Latin poet : and we have had our ^Eschylus and Sophocles, our Demosthenes and Cicero, but no Pindar, nor even a Petrarch or a Tasso. It would be more diffi- 19 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS cult to say why, too, we have not had a Homer or a Dante, an Ariosto, or a Milton. Is it for this that French literature has sometimes been accused of lacking depth and originality ? I do not intend to examine if, in this accusation, depth is confounded with obscurity. I only believe that our great writers affect somewhat the men of the world, or of the court, to cloak, or rather to disguise this depth, while certain Germans, on the other hand of the school of Hegel or of the famous Jean-Paul readily inform us what they have endeavoured to put into their works. The French- man piques himself on speaking clearly about matters which are sometimes profound, but the German seems to glorify himself too often on stating obscurely matters which are clear. Is Kant really more profound than Pascal, and Fichte than Rousseau ? Fichte and Kant, absorbed as they are in slow elaboration, in the consideration and, if I may say so, the proud satis- faction of their own thought, leave their readers the trouble of finding it out, while Pascal and Rousseau spare them such trouble. This is still, evidently, the effect of the same cause. The German is satis- fied if he understands himself, and in proportion to the difficulty which others have in understanding him, does he find proof of the depth of his thought. The Frenchman would think that he had failed in his aim if the reader could understand him only with effort, and he prefers to pass for superficial rather than for obscure. 20 IN FRENCH LITERATURE Should it not be added that, in a literature eminently social like the French, where the interests which are discussed are by definition the interests of humanity itself, the opportunities of being pro- found, in the philosophic sense of the word, are naturally less frequent than in a literature like the German, where the great pretension of the writer is to attain to the noumena of everything. For a useful discussion of the question of toleration, or that of the sovereignty of the people, there is need of less equipment if, for that matter, there is need of as much penetration and consequently there are fewer chances of astonishing and surprising than in the treatment of the question " how the Ego and the Non-ego, placed in the Ego by the Ego, are limited reciprocally." A Frenchman would have put it in a simpler manner, but, as is evident, he would have appeared less profound. Would he have merely put the question ? And since we can very well separate ourselves from our environment, would he not rather have left the problem to the universities as one of no practical utility ? What more is to be said but that, according as French literature merits the reproach of lacking depth, it is reproached, as it were, for not being German literature ? A very German reproach this ! I should have to say almost the same of its so-called want of originality, which I do not combat either, but explain by further reference to this same social 21 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS character. A man may well live, if he wishes, outside of and on the margin, as it were, of the society of other men, although for that matter it may be rather difficult. He may withdraw, in some way or other, from the circle of his fellow creatures, like Byron or Shelley. And he may, if he wishes, act in bold opposition to customs and received opinions. But if, on the other hand, he wishes to live in society, and for society which is undoubtedly permitted and really even ordered he must begin by submitting himself to its customs and opinions, since this is really the only way to modify them. Men are not to be persuaded against their prejudices. And just as we begin, so as to make ourselves masters of nature, by obeying its laws, the knowledge of which gives us the means of escaping from them, so, and with stronger reason, we can triumph over prejudices only as we begin by sharing them. In this way an eminently social literature would be always less original than a literature whose ideal would tend, like Italian literature of old, only to the realisation of pure beauty, or, like English literature still to this day, to the free manifestation of individual energy. This, if you will, is the weakness or the want of classical French liter- ature. It would be so certainly, if this weakness was not, on the other hand, as I have endeavoured to show, one of the conditions of its strength. We cannot have everything ; human affairs are always mixed ; and as for deciding, if, among so many con- 22 IN FRENCH LITERATURE ceptions of literature, there is one which should be absolutely preferred to others, or to all the others this would be a very interesting problem, but it does not concern us at present. Ill SHALL I now show the strong light which is thrown by this definition of the essential character of French literature on the obscure parts of its history ? The discredit and final neglect into which the " victims of Boileau," for example, have fallen, to whom may be joined the majority of those of Voltaire : the contra- dictory judgments that have been so often passed, and are passed still, on the " Societe precieuse " : the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, the importance of which has for so long been strangely neglected : the nature of the revolution wrought on the literature of his time by the author of the Nouvelle Heloise and the Confes- sions : the true point of debate in the first years of this century between the classicists and romanticists : all these become clearer and more connected, and order and adjust themselves, when they are referred to the essential character of French literature. If the names of the Theophiles and Saint-Amants are almost un- known, it is because they wished to indulge in " personal literature " at a time when the tendency of writers was 2 3 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS eminently social^ and when, accordingly, there was not that public opinion, without which nobody in France has ever been able to do anything. In like manner what the romanticists claimed was the right of being themselves, of breaking away from the restraints which the recollection of masterpieces of a " purely im- personal literature" imposed on them ; and, what is very curious, but very significant, they no sooner obtained this right than they renounced it. In like manner the Pro- testants, when they won from Rome liberty of thought and belief, hastened to surrender it in the making of separate churches for themselves. But all these questions are only for the literary historian, and this is why I prefer, now that I have alluded to them, to contrast the essential character of French literature so as to succeed in making it evident of itself with the essential characters of the German and English. In comparison with French literature, defined and characterised by its spirit of sociability, English literature is an individualistic literature. With the obvious exception of the generation of Congreve and Wycherley, and perhaps also of that of Pope and Addison, to which it must not be forgotten Swift too belonged, the English seem to write only to give themselves the exterior sensation of their individuality. Hence that humour^ which may be defined as the expres- sion of the pleasure which they feel in thinking only after their own way. Hence the abundance, the richness, 24 IN FRENCH LITERATURE the amplitude of the lyric vein, if individualism is pre- cisely its source, and if an ode or an elegy is as the in- voluntary flow and overflow of what is most hidden and secret and personal in the soul of the poet. Hence also the eccentricity of their great writers in comparison with the rest of the nation, as if in truth they recognised their own personality only in opposing themselves to those who seem most like them. Can we not name other characteristics of English litera- ture ? This I shall not venture to answer : all I say here is that I do not know how to express better the differences which separate it from ours. This, also, is all that I intend to do in saying that the essential character of German literature is that of being philosophic. Their philosophers are poets, and their poets philosophers. Goethe is to be seen no more, and no less, in his Theory of Colours or his Meta- morphoses of Plants than in his Divan or his Faust ; and lyricism, if I may here use this proverbial expression, "floods its banks" in the theology of Schleiermacher and the philosophy of Schelling. Perhaps this may be one at least of the reasons of the mediocrity of the Ger- man drama ? It is evidently the reason of the depth and reach of Germanic poetry. Even in the master- pieces of German literature there may be said to be something confused, or rather mysterious, suggestive in the highest degree, something which leads to the thought by the intermediary of the dream. Who has not been struck, despite the barbarous termin- 25 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS ology, with the fascinating and eminently poetical qualities, at once realistic and ideal, in the great systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopen- hauer ? Assuredly there is nothing more widely separated from the character of our French literature. We come to understand what the Germans reproach us with, when they reproach us with lacking depth. Let them pardon us in our turn if we do not reproach their literature with not being ours ! For it is well that it should be so, and for five or six hundred years it is this that has brought about the greatness, not merely of European literature, but even of western civilisation itself. I refer to what all the great peoples, after slow elaboration in national isola- tion, have paid back to the common treasury of the human mind. We owe, then, to this last nation the sense of the mysterious, and, so to speak, the revela- tion of the beauties of the obscure and intangible. To another we owe the sense of art, and what may be called the knowledge of the power of form. A third has transmitted to us what is most heroic in the conception of chivalric honour. And to another, lastly, we owe the knowledge of what is at once fiercest and noblest in human pride, what is most salutary and dreadful. But for us Frenchmen, our role has been to connect, to blend, and to unify, as it were, under the idea of the general society of the human race, all these contradictory or hostile elements. All Europe has borrowed our inventions 26 IN FRENCH LITERATURE and ideas to appropriate them to the genius of its different races, whether Latin or Romance in origin, Celtic or Gallic, or even Germanic. In reborrowing them, in our turn, and in adopting them when thus transformed, we have asked only to be able to assist in the progress of reason and humanity. We have cleared up their confusion, we have cured their canker, we have generalised their particularities, we have humanised their excess. Have we not also sometimes lessened the greatness or alloyed the purity ? If Corneille has made the still somewhat barbarous heroes of Guillen de Castro liker ourselves, has not La Fontaine, in imitating the author, of the Decameron, made him grosser than he is in his own tongue ; and if the Italians cannot accuse Moliere for what he has borrowed from them, the English have the right to complain that Voltaire little under- stood Shakespeare. But it is no less true that by distinguishing from the individual man of the North or of the South that idea of a universal man, for which we have been so much blamed if any modern literature has uniformly proclaimed " the public good and civility," it is French literature. And this ideal cannot be so futile as has been too often supposed, since, as I have endeavoured to show, from Lisbon to Stockholm, from Archangel to Naples, it is this which foreigners have been pleased to find manifest in the masterpieces, or rather in the entire range of the history of our literature. 27 THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN FRENCH LITERATURE* ALTHOUGH the books whose titles we give below are very unequal in merit, and do not address themselves to the same public, they have, at least, this point in common, that they deal with the history of polite society, and bring up once again the question of the influence of women in the vicissitudes of French literature. From "la tres sage Heloi's" and Marie de France, who lived in the thirteenth century, to Madame de Stae'l and George Sand, how many women authors have written without effect I mean to say without becoming models for the women, and even for the men, who have come after them, and without, consequently, inoculating the French spirit with some of the bad as well as the good qualities of their sex ? Even those who did not write, and * I. Les Mceurs folia et la Litterature de cour sous Henri 77, par M. Edouard Bourciez. Paris, 1886 5 Hachette. II. Histoire des femmes e'crivains de la France, par M. Henri Carton. . Paris, 1886 ; Dupret. III. Choix de lettres de femmes celibres, defuis le xvi siecle jusqu'a not jours, par un professeur de 1'Universite. Paris, 1886 ; Delalain. IV. Les femmes de France frosateurs et foetes, morceaux choisis par M. P. Jacquinet. Paris, 1886 ; Belin. 28 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE have left only a name, or at the very most a debris of correspondence, but who have none the less been vaunted for their wit and grace, and whose power was none the less real, how did they exercise this power, and for whose benefit or disadvantage ? This is what we ask ourselves on reading this Cholx de lettres de femmes celebres and this Recueil de morceaux choisiSy in which M. Jacquinet and a "university pro- fessor," by a gallant innovation, and as happy as gallant, have made only women figure. It is this question which M. Henri Carton's book on Les femmes ecrivains de la France should answer, and would answer, did it not absolutely fail to fulfil the promise of its title. It is this, too, which we in our turn should now like to examine. To be treated with the fulness it deserves, this subject would demand a whole volume, or more, for it is nothing less than the history of French literature treated with a certain bias and viewed in a certain perspective. Although we know nothing of the ruelles and salons of the time of the Crusades, and though the French court, for women as for men, was, till the time of Louis XII and Francis I, just the personal retinue of the king, yet the Middle Ages had their women historians and poets ; nor is there, from the first, any interruption in their line of succession. In proof of this, nothing would be easier than to name offhand twenty, thirty, or even a hundred authoresses, whom M. Jacquinet, in his Collection, and M. Carton, in his History^ have not even mentioned. Such, for 29 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS example, are Madame du Noyer, Madame Nouvellon, Madame Patin, Madame Pringy, Madame de Louven- court, Madame Moussart, Madame Durand, Madame Vatry, Madame de Gomez, Mademoiselle Masquiere, Madame du Hallay, Mademoiselle de La Force, Madame de Murat, and Madame d'Aulnoy, who all lived from 1680 to about 1725, a short but very obscure period of our literary history, and many of whom, I am sure, would not be unworthy of having " Extracts " made from their works. And as for those who did print, whether or not we add those who, without being authors, aimed at protecting or influencing literature, we could easily lengthen the already long list which Somaize has given in his Dictionnaire des Preciemes for a single half of the seventeenth century. If other literatures have not wanted women authors, the succession has not been so regular, nor the tradition so constant, as with us ; and a literary history of the women of France would trace, almost year by year, the very history of our national literature. Though we cannot here make any pretence to write, or even to sketch it, we can still try to show how we understand it, and to indicate roughly in what way the influence of women has affected our literature. We do not need to go further back than the six- teenth century. We have not a sufficient knowledge, either of the literature or of the habits of the Middle Ages. On the one hand we can find nothing in any literature more gross, more brutal, and less refined 30 IN FRENCH LITERATURE than our old fabliaux, while on the other hand we are unable to explain, without the influence, the example, and the authority of women, the prodigious success of the poetic and even mystic stories of the Round Table ; but what we are unable to understand, what, at least, I humbly admit I cannot, is the con- nection, or relation of so much ribaldry with so much delicacy, of the first part of the Roman de la Rose with the second. No doubt chronology, ethno- graphy, and philology will explain it to us some day ; they will distinguish with perfect precision what we mix up and confuse : but, in the meantime, neither can we distinguish it with sufficient certainty, nor can they explain it with sufficient assurance. Our scholars have done much for the literature of the Middle Ages, but in the histories which they have given us they have as yet forgotten to advance any theories, and have made catalogues rather than histories. I shall add, no matter how little it be their opinion, that if they have established anything, it is that there are two histories of French literature, just as there are two French literatures, the one beginning with the tenth century and ending with the fourteenth, and the other being reborn, or born, in the sixteenth and continuing to our day. The first has its own value, and the study of it is interesting, but it is useless to a knowledge of the second ; the interval between them was too long, the separation too profound, the very revolution of the language too complete and radical. 3 1 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS If we are wrong in judging the Chansons de Geste and the Fabliaux with a taste which has been formed by familiarity with the classics of the seventeenth cen- tury, we commit no less an error, nor one less danger- ous, in attempting to judge a tragedy of Racine or a comedy of Moliere from the point of view of the Middle Ages. And this is why, even though we regret it, we need not go back to the Middle Ages in search of the origins of the modern politeness of manners, language, and style. It would be more useful, and even indispensable so at least it has long been held to go back to the sixteenth century. This is what M. Edouard Bourciez has recently done in a very interesting book : Les Mceurs polies et la Litterature de cour sous Henri II. I am not going to criticise this book here, and pro- visionally I shall adopt its conclusions. Whatever the influence then which women undoubtedly had at the court of the princes of the house of Valois and though some of them, too, are plainly more than emancipated from the old servitude still it does not appear that they had the power to direct the current of public opinion or even to go against it ; and, generally, they followed it. Neither Rabelais, nor Calvin, nor Montaigne, nor so many others, and these are precisely the greatest, seems to have under- gone the influence of the women of the time, nor to have revolted against it, which, of course, is just another way of undergoing it. Perhaps they think 32 IN FRENCH LITERATURE with Erasmus " that woman is an absurd and ridiculous animal, though entertaining and pleasant ; . . . that Plato was right in asking if she should be classed as a reasonable creature, or left among the species of brutes ; . . . and that as an ape is always an ape, so a woman, no matter what part she plays, remains always a woman, that is to say silly and foolish." I am quite willing to believe them capable of it. But, whatever they think, it never comes into their head that if woman is a creature she can have a character, that she can claim her share in the occu- pations of men, and much less, consequently, that she can conceive the idea of leading, directing, or ruling them. Our French literature of the sixteenth century is still quite virile, without any alloy of feminine qualities, not only devoid of modesty and taste, but, it must be said, of shame, and as such it is hardly French, but, on the other hand, at once truly Gallic and Latin. This fact may lead us to ask the question if the troubles which filled the second half of the sixteenth century, the civil wars and the foreign wars, had not, by imposing on the women themselves other virtues than those of their sex, stifled, as it were, the awakening spirit of society, and, consequently, politeness of manners and elegance of speech. Even at the court of her brother, the first Margaret, the sister of Francis I, would have liked (according to the later phrase) to direct the affairs of taste. So too Mary Stuart, had fortune permitted it, BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS and had she not been forced too soon to leave the court of France for her misty Scotland. It has been truly said that this dynasty of the house of Valois "which the political historian has the right to reproach severely, created the brilliant side of French civilisa- tion, and powerfully contributed to found our su- premacy in point of elegance and taste " ; and what is true of its first princes is perhaps still more true of its last. Francis I did not usurp his title of " Father of Letters " ; everybody knows Charles IX's verses to Ronsard ; even Henry III prided himself on being a judge in matters of art and taste. Yet, all the same, neither kings nor queens, nor ladies outside their con- nection, succeeded in the sixteenth century in fixing in a truly stable if not final form what may be called the ideal of the French spirit. And whatever ex- planations may be given and these are liberal, as they always are, and innumerable, when the question is why something has not come to pass the fact is that not till the first year of the seventeenth century do we see the rise of the influence of women and the beginning of the history of polite society. The judgments of posterity are sometimes odd. As long as the Precieuses ridicules shall be acted that is to say as long as the French language shall endure so long shall we mock the Precieuses, whether true or false, ridiculous or not, of the Hotel de Ram- bouillet, and the incomparable Arthenice and Made- leine de Scudery. Yet it must be recognised that 34 IN FRENCH LITERATURE it is to them that the French spirit owes some of the best lessons which it has ever received, and our literature itself, by a consequence which I shall point out, an unmistakeable part of its glory. Moliere in mocking them, and, to mock them the better, in exaggerating their absurdities, was attend- ing to his business of dramatic author ; but as for us, it is time now to attend to ours, and not accept a satire as the lasting expression of the judgment of history. In reality, had the Precieuses taught us only propriety of language, and not to name on every occa- sion and before everybody everything by its name, that alone would have been much ; and Moliere him- self, yes, Moliere, without imperilling his glory, would not have done badly, on more than one occasion, to have put himself to their school. Art cannot and must not express what forms, no matter how, the material of everyday occurrence, the vulgar and gross stuff of life, or at least can do so only by transforming it ; and this formula, which is now that of the conversation of respectable people, is at the same time the beginning of the art of writing. All that is done cannot be spoken, all that is spoken in the liberty of private con- versation cannot be written ; we must not, like Buffon, put on lace ruffles to appear before the public, but no more must we, like Diderot, choose just this time to put on our dressing gown, much less to take it off ; and this is the first lesson which the habitues of the chambre bleue received of old from the Marquise de Rambouillet. 