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tflartntam f rm Swics 
 
 PRIMER 
 
 OF 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 SAINTSBUR Y 
 
tlonfcon 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 fjorfe 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
PRIMER 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 RD EDITION, REVISED 
 
 JHI7BRSIT7 
 
 ' 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1888 
 
 [ All rights reset-veif] 
 
Si 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 THE first edition of this little book appeared without a 
 preface : the second may perhaps be allowed one, if only to 
 express the Author's thanks to his critics and to the public 
 for the reception given to his work. Some corrections of 
 phrase have been made, and a few errors in the dates have 
 been rectified. That such corrections have not been more 
 numerous is, I believe, mainly owing to the great care with 
 which my friend Mr. Andrew Lang read the proof sheets 
 for me and to the valuable suggestions which he made. In 
 deference to the request of several friends an index has 
 been added, though I myself consider the addition somewhat 
 superfluous in the case of a book the body of which is little 
 more than an index in itself. I have limited it to those 
 names in connection with which something more than a 
 mere mention will be found in the text. For the compiling 
 of this index I owe my best thanks to Miss Emily J. Carey ; 
 while for indicating to me a somewhat important omission 
 in a passage relating to Pascal I am obliged to M. Paul 
 Stapfer, Professor in the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble. 
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 IN this third edition the text has been again carefully 
 revised, and some corrections made. It has not however 
 been thought well to encumber a book intended for beginners 
 
 SI 
 
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 with too many details and provisos referring to the now 
 rapidly accumulating, but not always certain or unanimous, 
 opinions of Old-French scholars on points respecting the 
 date and authorship of mediaeval work. As the greater part 
 of a decade has passed since the book was first written, a few 
 passages, dealing with writers who have made their mark 
 in the interval, have been inserted in the later pages, and 
 several death-dates have been added. 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. FRENCH LITERATURE BEFORE I2OO A.D. . . J 
 
 II. THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 15 
 
 III. THE DECLINE OF MEDLEVAL LITERATURE . . 35 
 
 IV. THE RENAISSANCE 48 
 
 V. THE BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD . . 63 
 
 VI. THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV. , . 76 
 
 VII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 89 
 
 VIII. FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION . 103 
 
 IX. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT . . . .114 
 
 X. CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE . . .128 
 INDEX 142 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE BEFORE I2OO A.D. 
 
 ^FRENCH literature has at the present day a history which 
 extends over a little more than eight centuries. *) A few 
 isolated documents can be produced which throw this his- 
 tory back somewhat further. But from the eleventh century 
 onwards there is no break in the story, and the literature of 
 France occupies a position which is almost unique. Other 
 countries, for instance our own, can boast of a literary 
 pedigree nominally longer. But there is one great difference 
 which separates French from English literary history. No 
 Englishman to-day can appreciate the earliest English litera- 
 ture, or any English literature before the fourteenth century, 
 without a special training quite as laborious as has to be 
 gone through in the case of a foreign language. Any 
 Frenchman, or any one who has acquired a fair knowledge 
 of modern French, can, with no special instruction and with 
 only a very little trouble, read the very earliest French literary 
 monuments. (The Chanson de Roland, which is at least as 
 old as the Norman Conquest, can be read with not more 
 difficulty by the one, than Chaucer, who is four hundred 
 years later in date, by the other.^) Another peculiarity of 
 early French literature is its extraordinary richness and 
 variety. With little foreign influence or admixture, the 
 French in the middle ages produced specimens of almost 
 
 B 
 
2 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 every kind of literary work that we now have, and some of 
 these rank among the best of their kind. Hence the study 
 of French literature is among the most interesting of all 
 literary studies, because we see in it what a nation can 
 achieve with the minimum of foreign aid. 
 
 The reason why French literature does not date so early 
 as English is that the language in which it is written is not 
 an original tongue, but a corruption of Latin. The conquest 
 of Gaul by the Romans, unlike the conquest of Britain, was 
 so thorough that, except in remote corners of the land, the 
 old tongue spoken by the Gauls was quite driven out. The 
 new tongue brought in by the conquerors was gradually 
 changed until what we call French arose out of Latin. It 
 seems probable that something like a new language came of 
 this change by the seventh century, but the first certain 
 instance of it that we have is much later. / A language, called 
 Lingua Romano, or Romance tongue, to distinguish it from 
 Lingua Latina or Latin, was sufficiently established in 842 for 
 it to be necessary for the two sons of Charlemagne's son, 
 when they made a treaty together at Strasburg, to have a 
 copy of the agreement made in French. \ The language of 
 the * Strasburg Oaths/ as they are callea, is very strange to 
 those who know French only or Latin only, but to those 
 who know both it is easy enough. Soon afterwards the new 
 language became sufficiently popular for poems to be written 
 in it. There is a hymn or poem of great beauty on the 
 martyrdom pf_ St. JEulalia which dates from the tenth century 
 at least, and possibly from the ninth. It tells how Eulalia, the 
 maiden bel avret corps, bellezour anima had a fair body and 
 a fairer soul ; how the enemies of God strove to pervert her, 
 but for no threat or promise would she listen to them. Par 
 manatee regiel ne preimen for royal menace nor prayer would 
 she become a heathen. So she was brought before Maximian 
 
BEFORE I2OO A.D. 3 
 
 the Emperor arid' sentenced to the flames. But the fire 
 would not touch her, and they had to behead her with a 
 sword. And then in the shape of a dove her soul fled to 
 the skies, in figure de colomb volat ad del. This is the earliest 
 or almost the earliest piece of really literary work that can 
 be called French, and we have a few other pieces of the same 
 period, mostly religious in kind. There is a poem on the 
 Passion, one on the life of St. Leger, and, in the form of 
 French which we now call Proven9al, a poem on the philo- 
 sopher Boethius. All these date from the tenth century, and 
 before that there is nothing certain except the oaths already 
 mentioned and a fe.w lists of words, dictionaries as it were, 
 to tell foreigners what were the equivalents in the new 
 Romance tongue of the words familiar to them either in 
 Latin or in German. 
 
 But when France was once for all separated from Ger- 
 many, and when the Normans had settled themselves in the 
 north, and the Spanish Arabs had been thoroughly beaten 
 back behind the Pyrenees, it was natural that the French 
 should set to work to make a literature of their own. The 
 very first kind of literature that they tried to write was of 
 great and remarkable interest. No nation in the world has 
 anything that can compare with what are called the Chansons 
 de Gestes. These Chansons de Gestes songs of families, as 
 the term literally means * are poems, most of them of great 
 length, describing the history and achievements of the great 
 men of France in early times. Most of them have to do 
 with the deeds of Charlemagne or of his son, but some are 
 concerned with the fierce battles of the feudal lords who from 
 a very early time divided France between them, and the 
 
 1 Geste has three senses (i) the deeds (gesta) of a hero; (2) the 
 poem illustrating those deeds ; (3) the family of the hero and the set 
 of poems celebrating it. 
 
 8 2 
 
4 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 latest deal with the first Crusade, in which Frenchmen bore 
 so large a share. These Chansons de Gestes are not mere 
 rude stories or legends. They are written in regular verse, 
 nearly as polished and careful as that which Englishmen and 
 Frenchmen write now. But there is one curious thing about 
 them. (JThe older ones are not rhymed, but are written in 
 what is called assonance.} This means that though the last 
 syllables of the lines have the same vowel-sound there is 
 not the same arrangement of consonants in them. Some- 
 times nowadays, when writers who do not know what they 
 are about try to write English poetry, they make such rhymes 
 as ' war ' and ' law/ ' time ' and i thine/ These are very bad 
 rhymes, but they would be very good assonances. Some- 
 times indeed in reading a Chanson de Geste one has to. think 
 a little even to see the assonance, because all the vowels were 
 not pronounced then quite in the same way as they are now. 
 But this does not at all interfere with the beauty of these 
 poems. They are often of very great length, and the oldest 
 and best of them all, the Chanson de Roland, which tells how 
 Roland and Oliver and many more of Charlemagne's paladins 
 died at Roncesvaux through the treachery of Ganelon, is 
 about four thousand lines long. Some of the others are 
 much longer. For it was a curious habit of the French in 
 the middle ages, that when a poem was written which they 
 liked, instead of letting it alone they were always altering it 
 and making it longer and suiting it to the taste of the time, 
 that at last the Chansons de Gestes got very long indeed 
 and not a little tiresome, some of them even extending to fifty 
 thousand lines, or about four times the length of Paradise Lost. 
 But the earlier ones were not so long as this, and they are 
 full of interest. In Roland there is a splendid passage just 
 before the account of the hero's death. The fight is going 
 on, though in France men know nothing of it. c But none 
 the less in France was there great disturbance. There was 
 
BEFORE 12OO A.D. 5 
 
 thunder and wind, hail and rain falling heavily, and always 
 the earth shook and trembled from St. Michael's at Paris J 
 to Sens, and from Wisant to Besangon. The walls of the 
 houses shook and there was darkness at midday, so that all 
 men who saw it trembled and said, " the end of the world is 
 at hand." But they were wrong, and knew not what they 
 said, for it was the great mourning of the land for the death 
 of Roland.' In all the older chansons the principal subject 
 is the noble 1 struggle unto death of Christian heroes against 
 the Saracens. But there are many other subjects. The 
 chief fault of the feudal system was the perpetual jealousy 
 and disunion which it spread among the great men of the 
 state. All these chansons bear witness to this, and show us 
 sometimes the nobles quarrelling among themselves ; some- 
 times the emperor prejudiced by traitors against his faithful 
 servants. At first ladies play but a small part in these chan- 
 sons, though afterwards it is different. (We have in all nearly 
 a hundred of these interesting poemsy many of which are 
 much later in date than the eleventh or even the twelfth 
 century, but in these cases they have generally been copied 
 and extended from others of an earlier time. 
 
 Not quite so early as these poems, but soon afterwards, 
 there began to be written another kind of romance 2 . Among 
 the Celtic peoples of Wales and of Brittany there had long 
 been traditions of a great king, Arthur by name, who was 
 supposed in the fifth century to have opposed the invasions 
 
 1 This is the reading of the oldest MS., but it is doubtless a mistake 
 for St. Michel du Peril (in periculo maris), i. e. Mont St. Michel in 
 Normandy. There is also some doubt whether Sens is a proper name, 
 or is not rather * seins/ the old form of 'saints/ i. e. the three kings or 
 saints of Cologne, to which latter place the phrase would then apply. 
 
 2 It should be observed that this word indicates the character and 
 popularity of early French literature. Enromancer properly means ' to 
 turn into French.' 
 
6 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 of the German and Scandinavian immigrants. It is possible 
 that some of these legends may have been written down in 
 the vulgar tongues, though there is no evidence to show that 
 any were so written earlier than the twelfth century. A 
 writer called Nennius had however written in bad Latin an 
 account of the Saxon and Anglian and Jutish invasion of 
 Britain, and this, with perhaps some assistance from the 
 legends alluded to, Geoffrej^i^Monrnoulh^worked up into 
 his HhtoriaJBritonum in 1140(7). This book became im- 
 mensely popular both in France and England, and a Jersey- 
 man named Wace translated it into French verse under 
 the title of Brut. Soon after, the story thus given was taken 
 hold of by a knot of clever writers at the English and French 
 courts, the chief of the former being WalterMap, and the 
 chief of the latter Robert de Borron. These writers, many 
 of whom are now unknown, in the course of a few years 
 produced a wonderful fabric of romance on the subject of 
 Arthur, his Knights, and the mysterious vessel of the Saint 
 Graal, which was supposed to be the vessel in which Christ 
 had celebrated the Holy Supper, and to have been brought 
 into England by Joseph of Arimathea. These stories were 
 written in the first place, not as all stories, whether true or 
 false, had apparently hitherto been written, in verse, but in 
 prose, and in very good prose too. Still, however, most of 
 those who cared for stories preferred verse, and the prose 
 romances were soon versified. The chief of the versifiers was 
 Chretien de Troyes, who lived about 1180. Chretien was 
 a very busy writer, and we have a large number of his works, 
 besides which we know that he wrote others which are lost. 
 Those we have concerning Arthur are Percevale, a long 
 legend of the Holy Graal, which was continued by others till 
 it extended to over fifty thousand verses ; Erec et finide, the 
 pretty story which Lord Tennyson has revived in the Idylh 
 

 BEFORE I2OO A.D. 
 
 of the King ; Le Chevalier a la Chareite, versified from part 
 of Walter Map's great book of Lancelot du Lac, in which 
 Map and perhaps some other writers told the story of the 
 greatest of Arthur's knights ; Le Chevalier au Lyon, a story of 
 Evan of Wales, another knight of Arthur's court ; and lastly, 
 Clige's, a romance, in which the son of the Emperor of Con- 
 stantinople is brought to join the Table Round. These 
 romances, both prose and verse, are very different from the 
 Chansons de Gestes. /In the first place, instead of being 
 written in assonance* verses of ten or twelve syllables, they 
 are written in pairs of verses of eight syllables each, rhyming 
 just in the same way as modern poetry does.N The char- 
 acters and scenery described are also very different. The 
 knights are much more of the kind which we now call 
 chivalrous than the paladins of Charlemagne. These latter 
 seem to care for nothing but fighting and killing infidels; 
 they are rude and brutal to one another and to their wives 
 and lady-loves. The Arthurian knights are much more 
 gentle and courteous ; they delight more in single combats 
 and tournaments than in confused battles with the Saracens 
 and each other ; they are full of politeness to ladies and of 
 reverence for the King. There is also much more religion 
 in the Romances than in the Chansons, though perhaps what 
 there is in the latter is more sincere. ^The whole story of 
 the Holy Graal was originally a religious one, though the 
 spirit of chivalry has somewhat altered it.^) Lastly, we can see 
 that by the time the Arthurian Romances were written, 
 civilisation had advanced a good deal. Living was more 
 luxurious, and the classes of society were more numerous. 
 In the Chansons we hardly hear of any one but nobles and 
 peasants; shopkeepers and citizens make their appearance 
 in the Romances for the first time. 
 
 Nor were Charlemagne and Arthur the only persons 
 
 
8 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 whose doings occupied writers at this date. It used to be 
 thought, and is still thought by some people, that the middle 
 ages were ignorant of the classics and classical times. This is 
 quite a mistake ; Chretien de Troyes wrote some translations 
 of Ovid, and by the twelfth century there began to grow up, 
 just as the other two kinds of romances had grown up, a 
 whole class of poems about classical subjects. The most 
 important by far of these is the romance of Alixandre, the 
 twelve-syllabled verse of which was thought so~excellent that 
 such lines have ever since been called Alexandrines. This 
 is a very long poem written at the end of the century by two 
 authors, a certain Lambert and Alexander, pjMB^rnay, and it 
 contains a very curious mixture of facts taken out of history 
 and of fancies prevalent at the time about fairies and giants 
 and the fountain of youth, and such like things. Another 
 very long and very important poem is the romance of Troy 
 by Benedict de Sainte-More, a poem written like the Arthurian 
 romances in eight-syllabled couplets. It is of great interest 
 to us, because it contains the original of the story of Troilus 
 and Cressida, which two of our greatest poets, Chaucer and 
 Shakespeare, have dealt with since. Qn fact one of the most 
 surprising things about early French poetry is the number of 
 stories which appear in it for the first time, and which other 
 nations have borrowed sincey Much indeed of the invention 
 was due to Englishmen, who happened to speak and write 
 French as the court language of the time in England ; but 
 still the books themselves belong to French literature, not to 
 English, and were soon copied and translated by the poets 
 of England, Italy, Germany, and all the nations of Europe 
 besides. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the people of France as a 
 rule read these poems. They were generally recited by a class 
 of men and women called Jongleurs and Jongleresses, who 
 
BEFORE 1200 A.D. 9 
 
 went about from house to house repeating poetry. When 
 these jongleurs began to play and to recite, they used to beg 
 the audience to be silent, and to boast of the superiority of 
 the poems they could tell to those of other jongleurs ; and 
 when they had done they would ask pretty plainly for money. 
 Many of the manuscripts in which we have received the 
 works of these times, are the very same which these jongleurs 
 carried about with them, and so these curious additions have 
 come down with the text. Those who wrote the poems 
 were not called jongleurs, but trouveujs, though sometimes 
 a trouveur would sing and recite his own works. By degrees 
 rich men cared to have these poems copied for them. For 
 this purpose they employed copyists, who wrote on great 
 books of parchment or paper all sorts of poems, one after 
 another, without any reference to their contents or connexion. 
 Such manuscripts as these were too large to be carried about 
 by jongleurs, but they have preserved to us the majority of 
 the poems which we have. To give some idea of the immense 
 quantity of poetry which was written at this time, it may be 
 mentioned that what we have, though doubtless much is 
 lost, amounts to several millinqjjrips. There is, for the time 
 of which we are speaking, much less prose. The long 
 Arthurian romances are almost the only long prose com- 
 positions before the thirteenth century. History was still 
 written in Latin. /But Maurice de Sully, who died in 1196, has 
 left us sermons written in French, and there are a few 
 translations and paraphrases of the Bible in the vernacular. 
 One of the oldest prose works we have is a commentary on 
 the prophet Jonah, in which French sentences are mixed up 
 with the Latin, according to a curious but not infrequent 
 habit of the time. There is also a translation of the Book of 
 Kings, which dates from the twelfth century. These works 
 were for the most part written by monks, and some of the 
 
 
10 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 French monasteries became famous for the pains which were 
 taken in them to write chronicles of present and past French 
 history, though until about 1200 they were not written in the 
 French language. 
 
 As men were as yet unaccustomed to write in prose, 
 they wrote in verse a good many things which, as it seems 
 to us now, might have been done much better in prose. 
 Quite early in the twelfth century they began to translate 
 and paraphrase various historical books in French verse. 
 We have spoken of Wace's Brut. The same poet wrote also 
 a very long poem called the Roman de Rou (Rollo), giving- 
 a history of the Dukes of Normandy and of their conquest 
 of England. Even before Wace, another writer, Geoffrey 
 Gaymar, had written a chronicle in verse, and after him 
 Benedict de Sainte-More, who has also been mentioned, 
 wrote a stuT longer chronicle of Normandy in eight- syllabled 
 verses. Besides these long poems, a great many shorter 
 ones, describing different events of the time, were composed. 
 Thus a sketch of the conquest of Ireland was written in 1172. 
 Nor was history the only serious subject which was thus 
 treated. About 1125 Philippe de Thaun wrote for Queen 
 Adela of England two curious little books, in French verse 
 of six syllables. One used to be called Liber de Creaturis 
 (now we are told to call it Comput), and contained an ac- 
 count of the calendar, and the arrangements which Caesar 
 and others had introduced to improve it. The other was 
 entitled Bestiariuj^ or Beast-book. In the middle ages the 
 knowledge of distant countries was not very full or accurate, 
 and many strange stories, some of them beautiful enough, 
 but few of them having much foundation of fact, were told 
 about all real animals and a good many fabulous ones, such 
 as unicorns and dragons. Philippe tells these stories in his 
 brisk little verses, and to each he adds a kind of moral, 
 
BEFORE 1200 A.D. II 
 
 treating the story as an allegory of some fact or doctrine in 
 the Christian religion. People in the middle ages were 
 exceedingly fond of these allegorical moralisings, and we 
 shall hear a good deal more of them. 
 
 Besides the long romances and poems on serious subjects, 
 of various kinds, the trouveres l composed many short songs 
 and tales, some of a serious and some of a comic kind. 
 The songs are generally divided by modern scholars under 
 two heads, romances and pastourelks. The romance may 
 perhaps be best described (as a song with a story in it} It 
 generally tells how some fair lady was won by a gallant 
 knight in tourney or in war, and has usually at the end of 
 each stanza what is called a refrain or burden; that is to 
 say, the same phrase repeated without alteration. Sometimes 
 these refrains have no particular sense, like our ' hey no 
 nonny/ ' derry down/ etc. ; sometimes they have a meaning 
 which connects itself with the general sense of the song. 
 The best of these romances are attributed to an otherwise 
 unknown writer called Audefroi le Bastard. The pastour- 
 elles were a very favourite kind of poem, and we have 
 great numbers of them. They generally describe how the 
 poet, or somebody else, was riding through a beautiful 
 country in a fine spring or summer morning, and how he 
 saw by the roadside a fair shepherdess keeping her flocks. 
 Then he gets down from his horse and begins to make love 
 to her, and sometimes she accepts his love, and sometimes 
 she says that she has already a sweetheart, some simple 
 shepherd whom she will not desert for a stranger. Besides 
 these there was another kind of poem, which was rather a 
 tale than a song, and which began to be written about this 
 
 1 This word ( = trouveur) is used to distinguish the poets of Northern 
 France from those of Southern. The term distinguishing the latter 
 (troubadour} is a third form of the same. 
 
 
12 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 time. This is what is called the fabliau, A fabliau has been 
 described as ' a story of some actual or possible event occur- 
 ring in every-day life/ and poems of this kind became great 
 favourites in France. Most of them were of the comic kind, 
 very much resembling the lighter of Chaucer's Canterbury 
 Tales, which indeed are in many cases taken from fabliaux. 
 Sometimes they have a moral, but not very often. The story 
 of Moliere's Me'decin malgre lui is found in one of the fabliaux, 
 and is a very good example of the kind. It tells how a 
 woodcutter quarrelled with his wife and beat her. So she in 
 revenge told some of the king's servants that her husband 
 was a great doctor, and he was carried off to the court, and 
 ordered to cure the king's daughter ; out of which scrape he 
 got himself by his cleverness. We have an immense number 
 of these little poems, almost all of which are more or less 
 amusing, and many of which have become famous in the 
 more modern shape which later authors in English, Italian 
 and French have given them. 
 
 Still more important, perhaps, if we look at what it led to, 
 though much less interesting in itself, is the beginning of 
 play -writing, which also belongs to the twelfth century. ( The 
 first French dramas, which are earlier than any written in 
 other modern European languages, were acted in church, and 
 almost formed part of religious services ;J consequently they 
 were all on sacred subjects. They had been written in 
 Latin, which was then the language of the church service, at 
 first; but as they were intended to amuse and attract the 
 common people, it was clearly necessary that they should 
 soon be written in French. For a time however Latin and 
 French were mixed in them as in the commentary on Jonah 
 which we have noticed. These dramas are called mysteries, 
 and one of the earliest, if not the earliest of all, is the mystery 
 of the Ten Virgins, in which some of the speeches are in 
 
BEFORE 1300 A.D. 13 
 
 French. Then we have a mystery or drama of the story of 
 Daniel ; and at last, but still before the end of the twelfth 
 century, there is the mystery of Adam, which is all written in 
 French, though the directions to the actors are in Latin. 
 
 Thus we see that early French literature was extraordinarily 
 abundant in amount and various in form. Although its 
 prose is a little backward, there is hardly any kind of poetry 
 which the trouveres had not tried, and in which they had not 
 succeeded. \To this day there are no more beautiful or 
 more beautifully told stories than the Arthurian legends.) 
 The Carlovingian epics, as the Chansons de Gestes are 
 sometimes called, are more monotonous and less attractive 
 in incident and manner, but full of fierce love of battle and of 
 the spirit of resolute independence. The songs are charm- 
 ingly musical, and the fabliaux, or short comic tales, are full 
 of fun and cleverness. The bad side of French literature 
 however had thus early begun to show itself as well as the 
 good. In all the popular poems, and especially in the 
 fabliaux, women are spoken of with constant disrespect, and 
 the baser side of their character is brought prominently 
 forward. (^Except in the Arthurian stories, where Welsh and 
 English influence is strong, there is but little imagination 
 shown, little sense of the mysterious and the beautiful in 
 nature, Jittle reverence for things that are great and good. 
 These drawbacks are compensated to some extent by the 
 excellence of literary form and expression, which contrasts 
 very strongly with the rough and inelegant metres and 
 phrases of most other European languages at the time. (Most 
 striking of all perhaps is the inexhaustible invention of the 
 French trouveres. )They were never tired of devising new 
 stories or new versions of the old ones, and it is a literal 
 truth that for some centuries almost every country in Europe 
 contented itself in the way of fictitious literature with trans- 
 
14 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 lations and adaptations from the French. So popular were the 
 Carlovingian epics, that there are several manuscripts of them 
 written in what we may call a kind of pigeon-French, on the 
 same principle as the pigeon-English which the Chinese talk. 
 These manuscripts have French words with Italian termin- 
 ations, and were evidently written to please the people of 
 northern Italy. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 THE thirteenth century is considered, and rightly, to be 
 the most flourishing period of old French literature. We 
 cannot, of course, expect that such a period should exactly 
 coincide with chronological divisions of an arbitrary kind. 
 But if we borrow a few years from the end of the twelfth 
 century and a few years from the beginning of the fourteenth, 
 making perhaps a hundred and twenty in continuous stretch, 
 we shall find singular excellence in almost all kinds of 
 literature shown during this time. It may have been noticed 
 (that hitherto the greater part of French literature has been 
 anonymous, except in the case of the Arthurian romances. *) 
 We do not know who wrote the Chanson de Roland, or most 
 of the older chansons; the majority of the other poems 
 of the time are in the same way by unknown authors, and 
 even where we have a name it is for the most part a name 
 only, little or nothing being known of the person designated. 
 It is very different in the time to which we are now coming, 
 and the works of Thibaut of Champagne, Rutebceuf, 
 Villehardouin, Joinville, and others, are made all the more 
 interesting by the knowledge, more or less accurate, which 
 we possess of the lives these writers led and the circum- 
 stances under which they wrote. 
 
 The Chansons de Gestes still continued to be written at 
 this time, but they underwent a considerable change. The 
 
1 6 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 language in which they had been originally composed had 
 become partially unintelligible, and was thought rough and 
 inelegant, as were the manners and customs depicted. So 
 the poets of the day set to work to rewrite the old chansons 
 as well as to write fresh ones, which were rhymed and not 
 merely assonanced like the old epics. A good instance 
 of such writers is Adene's le Roi, a trouvere of French 
 Flanders, who lived about 1260. Adene's is a diminutive of 
 Adam, and the poet has been supposed to have been called Le 
 Roi from his position as 'King of the Minstrels' in the Count 
 of Flanders* household. Adene's took three old chansons, 
 called Berte aux Grands Pieds, La chevalerie Ogier, and 
 Le Siege de Barbastre, and rewrote them under the same 
 title in the first place, and under those of Les Enfances 
 Ogier and Beuves de Comarchis in the second and third. As 
 it happens, we have part of the originals of Ogier and 
 Beuves de Comarchis, and therefore we are able to compare 
 the two ways of treatment. (/The newer poems are much 
 smoother and more pleasantly written, the older have more 
 vigour and character.^ The Arthurian romances also con- 
 tinued to be very much read, and to be lengthened and 
 rewritten. But the special form of long poem which the 
 century preferred was what is called the Roman d* Avenfure_$. 
 In these poems, neither Charlemagne nor Arthur, nor any 
 hero of ancient history, forms the centre. They are almost 
 independent, though some attempt has been made to bring 
 them under two classes, one joining on to the Arthurian 
 story, another having to do with legends fetched from the 
 East during the Crusades. One of the earliest writers of 
 such poems was Raoul de Hojodenc, whose date is not 
 known, but who must have lived at the extreme end of 
 the twelfth century. Raoul wrote, it is thought, two long 
 poems of adventure entitled Me'raugis de Portlesguez and La 
 

 THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. IJ 
 
 Vengeance de Raguidel, both of which are courtly Round- 
 Table stories, and besides these some curious smaller poems 
 of an allegorical kind. Adenes le Roi, who has just rjeen 
 mentioned, wrote a very long and popular romance entitled 
 Cleomades. This brings in the wooden horse flying up- 
 wards or downwards by means of pegs, which every one 
 knows in the Arabian Nights. Partenopeoc de Blois (written, 
 it used to be said, by Denis Pyramus, but this is now denied) 
 is a beautiful story where the hero, like Psyche in the 
 Greek story, loses his love for a time through foolish 
 curiosity; while another, Amadas et Idoine, has for its 
 central incident something like the fight of Death and 
 Hercules at the tomb of Alcestis. All these poems of 
 adventure, which are very numerous, are composed in eight- 
 syllabled verse, generally very well written ; and as there is 
 less monotony in them than in the Chansons de Gestes it 
 is easy to understand why they became popular, though they 
 are much less interesting as showing us the manners of the 
 time and have no passages quite equal to the best of the 
 chansons.^ They are so numerous that it is impossible to men- 
 tion all or even most of them, and many are still unprinted. 
 