35 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS How far this lesson was useful is known by all readers, not of Brantome or Tallemant des Reaux, who are suspicious anecdotists, collectors of scandal- ous and often calumnious tales, though men of wit for that matter, but by readers of the Moyen de parvenir, for example, or, at the height of the seventeenth century, of Saint-Amant, Theophile, or Scarron. In Balzac even there are traits which we would not dare to cite. Ronsard and the Pleiade had endeavoured to draw us out of the rut, but to no purpose : the Gallic element returned, and still kept on appearing, and, mounting to the surface, spread itself in the fulness of its complacent ribaldry. The delicate and subtle allegory of Astree, too long, but so charming in its very roguishness and sentimentality, was answered by the Histoire comique de Francion, just as at another time, and in another country, Fielding was to reply by his Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to the long novels of Richardson. Another was surprised that Madame de Rambouillet would not allow the words of Rabelais's vocabulary to be spoken in her hearing. "This is too much," he said ; " we have no more liberty." And once again we would have obeyed our natural tendencies had the Precieuses not come to warn and save us from them. They did not meet with immediate success ; it was not they who could have made French literature break entirely, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the Gallic tradition ; and, undoubtedly, 3 6 IN FRENCH LITERATURE this would have been a pity even had it been possible : but all the same they taught us to moderate the flights of a gross fancy, and to make everything pass, as La Fontaine said, with the help of a word, for in France everything must pass. Even those who are Gallic by nature should be thankful to them for all the piquancy that is given by a clever and ingenious disguise to the ideas of certain things. At the same time that they refined the old Gallic spirit, the Precieuses were no less averse to pedantry and bookishness. Smitten with the ancients, intoxi- cated with Greek and Latin, even our greatest writers of the sixteenth century are pedants, and pedants of the first degree. Rabelais mocks at pedants, and we know with what verve ; but who will deny that he is one of them himself, and that this Gargantua of letters, with the continual display of his encyclopaedic knowledge, is as often unendurable as extraordinary ? And what of Ronsard and his disciples, with their pindaric odes, their learned allusions, and their myth- ology ? And what shall we say of so many others who sweat their classics, so to speak, through every pore with whom, like Sorbonne recluses, two verses of Martial or an aphorism of Plutarch take the place of arguments ? They are scholars, and they had to be followed, but they lack a well-bred bearing and the art of pleasing. Again it is women who will give them this, and it is the Precieuses. They will teach them that their learning which is only erudition has no 37 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS importance in itself; that the ancients were natural people and that the best means of resembling them is to imitate them exactly in this ; in short, that we must learn to live and not live to learn. It is good to know what Plato thought, but the thoughts of Plato can no longer be ours ; " the ancients are the ancients, and we are the people of to-day," or even, to put it forcibly, "it is in us that is to be found that antiquity which we revere in others " ; and we must endeavour to think in our turn like them, that is to say freely and naturally, but not accord- ing to them. Let us know Latin if we will, and Greek if we can, but let us first be sensible men ; and to this end let us bring learning out of its cave, and remove its sordid, pedantic, and repulsive appearance, and bring it into the world amongst courtiers and ladies, and make it intelligible, accessible, and hence profitable to those whose profession it neither is nor ever will be. And, when we write, let us re- member that it is not for those few persons who know as well as and sometimes better than we do the subject we are treating, but, on the contrary, for those who know it not so well, who have the right to know it not so well, but who wish to know it all the same. The import of this lesson, which was given with- out any pedantry, and urged and insinuated rather than given, will be better understood by consider- ing some of its consequences in the history of our 38 IN FRENCH LITERATURE literature. By imposing on the writer the qualities of order and clearness qualities which they themselves do not always show in their writing, though they have a lively appreciation of their value women assured the perfection of French prose and its universal domination. One of the outstanding merits of the Discours de la Methode, and that which still gives it life, is to have brought philosophy out of the darkness of the schools and the closets of the abstractors of quint- essences, to make it appear, as it were, in the broad daylight of the public thoroughfare, and to introduce it accordingly into the conversation of polite society. Pascal did the same in writing his Lettres provinciates : he laicised, if I may say so, the theological controversy ; he gave to the gentlemen of the court, and not only to the gentlemen, but to the ladies too, the means of dis- puting on "efficacious grace" and "proximate power." And Bossuet, too, did the same, and later on the Vol- taires, the Montesquieus, the Rousseaus, the Buffons ; the last in making history for the first time readable, for up to then it had been buried in the heavy folios of a Dupleix or a Mezeray ; the first in translating, for the use of Madame de Tencin or Madame du DefFand, the learned lucubrations of a Grotius or a PufFendorfF; and all of them, in fact, one after the other, in opening up new roads, by making literary what was not so before, and what is not so necessarily a metaphysical dissertation, a theological discussion, the history of a great heresy or of a diplomatic negotia- 39 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS tion, and even a chapter of physical astronomy or com- parative physiology. Of all the services that women have been able to render French literature, surely no one will think that this is the least. For it is undoubtedly they, by their demands still more than by their example, though there has been no lack of examples, who have given French prose the qualities which are the last to be denied it elegance in precision, perfection in measure, and, in the very great writers, lucidity in depth. What though women have passed all measure in their demands : they would not be women had it been otherwise. In endeavouring to purify a lan- guage, we always run the risk of impoverishing it, and, in regulating its style, it is no uncommon thing to blunt that vivacity of expression which is its soul, so to speak. In the same way, if we are willing to admit that art should not represent everything, nor the writer speak of everything, it is very difficult, and indeed very rash, to try to mark exactly where the privilege of both ends and their freedom begins. The Precieuses who were in society, and generally in the best of society, and, after the Precieuses, the women who succeeded them for more than a century and a half in the direction of literary taste, were too ready to believe that the liberty of art and of the writer was bounded by their caprice, and that the world was neither wider nor more varied than what could be contained, in women and men, in their ruel/es 40 IN FRENCH LITERATURE and salons. Hence followed several consequences, of which they must bear the blame, and which I shall now endeavour to point out cursorily. I cannot consider so very criminal their ways of talking, which are often odd, but sometimes happy, and always amusing. There has been much stupid talk on this matter. They perhaps impoverished the language of some pithy words and simple turns, but, when everything is taken into account, they enriched it with almost as many new words or expressions. And it is not they who invented these metaphors of which Moliere makes fun : " I am going to fish in the lake of my memory with the fish-hook of my thought " ; or again : " In the public square of your attention I shall lead in dance the bear of my eloquence " ; these, in particular, belong to the greater time of the Italian Renaissance. Who does not know, too, that there are at least as many con- ceits in a drama of Shakespeare as antitheses in a letter of our Balzac ? And, like the seicentlsmo of the Italians and the euphuism of the English, did not the cultism of Antonio Perez and Gongora precede in European literature that of the Marquis de Mas- carille and the Vicomte de Jodelet ? Euphuism, or cultism, or whatever name it is called, is a malady of language, which can sometimes extend to the thought, but does not always do so ; which, moreover, to be well discussed, would perhaps need to be studied more seriously than has been done so far, and more BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS scientifically too ; for its effects often resemble closely enough those of the natural expansion of the creative power of languages. That it is ridi- culous to ask me, to make me sit down, "to satisfy the desire which an arm-chair has to embrace me," I shall certainly not deny ; but, since an arm-chair is usually said to have arms, I ask, when is the precise moment in its evolution that a metaphor ceases to be clever and becomes ridiculous ? There has not been enough interest taken in the solution, or even the examination, of this question. What the Precieuses must be accused of is, of having aggravated, by establishing the language of good society, and in order to establish it, the difference that everywhere separates the language of literature from the language of the people. We, in France, have no literature of the people ; the finest efforts of our eloquence, the most of our finest verses somehow expire before they reach the million ; and every writer worthy of his name is really with us an aristocrat. How often has this been pointed out ? All Spain understands Don )uixote, and in Italy they sing the octaves of the "Jerusalem; Burns, to the Scots, is a people's poet, and Dickens, to the English, is a novelist of the masses ; we, in France, have our novels of Paul de Kock and our songs of the "cafes-concerts," La Laitiere de Montfermeil and the Bi du bout du bane. The Precieuses are partly responsible for this. It 42 IN FRENCH LITERATURE is not that they aimed at or wished this, it is not even, in a certain sense, that they did anything for it. But they ignored the existence of too many things round about them ; they had not a sufficient knowledge of the world or of life, but only of the salons and of the court, and of a few men of letters ; their experience was lacking in breadth and variety. Envious of the suffrage of the salons, the men of letters in their turn, wishing to have, as is said, the women on their side, insensibly limited the field of their observation, diminished their means of expres- sion, and naturally refined on the small number that was left them. Thus, in no literature, perhaps, is the written style more different from the spoken style than in ours ; in none is it more difficult to reach the crowd and to satisfy at the same time the select few ; and in none, in short, have the best writers themselves I mean prose writers fewer appreciative readers at home, but, by compensation, more admirers abroad. According as authors, under the influence of the salons and the ladies, thus gave up the ordinary use of language and the observation of life, they gave up also the natural and the true. This is a new grievance, and perhaps the most grave, though luckily the native independence of some great men could not fail to considerably weaken its consequences. The majority of women will always prefer an elegant falsehood to an unpleasant or even indifferent truth ; and there 43 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS would be no salons if we were all of us quite natural. To tell the truth, we disguise ourselves to go into the world, and the disguise consists in first throwing off all the preoccupations, the cares, and the habits which are in some way or other the substance of our life, to put on a character whose first merit is not to differ perceptibly from others. This is well if literature is only an amusement ; the material is still rich enough for the observer, since it could suffice for La Roche- foucauld or Madame de Sevigne. But it is otherwise if the writer is entitled to aim at something more, as, for example, to see the true face under the mask, and the real man, living, acting, and feeling under the correction and the order of the man of society ; he needs a liberty which the manners of the court and the salon will never give him. This is the crisis through which the literary influence of women passed in the seventeenth century, and over which it just succeeded in triumphing. Indeed all the writers of the second class yielded to them, and even one or two of the first. If we except some of the debris of the sixteenth century, belated into the seventeenth, the jesters and the writers of grotesque born enemies of salons, from many motives, and especially because there there is no drinking all the others are with them : Balzac and Voiture, Menage and Chapelain, Conrart and Vaugelas, Benserade and Quinault, Pellisson and Patru, Mascaron and Flechier, Corneille even and 44 IN FRENCH LITERATURE La Fontaine. The envious rail at them, but the women applaud themselves, and they are right, and public favour encourages them. I have endeavoured to point out the motives, and I have done justice to the usefulness of their work. They had spirit and courage, good sense and taste, the taste of the ex- quisite and of the grand, or rather the grandiose, the art of understanding everything and speaking about everything, except just what the Pascals and Bos- suets, the Molieres and Racines, the Boileaus and La Bruyeres were to need to speak to them about and to make them understand. Great lords and charming ladies, salons of the Place Royale or the Faubourg Saint Germain, there was no decorum that could hinder the author of the Pensees or of the Sermon sur la Mart from displaying before their eyes the littleness and the nothingness of man, the un- bounded vanity of his enjoyments, and that inexorable weariness which is the substance of human existence. There was none that could restrain the author of Tartufe or of Phedre from piercing to the bottom of worldly hypocrisy, or of leaving behind vain gallantries to paint in all their reality the passions of love. And there were no considerations that could lead the author of the Satires to moderate his anger at the verses of Chapelain, or the author of the Caracteres to spare us the bitterness of his experience of the world and of life. This is why we see them all, each in his own 45 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS way, without plot or plan, rising against the domina- tion of the rhetoricians and the Precieuses. La Bruyere attacks them with his biting and subtle irony, which inflicts but a deeper wound ; Boileau was careful not to forget them in his Satire sur les Femmes : 'Tis theirs to pet at whom the wits poke fun, And grant an audience if the world gives none. Racine riddles them with his epigrams ; Moliere writes the Precieuses ridicules and the Femmes savantes ; Bossuet pitilessly upbraids those worldlings who wish to know how the preacher spoke, "who compare him with himself and with others, and the first discourse with the following, . . as if the pulpit were a place of contest for the prize of eloquence " ; and it was on his scorn, in short, of all rhetoric and all eloquence that Pascal dared to found his own. This is why we will also find if we examine the Memoirs and the Correspondence of the time that not one of them frequented the fashionable salons. And how could they, if it is there they have their adversaries and their enemies, if it is in the salons that Moliere is reproached with the crudity of his pictures, and Racine with the truth of his ? Even the worthy marquise, Madame de Sevigne herself, is she not suspected of preferring Nicole to Pascal ? She undoubtedly admires the eloquence of Bossuet, but 46 IN FRENCH LITERATURE how much more that of Mascaron or of Flechier ! And despite the court, despite Louis XIV and his declared protection, the battle continues until, Pascal and Moliere being dead, Bossuet having ceased to preach and Racine to write, and Boileau having retired into a morose and sullen solitude, the women and the salons regain their empire. It is for them, and thanks to them, that the Pradons and Boyers are reborn, the Perrins and the Corases ; for them that the Pavilions and the Sainte-Aulaires turn their madrigals, which for that matter are as lively as they are elegant ; for them that Fontenelle writes his Plur- alite des Mondes ; for them that Massillon preaches. The Marquise de Lambert revives the traditions of the Hotel de Rambouillet. The Duchesse du Maine exaggerates them, with her characteristic taste for the excessive ; others follow, a new age begins, and the movement, checked for a short time, resumes its course now stronger than ever. For never was the power of women greater than in the eighteenth century, and on to the approach of the Revolution. It is then that they are veritable queens, mistresses and judges of taste and opinion. Their courtiers, or rather their subjects, are now called Chaulieu, Lamotte, Sacy, Mairan, Moncrif, Marivaux, Trublet, even Montesquieu ; and, as at the height of the influence of the Precieuses, they filled the French Academy. Why is it that history and criticism here change their tone ? What has 47 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS not been said of the salons of the eighteenth century ! In what method have they not been celebrated ! What place have they not been given in the history of French literature ! But, from one end of the century to the other, has it been noted what writers frequented the salons, and how the truly great men, or rather the only great men, were seldom there ? Voltaire may be said to have lingered in them, though for that matter I have never found him at Madame de Lambert's or Madame de Tencin's ; but after once having breathed their atmosphere with delight, circumstances turned him from them, and it is from that time, and the point is well worth the trouble of being noted, that dates his true influence on his contemporaries. Montesquieu also is to be met at Madame du Deffand's, and caught sight of at Madame Geoffrin's, but he is only on a passing visit, so to speak, when he chances to come to Paris, and for eight or ten months of the year it is at La Brede, while making his wine, that he thinks out his Esprit des Lois. It is the same, too, with Buffon ; when he leaves Montbard, if he thinks of calling on Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, he is said to astound this eternally enamoured creature with the familiarity of his manners and the vulgarity of his conversation. I say nothing of Rousseau : the part he sets himself to play is to fly from salons and society, where, moreover, he feels ill at ease, as if he feared that their flatteries, by softening the violence 48' IN FRENCH LITERATURE or his hatreds, would deprive his eloquence of the food which was its nourishment. And, in truth, not one of them had need of the salons, nor the salons of them. Let the salons applaud the pastorals of Fontenelle and the tales of Moncrif ! The value of the Esprit des Lois or of the Discours sur rinegalite does not depend on the ap- probation of Madame du Deffand or the opinion of Madame d'Epinay. They are badly prepared, and above all in a bad position, to judge and even to understand these works. The meaning is beyond them, as also is that of the Histoire naturelle^ and even of Candide and the Homme aux quarante Ecus, But they made up for it by gathering around them, and so completing the picture, if not Voltaire or Buffon, at least Saint-Lambert and Marmontel, Duclos and Voisenon, Bernis and Boufflers, Laharpe and Thomas, Grimm, Galiani, Chamfort and Rivarol, Delille and Morellet. These are the men who are wanted, men whose merit I do not deny, who are far from being worthless, who can speak, can write, can turn a madrigal or give point to an epigram, draw up a speech or rhyme a tragedy, but men, in short, whose work has perished almost entirely with them- selves, and who could be cut out of the history of the century and almost not be missed. I am wrong and must correct myself : they suc- ceeded at least in reducing the material of observa- tion, and, by force of perfecting the language, they BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS succeeded in weakening it. I have said that they could write : this is not sufficient. Never was writing more clear, for never was style more abstract : it is the limpidity of pure water, and it is also, and above all, the insipidity. Why are the little verses of the Chevalier de Boufflers not by the Abbe de Bernis, just as a tragedy of Marmontel might be by La Harpe, or a saying of Rivarol by Chamfort ? Differences in spirit vanish one after the other in the lack of distinction in the style ; a man must speak like everybody to be sure to be understood by everybody ; and good taste ceases at the precise point where originality begins. At this period of the century the coincidence had become perfect : the proprieties of society are the very laws of the art of writ- ing. Words are now but signs of a conventional algebra, and the laws of hard logic regulate their uni- form arrangement. But it is not Buffbn or Voltaire who is to be blamed for this, as they have often been, and still less is it Rousseau ; it is the salons ; and it is the writers who aimed, like those I have just men- tioned, only at the approbation of the salons, if indeed they did not write solely to be admitted into them. It is told that, at Madame Geoffrin's, every time the conversation threatened to break loose " on authority, religion, politics, morality, people in office or men in power," the hostess hastened to check the offenders with an " Oh, isn't this good ! " and to send them, as she said herself, to make their noisy gossip elsewhere. 50 IN FRENCH LITERATURE This is the last reproach which can be brought against the salons. At no time, perhaps, and certainly not under the old regime, was it possible to discuss the great questions, and still less to plunge deep into them, for there was really nothing in the world, according to the circumstances, more pedantic or fantastic. Everything might be touched upon, but nothing was to be examined deeply ; everything might be spoken about, but without being considered in its essentials. Besides that it is polite to share the opinion of every- body else, we do not meet together to weary, but on the contrary to amuse ourselves. If, then, we have any crotchets, no matter their nature, or should they be metaphysical, nothing would be more out of place than to make them public and thereby disturb those who take no interest in them. This is the rule of the game, and the rule is good. It is only regrettable when the habits of conversation in society are carried into the art of writing, and this is what happened in the history of our literature. All the questions that can naturally interest worthy people we have treated, under the influence of the salons, as they would be treated there, and only as they could possibly be treated there, that is to say, pleasantly and superficially. " To speak always nobly of mean things, and simply enough of lofty things " has thus become the law of our writers, as it was of conversation. Out of deference to women, or, perhaps, without thinking of it, and by the mere contagion of example, some very great writers, such as BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS Montesquieu, aimed at dealing in a grave manner with the most futile objects, and made a mannerism of so doing ; and others, such as Voltaire, at deciding by an epigram, often enough of very doubtful taste, the most grave questions. Thus it follows that the salons are in this way responsible, to say nothing about other matters, for all the artificiality and superficiality of the Esprit des Lois and of the Essai sur les Maeurs. There are, too, certain questions of the most serious and lofty nature, which the salons excluded from the range of our authors and our literature, just as they had always excluded them from conversation. "Al- though conversation ought always to be equally natural and reasonable" wrote, in 1680, Mademoiselle de Scudery, " / admit for all that that there are occasions when even the sciences can enter into it with a good grace " ; and this could not have been said better, nor could it at the same time be more entirely just. The salons were not made for discussions, for example, on Semitic inscriptions or comparative anatomy. Not only the pure sciences, but what are called the applied sciences, and politics, and social economy could not " enter with a good grace " into polite conversation, and still less, undoubtedly, history, philosophy, and religion. Con- sequently they have not entered into it, nor into our literature. It is an astonishing thing for foreigners, especially for Germans and Englishmen, perhaps also for Russians, and generally for men of the North, to note the indifference of our writers to the problems 52 IN FRENCH LITERATURE which torment the soul of Faust or Hamlet. And, indeed, these questions are hardly ever treated in the salons, in spite of the strange way in which they often trouble women. Their attention is directed to quite other objects. The present life, and only its outmost part, the social life and its relations, occupies and absorbs them entirely ; and our writers, to be on good terms with them, confine and absorb themselves in it, and are absorbed in it with them. One is sorry for the French genius to see the air of unconcern, and the tone of elegant badinage with which even a Voltaire, in his pamphlets, his Contes y and his Dictionnaire philosophique^ ridicules or scouts, despite all his genius, whatever he does not understand. If we had not had our Protestants ; if we had not had our Jansenists, those of the early times, and Pascal above all ; if we had not had our great preachers, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and even Massillon ; if we had not had Rousseau, the Profession de fol du Vicaire Savoyard and the Lettres de la Montagne, it would be terrible to think of the number of questions to which our classic literature remains almost entirely a stranger. What does Racine think of free-will, and Moliere of destiny ? The salons have lightened, as it were, our literature of its philosophic ballast. And if, towards the end of the eighteenth century, in the foreboding of a uni- versal catastrophe, and in that slightly feverish state of agitation which precedes great crises, some of them broach for the first time the discussion of the public 53 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS interest, and the political and social questions of the immediate future, these other questions of which we are speaking, and which are vital in another way, since the conduct and direction of life depend on them, are still refused admittance. They have not yet forced the door. Let us hasten to admit not to expose ourselves to the reproach of pedantry, to exaggerate no- thing, to place the good side by side with the bad that the salons were able to compensate in some measure for what they deprived us of, and that the losses which we enumerate have been bal- anced by real gains. True, we have neither Milton nor Shakespeare, neither a Paradise Lost nor a Hamlet ; we have neither Goethe nor Kant ; but in no litera- ture, since Letters have been written, are there any that can be compared with the Correspondence of Vol- taire or Madame de Sevigne, or even with that of Madame du Deffand or Mademoiselle de Lespinasse ; and this is already something. Likewise, in what other literature can be found that succession of pene- trating moralists who, from Montaigne to Rivarol, one after the other, with as much steadiness as delicacy of hand, have anatomised the social and moral man even to his imperceptible fibres ? And with what- ever brilliance the English novel may have shone, in the present century still more than in the last, I am not sure if, on making the necessary ex- ceptions, I do not still prefer the vein of the 54 IN FRENCH LITERATURE French novel. I could say much more, if I chose, about the theatre, which for the last two hundred years or more has become our privilege and mono- poly. And it must be admitted that it is to the influence of women, to the life of the salons and the court, to the perfection of the spirit of sociability, that this is really due. "It is only women who can express in a single word a whole emotion and render delicately a delicate thought " ; and when La Bruyere, before even the letters of Madame de Sevigne were known, thus praised the superiority of women in letter-writing, he found the explanation of it in their very effort towards preciosity. And in truth this anxiety to speak well so far as it consists in enhancing, by the expression or the sentiment, by the vivacity of a turn or the unexpectedness of a touch, things that are ordinary or common, in giving to good sense even and to banality the charm and piquancy of paradox, in passing over in silence precisely that which is wished to be heard, or in diminishing, with- out appearing to do so, the importance or gravity of what is said is not this anxiety to speak well preciosity itself, understood as it should be, and is it not the basis of epistolary style ? Have you ever asked yourself why it is that the letters of so many great writers the few we have of this same La Bruyere, those of Boileau, those of Racine, or also, in the eighteenth century, those 55 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS of Montesquieu, of Rousseau often, and Buffon always give such a bad and far-away like- ness of their authors, correspond so little to their works, and rather contradict the -jidea we had formed of them ? It is because they do not write them for the pleasure of writing them, but from particular reasons, to fulfil their obligations, from duty rather than from inclination. Women, on the contrary, put their whole soul into them, their invincible desire of pleasing, all the abundance and vivacity of their conversation. They are not content with mentioning things, they mention them again, and in twenty ways, each way adding some- thing unexpected to the elegance of the others. Their simple manner does not come naturally ; it is acquired. They owe it to their experience in society, or, rather, it is their nature not to be natural, and to do with ease, good humour, and simplicity what men do only with difficulty, bungling, and clumsiness. As society is their element and the salons their universe, they are only truly and absolutely women in enter- ing into society and reigning in the salons. In their letters, therefore, are to be found that art of " perverting facts " which is the basis of modern con- versation, these unusual metaphors and periphrases which serve to disguise what they cannot say crudely, that "spirit of politeness" which warns them on every occasion to stop in time, that playfulness which in- spires "a disposition to make use of everything and 56 IN FRENCH LITERATURE be wearied with nothing." In emancipating women, the spirit of society permitted them to be them- selves, but undoubtedly they are themselves only in so far as they differ from men, and it is in letter- writing, which is most in their line, that they have shown these differences and shown their originality. Some men of wit, ready and quick like them, have now and then succeeded in robbing them of some- thing Voltaire, for example, and if only he had not had such a strong hankering after the gross, to say nothing more the author of the Lettres a Mademoiselle Poland. No more need we doubt that the penetration of our moralists has been sharpened by contact with women in the subtle atmosphere of the salons. Under the uniformity of appearance and outward correctness of bearing, it soon became a malicious occupation to endeavour to discover and recognise shades of difference. La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere in the seventeenth century particularly ex- celled in this ; Rivarol and Chamfort a little later, towards the end of the eighteenth. How often "gravity is a mysterious carriage of the body in- vented to cover the defects of the mind " we might not know but for La Rochefoucauld ; and he himself recognised this only by being struck, in the salon of Madame de Sable or of Madame de La Fayette, with the stupidity of a magistrate or the majestic nullity of a bishop. That a man without position 57 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS "cannot be benevolent, but only good-natured," as Chamfort remarked, is another of these fine distinc- tions which can be hardly recognised in everyday experience : they are too imperceptible ; opportunity and leisure are necessary to observe them. Thanks to the life of the salons and of the court, our moralists, if they have too often lost sight of the individual man, have at least understood and described the essential character of the universal man, or better still of the social man. They have advanced the dissection of him, as I said, to the last degree of delicacy and precision. And, perfecting the language at the same time as them powers of observation, their means of expression, if I may say so, at the same time as their eyes, while inimitable in the art of discovering shades of distinction, they are equally so in the almost infinite resources they have found in the use of the poorest vocabulary and the severest syntax. This is not yet all, and I consider it would be an inexcusable omission not to credit the influence of the salons and women with one part at least in the rise of the modern drama and novel. In purifying love, in spiritualising it, in mingling senti- ment with it yet without letting the devil lose his share, as the saying goes in making it a topic of conversation, women have made it, in France, the great question of the nation. If we omit those whose profession forbids them to speak of the passions of 58 IN FRENCH LITERATURE love otherwise than to deplore them and condemn their errors, our modern literature is taken up entirely with this topic, as was the talk in the salon of Madame de Lambert or of Madame de Rambouillet. And for the last two hundred and fifty years, that is to say since the birth or the formation of polite society, I do not think that there is any literature, not even the Italian, which is richer in tales of gallantry and emotion, and generally of love. D'Urfe was the first ; Racine followed him too clever, though shrinking from the salons and fleeing the Precieuses, not to avail himself of whatever he found in them to suit the nature of his genius ; then came Marivaux, then Prevost, then Rousseau, all adding to it the flame of passion ; and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the author of Atala ; and the author of Delphine ,- and the author of Indiana, of Valentine, of Jacques^ of Mau- prat, and Balzac ; and after them so many others ! Need we add the poets, Lamartine at least, and Musset, if not Hugo ? If the salons really did not do everything, it is they, at the first at any rate, by directing manners towards gallantry, to say the least, as much as towards politeness who drew the mass of writers after them. It is they who, in a literature which had been rational so far, or at least intellectual, made sentiment play the part it had been so long denied. It is they who began by distinguishing, noting, and classifying for us the changing shades of the same sentiment or the same 59 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS passion ; they who planned, and then enriched, that Carte de Tendre which is a laughing-stock, but which, after all, novelists are only eternally running over in the search of new countries and an unexplored corner. And it is they, though they have im- poverished the language of description, who have supplied the language of observation and psycho- logical analysis ; and perhaps also that of the dialogue for our dramatic authors. And since I can here only indicate what would require too much space to show clearly, it is this, in short, that can be verified by a mere glance at the history of foreign literatures, in which the drama and the novel have been at all times, as with us, exactly what the spirit of sociability has made them. These are undoubtedly many services so many services that I really hesitate while on the point of concluding, and ask myself if the best conclusion would not be to give up the search for one. For, do you not care for the salons and do you happen to hold the same ideas on women as the Arnolphe of the Ecole des Femmes or the Chrysale of the Femmes savanteS) that is to say, the same as Moliere ? Then I have spoken of the evil which the salons have done us, and some of even our greatest writers. But, on the contrary, do you care for the salons and hold the same ideas on them as Madame de Lambert or Madame de Rambouillet ? This can be done without literary scruple, and I have endeavoured 60 IN FRENCH LITERATURE to show the reasons why. What everybody must at least admit is that this is a sign by which great and durable influences are to be recognised, the difficulty of deciding definitely for or against them. I may add that this has been more than once over- looked, by the one party in their too violent attacks on the Precieuses, by the other in their immoderate praise of the eighteenth century salons, and by the one as by the other precisely from not having ap- preciated this influence at its true value ; and this is certainly one conclusion. But if now we seek to characterise in one word the nature of this influence, we may say that women have given the French genius its form. While in other literatures, generally, the great writers create in a way at once the matter and the form of their work, and are masters, at the very least, of one as well as the other, it is to be remarked that in our literature they must, to be received, accom- modate their matter to a. form which is given or agreed upon beforehand. In French there are rules of the art of writing as of that of composing, or rather they are the same, which we call formal^ that is to say pre-existent to the ideas which are to be expressed. So the women have decided. What they wished was that the writer should not be allowed to re- make the language in his own image, and, were he to try to, that he should incur their disgrace and be considered a barbarian. They wished like- 61 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS wise that if a person wrote, it should be with the intention of being read and consequently under- stood, and that he should not be contented with being understood by himself, and still less by him- self alone. They wished, also, that there should be no sentiment, no matter how subtle, and no thought, no matter how profound, that could not be expressed by the words and grammar of modern usage. They wished, in short, that elegance should be given to those matters which least allow of it, and that there should never be any escape, under any pretext whatever, from the laws of the art of pleasing. This is why all revolutions in taste have begun, in France, by being revolutions in language : an attempt to introduce into literary usage habits of language which everyday usage had expelled from it, or, inversely, to cleanse the good usage of the mud which the revolutionaries had been able to deposit. But, throughout these revolu- tions, most of which succeeded only in so far as they had their support, the women always pursued the design they had formed to subject sooner or later the innovators themselves to the need of clear- ness, justness, and order. Whatever subject one treats in French, if he wishes to treat it as an author, he must circumscribe and limit it, transpose it from its special and technical language into the language of everybody, spare the reader the fatigue of atten- tion, and lead him, in short, to believe that our 62 IN FRENCH LITERATURE thoughts have for long been his, and were his even before they were ours. This is the secret, for the last two hundred years, of the diffusion of the French language : French books explain each other. But perhaps this is also the secret of the often strange mistakes which the Germans or English make about our writers. We alone, indeed, under this uniformity of manner, and after much study, are capable of distinguishing in our books the mediocre from the excellent, the commonplace from the original, and a clever rhetorician from a very great writer. I have so many appropriate names at the end of my pen, and so many titles, that I prefer not to give any. As to the utility of this discipline, I consider it good, if we write solely to please ; less good, as I have said, if we aim at something higher, but yet still good. " We warn those who read these writings," said Bossuet once, in a preface, " that they must expect to find in many places very subtle matters which may give them trouble to read^ but which I cannot convey to the minds of men without their attention, nor without that attention being troublesome." And it is certain that there are some matters which can receive only a certain degree of clearness, which cannot be treated cursorily, which are not to be skimmed, which must be fathomed ; but perhaps also we need to be Bossuet to dare to touch them. Most of our great writers have shaken off the yoke of this discipline, 63 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS and it is clear that they have been right, but it will always be furiously delicate, as our Precieuses used to say, to try to imitate them in this point. Voltaire even, who dared so much, had not this audacity, or at least he had it only on the example of Rousseau. The fact is that to revolt against conventions we must be sure of having genius, or at least of having very new truths to proclaim, of speaking in a very great cause, of acting in the name of very great in- terests. And since it is evident that the one is as rare as the other, the best course is to follow traditions when they have been fixed, as is here the case, by the most worthy people who have preceded us, when these are, moreover, conformable to the genius of the race, and have, in short, assured in the world the empire of the national spirit. For all these reasons let us hope, in conclusion, with M. Jacquinet in his interesting Introduction to hi&Recueildt morceaux choisis that his collection, and the pleasure which everybody will undoubtedly take in perusing it, will inspire someone with the ambition of writing this History of Polite Society of which a woman, who unfortunately lacked the ability, would seem to have had the first idea ; of which Roederer, in a curious book, and Victor Cousin, in a well known one, have sketched only the first chapters ; and from which we may draw quite different conclu- sions, and many more too, than they have. Let us only advise this future historian not to believe for a 64 IN FRENCH LITERATURE moment this melancholy Thomas and this terrible Diderot, nor, when discussing women, to think of " dipping his pen in the rainbow " or of shaking over his writing " the dust of the wings of butterflies." Despite appearances, false brilliance would be no- where more unsuitable. There is need of taste rather than of show ; of acuteness, but not of eloquence ; of as much discretion in praise as moderation in criticism ; of a simple and quite uniform style. And let us beg of him to hasten with this book, if he has no special reason for delay, for at the rate at which things are going, we may soon lose entirely the sense and appreciation of those manners which have quite passed away. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLIERE I KNOW it is difficult to make oneself understood, and I willingly admit that whoever does not succeed in doing so has himself to blame. But really, with every allowance for my own incompetence, I would never have believed it would have been so hard to convince certain Frenchmen dramatic authors, pro- fessors, journalists, and lecturers that Moliere would not be Moliere had he not thought sometimes ; that there is something more in him than a classic Labiche ; and that after seeing the Ecole des Femmes or the Malade imaginaire, and laughing heartily at Arnolphe or the worthy Argan, we still carry away with us something to think over for a long time. For having dared to say so, indeed, I find that I am reminded on all hands of the false modesty which is expected of the commentator, and I would have re- quired to treat Moliere as a merry-andrew or buffoon, in order not to cause alarm among those who will on no account allow their notion of him to be disturbed ; or rather, according to their view, it is in this way that he will now have to be treated. " Come away, Baptiste, make us laugh," said Moliere 66 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE to Lulli, when he felt the need of laughing at other fooling than his own which, moreover, is not always clever, and the story goes that the Florentine did his best. So too it seems that we do not nowadays ask more of him whom his century called " the con- templator " than amusement. Jester he was, and jester let him remain ! His whole business is to amuse us, and if we haven't paid for it, our fathers have ! ' Only we forget that he would be dead, like so many others who none the less did not fail to amuse the good folk of their time, had there been nothing more in his work than in theirs ; and that, since we must possess for the understanding of the Ecole des Femmes or Tartufe what is ironically called "enlightenment" and "intellect," which are quite unnecessary for the appreciation of La Cagnotte, this is just the reason why he is Moliere. I shall lay stress at the outset on this remark. Nobody now is unaware that the subject of the Ecole des Pennies^ which was borrowed by Moliere from Scarron, is essentially the same as that of the Folies amoureuses and the Earlier de Seville. There is the same situation, the same intrigue, the same denoue- ment. There are the same characters too ; Bartholo, Albert, or Arnolphe, it is still the same guardian who is duped ; Rosine, Agathe, or Agnes, it is still the same artless girl who makes game of him ; Almaviva, Eraste, or Horace, it is still the same lover who lends his aid, young, resourceful, and triumphant. Yet, in whatever 67 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS esteem we hold Beaumarchais or Regnard, they are not Moliere, neither in build nor in class, nor perhaps in species, and though it is possible to prefer them to him, we never venture a comparison. Why is this ? For the fact of being the first of the three could not be considered so great a merit in the author of the Ecole des Femmes. And even if this were a merit, it could not belong to him but to Scarron, as we have just said, and not even to Scarron, but to Donna Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, the Spanish novelist from whom Scarron himself imitated his Precaution inutile. In another respect, good judges, delicate and subtle judges, have been able to hold, and not without reason, that the verses of Moliere have not in general the elegance and ease, the grace and facility of those of Regnard : that his style, though more podded perhaps, to use Sainte-Beuve's happy expression, is yet not so lively, smart, or clever, nor its air so free and sprightly. And who will refuse to admit that, if the plot of the Barbier de Seville is not better than that of the Ecole des FemmeSy it is at least in a way more implex^ as used to be said, more ingenious, richer in surprises, above all nearer our modern taste ? From Moliere to Beau- marchais, during the insensible decadence of all the other parts of the dramatic art, one alone has been perfected, and this is precisely the intrigue ; and the comedy of Beaumarchais marks the principal epoch in this progress. Since, then, it is neither by the complexity nor the 68 IN FRENCH LITERATURE ingeniousness of the intrigue, nor by quality of style, nor novelty of invention, that Moliere is as superior to his first model as to his imitators, what is there left, and what conclusion is to be drawn ? There is left this, that it is by the depth of the penetration with which he has drawn his characters ; by the truth of an imitation of life which could not suc- ceed but from a certain manner, at once personal and original, of seeing, understanding, and judging life itself; in one word, by the reach, or, in another, by the philosophy of his work. It is this philosophy which, in the following pages, I shall try to define and characterise. Not that I wish, as may be suspected, to ascribe to the author of the Fourberies de Scapin what is called a connected system. I shall not forget that I am speaking of a dramatic author, and that Tartufe, the Ecole des FemmeSj and the Malade imaginaire are primarily comedies. But what I shall not forget also is that Moliere thinks ; and since he makes me think, I wish to know on what ? Since he forces me to reflect on certain questions, I wish to know what precisely these questions are. Since he has put them, I wish to know how he has decided them. And if these questions do still concern us, and are still of living interest, I wish to know, in short, how far I am myself for or against Moliere. His comedies are not exactly theses, but they are not very far from being so. They have more connection with the 69 BRUNETI&RFS ESSAYS Fits nature/ than with Adnenne Lecouvreur, or with the Ami des Femmes than with Mademoiselle de Belle- Isle. Nothing could be more unlike anecdotes stretched over five acts. In this sense, the phil- osophy of Moliere may be said to be Moliere himself, and I shall endeavour to show that, properly under- stood, it is Moliere in his entirety. IT does not appear that he took any trouble to dis- guise his philosophy, nor consequently is it difficult to recognise or to name. Naturalistic or realistic^ what the comedy of Moliere always preaches, by its faults as much as by its merits, is the imitation of nature ; and its great lesson in aesthetics and in morality, is that we must submit, and, if we can, conform to nature. By this, by the endeavour after a faithful imitation of nature, is to be explained the subordination, in his plays, of the situations to the characters ; the simplicity of the intrigues, the most of which are only " scenes of private life " ; the unsatis- factoriness of the denouements, which, from the very fact that they are not denouements, bear a closer resemblance to life, where nothing begins or ends. 70 IN FRENCH LITERATURE By this also is to be explained the quality and the depth of the comic art of Moliere. For if, among the many ways of provoking laughter, Moliere knew too well his triple business of author, actor, and manager to despise or overlook any of them, not excepting the easiest and commonest, there is yet one which he prefers, and this way consists in making merry over habits or prejudices which are conquered by the all-powerfulness of nature. And by this still, by his confidence in nature, is to be explained also, and above all, the character of his satire, since he directed it only against those whose fault or absurdity lay in disguising, falsifying, corrupting, restraining, or en- deavouring to coerce nature. In the same way he never inveighed against licen- tiousness or debauchery ; he never inveighed against ambition : he never seems even to have had the intention of attacking them. These are vices which are instinctive and conformable to nature : they are self-confessed, and sometimes even vaunted. What more natural in a man than to wish to raise himself above his fellows, unless it be to play with the pleasures of life ? But, on the other hand, " precieuses " of every sort and absurd marquises, ageing prudes and grey-haired gallants, bourgeois people who would be gentlemen and matrons who dabble in philosophy, sextons or great lords who cover " their fierce resent- ment under the cloak of heaven's interest," the Don Juans and Tartufes, the Philamintes and Jourdains, 7 1 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS the Arnolphes and Arsinoes, the Acastes and Made- Ions, the Diafoiruses and Purgons these are his victims. They are all those who disguise nature, who, to distinguish themselves from her, begin by leaving her, and who, flattering themselves on being stronger or cleverer than she is, have had the preten- sions to govern her and reduce her to their sway. On the other hand all those who follow nature, true nature, the Martines and Nicoles, his Chry- sale and Madame Jourdain, Agnes, Alceste, and Henriette, with what sympathy have they not always been treated ? " Such are his people, such is the way to act." They show themselves just as they really are ; and by nothing but showing themselves they bring into prominence the universal and somewhat mean complacency of Philinte, the fierce egoism of Arnolphe, the stupidity of M. Jourdain, the pretenti- ous simpering of Armande, or the solemn affectedness of her mother Philaminte. Is the lesson not clear enough ? On the side of those who follow nature, on the side of the former, are also truth, good sense, honesty, and virtue ; on the other side are absurdity, pretension, stupidity, hypocrisy that is to say, on the side of those who defy nature, who treat her as an enemy, and whose doctrine is to fight and triumph over her. But the critics are unwilling to yield, and carp and quibble over the words nature and natural. Nature is one thing, they say, and the natural is another, and 72 IN FRENCH LITERATURE that makes two ; and, if they have not gone the length of saying they are the opposites of each other, I rather fear they think so. Here is a distinction which Moliere would have laughed at heartily ! The " old fellow " of the Lettres provinciates has few more amus- ing, and so I shall not name the discoverer thereof. Others hold that this kind of religion or philosophy of nature was able to mislead a Rousseau, but not a Moliere, a comic author, the man who has left us "so rich a gallery of vicious and absurd creatures." They have not considered what is habitually the char- acter of these " absurd " and " vicious " creatures ; and that if their vice or absurdity is to contradict nature, that is exactly what we have just been saying. But those seem to come nearer the point who remark that the word nature, which is vague, changeable, and badly defined, may perhaps have several meanings ; that, if there is one which can be agreed upon to-day, it must differ from that in vogue in the seventeenth century ; and that, before knowing how far it differs, it would be imprudent to inscribe Moliere in the number of the philosophers of nature. We must then investigate what was understood at that time by the word nature if it was only a mysterious name cover- ing a great mass of philosophical indifference and love of easy pleasures, or on the contrary, as we hold, containing two or three ideas, very precise, very bold, and much more akin than we might suspect to those which it expresses nowadays. 73 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS If I am forced to go rather far back, I must lay the blame on the historians of our literature. To read them, one would really think that the Molieres and Racines fell from the clouds one day, and if, in speak- ing of them, they do sometimes consider the milieu for the milieu is the history of the love of Racine for Mdlle. du Pare or the relations of Moliere with Madeleine and Armande Bejart they have, on the other hand, a strange heedlessness and unconcern of the moment; chronology for them is non-existent. No doubt, to explain the comedy of Moliere, they are capable of going back to that of Scarron, and, if necessary, even to the Menteur or to the Italians, but they are usually satisfied with that. The com- mentators go much further back, to the fabliaux of the Middle Ages or the Latin comedy. But what neither the one nor the other seems to know is the sixteenth century j they reduce it to three or four names, and are apparently ignorant that the seven- teenth century is sprung from it entirely. This was quite clear when, at my suggestion that the philosophy of Moliere was what we now call a " philosophy of nature," they triumphantly upbraided me with crediting Moliere with ideas younger than him by some hundred years, and accused me of confusing, with utter senselessness, the true physiognomy of the seventeenth century by mixing up with it certain features of the eighteenth. Now I used to think that the story of Rabelais 74 IN FRENCH LITERATURE belonged to the sixteenth century, and the language seemed significant and eloquent enough. " All the life of the Thelemites was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good ; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. ... In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, DO WHAT THOU WILT ; because men that are free, well- born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions^ and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue^ to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved ; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us." (Gargantua, Ivii.) * I thought I found there, in this bold vindication of the excellence of nature, all the philosophy of the Ecole des Femmes. And I also thought that I found that of Tartufe in the famous allegory which we all know : " Physis that is to say, Nature at her first burthen begat Beauty and Harmony. . . . Antiphysis, who * Urquhart's translation. 75 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS ever was the counterpart of Nature, immediately, out of a malicious spite against her for her beautiful and honourable productions, in opposition begat Amodunt and Dissonance. . . . Yet as you know that apes esteem their young the handsomest thing in the world Antiphysis extolled her offspring, and strove to prove that their shape was handsomer and neater than that of the children of Physis. . . . Since that, she begot the hypocritical tribes of eavesdropping dis- semblers, superstitious pope-mongers, and priest-ridden bigots, the frantic Pistolets, the demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva, the scrapers of benefices, apparitors with the devil in them, and other grinders and squeezers of livings, herb-stinking hermits, gulli- gutted dunces of the cowl, church vermin, false zealots, devourers of the substance of men, and many more other deformed and ill-favoured monsters, made in spite of nature." (Pantagruel, iv. 32.) * This is the purest substance of pantagruelism ; and if perchance the remark were to be made that the allegory is not Rabelais's own, then its signification would only be clearer, for in this case, instead of being a mere freak, it would be nothing less than the figure or symbol of the very philosophy of the Renaissance. This may be shown in a few words, the justness of which could be verified as well in the history of European philosophy as in that of Italian art or * Motteux's translation. 76 IN FRENCH LITERATURE French literature. The Renaissance was in every respect only a reaction, or rather an ardent and pas- sionate revolt of the flesh against the spirit, of nature against discipline ; and, generally, what it set itself to do by the means of this return to paganism, was to emancipate nature and the flesh from their old servi- tude, in the hopes of deifying them. If there is one meaning in the droll epic of Rabelais, one that is neither hidden nor secret but its soul, I make bold to say that it is none other than this. To use the master's own words, this is its "horrid mystery," its "absconse doctrine," its "substantific marrow." Let us conform to nature. Do not ask her works or actions to be other than her own. And above all, never let us doubt that we fulfil all our duty by following her, since we thus fulfil all her aim. For long, and too long, under the pretext of " imitating the creator of the universe," have men, obeying "some derangement or other of good judgment and common sense" walked "with their feet in the air and their head on the ground," and lived a life opposed to nature and truth. Now the time is come for them to understand that if they form part of nature, it is not for the purpose of distinguishing themselves from her, that where there is pleasure there is no sin, and that Physis, the teacher or mother of all beauty and all harmony, is consequently the teacher and mother of all honour and virtue. This is the teaching of Rabelais ; this is the "holy gospel" he came to preach, " although people scoffed " ; and 77 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS this is why his work, in which filth rudely blends to the pollution of almost everything which he touches, is the completest expression we have from the very reason that it is the most confused of the spirit of the Renaissance. We must not forget that the obscene works of Jules Remain issued from the school of Raphael himself. The Protestants made no mistake about it, neither Luther, nor especially Calvin ; and in this respect no greater error could be committed than to endeavour to reconcile, or rather join them, in a kind of sym- pathetic indifference, with those who were their worst enemies. As if to this very day the hatred of the Renaissance was not plainly written on the bare and melancholy walls of the Protestant church ! If Luther had not seen with his eyes the much vaunted splendour of the age of Leo X, which he called the epoch of Roman infamy, and Paganism seated on the pontifical throne, perhaps the Reformation, which had begun with a "quarrel of monks," would have ended obscurely in the in pace of a German or Italian convent. And who does not know, too, that what Calvin endeavoured to found at Geneva was a republic of the just, where civil and political law, the expression of Christian morality, was founded, like that morality, on the dogma of original sin and predestina- tion ? But what happened neither the one nor the other had foreseen : I mean to say that, by arming one half of Christianity against the other, they threw 78 IN FRENCH LITERATURE suspicion on the use of liberty, morality, and religion for temporal ends, they compromised the cause they had defended in deplorable and bloody quarrels, and, thanks to their disputes with Catholicism, it was not morality that righted itself, but it was indifference, scepticism, and epicureanism that gained. At the end of the century, indeed, the language of Montaigne is identical with that of Rabelais : "I have taken," he said, "for my regard this ancient precept, very rawly and simply, that "We cannot err in following Nature " : and that the sovereign document is, for a man to conform him- self to her. / have not, as Socrates, by the power and virtue of reason, corrected my natural complexions, nor by art hindered mine inclination. Look how I came into the world, so I go on ; I strive with nothing. . . . Shall I say thus much by the way ? That I see a certain image of bookish or scholastical c prudhomiej only which is in a manner in use amongst us, held and reputed in greater esteem than it deserveth, and which is but a servant unto precepts, brought under by hope and constrained by fear? I love it such as laws and religions make not, but over -make and authorise ; that they may be perceived to have where- with to uphold herself without other aid: sprung up in us of her own proper roots, by and from the seed of universal reason, imprinted in every man that is not unnatural." (Essays, in. 12.)* * Florio's translation. 79 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS In a short time these will be the words of the Cleantes, Philintes, and Aristes of our Moliere. Moreover, we may now note that they will not go so far as Montaigne, and that none of them will dare to say as boldly as the author of the Essays : " Nature hath like a kind mother observed this, that such actions as she for our necessities hath enjoined unto us, should also be voluptuous unto us. And doth not only by reason but also by appetite invite us unto them : it were injustice to corrupt her rules. When I behold Caesar and Alexander in the thickest of their wondrous great labours, so absolutely to enjoy human and corporal pleasures, / say not, that they release thereby their mind, but rather strengthen the same ; submitting by vigour of courage their violent occupation and laborious thoughts to the customary use of ordinary life." (Essays, in. 13.)* It is a hundred and fifty years before this cynical language is spoken again, not before Helvetius, Diderot, and the Baron d'Holbach. For the seventeenth century clearly saw the danger; and indeed all the characteristics of its earliest years can- not be understood or reduced to unity but by this by the concern which it felt at the spread of these doctrines, by the horror of the consequences which it saw were sure to follow, and by the effort which it made to stop them. * Florio's translation. 