 The influence of Eastern literature was felt in a good 
 many ways about this time, especially in the shape of moral 
 stories. There was one famous book, which came from India 
 originally, it is thought, and being translated into Greek, 
 was called Syntipas. It contained a large number of stories, 
 supposed to be told by seven wise men to an Emperor of 
 Rome, to persuade him not to put his son (who had been 
 falsely accused of a crime) to death. This book got itself 
 paraphrased into French in two ways early in the thirteenth 
 century. The first form was in verse, and is called Dolopathos, 
 from the name of the hero. This was written by a monk 
 named Herbert, from a Latin translation made by another 
 
 c 
 
1 8 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 monk, John of Hauteseille. The second form was called 
 The Seven Wise Men of Rome, and was originally in prose. 
 It supplied a good many stories for a still more famous book, 
 the Gesta Romanorum\ but this, though there were versions 
 of it in French, is supposed to have been originally written 
 by an Englishman, probably in Latin. ('Prose stories become 
 common at this time. ) We have one very beautiful one called 
 Aucassin et Nicolette, which describes how the son of the Count 
 of Beaucaire fell in love with a beautiful Saracen girl, and 
 how, despite the opposition of his friends, they were at last 
 made happy. Another tells the story which Mr. Morris has 
 told in English verse, under the title of The man who was 
 born to be king,' and another that of Troilus and Cressida. 
 Most of these short stories show traces of Classical or 
 Eastern origin, or are prose versions of the old verse 
 romances. 
 
 The East also had an influence, by means not merely of 
 the Bible but of other sources, on the moral literature of the 
 time, which was considerable. At an uncertain date a book 
 was translated or adapted from the Arabic under the title of 
 Le Castoiement d'un Pere the advice of a father embodying 
 various moral precepts which are enforced by stories and 
 examples. The pattern of the Bestiaries was still further fol- 
 lowed up, and treatises on all kinds of arts and science began 
 to be written, for the most part in verse, but later also in prose. 
 
 The fancy for story-telling, and the fancy for moral 
 instruction and allegory, found one particular outlet in the 
 fable or beast-story. The fables of Esop early became 
 popular, and the title Ysopet was for a long time used for 
 collections of this kind. The best, and one of the first, of the 
 writers of such work was Marie de France. We know very 
 little about Marie except ThaT she lived for the most part 
 at the English court, and called herself ' de France ' to mark 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 19 
 
 er nationality. Her fables are very brightly and pleasantly 
 written, but her poetical reputation does not rest solely upon 
 them. The best work she did was her Lais, as they are called. 
 The Lai was a kind of narrative poem, not very long, and 
 "supposed to be of Breton origin, and to have been sung to 
 the accompaniment of a peculiar kind of music. In verse and 
 style, as Marie wrote it, it is not distinguishable from a short 
 romance. 'TiMost of the stories of her lays (Lanval, Les Deux 
 Amants, Le Chaitivel, &c.) are very affecting, while some of 
 them, such as Bisclaveret, deal with wild Breton fancies in 
 this case the notion of were-wolves which lend themselves 
 excellently to poetical treatment. There are other lays of the 
 same kind as Marie's, and later French poets adapted the 
 term for an altogether different and much inferior sort of 
 poem. 
 
 While Marie was thus writing poems which were half 
 narrative and half lyrical, lyric poetry proper was being 
 abundantly cultivated. Quite at the beginning of the cen- 
 tury there were two groups of clever singers who cultivated 
 the romance as we have already described it in the twelfth 
 century. Representative of one of these was Quesnes de 
 Bethune, a crusader and a famous warrior and diplomatist, who 
 wrote both love poetry and satire ; of the other, Colin Muset, 
 a poor trouvere who depended on his art for his bread. 
 These writers for the most part wrote what are called 
 chansons, which are much more like our notion of songs 
 than the Chansons de Gestes. They are written in short 
 stanzas, but without any very special arrangement of rhymes. 
 Besides the singers already named, there were an immense 
 number of others, known and unknown, some hundreds 
 being counted by M. Paulin Paris, who had perhaps read 
 more Old French literature than any man living or who 
 ever lived. The most famous of all the lyric poets of 
 
 c 2 
 
20 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 this century has however still to be mentioned. This is 
 Thibaut Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, the 
 earliest individual French poet who obtained by name 
 a considerable reputation even before the revival of the 
 study of Old French literature in the present century. 
 Thibaut de Champagne, as he is generally called, was not 
 a great poet, but he was a good one, and as it happened, 
 he is the central figure of a group of other noble poets, 
 who are certainly good if not great. Most of these are 
 little more than names to the modern reader, yet they 
 are of no little worth. Among them there is the Vidame 
 de Chartres, a great feudal personage who, like most others 
 of the time, went to the Crusades ; and Hue de la Ferte\ who 
 was a bitter enemy of Thibaut ; and John of Brienne, King 
 of Jerusalem, who, like Quesnes de Bethune, was famous 
 not merely in song but in war and council ; and the Chatelain 
 de Coucy; and many more, too many to mention. ^All 
 these great chiefs and nobles wrote verse, sometimes of 
 the love-poem kind, sometimes satirical and rather personal. 
 Thibaut was the best of them all. J He was not himself 
 a hero, like Quesnes de Bethune and King John of Brienne, 
 but he was a very important person in feudal France, 
 having great possessions both in the north and in the 
 south, between which parts of the country there was then 
 a strong and sharp division. He was not popular with his 
 contemporaries, perhaps because he assisted the mother of 
 St. Louis, Blanche of Castile, in maintaining the royal authority 
 in the sorely divided land. But his songs are very original, 
 very sweet, and very free from the monotony which is 
 the great drawback of mediaeval literature. He was born 
 in 1201, and died in 1253, so that his life almost exactly 
 covers the first half of the thirteenth century, and must 
 have been contemporary with that of Marie de France, 
 

 THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 whose precise date is however not known, though she 
 certainly lived at the court of our Henry III. Thibaut's 
 works are less extensive and less varied than Marie's, 
 consisting as they do of some sixty or seventy songs only. 
 But with her he has generally been ranked as representing 
 early French lyric poetry. A wider knowledge has since 
 discovered many other writers of equal if not superior 
 talents, but it has not interfered with the interest attaching 
 to the work of these two. 
 
 After Marie and Thibaut in the first part of the century, 
 there are two other poets in the second part who deserve 
 notice, one because he did what he did do extremely well, 
 and the other because he was the first, as far as we know, to 
 do some things of great importance. Rutebceuf (12 30 P-iapo ?) 
 as the first was named, or nick-named, is a very good example 
 of the later trouvere, who did not write long poems, was not 
 a nobleman, nor directly attached to any noble house, and 
 probably had on the whole a hard and unprosperous life. 
 His poems are of very different kinds, but most of them are 
 either satirical or religious. Rutebceuf wrote several fabliaux, 
 and he is supposed to have written one of the divisions 
 (though it is one of the worst) of the great Roman du Renart. 
 He wrote a miracle-play too, and a life in verse of St. 
 Elizabeth of Hungary, and another of St. Mary of Egypt. 
 But perhaps his most interesting poems to us are the per- 
 sonal ones, in which he either deals with his own affairs or 
 comments on the historical events of the time. The very 
 titles of the former tell their own tale. They are 'The Com- 
 plaint of Ruteboeuf,' ' Rutebceuf s marriage/ and so forth, 
 while the historical pieces are for the most part laments on 
 celebrated persons who had died. These latter were most 
 probably composed, as we should say, on commission for the 
 survivors, and often include very interesting details. Thus 
 
22 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 the indignant phrase in one of the historical poems, ' mort 
 sont Ogier et Charlemagne/ expresses excellently the decay 
 of the earlier chivalry, and so do the many invectives made 
 by the poet against the extinction of the crusading spirit in 
 France. 
 
 Adam de la Halle (exact date uncertain : latter half of the 
 century) is a less interesting person than Rutebceuf, and 
 seems to have been a much more unamiable one. He has 
 left a very spiteful contrast between the fondness he felt for 
 his wife before he married her and the desire he felt to get 
 away from her afterwards, and . he has also represented his 
 father in by no means a respectful or filial manner. But he 
 is a decidedly important figure in the history of French 
 literature, because, as far as we know, nobody before him 
 had done what he did. Mystery and miracle-plays had been 
 written for some time. Now it seems to have struck Adam 
 that there was no reason why no other use should be made 
 of the drama than this, and he accordingly wrote a play 
 called Li_Jus Adam, literally ' Adam's play/ in which he 
 himself, his father, and many other citizens of Arras, his native 
 town, are brought on the stage. This was, in short, the first 
 French comedy. Adam did something else remarkable of 
 the same kind. He took the common and popular pastour- 
 elle of RMn^et^Marion and made this into what we should 
 now call an operetta, making the various personages speak 
 and sing instead of merely telling their story himself as 
 others had done before. Our knowledge of the literature 
 of the time is not exact enough to enable us to say that 
 these two things, comedy and comic opera, which Adam de 
 la Halle had certainly produced some twenty years before 
 the end of the thirteenth century, were his own invention. 
 But nobody, as far as we know, had done a similar thing in 
 a modern language before, and nobody did it again for 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 1$ 
 
 many long years, though mysteries and miracle -plays, often 
 with comic interludes, became more and more common. 
 Thus Adam appears to be entitled to the credit a very rare 
 one in literary history of having, as far as his own language 
 was concerned, and with no direct aid from any other, 
 actually invented two important literary forms, one of them 
 destined to produce some of the very best works in French 
 literature, and both peculiarly consonant to the genius of 
 the nation. The fables which Marie wrote, and the fabliaux, 
 of which some notice was given in the last chapter, and 
 which were written more than ever in the thirteenth century, 
 joined together to produce one of the most remarkable 
 works of the middle ages, the Roman du Renart^ or story of 
 Reynard the Fox. This famous story, which has been 
 translated into all the languages of Northern Europe, cannot 
 be traced with certainty to any one original. Some people 
 will have it thafr*it was originally written in German, some 
 in Northern French, some in Latin, some (and they seem to 
 have most reason on their side) in French, but French of a 
 decidedly Flemish kind. However this may be, most of the 
 names of the beasts in the story are French, and the French 
 poems on the subject are much the most remarkable as well 
 as much the longest. Everybody knows the main outlines 
 of the story, or rather the collection of stories, which bears 
 the title. Reynard the Fox deceives and gets the better 
 of all the other beasts by turns, though sometimes he is 
 hard put to it, and his retreat or castle of Maupertuis is 
 threatened. In the long French poem which goes under 
 the title of Roman du Eenart (it should be ' de Renart/ for 
 this is a proper name), we have a great many different pieces 
 by different authors, fastened together and making up in 
 all a total of more than thirty thousand lines. Very few 
 of the authors of these are known, and, except that the 
 
24 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 personages of most of them are the same, they have little 
 connection the one with the other, each of them telling of 
 some separate trick of Reynard's. It has already been 
 noticed how fond the poets of the time were of taking up 
 and completing each others work, so as to avoid the trouble 
 of inventing an entirely new subject, and Renart is a striking 
 example. Some of the poems of this the ' Ancien Renart/ 
 as it is called, may belong to the twelfth century, and few 
 of them are later than the first half of the thirteenth. Some- 
 where about the middle of this time a longer poem that 
 is, longer than any of the divisions of the old story, though 
 not one tenth of the whole in length was written, called Le 
 Couronnement Renart. In the old story, the Fox, though 
 frequently disobedient to King Noble, the Lion, and often 
 making a fool of him, is still outwardly loyal and respectful. 
 Here his success and daring go so far that he is actually 
 crowned king. It used to be thought that this poem was by 
 Marie de France, but there is no reason for this belief, and it 
 is not at all like her writing. Then, towards the end of the 
 century, one Jacquemart Gie'lee, a Fleming, wrote a long 
 poem called Renart^le^Novel, in some eight thousand lines. 
 This is much less amusing than the old stories, and is full 
 of rather tedious allegory and personification, things that 
 were invading French literature almost everywhere at this 
 time. And last of all (to finish with Renart while we are 
 about him), an immense poem called Renart le Contrefait 
 was written in the fourteenth century, which seems to have 
 still more moralising and digression in it, and still less story. 
 Renart le Contrefait has never been printed, and it is there- 
 fore difficult to judge it properly. 
 
 Good as was the general spirit and character of the litera- 
 ture of this time, the two drawbacks which have been noticed 
 in these continuations of Renart made themselves pretty 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 35 
 
 obvious as the century went on. ( These drawbacks were, it 
 must be repeated, the tendency to allegory and to intro- 
 ducing abstract qualities as persons, and the tendency to 
 drag in all sorts of incongruous digressions and to make 
 occasions of showing what learned men the poets were.) 
 This was still more strikingly shown in the other great poem 
 of the century, the Roman de la Rose. This Roman de la 
 Rose has a very curious history, for it was written by two 
 different poets at a considerable distance of time. The 
 work of the first, Guillaume de Lorris, who lived before the 
 middle of the century, was an allegorical love -poem, full of 
 pretty descriptions of gardens and so forth. Guillaume tells 
 his readers how he fell asleep and dreamt that he came 
 under the walls of a fair garden whose walls were painted all 
 about with figures. These figures represent abstract virtues 
 or vices, or qualities of some kind or another, such as hypo- 
 crisy, pride, etc., and the personages thus represented, with 
 many others of the same kind, such as Bel-acueil, Dangter, 
 and the like, help or hinder the poet in his attempts to 
 gather the beautiful rosebud he has seen and fallen in love 
 with. When Guillaume de Lorris had written between four 
 and five thousand verses he seems to have been interrupted sud- 
 denly by death or some other cause. Forty years afterwards 
 another poet, called Jean Clopinel, or JeanjleJVIgsrig, took 
 up the poem and finished it in a very different spirit. In- 
 stead of a graceful allegory about love (or rather besides 
 this, for the main design of the poem was nominally kept up) 
 Jean made it a satirical discussion of politics, morals, and 
 many other things, while he brought in all sorts of classical 
 quotations and miscellaneous stories to suit the taste of the 
 time. In this way, before he had finished he made it nearly 
 five times as long as Guillaume de Lorris had left it, and as 
 unlike in character as two things can well be. But the 
 
26 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 poem became enormously popular, and remained so till the 
 end of the middle ages, and even much later. f Chaucer 
 translated a large part of it (though it is held by some that 
 the translation which now goes by his name is not that 
 which he wrote), and the imitations both in England and 
 France were numberless. Indeed for two hundred years at 
 least hardly anybody wrote a love-poem in either of the two 
 countries which was not in some degree an offspring of 
 the Roman de la Rose.) The writers never spoke straight- 
 forwardly and directly, out always in roundabout allegorical 
 phrase, often using the very allegory and personages of the 
 Rose. This was very bad, and makes such poetry very 
 tedious to read. But the Roman de la Rose itself is well 
 worth reading, and there is perhaps no other single work 
 which lets us see so clearly what the later middle ages 
 thought about science, politics, and many other things. 
 
 It would have been strange if, while poetry was thus 
 in many ways receiving development, prose had been 
 altogether behindhand. We have already mentioned some 
 prose works of the time, but the most important has yet 
 to be noticed. It was not till the end of the twelfth, 
 or perhaps the beginning of the thirteenth century, that the 
 most fertile of all branches of prose writing, history, 
 began to be cultivated in France in the vulgar tongue, and 
 even then writers for some time chiefly confined themselves 
 to translations. Collections of chronicles, written in Latin 
 and reduced to uniformity and continuity, had for some time 
 been growing common, and it was these, or parts of them, 
 that were first turned into French. For all this a writer of 
 genius showed himself almost as soon as the practice had 
 been begun. Geoffroy de Villehardouin was a noble of the 
 Province of Champagne, and bore a part in the Fourth 
 Crusade (1203). Of this Crusade (the great exploit of which 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 2 7 
 
 was not any victory over the infidels, but the capture of 
 Constantinople and the establishment for rather more than 
 half a century of a Latin Empire of the East) Villehardouin 
 has left us an account, called La^Conqufte de Constantinople, 
 which probably gives to the reader a better idea of chivalry 
 and feudalism at their best than any other single work. We 
 find in it all the ardour, the picturesque colour, the love 
 of fighting, and the apparently fervent piety, which distinguish 
 the Chansons de Gestes, while at the same time the author 
 does not for a moment attempt to conceal the self-seeking, 
 the mutual jealousies, and the insubordination which were 
 the great curses of the feudal system. Villehardouin was 
 succeeded by Henri de Valenciennes and Robert de Clari. 
 It is possible, though not certain, that the work of Henri 
 was originally in rhyme, and that it was according to a 
 curious fashion of the time which shows the growing 
 popularity of prose ' unrhymed,' as it was called ; that is, 
 turned into prose. This growing popularity is a very im- 
 portant thing in literary history, because it shows that the 
 habit of reading was getting common. As long as the 
 compositions of the trouveres were mainly recited, it was 
 better to write them in verse, which was more attractive to 
 the listeners, and easier for the reciter to remember. But 
 when they began to be read there was no reason for writing 
 them in any form more troublesome to the writer than 
 prose. Still it was not till the latter end of the thirteenth 
 century that what may be called the official history of 
 France, the Grandes^Chromques de St^JDenis^ began to be 
 written in the national language. By that time a second 
 original writer of great importance had' arisen. This was 
 Jean de Joinville, the companion and historian of St. Louis. 
 Joinville writes in quite a different style from Villehar- 
 douin ; he is still, as we should expect, a brave knight and 
 
28 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 experienced warrior, but he cares much less for what may 
 be termed the poetry of fighting. He is by no means 
 convinced that it is not better to stay at home and mind 
 business, than to go wandering about the world in search 
 of adventures. When he is on his travels too, he has 
 curiosity about the ways and manners of the countries he 
 visits, while nothing of the kind ever seems to occur to 
 Villehardouin. In accordance with these peculiarities the 
 later book is much less picturesque and poetical than the 
 earlier, but more easily written, fuller of interesting little 
 details, and altogether more modern. The interval of time 
 between the two works, and still more between the states 
 of feeling which they represent, is indeed considerable, for 
 Joinville was not born till at least ten years after Ville- 
 hardouin's death (which occurred, it is believed, about 1213), 
 and did not write till he was a very old man. During this 
 interval it was still fashionable to compose chronicles in 
 verse, and one such chronicle, that of Philippe Mouskes, 
 is of value. Its literary merit is small, but its author has 
 abstracted many of the old chansons (which he takes to be 
 historic documents), and these abstracts are often very useful 
 to throw light on the lost parts of the Carlovingian legend. 
 Works of this kind however, whether verse or prose, cannot 
 be compared for a moment with those of Villehardouin and 
 Joinville. which rise altogether out of the class of ordinary 
 literature, and deserve notice not merely in connection with 
 the French middle ages, but for their own intrinsic merit. 
 Still the composition of prose chronicles naturally encouraged 
 the use of the form. Besides chronicles, and besides the 
 miscellaneous didactic writings already noticed the most 
 important of which is the Tre'sor of Brunetto Latini (1266), 
 the master of Dante, an Italian, who, he tells us, wrote in 
 French expressly on account of its wide vogue and fitness 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 2$ 
 
 or the purpose two other kinds of literature gave im- 
 portant employment to the prose-writer. The sermons of 
 Maurice de Sully at the close of the twelfth century have 
 been noticed. The establishment of the great orders of 
 St. Dominic and St. Francis in the thirteenth gave a great 
 impulse to vernacular preaching, and sermons became from 
 this time a regular branch of French literature. The law 
 too came in for its share of attention. Already there had 
 been important collections of edicts and legal procedure, 
 such as those of William the Conqueror and the Coutumier 
 de Normandie. But in the thirteenth century Philippe de 
 Navarre (1240?) and Jean dTbelin (1266?) elaborated from 
 the old traditions and customs of the Frankish kingdom of 
 Jerusalem the Assists de le'rusalem> the most important 
 record in existence of purely feudal jurisprudence. Some- 
 what later Philippe de Beaumanoir (who has the repute 
 of a poet as well as of a lawyer, having written two long 
 romans d'aventure, La Manekine and Jehan de Dammar tin 
 et Blonde d 'Oxford, besides shorter poems) produced in the 
 Coutumes de Beauvoisis (1283) another extremely important 
 work, both from the point of view of legal history and of 
 French prose style. Henceforward it may be said that 
 French prose, if not yet quite fitted for all sorts of literary 
 work, had at any rate attempted almost all sorts, and in 
 some at least had achieved notable successes. 
 
 Hitherto we have been wholly occupied with the literature 
 of French proper, from a linguistic point of view ; that is to 
 say, with the literature of Northern France. During all the 
 earlier middle ages there was a very sharp division between 
 French and what we now generally call Proven9al, and 
 between the people who spoke the two languages. The 
 geographical boundary line was drawn, speaking roughly, 
 from Poitou to Franche Comte*, and the Provenal district 
 
30 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 included, besides all the country of modern France to the 
 south of that line, Savoy beyond the Alps and Catalonia 
 beyond the Pyrenees. For a time this district had been 
 much harassed by the Saracens of Spain, but after Charles 
 Mattel's great victory and the strong rule of Charlemagne, it 
 enjoyed for many centuries a much quieter government and 
 a more advanced social civilisation than Northern France. 
 The eastern part of it, under the powerful Counts of 
 Toulouse, the western under the Dukes of Aquitaine and 
 the Kings of England, were prosperous and flourishing, 
 while the northern provinces were torn first by the northern 
 invasions and then by the feudal dissensions of the great 
 vassals. The language too of this part of the country was 
 somewhat 'earlier suitable for literary performances. It 
 altered less from the Latin, and was on the whole more like 
 Spanish or Italian than French. (The vowel-terminations 
 which are characteristic of southern tongues remained in it, 
 and made rhyme and complicated poetical forms easy^ We 
 have mentioned a poem on Boethius which is of the tenth 
 century, and which shows far more literary capacity in the 
 language than the contemporary song of St. Eulalia in 
 Northern French. There was however a very remarkable 
 deficiency of inventiveness in those who spoke the Southern 
 dialect to balance their greater advantages in point of 
 language. It does not appear that the Chansons de Gestes 
 had any representatives in early times in Provenal, or if they 
 had any they were merely translated or imitated from the 
 French, in the dialect nearest to that language. Provence 
 lay far from Brittany, and it was long before the attractive 
 and stimulating legend of Arthur penetrated to the shores 
 of the Mediterranean. The Proven9als indeed seem to have 
 had little genius for story-telling, narrative or dramatic. One 
 of the earliest specimens of dramatic work that we have in 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 31 
 
 French, the mystery of the Ten^Virgins, is in a language 
 which is almost as much Proven9al as French, showing that 
 at the time and in the place of its composition the two 
 dialects had not fully separated, yet Proven9al has but little 
 if anything to show in the mystery way afterwards. Against 
 all these deficiencies, however, has to be set a remarkable 
 and almost unparalleled fertility in lyrical poetry. Provence, 
 in the wide sense we have indicated, was the country of the 
 troubadours, and for two centuries the troubadours set the 
 example to Europe in the point of lyric verse. They were 
 extraordinarily numerous, and they received extraordinary 
 encouragement in the somewhat artificial style of love-poetry 
 which they principally but not solely affected. The longer 
 works of Proven9al literature which have much merit are 
 very few. Girartz de Rossilho (Ge'rard de Roussillon), the 
 one Chanson de Geste which seems to have been originally 
 written in a Southern dialect ; the celebrated poem . on the 
 Albigensian Crusade, written at the time of the events by 
 two different poets of very unequal merit; the interesting 
 romance of Flamenca, possessing unusual attraction as a 
 study of character and manners; and that of Jaufre, a good 
 Roman d'Aventures, almost exhaust the list. On the other 
 hand, the number of the troubadours proper, that is to say 
 the lyric poets, is very large; the names of nearly five 
 hundred have come down to us, and their work is both 
 abundant and various. They began to write or sing at the 
 end of the eleventh century, and their palmy time was the 
 twelfth and the earlier part of the thirteenth. By the end 
 of this latter century literature in Provence, even more than in 
 Northern France, had passed into a condition of decadence. 
 These troubadours, like the northern trouveres, were of 
 all conditions, but knights and nobles, even great princes, 
 made up a very large proportion of their numbers. Assisted 
 
32 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 by the frequent vowel-sounds and melodious cadences of 
 the language they devised many artificial forms of verse, 
 the rules of which were extremely complicated and precise. 
 [ The subjects dealt with were, however, very few, being 
 "chiefly love, war, and, to a certain extent, personal satire ; 
 and the different classes of poem were designated by names" 
 sometimes referring to their form, sometimes to their matter. 
 Thus there were the alba, a morning greeting or farewell, as 
 the case might be; the serena, or serenade; the sirvente, 
 generally a satiric poem ; the plank, or complaint ; the tenson 
 (contention), in which two singers dispute with one another ; 
 the ensenhamen, or didactic poem. Of the species named, 
 from their form may be mentioned the canson, the chief 
 form for love-poems, and very elaborate in construction; 
 the balada, which, like the Northern ballade, had a refrain 
 but was less regular in form; the reiroenza, of somewhat 
 similar nature ; the descort, in which the metre and rhymes 
 of each stanza were different ; and finally the sestina, which 
 is perhaps the most complicated of all. So numerous are 
 the troubadours that it is hard even to select names here. 
 The most famous perhaps, partly for their poetry, partly 
 for stories more or less romantic connected with their lives, 
 are Beitranjde Born, the warlike accomplice of the disobedient 
 sons of our Henry II ; Guillem de Cabestanh, the hero of 
 a well-known story of barbarous revenge ; Jaufre Rudel, 
 celebrated for his love of the lady of Tripoli, at "whose feet, 
 having at last come to sight and speech of her, he died; 
 Peire^Vidal, an eccentric person (who on one occasion 
 dressed himself up as a wolf, and roamed about thus attired 
 in honour of his beloved, whose name was 'Loba' she- 
 wolf) but a very good poet; Sordello, whom Dante and 
 Mr. Browning have helped to make famous ; Folquet, who 
 lived to be something very different from a troubadour ; 
 
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 33 
 
 Guillem de Figueiras, author of a terrible poetical attack on 
 Rome" and her corruptions. But of many little or nothing 
 is known, and some of the most beautiful poems (especially 
 an alba beginning en un vergier sotz folha d'albespi, which 
 is typical of the whole literature) are anonymous. 
 