80 IN FRENCH LITERATURE What did the early Precieuses these Precieuses whom Moliere was to mock so cruelly, and whose very virtues he was to ridicule an Arthenice and Sapho, a Cathos and Madelon, what did they do, in purifying the language, but try to make it again respect itself and its readers ? Against this dissoluteness of manners which is to be seen everywhere, in the Moyen de Par- venir or the Parnasse satyrique and of which we must frankly admit that Henry IV himself from his throne set an example as scandalous, though in a very different way, as Louis XIV, the cultured folk of the Hotel de Rambouillet endeavoured to raise their opposition. Men like Francois de Sales and Berulle come to their aid from every quarter. Against libertines of the type of Theophile or Des Barreaux there is formed a coalition of all those who do not believe that virtue can, as Montaigne said, " uphold herself without other aid," or, as Rabelais said, that " men that are free . . are naturally goaded to virtuous actions." Priests of the Oratory and Nuns of the Visitation, Carmelites, Friars of Saint John, Franciscan Sisters, it was then, between 1610 and 1625, that all these orders are founded or established in France. It was then also that Mother Angelique reforms Port-Royal, that Saint-Cyran and Jansen begin to spread and preach the doctrines of Saint Augustine, that the very ethics of the Jesuits, still too worldly, too accommodating, or too political, are forced to return to the source of Christianity and become, if I may say so, more rigid and extreme. BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS The battle is now fought all along the line, and, from this time onwards, the history of ideas in the seventeenth century is no more than the history of the long com- bat of Jansenism against Cartesian rationalism on the one hand, and against " libertinism " on the other for this is what the philosophy of nature was then called. But what is this philosophy of nature ? And can it be really called a philosophy ? And who are the " libertines " ? And when Mersenne, for example, in an oft-cited fragment, gives the number of atheists at not less than fifty thousand for Paris alone, is he not to be suspected of a little imagination, to begin with, for how did he count them ? and of a good deal of exaggeration ? Is a man an " atheist " for gambling or running after women, or for not keeping Lent, or for burning "a piece of the true Cross"? Who knows the secrets of conscience ? And, even in the soul of a Theophile or a Des Barreaux, who knows, or ever can know, the latent faith which still mingles with the outer blusterings of impiety ? Nobody, assuredly. But, instead of the secrets of their hearts, we know at least the principles which they openly confess, and here are some of them. " Men of wit," they say, " believe in God only from convenience, and as a maxim of State." They say also that " all things are led and governed by Destiny, which is irrevocable, infallible, necessary, and inevit- able for all men, no matter what they do." And they 82 IN FRENCH LITERATURE say too that " there is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world than nature, which must- be satisfied in everything, without refusing to our body or our minds what they desire of us in the exercise of their power or natural faculties." No matter what name they be known by, if our " libertines " of the seventeenth century rally round these principles, their doctrines, we may say, were already those of our modern determinists, naturalists, or materalists. They aimed at something more than gaining the liberty of a life of pleasure. And though our ideas on God, Destiny, or Nature are now more precise, and are enriched by all the scientific discoveries of almost three hundred years, they are no more deeply or securely fixed in our minds. The formulae alone have varied and that is something but not the substance or the essentials. II MOLIERE'S EARLY WORK To have escaped from the influence of the ideas of his time and to have adhered neither to one party nor the other, in a century which was much more contentious than ours and had more readily the courage of its opinions, Moliere would have to have been born in 83 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS different circumstances, to have received from his family and surroundings a different education, and to have served a different apprenticeship in the work of real life. But he was a bourgeois of Paris, like Boileau and Voltaire and a bourgeois in a small way, the son of Jean Poquelin, upholsterer and if ever Moliere heard the names of a Saint-Cyran or an Arnauld mentioned in his father's house, we may doubt if it was with the accent of respect, or even of sympathy. They asked of mortal men too great perfection. I mean to say that they preached virtues which the Parisian bourgeois, the friend of easy pleasures, did not relish any more then than now. And, though bourgeois themselves, they were still too much of gentlemen for all these little upholsterers, linen- drapers, feather-dressers, or men of odd jobs : Jansenism in the seventeenth century was always somewhat aristocratic. I may be allowed to refer the reader, on the question of Moliere's early education his secular, as well as his home education and his indebtedness to Gassendi, to the recent works, so conscientious and learned, of M. Louis Moland, M. Gustave Larroumet, and M. Paul Mesnard. In truth, whatever tradition may say, it cannot be proved that Moliere ever heard Gassendi or knew him well. But it may suffice that on leaving the College de Clermont the young Poquelin, we know 84 IN FRENCH LITERATURE not why, formed a friendship with the young Chapelle, and that he was thus enabled to visit the house of Lhuillier, the natural father of Chapelle, much more ribald still and dissolute than his drunken son. " I saw somewhere a print of Rabelais," says Tallemant des Reaux, " which was as like Lhuillier as two peas, for he had the mean and scoffing face of Lhuillier." A mere likeness to Rabelais does not necessarily imply anything. Unfortunately some other details which Tallemant adds give or would give, if only we could transcribe them a much worse idea of his character. And if we were to dare yet to add what his friend Nicolas Bouchard has said of him, in his Confessions d'un Bourgeois de Paris, we would then be able to judge in what school, in his twentieth year, Moliere learned the life of the young man. " These confessions of a very wretched man," said Paulin Paris in his excellent edition of the Historiettes^ " show up in a very unfavourable light the little meetings of Lhuillier, Du Puys, Gassendi, and other famous people. Excepting the passion and the frenzy, so to speak, of proselytism, these men were not so much behind the philosophical ideas of the following century" It is not we who make him say so, and it is almost forty years since those lines were written ! If Moliere learned any lessons in philosophy in the company of these debauchees and libertines, they must have been singularly like those which the " petit Arouet " was to receive in his turn from old Ninon de Lenclos 85 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS and the frequenters of the society of the Temple. Is it astonishing that they bore the same fruits ? Or, if this is overstating the case, what more natural than that the examples of indifference or unconcern which Moliere had seen while still a child in the house of the upholsterer Poquelin may have prepared him to profit from the lessons of " libertinism " which he received in the house of councillor Lhuillier ? The lessons which he gave himself could not, of course, but confirm the former. Our comedians nowadays are the " notaries of art," as has been so well said ; and, no matter how little taste they may show, nothing prevents them joining to the exercise of their profession all the bourgeois virtues, and being good sons, good husbands, good fathers, and all the rest. It was otherwise at the time of Moliere. The comedian lived on the margin of society, and claimed the benefits of an irregularity whose annoyances and humiliations he felt daily : and if his ways were not altogether those of a rebel, they were at least those of an independent man, who hardly reckoned with the prejudices of " the wife of the bailie or the wife of the assessor." The life of a bohemian, the adventurous existence of the travelling comedian, for so he was called, meet- ing with adventures all along his lengthy route, play- ing kings in a barn, at Pezenas or P'ontenay-le-Comte, travelling in a waggon, when not on foot, in the costume of his character, now dressed as a tyrant 86 IN FRENCH LITERATURE and now as a nurse, let us remember that it was this life which Moliere led for more than twelve years. Let us call to mind the Roman comique. Picture the arrival in a town, at Narbonne or Toulouse, on a hot summer afternoon, the youngsters running to see the " showmen " pass, the curious and distrust- ful glance of the artisan at the door of his shop or of the housewife at her window ; and in the evening, the nights at the inn, the mixed collection of people, the loud mirth of the company at their table feasting on a big day's drawing ; or even on the following day, if they have been pelted with potatoes, as some- times happened, their flight at early morning, with violent rage in their hearts, showing itself in re- ciprocal recriminations ; and often, too, the uncer- tainty as to where they were to sleep and on what to make their supper. Thus passed the youth of Moliere ; too fortunate when the disdain of these country folk, whom he amused for half-a-crown, did not go the length of outrage, and worthy of respect, it must be said, for not having borne them any further grudge, if certain inoffensive witticisms on Limoges in his Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and the caricatures of the Comtesse d? Escarbagnas are, as they seem to be, his almost unique vengeance. But if he believed in few things, and if, on leaving Paris, he carried away with him few illusions, he would surely not have brought them back with him from his wanderings through the country ! If, in 8? BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS his twentieth year, he had yielded unawares to the simple attractions of pleasure, he had the time, during these twelve years, to see, to compare, and to reflect. And the comedian who returned to Paris, in 1658, never to leave it again, was not then an ordinary " libertine " or a vulgar " epicurean." He had his ideas, he had his philosophy, he had his plans in reserve ; and all those whom he, like Rabelais before him, would have readily treated as "eavesdropping dissemblers, church vermin, and false zealots," were not slow to recognise it. I shall pass rapidly over his first pieces : UEtourdi^ Le Depit amoureux y Les Precieuses ridicules^ Sganarelle, UEcole des Maris. Not that, if we look at them closely, we can fail to see the thought of Moliere and the liberty of his banter already giving promise of greater boldness. If the Depit amour eux and the Etourdi are only canvases in the Italian manner, on which Moliere is content to trick out the arabesques of his fancy more brilliant, more lively, more witty too perhaps, at that time while youth had not yet left him, than in the ceremony of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme or the Malade imaginaire the Precieuses ridicules and the Ecole des Marls are already a spirited and a well- ordered attack on all those who designed, as we have said, to disguise or deck out nature. Their very succession seems to me instructive. Instead of asking M. de Mascarille simply to sit down, perhaps you say to him, with the Misses Gorgibus, " Satisfy the 88 IN FRENCH LITERATURE desire which this chair has to embrace you " ? Then you are quite ridiculous, as you are not at all natural. You are, however, only ridiculous. But, instead of overstraining nature and making her, if possible, as ridiculous as we are, perhaps we aim at forcing, cramping, and regulating her ? Let us be on our guard. We meet the fate of the Sganarelle of the Ecole des Marls and his Isabelle, and we are not only ridiculous, but begin to be dull, harsh, and offensive. First proof or first sketch of Arnolphe, this Sganarelle differs from him only in being treated less seriously, in the style of Scarron, if I may say so, rather than in the great style of Moliere. Now let us come to Arnolphe, and speak of the Ecole des Femmes. It is the first in date of the great comedies of Moliere, that which first placed him in the position he still continues to occupy alone, and, because its intrigue is more amusing, its language more frank, and its philosophy more optimistic, I know several of his devotees who will even now have it to be his masterpiece. Recently we have heard the amusing proposal that we should talk of the Ecole des Femmes as if Moliere had entitled it the Suite de V Ecole des Marls. It is equally probable that if the Misanthrope was entitled the Manage fait et defalt we would not sec in it what we do see, and what we have at least the right to wish to see, no more than in Tartufe which should rather have been called the Imposteur if Moliere had entitled 89 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS it, for example, Une Famllle an temps de Louis XIV. This is a curious way of reasoning. To justify Bos- suet from the reproaches made against his Discours sur PHistoire universelle, may we not also propose to speak of it as if he had entitled it Observations sommaires sur rHistoire de quelques Peuptes anciens ! But titles which have no value when the authors have not cared to give them, as for example Monsieur de Pourceaugnac^ have a value when, like the Ecole des Femmes^ they signify something of themselves ; and I am no doubt very naive to say so, but it is worth saying since there are some who hold an opposite opinion. What then is the " school for wives " according to Moliere, and what is the lesson to be derived from his comedy ? There is nothing more evident. The " school for wives " is love, or rather it is nature ; and the lesson, which is plain enough, is that nature alone will be always stronger than all we can do to thwart its wish. Brought up " in a small convent, far from all experience," Agnes has nothing for her but to be youth, love, and nature. It even seems that there is a certain element of unfeelingness in her, not to say of simple perverseness, which I should mistrust if only I was Horace ! More natural and less learned, less lively, too, than the Isabella of the Ecole des Marh^ she has not and never will have the playful grace of the Henriette of the Femmes savantes. As for Arnolphe, Moliere himself has been careful to inform us, in speaking of him, " that it is not incompatible for a 90 IN FRENCH LITERATURE person to be ridiculous in certain things and an honest man in others." He is not, moreover, an old man, as he seems generally to be imagined, and many people believe themselves young at his age. What he has against him is, then, merely his wish to force nature, and he is foolish, ridiculous, and contemptible only in this point. I say nothing of Horace : among the lovers of Moliere's repertoire, there is none more insignificant, whose merit more strictly reduces itself to that of his "flaxen peruke," who is, moreover, more worthy of Agnes. He is young like her, as he is simple, and like her he is nature itself. What could be clearer ? And without passing the limits of his art, without preach- ing on the stage, how could Moliere have told us that we do not change nature in her essence ; that who- ever tries to pays for it dearly ; and that conse- quently the beginning of all our evils is the desire to make the attempt. For, as to those who refuse this interpretation of the Ecole des Femmes, I should be curious to know how they explain the effect it produced and the outburst of resentment which followed. Would the very in- decent double meaning of the ribbon scene and the joking about " hell's caldrons " have been sufficient ? Yes, if you will, and on the condition that they signify something else and more than they really do. But, in reality, what contemporaries thought was that comedy, which had, till then, with the Corneilles, Scarron, and Quinault, confined itself to providing amusement 9 1 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS by devices in turn ludicrous and romantic, had now, with Moliere, puffed itself up, if I may say so, with quite another ambition, and had, for the first time, in the Ecole des Femmes^ touched indirectly on the great question which then divided men's minds. They re- cognised in the Ecole des Femmes an aim which went further. It seemed to them in short that this poet was overstepping his limits, that he was extending the sphere of his art even to those objects to which it should remain a stranger, and that he was haughtily leaving behind his role of "public entertainer." They endeavoured to silence him. Moliere replied to them one after the other with the Critique de VEcole des Femmes^ the Impromptu de Versailles^ and Tartufe. Ill THE QUESTION OF TARTUFE As he had written the Critique de rEcole des Femmes in answer to the pedants and prudes and people like his Lysidas and Climene who " censured his finest work," as he had written the Impromptu de Versailles to avenge himself on the comedians of the Hotel de Bourgogne, who did not scruple to attack even his private life, so Moliere seems at first to have thought 92 IN FRENCH LITERATURE of Tartufe only to reply to those, and at the same time to carry fire and sword into their camp, who accused him of indecency and, above all, of impiety in his Ecole des Femmes. This is what chronology proves. But since Tartufe took possession of the stage only in 1669, and since, even now, it is separated, in many editions of Moliere, from the Ecole des Femmes by Don "Juan, which is of the year 1665, by the Misanthrope, which is of 1666, by the Medecin malgre lui and Melicerte, the con- tinuity of inspiration which connects the two master- pieces of the work of Moliere escapes our view at first, and we do not see, or we forget, that, in the history of the public life of Moliere, Tartufe is first and foremost a reply and an attack. To make no mistake about it, it is sufficient to remember that, before appearing for the first time in the month of May 1664, Tartufe was separated from the Ecole des Femmes, which was represented for the first time in the winter of 1662, really by an interval of only fifteen or sixteen months the time necessary to write it ! and by two or three pieces, which are precisely the Critique de VEcole des Femmes, the Im- promptu de Versailles, and the Manage force. If the first two are sufficiently well known, we must say of the third that Moliere doubtless saw in it as it was expressly written for the king, and in haste a means of paying his court and of ranging on his side the all-powerful master on whom his adversaries 93 BRUNETlfeRE'S ESSAYS depended as well as he. A clever courtier indeed was Moliere ; this is a point we must remember ; and poor Corneille himself has no humbler dedica- tion than that of the Ecole des Marts to the king's brother : " There is nothing so superb as the name I put at the head of this book, and nothing meaner than that which it contains." This preliminary remark may already throw some light on the true meaning of Tartufe and Moliere's intentions. It shows at least that Tartufe very different in this respect from Amphitryon^ for example, is an act as much as a work : a work of combat, as we would now say, and an act of declared hostility. But against whom ? This is the point. For it is no use repeating that Moliere himself declared that it was only against " false coiners of devotion " : I shall first reply that, being himself a party in the case, his evidence cannot be received ; and, should it be re- ceived, I would add that there would still be excellent reasons, if not for disbelieving it, yet for acting as if we did disbelieve it. I may be permitted to give only one, that, without running the almost inevitable risk of losing the good graces of the king, of seeing his company broken up and his theatre closed, of compromising, in short, his peace and his liberty, Moliere could not have spoken otherwise. Do you see him glorying in having openly attacked religion ? Voltaire even, in the following century, could hardly dare to do this : and 94 IN FRENCH LITERATURE I know some people even in our days who attack it, and do not wish it to be known. And yet they have no Bastille to fear ! So we need not pay much attention to such statements : for if Moliere, when he professed his esteem and his respect for the truly pious, said one thing "while he thought another," and if "that is called lying" let us have no fear of the word he lied. Perhaps, too, he did not tell the truth when, in the preface to his Precieuses, he said he had attacked only the false Precieuses, when, like- wise, in the Critique de V Ecole des Femmes^ he imputed the double meaning of the ribbon scene to the defiling imagination of those who had pretended to be shocked by it ? No more let us pay any attention to the arguments which are drawn from a certain theory of Moliere's intentions ; let us remember rather that what is to be cleared up is precisely the nature of these intentions ; and, taking Tartufe in its place in history, let us see where, between 1650 and 1664, were these hypocrites and false religionists, what were the great dangers with which they threatened society, and what were their names ? One always reasons as if there was only one seventeenth century, identical with itself in all the duration of the hundred years of its course, and as if Tartufe was contemporary with the reign of Madame de Maintenon, and not with the time when the La Vallieres and Montespans were in favour ! But in this court where Louis XIV, barely emancipated from the 95 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS tutelage of his mother, turned his caprice from sultana to sultana, and let his covetousness wander even to his brother's wife ; where around him every man and woman, young and ardent like him, on his example thought only of gallantry, love, and sensuality ; where the severe Colbert even made himself the minister as much of the pleasures as of the business of his master, there were not, there could not be, any hypocrites or false religionists, from the simple reason that devotion there led nobody to anything ; that it would have been not only useless, but imprudent and danger- ous, to feign devotion ; and that, unless under the obligation of his business of confessor or preacher, a man would have been suspected, if he did not imitate the conduct of his prince, of censuring it. Let us remember, in this connection, the fate of Madame de Navailles, who was driven from the court and whose husband was deprived of all his offices for having walled up the door which put the apartment of Louis XIV in communication with the chamber of the lady's-maids. This is all the profit that a man of hypocritical or sincere piety could hope to gain from devotion, and I leave it to the reader to think if there were many who were eager for it. Hypocrisy is not one of those vices which are self-originated, and certainly not one of those which bring their own gratification, as avarice, ambition, or debauchery. It does not live for its wry mouth, like Harpagon by the sight of his gold. And it has no reason or cause for existence, but in so 96 IN FRENCH LITERATURE far as it leads to certain solid satisfactions to fortune, honour, and reputation. But if there were no people of false piety at the court of the young Louis XIV, there were others of true piety, who saddened at the sight of this other kind of " libertinism " ; and I do not suppose that we dispute them the right to have been sincerely sad and more than sad, to have been scandalised since, after a lapse of two hundred years, we still allow it, in their Histories of France, to the grave Henri Martin and the lyrical Michelet. And these truly pious people were not called the Abbe de Pons, or the Abbe Roquette, or the Sieur Charpy de Sainte-Croix, as the annotators or commentators of Tartufe repeat ad nauseam; they were of higher origin, of another class, and more troublesome and irksome to the king himself and to Moliere. First, there was the queen mother, Anne of Austria, the secret witness of the tears of the young queen Marie-Therese, who feared to see Louis XIV endanger, by the hasards of his easy love affairs, his health especially, the glory of his reign in this world, and his safety in the next. There was the Prince de Conti from whom Moliere is usually said to have taken the model and the measure of his Don Juan and there was his sister, the Duchesse de Longueville, both now converted, and whose entire sincerity cannot, for any reason that I know, be doubted. There was also that eloquent abbe who began to preach, or rather to thunder, in the pulpits of Paris, BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS against The love of worldly pleasures the future Bishop of Condom and of Meaux, the future teacher of the Dauphin till the time came for him to write his Maximes sur la Comedie. And, in the town as at the court, there were the Jansenists, a Desmares and a Singlin, the people of Port-Royal, those of the "party," as was then said ; there was the honest and gentle Nicole, there was Arnauld, there was this austere and passionate Christian who used what strength was left him to scrawl the fragments of his book of Pensees there was Pascal ; and I have named only the most important. Those were the enemies or the adversaries of Moliere, the people of true and not of false piety, those whom the brilliancy of the success of the Ecole des Femmes had made to murmur, and those above all whose indignation and credit threatened or could threaten the liberty of his art. From every sort of motive Moliere feared that the pious " the good and truly pious, whom we ought to follow " might some day restrain the vivacity of this satire, if even they did not go the length of quenching it. "I await respectfully the judgment which your Majesty will deign to pronounce on this matter" so may be read in the second Placet relating to Tartufe, that of 1667, "but certain it is that I must no longer think of making comedies if the Tartufes gain the day, for they will claim the right thereby of persecut- ing me more than ever, and will try to find something IN FRENCH LITERATURE to cavil at even in the most innocent things that will come from my pen." We read likewise in the triumphant preface of 1669: "Either the comedy of Tartufe must be approved, or all comedies in general must be condemned. . . . This is what people have insisted on so furiously of late, and never were they more incensed against the theatre." Therein lay the danger for Moliere. He doubted, instinctively, that Jansenism might do for the drama what Puritanism had done in England. And as for us, we must undoubtedly congratulate ourselves that Jansenism did not succeed, but we must not deny that Moliere, in writing Tartufe^ attacked Jansenism, and in Jansenism, as we shall now see, religion itself. This would never be doubted but for the accepted custom of considering in Tartufe only Tartufe him- self; and when Tartufe only is considered there is no trouble in showing that he really is Tartufe and a hypocrite. " The traitor is to be plainly seen through his mask ; he is recognised at once in his true colours ; and the rolling of his eyes and his honeyed tones impose" only on Madame Pernelle, an old fool, and her son Orgon. Tartufe sweats hypocrisy : all the meaner lusts are con- centrated in him as it were to make him a monster of moral deformity ; however comic he be, he in- spires fear, and disgust perhaps even more than fear ; to touch him we would wish a pair of tongs ; 99 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS and on meeting him on our way we would take care not to run up against him, for fear of befouling ourselves. The intention here is manifest beyond doubt. Tartufe is the satire or caricature of hypocrisy ; the expressions he uses could not for a moment deceive anybody ; and if one were to dare to offer any criticism on Moliere, it would be, with La Bruyere, that he has painted him in too crude colours. But what is to be made of the other characters, and of Orgon in particular, who is undoubtedly of distinct importance, for we must remember that it was not the character of Tartufe, but of Orgon, which Moliere interpreted in his piece, just as he acted Arnolphe in the Ecole des FemmeSj Alceste in the Misanthrope^ and Harpagon in the Avare? And it is really on Orgon, as much as on Tartufe, that the whole piece turns ; it is he who keeps the stage from the first act to the last, while Tartufe appears only at the third ; and for a clear understanding of affairs, it is from him con- sequently, as much as from Tartufe, (hat we must ask Moliere's secret. Now Orgon was by no means a simpleton, and Dorine, from the first act, took great care to tell us so. " During our troubles he acted like a man of sense and displayed some courage in the service of his prince." His house was free and hospitable, and the presence of a mother-in-law had brought neither dis- order nor trouble. A good husband, a good father, a IOO IN FRENCH LITERATURE good master was Orgon : he was also a good citizen. A faithful and sure friend, he was chosen from among twenty others to be entrusted with a matter on which depended a friend's honour, liberty, and life. "But since he has taken so strongly to Tartufe, he has become a perfect dolt." That is to say, since he met him, all his former good qualities had turned into as many faults. Instead of being the indulgent husband of a young wife, he had become indifferent and crotchety ; the tender father had changed into a domestic tyrant ; the man of honour into an unfaith- ful guardian. What is this to say for Orgon is sincere, his devotion is true, and not for a moment is he made to appear as a dishonest man, and still less as a hypocrite what is this to say but that as much as he advances in devotion, so much does he advance towards inhumanity ? Now, " he could see brother, children, mother, and wife die, without troubling him- self one whit," as he said while hitting his nail on his teeth ; and Tartufe alone accomplished this work, not the Tartufe, let it be understood, who covets his wife while marrying his daughter, but the Tartufe who can barely be seen, he whose lessons teach only, according to the language of Christianity, no heed of the things of this world, self-denial, and the pure love of God. These words put us on the track of what Moliere attacks in religion ; the point is delicate enough, but it is important to mark it. Is it dogma ? Cer- 101 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS tainly not, although for that matter he thinks, with the " libertines " of his time, men like Des Barreaux or Saint Pavin, that " to oblige a man of sense to believe in all that is in the Bible, even to the tail of Tobias's dog, is absolutely absurd." Perhaps it is the evils which fanaticism has caused in history ? No again, although this idea, which passes for Voltaire's, is already in Lucretius, one of Moliere's favourite authors, under whose shelter he could have hidden himself. Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum. Or is it then morality, I mean to say the common morality, the morality in vogue, the morality of honest folk, that which is usually said to be sufficient for the affairs of life ? No, not even that ! Moliere is an honest fellow too, and much more an honest fellow than his friend La Fontaine ; and if he never taught anything very lofty or noble and this after all is not the business of comedy he at least taught nothing which, in appearance, is not wise and reasonable. But what he does not like in religion is that which is opposed to his philosophy, the principle on which all religion worthy of its name reposes, the constraint, in short, which it places on us. While all around him, not only the Jansenists, but the Jesuits also, arc teaching that human nature is corrupted in its sub- stance ; that we carry in ourselves our most dangerous enemies, and that these are our instincts ; that in 1 02 IN FRENCH LITERATURE following their impulse we run of our own accord to eternal damnation ; that there is no hope of safety but in keeping a tight rein on them ; that the life of this world has been given us not to be used, and that nature is a perpetual source of combat, struggle, and victory over herself, Moliere believes, as we have shown, precisely the reverse. He believes " that we must refuse our body or our senses nothing which they desire of us in the exercise of their powers or natural faculties " ; he believes that in following our instincts we obey the wish of nature ; and, since we ourselves form part of nature, he believes that one cannot tell if there is more insolence and pride, or stupidity and folly, in wishing to live not merely apart from her, but in opposition to her. Is the contrast not evident or even glaring ? Will it not be granted that it is the moral constraint which is the foundation of religion and had alone been so since the appearance of Calvinism and Jansenism which Moliere attacked in his Tartufe under the name of hypocrisy ? Did he not wish to show us that in teaching us to "set our hearts on nothing," religion taught us to neglect, not so much ourselves as these " human sentiments " which give life its value ? Did he not wish to show, in short, that pious people, whether sincere or hypocritical, are always dangerous ; that in proposing for the efforts of men an end which is unattainable, they dissuade them from their true duties ; and that in preaching, as 103 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS they do, the contempt and dread of this world, they turn us from the object of life, which is first of all to live ? Here it is, I know, that the sayings of Cleante are appealed to : " There is false devotion as there is false bravery : and as we never find that the truly brave are those who make much noise where honour leads them, so the good and truly pious, in whose footsteps we should follow, are not those who pull so many long faces." But, to appeal to these lines, it would first be necessary to show that they, and the speeches of Cleante generally, are the expression of the true thought of Moliere. Now this cannot be, no more than Moliere can be held answerable for the Alceste or the Philinte of his Misanthrope ; and when, too, the Chrysalde of the Ecole des Femmes is mentioned in this connection, we forget, if this good fellow really spoke in the name of Moliere, what is the strange advice which Moliere would thus have given us, and that it would justify the most violent passages of the Maximes sur la Comtdie. Indeed the " raisonneurs " of his plays do not act the part of the chorus of the ancient comedy ; they express a part of his thought only, that which he believes most in accordance with the prejudices of his public ; and their speeches are but a bait for the pit. And so what is the distinction Cleante en- deavours to establish between the sincere and the hypocritical in religion ? The hypocritical, to him, 104 IN FRENCH LITERATURE are all those who make a show, if I may say so, who act openly in some way or other, who do not conceal their devoutness as a weakness or a crime. But the sign of the sincere is to show no devoutness, to be content to be devout in themselves, and, provided they live a good life, to let others live as they wish. In other terms still, the mark of true piety, for Cleante, is to be concerned only with piety. As soon as religion aims at raising itself into a guide for life, he begins to suspect it, as he also says, of ostentation and insincerity. And this is why, were a new demonstration needed of Moliere's intentions, it would be found in the speeches and role of that character whom we are told to consider his interpreter. So had he really wished to shelter his Tartufe from malevolent interpretations, I shall not have the im- pertinence to say how he ought to have set about it, but it is not Cleante whom he would have chosen to speak in his name ; it is Elmire, the wife of Orgon, whose tractable and sincere devotion he would have opposed to the devotion, sincere too, but extravagant, of her booby of a husband. It is she, since he has entrusted her with unmasking Tartufe, whom he would likewise have entrusted with expressing his respect for these sentiments of which the language of Tartufe is only a sacrilegious parody, she, and not Cleante, who takes no part in the action, who speaks only behind the scenes, and who could easily be taken out of the piece without being missed. 105 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS So at least has he done in the Misanthrope^ where the sincere Eliante decides between Alceste and Philinte, and fills, between the coquettishness of Celimene and the prudery of Arsinoe, the part of nature and truth. So also has he done in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme y and so in the Femmes savantes^ where it is not the old fellow Chrysale, nor his brother-in-law Ariste, nor even perhaps Clitandre, but Henriette in especial, who incarnates his true thought. But the Elmire of Tartufe is only a pleasant woman, to whom every religious idea may be said to appear a stranger, who cannot find any of the necessary words to reply to the gross declaration of Tartufe. " Others would perhaps take it in a differ- ent fashion ; but she wishes to show her discretion " ; and since, moreover, her virtue is not the less unim- peachable for it, what is this to say but that by nature "men that are free have an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and with- draws them from vice"? In her difficult situation as the young wife of an old husband, as the mother- in-law of a grown-up girl and a grown-up man, to avoid giving any handle to slander and to remain thoroughly honest, Elmire had only to follow her nature, and had not the least need of correcting or conquering it, or even of trying to bring it to perfection. Contemporaries and their impressions must be 1 06 IN FRENCH LITERATURE trusted made no mistake about it ; and five days after the first performance of Tartufe, the Gazette de France^ in the issue of lyth May 1664, declared the piece "absolutely injurious to religion, and capable of producing very dangerous effects." Moliere, now that he had the support of the king, showed his bold- ness by replying with his Don Juan. He did better still ; he profited by the quarrels of his adversaries ; he had the tact to persuade the Jesuits that his Tartufe was a retort to the Lettres provinciates, and to per- suade the Jansenists that it was the continuation or redoubling of these Lettres. It is Racine who tells us, in the oft - cited sentence, that " the Jansenists said that the Jesuits were represented in that comedy, but the Jesuits flattered themselves that it was aimed at the Jansenists." And, indeed, when Tartufe conies upon the stage, speaking the verse : Laurent, put by my hair-shirt and my scourge ; as also when he says, in offering his handkerchief to Dorine : Go hide thy bosom, for I hate the sight, it seems as if it were a Jansenist who spoke. On the other hand, was it not the Jesuit who was represented in his turn when Tartufe ardently explained to Elmire " the art of rectifying the evil of the act by the purity of the intention " ? 107 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS \ But the truth, which accords better with all we have just seen, was that Moliere had made no distinc- tion ; and the fact is that he mixed up every pious person, every enemy of the theatre, every foe to nature, one and all Jansenists and Jesuits, Escobar and Arnauld, Pascal and Bourdaloue in his bold derision of devotion, or rather of religion itself. If there could ever have been any mistake, this was recognised by all, when, in 1669, after many difficulties, Tartufe at last appeared publicly on the stage. The test of the representation decided the meaning of the piece. Jesuits or Jansenists, each alike felt the attack ; and this is forgotten by those who, even at this day, can see in Tartufe only a machine directed against Port-Royal : they forget that nobody was more in- dignant at it, nor expressed more eloquently the painful indignation of every truly pious person, than Bourdaloue, in his Sermon sur I' Hypocrlsie. As to the question of discovering now if Moliere deceived Louis XIV, and if the king, throughout the whole affair, was the dupe of his valet-de-chambre it may be pretty, but it is stupid ; and, to ask it in these terms, is to be oneself the dupe of mere words. For why should Moliere have deceived Louis XIV, or why should Louis XIV have been want- ing in discernment ? But we know, all the same, that if the king did not see the danger, he suspected it, since he hesitated for five years to allow the repre- sentation of Tartufe ; and Moliere, on his side, had 108 IN FRENCH LITERATURE no occasion to deceive his master : he was uneasy only about his own pleasures, and in the enemies of the theatre he could see only the silent censors of his own failings. But, in this connection, has it not even been held that Louis XIV commanded Tartufe of Moliere ? Rapin says so in his curious Memoirs. What at least is certain, is that religion, at all times, before being a rule for the inner life, was for Louis XIV an affair of State. Long after Tartufe^ in the question of the liberties of the Gallican Church, he was to have no fear in threatening to drive it even to schism, if need be, in order to bring about the triumph of his religious policy. A power apart, he never let any opportunity pass of making the representatives of religion feel that his wish should remain always above it. And if, from many reasons, we do not believe that he occasioned Tartufe, everything allows us to hold that, when Moliere gave him the opportunity, he availed himself of it as a tool of government. Whether they were sincere or hypocritical, Louis always suspected these pious people of wishing to impose on him a will other than his own, perhaps even of aiming, like the Protestants hitherto, at form- ing a party, a state within a state. After long hesita- tion which he conceded chiefly on the entreaties of his mother, or perhaps on those of the Archbishop of Paris, M. de Perefixe, his old tutor, and M. de Lamoignon he let Tartufe be acted. And knowing 109 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS that the piece was "likely to produce very strange effects," he doubtless believed himself strong enough to prevent things going further than he wished, but he was the dupe of nobody ; or rather it is precisely because he had measured the probable consequences of the comedy that he ended by authorising its representation. Is this, moreover, not what is understood when he is praised for " having gained on that day one of the most glorious victories of his reign " ? For, other- wise, what could be said, and for what could he be praised ? Yet he is praised for having better under- stood, in spite of fanatics, if there were any at his court, the true interests of religion than all the people of sincere and deep religion who were about him. It was they who made the mistake in thinking them- selves attacked and wounded by Tartufe. They did not understand Moliere. In distinguishing false devo- tion from the true, " the mask from the person," and " the false money from the good," they did not see the service which that " reforming comedy " rendered to the cause of religion. But Louis XIV saw it, since he was, as it were, outside of and above the dispute ; he is praised for having had the courage to join in it ; and we, to-day, pretend to see even better what he saw so well. Need I show the absurdity of this position, and that of itself it could be an adequate interpretation to us of the true intention of Moliere ? To " acquit " Tartufe^ no IN FRENCH LITERATURE it supposes, indeed, that where the Bossuets and Bour- daloues saw nothing, it is we, dramatic critics and lecturers in the Odeon, sons of Voltaire and of the eighteenth century who make use of religion, when we do make use of it, only on the day of our marriage or burial, with the accompaniment of bari- tones and sopranos it is we who know, who see clearly, who can say exactly where religion ends and hyprocrisy begins ! But if we were sincere, or rather if we only took the trouble to think, we would realise that what pleases us in Tartufe is just Moliere's effort to separate morality from religion. We have no need of a rule of good life, and certainly not of a rule outside of and above nature : this is what Tartufe teaches clearly enough, and this is what we like in the usual inter- pretation. We are very pleased to see all those who labour to correct their nature fall, like Orgon and his mother, into absurdity and folly ; and, on the other hand, we admire, in the honesty of Elmire and the good sense of Dorine, the beauty of our indiffer- ence. But it would be time also to recognise that this is the opposite of religion. It would be time above all to acknowledge that, if it is the opposite, the truly pious people have the right to feel hurt by Tartufe; that if the wound has not closed for two hundred and fifty years, there is no doubt that it was deep ; that the hand which made it meant to make it ; that therefore it was not only false devotion, but also true, which Moliere meant to attack ; and ill BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS that it was for the gain of nature that he meant to destroy the religion of effort and moral constraint. IV THE APOLOGY OF NATURE THE last comedies of Moliere, far from belying this definition of his philosophy, confirm it, and in the author of George Dandin y the Bourgeois Gentilhommc^ or the Malade imaglnaire, with all his genius, there is still to be found the thought of the author of the Ecole des Femmes. Consider only the place and role not of the lady's-maids but the servants, which is not at all the same thing of Nicole in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme^ or Martine, too, in the Femmes savantes, true daughters of nature if there ever were, who do not try to be witty, like Nerine in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac or Dorine in Tartufe^ but whose