 From this sketch of the thirteenth-century literature of 
 France it will be obvious that, such as it was, it had reached 
 its zenith. Nothing better of the kind could be done than the 
 Chansons de Gestes, the Arthurian stories, and the Romans 
 d'A ventures, the Fabliaux, and the Roman du Renart and the 
 Roman de la Rose, the romances of Audefroy and Thibaut, 
 the satirical and personal poems of Rutebceuf and Adam 
 de la Halle. What these things wanted was precisely what 
 they could not have without a complete change in the 
 language and the thought, and the persons who wrote and 
 read or heard them. Consequently, in the remaining years 
 of the middle ages there were nearly a hundred and 
 fifty of them we hear nothing absolutely new in French 
 literature. !/ Some few things* of the old kinds are done 
 better than they were before ; additional attention to the 
 minutiae of form and language results in work of a more 
 elegant kind than is previously to be discovered, and a few 
 writers of great genius single themselves out from the 
 mass, as writers of great genius always will do. ) But until 
 the Renaissance no general period of literary excellence 
 occurs, and when the next period of general literary 
 excellence does occur, the conditions, the stock in trade, 
 and the objects of literary work are entirely changed. 
 The reasons for this comparatively sudden decadence are 
 partly political, depending on the decay of feudalism and 
 the English wars. With these we are not concerned. 
 fiut there were not a few causes of a purely literary kind 
 also at work. The immense popularity which the alle* 
 
34 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 gorical matter of the Roman de la Rose and the artificial 
 manner to be noticed in the next chapter of writing 
 lyric poetry attained, made it easy for writers to go on 
 simply producing new work of the old kind. Nor were 
 the language and the stock of general ideas and subjects 
 of thought as yet fitted for a new kind of writing. There 
 was, as has been pointed out, considerable knowledge of 
 the classics among a few scholars, but it was for the most 
 part limited to the Latin classics, and it was wholly confined 
 to a few learned men, and could not be well extended 
 until the invention of printing and the complete break-up 
 of the mediaeval polity in Church and State had altered 
 social conditions. A great many of the literary exercises 
 of the period on which we shall now enter may be fairly 
 enough compared to the exercises of chivalry, which like 
 them long continued to be popular. They had lost the 
 real practical importance and life which they had once 
 possessed. But they were suitable enough to the tastes of 
 the persons who pursued them; they were graceful and 
 interesting in themselves, and the time was not ready for 
 the substitution of anything else. Hence, though there is 
 much that is interesting in the literature of the fourteenth 
 and fifteenth centuries, it is with justice that the thirteenth 
 is regarded as the palmy time of mediaeval letters in France, 
 the time when the old language was in its chief vigour, 
 and was handled by the greatest number of writers of 
 individual genius and talent. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE DECLINE OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE. 
 
 As has been already pointed out at the conclusion of the 
 last chapter, there is, after the first few years of the fourteenth 
 century, a decided falling off in the quality of French litera- 
 ture, and in the number of good authors who contributed 
 to it. This was due to a great many causes, of which the rapid 
 decay of the feudal system was not the least. France fell 
 into a state of great disorganisation, and during what is called 
 the Hundred Years War people had something else to do 
 than to think and write. Still there is much that is interest- 
 ing to be found by those who look for it. The Chansons de 
 Gestes almost ceased to be written, though a few of them 
 were extended and magnified in the taste of the time, and 
 one very remarkable one was composed. This is entitled 
 Bauduin de Sebourc, and is in all probability, with its sequel 
 Le Bastart de Bullion, the very latest original poem of the 
 kind which was ever written. It is connected with the Geste 
 or series of the Crusades, and it tells the adventures of the 
 hero not merely in the Holy Land but in Europe, where he 
 has to fight with the enemies of his house. But it is not the 
 adventures of Bauduin de Sebourc, though they are very 
 interesting, that give it its peculiar value. It is the spirit in 
 which it was written. It is in parts rather a satire than an 
 epic, and it tells of a complete change in the general way of 
 
 D 2 
 
36 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 regarding life and its affairs. Towards the end of the four- 
 teenth century Chansons de Gestes in verse ceased to be 
 written altogether, and began to be translated into prose, in 
 which state they still continued to be popular with readers 
 for the old institution of recitations had nearly died out. 
 The same was the case with the Arthurian romances. But 
 the Romans d'Aventures, which had no peculiar or common 
 subject, continued to be produced in some numbers, and 
 short prose stories began to be popular, such as those of 
 which we have already heard in the last chapter. 
 
 A change likewise came over the nature of smaller and 
 lighter poems. There were many poets who wrote such 
 things, the chief of them being in the fourteenth century, 
 Jean de Lescurel (? before 1350), Guillaume de Machault 
 (1295?-! 380?), Eustache Deschamps (1328-1415), and Jean 
 Froissart (1333-1410); with Alain Chartier (1386-1458), 
 Christine de Pisan (1363-1420), Charles d'Orle'ans (1391- 
 1465), Fran9ois Villon (1431- ?), and Guillaume Coquil- 
 lart (?-i5io) in the fifteenth. The longer poems of these 
 men (with the exception of Villon) are chiefly allegorical 
 love-poems, something in the style of the Roman de la Rose, 
 not so long indeed, but far more tedious. ^Their shorter 
 poems are much more serious and interesting.^ They are 
 written in certain forms or arrangements, in' which the num- 
 ber of the lines and rhymes is the same for all the stanzas, 
 and does not differ in each as is usual. The sonnet, which 
 consists of fourteen lines with the rhymes arranged in a 
 regular order, is the only poem of this kind that has, till 
 lately, been much written in English. The sonnet is an 
 Italian invention, and the French poets of the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth century did not write it. But instead they wrote 
 ballades and rondeaux. (The ballade was a poem of three 
 stanzas. It might have Yrom six to ten lines each, but the 
 
DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. 37 
 
 last line was always the same, and so were the rhymes in 
 each stanza, while the poem was often finished off with 
 what was called V envoy, an address in four lines to some 
 person, real or imagined, and ending like the other stanzas 
 with the refrain. J Eustache Deschamps wrote more than 
 a thousand such ballads. The rondeau, which had some 
 subordinate kinds, known as the rondel, the triolet, &c., 
 was a much shorter poem, in which the first words of the 
 first line in the rondel and triolet the first line, or two lines, 
 were repeated at intervals. These repetitions give a very 
 musical sound when they are well managed, but sometimes 
 they are dragged in without much sense or aptness, and 
 then the poems are dull enough. Guillaume de Machault 
 wrote many other kinds of verse, and Ted^aTstirring life. 
 He was attached at one time to the old blind King of 
 Bohemia, who was killed at Cressy, at another to Pierre de 
 Lusignan, King of Cyprus, one of the last of the errant 
 kings whom the Crusades had established in the East. 
 When Machault was quite an old man he fell in love 
 with Agnes of Navarre (or perhaps with another lady,, for 
 it is not certain), and a curious poem called the Voir Dit 
 true tale tells the story. Eustache Deschamps, besides 
 his ballades and rondeaux and other short poems, wrote an 
 'Art of Poetry/ to teach other people how to write them, 
 a long poem called the Mirror of 'Marriage ', in the moral- 
 ising and allegorical taste of the time, and other works, which 
 amount in all to more than 80,000 verses. ( Froissart, who 
 is more famous as a historian, wrote poems of the same 
 sort, which fill three thick volumes. Besides these there 
 were many anonymous poets. An interesting book called 
 Le Livre des Cent Ballades was the joint composition, it is 
 thought, of several gentlemen who were making a voyage to 
 the East, with Bouciqualt, the Marshal of France, who was 
 
38 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 afterwards captured at Agincourt, at their head. Christine 
 de Pisan and Alain Chartier were still more inclined to 
 moralising in their verse. But in Charles d'Orteans we 
 come to the best writer by far of this kind of poetry. 
 Charles was the son of that Duke of Orleans who was 
 murdered in the streets of Paris by the Burgundians, 
 and his youth was spent amid the quarrels which then 
 distracted France. He too was taken at Agincourt, where 
 he held high command in the French army, and he was 
 kept prisoner in England for many years. When he went 
 back to France he was wiser and lazier, and took but little 
 part in public aifairs, but gathered a great body of minstrels 
 and men of letters at his castle of Blois, and spent the time, 
 like King Rene* of Anjou later, in rhyming and singing. 
 His verses tell us how he had vowed himself to the service 
 of the Dieu Nonchaloir, the god of indifference, and in fact 
 when he tries to be earnest his poetry is not worth much. 
 But his little rondels about the seasons, about his love 
 affairs (mostly fancy ones), and so forth, are among the 
 best poetry of the kind that has ever been written. A very 
 different poet was Villon, who lived a vagabond and dis- 
 reputable life, and has left strange poems called Testaments, 
 in which, under guise of bequeathing his different posses- 
 sions, he tells us all his life, and satirises his friends and 
 enemies alike. These poems are studded here and there 
 with ballades and rondeaux, so full of sad and beautiful 
 poetry, that even those who care for no other mediaeval 
 work admit their charm. One of Villon's ballades is on 
 6 The Ladies of Past Time/ It is little more than a list of 
 names, with the burden Mai's ou sont les neiges d'antan 
 (where are the snows of last year?), but the note of regret 
 and passion is true and sweet, as only the best poetry is or 
 can be. Coquillart was not so good a poet, but a very good 
 
DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. 39 
 
 satirist, and somewhere about this time there lived in 
 Normandy a miller, Olivier Basselin by name, whose pa- 
 triotic and convivial songs got a great vogue. It is not 
 certain that we have any of them, though it is possible. 
 Later in the century there were no good poets, but people 
 went on writing stiff ballades and rondeaux, making 
 the rules more and more difficult, as if by so doing they 
 could make the poetry better. Unluckily there is no such 
 easy way of securing good poets. 
 
 i As the poetry however, with some brilliant exceptions, con- 
 tinued to get worse and worse, so the prose continued to get 
 better and better, j We have seen that, by the end of the thir- 
 teenth century, men had quite got over the idea that French 
 prose was not suitable for the treatment of serious subjects. 
 They still, however, were rather inclined to write in verse 
 when they wanted to secure an audience, no matter what the 
 subject might be. In the time we are now handling, this 
 custom began to grow out of fashion. It became quite usual 
 to write history in French, and to the fourteenth century be- 
 longs Froissart, who has probably been more read than any 
 other French author before the invention of printing. Frois- 
 sart was a Hainaulter by birth, and was much patronised by 
 Queen Philippa of England. He spent nearly his whole life 
 in journeying about from court to court, and picking up news 
 about the battles and other events of the time. His poems, 
 of which we have already spoken, were mostly the work of 
 his youth ; his history, of his middle life and old age. At 
 first he began by closely copying the Chroniques of Jean 
 LefeeJ, Canon of Li&ge, but this part of his work he 
 altered a good deal in what we should now call later editions. 
 At first he was very much on the English side, but in this 
 too he changed latterly to some extent. In fact we do not 
 go to Froissart for opinions, or even for a very trustworthy 
 
40 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 statement of historical facts, but for brilliant descriptions of 
 striking events. In this last respect hardly any historian 
 has ever surpassed him, and his book is as delightful as any 
 romance. It became very popular, and decided no doubt a 
 great many other people to write French histories, though 
 in this same century we have a last survival of the old 
 practice, in the shape of a long poem written like a Chanson 
 de Geste, on the great Breton hero Duguesclin and his 
 achievements. Froissart was continued by Monstrelet, a 
 rather dull writer, and by many others whose names are 
 hardly worth mentioning. In the memoirs of Marshal 
 Bouciqualt, we have a book much more in Froissart's own 
 style. Soon too people began to attend to things to 
 which Froissart had paid little attention, because they con- 
 cerned not kings and queens, and knights and ladies, but 
 citizens and poor people. Juvenal des Ursins (1388-1473), 
 who wrote a long history of the disastrous reign of Charles VI, 
 puts down all sorts of minute facts, which are not perhaps 
 of much importance individually, but which help better than 
 anything else to give us an idea of the actual state of the 
 country, and of its daily life. Of the same sort are some 
 very interesting journals of anonymous ' Citizens of Paris/ 
 which give us an account, from the Burgundian side, of the 
 terrible struggles between that party and the Armagnacs, 
 and the history of Jean de Troyes, called the Chronique 
 scandaleuse, which deals with the reign of Louis the Eleventh. 
 Last of all, and finishing our period, is another famous book, 
 as remarkable as Froissart's, though in a different way, the 
 memoirs of Philippe de Comines (1445-1509). Comines 
 was a statesman, who first served Charles the Bold of 
 Burgundy, then Louis the Eleventh, and lastly Charles the 
 Eighth. He is just the opposite of Froissart. He does not 
 describe battles well, nor indeed is he good at description 
 

 DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. 41 
 
 of any kind. But he pays a great deal of attention to 
 the causes of things and to their political aspects, so that 
 his book has been called the first philosophical history of 
 modern Europe. 
 
 It has been said that at this time prose fiction began to be 
 written more commonly. At first it took the form either of 
 short tales or of prose adaptations of the verse romances. 
 But soon writers grew bolder. There is a delightful little' 
 story called Jean de Paris, the date of which is uncertain, 
 which no Englishman can help enjoying, though the butt 
 of the story is an English king. The hero is the king of 
 France, who disguises himself under the title of l John of 
 Paris/ But the most famous prose writer of fiction during 
 the latter part of our time was Antqine de laJSalle (1398- 
 1461). It is thought that he was the author of three prose 
 works, each of which is a masterpiece. The first is a 
 romance called Petit Jean de Saintre. This tells how a 
 young knight of that name was chosen by a beautiful lady 
 as her lover and servant, how he gained great renown for 
 bravery and courtesy, how he went away to fight the infidels, 
 and in his absence she preferred to him a rich abbot, so that 
 when he came back he exposed her faithlessness before the 
 court. The lady is called by the curious title of * La Dame 
 des Belles Cousines/ This book is a very pleasant sketch of 
 the better side of chivalry, as it was in fancy rather than in fact, 
 for the reality had departed before La Salle's time. Another 
 work believed to be his is even more famous. This is the 
 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, clever prose versions of the old 
 fabliau stories supposed to have been told before the Dauphin, 
 afterwards Louis the Eleventh, when he was living at Ge- 
 nappe under the protection of Philip of Burgundy. The 
 last of the three is called Les Quinze Joyes du Mariage, and 
 is a bitter satire upon women. These three books together 
 
42 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 give an almost complete view of the good and bad side of 
 society in the later middle ages, and they are extremely well 
 written. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles especially is one of 
 the earliest works of polished French prose. 
 
 Besides history and prose fiction a great deal of other 
 prose work was done. The Castoiements, or moral treatises 
 in verse, of which we have spoken, gave way to prose books 
 of the same kind. One of the earliest and best of these is 
 the book which the Chevalier de la Tour Landry wrote for 
 the instruction of his daughters. It consists of a number 
 of short chapters, often with stories in them illustrative of 
 right and wrong conduct. The evils of the Hundred Years 
 War also caused a good deal of serious prose work to be 
 written. Christine de Pisan wrote a life of Charles V, which 
 was nominally a biography, but in reality. rather a treatise of 
 advice to his successors. Alain Chartier, too, wrote several 
 moral and political treatises. These authors, and others, 
 such as Raoul de Presles and Nicholas Oresme, also under- 
 took the very important work of translating the classics into 
 French. This enriched the language with a great many 
 new words, which were however not always very well chosen, 
 and give the books in which they occur something of a 
 pedantic look. 
 
 About this time sermons began to play a very important 
 part in literature and in history. During the thirteenth 
 century, it will be remembered, it became common to write 
 sermons in French, and as the political struggles of the 
 different princes and parties in France grew hotter, it 
 became more and more important for each in turn to secure 
 so important an engine of persuasion as the pulpit. Even 
 such acts as the murder of the Duke of Orleans found 
 defenders among the clergy. About the middle of the 
 fifteenth century several preachers of great note arose, of 
 
DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. 43 
 
 whom the chief were Raulin (1443-1514), Menot (1450- 
 1518), and Maillard (1440-1502). These men did not 
 observe what we should now call decency in the pulpit ; they 
 told comic stones, and used vulgar and even blasphemous 
 language, besides addressing their audiences much more 
 personally than would now be endured. But they were 
 on the whole well-meaning and fearless in the denunciation 
 of abuses, and those of their sermons which survive throw 
 great light on the social conditions of the day. The 
 greatest name of our present period in respect of preach- 
 ing and of theological literature, is however an earlier 
 one, that of Jean Gerson (1363-1429), Chancellor of the 
 University of Paris, to whom (on insufficient evidence) the 
 authorship of the Imitation of Christ has sometimes been 
 assigned. Gerson was a good preacher, and his sermons 
 Doth in Latin and French exist in considerable numbers. 
 The latter are well-written and arranged, though they suffer 
 occasionally from the drawback almost universal at this time 
 of excessive and wearisome allegory. 
 
 While prose was thus advancing to perfection, and while 
 poetry proper was showing evidences of gradual decline, a 
 form of literary work which for the most part stands between 
 prose and poetry, the drama, was flourishing in various 
 peculiar and characteristic ways. It had begun in France, 
 as we have seen, with dramas or mysteries of a liturgical 
 kind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while in the 
 latter, Adam de la Halle had laid the foundation of purely 
 secular dramatic work. During the troubles of the four- 
 teenth century it does not appear that Adam's example was 
 followed. But a new kind of sacred dramatic work, the 
 miracle-play,, seems to have acquired popularity. The 
 ~mScTe : play is distinguished from the mystery because it 
 connects itself less closely with the Scriptures and the 
 
44 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 services of the Church, and embodies, for the most part, 
 various apocryphal legends about the saints and the Virgin. 
 The most remarkable monument of this kind of literature 
 is a manuscript in the Paris National Library, which contains 
 forty miracles of the Virgin Mary. /These plays average 
 about fifteen hundred lines in length, and tell of all sorts 
 of incidents in which the Virgin helped her devotees. ; They 
 seem, as far as can be made out from the manuscript, to 
 have been performed by a kind of club or society which met 
 together for the purpose, and which bore the title of Puy 
 Notre Dame. These Puys were not infrequent institutions 
 of the middle ages in France, and in the days before acting 
 became a profession they generally undertook the per- 
 formance of dramas. By degrees other societies were 
 formed, and undertook the representation of a very large 
 number of different kinds of dramatic work. The fifteenth 
 century is exceedingly rich in such societies and in their 
 productions. In the first place the old mystery-plays, 
 which had generally been busied with some short portion 
 of the Scriptures or the Church Service, were connected 
 together, rewritten in the taste of the time, and made into 
 huge dramas, the acting of which sometimes took up as 
 much as four or five weeks. The best-written and most 
 famous of these is the mystery of the Passion (before 1452), 
 by Arnould Gre'ban, which is 35,000 lines in length. Simon 
 Gre'ban, brother of the author, wrote Actes des Apotres to 
 complete it, and the two were connected and lengthened 
 still further by a certain Michel. Then there is a great 
 Mistere du Viel Testament which is about 50,000 lines 
 long, and of which the author is unknown. So popular 
 did these vast compositions become, that ' profane ' mysteries 
 as they were called were written on the same plan. The old 
 romance of Troy was turned into a mystery, and the siege 
 
DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. 45 
 
 of Orleans, in which Joan of Arc figured, was treated in the 
 same way very soon after its date. To act the sacred 
 mysteries a ' Confraternity of the Passion ' was founded at 
 Paris in 1402, and no doubt similar bodies existed in 
 provincial towns. 
 
 It was not likely that when acting and playgoing were 
 both so fashionable, sacred subjects or heavy historical 
 pieces should monopolise the stage, and very soon other 
 companies were formed to play lighter pieces. These pieces 
 were called moralities, soties, farces, sermons joyeux, and 
 monologues. And the companies which played them were 
 the ' Clercs de la Basoche ' (the law-clerks and law-students 
 of Paris), the * Enfants sans souci ' (a body of young men of 
 respectable birth who amused themselves in this way), and 
 several other societies with quaint titles. The morality was 
 only by comparison lighter than the mysteries. It was 
 doubtless a result of the passion for allegorical poetry which 
 has been noticed, and it brought on the stage all sorts of 
 personified virtues and vices, and even stranger figures than 
 these. Sometimes the moralities were nearly as long as the 
 great mysteries, but as a rule they are much more moderate 
 in dimensions. A good example is the ' Condemnation of 
 Banquet/ Banquet being a personified instance of gluttony 
 and extravagance. The play opens with a wise speech by a 
 kind of chorus, then ' Banquet ' with ' Dinner/ ' Supper/ 
 'Gluttony/ etc., is introduced, together with a great many 
 diseases, who threaten him with the consequences of his 
 excess. Nevertheless there is a joyous feast, and Banquet 
 mocks the diseases, while the chorus (Doctor Prolocutor he 
 is called) draws the moral. Then the catastrophe approaches, 
 the diseases attack the guests and kill them all, while 
 Banquet is finally put to death for tempting them. As the 
 morality was a moral play, and the mystery and miracle 
 
46 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 religious ones, so the sotie was chiefly political, and under 
 the figure of some stock .characters, ' Le Prince des Sots/ 
 * Mere Sotte/ etc., occasion was taken to satirise abuses or 
 obnoxious things and persons in church and state. This, in 
 the condition of things at the time, could only be done under 
 powerful protection, and so the sotie was the least frequent 
 of all the kinds. The farce, on the contrary, was the most 
 frequent of all. It was for the most part a putting into 
 dramatised dialogue of the old merry adventures recounted 
 in the fabliaux, and was evidently immensely popular. About 
 a hundred and fifty farces have been preserved, most of 
 which are of the end of the fifteenth or the very early 
 sixteenth century. Sometimes the farce had only one actor, 
 and in this case it was called a sermon joyeux or monologue, 
 though the actor, as in modern times, sometimes managed 
 to represent more than one person by changing his dress 
 and disguising his voice. An excellent example of the 
 monologue is that called Le Franc Archer de Bagnolet 
 (sometimes ascribed to Villon), in which the hero, a boastful 
 but cowardly soldier, takes a scarecrow by the roadside for 
 an adversary, and manifests abject poltroonery. The sermons 
 joyeux, as their name implies, were most frequently parodies 
 of the curious discourses usual in the pulpit at the time, but 
 applied to secular subjects. But both of these styles were 
 far inferior in importance to the farce jgrorjej:, which may 
 have any number of personages, and is in every respect a 
 complete comedy on a small scale. The most famous of all 
 these performances (sometimes nowadays ascribed to Antoine 
 de la Salle) is that of Pathelin^ which is known to every 
 student of French from the adaptation of it made by Brueys 
 and Palaprat, in the seventeenth century. All the best of 
 the fun is in the original version. Another extremely clever 
 farce is that called Le Cuvier, where a henpecked husband 
 
DECLINE OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE. 47 
 
 is made to sign a long list of duties, which he engages 
 himself to perform without murmuring, for his wife. Soon 
 afterwards the wife overbalances herself and falls into a large 
 washing-tub. In vain she implores her husband to pull her 
 out. Ceci nest pas dans mon rollet ' It is not in the bond ' 
 is all she can get out of him. .There is one very curious 
 thing about these farces, which is noticeable also in some of 
 the other dramatic forms, and which shows how strong a 
 hold the artificial forms of verse described at the beginning 
 of the chapter had obtained on the popular taste, j The 
 characters frequently speak in triolets or short roHUeaux, 
 repeating the lines so as to complete the form between them. 
 (It has been thought that ihese farces were acted, like the 
 X Greek satiric plays, after more serious dramas, and in some 
 cases it is known that this was the fact, but it cannot be said 
 with certainty that it was a general rule. ^\ They are however 
 for the most part so short that, except ai fairs and suchlike 
 entertainments, it is difficult to imagine that they can have 
 formed the whole of the performance. No division of old 
 French literature, with the possible exception of the fabliaux, 
 shows more clearly the bent of the national genius and the 
 inexhaustible store of wit of a certain practical kind which 
 the lower classes possessed. For these entertainments are 
 evidently intended for the most part rather as amusements 
 for these classes than for their superiors. They continued 
 to be fashionable for a very long time, and even Moliere's 
 earliest works were in very nearly the same style as the old 
 farces of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, most of which 
 have only recently been made available for study. The best 
 collection of them was found by accident in Germany some 
 forty years ago, and is now in the British Museum. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE. 
 
 ALTHOUGH the literature of the fifteenth century in France 
 is not in itself of the greatest importance, and though it was 
 marked by many signs of decadence, yet, side by side with 
 these, there may be noted in it other signs pointing to a 
 new growth of letters. The great movement which is called 
 the Renaissance, and which resulted mainly, though not 
 wholly, from the recurrence to Greek and Roman literature 
 and art as models, was working in Italy throughout the 
 century, and the close connection between French and 
 Italians resulting from the wars of Charles VIII and Louis 
 XII was certain to spread its influence northwards. In- 
 dependently of this, the studies of native Frenchmen pointed 
 in the same direction. Moreover, in the fifteenth-century 
 literature of France are to be found other promising signs. 
 In the works of Antoine de la Salle satire assumed a wider 
 range and a more polished tone than in those of the fabliau 
 writers. The passion for dramatic compositions, which 
 enabled spectators to sit out mysteries that took weeks in 
 the performance, was the certain forerunner of a great de- 
 velopment of this class of literature. The gradual disuse 
 of the allegorical fashion of love-poetry promised something 
 more personal and genuine in this direction as in others, 
 the discovery of new countries promoted a general spirit 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 49 
 
 of adventure and enquiry in intellectual as well as com- 
 mercial matters, the invention of printing gave an otherwise 
 impossible opportunity to this spirit; and lastly, the great 
 religious revolution of which Erasmus was the forerunner 
 and Luther the author, gave the amplest exercise to men's 
 powers of speaking and writing. From the very first the 
 Reformers fought the battle of the vernacular against the 
 learned tongues both as a matter of religious belief and of 
 worldly prudence, for it was by the use of the vernacular 
 that they gained adherents. In France especially the lite- 
 rary influence of the Reformation was immense, and it would 
 hardly be too much to say that the Psalms of Marot and the 
 Institution of Calvin set for the first time the example of 
 works destined to exercise a wide popular influence in 
 French verse and in French prose. 
 
 Cle'ment Marot (1497- 1544), who has just been mentioned, 
 is the" first writer who deserves to be noticed in this division 
 of our subject. The son of a father of Norman extraction 
 (himself a poet), he was born in the south of France, at 
 Cahors, and the union of northern blood and southern birth 
 should not be overlooked in estimating his character and 
 that of his work. His earlier poems were of the rhetoriqueur 
 fashion 1 , and the chief thing noticeable about them is the 
 pretty title L Adolescence Cle'menline (a reminiscence perhaps of 
 the Chansons Georgines of Georges Chastellain), under which 
 they were afterwards collected. Marot's father had been a 
 follower of the court, and he himself soon became a favourite 
 at that of Francis I, where he was one of the chief literary 
 lovers of Marguerite d'Angouleme, queen of Navarre, the 
 king's sister, and a great patroness of literature as well as of: 
 
 1 LS Rhttoriquenrs is a term often applied to the pedantic and 
 artificial writers of the I5th century, of whom Georges Cliastellain\ 
 and Guillaume Cretin were the chief. 
 
50 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 the new religious doctrines. Before long, however, the favour 
 with which these doctrines had from political reasons been 
 regarded at the French court, was (also for political reasons) 
 changed into persecution. The influence of Marguerite was 
 not in all cases able to save her favourites from their fate, and 
 Marot had to fly to Geneva and Italy. His poetical works 
 are of a very miscellaneous character, embracing almost all 
 the poetic forms which had been popular in the middle 
 ages, sometimes with a slight change, as of the dit into the 
 llason, and of the fatrasie, or nonsense-verse, into the coq- 
 a-l'dne. But it was not in the selection of the form, so much 
 as in the management of it, that Marot's peculiar talent lay. 
 
 C Discarding the pedantic language and phrase of the rhe'- 
 toriqueurs, and with it for the most part the apparatus of 
 allegorical personages which had been part of a poet's equip- 
 ment for two centuries, he affected a singularly plain and 
 straightforward, but at the same time singularly graceful and 
 elegant fashion of diction) The simplicity and directness 
 which have ever since been characteristic of all but a few of 
 the best French authors, date to a great extent from Marot. 
 
 /'His translated psalms were extremely popular, and were said 
 TO have done not a little to spread the reformed doctrines in 
 France, though this is probably a mistake/) Around Marot 
 grew up a very numerous school of poets, some of whom 
 opposed him, while others regarded him as a master, though 
 almost all copied as well as they could his manner of writing. 
 The chief of these secondary poets was Mellin or Merlin de 
 Saint Gelais (1486-1558) who, like Marot, came of a 
 poetical family. Saint Gelais has the credit of being the first 
 to introduce into French the regular Italian sonnet, the most 
 famous and fortunate of all artificial forms of verse. 
 
 Marot however, though in many ways a representative of 
 the newer time, did not represent it fully, and in particular 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 51 
 
 did not express the reverence for classical antiquity which 
 was the strongest of all its intellectual peculiarities, stronger 
 even than the striving for religious and philosophical liberty. 
 Indeed the peculiar bent of his taste, and his reaction against 
 the pedantries of the rh&oriqueurs, inclined him rather in 
 the opposite direction. Before the century was half past 
 a second school of poetry was therefore set on foot, by an 
 association of friends who were all ardent admirers of the 
 classics, and who endeavoured, as nearly as might be, to shape 
 French poetry and the French language on classical models. 
 The chief of these were the celebrated Pl&ade, a group of 
 seven writers, whose names were Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baif, 
 Jodelle, Daurat, Belleau, and Pontus de Tyard. Of these, 
 Daurat was one of the oldest, and the instructor of the others 
 in classical lore. Jodelle (1532-1573) was before all things a 
 dramatic writer, and has the glory of writing CUopdtre, the 
 first regular French tragedy on the antique plan, and the first 
 regular French comedy, Eugene. The models were Seneca 
 and Terence rather than Sophocles and Aristophanes, but 
 the style was suited to the taste of the people before whom 
 it was set, and French tragedy followed no other for nearly 
 three hundred years. The other five members of the Ple'iade 
 were chiefly poets, though Joachim du Bellay (1525-1560) 
 was an eloquent and forcible writer of prose. Some of his 
 smaller poems, such as those 'Ruins of Rome' which 
 Spenser translated, the charming Vanneur or song of the 
 winnower, and the Sonnets to Olive, are very beautiful. But 
 the representative poet of the school is Pierre de Ronsard 
 (1524-1585), who was its acknowledged head, and was for 
 a very long time hailed as the * prince of poets' both by 
 Frenchmen and foreigners. The best works of Ronsard 
 are his sonnets and his odes, in the latter of which his 
 endeavour was to imitate Horace. All these poets, indeed, 
 
 E 2 
 
52 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 sought to classicise themselves as much as was possible. 
 They brought into French Latin words by the hundred, and 
 endeavoured even to naturalise the compound phrases of the 
 Greek, though the genius of the French is wholly repugnant 
 thereto. Yet the Pl&ade as a whole is singularly free from the 
 heaviness and dryness which have generally attended imita- 
 tions of the classics in modern tongues. The truth was 
 that, though its members professed to despise the middle 
 ages, and even such modernised representatives of those ages 
 as the followers of Marot, they were still themselves ani- 
 mated by a large portion of the mediaeval and romantic 
 spirit. The union of this with the classical attention to 
 elegance and form, produced the various schools of art and 
 literature to which the term Renaissance has been attached, 
 and among which French sixteenth-century literature, and in 
 particular the poetry of the Pl&ade, hold an honourable 
 place. Around the seven chiefs were grouped many minor 
 writers, some of whom were superior to the stars of the 
 Pleiade itself, with the exception of Ronsard and Du Bellay. 
 Such were Jacques Tahureau (1527-1555), a charming- 
 writer of poetic trifles, who died very young ; such Olivier 
 de Magny (d. 1560), a more prolific but also short-lived 
 bard; such Louise Labe* (b. 1526), a poetess of Lyons. 
 
 But the two most famous of the followers of the PMiade, 
 though in some sort rebellious followers, were Du Bartas 
 and D'Aubigne*. (Both of these were eager Protestants, 
 whereas the members of the Pldiade were either free-thinkers 
 or attached more or less loosely to the established religion. 
 Guillaume du Bartas (1544-1590) attempted works on a 
 much greater scale than his predecessors, and was much more 
 successful for the Franciade, Ronsard's only long work, is 
 anything *but a success. The Divine Sepmaine^ or Week of 
 Creation, of Du Bartas, is an elaborate poem, containing much 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 53 
 
 apocryphal natural history after the taste of the time, and 
 written in phraseology of the stifFest Pl&ade pattern ; full of 
 Latinisms, double epithets, and so forth, but at the same 
 time abounding in passages of great eloquence and sustained 
 dignity of language. The same may be said of his less- 
 known works. Du Bartas, partly perhaps from partisan 
 motives, was at one time exalted above Ronsard by popular 
 taste, and he continued for a considerable time to be widely 
 read in France, and by means of Sylvester's translation in 
 England. Agrippa d'Aubigne* (1550-1630) was a writer of 
 a different character. /An ardent politician and Calvinist, 
 'his temper was haughty and rough, and led him to write 
 satire rather than milder kinds of poetry.^ Les Tragiques 
 are among the first satires really deserving the name in 
 French. They exhibit the true spirit of Juvenal, and are 
 written in Alexandrine verse of admirable quality, /i his 
 metre, which had during the later middle ages shared the 
 position of honour in poetry with the decasyllabic, was now 
 definitely accepted as the only medium for serious verse of 
 the highest kind, both narrative and dramatic.") Jodelle's 
 first play, the Cle'opdtre, is partly written in Alexandrines, 
 partly in decasyllabics, but his second, Didon, is entirely in 
 the former; and from that time forward the practice never 
 varied. In the same way Ronsard's Franciade was the last 
 serious poem of importance written in the decasyllabic. La 
 Divine Sepmaine and Les Tragiques established the use of the 
 Alexandrine. 
 
 There was even more for the sixteenth century to do in 
 respect of French prose than of French verse, and even 
 more was actually done. Some of the greatest names in 
 prose writing date from this period, and their work is, in 
 many respects, still a model of style, though they them- 
 selves had hardly any predecessors by whom to guide their 
 
54 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 attempts. Up to the beginning of the century, the only works 
 of importance that had been written in prose were chronicles, 
 and latterly, lengthy prose versions of the old verse 
 romances. A few sermons, a few legal works, a few short 
 prose tales, and still fewer treatises on serious subjects, 
 summed up the contents of French prose literature. Before 
 the close of the period, however, there was not a single 
 branch of literature practised in the present day, if we except 
 the comparatively recent growth of journalism, which had not 
 been attempted by writers of the first talent. The two 
 earliest prose works of importance were singularly different 
 in character, for they were the Gargantua and Pantagruel of 
 Franois Rabelais (1495?- 155 3), and the Institution Chretienne 
 of Jean Calvin (1509-1564). Rabelais was a monk who 
 had left the cloister, who had given himself to the study of 
 medicine, and who was deeply imbued in all the learning, 
 literary and scientific, of the time. The tendency to a 
 peculiar variety of free-thinking, which has always been 
 strongly developed in the French character, and which 
 shows itself in a kind of sceptical ridicule of established 
 beliefs and institutions rather than in an earnest and 
 practical desire for reform, was eminently present in Rabelais. \ 
 His great work, so far as it has any form at all, has that of a 
 prose Roman d'A ventures, and probably borrowed some at 
 least of its personages from popular works already in 
 existence. The story however, such as it is, is merely a 
 vehicle for satirical comment of the most varied kind on all 
 sorts of things, touching sometimes human nature in general, 
 sometimes the particular circumstances of the day and the 
 personalities of contemporaries. The licence of language 
 current at the time was very great, and Rabelais availed 
 himself of it to the fullest extent, partly because it suited his 
 humour, partly because it was dangerous to appear to take 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 55 
 
 things too earnestly. Nor is it true that his book is a satire 
 with a definite purpose, such for instance as Swift's Gulliver. 
 I It is rather the outcome of an extraordinarily active and 
 powerful brain, well stored with learning, assisted by an in- 
 exhaustible fancy, and not devoid of a certain moral sense. / 
 There is, for instance, no doubt that Rabelais had an original 
 and remarkable theory of education, and that he was vio- 
 lently opposed to the abuses of the Church of Rome. But 
 he was neither a Protestant nor an infidel, though attempts 
 have been made to claim him for both parties. A very 
 different book is the Institution ; of Calvin, which contains, so 
 to speak, the constitution and code of all those religious 
 bodies which at the Reformation definitely broke with 
 Catholic tradition and declined to recognise the continuity 
 of the Christian Church. Originally written in Latirvit was 
 almost at once translated by its author, who saw the neces- 
 sity of appealing to the people and not merely to the learned, 
 and who indeed is responsible for the strong democratic 
 feeling which accompanied the religious revolt in many 
 cases. The style is entirely unlike anything that had before 
 been known in French, being grave, sustained, and at the 
 same time polished, and equally remote from the simple and 
 inartistic phrase of the earlier chroniclers and from the 
 heavy sentences, charged with foreign terms and construc- 
 tions, which the first imitators of the classics had brought 
 into fashion. The style of Calvin is on the face of it as 
 'much opposed to that of Rabelais as his substance. Yet the 
 author of Gargantua, as if to show what in other circum- 
 stances he could have done, occasionally drops the fantastic 
 mantle of exaggeration and burlesque in which he wraps 
 himself, and then his language has an incomparable dignity 
 and a sober grace superior to that of Calvin himself. 
 
 The immediate followers of Calvin were not remarkable 
 
56 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 for literary proficiency. They imitated their master's scholarly 
 and classical style as best they could, but the result was 
 generally heavy and pedantic, so that style refugie became a 
 term of reproach. On the other hand, the example and the 
 enormous popularity of Rabelais also brought about a great 
 number of imitations. Some of these, as was natural, copied 
 only the worst parts of the master, and reproduced and 
 exaggerated his ribaldry and his extravagance, without aiming 
 at or caring for the fancy, the wit, and the occasional dignity 
 of thought to which that extravagance and that ribaldry were 
 for the most part little more than a cloak. The court of 
 Marguerite__of Navarre produced, however, two volumes of 
 short tales in which the influence of Rabelais is less strong 
 perhaps than that of the earlier French tale and of Italian litera- 
 ture, but which are masterpieces of their kind. The first, the 
 Heptameron, is attributed to Marguerite herself. It is com- 
 posed on the model of Boccaccio's Decameron, and the stories 
 of which it consists are supposed to be told on seven days 
 and a part of an eighth, by a company of noble guests 
 stopped by a flood on their way back from Cauterets in the 
 Pyrenees, then as now a fashionable watering-place. The 
 tales of the Heptameron have much intrinsic merit and charm, 
 and are besides highly characteristic of the polished society 
 of the time, which was a kind of aftermath of chivalry, with 
 more refined manners and greater intellectual development, 
 especially on the side of art-culture, but of somewhat more 
 corrupt morals. The Queen has left other works, genuine' 
 or attributed, including some poems entitled Les Marguerites 
 de la Marguerite, but a strong suspicion is entertained that 
 she was not the author of the entire Heptameron, perhaps not 
 even of a large part of it. There were many of her literary 
 courtiers and favourites whose part authorship in it may 
 be guessed, notably Bonaventure des Pe'riers (1500?- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 57 
 
 1544 ?), who has left a short volume of acknowledged tales, 
 Contes etjqyeux Devi's, not dissimilar in character though less 
 elaborate. Des Pe'riers was a free-thinker, and wrote a singular 
 series of dialogues entitled Cymbalum Mundt\ composed on 
 the model of those of Lucian and not at all orthodox in 
 tendency. It is believed that he committed suicide in con- 
 sequence of the persecution which this work brought upon 
 him, and from which the protection of Marguerite was an 
 insufficient shield. Other writers of a somewhat similar kind 
 were Jean Bouchet, Noel du Fail, the Seigneur de Cholieres, 
 and somewhat later Be'roalde de Verville, the most Rabelaisian, 
 in the good as well as the bad sense, of all. Perhaps also 
 the well-known scholar Henri Estienne (1528-1598) should 
 be classed with this group, in virtue of his curious Apologie 
 pour He'rodote, a book nominally in defence of Herodotus, but 
 really consisting of an attack on the Roman Catholic clergy, 
 and indebted both to Rabelais and to the Heptameron for style 
 and substance. The Apologie is an amusing book, and full 
 of information about contemporary and earlier manners, but 
 as literature it is far inferior to its models. 
 
 Another very important branch of the literature of the 
 sixteenth century in France was history and memoir-writing, 
 for the latter of which the French had already amply shown 
 their capacity. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it 
 became usual to write not merely chronicles of the writer's 
 own time and experiences, with introductory summaries of 
 other men's work, but also regular histories, either general or 
 of France in particular. Such were written in our present 
 period by Du Haillan, La Popeliniere, and others, not without 
 some glimmerings of the critical spirit. But the memoirs in 
 which those who were actors or spectators of public affairs 
 wrote down their own experience are far the most important 
 branch of the historical writing of this time, both for the 
 
58 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 information they convey and for their literary merits. The 
 memoirs of Blaise de Montluc (1503-1577), a soldier of 
 fortune who distinguished himself in the Italian and religious 
 wars, and was famous for the ruthless severity with which he 
 enforced the royal authority against Catholic and Huguenot 
 alike ; of his brother marshals Vieilleville and Tavannes, the 
 former written by his secretary, the latter by his son; of 
 Fran$ois de Lanoue (1531-1591), the distinguished Huguenot 
 chieftain and one of the most moderate and esteemed 
 politicians of the time, are the chief of these memoirs of the 
 purely or mainly military kind. Marguerite de Valois (1553- 
 1615), the first wife of Henri IV, has left memoirs which are 
 very well written and extremely interesting. Pierre de TEstoile 
 (1546-1611) kept elaborate records of the events which came 
 under his notice officially and unofficially. But the most 
 famous memoirs of the whole century, memoirs which form 
 one of the capital books of French literature, are those of 
 Pierre de Bourdeilles, Abb6 de Brantome (1540-1614). 
 Brantome lived much about the court, and was an inde- 
 fatigable collector of gossip of all sorts, which he has recorded 
 without the slightest scruple. The form which his works 
 take is a singular one. They consist of collections of brief 
 biographies of the famous men and women of the time, 
 under the head of Vies des grands Capitaines> des Dames 
 galantes, &c. But there is very little method about them, and 
 the author digresses continually. Nevertheless, though they 
 have few pretensions to the observance of any literary rule, 
 the vivacity, the truth of colouring, and the power of drawing 
 character and relating anecdote which they display, are 
 exceedingly great. 
 
 Towards the end of the century many prose works of 
 remarkable excellence were written, besides those already 
 mentioned, and of many different kinds. The Satyre Memppe'e, 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 59 
 
 %v- . 
 
 a remarkable production, due to five or six different authors, 
 was the first example of political satire conceived on the 
 great scale and rewarded by great success. It helped the 
 cause of Henri IV against the League not a little ; and one 
 of the sections which it contains, the discourse of Claude 
 d'Aubray, the leader of the Tiers &at, is an admirable piece 
 of serious political writing, and like the whole work, one of 
 the earliest of its kind. Half politicians, half lawyers, were 
 Bodin (1530-1596), and Du Vair (1556-1621), the former a 
 defender on philosophical principles of absolute government, 
 the latter a constitutionalist of a moderate kind. A third 
 lawyer who did not confine himself to his profession, but 
 busied himself with literature, history, and antiquarianism 
 generally, was Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), whose Recherches 
 de la France unite literary elegance, sound critical spirit, and 
 great learning. What may be called scientific writing in the 
 vulgar tongue was also practised at this time. Ambrose Pare*, 
 the great surgeon, was a good prose writer ; Bernard Palissy, 
 the potter, has left writings of value and interest ; while Olivier 
 de Serres set the example of treating economic subjects. 
 Of a very different kind, but still more widely popular, and of 
 great influence upon style, was the translation of Amadis of 
 Gaul, which Herberay des Essarts undertook. France had 
 so many romances of chivalry of her own that it may seem 
 strange that she should go to Spain for another. Amadis, 
 however, in Herberay's well-written version, became highly 
 popular and was widely read. It is even said to have been 
 the most usual reading book for foreigners learning the 
 French language. Another translator takes rank among the 
 very best prose writers of the time, and has always been 
 a favourite study of Frenchmen who wished to write a pure 
 and at the same time a picturesque and racy style. This 
 was Jacques Amyot, bishop of Auxerre (1513-1593). 
 
60 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Translation from the classics was naturally practised to a 
 very considerable extent at a time when the classics were 
 regarded with so much interest and veneration. But no 
 translator even approached the success of Amyot His two 
 chief works are his version of Plutarch and that of the 
 Daphnis and Chloe of Longus. The former suited the taste of 
 the time for stirring business and at the same time for moral 
 reflection, and had a very great influence an influence 
 extended to England by imitations of it in our tongue. The 
 Daphnis and Chloe hit equally well the peculiar feature of 
 the day which we have alluded to in characterising the 
 Heptameron. It is an exceedingly beautiful piece of prose, 
 doing full justice to the exquisite pastoral it translates, in a 
 language which, unlike the Greek of Longus, is in the height 
 of its youthful vigour. 
 
 The coarse but forcible eloquence of the preachers of the 
 preceding period was, in the third quarter of the century, 
 revived in the midst of the excitement of the League. This 
 revolutionary movement was directed at least as much 
 against the house of Valois as against Protestantism, and the 
 invectives of the preachers against Henri III and Henri IV 
 were about equal in their virulence. . The chief pulpit 
 orators of the time were Boucher, Launay, and Guincestre, 
 many of whose furious harangues have been preserved. 
 They would hardly deserve the name of literature, were it 
 not that they afford evidence of the enrichment of the 
 language, and of the greater control which speakers and 
 writers alike had gained over it for almost all purposes. 
 
 The most celebrated, and, from a literary point of view, 
 beyond all question the greatest book, of the last half of the 
 century, remains to be noticed. This is the Essais of Michel 
 de Montaigne (1533-1592). Montaigne .was a Gascon 
 gentleman of the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, where his 
 
THE RENAISSANCE. 6 1 
 
 forefathers had long occupied a distinguished position in 
 town and country. His family name was Eyquem, and 
 it used to be thought that it was English by origin, but 
 later research has made this doubtful. At any rate, he is 
 the only French writer, except Rabelais, before our own day, 
 who deserves in the English sense the name of humourist. 
 His essays are very original in form, nor is there any 
 previous author to whom he can be shown to have been 
 indebted for the idea of them. Although full' of anecdote, 
 they are not narrative in the main, and start from some idea 
 which has occurred to the author, some passage he has met 
 in his reading, and the like. On this Montaigne comments, 
 and allows his comment to lead him in any direction, without 
 troubling himself at all about the text. According to the 
 fashion of the time, he makes a considerable parade of 
 learning and quotation, but no one can say that the quo- 
 tations are the attraction of the book. The author, without 
 possessing a highly poetical imagination, or much feeling 
 of the deeper kind, has an incomparable common sense, a 
 wide knowledge of life and human nature, great humour, and 
 above all the peculiar faculty of saying anything that occurs 
 to him without caring for the good or bad effect it may 
 produce on the reader. His motto Que sais-je ? only partially 
 expresses him, for the presence of doubt is not so much the 
 characteristic of Montaigne as the absence of dogmatism. 
 As in the case of Rabelais, there is little ground for putting 
 him down as a religious sceptic, though he certainly could 
 not be called a devout member of any church. His attitude 
 in politics is similar to his attitude in religion. The purely 
 literary merits of Montaigne are very great. Without affect- 
 ing the pedantry of the Pldiade, he did not scruple to use 
 classical words whenever he was at a loss for a phrase to 
 express his meaning. His sentences at the same time 
 
63 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 observe no regular rule of shortness or length, but are 
 always clear and intelligible. Montaigne had an imitator 
 of his peculiar style of sceptical moralising in Pierre Charron 
 (1541-1603), who wrote a book entitled De la Sagesse. 
 Neither in literary nor in philosophical merit however does 
 this work even approach the Essays, which will always hold a 
 foremost place among the triumphs of French literature. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD.. 
 
 THE great writers who together represent the influence of 
 the Renaissance in French literature, and of whom account 
 has been given in the preceding chapter, contributed in point 
 of intrinsic worth as important a mass of work as that supplied 
 by the writers of any other period in French history. But 
 partly from the circumstances of the time, partly perhaps from 
 the very superabundance of their individual genius, they did 
 not help to produce any one marked effect upon literature ; 
 each went his own way, save in the case of the Pl&ade group, 
 and even in their case more than might at first be supposed. 
 Verse to some degree, and prose almost entirely, were written 
 either according to the bent of the writer's individual taste 
 and the character of his studies, or else in imitation of some 
 particular author whom he set before him. The outcome of 
 this was much admirable work ; but no definite and uniform 
 style, especially no definite and uniform prose style, resulted 
 from it, The consequence is, that while the best sixteenth- 
 century writers are exceedingly good, the ordinary run are 
 perhaps not so good as they might be. A wide study of 
 antiquity, and an extensive importation of foreign words and 
 ideas, had moreover left the language in a somewhat chaotic 
 state, and it so happened that at the end of the sixteenth and 
 the beginning of the seventeenth century there were but few 
 writers (perhaps only one) of the first genius for original 
 
64 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 composition. It was therefore not unnatural that the period 
 should be one rather of criticism than of original performance. 
 And though the criticism was in some cases unfortunate, it 
 was in a great degree justified by the brilliant period of 
 creation which followed. 
 
 At the time of which we are speaking the end of the 
 sixteenth century the mediaeval influence, properly so-called, 
 was entirely exhausted, and no trace remains of it as an active 
 and living force. The surest sign of this is, that people now 
 began to imitate mediaeval work as in the case of the famous 
 Vaux de Vire y written by Jean le Houx, a Norman lawyer, 
 and attributed to Olivier Basselin and even to edit and study 
 it as a purely literary and antiquarian task. The school of 
 Marot had left no very definite successors, and that of the 
 Plelade had worn itself out, partly owing to its undue 
 pedantry, partly to the error, constantly recurring in the 
 history of literature, which had induced its members to form 
 themselves into a kind of sect or clique. At the same time 
 the first energy of the Renaissance, and the enjoyment and 
 delight in living and learning which had characterised it, had 
 died out in the midst of the terrible wars of the League 
 period. The great range of modern science, and the 
 necessity of attaching oneself more or less definitely to some 
 particular branch of it, also began to be recognised, at the 
 same time that the critical spirit began to make its first mark 
 on literature. These two influences, the spirit of subdivision 
 and the critical spirit, preside over all the work of the seven- 
 teenth century, and are responsible both for its merits and its 
 defects. 
 
 In poetry proper the result of these new influences did not 
 produce any work of the very first class after the first years 
 of the century. Desportes and Bertaut, the last of the school 
 of Ronsard, were not strong men. Mathurin Regnier 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 65 
 
 (1573-1613), the nephew of Desportes, was indeed a great 
 poet, with a strong and flexible versification and vocabulary, 
 and an almost equal command over the tender and the 
 satirical style in poetry. His satires, with those of D'Aubigne', 
 are perhaps the best that French literature has produced, 
 while some of his minor poems are full of pathos. But 
 Regnier occupied a somewhat isolated position, and exercised 
 but little influence. The poet of the time was Fran9ois de 
 Malherbe (1556-1628), a poor enough writer as far as real 
 poetical merits go, but one who had the luck or the merit 
 to recognise the taste of the day, and to meet or rather to 
 anticipate it. Malherbe set himself to oppose the classical 
 tendencies of the Pl&ade by substituting for them other aims 
 of a not dissimilar kind. He it was who set the example of 
 the characteristics which distinguished French poetry for 
 fully two centuries, and which made it the admiration of all 
 Europe, while at the same time they now make it in parts 
 very difficult to read. These characteristics may be thus 
 summed up, a very accurate versification and manner of 
 rhyming, the use exclusively of a carefully chosen and 
 conventional phraseology, the avoidance of picturesque or 
 startling language and effects, and the preference of a kind 
 of elegant commonplace in the treatment of every subject. 
 
 The principles of Malherbe did not at once take root in 
 French poetry, yet there was no poet sufficiently strong to 
 resist their gradual introduction, though Regnier did what he 
 could. The first half of the seventeenth century produced 
 indeed many rhymers of talent, but after Regnier' s death no 
 poet of genius, in France. The two chiefs of Malherbe's direct 
 disciples, Racan (1589-1670) and Maynard (1582-1646), 
 were correct and elegant versifiers ; especially the first, who 
 may be said to have had not a few sparks of the true poetic 
 fire. Side by side with these, and somewhat later, there 
 
 F 
 
66 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 existed three different schools of poetry, while a singular 
 and unequal poet, The'ophile de Viaud, occupies a position 
 by himself. These three schools, in the order of time, and 
 perhaps of literary importance, were the school of writers of 
 vers de societe, that of Bacchanalian poets, and that of the 
 producers of ponderous epics. Of the first the chief supporter 
 was Voiture (1598-1648), to whose name may be joined 
 those of Benserade, Sarrasin, Segrais and Charleval. Saint- 
 Amant (1594-1660), a vigorous writer, was the chief repre- 
 sentative of the second ; and the third had at its head the 
 much-ridiculed Chapelain (1595-1674), author of the Pucelle, 
 and included besides a priest of some talent, the Pere Lemoine 
 (1602-1671), members who busied themselves also with other 
 poetic forms, such as the just-mentioned Saint-Amant and 
 Georges de ScudeVy (1601-1667). 
 
 While the purism of Malherbe was slowly making its way 
 in French verse, a similar and much more healthy influence 
 was being exerted in the department of prose by Jean Guez de 
 Balzac (1594-1654) the elder Balzac, as he is often called 
 to distinguish him from the great novelist of the nineteenth 
 century. Balzac was a man of family and position, who 
 seems to have had very little to write about, but who, perhaps 
 for that reason, was extremely careful about his manner of 
 writing. In his letters, essays, and a moral treatise called 
 the Socrate Chretien, he endeavoured to purify the vocabulary 
 and regulate the style of ordinary prose writing, which hitherto 
 had been, except in the hands of a few great writers, by no 
 means a convenient instrument for general literary purposes. 
 These various reforming influences were largely assisted by 
 the formation of the Academy, and by the fancy of the time 
 for literary coteries, in which authors and ladies of rank played 
 the chief parts, but which were also frequented by many states- 
 men and nobles. The famous Madame de Rambouillet was 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 67 
 
 the chief patroness of these meetings, at which much minor 
 poetry and many short prose pieces were composed or 
 recited. Connected more or less intimately with these 
 meetings were the ponderous prose romances which are 
 generally associated with the period in literary memory. The 
 popularity of the Amadis has been mentioned. But since the 
 Amadis had been translated, not merely the fashion of writing 
 but the fashion of thinking had changed a good deal, and 
 something different from mere tales of righting and enchant- 
 ment was required. Accordingly, writers like Gomberville, 
 La Calprenede, Mademoiselle de Scude'ry, wrote Cleopdlre, Le 
 grand Cyrus, Clelie, and many other works, in which formal 
 gallantry and love-casuistry, with noble sentiments of various 
 kinds, were illustrated at immense length. Influences too 
 many to be here discussed were at work on these curious 
 and now forgotten compositions. But the principal native 
 forerunner of them was a singular work, the Astrfo of Honore* 
 d'UrfiS (1567-1623). This, which bears some faint resemblance 
 to our Arcadia, represents a kind of pastoral society on the 
 banks of the Lignon, a river traversing the writer's own 
 estates in the south of France. Of a much more genuine 
 kind in the department of prose fiction were the burlesques 
 of Scarron (1610-1660), the chief of which is the Roman 
 Comique, an interesting sketch of the life of strolling actors 
 in the provinces, and the extravaganzas of Cyrano de 
 Bergerac (1620-1655). The last writer, who was a dramatist 
 as well, composed a Voyage au Soleil and Voyage a la Lune, 
 in which the influence of Rabelais is evident. 
 