artless good sense escapes in proverbial sallies, and who make us laugh, and are comic or droll, only by force of being true. Does it not seem that they are there to tell us that all that is known as instruction or educa- tion is useless where nature is wanting, and cannot, wherever she does exist, but thwart and falsify her ? A single word from them is sufficient to disconcert the novel science of M. Jourdain, or close the mouth 112 IN FRENCH LITERATURE of the majestic Philaminte ; and this word they did not search for ; it was suggested to them by nature, that nature which their masters, in their attempts at improvement, have, as we see, only changed, disfigured, and corrupted. Or again, while their masters sink, at each step, deeper in absurdities, they attract us by, if I may say so, their simplicity, their ignorance, and their naturalness. Consider also the nature of the subjects and the lesson to be drawn from them. In this respect, the last of Moliere's comedies this Malade imaglnalre which has sometimes been wrongly placed, with Pour- ceaugnac and Scapin, among his farces is perhaps the most instructive. The cause has often been asked of Moliere's strange animosity against medicine and doctors. Were the Purgons and Diafoiruses then also "one of the scourges of the century," and, in ridiculing them on the stage with unmeasured liberty of which there is not a single blow that does not strike their successors did Moliere believe that he was doing public health the same service as he did morality in attacking the Tartufes ? Or shall we say that, having himself proved the uselessness of their prescriptions and the vanity of their art, he only re- lieved himself at their expense from his Don Juan to his Malade imaginalre of a valetudinarian's ran- cour ! No ; but the truth is that in his eyes the pretensions of doctors are no less absurd in their own way than those of bigots. They also, like bigots, H BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS believe themselves stronger and cleverer than nature, and pride themselves, likewise, on restoring and rectify- ing her, and, when necessary, on improving her. With their remedies, like the others with their long faces, they believe themselves clever enough to thwart her workings ; they promise us, if we will only listen, to give us back, with their bleedings, purgings, and bath- ings, the powers which we have lost ; and this matter, which, according to the expression of Lucretius, nature incessantly demands for other uses, they flatter them- selves on fixing, so to speak, and eternising in us. Is this not actually what Beralde says so well in a long scene of the Malade imaglnaire, which is very carefully abridged when acted, and from which, for this reason, I take the liberty of reproducing a few lines. " If we leave nature alone," he says, " she recovers gently of herself from the disorder into which she has fallen " ; and as Argan replies that one may still "assist this nature by certain things," he answers with an insistence and harshness which are new : " Good heavens, brother, these are mere ideas, with which we love to beguile ourselves. When a doctor speaks to you of aiding, assisting, and comforting nature, of taking away from her what annoys her and giving her what she lacks, of re-establishing her and putting her in the full command of her functions ; when he speaks to you of purifying the blood, of regulating the bowels and the brain, of reducing the spleen, 114 IN FRENCH LITERATURE of putting the chest in order, of strengthening the heart, and of having secrets for prolonging life to an advanced age, he is just telling you the romance of medicine." These words seem characteristic enough, and while they throw light on the folly of Argan which is to wish to be ill in spite of nature there is no doubt as to where they lead us. If Moliere was no less bitter and passionate against doctors than against pedants and hypocrites, his reasons are the same, or rather they are identical. He inveighs against all, no matter what they be, a Purgon or a Trissotin, a Vadius or a Tartufe, who do not follow nature, even when their pretensions are not so extravagant as to aim at combatting her. It is they who will fall ; and it will be enough for Sganarelle or Toinette to don the robe or wear the pointed bonnet to know as much as all the Diafoiruses in the world, as the natural honesty of Elmire was enough to outplay the plans of Tartufe, as it was enough for Agnes to be in- structed by nature to be able to outplay the politics of Arnolphe. For, once again, they are not fools, or, if we prefer Moliere's expression, they are not " betes," these Arnolphes, Tartufes, and Purgons. The last in particular " have, for the most part, a good deal of classical learning, can speak in fine Latin, can name all the diseases in Greek, and can define and classify them." But, " as for curing them, they know nothing about that," and never will know, "5 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS and nature, cleverer than all their tricks, will of her- self triumph in the long run. This is the more surprising, considering that life was not always pleasant for Moliere, and that he lacked neither annoyances, nor humiliations, nor troubles too of every sort. If his irregular and rov- ing youth had been little more to him than a long apprenticeship in the contempt which was then meted out to the comedian, the favour even of Louis XIV was unable to protect him, in his maturity, from the usually refined but sometimes brutal insolence of the people of the court, and still less from the grossness of the pit. I say nothing of the difficulties or quarrels he had, in his position of company manager, with his rival comedians, with his actors, with his authors, or, as author himself, with his adversaries and detractors. Moliere's enemies did not injure him : and after all, to fight as he did, in returning blow for blow in replying to the Portrait du Peintre by the Impromptu de Versailles, or to the prohibition of Tartufe by the writing of Don Juan is a way to feel the pleasure of living. But, on the other hand, we know the worries of his domestic life, and, without troubling to defend or attack once more the virtue of Armande Bejart, we know, and cannot doubt, what Moliere suffered by having married her. Younger than him by twenty years, coquettish, light-headed, fast perhaps, and dragging after her a train of admirers whose "fair 116 IN FRENCH LITERATURE hair, long nail, and falsetto voice had been able to find the secret of charming her," Mdlle. Moliere taught her husband the reality of these tortures of jealousy and this humiliation of loving what is despised, which he has himself so often expressed : " Strange thing it is to love, and that men should be subject to such weakness for these traitresses. . . . Their mind is wicked, and their soul is weak ; there is nothing more feeble, more stupid, more faithless ; yet, despite all that, everything in the world is done for these creatures ! " How many times must Moliere have repeated to himself these lines of his Ecole des Femmes ! Things went so far as to lead to a separation, and, from 1666 to 1671, Moliere and his wife saw each other only at the theatre. Further, his illness began to add to all the causes for his being discontented with others and with himself, and, if it cannot be said that from this very year 1666 he began to die slowly, it is at least true that from this time he lost, never to recover it again, the cheer- ful good humour of his earlier years. Life, which up to then had been " equally mingled with sweetness and pleasure," had no longer for him " any moment of satis- faction or sweetness " ; and, when he had to quit it, so well was he prepared, that death doubtless came to him as a deliverance. This explains the characteristics of his last pieces of some of them at least of this Malade imaglnaire 117 BRUNETLfcRE'S ESSAYS of which we were speaking, of the Bourgeois Gentil- homme, and George Dandin. The satire is plainly more harsh, the mirth more bitter, and, if I may say so, the laughter more conclusive. Even the import is different. No doubt the question was to be treated differently later, but has Rousseau himself shown up more eloquently the iniquity in the differences of men's circumstances than the author of George Dandin? For what would be more immoral than George Dandin, if in this did not lie its true meaning and its true lesson ? And has the author of Candide ever treated "this beggarly life" more outrageously than the author of the Malade imaginaire? What do I say, the author of Candide? It is the author of Gulliver I should say ; it is of Swift that I think every time I see the Malade imaginaire acted, it is of the bold, cynical, and violent character of his jest- ing. Read and re-read the Malade imaginaire from any point of view ; take all its characters one after the other ; Argan himself, and Beline, and Angelique, and M. Bonnefoi, and Toinette, and the Purgons, and the Diafoiruses, even the little Louison, never did Moliere, unless perhaps in his Avare, place together on the stage a like collection of imbeciles or rogues ; and never really still excepting his Avare did he mark with stronger touch the stupidity and rascality which is often hidden under the apparent regularity and respectability of bourgeois virtue. As he was by birth 118 IN FRENCH LITERATURE naturally melancholy, as has been remarked, we are almost tempted to believe that his naturalism would have ended, had he lived longer, by turning, as with some of our contemporaries, to a sort of pessimism. It is a curious mirth that shows itself in George Dandin and the Malade imaginaire^ a scornful and un- kind mirth, the mirth of those who force themselves to laugh, from fear of being obliged to weep. If however, amongst all this, the philosophy of Moliere is, as we have seen, still present, and still the same ; if he cannot keep from returning, between two domestic scenes or two tiffs, to the vindication of nature ; if he continues to scoff at those who wish to encroach on the rights of this mother of all health, of all wisdom, of all virtue, how must this philosophy have been at his heart, and must he not have been much more deeply imbued with it than he himself believed ! Listen rather to the Angelique of George Dandin : " With your permission, I would play with the happy days which youth offers me, and take the sweet liberties which age permits." This is still the language of the Ecole des Femmes. Neither the ex- periences of life nor the sorrows of his last years had any effect on that. How shall we best pursue what makes for pleasure ? This is the cry of nature ; and when one knows men, when one has judged them, when one has himself experienced the vanity of things, how shall we cling 119 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS yet more closely to his principle ? Is it not then, above all, that life seems good, and then, before she escapes us, that we hasten to enjoy her ? So let us follow nature. This is Moliere's rule of rules I mean that which determines the others, and on which they all necessarily hinge : and the end of this work thus joins on to the beginning. I have only to show that, as soon as he was dead, it was in this way that he was understood, and, as his work still lives, it only remains for me to state the place it gives Moliere in the history of ideas. V THE COMEDY OF MOLIERE IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS " M. MOLIERE," says the learned Baillet in his Jugements des Savants y " is one of the most dangerous enemies that the age or the world has raised up against the church, and he is the more formidable as he still makes after his death the same havoc in the heart of his readers as he made in his lifetime in that of his spectators. . . . Gallantry is not the only science to be learned in the school of Moliere, but also the most ordinary maxims of licentiousness against the true sentiments of re- ligion, whatever the enemies of bigotry may say, and we can assert that his Tartufe is one of the least 1 20 IN FRENCH LITERATURE dangerous to lead us to irreliglon " it is Baillet who underlines " the seeds of which are scattered in so cunning and hidden a way in most of his other pieces, that we may affirm that it is infinitely more difficult to resist its influence there than where he openly and indiscriminately ridicules the bigoted and the devout." When these lines appeared, in 1686, twelve or thirteen years after Moliere's death, no voice was raised, as far as I know, to protest against Baillet's judgment. If there was a party of libertinism or irreligion, nobody then doubted that the author of Tartufe had belonged to it ; none of his contemporaries made any mistake about the character of his work ; and nobody, in short, would then have dared to pre- tend that the blows he had aimed at the bigots had not struck, at the same time, the pious and religion itself. One question alone remains : what had become, during the last sixty years, of the doctrine bequeathed to Moliere by his masters, and transmitted to them, as we have seen, from Montaigne and Rabelais ? There is no lack of information ; and, if it was not against libertines, I should like to know against whom it was that Pascal had thought of writing, even before the appearance of Moliere, that Apologie de la Religion chretienne of which the Pensees are the fragments. Since for more than a hundred years the editors of the Pensees have arranged them in an order which is the more arbitrary the more it differs from that of the edition of 121 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 1670, published by Port-Royal, it has been and is still too often believed that Pascal wrote for himself, with- out other intention than to resolve his own doubts and to be assured on the foundations of his belief. But it is sufficient to go back to the edition of 1670, and to re-read in it the celebrated fragment Contre F In- difference des Athees to be assured that, if death had not come to interrupt it, the Apologle de la Religion chretienne was to have been, like the Provinciates, primarily a polemic, and that, after " easy-going piety," it was libertinism that Pascal proposed to combat. " I know not who has sent me into the world," he makes the free-thinker say, " nor what is the world, nor what I am myself. ... As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go, and I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothing- ness, or into the hands of an angry God. . . . And from all that I conclude that I ought therefore to pass all the days of my life without thinking of what must happen to me, and that I have only to follow my inclina- tions without thought or anxiety, . . . and in treating with scorn those who would be troubled with another care, I will proceed without foresight and without fear, . . . and let myself be gently led to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future condition." (Pensees. Edition of 1670. Contre /' 'Indifference des Athees, 1-8.) Here we recognise the language of Montaigne. I 122 IN FRENCH LITERATURE cannot say that it was also that of Descartes ; I have endeavoured to show, however, in another essay,* that with his tendency to treat as science the truths of religion and the rules of morality, Descartes did not fail to assist the progress of indifference and liber- tinism. Or rather what was, before his time, merely a way of living just as it was a fashion of thought, he founded, if I may say so, on reason, and conse- quently on right ; and though the libertines did not fall in exactly with Cartesianism, they found in it the excuse and justification of their usual rules of conduct. This is proved by a passage in Spinoza, in that Ethic, where I can see, on the whole, only a doctrine of liberation, and, as in the De Natura Rerum of Lucre- tius, an endeavour to emancipate human life from the terrors with which it is oppressed by the vain phantoms of superstition. In the name of Cartesianism and epicureanism, then banded together against re- ligion, is it not really to Pascal, is it not to the Pensees, which had appeared five or six years earlier, is it not to the Christian moralists Protestants or Jansenists that Spinoza replies in the following lines ? " Most of those who have hitherto treated of human passion and morality seem to have spoken of them, not at all as things which are natural and regulated accord- ingly by the laws of nature^ but as things which are outside * " Jansenistes et Cartesiens," in the fourth series of the Etudes critiques iur Fhhtoire de la litteraturefrarifaise. Translator. 123 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS of nature. Or rather, they represent man in nature as one empire within another. . . . This is why, far from attributing the inconstancy or feebleness of man to the laws of nature, they impute them to some vice or other of human nature, which accordingly some bemoan and others deride or despise, or end by hating" (Ethics in., Preamble.) This was the case of the Protestants in whose midst lived the author of the Ethics, the case of the Jansenists, and the case also of the author of the Pemees. But this is also the explicit and authentic evidence of the progress which the philosophy of nature had made in the first half of the seventeenth century, and this we must know, if we wish to know exactly what was, between 1660 and 1680, the substance of the thought of our " libertines." They did not exactly believe that nature was good, in the sense that the author of the Nouvelle Helo'he and of Emile was to understand it, but no more did they believe that she was bad. They held only that she was nature, that her inspirations or counsels coufd not differ in general from those of wisdom : Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit; and they said in particular it is the expression of La Mothe Le Vayer, one of Moliere's intimate friends that to try to resist her is to attempt to row against the current. Not that we should always follow her, or always obey her impulses : 124 IN FRENCH LITERATURE What once a Greek to great Augustus spake, We may for counsel just and useful take : That when to angry noise your words would tend, Run o'er your alphabet from end to end ; The while to gentler mood your thoughts will move, And 'scape the follies which your shame would prove. The counsels of nature are not always happy, and they are not always clear. But, in refusing to follow her, we must at least be careful not to thwart her, and to identify nothing with her movements that is not taken or deduced from her herself, if I may say so, and derived from her essentials. We should therefore not tell a man to separate himself from nature, but rather to conform to her, to use her as the members do the stomach, to remember that, being of her, he lives only by her, and, in short, never to treat her as a hostile power. But is it this that every religion teaches, and, like religion, every discipline which does not place in life itself, and in the pleasure of living, the object and end of life ? The consequence is evident, and there is no need for me here to state it at length. It was of this philosophy, so clearly defined and so precise, that Moliere was the interpreter, and these are the "cunning and hidden seeds of irreligion" which Baillet discovered in almost all his comedies. The partisans of this philosophy were more numerous in the seventeenth century than is generally believed, and to take but one example the Contes and Fables even of his friend La Fontaine insinuate it no less subtly than 125 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS do the masterpieces of Moliere. One and all, with a consciousness more or less clear of their own work, whether indifferents or sceptics, libertines or atheists, for those were the names they were then given, they continued the pagan tradition of the Renaissance, and, by an effort opposed to that of the Pascals, Bossuets, and Bourdaloues, worked at unchristianising the spirit of the seventeenth century, or, if I may use the word, at laicising its thought. Are they to be praised or blamed for it ? This is a question I shall not examine, and I shall confine myself to saying that, in preaching the liberty of thought, the two greatest of them, La Fontaine and Moliere, are suspected with good reason of having preached the liberty of morals. If they themselves are not what was called in the language of the time "passionate unbelievers" and for that matter are they not this ? their doctrine has yet always this against it, that it gave the passions full play. But I am now treating the question only historically ; and, whatever may be thought of their influence, we are concerned for the moment only with determining its nature. Now the naturalism they represent is of such importance in the history of ideas in the seventeenth century, since it balanced the power of Jansenism, and did not work in the same direction as Cartesianism, that it is to be considered as a third current which must be carefully distinguished from the other two. If we have seen above how the spirit of the six- 126 IN FRENCH LITERATURE teenth century became that of the seventeenth, we now see how the spirit of the seventeenth became in its turn that of the eighteenth. This I shall endeavour to show some day with more precision and clearness. But in the meantime it is sufficient to remember that it is there that Voltaire and Diderot, for example, have their true origin. I do not speak of Rousseau ; Rousseau comes from elsewhere ; but Voltaire and Diderot are there in their entirety. Though I have already pointed this out, there will be no harm in re- peating it : it is Pascal that Voltaire, with a singular clearness of view, attacked first of all, from 1728, and it is first of all against the Pensees, or against Jansenism, that he renewed the combat of Tartufe and the Ecole des Femmes. The Jesuits made the remark- able blunder of encouraging him, as Louis XIV had formerly encouraged Moliere. It was really in the name of respectability, that he also, Voltaire, wrote in his Remarques sur les Pensees de Pascal: " Man is no enigma, as you make him, in order that you may have the pleasure of solving it : man seems to be in his place in nature. Superior to the animals, whom he resembles only in his organs, inferior to other beings, whom he probably resembles in thought, he is, like everything we see, a mixture of good and evil, of pleasure and pain : he is pro- vided with passions to act, and reason to govern his actions. . . . And these so-called contrarieties which you call * contradictions ' are the necessary ingredients 127 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS for the composition of