 The really great developments of French literature in this 
 first half of the century, while Louis XIII was on the throne, 
 or during the minority of his son, were of a very different kind. 
 During the sixteenth century, -abundant as had been the 
 exercise given to the intellect, that exercise had, in the most 
 
 F 2 
 
68 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 serious and abstract subjects, been chiefly confined to religious 
 disputes on questions of church government and a few 
 points of dogma. The unseemly controversies of the earlier 
 religious struggles, and the furious preachings of the League, 
 were succeeded by religious polemics of a more decent kind, 
 and by pulpit eloquence which promised the great oratorical 
 displays of the latter part of the century. The chief par- 
 takers in this were, on the Protestant side, Duplessis-Mornay 
 (1549-1623), a scholarly and forcible writer; on the side of 
 Rome, the Cardinal du Perron (1555-1618), a great master 
 of argument, and Saint Francis of Sales (1567-1622), famous 
 as a preacher and a writer of devout meditations as well as 
 for his polemical writings. But the thought of the new age 
 threw itself still more into purely philosophical lines, and into 
 subjects which appeared less dangerous to handle. The old 
 scholastic philosophy, which, in various shapes, had sufficed 
 the philosophical appetite of the middle ages, had been 
 practically dead for a long time, though its forms still 
 continued to be taught in colleges and universities. The 
 sixteenth century, in this as in other things showing its 
 reverence for classical antiquity, had tried, but without 
 success, to satisfy itself with the actual text of the Greek 
 philosophers. It is the glory of France to have produced, in 
 Rene Descartes (1596-1650), at once one of the earliest and 
 most skilful writers of a clear, elegant, and scholarly prose in 
 any modern language, and also the first great modern philo- 
 sopher, taking philosophy in its strictest meaning. The 
 Discours de la Methode and the Meditations of Descartes treat 
 of the most abstruse subjects that can possibly occupy human 
 thought, yet they are written in French so clear and simple 
 that any child, as far as the mere literal and grammatical 
 meaning goes, can understand them at once. Nor did the 
 spirit of discussion stop at profane philosophy. Many points 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 69 
 
 of Christian theology, which had not been made the subject 
 of the great half political, half ecclesiastical disputes of the 
 sixteenth century, came in for discussion and study. Among 
 these, the questions of freewill, etc., were handled by a Dutch 
 theologian named Jansenius (1583-1638), and from him a 
 school or sect of religious thinkers, who had themselves no 
 inclination to separate from the Church of Rome, and no 
 suspicion that their tenets involved any disloyalty to her, grew 
 up in France. From the first this school was of great literary 
 and philosophical importance ; it adopted ardently much of 
 the philosophy of Descartes, published an important work on 
 logic (called, from the chief home of the school, the Port 
 Royal Logic), and in Arnauld, Nicole, and others, produced 
 men of letters of great eminence. It produced also, after a 
 time, one of the greatest of all French writers, a man superior 
 even to Descartes from the purely literary point of view, 
 Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the author of the Pensees and of 
 the letters called for shortness the Provinciates. These latter, 
 which are among the masterpieces of the literature of the 
 world, were drawn forth by a dispute that had arisen between 
 the Jansenists and Jesuits, a dispute which in the long run 
 was fatal to the former. But, so far as Pascal's book is 
 concerned, the victory rested wholly with him, and it may be 
 said that in more than two centuries the Jesuits have never 
 got over it. All the faults and absurdities that could be 
 found in the principles or practice of that famous order are 
 exposed in the Provinciates with the most exquisite literary 
 skill, and with irony which for the first time was completely 
 presented in literature. There is, at least in the earlier letters, 
 no direct attack or harsh language, but the persons and 
 theories attacked are steeped in such a bath of ridicule, held 
 up to such unpitying derision, that to ^this day the book 
 serves as a pattern and a storehouse to everybody who wishes 
 
JO FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 to perfect himself in the art of polite attack. Pascal's other 
 great work is of a different kind. No other PensSes have 
 more depth or greater range than Pascal's, but in what is 
 technically called ' form,' that is to say in perfection of style 
 and literary arrangement, they are inferior for the most part 
 to the Provinciates. This is due to their being rather rough 
 notes, intended for subsequent working up, than finished 
 productions. 
 
 The renown which France had already acquired for 
 memoir-writing did not decline in this age, from which 
 many famous books of the kind date, and which supplied in 
 its turbulent and changeable politics abundance of materials 
 for the purpose. Conspicuous among such writers is the 
 great Cardinal of Richelieu, who -though not exactly the 
 founder of the Academy, as he is sometimes ignorantly 
 called, brought it for the first time into a solid and stable 
 condition, and transformed it from a mere private club of 
 wits, such as the century saw many, into an institution 
 formally charged with the overseeing of French language 
 and literature. It has already been observed that the time 
 was very propitious for such an institution, owing to the 
 habits of criticism which Malherbe and Balzac had in- 
 troduced. There was also all the more reason for it that 
 what may be called the profession of literature was, for the 
 first time, assuming a regular position. In the middle ages 
 men who wrote were either persons of distinction writing for 
 their own pleasure, or else for the most part dependents 
 upon such persons writing to please their patrons and 
 masters. The printing press, and the growth of education 
 and of a desire for knowledge, if they had not made writing 
 certainly and absolutely profitable, had at any rate connected 
 with it the possibilities of profit. It so happened, too, that 
 at this time a form of literature which had been long pursued 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 71 
 
 rose greatly in the public estimation, and offered something 
 like a regular livelihood to those who could hit the public 
 taste. This was the drama, with which some of the greatest 
 triumphs of French literature in the seventeenth century are 
 indissolubly associated, and of the state of which some 
 account must now be given, as account has already been 
 given of the mediaeval theatre in France. 
 
 Towards the middle of the sixteenth century a great altera- 
 tion took place by the prohibition, at least in Paris, of the 
 acting of miracle-plays and mysteries. The Confraternity of 
 the Passion, when their licence was renewed, were expressly 
 confined to profane dramas, though mysteries continued to be 
 acted for some considerable time in the provinces. The 
 profane mystery however held its ground, as also did the 
 morality, while the farce was more popular than ever. But 
 the establishment of the form of French drama which was to 
 gain most celebrity and popularity was, as has been noticed in 
 passing, a work, and the most durable work, of the Pl&ade. 
 The tragedies which Jodelle imitated were not so much those 
 of the great masters of Greek drama as the singular pieces, 
 sometimes full of merit, sometimes quite devoid of it, which 
 have come down to us under the name of Seneca. There 
 was something in these plays, their regular arrangement, 
 their stately declamation, and the somewhat stilted grandeur 
 of their sentiments, which commended itself peculiarly to the 
 French mind. Besides the classical subjects, which could be 
 copied more or less directly from Seneca, the Bible (which, 
 it must be remembered, was a novel possession in the vulgar 
 tongue at this time, and perhaps the most popular of all 
 books wherever it was permitted to be read) furnished 
 numerous stirring themes. Jodelle's example was followed 
 by Grdvin, De la Taille, and many others. Shortly, too, there 
 arose a dramatist of great talent to help the popularity of the 
 
73 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 model. This was Robert Gamier (1545 1601), whose 
 faculty of versification was praised by Ronsard, and whose 
 chief plays (Les Juives, a tragedy on the fall of Jerusalem 
 under Nebuchadnezzar; Bradamante, a tragi- comedy from 
 Ariosto ; Cornelie, a classical piece) have great merit both 
 as poetry and as drama. In these pieces the chorus, as 
 in the classical drama, plays a very important part, and 
 some of the finest passages of Garnier's work are to be 
 found in these choruses, for which the French of the six- 
 teenth century was well suited. Gamier was followed by An- 
 toine de Montchrestien (d. 1621), a Huguenot, who lived a 
 stormy life at the end of the sixteenth and 'the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century. Montchrestien wrote several plays, 
 including one on the contemporary sufferings of Mary 
 Queen of Scots, which was probably the first of the many 
 dramas devoted to that ill-fated queen, and one on the story 
 of Haman and Mordecai, from which Racine afterwards 
 borrowed something. Montchrestien's choruses (for choruses 
 still continued to be used) are often very fine. It ought to 
 be observed that these plays are in the main of entirely the 
 same character as those which afterwards made French 
 drama famous, and that the idea of Corneille and Racine 
 having invented this drama, or of their having borrowed it 
 from the heroic romances of the ScudeVy type (a strange 
 fancy which has often been repeated) is wholly erroneous. 
 There was however in them what we should call a great defi- 
 ciency of practical acting merit. The speeches are far too 
 long, there is rarely any action, and what there is is interrupted 
 by the chorus and its performances. The father of the French 
 stage, as far as the function of the playwright proper is 
 concerned, was Alexandre Hardy (1560-1631). Hardy was 
 regularly engaged by a troop of actors, one of many which 
 existed at this time both as strollers about the country and as 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 73 
 
 stationary in the large towns, and he produced an enormous 
 number of plays, in many of which he was indebted to 
 Spanish originals. Writing as Hardy did, directly for repre- 
 sentation, and under the eyes, so to speak, of the actors, 
 he was certain to consult acting capabilities and popular taste 
 almost before anything else. His plays, while sometimes con- 
 taining passages of no little merit, are rather intended to be 
 acted than to be read. They have plenty of action, of lively 
 dialogue, and of striking situations, but often sin in the 
 direction of bombast and rant. It was significant too of 
 the taste of the time that Hardy never (though another 
 playwright, Jean de Sch&andre, nearly did so) ventured on 
 the complex action and free development of the English 
 play. Something like the classical standard of unities was 
 always maintained. At the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century there were a large number of dramatists, none of 
 them of much merit ; but by the termination of the first 
 quarter of it, things began to improve. Mairet, Du Ryer, 
 Tristan, wrote plays of some pretension both for acting 
 capacity and literary merit. Rotrou (1609-1650), the im- 
 mediate predecessor of Corneille, next appeared. Rotrou's 
 best work ( Venceslas, St. Genesf) was not produced until 
 Corneille had set him the example. Pierre Corneille him- 
 self (1606-1684), the first French dramatist of the highest 
 class, and perhaps, as far as tragedy goes, the only dramatist 
 of that class which France has produced, did not begin with 
 a masterpiece. His first play, Melite, a lively bustling comedy, 
 is only a little better than contemporary work ; and his second, 
 Clilandre, a preposterous tragedy of the school of Hardy, is 
 only a little more absurd than its rivals. Like Balzac the 
 novelist, Corneille did a great deal of work before doing 
 anything decidedly good or characteristic. At length Me'de'e, 
 a fine tragedy on a fine subject, ' announced Corneille ' as 
 
74 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 has been happily said, and the announcement was soon 
 fulfilled by the appearance of the Cid. A desperate critical 
 controversy sprung up about this famous play. Corneille's 
 patron, Richelieu, was to a certain extent jealous of him, and 
 the then new Academy was set to criticise the work, while 
 envious rivals, such as Claveret and Mairet, did their best to 
 write it down. It was all in vain. ' All Paris/ as the stock 
 quotation has it, ' had for Chimene the eyes of Rodrigue/ and 
 it gained at once the popularity it has never lost with lovers 
 of magnanimous passion and full-toned verse. Its author's 
 great qualities were further shown, and his fame conclusively 
 established, by Cinna and Horace. Unfortunately for him- 
 self, Corneille outlived his popularity though not his genius ; 
 and his last works, which belong to the next period, were 
 contrasted with the weaker but fresher, and, to the taste of 
 the time, more attractive dramas of Racine. But the plays 
 already mentioned, with Rodogune and Polyeucte (perhaps his 
 two best works), were all produced comparatively early. 
 Corneille's chief characteristics are the stateliness and 
 grandeur of his thought and of the verse in which he 
 dresses it. His range is not very wide, nor is he particularly 
 happy in the delineation of ordinary character or of the 
 softer and lighter feelings ; yet he managed, with some help 
 from a Spanish original, to write the best comedy, Le Menteur, 
 before Moliere. The display of heroic sentiments and conduct, 
 such as Rodrigue's sacrifice of love to honour and filial 
 affection, Horace's elevation of the idea of patriotism above 
 all domestic ties, Polyeucte's religious zeal setting at nought 
 the chance or rather certainty of losing his private happiness, 
 are the subjects which Corneille can perfectly treat. His 
 most famous single piece of verse, the splendid declamation 
 of Camille when she learns that her brother has slain her 
 lover, .is perhaps unapproached in its kind, or only ap- 
 
BEGINNING OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. 75 
 
 preached by other pieces of the same author. But Corneille, 
 like every French dramatist, fails when he is compared with 
 our own great playwriters, by reason of the partial and 
 exaggerated view which he gives of human nature, and of 
 his inability to depict the more individual kinds of character. 
 It is probable that these drawbacks are due at least as much 
 to the form of play which, by his time, was the accepted and 
 almost the only possible one in France, as to his own 
 shortcomings. The ideas of regularity and correctness 
 which had been strongly impressed on French literature, 
 even before his birth, were by this time thoroughly esta- 
 blished, and his audience would have been shocked at the 
 free display of action, the complicated story, the abundant 
 characters, which allowed Shakespeare and his great fol- 
 lowers to show at once their knowledge of human nature 
 and the resources of their literary art. 
 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 
 
 THE age of Louis XIV in French literature is one of the 
 numerous periods of history which have had to pay the 
 penalty of exaggerated and uncritical admiration. It produced 
 only one of the very greatest names, Moliere ; and three of 
 such names, those of Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal, which 
 are sometimes borrowed to increase its lustre, belong un- 
 doubtedly to an earlier time. In the highest branch of letters, 
 poetry pure and simple, it was sterile. The critical principles 
 which were chiefly professed, if not sqlely observed in it, led to 
 the impoverishment and degradation of the language and its 
 literature. But when deduction has been made for all these 
 things, it has still to be confessed that but few periods, not 
 meifcly of French history but of any other, can vie with it in 
 the production of work, of permanent value. With Moliere 
 to represent the class of names of which the whole world 
 cannot furnish more than a score or so ; with La Fontaine, 
 Racine, La Rochefoucauld, Malebranche, Bossuet, Fdnelon, 
 to be classed among those who only just ^miss this highest 
 honour ; with Saint-Evremond. Boileau, La Bruyere, Madame 
 de Sevigne*, Saint-Simon, Massillon, Bourdaloue, Hamilton, 
 Perrault, Regnard, Quinault, St. Real, and many more 
 holding hardly a lower place as regards their best work, the 
 time must always have a great claim on the attention of 
 
AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 77 
 
 literary students, and the shortsightedness and narrowness of 
 its prevailing literary principles must be pardoned in favour 
 of the excellence of its general literary practice. 
 
 The most prominent place in the literature of the age of 
 Louis XIV is usually assigned to the drama, of which Moliere 
 and Racine were the great representatives, Corneille, though 
 he was actually their contemporary, and continued to write 
 almost as long as either, belonging clearly to an elder 
 generation in character as well as in age. For perfection 
 in his own style Moliere (1622-1673) is undoubtedly the 
 greatest of all comic writers. In verbal wit he is not quite 
 the equal of Congreve, but his wit is used with much better 
 taste, and is allied with a far deeper and wider conception of 
 human nature. In giving comedy a poetical aspect, and in 
 taking in all the intricacies of character, he is the inferior of 
 Shakespeare. In rich humour he certainly yields to Aristo- 
 phanes, and in dry humour possibly to Plautus. But for\ 
 orderly and regular treatment of his themes, with reference 
 at once to literary standards to the truth of nature and to the 
 requirements of the stage, he has never been, and is never 
 likely to be surpassed. His two greatest plays, Tartuffe, a 
 satire on religious hypocrisy, and Le Misanthrope, a satire on 
 the frivolity of fashionable life, are almost impossible to be 
 excelled ; and it may be said of Moliere that he is the one 
 great dramatist who has persistently kept before his eyes the 
 moral purpose which is always asserted to be one of the chief 
 merits of the stage. The only charge that can fairly be 
 brought against his plays is that, notwithstanding the range 
 of their subjects and the truth of their handling, each one is 
 apt to take too limited a view of the characters with which it 
 deals. To explain what is meant we may compare Moliere 
 with the master of all literature. When Shakespeare draws 
 Falstaff, he does not make him a mere type of cowardice or 
 
yS FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 of sensual indulgence. He gives strokes that show how in 
 other circumstances the fat knight might have been, and 
 probably was, a brave and honourable man. The soul of 
 goodness in things evil, and contrariwise the weakness and 
 'dram of eale' in things good, is never forgotten by him. 
 Even lago is rather warped by a devilish special purpose 
 than wholly diabolical. Tartuffe, on the contrary, is little more 
 than embodied hypocrisy, and Alceste little more than em- 
 bodied pride and impatience of that with which he does 
 not sympathise. This tendency to produce types rather than 
 individuals had been characteristic of French literature in 
 very early times, had broken out conspicuously in the alle- 
 gorical school of poetry which reigned for two centuries, 
 and was strongly assisted at the time we are discussing by 
 the adoption of the artificial rules of the ' unities ' which the 
 critics forced upon the poets. It is clearly difficult, if not 
 impossible, to show the natural complexity of human char- 
 acters on a stage where the action is strictly limited to the 
 display of a definite and particular plot, where little or 
 nothing is allowed to be done as well as spoken, where the 
 story has to pass in a few hours, and even the scene is 
 scarcely changed. These rigorous restrictions were not 
 indeed enforced in comedy to the same extent as in tragedy; 
 and the former was consequently able to develop itself much 
 better than the latter. But still there was a general tendency 
 in the same direction, and one of the signs of it may be 
 found in the fancy for entitling plays (Le Misanthrope, Le 
 foueur, &c.) so as to show beforehand that one aspect of 
 character was intended to be kept in view. The notion of 
 the ruling passion may be said to be at the bottom of French 
 comedy, if not as Moliere wrote it, at any rate as his 
 successors, the greatest of whom was Regnard, adopted it 
 from him. 
 
AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 79 
 
 In tragedy the matter was much worse. It became by 
 degrees understood that the persons of tragedy must do 
 nothing but talk, and in the tragedy of Racine (1639-1699) 
 and his successors they do nothing else. Now there are 
 but few situations endless talk about which can be made 
 interesting to audiences and readers. The chief of these 
 few situations is what is called making love, and Racine, 
 submitting himself to the critical ideas of the time, adopted 
 this situation as the only one in most of his plays (Phedre, 
 Iphige'nie, Milhridate, &c.). Athalie and Esther are to 
 be excepted, and, curiously enough, they contain his best 
 work. The author, it is true, shows extraordinary talent in 
 handling his limited theme, and he has so exactly hit the 
 taste and ideas of his countrymen that even now, when the 
 critical unsoundness of the ideas under which he wrote has long 
 been demonstrated, his plays continue to be frequently acted 
 with applause, and sometimes read with pleasure. It was 
 also much in Racine's favour that he was one of the most 
 industrious and careful of writers, and was possessed of an 
 extraordinarily equable talent. His great rival, Corneille, 
 though far his superior both as a poet and a dramatist, was 
 a rapid and a very unequal writer. Between the passages 
 which to the present day strike both eye and ear with the 
 crash of thunder and the brilliance of lightning, there are 
 long tracts of the most dreary monotony and insignificance 
 in Corneille. Racine, on the other hand, by his marvellous 
 attention to his language and versification, maintains a pretty 
 uniform level of attractiveness. With Pope and Virgil he is 
 perhaps the greatest of all poets whose claim to immortality 
 is that they have thoroughly mastered the formal part of 
 poetry. The value of these, though at times it may be 
 overrated and at times underrated, is permanent and cannot 
 be destroyed. But in Racine's contemporaries and successors, 
 
80 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 such as Campistron (1656-1737), Pradon (1632-1698), 
 Duche* (1668-1704), La Fosse (1653-1708), the faults of 
 whose plan and material are as great or greater, while their 
 merits are far inferior, the result is nearly intolerable, and 
 between Racine and Voltaire there are few French tragedies, 
 except the works of the elder Cre'billon (1674-1763), which 
 deserve to be read or even mentioned. 
 
 The critical opinions which these poets obeyed were not 
 indeed prevailing critical opinions never are the opinions 
 of any one person. They had been started by the admiration 
 of antiquity affected by the Ple'iade, formulated in a manner 
 very disastrous to their originators by Malherbe, continued by 
 the chief constituents of the early Academy. But they were 
 finally laid down as laws by the most famous of all French 
 critics, Nicholas Boileau Despre*aux (1636-1711). This cele- 
 brated man had a keen but narrow intellect, a fair knowledge 
 of the Latin classics, some considerable skill in handling and 
 teaching others to handle one form of French verse, little 
 acquaintance with Greek, no taste whatever for the higher 
 -. oetry, and a complete ignorance of the earlier literature of 
 his own and the contemporary literature of other countries. 
 He thus lacked what is perhaps the very first requisite of 
 poetical criticism, a wide acquaintance with poetry in different 
 tongues, to prevent the critic from mistaking its accidental 
 for its essential elements. He did a great deal to narrow 
 and weaken French poetical literature, though he did some- 
 thing also to give formal perfection to those branches of it 
 which his taste admitted. His rude ridicule did service by 
 putting an end to the ponderous epics of the Chapelain 
 school and the extravagances of some of the earlier tragedians; 
 but except as regards the structure of the Alexandrine, that 
 is to say of one kind of Alexandrine, he had little positive value. 
 He could only decry, and his talents in this direction were 
 
constan 
 
 AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 8l 
 
 instantly misused, as in the case of Quinault (1635-1688) 
 and Brebeuf (1618-1661), poets of limited merit, but, as poets, 
 far superior to himself. He did not, however, confine himself 
 to criticism : his satires, chiefly borrowed from Horace, are 
 fairly good ; and his burlesque poem of the Lutrin, in which 
 he was also indebted, though in a less degree, to others, 
 has merit. But his higher flights, such as his ode on the 
 taking of Namur, are ridiculous compounds of bombast and 
 platitude, and show that the 'man who could publish them 
 must have been entirely blind to the requisites of true poetry 
 For it is never to be forgotten that, though no one can call 
 upon the critic to write good verse, he may fairly be called 
 upon not to write verse that is bad. 
 
 A better critical spirit than Boileau's was represented by 
 Saint-Evremond (1613-1703), who also deserves a con- 
 siderable place as a literary moralist. The great fame and 
 success of Montaigne had made it fashionable to treat all 
 sorts of subjects essay- fashion, and there was hardly any 
 limit to these exercises, which were often pursued in the 
 literary coteries already commented upon. At one time the 
 fashion was for what were called * conversations ' short 
 narratives of real or imaginary interviews between people of 
 more or less celebrity. At another time it was for literary 
 studies on particular kinds of verse or prose ; at another for 
 what were called ' portraits/ that is to say elaborate sketches 
 of character of the kind of which Clarendon's History con- 
 tains so many in English ; at another for Pens&s or Maxims, 
 which were detached reflections, the former of no great 
 length, the latter drawn up in the shortest possible form of 
 words. Saint-Evremond excelled in most of these, as well 
 as in letter-writing. His Conversation du Marechal d' Hoc- 
 quincourt avec le Pere Canqye is one of the liveliest and most 
 lifelike of all such pictures of manners and thoughts ; his 
 
 G 
 
82 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 ' Thoughts on French Tragedies/ and his ' Dissertation on 
 the word Vastej are models of literary criticism, and his 
 character of the Duke de Candale has never been surpassed. 
 The Pense'e and the Maxim he did not much practise. The 
 former has been noticed in the last chapter. Of the latter, 
 the Duke de la Rochefoucauld (16131680), a great noble 
 who had taken a share in the Fronde, and who has left 
 memoirs of an important kind, was the chief writer. La 
 Rochefoucauld has never been excelled in the power of 
 packing the greatest amount of meaning into the fewest and 
 best chosen words. Most of his maxims are of the moral 
 kind, and perhaps do not express a very elevated view of 
 morality or of human nature. But La Rochefoucauld, much 
 as he had mixed with his fellows, had almost always seen 
 them in unfavourable lights, first in , the anarchy of the 
 Fronde, and secondly in the period of general seeking for 
 court favour which followed the majority of Louis XIV. 
 Personally he was regarded with great respect by almost all 
 his contemporaries. This kind of sententious moral writing 
 was at a rather later period taken up by a somewhat inferior 
 writer, La Bruyere (1639-1696), who developed it chiefly in 
 the form of imaginary characters suggested by those of 
 Theophrastus. La Bruyere has been called inferior to La 
 Rochefoucauld, but this relative inferiority does not imply 
 any inferiority to writers in general. La Bruyere was a 
 great master of French, French rather of the newer and more 
 polished but weaker type that resulted from the criticism of 
 Boileau, than of the vigorous elder language which, with an 
 improvement in grace but no loss of energy, La Roche- 
 foucauld was able to employ. 
 
 In somewhat close connection with this moralist literature 
 stands that of history, memoirs, and letters, in which the age 
 hardly yields to either of those that immediately preceded it. 
 
AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 83 
 
 To Louis XIV's reign belong the most famous letter-writer 
 and the most famous memoir-writer of France, though the 
 latter somewhat outlived in point of time the period to which 
 his works properly belong in spirit as well as in subject. No 
 writer of memoirs has ever approached the Duke de Saint- 
 Simon (1675-1755) in vividness, originality, and irregular 
 power. No writer of letters has ever approached Madame 
 de Sevigne' (16271697) in natural grace, in fulness of 
 interest, and in power of attracting the reader to the 
 personality of the writer. By the side of these distinguished 
 names might be grouped a very long list of both descriptions 
 of authors, among whom Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719) 
 would hold a place not very far below Madame de Sevigne', 
 Dangeau one a good deal below Saint- Simon, and Tallemant 
 des Raux, a writer of curious and scandalous anecdotes 
 called Historiettes, one quite by itself. 
 
 Nor while the contributions which were being made to 
 the materials of history were so numerous was regular 
 history-making neglected. It is true that at this time the 
 spirit of historical criticism was not felt, and that what is 
 called the philosophy of history was not as yet dreamt of. But 
 Mezeray's (1610-1683) History of France is really a great 
 work, showing both historical insight and literary skill of the 
 first class ; and a large number of other writers followed in 
 his steps. Pellisson (16241693) was a very accomplished 
 writer both of political and literary history. Less remarkable 
 for style, but still of merit, is Pe're'fixe (1605-1670), while 
 d'Orleans (1644-1698), Daniel (1649-1728), and Rapin, the 
 refugee historian of England (1661-1725), also deserve 
 mention. Moreover, among the numerous fancies of the age 
 for amicable literary competition, history had its share. It 
 was for a time fashionable to take short striking episodes and 
 handle them in the polished and nervous language which the 
 
 G 2 
 
84 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 union of ancient vigour and modern correctness had placed 
 at the disposal of the prose writer. Such, rather before 
 our present period, were the Cardinal de Retz's Conjuration 
 de Fiesque, and Sarrasin's Waldstein (Wallenstein), such, later 
 (1672), the Abbe de Saint-Real's Conjuration de Venise, three 
 tracts which perhaps carry the art of historical narration on 
 the small scale to as high a pitch as is from the literary point 
 of view possible. In connection with the subject of history 
 too must be mentioned the vast and precious labours of men 
 who were purely scholars, and who availed themselves of the 
 leisure which was given them, sometimes by the endowments 
 of the Church and especially of the monasteries, sometimes by 
 their own private fortune, or by the easy public appointments 
 common under unreformed governments, to research and 
 compile. In not a few cases the materials they worked up 
 have since perished, even if the handling of them were not 
 beyond the degenerate strength and patience of modern 
 scholars. Such were Fleury (1640-1723), Tillemont (1637- 
 1698), Ducange (1614-1688), Mabillon (1622-1707). 
 
 As in poetry proper, in which the labourers of the period 
 were so insignificant that they hardly require mention here, 
 so in prose fiction, the department of literature which with the 
 prose drama comes nearest to poetry, its achievements were 
 not great. They were however decidedly greater than its 
 poetical performances, and deserve some notice. Indeed if we 
 throw La Fontaine into this class (and his works are little more 
 than easy rhymed prose), the department becomes one of the 
 most important of all. The huge romances of the heroic class 
 continued to be popular, but there was already a reaction 
 against them. This produced on the one hand the now 
 forgotten tales of Madame de Villedieu (1631-1683), and on 
 the other what may be considered as the starting-point of the 
 modern novel, the works of Madame de la Fayette (La Prin- 
 
AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 85 
 
 cesse de Cleves, Zai'de). Madame de la Fayette (1633-1693) 
 was a great friend of La Rochefoucauld and of Madame de 
 Sevigne' ; her novels are not remarkable for vigour, but have 
 plenty of delicate character-drawing, and are perhaps the first 
 which aim strictly at the delineation of actual and probable 
 life and sentiment, without regard to the conventions of 
 the romance. But the best fiction of the time in point of 
 absolute literary goodness is to be found in short stories, and 
 especially in the fairy tales, for which there was a great 
 demand towards the close of the century. Such things have 
 never been better done than in the works of Charles Perrault 
 (1628-1703) and Anthony Hamilton (1640-1720), while 
 those of Madame d'Aulnoy (d. 1705), though perhaps in- 
 ferior in literary art, preserve very happily the simplicity and 
 grace of the original myths. All these prose tale-tellers, 
 however, fall far short of the literary eminence of the verse 
 tale-teller La Fontaine (1621-1695), who ranks among the 
 men of letters of the period above Racine, and only below 
 Moliere. La Fontaine was a man of curious personal char- 
 acter. Absent, indifferent, and generally childlike in tastes 
 and sympathies, but possessed of a fine literary taste and 
 a rare literary faculty, he ranks as a direct descendant of 
 the old fabliau-writers, and may indeed be described as the 
 best fabliau-writer the world has ever produced. His two 
 great works are different in subject but not dissimilar in 
 manner and merit His Contes are for the most part taken 
 from older prose and verse originals, and often deal with 
 matters not exactly edifying; but the wonderful narrative 
 grace, the sly humour of the comment, the ingenuity of the 
 moral reflections, and the knowledge of human nature which, 
 like Goldsmith (also a kind of baby and plaything to his 
 intimates), La Fontaine possessed, appear in every page. The 
 same qualities without the drawbacks also appear in the 
 
86 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Fables by which he is most known. This difficult kind of 
 work, in which the writer has to be simple without being 
 trivial, and wise without giving himself airs of wisdom, has 
 never been so well done as by La Fontaine. 
 
 Perhaps in no period of history have preachers and theo- 
 logians played such an important part, from the literary 
 point of view, as in the age of Louis XIV. The inclination 
 of the time to purely abstract speculation had not yet 
 generally taken a freethinking turn, nor was it checked in 
 handling questions of controversy by the presence of active 
 religious conflicts. Until the close of the century the Pro- 
 testants were quietly tolerated in France, and the quarrel be- 
 tween the Jansenists and Jesuits was only after a time carried 
 out of the range of literature by the interference of the 
 secular arm. The king's defence of the Gallican Church 
 against Ultramontanism, too, communicated to theology in 
 France the national spirit which has always been of more 
 importance as a motive in that country than in almost any 
 other. The greatest of all the sacred orators of modern 
 times, Bossuet (1627-1704), stands at the head of the 
 literary theologians of the day in France. Bossuet's general 
 manner was of a grand and almost rough stateliness, holding 
 strongly by the Biblical style, and indulging but little in the 
 minor graces and elegances of language. Something of the 
 same kind was characteristic of Bourdaloue (1632-1704), 
 while Fiddlier (1632-1710) and Mascaron (1634-1703) 
 approach nearer to the model of sixteenth-century writers, 
 and abound in learned citations and quaint ornaments of 
 rhetoric. On the other side, the Protestants Claude (1617 
 1687) and Saurin (1677-1730) deserve notice in this con- 
 nection. The most famous of pulpit orators next to Bos- 
 suet was of a somewhat younger generation. Massillon 
 (1663-1742) preached his most brilliant sermon on the 
 
AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 87 
 
 death of Louis XIV, and survived his subject full thirty years. 
 His style was more elegant and persuasive than that of the 
 authors already mentioned. Fe'nelon (1651-1715) has been 
 postponed because his genius was less purely ecclesiastical 
 and theological than that of the others. Bossuet indeed 
 wrote a sketch of universal history, but it was entirely from 
 the theological point of view. Fdnelon's works were of a 
 much more miscellaneous character. His famous romance 
 of Telemaque has perhaps been read by more foreigners than 
 any other French book published during the last two 
 centuries and a half, not excepting the tragedies of Racine 
 or the fables of La Fontaine. His political wisdom was 
 great, and his views on the state of France accurate and 
 far-sighted. Almost alone of his contemporaries he regarded 
 with dislike and suspicion the innovating and restrictive 
 criticism which had begun with Malherbe and had cul- 
 minated in Boileau. Though himself a most correct and 
 elegant writer, according to the current standard of elegance 
 and correctness, he regretted the rich vocabulary and daring 
 attempts of the Pl&ade, and prophesied that the result of the 
 modem theory could only in the long run be poverty and 
 constraint. 
 
 Last of the long array of subjects must be mentioned 
 philosophy, proper and applied. The brilliant work of 
 Descartes had made a durable impression on the century, 
 and all the prominent thinkers were for a time Cartesians. 
 The Cartesian philosophy was, it must be remembered, a 
 highly idealist philosophy, and it thus lent itself almost 
 equally to cultivation in connection with or in neglect of 
 religion. The greatest of the religious philosophers (one 
 of the greatest of all philosophers as far as the history of 
 literature has to do with philosophy) was Malebranche (1631 
 1715). His great work, the Recherche de la Verite, is written in 
 
88 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 one of the clearest and most beautiful of styles so much so, 
 that notwithstanding its highly abstract character, and the 
 absence of any deliberate attempt to conciliate the reader by 
 ornament and illustration, it is delightful to read. Clearness 
 and precision were indeed of the essence of the philosophy of 
 Descartes, but few writers succeed in associating with them 
 so great a literary charm as Malebranche. On the sceptical 
 side, the greatest literary representative of philosophy was 
 Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), nominally a Cartesian in philo- 
 sophy and a Protestant in religion, but really a sceptic on 
 almost all points of intellectual interest. Bayle's chief work 
 is his Dictionary, which is not 'a lexicon but a kind of very 
 unmethodical encyclopaedia, . giving an account of and dis- 
 cussing various controverted points, or points of general in- 
 terest, in history, literature, philosophy, and religion. It was 
 one of the earliest books of the kind, and had a very great 
 influence both from the amount of information it contained 
 and from the freshness and piquancy of its ironical doubt. 
 Regarded purely from the point of style, Bayle is not worthy 
 to be ranked with the best of the writers already mentioned, 
 but his importance in literary history is very great, because 
 he acted as teacher to a large number of writers who gave 
 tone and character to the next age in literature as well as in 
 philosophy. The desultory character of his work is also 
 significant of the taste of the day for miscellaneous literary 
 undertakings. The litterateur of all work was a creation of 
 the time, and a good example of this class was Thomas 
 Corneille (1625-1709), the younger brother of Pierre, who 
 was a voluminous play-writer, a journalist, a grammarian, 
 and an editor of gazetteers. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 THE literature which is usually spoken of as the literature 
 of the eighteenth century in France, does not in reality 
 extend in point of time of composition over the whole of 
 the hundred years between 1*700 and 1800. It is confined to 
 the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI ; nor does its palmy 
 time even cover the whole of this interval of seventy or eighty 
 years. Like the last years of the reign of Louis XIV, the 
 first years of that of his great grandson were very % unfruitful 
 in literature, and the Revolution did not at first produce 
 much literary work of interest or of value. Until the third or 
 fourth decade of the century was reached there are few names 
 of mark except those of some long-lived survivors of the 
 former age. So also, after the death of Voltaire and Rousseau 
 in 1778 little of value was produced for many years. Thus 
 the literary activity of the time, one of the most influential if 
 not the most intrinsically valuable of all literary periods, may 
 almost be limited to the manhood and old age of Voltaire. 
 
 There is a good deal more in this limitation than mere 
 chronological coincidence. The eighteenth century in France 
 is, from the literary point of view, more emphatically the age 
 of Voltaire than any other literary period can be said to be 
 the age of any single man. Not merely did Francois Marie 
 Arouet, called Voltaire (1694-1778), actually attempt almost 
 
90 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 every branch of literature with great success, but the spirit 
 which animated most if not all of his work was emphatically 
 the spirit of the age. This spirit was one of restless and 
 irreverent, though often very well-meaning, questioning of 
 all sorts of established beliefs and institutions. The ' Philo- 
 sophers/ as the prevailing school of men in letters in France 
 were rather loosely called, were not content or disposed to take 
 anything on trust. In physics and metaphysics they attacked 
 the accepted principles of Descartes with the aid of the 
 English ideas of Locke and Newton. In politics they 
 affected admiration of the English system of representative 
 government and of limited monarchy. In ecclesiastical 
 matters they assailed the enormous wealth and political pre- 
 ponderance of the Church of Rome in France, while many of 
 them went further and questioned the truths of Christianity, 
 not a few advancing to the utmost length and ridiculing all 
 belief in the supernatural as superstitious. In history they 
 attempted for the first time to trace out general laws and 
 to systematise investigation. In natural science they were 
 untiringly, if perhaps not always very wisely, inquisitive. It 
 is rather curious that in pure literature this innovating spirit 
 should have given place to the profoundest distrust of inno- 
 vation, and to the most implicit belief in the sanctity of 
 constituted authorities. The very men who most admired 
 the English constitution and the ideas of Newton and Locke, 
 for the most part regarded Milton as a tiresome preacher 
 and Shakespeare as a sometimes inspired lunatic. Dis- 
 trusting artificial forms of government and traditional beliefs 
 in religion, they accepted unquestioningly the most arbitrary 
 and artificial forms of poetry and the drama that have ever 
 prevailed. Even in prose fiction comparatively little advance 
 was made, and it was left to England to lead the way in this 
 respect also. Hence the fictitious literature of the period in 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 91 
 
 prose and verse is perhaps the least important of all its 
 contributions to literary history, if we except the short prose 
 tales which French for five centuries had rarely lacked. The 
 strength of French eighteenth- century literature does not 
 therefore lie in those branches where the form is of most 
 importance, but in those where the matter is chiefly con- 
 sidered. Indeed almost every kind of composition was made 
 to subserve the general purpose of attacking or at least 
 questioning existing institutions. Five great names emerge . 
 in the course of the century, those of Montesquieu, Voltaire, 
 Rousseau, Diderot, and Buffon. These we shall treat in 
 the order named, with the lesser writers who are more or 
 less to be grouped with each. But first it is necessary to 
 give an account of those older authors, who fill the space 
 between the age of Louis XIV and the age of the Encyclo- 
 paedia as it is sometimes termed. In the same way, after 
 passing in review the five names just mentioned, we must 
 notice such isolated authors as fall out of these groups. To 
 observe the distinction of subjects in this period is, in a brief 
 review, hardly possible, inasmuch as very many of the writers 
 to be treated attempted many different classes of composition' 
 and Voltaire, the chief of them, attempted nearly every class 
 The chief writer of the transition period in merit is un- 
 doubtedly Le Sage (1668-1747), the author of the famous 
 novels Le Diable Boiteux and . Gil Bias, and of a play, less 
 read in England, but of great merit, Turcaret, besides a large 
 number of other works. Le Sage, who presents some remark- 
 able analogies to our own Fielding, had little in common with 
 his contemporaries in his own country except wit and polish 
 of style. It is significant that his two chief prose works both 
 have their scenes laid out of France, and he is distinguished 
 rather for his knowledge of human nature at large than for 
 his special sympathy with the peculiarities of Frenchmen. 
 
92 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 It is to this no doubt that his wide popularity in foreign 
 countries is due. Gil Bias in particular has an almost 
 Shakespearian quality of universal application, while at the 
 same time the local colour, as it is called, of Spanish manners 
 is strictly observed. Next in importance to Le Sage, but of 
 a widely different character and a less original genius, was 
 Fontenelle (1657-1757), the nephew of Corneille, a man of 
 great acuteness and literary faculty, who, after attempting 
 more independent kinds of work with out much success, became 
 a famous populariser of scientific and philosophical theories, 
 and an almost unmatched composer of the half critical, half 
 rhetorical treatises which the institution of the Academy 
 made popular and profitable in France. His chief work is 
 Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes. Two poets of an 
 artificial kind but not destitute of talent, Chaulieu (1639- 
 1720) and La Fare (1644-1712), also belong to this period, 
 and so in part does J. B. Rousseau (1670-1741), to be 
 carefully distinguished from the more famous J. J. Rousseau. 
 J. B. Rousseau was the best writer of the artificial lyric 
 poetry which was alone possible on the principles of Boileau. 
 His best work is of two curiously different kinds, one con- 
 sisting of sacred odes and Cantates taken from Biblical 
 sources, the other of epigrams of great wit and point. La 
 Motte (16721731) was a writer of somewhat the same class 
 as Fontenelle, but whereas the latter had entirely failed in 
 tragedy, La Motte produced, in Ines de Castro, a play which 
 had a great deal of success. He was, like all his contem- 
 poraries, a much better prose writer than poet, though few 
 of his works in prose are of a kind to tempt the modern 
 reader, consisting as they do chiefly of academical essays, 
 controversies, and paradoxes, of the same kind as Fontenelle's. 
 The comic series of Moliere and Regnard was continued, 
 with not more than proportionate falling off, by Destouches 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 
 
 (1680-1754) (Le Glorieux y Le Philosophe Marie'}, and a 
 single tragedian, Crdbillon (1674-1763), succeeded, by taking 
 up the tradition of Corneille rather than of Racine, in pro- 
 ducing work (especially in his Rhadamiste) of real dramatic 
 and poetical value. Racine's son Louis (1692-1763) was a 
 poet after a fashion, who studied Milton and wrote religious 
 verse; and the Chancellor d'Aguesseau (1668-1^51) revived, 
 after a long period of eclipse, the reputation of French 
 lawyers for cultivated eloquence. Nor perhaps should it be 
 forgotten that Saint-Simon in point of time, though not of 
 style and subject, rather belongs to this age than to the 
 foregoing. 
 
 The first writer of great eminence belonging properly to 
 the eighteenth century was Charles de Se'condat, better known 
 by his title of Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), a gentle- 
 man of good birth in Guienne, and belonging to one of 
 those families who were called in France noblesse de robe, 
 from their continual and hereditary connection with the 
 parliaments or provincial courts of law. Montesquieu was a 
 great thinker and a great writer. His Lettres Persanes follow 
 a favourite practice of the century, in satirising European 
 manners and institutions by the mouth of an Eastern traveller, 
 and in this, as in some minor works, he allows himself a 
 certain amount of complaisance to the fashions and tastes of 
 the time. His fame however rests upon his graver works, 
 the Grandeur et Decadence des Romains and the Esprit des 
 Lot's, especially the latter. The ' Spirit of Laws ' is one of 
 the first books of any modern language which deal with his- 
 tory and politics on a wide system of philosophical enquiry. 
 It is sometimes a little rhetorical in style, and very often its 
 generalisations are a great deal too wide, but it is on the 
 whole a very remarkable work, still calculated to stimulate 
 the mind, especially in youth, to the taking of large and 
 
94 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 comprehensive views. Moreover it is delightful from its 
 literary merit and its independence of thought, even when 
 the insecure basis of some of its speculations is fully acknow- 
 ledged and understood. Round Montesquieu may be grouped 
 several lesser men who also attempted philosophical estimates 
 of politics and history, but without the careful study as well 
 as without the genius of the author of the Esprit des Lois. 
 That work is, among its many remarkable characteristics, 
 especially remarkable for the absence of the ignorant con- 
 tempt for the political institutions of the middle ages which 
 was fashionable, as a consequence, in part, of the equally 
 ignorant contempt inculcated by Boileau for their literature. 
 In historical matters the chief representative of this contempt 
 was the Abb6 de Mably (1709-1785), a writer of some merit, 
 but who did a great deal of harm by his indiscriminate 
 laudations of Greek and Roman institutions and manners. 
 Mably was perhaps more responsible than any other single 
 person for the nonsense talked in the days of the Revolution 
 at popular clubs and assemblies about Brutus and Harmodius 
 and Leonidas, and other misused heroes of antiquity. His 
 Entreiiens de Phocion is his principal work. A much greater 
 man than Mably, and also a much more profound thinker, 
 was Turgot (1727-1781), who perhaps came nearer than 
 Montesquieu to the full philosophical conception of history 
 and historical development. His style is not remarkable, but 
 his matter is. Turgot conducts us at the extremity of the 
 century to Condorcet (1743-1794), his chief disciple, an 
 eloquent writer, but much less original than his master. 
 Turgot's works were principally short essays or discourses ; 
 Condorcet's chief production is his Esquisse des Progres de 
 I Esprit Humain. Voltaire (between whom and Montesquieu 
 there was not a little jealousy) had less originality and range 
 of thought than his rival, but a much more miscellaneous 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 
 
 equipment of literary attainments. He wrote almost every- 
 thing, long and short poems, plays, novels, imaginary con- 
 versations, literary criticism, histories of greater or less 
 length ; and last, but not least, a desultory composition called 
 a ' Philosophical Dictionary/ having some resemblance to 
 Bayle's, but more definitely intended to stimulate religious 
 doubt and disbelief. Voltaire was not an ardent reformer in 
 politics, though and this is the best point in his personal 
 character he was a most ardent defender of individuals who 
 suffered from social and political abuses. His great literary 
 weapon was ridicule, and this he could apply in almost every 
 form and to almost every kind of subject. In purely serious 
 work he was decidedly less successful. He began, as perhaps 
 most writers of great talent have begun, with poetry, but, 
 unlike the majority, he continued to practise it, and in many 
 different kinds. Master as he was of ridicule, he seldom tried 
 comedy, and his comedies are not good. But his first tragedy 
 fidipe, was extremely and not undeservedly successful, and the 
 best of his subsequent performances in the same kind (Zaire ', 
 Ahire, Mahomet) rank among the very best tragedies of the 
 artificial kind. His so-called epic, the Henriade, is a very 
 dreary poem ; but he was a master of the lighter poetic forms, 
 and in short satires, verse epistles, and the like, has but few 
 , superiors. Le 'pauvre Diable and Le Mondain, satires ranging 
 over a wide social and literary field, may be especially men- 
 tioned. It is however as a prose writer, not as a poet, that 
 Voltaire best deserves his fame, and his performances in prose 
 are even more miscellaneous than his performances in poetry. 
 In absolute literary merit nothing probably that he has done 
 exceeds his short romances, or rather tales, the best-known 
 of which, and the best where all are good, are Candide and 
 Zadig. For polished wit, knowledge of human nature, and 
 adroit literary composition, these are masterpieces. His short 
 
g6 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 histories (Charles XII, Peter the Great) are also excellent of 
 their kind, and his longer works of a historical or semi- 
 historical kind (Siede de Louis XIV, Essai sur les Mceurs) 
 are not inferior. There is however no possibility of here 
 going through half of Voltaire's titles to literary distinction. 
 Although given to violent resentment against those who 
 attacked him, he was very well disposed towards literary 
 beginners who looked to him for patronage, and in almost 
 all of his lines of work he had followers and disciples. The 
 most remarkable of these perhaps were Florian (1755-1794) 
 and Marmontel (1728-1799), both of whom wrote light prose 
 and verse of very various kinds. Marmonters best-known 
 works are Belisaire and Les Incas\ Florian's, Numa Pompilius 
 and Gonsalve de Cordoue, besides fables and suchlike trifles. 
 The titles of these works indicate a favourite habit of the 
 time, which was partly due to the example and popularity of 
 Te'le'maque. This habit consisted of writing what we should 
 now call historical novels with a purpose, the purpose being 
 more or less definitely to inculcate the moral and philoso- 
 phical ideas of the day. Under this head, though not quite 
 in the same class, may be mentioned the Abbe Barthelemy 
 (1716-1795), whose Voyages du jeune Anacharsis once had 
 a considerable vogue. 
 
 A third great single name, and that of a man who had 
 perhaps more practical influence than any one else in the 
 latter part of the century, and on subsequent literature, is that 
 of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1713-1778). An unhappy man, 
 of melancholy temperament and weak will, Rousseau was 
 the undoubted literary originator of what has since been 
 known as sentimentalism. He found everything to be, as it 
 seemed to him, wrong in society, and he set himself to preach 
 that all should be altered. Men were to return to nature, 
 political society was to be directly based on a social contract, 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 97 
 
 education was to teach not accomplishments or learning 
 but useful arts, the affections and emotions were to be given 
 the fullest play. These principles Rousseau enunciated 
 and illustrated in a series of works very different from 
 one another in form. Sometimes they were novels (Julie, 
 Emile), and the first of these enjoyed such a popularity 
 as probably no novel had ever enjoyed before. Some- 
 times they were regular philosophical discourses (Le Contrat 
 social), sometimes meditations or essays or autobiography 
 (Lettres de la Montague, Promenades d'un Solitaire, Les Con- 
 fessions). The language, if not as academically correct as 
 was usual at the time, was singularly flexible and affecting, 
 full of elaborate description of nature and of analysis of the 
 strangest, and sometimes the meanest, parts of human cha- 
 racter. On literature, on politics, on private manners and 
 morals, Rousseau exercised a vast and almost unequalled 
 influence. 
 
 As a preacher of the love of nature, and a describer of 
 natural beauty, his mission was taken up by Bernardin de 
 St. Pierre (1737-1814), who, with considerably less literary 
 faculty, and infinitely less power and originality of mind, had 
 the advantage of a wider experience and a less unhappy 
 temperament. Like many of the authors already mentioned, 
 Bernardin de St. Pierre has enjoyed the advantage of being 
 very widely read, at least in his masterpiece. Paul et Vir- 
 gtnie ranks with Te'ttmaque as a book of general reading. 
 
 When Voltaire and Rousseau are mentioned, another 
 name is frequently associated with them the name of 
 Denis Diderot (1713-1784). The importance of this writer 
 is manifold, but lies perhaps chiefly in the realm of literary 
 criticism. Voltaire was almost entirely conservative in this 
 respect, and Rousseau cared less for the forms of literature 
 than for the moral and sentimental ideas which it could be 
 
98 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 made to express. But Diderot, though himself a careless 
 and very unequal writer, was an excellent and a most original 
 critic, and he did perhaps more than any one else to lay the 
 critical and formal foundations of the new school of literature 
 which arose after his death, and in Germany even before it. 
 His works are very voluminous, almost as much so as 
 Voltaire's, and though inferior in elegance and perfection of 
 workmanship to these latter, are far fuller of really original 
 thought. They consist of plays (Le Fih Nature?), of essays 
 on all sorts of subjects, chiefly philosophical, of art criticisms 
 on the exhibitions of the Paris salon which are among the 
 earliest and best examples of this class of literature, of novels 
 (La Religieuse\ and of a great many pieces almost im- 
 possible to class, the chief of which, and of all Diderot's 
 works, is a singular character-sketch called Le Neveu de 
 Rameau. But the bulkiest and perhaps the most influential 
 of Diderot's literary undertakings was the famous Ency- 
 clopedie, in which he, with the assistance of almost all the 
 greatest writers of France, undertook at once to give the 
 world information upon all arts and sciences, and (indirectly) 
 to attack what seemed to reformers the drawbacks of the 
 existing system of church and state in France. His chief 
 coadjutor in this undertaking was D'Alembert (1717-1783), 
 a great mathematician and an accomplished writer ; but, as 
 we have said, almost all French men of letters, except the 
 few who were on the orthodox and conservative side, and 
 some even of these, assisted. 
 
 The names of these and other distinguished writers of a 
 more or less practical or philosophical kind are so numerous 
 that it is only possible to give them a brief mention. Con- 
 dillac (1714-1780), the chief French metaphysician of the 
 time, was a follower of Locke, who carried that philosopher's 
 principles still further, and wrote in a clear and luminous 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 99 
 
 manner. Helve'tius (1715-1771) was a lively essayist who 
 expounded what is called the selfish system of morals, in 
 a book entitled De ? Esprit, and couched in the form of a 
 regular philosophical treatise, though possessing little of the 
 gravity usually expected in such work. Three abbe's, 
 Raynal (1711-1796), Galiani (1728-1787), and Morellet, 
 wrote, the first on history, the second on political economy, 
 and the third on miscellaneous subjects. Almost all the 
 philosophical writing of this time is of the kind called mate- 
 rialist. A distinguished writer of this class, not yet mentioned, 
 but earlier than most of those who have been mentioned, 
 was La Mettrie (1709-1751), in whom many of the worser 
 features of the time were illustrated, but who occasionally 
 thought with much originality, and wrote (L'Homme Machine) 
 with vividness and force. 
 
 The last of the five names set apart for special mention is 
 that of George Louis Leclerc, Comte de BufFon (1707-1788), 
 and like the others he may be set at the head of a class. 
 Great part of the enquiring energy of the time was given to 
 physical science, and Buffon was among the first who set 
 the example of treating such subjects with attention to 
 literary form. His style is pompous and rhetorical, wanting 
 in directness and precision, and especially in what is called 
 the mot propre, that is to say, simple graphic phrase without 
 roundabout amplifications. But at its best, it is very 
 eloquent and sonorous, partaking rather of the qualities of 
 oratory than of written work. Buffon is still recognised as 
 the chief master in French of this elaborate and artificial 
 style. His Histoire Naturelle, a great work, in which he was 
 assisted by humbler men, is his main production. Among 
 other writers on physical subjects may be noticed here 
 Maupertuis (1690-1759), and La Condamine (1701-1774), 
 both of them geographical explorers as well as scientific 
 
 H 2 
 
100 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 students. The former, though not a despicable writer, is 
 chiefly famous in literature for having been the butt of 
 Voltaire's satire. The latter wrote an interesting account 
 of his travels in South America. 
 
 Of names that do not readily fall under any of the groups 
 yet mentioned, the following are the most important. In 
 poetry the period was occupied, leaving Voltaire and his 
 direct followers out of the question, by two pretty numerously 
 attended schools, and by one or two single figures. One of 
 the schools was that of writers of trifling vers de socie'tt 
 mostly in a very artificial style, but often possessing con- 
 siderable literary merit. Such writers were Bernis (1715- 
 1794), Gentil Bernard (1710-1775), Boufflers (1737-1815), 
 and Dorat (1734-1780). To these 'glow-worms of Par- 
 nassus,' as they were called, may be opposed another school 
 of Anacreontic poets and epigrammatists who wrote songs, 
 chiefly in praise of love and wine, light operas, etc. The 
 chief of all these was Piron (1689-1773), a writer of great 
 talent who very seldom made a good use of it. 00116 
 (1709-1783) and Panard (1694-1765) also deserve mention. 
 Malfilatre (1733-1767) was a lyric poet of some merit, and 
 Gilbert (1751-1780), who also died young, and perhaps in 
 poverty, displayed not a little satiric faculty. Cresset 
 (1709-1777), the author of Ver-verf, was however the chief 
 minor poet of the time, and his masterpiece, the burlesque 
 history of a parrot, is excellent. In drama, besides the 
 names of La Chausse'e (1692-1754), the inventor of what 
 was called comedie larmoyante, or sentimental comedy, 
 Marivaux (1688-1763), the novelist (Les Fausses Confiances), 
 and especially Seclaine (1717-1779) (Le Philosophe sans le 
 Savoir), must be mentioned. Gresset, also wrote an excellent 
 comedy (Le Merchant), and Piron one hardly inferior (La 
 Metromanie). Among fiction writers the first place goes to the 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CE1JTUR1 . IOI 
 
 Abb6 Provost (1697-1763), who among nuicii unequal -work 
 produced a masterpiece of truth and pathos in Manon 
 Lescaut, an immense advance on Madame de la Fayette's 
 books, and hardly to be distinguished from the best modern 
 novels. Marivaux's Marianne is good, and many writers of 
 the time contributed to fictitious literature short tales after 
 the fashion of Voltaire. An independent and striking moral- 
 ist of the first half of the century was Vauvenargues (1715- 
 1747), a man of rank, but not of fortune, who served in the 
 army and died young, leaving a collection of maxims of 
 great literary and philosophical merit. Thomas (i73 2 ~ I 795) 
 was a writer of the academic discourses already noticed, and 
 his works have ceased to be read, though they have merit as 
 examples of the somewhat declamatory eloquence popular 
 at the time. The Abbe* Gue'ne'e (1717-1803), in his Lettres 
 de Quelques fuifs, attacked the inaccuracies and blunders in 
 which Voltaire too often indulged, with great wit and ability, 
 and was indeed the chief worthy defender that orthodoxy had. 
 Another great enemy of Voltaire was the critic Fre'ron 
 (1718-1776), an acute though ill-tempered writer, to whom 
 after a long period something like justice has been recently 
 done. The presidents, Renault (1685-1770), and De 
 Brosses (1706-1777) chiefly busied themselves with classical 
 antiquity, the subjects connected with which both treated 
 with considerable literary skill. Letter and memoir writing 
 were still pursued, though on the whole with diminished 
 success. The best memoirs of the century are probably those 
 of Madame de Staal-Delaunay (1693-1750), the best letters 
 beyond all comparison those of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
 (1732-1776), a great friend of D'Alembert's. These latter 
 are of an impassioned character, and of their kind are not 
 to be surpassed in any literature. Among' historians of 
 different kinds, Rollin (1661-1741) may be mentioned as 
 
103 FR&MB LITERATURE. 
 
 ari example 'of carefui labburj and Rulhiere (1735-1791) of 
 literary skill. The latter produced, in Les Revolutions de Russie, 
 a short historical work of great elegance, and in his book on 
 the dismemberment of Poland one of greater importance, 
 but which unfortunately was not finally completed by the 
 author. Rulhiere, it should be said, was also a minor poet 
 of considerable merits, though like many of his contempo- 
 raries he did not make the most amiable use of his talent. 
 