man, who /V, like the rest of nature, what he ought to be" (Ed. Beuchot, xxxvu, P- 3 6 -) Mofiere had not said anything else by the mouth of the reasonable Philinte of the Misanthrope: "I take men calmly just as they are ; I accustom myself to bear with what they do ; and I believe that at the court, as well as in the city, my phlegm is as philo- sophical as your bile." This is only the excuse for nature, so to speak ; it is not the apotheosis, nor the religion of nature. Voltaire in many respects still belongs to the seven- teenth century, and, brought up as he was in Jansenism, he believes no more than Moliere in the goodness of nature. He believes only, first in the uselessness, and then in the cruelty of the means which men * have thought upon to combat nature, and which end only in being defeated. But Diderot goes further ; he gives a prominence to this religion of nature, which, with Voltaire and Moliere, was as yet only a far away consequence of its first principle ; and he does so much more openly and boldly than Rousseau. " Dost thou wish to know on every occasion " says Orou to the chaplain, in the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville " dost thou wish to know what is good and what is bad ? Consider the nature of things and actions, thy connections with thy fellow-creatures, the influence of thy conduct on thy personal usefulness 128 IN FRENCH LITERATURE and on the public good. Thou art mad if thou dost believe that there is anything above, below y or in the universe^ which can add to or take away from the laws of nature. Her eternal wish is that the good^be pre- ferred to the evil, and the public good to the private good. Thou shalt order the contrary, but thou shalt not be obeyed. Thou shalt multiply the evil-doers and the unfortunate by fear, punishment, and remorse ; thou shall deprave the consciences^ thou shall corrupt the minds. Troubled in their state of innocence, tranquil in their crime, they will have lost the pole-star on their way. Answer me sincerely : despite the express orders of thy three legislators God, the priest, and the magistrate does a young man in thy country never have his girl without their permission?" (Ed. Assezat & Tourneux, n., p. 198.) I ask pardon for this last line. Obliged as we believe ourselves to be, when ,we cite Diderot, to cite always only the half of what he says, we have as a result an insufficient knowledge of his personality j and here, in particular, I rather fear the true bearing of the quotation would not have been gathered, had I not given it entirely. Characteristic as this is of the usual form of Diderot's tendencies when he moralises, it seems to me to be no less characteristic of the consequences to which the superstition of nature, sooner or later, must inevitably lead. Diderot here joins Rabelais, and his dream of Otaiti leads us, if I may say so, BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS back to the Abbey of Theleme. Shaken in its foundations by the paganism of the Renaissance, of which Luther, and Calvin above all, in vain en- deavoured to stay the progress ; compromised and discredited by the very bitterness of the theological quarrels of the seventeenth century ; restored for barely fifty years by the Pascals, Bossuets, and Bourdaloues to its early dignity ; attacked on all points, simultaneously or successively, by the liber- tines, by the philosophers of the eighteenth century, and by the encyclopaedists, Christianity lost the battle. There will surely be no cause for wonder if the single combat of Moliere against the Pascals, Bossuets, and Bourdaloues is not its least interesting episode that we have been anxious to throw light on it, and that we have dwelt on it at length. I would not dare to say, and it matters little, whether Moliere foresaw all the consequences which were yet to arise from his doctrines. Neither Voltaire nor Diderot foresaw, or even wished, all that has been done since their time under the authority of their name. In the ardour of the fight, enveloped and blinded as it were by the smoke of the battle-field, we can hardly measure our blows, much less judge of their effects. Perhaps, however, it is the peculiarity of genius to insinuate something more into its work than is imagined. Talent, which knows everything it does, and can account for it, can do so only from being incapable 130 IN FRENCH LITERATURE of stretching its view beyond the horizon of its time and the actual bounds of its experience. But genius is really the power of anticipating the future ; and, from age to age, its creations do not change on tihat account, as is sometimes said, in nature or in meaning, but they must be compared with those laws whose fruitful formulae include even unforeseen phenomena. Nobody will dispute me the right of inscribing Moliere in the rank and number of men of genius. In any case, whether or not he was conscious of the entire bearing of his work, what cannot be doubted is that, son of Montaigne and Rabelais, friend of Chapelle and La Fontaine, lover of Made- leine Bejart and husband of Armande, nobody was freer in thought than Moliere, more untied in every belief, more indifferent in matters of religion or, from that very reason, more aggressive, at a time when religion left nobody the liberty of indifference. This might well have been granted him, since, as I have endeavoured to show above, he would probably have continued to attack everything in religion which tends to fetter the development or expansion of the natural and of nature. His work thus enters into history, and takes its rightful place in the history of ideas. The general aspect of the seventeenth century is perceptibly modified. The false unity which is ascribed to it is merely apparent and superficial. Epochs are '3 1 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS to be distinguished in it, and parties in each of these epochs. The Cartesians are one and the Jansenists another. But the libertines are a third, and Moliere is their most illustrious representa- tive. What would be whispered, so to speak, only within closed doors, amongst accomplices, and in the coteries of wits, he said publicly, with open doors. What was only a secret or reserved doctrine, of which the common people were not yet considered capable, he taught on the stage and instilled into the agents, the soldiers, and the lackeys who filled the pit. So what was only a theory, to which one did not always dare to con- form his conduct, he made a doctrine of morality : a doctrine of morality, that is to say a practice, a rule for life. And the battle was warm, the fray was confused, with now a loss, and now a gain. The Jansenists seemed to triumph at one time, and the Cartesians, at one time, seemed to unite with the Jansenists. The same Baillet who saw so clearly in Moliere " one of the most dangerous enemies of the Church " is the biographer of Descartes. But it was Moliere who won ; his Tartufe changed the future of the battle ; and neither piety, nor eloquence, nor even genius has been able to re-establish a reputation or prosperity. In this respect he may be said to herald the doctrine of the eighteenth century, or even to prepare it. He broke to some extent the restraints on free-thought. And 132 IN FRENCH LITERATURE as we pass from Rabelais and Montaigne to him with- out a hitch, so we pass quite smoothly from him to Voltaire and Diderot. He belongs to the family; and, not to trouble with a comparison, it is undoubtedly he who did the most of all, were it only by the superiority of the dramatic form for spreading the ideas of which it makes itself the interpreter. Shall I say that he is the greater for it ? No, since it has been kindly pointed out to me that it is in nobody's power to c lessen ' or * magnify ' Moliere which means nothing, let me say, unless the nega- tion of all criticism. But I do not think it can be a matter of indifference to his glory, to have been, instead of a simple entertainer or a clever merry-andrew, a thinker. The Ecole des Femmes^ or Tartufe, or the Malade imaginaire are not works which can be emptied of their contents, to be considered only in their form : we cannot neglect their substance and attend only to their style. This is too often forgotten, and I do not wish to give the reasons now I shall give them only if I am forced to but all the same this is too often forgotten. This is what I have endeavoured to show. If, in addition, I have been able to point out, by a notable example, how disastrous for every writer is this verbal criticism, which attends only to the manner in which a thing is said, and never to the thing itself, I should not think that I had lost either my time or trouble ; and I hope the reader will agree with me. 133 VOLTAIRE AND JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU * IT seems an advisable and even a humane act to begin by relieving M. Gaston Maugras of a certain uneasiness : " Although researches, crowned with success," says he in his preface, " and the extreme kindness of the collectors to whom we have applied, have put us in a position to give a considerable amount of unpublished material, the documents which appear in this volume are for the most part extracted from the letters and works which have appeared from the last century to the present day " ; and he fears the reproach of having added little to the three thousand odd letters which we should have of Rousseau, if there was a good edition of his correspondence, and to the ten thousand which we do have of Voltaire. Apparently M. Maugras thinks that everybody has read, not only all the letters, but also all the works of Voltaire and Rousseau ; not only all their works, but also all those of their contem- poraries ; and has not only read them, but has them all in vivid recollection. Let him be undeceived and reassured. In our time the real unpublished * <$uerelles de fhilosophes : Voltaire et J.-J. Rousseau, par M. Gaston Maugras. Paris, 1886 ; Calmann Levy. 134 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE document, according to the famous saying, which is even more true than witty, is precisely what is printed. Only those then will find fault with M. Gaston Maugras for not having given a more " considerable amount of unpublished material " who are themselves ignorant of the bibliography of the subject he has treated. Others know that the difficulty in dealing with Voltaire and Rousseau is not to give or find unpublished material, but not to go astray or lose one- self altogether among the printed material, for even M. Gaston Maugras himself neither knows nor dis- cusses it all. And this is why the best service that can be done us, and the most urgent, is to put a little order into these printed works, to read them for the instruction of those who have not the time to read them themselves, to assort and judge and criticise them, and to use them for the composition of the work of which they are only the material. The use and end of rubble is not to block up the public way, but to serve sooner or later for building houses, if not monuments. The reader would be surprised were I here to draw up a list of the works we have on the history of the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Genevans in particular for Rousseau to them is not merely what he is to us, but something more, a compatriot, the great man, their most illustrious author never tire of editing his work, and of clearing and preparing the way for the historian of his life. The people of Neuchatel, who are the 135 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS trustees of his papers, are no less arduous in the same task. And in France, during his lifetime and even after his death, Rousseau played too great a part, attracted too much of the attention of the public, and exercised too great an influence in every way for us not to be passionately curious of all that con- cerns him. No doubt we are as curious, and for the same reasons, of all that concerns Voltaire, nor is there a lack of works on the history of his life and writings ; but, if I may not say that they are less numerous, still they are not so scattered, and, though not final) of a character not so provisional. Further, there is an excellent edition and good biographies of Voltaire, but there are none yet of Rousseau. The best edition we have is of no value the edition of Musset-Pathay ; and, as for bio- graphies, neither the two volumes of Saint-Marc Girardin (1853), nor the heavy compilation of M. Brokerhoff (1863), nor the brilliant sketch of Mr. John Morley (1873) is all that is to be desired. Who can say that it is not the very abundance of materials which discourages the historian from work- ing them up ? But who can fail to see, consequently, that, the more they accumulate, the greater the need of haste, even at the expense of being obscure or incomplete in certain points, to turn them to account as far as possible ? Granted that the time is not yet come to build, must we not always before build- ing make our plans, and why not begin ? 136 IN FRENCH LITERATURE Let us congratulate M. Maugras on having had this courage, for in his volume on Voltaire et Jean- yacques Rousseau, though he does not altogether fulfil the promise of the title, he has really given us a sketch of a history of Rousseau's life, or, to be quite exact, of the second half of his life from 1755 to 1778. So I shall not examine if, as I have just been urging, and as would need to be insisted upon in other circumstances, any brochures or newspaper or review articles have escaped the attention of M. Maugras, if, in the long voyage in search of the unpublished, he has been diligent enough in his in- vestigation of the printed matter, if he should not sometimes have followed more closely and discussed more carefully the sayings of his predecessors : it is sufficient for my purpose that he has written his book, and that the book is interesting. But, in case he should return to his sketch to correct and complete it, and thus give us the book we wish, I shall con- tent myself at present with pointing out its two great faults as it now stands it is not sufficiently impartial, and the composition lacks breadth of treatment. With the exception of Buffon and Montesquieu, our great men of the eighteenth century were rather unamiable characters, such as d'Alembert, Grimm, Diderot ; and above them all, undoubtedly the two greatest, stood Voltaire and Jean - Jacques, two " puissant gods," two shabby fellows. When I think of the one I always prefer the other. Voltaire was '37 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS more perverse, Jean- Jacques was more suspicious ; the former was more irritable, the latter more dan- gerous ; scurrility was at the bottom of the character of the one, and even was one part of his genius, the other was never better inspired than by defiance, envy, or hatred : and though nobody could safely be the enemy of Voltaire, that was almost better than being the friend of Rousseau. And so, if I must compare them, I cannot incline more to the one than the other, and much less can I join with M. Maugras in placing all right and moderation and generosity on the side of Voltaire, and all the faults on the side of Rousseau. M. Maugras is too forgetful that on every occasion, and without any provocation, only because the success of their works made them rivals of his glory and popularity, Voltaire attacked, one after the other, the least and the greatest of his contemporaries : Piron and Freron, Crebillon and Maupertuis, Buffon and Montesquieu. " He seems to have laid the scheme of burying all his contemporaries during his life- time," said Buffon ; " he has a grudge against every pedestal," said also Diderot ; and I would willingly add that, aristocrat in everything, he was truly democratic only in his jealousy of all that was above him. After the success of the Nouvelle Hllo'ise and the notoriety of Emi/e, in vain had Rousseau been the friend of Voltaire, and Voltaire, under the pseudonym of M. de la Roupilliere or '3* IN FRENCH LITERATURE Le R. P. 1'Escarbotier, would have jeered at it no less cruelly. So partial is M. Maugras to Voltaire, that not only does he overlook all this, but even goes to the other extreme of holding that Voltaire had the right to see a direct and personal attack in Rousseau's famous Discourses, as in his Lettre sur les Spectacles. For, he argues, had not Voltaire been for the last thirty years the support of those theatres which Rousseau attacked, just as he was " the most sur- prising incarnation of the civilisation, the arts, and the sciences " in which Rousseau could see only the ever renewed nourishment of human corruption ? M. Maugras is surely unwilling to grant the right of having other ideas on the theatre than those held by the author of Zaire. And because Vol- taire wished to establish a theatre at Geneva, no Genevan had the right to think it bad ! It is the same, too, when M. Maugras deals with Rousseau's well-known letter which contains his challenge to Voltaire : " I do not like you at all, sir ; you have done me the most painful injuries possible, me your disciple and enthusiast " ; and when he finds it, as indeed it is, I may say impertinent, the most impertinent, to use Voltaire's word, which fanatic ever scrawled. But M. Maugras forgets that if Rousseau, throughout this long quarrel, was impertinent in his letters and fanatical in his proceedings, he at least knew, in his public writings, how to keep from descending 139 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS to the low insults which Voltaire heaped upon him, and which this irritable patriarch did not cease to spew upon him even to the last. When M. Maugras retouches his book, he will be able to keep his sympathies for Voltaire, and even let them be plainly evident ; but he will do well merely to ground them better, if I may say so, and to strengthen his own case by being more just to Rousseau, though still preferring Voltaire. I should also have liked if M. Maugras, without any essential change in the plan of the book, had not put out of court, as he says, the talent and the genius of Voltaire and Rousseau, so as to study only their character. Speaking generally, I really do not understand how anyone can dis- tinguish, separate, and in fact dissociate what nature has meant to be so closely united the talent, the genius, and the character of a great writer. But when we are concerned with a man who, like Voltaire, paints himself so true to life, unintentionally and unwittingly, in ten lines, or of a man who, like Rousseau, passed the one half of his life only in telling us about the other, I admit I cannot understand it at all. This is the gravest fault in M. Maugras's book. His study of the mere character of Voltaire and Rousseau tempted me while I read it to repeat the saying which is attributed to M. de Castries, at the very time of the great quarrel of Rousseau and Diderot. "This 140 IN FRENCH LITERATURE is absurd," he said ; " why, these people are the only thing spoken about, people of no position, who have no house, and are lodged in a garret : we can't put up with this." And indeed, if Voltaire and Rousseau were not known otherwise, we neither do nor may see any reasons why we should interest ourselves in their quarrel, nor for M. Maugras himself to take such a great interest in it. Who are these people ? What have they to do with us ? What does it matter whether they agree or pitch into each other ? And since it is evident that they did quarrel, what business of ours is it to examine so carefully who was the first to begin ? M. Mau- gras assuredly knows why. He could tell us. Perhaps he thinks he has reasons for not telling us. But all the same he has not done so. And I am sorry for it, for had he tried to tell us, he would have seen that there was something more than the meeting or collision of two adverse vanities. Not that in my turn I wish to abstract Voltaire and Rousseau, of all people, from their human char- acteristics, to make them pure spirits that can be separated only by their way of understanding liberty, progress, and justice. God forbid ! this would be erring in the other extreme. Many paltry reasons helped on their quarrel, these vulgar and lamentable reasons which could as well provoke two door-porters. For example, if Rousseau was not exactly jealous of Voltaire's fortune, his estates and his income, he cer- 141 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS tainly was jealous of the show and security of his social position, and if not of his money, at least of the consideration Voltaire owed to his money. And what Voltaire, on his part, could not put up with, was to be compared, he, the gentleman in ordinary of the chamber, the table-companion of kings, the friend of the mistresses and empresses, with this little Genevan, this " clockmaker's boy," as he calls him, without money, position, and society. We know the tone in which he reproached the other Rousseau, Jean- Baptiste, with being the son of a bootmaker. Adroitly and maliciously M. Maugras shows up these paltry reasons. Thus, on the side of Jean- Jacques, one of these was the installation of Voltaire at the gates of Geneva. This intriguer had taken his place from him. In this town, to which the " citizen " counted on returning in triumph, a master of witticisms irrecoverably filched from him all hopes of popularity. "You have alienated my fellow -citizens from me," he wrote, "you will make me die in a foreign land, while all the honours that a man can expect will accompany you into my country." There is the arrow, and there the wound ! Reciprocally, on the side of Voltaire is the influence which Rousseau continues to exercise on the preachers of Protestantism. He is worried in his pleasures : he is not allowed to recruit actors for his theatre among the youth of Geneva : " The priests of Geneva are joined in horrible faction against comedy. I shall have 142 IN FRENCH LITERATURE the first socinian priest who passes on my territory shot. Jean-Jacques is a 'jean f. . .' who writes every fortnight to these priests to enflame them against plays." His letters to d'Argental, d'Alembert, and Damilaville are full of this sort of complaint. But these are not the only reasons, either on one side or the other, and certainly not the truest ones, as M. Maugras seems to think. And if Rousseau's persuasion that the burning of Emile at Geneva was due only to Voltaire, and Voltaire's indignation on hearing of the underhand methods of which Rousseau accused him, are stronger reasons, I should like still stronger and deeper reasons, and these there are. When there appeared, one after the other, in less than ten years, from 1755 to 1764, the Discours sur rinegalite^ the Lettre a