 Such is the summary, brief and necessarily imperfect, of 
 the literature of this remarkable period of history. With the 
 exception of the Esprit des Lot's, it comprises no work which 
 unites literary merit, importance of scale, and practical value 
 of contents in an extraordinarily high degree, but the number 
 and multiplicity of its remarkable names and its remarkable 
 books is very considerable. This number, as well as their 
 comparative want of literary importance, at once necessitates 
 and excuses a briefer review than has hitherto been given. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. 
 
 FRENCH literature from the Revolution to the Restoration, 
 or, to adopt more precise and accurate literary dates, from 
 the death of Voltaire to the appearance of Lamartine, divides 
 itself conveniently enough into two periods, the first of which 
 contains a number of remarkable names, but none of the 
 first rank ; the second four or five of the first importance, but 
 very few others to whom even the third or fourth can be 
 assigned. The first period extends in point of time to the 
 quenching of the most sanguinary civil dissensions at the 
 incoming of the Directory ; the second continues thence- 
 forward. To the first class belong the names of Beau- 
 marchais, Chamfort, Rivarol, Delille, Roucher, Volney, La_ 
 Harpe and Chdnjer ; to the second those of Chateaubriand 
 and De Stael, with, at the extreme end of it and by a certain 
 license, BeTanger, Joubert, and Courier. It is remarkable 
 that, with the doubtful exceptions of Che'nier and Beaumar- 
 chais, no one- of the first set (who may be generally described 
 as a younger generation of philosophes) produced work 
 which has continued to be highly valued, though all of them 
 well deserve a place in literary history, as writers, and in some 
 cases thinkers, of power. Their defect was that, with the 
 single exception of Che'nier, they merely followed up the 
 tracks of others. Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was in some 
 
104 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 sense an inheritor of Voltaire in his talent for the attacking 
 of social abuses with light and lively satire. But Beaumar- 
 chais' struggles with the legal iniquities of the Ancien Regime 
 were purely selfish, and thus ill replaced Voltaire's defences 
 of Galas and Servan and Lally. Le Mariage de Figaro, which 
 is Beaumarchais' strongest title to fame, is a clever satirical 
 drama of society, and has had its truth to nature testified to 
 by a popularity, in one form or another, of nearly a century; 
 but its attractions are not by any means purely literary. 
 Chamfort (1747-1794) and Rivarol (1753-1801) represented 
 another side of Voltaire's talent. They excelled especially in 
 what may be called drawing-room wit, scandalous stories, 
 epigrams, and detached aphorisms having reference to the 
 gossip of the moment and the political accidents of the 
 hour. Chamfort inclined to the Republican side, Rivarol to 
 the Royalist. Both attempted literary criticism, Rivarol not 
 without a good deal of success, while Chamfort wrote plays 
 which are deservedly forgotten. Their real titles to remem- 
 brance are those of anecdote-mongers and epigrammatists. 
 Rivarol in the latter capacity, and Chamfort in the former, 
 need fear hardly any competition. A contemporary and 
 rival of theirs in the formal essays on literary and other sub- 
 jects which at this time engrossed a large share of the atten- 
 tion of literary men, was La Harpe (1739-1803), a disciple 
 of the philosophes who outlived most of his contemporaries, 
 and held for a time something like the position which Mal- 
 herbe had occupied at the beginning and Boileau at the end 
 of the seventeenth century. La Harpe's principles of criticism 
 were not altogether different from those of these masters of 
 classicism, and his work has therefore lost much of its value, 
 though the writer was very far from being destitute of talent. 
 The poets of the time constituted what is known as the 
 descriptive school, which was strongly influenced by English 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. 105 
 
 poetry. The chief of them, Delille (1738-1813), was a man 
 of considerable literary powers, who simply devoted himself 
 to description, in verse of the artificial kind then alone 
 favoured, of everything in nature and art that could possibly 
 be described. Delille's style was much better suited for 
 translation than for original composition, and his version 
 of the Georgics has considerable merit. Earlier than Delille, 
 however, the example of this poetry had been set by Saint- 
 Lambert (1707-1783), an industrious contributor to the 
 Encyclopedic and in other ways a man of mark. He imitated 
 Thomson's Seasons, in a poem of the same name, with great 
 applause. The best of the poets of this school, though at 
 no time the most popular, were probably Roucher (1745 
 1794) and Le Mierre (1733-1793), the former of whom in 
 Les Mois, and the latter in Les Fastes, displayed not a little 
 poetical fancy. This fancy was unfortunately employed for 
 the most part in unpromising directions. A poet of great 
 reputation at this time was Lebrun (1729-1807), who took 
 up rather the tradition of J. B. Rousseau than of any other 
 singer, and imitated his model both in elaborate odes of a 
 so-called lyrical kind, and in epigrams. Lebrun, whom the 
 ignorance and pseudo-classical fancies of the time absurdly 
 united to call l Pindar/ was a man of real, though as in the 
 case of nearly all his fellows, of misdirected talent. A 
 better, though a still more unequal poet, was Parny (1753- 
 1814), whose early elegiac work attracted and deserved the 
 notice of Voltaire. Parny, like many other French men of 
 letters of distinction, was a native of the colonies, and his 
 first work has a freshness of character as well as a grace of 
 form which contrasts very pleasantly with the hackneyed 
 mannerisms of his contemporaries. Unluckily, as he became 
 older he became a much feebler writer, and fell into some of 
 the worst fashions of the time. Similar to his early elegies 
 
106 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 was the work of his friend and fellow Creole, Bertin (1752- 
 1790). 
 
 Among these mediocrities or wasted talents, the figure of 
 Andre* Che'mer (1762-1794) stands out very remarkably. 
 With modern Greek blood in his veins, and himself a dili- 
 gent student of the ancient tongue, Che'nier sought to trans- 
 fuse the spirit of that language into French verse, but 
 neglected to fashion a new vocabulary and new metres for 
 his purpose. Hence his work is of a singular character, the 
 ideas and spirit being wholly different from those of his con- 
 temporaries, though the form is, outwardly at least, not to 
 any remarkable extent dissimilar. His brother, M. J. Che'nier 
 (1764-1811), was a writer of talent in verse and prose, but 
 far inferior to Andre, who perished by the guillotine in the 
 last days of the Terror. M. J. Chenier lived to write dramatic 
 works of doubtful merit, to take an active part in journalism, 
 and to help, at least as a master of literary study, in the 
 revival of old French literature. The weakest branch of 
 French poetry at this time, though it was the most popular, 
 was the drama. It has already been pointed out that the 
 great drawback of the standard French tragedy was the 
 confined character of its scheme, and the absence of any 
 opportunity for the display of complicated incident or char- 
 acter. When, as was now the case, it had been constantly 
 practised by five or six generations of writers, the limited 
 number of scenes and situations that admitted of treatment 
 according to its rules was completely exhausted. The differ- 
 ences of the new plays as compared with the old became a 
 matter of the names of the characters mainly, and an intoler- 
 able sameness and staleness was the inevitable result. To 
 make the matter worse, the artificial system in dramatic 
 writing was extended to epic poetry, in which the French 
 had never since the middle ages been skilful or fortunate. 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. IOJ 
 
 The epic as well as the dramatic poets of the Republic and 
 the Empire were extremely numerous, but for the most part 
 of no literary value. It was in vain that Napoleon, who 
 would have liked his reign to be illustrated like that of Louis 
 XIV by literary as well as military triumphs, extended 
 patronage, or tried to do so, to literary men. Masterpieces 
 were not to be had for the asking. Here and there indeed 
 there appeared during his time of power writers of great 
 eminence, but they were either hostile to him or stood aloof 
 from him with one single exception, who had hardly begun 
 to make his mark when the Empire came to an end. Yet 
 these persons are of great importance in French literature, 
 and deserve somewhat particular notice. Joubert, Chateau- 
 briand, Madame de Sta"e"l, Paul Louis Courier, Beranger, 
 Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, are distinguished not merely 
 by great talent if not genius, but (with the exception of 
 Joubert and Beranger, who formed no new schools but were 
 rather the last and most brilliant disciples of older ones) by 
 the immense influence which they exercised on the literature, 
 and thought which came after them. 
 
 Joubert (1754-1824), was the last great pense*e-writer of 
 France, and perhaps another cannot be expected until 
 thought and speech have gone through some considerable 
 changes. He differed from his predecessors, Pascal, La 
 Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues, by including a much 
 greater variety of subjects in his short maxims. The whole 
 of a life which, though Joubert suffered from continuous 
 ill-health, was not a short one, was devoted to their 
 composition, and they were not published until after his 
 death. He has very well described his own method by 
 speaking of himself as tormented by the ambition of 'putting 
 a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase 
 into a word/ Like La Rochefoucauld, and perhaps unlike 
 
108 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 any other writer of pense'es, he has perfectly succeeded in his 
 attempt, achieving the utmost brevity without any corre-. 
 sponding sacrifice of fulness or clearness of meaning. His 
 observations on literary subjects are perhaps the best of all 
 his work, and it is remarkable that at the time at which 
 they must have been composed, literary criticism, and the 
 theory of poetical composition especially, was at the lowest 
 ebb in France. In politics, upon which he seems to have 
 thought much and strongly, he was a decided Conservative, 
 and might almost have been called a Reactionary. He had 
 early in life imbibed a distaste for the principles of the 
 philosophes, and the horrors and disturbances of the Revolu- 
 tion were not calculated to reassure a man of his tempera- 
 ment. On religion too his thoughts are noteworthy. Least 
 successful are those on the lower and more practical side of 
 morality, which perhaps requires for successful handling a 
 more active commerce with the world than Joubert enjoyed. 
 The Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) was a 
 younger son of one of the noblest Breton families, many of 
 whose members suffered in the Revolution. He himself, 
 however, had already left the country before the actual 
 disturbances broke out, and spent a considerable time in 
 America, where he travelled much in the wilder parts of the 
 country, afterwards sojourning for a time in England, and 
 returning to France under Napoleon's amnesty. His early 
 hardships assisted his temperament which was a curious 
 mixture of sentimental selfishness, poetical gloom, and 
 morbid vanity to produce the peculiar colour of his work, 
 which may be described as that of a Christian Rousseau. 
 On the one side he delighted in depicting the manners of 
 savage tribes and the scenery of their countries (Atala, Rene, 
 Les Natchez, etc.), on the other he distinguished himself as 
 the rehabilitator of Christian ideas in religion, and monar- 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. 109 
 
 chical ideas in politics. His adoption of these poetical and 
 religious views was much more of a matter of sentiment 
 than of reason. His learning was small and his powers of 
 argument very weak. But he appreciated, and eloquently 
 urged upon his contemporaries, the poetical and romantic 
 side both of Christianity and of the old monarchical and 
 aristocratic constitution. Soon his eastern voyages enabled 
 him to unite his two lines of thought, and urge his favourite 
 motives both by historical sketches and by landscape pictures. 
 He was not an amiable man, and much of his writings rings 
 very false to the ear, but he had real genius of an un- 
 common kind, and he was undoubtedly one of the chief 
 propagators of the romantic movement both indirectly and 
 directly in France as well as abroad. 
 
 Madame de Stael (1766-1817) was a daughter of the 
 celebrated financier Necker. With Chateaubriand she occu- 
 pies the foremost place in French literature between the 
 Revolution and the Restoration. By birth and early con- 
 nections she was inclined rather to the Liberal than to the 
 Conservative side, but she had the strongest family reasons 
 for disliking the extreme party of innovation in France, and 
 she was bitterly opposed to Napoleon's tyranny, an oppo- 
 sition which subjected her to not a little inconvenience. 
 Her best-known works are some early treatises of a half 
 literary, half philosophical kind; two novels, Corinne and 
 Delphine, the first of which had a great share in directing 
 French enthusiasm towards Italy and Rome ; and a book on 
 Germany, which in the same way directed the French to the 
 literature and thought of their formerly patronised and de- 
 spised neighbours. In all these works a certain superficiality 
 of thought strikes the reader now, as well as the absence of 
 grace in the style, and the presence of trite and common- 
 place expression. But they were extremely stimulating to 
 
110 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 the readers of their own time, and were of especial service 
 because they suggested to Frenchmen that their own intel- 
 lectual position was not so absolutely superior to that of 
 all other nations as they had been accustomed to think. 
 
 The strong reaction which the anti-religious and anti- 
 monarchical excesses of the revolution provoked, was repre- 
 sented in the less ornamental departments of literature by 
 two remarkable writers, De Maistre (1754-1821), and De 
 Bonald (1753-1840). These partisans of the elder order of 
 things did not, like Chateaubriand, confine themselves to a 
 kind of sentimental regret for its associations and accom- 
 paniments ; nor did they, like the Liberal school, blame the 
 Revolution for the practical tyranny which it had substituted 
 for the nominally despotic but really indulgent government of 
 the eighteenth century in France. On the contrary they 
 were absolutists of the severest type, though they reached 
 their conclusions by different roads. Both uphold what is 
 called theocracy, but with Bonald the immediate delegate 
 of God is the King, with De Maistre it is the Pope. Both 
 wrote with great energy, and frequently in a very effective 
 style, but Joseph de Maistre is, in originality of thought and 
 literary merit, far the superior of the two. 
 
 Be'ranger and Courier date in point of literary celebrity 
 considerably later than the writers just mentioned, but as 
 they lie quite outside the Romantic movement proper/and in 
 Be'ranger' s case can hardly be said to have exercised the 
 least influence upon it, they are best mentioned here. Paul 
 Louis Courier (1773-1825) served as an officer in the army 
 during several campaigns, and until he was past middle life 
 attempted no literary work, except translations from the 
 classics, especially Greek, and study of the French writers of 
 the seventeenth century. Both these studies inspired him 
 with not a little contempt of the eighteenth-century writers, 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. Ill 
 
 who had, as he saw, fallen as far away from the classics of 
 France as from the classics of Greece and Rome. It was 
 only after the Restoration that these elaborate studies in 
 language bore fruit in original work. Courier did not in the 
 least share the aristocratic and monarchical and ecclesiastical 
 reaction, and was in this respect a thorough political child 
 of the eighteenth century which in literature he despised. 
 He therefore heartily threw himself into the pamphlet war 
 which the advanced Liberal opposition kept up against the 
 Government. In point of form and style these pamphlets 
 are among the most admirable things in literature. They 
 most nearly resemble Swift's Drapiers Letters in their elabo- 
 rate simplicity and the fine irony which abounds in them, 
 but they are written with almost more delicate art. 
 
 Pierre Jean de Be'ranger (1780-1857), again, is almost 
 wholly of the past, even more so than Joubert ; for while the 
 ideas of the latter are mainly those of the nineteenth century, 
 Be'ranger is only the chief and concluding member of the 
 school of French song- writers which extends over the whole 
 of the eighteenth. These songsters sang of love and wine, of 
 politics and social follies, and Be'ranger did the same, but 
 with a more earnest purpose, a greater metrical faculty, and 
 a wider range of subject. He was an ardent devotee of the 
 Napoleonic legend, as it is called ; that is to say, the theory 
 which represents Napoleon as the greatest and most glorious 
 chief of the French nation. This, however, is most appa- 
 rent in him after the overthrow of the Empire, it being the 
 general habit of the song-writer to be in opposition. Be'- 
 ranger was sincerely attached to his country, though his 
 attachment often took the form of not very intelligent abuse 
 of other countries, and his common sense, good nature, and 
 desire to promote the welfare of France and Frenchmen as 
 he understood it deserve acknowledgment, Jt may be noted 
 
 OF THB ^ 
 
113 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 that he had learnt something from his immediate prede- 
 cessor Desaugiers (1772-1827), a fluent and musical singer, 
 who however kept to the older style of song, and is much 
 less remarkable for earnestness and purity of purpose than 
 BeVanger himself. But for this very reason he is sometimes 
 preferred to BeVanger (unjustly it must be confessed) by 
 those who differ from the younger singer on political points, 
 or who think that a song-writer ought not to touch serious 
 subjects at all. 
 
 A few other writers deserve mention. Se'nancour (1770- 
 1846) was a meditative writer of some originality and 
 more suggestiveness, belonging to the school of dissatisfied 
 sentimentalists. Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), a famous 
 parliamentary orator and politician, belongs to literature 
 as well as to politics, and wrote novels and philosophical 
 treatises as well as numerous pamphlets on the Liberal 
 side. This side was also espoused by a considerable 
 number of philosopher-statesmen whose principal aim was 
 not, as that of the philosophes of the eighteenth century 
 proper had been, to destroy, but rather to build up. The chief 
 of these was Royer Collard (1763-1846). This philosophical 
 school, resting chiefly on the Scottish school of metaphysics, 
 produced not a few writers of merit. In a very different 
 order of literature, Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852), the 
 younger brother of Joseph, wrote his charming Voyage 
 autour de ma Chambre, a model of discursive writing which 
 has been frequently imitated since. The same writer, in Le 
 Le'preux de la Cite* d'Aosfe, attempted the narrative more 
 definitely, and may be joined to a small band of novelists of 
 the time of the Empire, of whom Fie've'e (1767-1839) is 
 perhaps the chief, and who anticipated in some degree the 
 immense development which prose fiction was shortly to 
 receive. H. Beyle (1783-1842), who wrote under the name 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE RESTORATION. 113 
 
 of Stendhal, began the novel of psychological analysis. His 
 work (La Chartreuse de Par me, De I' Amour) had great in- 
 fluence both on his younger contemporaries and on later 
 writers, and is very remarkable both in style and substance. 
 The dramatists of the Empire, as of the Republic, were 
 of so little value that in the present sketch it is unnecessary 
 to burden the page with their names. But one of them, 
 Nepomucene Lemercier (1771-1840), was also a poet, and 
 in both capacities showed a considerable if unequal talent. 
 Another poet of the time deserving a passing mention is 
 Che'nedolle' (1769-1833), nor perhaps should Fontanes 
 (1757-1821) and Arnault be left out. The former is chiefly 
 of importance to the history of literature because he was 
 under the Empire charged with the patronage of it by 
 Napoleon, and did his best to encourage men of talent and 
 faculty superior to his own. Arnault (1766-1834) was a 
 graceful writer of fables. This style of composition has 
 always enjoyed a considerable popularity in France, a popu- 
 larity which may be presumed to be due in part to that of 
 La Fontaine's masterpieces, and to the natural emulation and 
 imitation which these have excited in succeeding writers of 
 the last two centuries. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 
 
 VERY soon after the completion of the great period of 
 political upheaval and of foreign conquest which terminated 
 at Waterloo, a revolution almost as great in degree came 
 upon French literature. In the last four chapters we have 
 surveyed the fortunes of that literature from the time when, 
 at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it definitely 
 severed itself at once from mediaeval tradition and from the 
 unfettered innovations and experiments of the Renaissance. 
 We have seen it go through four phases of what is vaguely, 
 but with sufficient expressiveness, called classicism. The 
 first, the age of the origins of the classical tradition, is 
 occupied for the most part in slowly excluding certain forms 
 and manners as barbarous, and in regulating those which are 
 allowed to remain by narrow and artificial rules. The 
 second, the age of Louis XIV, exhibits the most brilliant 
 results that can possibly be obtained from such a system of 
 literary criticism. The polish, the proportion and the ordered 
 beauty which come from a strict adherence to rules appear 
 in full lustre, and as yet there is no sameness or monotony. 
 In the third period, that of the eighteenth century, the 
 decadence is obvious and rapid. Much good literature is 
 written, but its goodness depends either on the interesting 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 115 
 
 nature of the subject treated, or on the individual power and 
 expertness of the writers, and as soon as this fails, literature, 
 especially imaginative literature, sinks into a state of aridity 
 and sterility. The fourth or revolutionary period manifests 
 this decadence at its very worst in its ordinary literature, 
 though all its writers of merit, save one or two, indicate more 
 or less unconsciously means of recovery. The comparative 
 quiet of the Restoration period, a quiet not of apathy or 
 political deadness, but of fairly good social order, gave oc- 
 casion for the new birth to take place, and this new birth 
 was what is called the Romantic Movement. 
 
 To understand what this movement was and what it did, 
 we must point out more precisely what were the faults of the 
 older literature, and especially of the literature of the late 
 eighteenth century. They were in the first place, an ex- 
 tremely impoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to 
 the older tongue for picturesque archaisms, and little welcome 
 being given to new phrases, however appropriate and distinct. 
 In the second place, the adoption, especially in poetry, of an 
 exceedingly conventional method of speech, describing every- 
 thing where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and avoiding 
 direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature, 
 but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost 
 every kind of work of cut and dried patterns, to which it was 
 bound to conform. We have already pointed out that this 
 had all but killed the tragic drama, and it was nearly as bad 
 in the various accepted forms of poetry, such as fables, 
 epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemble 
 something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of 
 bad taste and insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission 
 to a very limited and very arbitrary system of versification, 
 adapted only to the production of tragic Alexandrines, and 
 limiting even that form of verse to one monotonous model. 
 
 I 2 
 
Il5 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to a very 
 few classes and kinds. Now as a matter of formal criticism, 
 no one had yet arisen to point out these evils and their 
 remedies, though in some cases much that Diderot had said 
 went directly to the root of the classical, that is, the Malherbe- 
 Boileau tradition. But for many years critics, even while 
 omitting to discover, or at least to indicate, the cause, had 
 ridiculed and condemned the result. Rivarol and La Harpe, 
 neither of them disinclined to classicism in the abstract, and 
 the latter in his old days a fanatical defender of it, had waged 
 war against the poetasters of their time. The influence first 
 of Rousseau, then of Bernardin de St. Pierre, then of Chateau- 
 briand, had directed men's minds rather to the study of 
 nature and of savage countries than to the acceptance of the 
 conventional French-classical world of civilised convention. 
 The last-named writer, acting together with the political 
 reactionaries of his generation, and assisted by the studies 
 of antiquarians, had- revived an admiration for the middle 
 ages, which had for centuries been more neglected and 
 despised in France than anywhere else. Madame de Stael, 
 by her novels and her book on Germany, had in a 
 different order of thought helped to break down the idea 
 that France was necessarily a model and pattern of the 
 universe, and German literature had powerfully assisted the 
 ferment. Lastly, at the close of the period, and when peace 
 had been restored, the works of Scott and of Byron exer- 
 cised an immense influence, the former by turning attention 
 to mediaeval romance, the latter by suggesting, perhaps on 
 some hints from Goethe and Chateaubriand, the modern 
 romantic dissatisfaction and despair which have contributed 
 so much good work and so much bad work to literature. 
 Hence, by 1820 everything was favourable to a revolution in 
 literary art. Even Courier, the ardent opponent of royalist 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. IlJ 
 
 religious and mediaeval ideas, had, as has been said, a pro- 
 found contempt for eighteenth-century style, and recom- 
 mended that nothing later than Louis XIV should be taken 
 as a standard. 
 
 The spirit of literary camaraderie has always been strong 
 in France, and it was assisted to produce an effect in this 
 instance by the new institution of journalism. More than 
 one periodical, especially Le Globe, bore a very great 
 share in bringing about the romantic movement. But before 
 noticing this it will be well to give some account of two 
 remarkable and distinguished writers who, falling out of the 
 list of romantics proper, stimulated the movement almost as 
 powerfully as any of its forerunners already mentioned, or 
 as the chief partakers in it themselves. These were Lamar- 
 tine (1790-1869), and Lamennais (1782-1854). The former 
 derives directly from Chateaubriand, though he was in the 
 first place a poet, while Chateaubriand was essentially a 
 writer of poetical prose. Lamartine at a comparatively early 
 age began to write poems (Meditations, Harmonies^ etc.), 
 presenting in outward form considerable resemblance with 
 the accepted lyric poetry of the later classical period, but 
 characterised by a much greater freshness and truth of poetical 
 expression and thought. The note of gentle and chastened 
 sentiment and of a kind of tearful sympathy with nature 
 dominates, and there is a remarkable absence of striking 
 expressions, of bold metrical experiments, and of the varied 
 and unrestrained choice of subjects which characterise the 
 romantics proper. But though the verse of Lamartine 
 expressed the new spirit in old forms, and in a hesitating 
 way, it still expressed it. Lamennais, on the other hand, 
 while also deriving in style not a little from Chateaubriand, 
 was exclusively a religious writer, even at a late period of his 
 life, when the disfavour of the Church of Rome drove him 
 
11 8 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 into a kind of irreligious philosophising. His Essai sur 
 V Indifference en Matiere de Religion had a great effect, and 
 established him as the future leader of the more ardent and 
 reforming ecclesiastical party. His style was vigorous and 
 bold, not indeed at first so broken and mysterious as it 
 afterwards became in his most famous book, the Paroles d'un 
 Croyant, but very different from the chastened pattern of 
 standard French prose. Two poets of some note, Alexandre 
 Soumet (1780-1845) and Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843), 
 also lie out of the list of romantics proper. The former was 
 chiefly a dramatist, and in his Fete de Neron and other plays 
 endeavoured to give life and movement to the drama without 
 wholly breaking with the classical tradition. Casimir Dela- 
 vigne also wrote plays, for the most part bad ones. In his 
 Messe'niennes he displayed considerable poetical faculty alloyed 
 with much of the false rhetoric and declamation of the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 The romantic movement proper divides itself into two 
 stages, the first of which passed before 1830, the latter 
 subsequently to the Revolution which extinguished legitimate 
 monarchy in France, while both, subsequently confounding 
 themselves, extended till nearly the end of the reign of Louis 
 Philippe in full militant .vigour, and have not lost their 
 influence to the present day. The distinguishing names of 
 the first are Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, 
 Emile and Antony Deschamps, Prosper Merime'e, Charles 
 Nodier, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Vigny; of the later, 
 The'ophile Gautier and Ge'rard de Nerval, with in each case, 
 but especially in the latter, not a few minor names to 
 supplement those of greater importance. 
 
 The immense literary work of Victor Hugo began within 
 four years of the battle of Waterloo, by the establishment of 
 the journal called, oddly enough, Le Conservateur Litte'raire, 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 119 
 
 in which the poet, though then only a boy of seventeen, took 
 part with his brothers Abel and Eugene, and by degrees with 
 all the rising spirits of the new movement, as well as with 
 those of an elder generation, such as Chateaubriand. But 
 he soon appeared as an independent author, and his Royalist 
 Odes, his mediaeval Ballades, his barbaresque Orientates, and 
 the somewhat more sober but not less beautiful volumes 
 which followed under the titles of Les Feuilles cTAutomne, 
 Les Voix Inte'rieures, Les Rayons et les Ombres, etc., soon 
 placed him at the head of French poetry, a position which in 
 more than sixty years of life he did not lose. His innovations 
 in drama were not less than those which he affected in poetry 
 proper. Cromwell was not performed, but Hernani served 
 as the battlefield between classics and romantics, and resulted 
 in the decided victory of the latter. It was followed by many 
 other dramas which had an almost equal success. The main 
 characteristics of Victor Hugo's poetry are an extraordinary 
 boldness of thought and phraseology, a complete contempt 
 of artificial rules as to versification, diction, and choice of 
 subject, and above all the most surprising command of 
 musical language, and of a rushing style which carries away 
 the reader whether he will or no. The young writer soon 
 showed himself to be possessed of an equal faculty for prose 
 and for poetry. His earliest prose works were romances of 
 a wild character, drawing their scenes and characters from 
 uncivilised and barbarous times. Han dlslande, an im- 
 possible romance of Norway, full of the most grotesque 
 extravagances, is nevertheless admirable in the vigour and 
 picturesqueness of not a few of its passages. JBugJargal, in 
 which the scene is shifted to St. Domingo, is but little inferior, 
 while Notre Dame de Paris, in which the author shifts again 
 to mediaeval times, at once took rank as the most striking 
 though one of the most unequal prose romances of the 
 
ISO FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 century, during which, till his death in 1885, Victor Hugo 
 remained at the head of French literature, and perhaps of 
 the literature of Europe. 
 
 As Victor Hugo was the poet of the new movement, so 
 Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) was its critic; and, like the poet, 
 the critic retained for the whole of his life the superiority 
 which he obtained at the beginning of his career. The first 
 work of importance which Sainte-Beuve composed was the 
 series of Tableaux de la Litter ature Frangaise au XVT enu 
 Siecle, which he published in the Globe. This remarkable 
 work at once reinstated the older writers of France in the 
 place which since Malherbe had been denied them, and 
 directed the rising generation to the proper places to look 
 for models of language and style. For a time Sainte-Beuve 
 endeavoured by purely original work to obtain a place for 
 which he was not fitted, his poems and works of fiction 
 ( Volupte', Joseph Delorme, etc.), being of no extraordinary merit. 
 But he soon recovered from this failure, and devoting himself 
 afresh to purely critical work, became perhaps the most 
 celebrated prose critic of any age, founding indeed an en- 
 tirely new school of criticism, as Victor Hugo has founded 
 an entirely new school of poetry. The latter had said ' Never 
 mind the rules, is the poem good?' and the former set him- 
 self to work to criticise not merely poems, but all literature 
 on the same principle. For this purpose he took immense 
 pains to enquire exactly into all the influences which might 
 have acted upon his subjects, and endeavoured to represent 
 these to his readers in order that they might judge rather 
 what the author intended to do, than whether he had done it 
 according to some pre-established regulations for the guidance 
 of authors. In this his later career Sainte-Beuve was judged, 
 partly from personal motives, to have ceased to be a 
 Romantic, but this was simply because the true import of the 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 121 
 
 literary revolution was mistaken. He worked his work, 
 Hugo his, and the effect of the lives of the two men has 
 been an entire revolution of literary principles and practice 
 in every country in Europe, except where, as in England, 
 native genius had anticipated the necessity of any such 
 change. 
 
 Under the banners of which in poetry and criticism these 
 two men were the standard-bearers, many champions fought, 
 some of whom only half agreed with the principles of the 
 leaders, while others, from individuality and eccentricity of~~ 
 genius, parted early from the army. Charles Nodier (1783- 
 1844), an older man than most of his friends, was a charm- 
 ing writer, but did not sufficiently devote his genius to the 
 task of mastering one particular field. Yet his short tales 
 rank among the best in French. Emile (1795-1871) and 
 Antony Deschamps (1809-1869) did good service, not 
 merely by original work, but by translating great foreign 
 classics, such as Dante and Shakespeare. Alfred de Vigny 
 (1799-1863), a writer of fastidious taste and of some indo- 
 lence, chose his subjects on the new principles, but handled 
 them with a precision and classical elegance rather sugges- 
 tive of the old. Auguste Barbier wrote, as Delavigne had 
 written before him, satires of a somewhat obsolete form but 
 of admirable vigour and elegance. Alexandre Dumas (1803- 
 1870), bringing to the service of romanticism an almost un- 
 matched fecundity of imagination and readiness of pen, 
 began by composing dramas of an extravagant but powerful 
 cast, but soon subsided into the composition of historical 
 romances, which are perhaps the very best of their kind, or 
 which, if not the very best, share that position only with 
 Scott's. Prosper Me'rime'e (1803-1870), a man of exact 
 taste and great scholarship, began by forging imitations of 
 Illyrian and other barbaric poetry, according to a general 
 
122 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 fancy of the early Romantics. He soon however quitted the 
 school as far as outward companionship went. But he con- 
 tinued to write in a marvellous prose style, and to compose 
 short tales and novels of extraordinary merit in construction 
 and subtlety in depicting character. Last, and perhaps, next 
 to Hugo, greatest of the earlier romantics, comes Alfred de 
 Musset (1810-1857), a lyric poet of incomparable grace, 
 though of a somewhat Byronic school, the author of exquisite 
 small dramatic pieces and of miscellaneous works of great 
 merit. The exertions of these leaders, especially those of 
 Victor Hugo, were after 1830 supported by a band of younger 
 recruits, of whom the principal were Thdophile Gautier and 
 Gerard de Nerval. The'ophile Gautier (1807-1872) became 
 the most perfect poet in respect of poetical form that France 
 has ever produced, while he was hardly less remarkable as a 
 writer of romances and short tales, as a critic of literature 
 and art, and as a describer of foreign countries. In most of 
 these capacities GeVard Labrunie (1808-1855), wno called 
 himself De Nerval, was but little if at all less distinguished. 
 It has been already observed that though almost all the 
 writers of this period exhibit the influence of the Romantic 
 school, many, even in the imaginative departments of litera- 
 ture, cannot be directly classed as belonging to that school, 
 while others, from the character of their work, employed as 
 they were upon serious or scientific subjects, had no cause 
 for expressing adhesion or aversion to the prevailing doc- 
 trines. Yet among both these latter classes it is almost an 
 invariable rule that the principles of the Romantic school in 
 its saner and less extravagant forms are exemplified. Fore- 
 most among the novelists of the time must be mentioned 
 Honore* de Balzac (1799-1850), the author of a wonderful 
 series of studies of French life, largely tinged by the author's 
 idiosyncrasy, and even by his imagination, but still faithful 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 12$ 
 
 in principle and in the main to the truth of nature. Next to 
 Balzac comes Aurore Dudevant (1793-1876), universally 
 known by the name of George Sand, one of the most 
 voluminous of writers, and perhaps for that reason not likely 
 long to retain the position which she has hitherto held. 
 Her later studies of provincial life are admirable, more so 
 than the powerfully coloured but too often extravagant and 
 tedious novels written in her earlier days. Charles de 
 Bernard (1805- 1 8 50) excelled in short sketches, for the most 
 part of Parisian society, which he wrote with a pleasant 
 mixture of satire and sympathy that in some sort inspired our 
 own Thackeray. Jules Janin (1804-1874) began by some 
 novels in the extremest romantic style, but ended as a 
 theatrical critic, in which capacity he achieved great popu- 
 larity and influence. Leon Gozlan was a writer of miscel- 
 laneous literature often remarkable for felicity of style and 
 construction. So also Alphonse Karr, one of the few sur- 
 vivors of the ' generation of 1830,' has written on a vast 
 variety of subjects, all of them of the kind, called light 
 literature, wtych has of late years been popular in France as 
 well as elsewhere. Madame Charles Reybaud, X.B. Saintine, 
 Jules Sandeau, Frederic Soulie*, Emile Souvestre, Eugene 
 Sue, contributed work more or less remarkable to the immense 
 total of fiction of literary merit which France has during this 
 century produced. 
 
 Of dramatists, besides those already mentioned, Eugene 
 Scribe (1791-1861), the most prolific of recent French dra- 
 matic authors, but distinguished from the romantic school 
 by a loose and careless style and by vulgar and unpoetical 
 thought, deserves the first place. Ernest Legouve' (b. 1807) 
 is another popular dramatist of a semi-romantic kind, while 
 the success of the Lucrece of Ponsard (1814-1867) has been 
 taken as the epoch at which the first flush of romanticism 
 
124 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 died out and a classical reaction set in. But there was 
 no real reaction, and the literature of the last forty years 
 has been, whether professedly or not, always under the in- 
 fluence of the movement at the head of which we have 
 placed Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. Among lesser poets, 
 Jean Reboul (1796-1864), a southern poet of some elegance, 
 F. Viennet (1777-1868), who clung to the old models, and 
 chiefly wrote fables, Madame Tastu and Madame Desbordes- 
 Valmore (1787-1859), the most successful of modern French 
 poetesses, He'ge'sippe Moreau (1810-1838), a poet of some 
 power, who died young, Victor de Laprade, who till his death 
 the other day continued with grace and not without power 
 the tradition of Lamartine, Auguste Brizeux (1806-1858), a 
 Breton of talent, and J. Autran (1813-1877), who, like La- 
 prade, represented rather Lamartinje than Hugo, deserve 
 attention. 
 
 Although Sainte-Beuve far excelled all the critics of the 
 earlier part of the century in talent, there were many who 
 must be ranked beside him, some of whom anticipated if 
 they did not quite equal his reformation of the critical 
 method. Of his seniors, J. J. Ampere (1800-1864), an 
 amiable historian of Rome and of Roman French literature, 
 Abel Villemain (1790-1870), who was among the first to 
 give intelligent attention to foreign literatures, deserve no- 
 tice ; and among his contemporaries and juniors, Saint-Marc 
 Girardin, Blanche, Nisard, and others. 
 
 The destruction of the old regime and its salons has 
 somewhat destroyed the reputation of French literature for 
 memoirs, private letters and similar work, but it has on 
 the other hand produced an abundant crop of regular his- 
 tories. Barante (1782-1866) produced in a picturesque 
 style many learned works on the older annals of France, 
 among which his Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne is the chief. 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 125 
 
 F. Guizot (1787-1874), also famous as a statesman, gained a 
 considerable place in literature with various writings on 
 French and English history; his rival, A. Thiers (1797- 
 1877), began a long series of historical works by his History 
 of the French Revolution ; Henri Martin produced the most 
 comprehensive and perhaps the most trustworthy of histories 
 of France, vand J. Michelet (1798-1873), in a series of works, 
 partly purely historical, partly busied with political and social 
 philosophy, developed one of the most original of French prose 
 styles, a style which has sometimes been compared to that 
 of Mr. Carlyle. With Michelet is generally mentioned Edgar 
 Quinet (1803-1875), also master of a rather poetical style. 
 They were both extreme Liberals ; both were attracted, not- 
 withstanding their Liberalism, to the study of the middle ages, 
 and both were professors at the same time in Paris, where 
 their lectures drew crowded audiences. On the opposite, or 
 Catholic side, but still with a strong leaning to political 
 Liberalism, may be noticed another brilliant lecturer and 
 ardent student of the middle ages, FrddeVic Ozanam (1813- 
 1853), wno died young. 
 
 In philosophy, the French Scottish metaphysical school of 
 Royer Collard and his fellows was succeeded by what is 
 called the eclectic school of Victor Cousin (1792-1867), an 
 eloquent writer who endeavoured to execute a movement in 
 philosophy somewhat parallel to the romantic movement 
 in literature, by borrowing some of the theories and pro- 
 cesses of the German thinkers. There was more rhetoric 
 than thought in Cousin's system, and towards the end of his 
 life he abandoned philosophical writing altogether and be- 
 took himself to literary essays on attractive characters in 
 French history. His influence however was very consider- 
 able on the younger generation, and many writers were 
 impelled by it to study the history of philosophy and to 
 
126 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 compose works of more or less literary value on that 
 subject. 
 
 The prose works mentioned in this chapter show an 
 alteration in French prose style which is at least as im- 
 portant as that which the language of poetry underwent. 
 It has already been said that the results of the classical 
 traditions upon prose were much better than those upon 
 poetry. In accordance with them two things were con- 
 sidered incumbent upon a French prose writer, to treat his 
 subject in a regular and orderly manner and to be above 
 all things clear and precise in his 'expressions. Of these 
 conditions the prose of the eighteenth century frequently 
 complies with the first and always with the second. The 
 last writer on this classical model was Paul Louis Courier, 
 and on the whole prose has not been improved by the 
 romantic movement. The average French prose writer since 
 1830 has been less careful of his plan, less intent upon 
 making his mear;ing clear, than his predecessors. But on 
 the other hand the language has gained a great deal of 
 ornate and picturesque prose which was impossible with the 
 limited vocabulary and phrases of the elder style. The 
 manner of Michelet has been already mentioned, and it is 
 hardly to be surpassed for pictures of the bold and striking 
 order either in landscape or in historical event. So 
 that of Lamennais is admirable for solemn religious elo- 
 quence, while that of Edgar Quinet comes between the two, 
 and is weakened by a certain tendency to sentimentalism. 
 On the other hand, the short tales "and descriptive literature 
 which occupied so many of the romantics proved very 
 favourable to prose of the extremely careful and exquisite 
 kind. Prosper Me'rime'e and Thdophile Gautier carried the 
 powers of the language probably as far as they will go in 
 this way, Gautier inclining rather to a rich and highly 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 127 
 
 coloured style of diction, Me'rim^e to one simpler and some- 
 what more of the classical in kind. Gautier's descriptions of 
 foreign countries are hardly to be matched in any language 
 for the vividness with which they bring the scenes described 
 before the eyes of the reader. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE, 
 
 THE contemporary literature of France concerns us rather 
 in so far as it is an outcome of the history and tendencies 
 already sketched, than as it is composed of the performances 
 of individual writers. Yet inasmuch as it is impossible to 
 exhibit the former without giving some account of the latter, 
 no great deviation from the method observed in former 
 chapters will be necessary. The literature of the last thirty 
 or forty years in France has been for the most part com- 
 plexioned by the Romantic movement, of which an account was 
 given in the last chapter. It is true that from time to time 
 writers of more or less talent have arisen who have affected 
 to question the necessity and value of that movement, and to 
 deny the merit of its chief literary representatives. But when 
 we turn to the actual work of these, as of other French men of 
 letters, we find the practical triumph of the movement recog- 
 nised in the most practical way. No one for half a century has 
 with the least success attempted to revive the old dramatic 
 theory of limited interest, of arbitrarily confined action, of con- 
 fidants, of long rhetorical tirades, of artificial noble sentiment 
 and more artificial interchange de soupirs et de flammes. No 
 one in poetry proper has reverted to the standards of La 
 Harpe, no one in fiction has attempted to take his characters 
 
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 129 
 
 from a conventional assortment of cut-and-dried personages. 
 Even at the present moment the most obvious and most 
 discreditable failures of French literature are due rather to 
 an unintelligent exaggeration of Romantic principles than 
 to an abjuration of them. The work which was done in 
 1830 was to all appearance done as finally as the work of 
 all literary reactions is done. The absurdities which arise 
 from perversion and travestie of their principles die out or 
 are violently overthrown, what is weak in them asserts itself 
 for a time, and is after a time exploded ; but what is strong 
 and good and true remains and is permanently incorporated 
 in the structure and tendencies of the language and the 
 literature. This is true, to confine ourselves to the present 
 subject only, of every great change which has passed over 
 the literature of France, whether the author to speak more 
 philosophically, the chief representative of that change be 
 Alain Chartier, or Clement Marot, or Pierre de Ronsard, or 
 Fran9ois de Malherbe, or Nicolas Despre'aux, or Victor 
 Hugo. Every one of these men has contributed, according 
 to his lights and in the measure of his powers, something to 
 the perfection of the language which all of them used and the 
 literature which all of them loved and in different degrees 
 honoured. No one of them has been absolutely right or 
 wholly wrong, though the varying degrees of influence which 
 they have exercised have enabled their followers to do less 
 or^ more good work as the case may be. The innovators, 
 the suggesters of foreign models, such as Chartier and Ron- 
 sard and Hugo, have perhaps done more good than the 
 formalists and conservatives, such as Marot and Malherbe 
 and Boileau, because there is an undoubted tendency in 
 Frenchmen and in the French language to stereotype rules 
 and habits, and to fall into a childish admiration of their 
 own ways and a vain reproduction of those ways. But their 
 
 K 
 
130 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 opponents have had this merit that they have perhaps been 
 more thoroughly in accord with the genius of the nation, and 
 that they have therefore enabled the average writer of prose, if 
 not of verse, to do better work than has been done by such 
 average writers in the periods dominated by their rivals. 
 The unfavourable effect which, with some brilliant exceptions, 
 has been produced upon French prose by the exaggerations 
 of the Romantic movement has been noticed in the last 
 chapter, and is still more noticeable in the productions of 
 living men of letters in France. Nor is it as yet at all obvious 
 what influence is likely to put a stop to the degeneration. It 
 may perhaps be said to be due in part to the increase, 
 noticeable in French literature of this period, as indeed in 
 most of the other literatures of Europe, of periodicals and 
 newspapers. In no country has the newspaper attained 
 greater power and popularity than in France, and in none 
 has it attracted so many of the best writers. It is fair to 
 allow that, putting certain poetical works out of the question, 
 the best books of the last forty years in France are, for the 
 most part, volumes of reprinted essays, criticisms, and the like. 
 Though the general effect on style may have been bad, the 
 new system of criticism started and practised by Sainte- 
 Beuve transformed this department of literature, from one 
 of the most arid and unattractive of literary forms, into 
 one of the most fascinating. Almost all French writers 
 since 1830 have given themselves up, either permanently or 
 for a time, to it, and also to the writing of fiction, for which, 
 owing to tiblb fewllefon system, or practice of including an 
 instalment of fiction in almost all periodicals, daily and 
 weekly and monthly, there has been a very great demand. 
 
 During all but the whole of this period, as of the last, M. 
 Victor Hugo continued to be the representative poet of France, 
 though after the termination of the period which we have 
 
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 131 
 
 fixed as that of the Romantic movement proper he ceased to 
 write dramas for the stage. The establishment of the Second 
 Empire, to which he was violently opposed, turned his genius 
 in the direction of satire (Les Chdtiments] and of eloquent 
 historical moralising on the fate and history of man (La 
 Legende des Siecles, Les Contemplations], in which he persevered 
 till his death in 1885. He produced with astonishing fecundity 
 every few years volumes of generally admirable verse in 
 different styles, the finest being, perhaps, Les Qualre Vents 
 de V Esprit. Meanwhile the first school of Romantic 
 poets gave way to another, in which the influence of 
 The'ophile Gautier was more directly represented than that 
 of Victor Hugo, though the latter was still regarded as the 
 general master. Gautier had from the beginning been ex- 
 traordinarily careful about the form of his work, and the 
 peculiarity was imitated by the younger school, of whom the 
 most remarkable were Theodore de Banville, Charles Bau- 
 delaire, and Leconte de Lisle. The first of these poets 
 has spent much of his time in reviving and popularising the 
 elegant artificial forms of verse which have been noticed as 
 being chiefly cultivated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu- 
 ries. The last two relied chiefly upon the presentation of 
 unusual scenes or sentiments to their readers. M. Leconte 
 de Lisle in especial, a very learned poet, translated 
 many classical authors, and went by turns for his in- 
 spiration to Greece, to Scandinavia, and to the East. Under 
 the auspices of these writers there grew up in the later days 
 of the Empire a school of poets who have gone under the 
 name of Parnassiens, from the habit of publishing from time 
 to time collected specimens of their work under the title of 
 Le Parnasse Contemporain. They were very numerous, and 
 for the most part attained great mastery over the technical 
 part of their art, though there may be perhaps rather too 
 
 K 2 
 
132 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 little spontaneity about them. Some of these, as M. Frangois 
 Coppe'e and M. Sully Prudhomme, diverged after a time from 
 the school in which they began, and adopted different methods: 
 while the Parnassians proper have sometimes exaggerated 
 the tendencies of the three masters mentioned above. Of 
 the many writers of verse who have appeared during the last 
 fifteen years, two only, M.Guy de Maupassant and M.Richepin, 
 have shown really original talent, and in both cases this talent 
 has been too often directed to unworthy objects. 
 
 After the termination of Victor Hugo's great series of 
 romantic dramas no new work of the same kind was for 
 some time attempted. The most popular dramatist of the 
 early part of the Second Empire was Emile Augier, a skilful 
 dramatist of the comedy of manners. Later, Augier's eminence 
 was shared by Alexandre Dumas the younger, and by Victorien 
 Sardou. The former has devoted himself rather to studies of 
 morals, the latter to pictures of contemporary manners, 
 M. Sardou has frequently attempted more serious pieces, 
 without the success which has attended his lighter and more 
 satirical efforts. The Empire was not favourable to a high 
 class of theatrical literature. But since its downfall efforts 
 have been made to revive the romantic drama in a form not 
 quite so English or Spanish as that affected by the dramatists- 
 of 1830. M. Henri de Bornier's Fille de Roland and his 
 Noces d'Attila are plays which set the example, followed by 
 some success and imitation, of pieces different from the 
 ignoble burlesques and spectacles which were long the fashion. 
 One kind of dramatic composition, which was brought to 
 perfection by Alfred de Musset, remains to be noticed. 
 This is the Proverbe, a short piece with few characters, in 
 which some well-known maxim is illustrated. Musset's 
 pieces of this kind are examples of very delicate and refined 
 art, both as drama and as pure literature. He has not been 
 
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 133 
 
 fully equalled by any of his successors, though several of them, 
 with M. Octave Feuillet at their head, have done good work 
 in their attempts to tread in his steps. The purely literary 
 merit of theatrical writing has however rapidly declined of 
 late years, and its distinction even in the lighter forms has 
 been made good chiefly by writers hardly belonging to the 
 present generation. The poet Theodore de Banville has 
 produced some excellent work, the best-known of which is 
 Gringoire, a short romantic comedy on the satirist and farce- 
 writer of the fifteenth century. M. Ludovic Halevy, now an 
 Academician, obtained his reputation chiefly by librettos to 
 the music of Offenbach. Of late, however, he has turned his 
 attention to pure fiction} and has won, not only in the admirably 
 Voltairian sketches of the Famille Cardinal, but in scrupu- 
 lously virtuous stories, such as L Able Constantly a re- 
 markable popularity. Probably the best playwright, in the 
 proper sense, of the last thirty years has been Eugene Labiche 
 (1815-1888), who struck with extraordinary success a vein 
 between comedy and farce, his working of which, in at least Le 
 Voyage de M. Perrichon, has almost, if not quite, succeeded in 
 adding something permanent to literature. M. Edouard 
 Pailleron, like MM. Hale'vy and Labiche an Academician, 
 has also done work of much literary quality, among which, in 
 different styles, Le Monde ou I' on s'ennuie and Le Chevalier 
 Trumeau deserve remark and reading. 
 
 The famous novelists of Louis Philippe's reign have been 
 succeeded by a group hardly less remarkable, though perhaps 
 inferior in individual talent. Two writers, MM. Erckmann and 
 Chatrian, revived interest in the novel of stirring incident, 
 which the popularity of the works of George Sand, Balzac, 
 &c., had somewhat dimmed, by a series of tales of the revo- 
 lutionary wars, distinguished by great freshness of manner, by 
 much interest of narrative, and by a very healthy and pure 
 
134 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 tone of morality. The elaborate analysis of motive and 
 character of which Balzac had set the example was carried 
 to a still further pitch by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), who 
 also enjoyed the advantage of greater power of the purely 
 literary kind, and of immense and careful study. Besides his 
 novels of analysis of modern character, Flaubert produced 
 some tales on ancient topics full of splendid colouring and 
 imaginative incident. M. Octave Feuillet, rather following 
 George Sand, has made himself the novelist of the higher 
 fashionable life in France. Ernest Feydeau worked a some- 
 what similar vein, but with less refinement and more doubtful 
 morality. M. Cherbuliez (like many other distinguished 
 French writers, a Genevese by birth) has written a large 
 number of novels usually displaying great literary skill, and 
 generally of good moral tone. M. Droz has added to the 
 list volumes of short stories, showing much wit and accurate 
 observation. A little earlier came a writer of genius who 
 lived unhappily and died young. This was Henry Murger 
 (1822-1861), the special novelist of what is called ' Bohemian 7 
 life, that is to say, the life of the young artists, musicians, and 
 literary men who have always haunted Paris in great numbers. 
 Murger had great truth to nature and a command both of 
 pathos and comic power. Edmond About (1828-1885), a 
 most lively narrator and possessed of some of the qualities 
 of Voltaire without his range, never did anything quite so good 
 as might have been expected from him : but, like many men 
 of letters in the present day, he spent much of his talent in 
 journalism. During the last decade or a little more a school 
 of so called ' Naturalist ' writers has grown up whose avowed 
 purpose is to consider, in subject and treatment, not artistic, 
 still less moral qualities, but only a certain faithfulness to 
 what is or is assumed to be fact. This school, which, without 
 much justice, traces itself to Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert as 
 

 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 135 
 
 originals, shows some signs of declining; but two of the 
 strongest, if not the best, of recent French novelists, M. Zola 
 and M. Alphonse Daudet, belong to it, as well as, in his 
 prose work, M. Guy de Maupassant. Unfortunately, in all 
 the work of this school, and especially in that of M. Zola, 
 contempt of decency is pushed to an extreme as inartistic as 
 immoral. Two other writers deserve to be mentioned 
 M. Ohnet for his extraordinary popularity with readers, 
 which is only equalled by the disfavour with which his work 
 is regarded by all competent critics, and M. Viard (' Pierre 
 Loti ') who has embodied his foreign experiences as a naval 
 officer in a style of much elegance and some affectation. 
 
 Of the various critics whom the general adoption of Sainte- 
 Beuve's method has called, as already mentioned, into notice, 
 three are perhaps deserving of special mention. M. Taine, 
 whose History of English literature has made him better 
 known in England than most French writers, has carried his 
 master's practice rather than his theory to the utmost possible 
 limits, limits which indeed often produce an absurd result, as 
 is amply to be seen in the book just mentioned. M. Taine's 
 theory, broadly stated, is that every author is a ' product of his 
 circumstances' rather than an individual genius, so that by 
 examining those circumstances he can be fully explained 
 and understood. This theory he has exemplified with much 
 ingenuity and skill, but too frequently with the result of mis- ' 
 understanding, and therefore misleading. A more sober critic 
 is M. Edmond Scherer, whose only defect may be said to be 
 a too great tendency to judge authors by the standard of his 
 own agreement or disagreement with their principles and choice 
 of subjects. A third critic, now dead, who resembled rather 
 Gautier than Sainte-Beuve in his careful choice of language 
 and the pictorial character of his work, was Paul de St. 
 Victor (1828-1881), whose critical acuteness was not always 
 
136 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 equal to his literary faculty. A collection of his earlier 
 critical essays, entitled Homines etDieux, contains, with much 
 unequal appreciation, some of the most admirable writing of 
 the kind anywhere to be found ; and had he completed and 
 revised the series of studies on the Drama of the world, on 
 which he was latterly engaged, it might have been, if it is not 
 still, the most remarkable specimen of a certain kind of 
 nineteenth-century style and critical method in France. 
 This is entitled Les deux Masques, and in the vivid pictorial 
 manner, not seldom overwrought, in which it endeavours to 
 exhibit the stage of Greece, it is thoroughly characteristic. 
 In years immediately recent there has been more appearance 
 of the devotion of talent to criticism than in most other literary 
 departments, and M. Paul Bourget, M. Jules Lemaitre, and 
 others have attracted much attention. It is perhaps also 
 worth noticing, that translations of a high order of literary 
 merit have been commoner in French of late years than in 
 most other tongues. Franois Victor Hugo's Shakespeare, 
 and M. Leconte de Lisle's versions of many of the Greek 
 poets, are among the most remarkable instances. 
 
 In what have usually been considered the more serious 
 branches of literature few finished works of the highest merit 
 have been produced during the last thirty or forty years, and 
 those mostly by writers who have been mentioned in the 
 preceding chapter. The principal, if not the solitary exception, 
 is M. Ernest Renan, who in his position as an ecclesiastical 
 historian and critic has emitted many disputable opinions, 
 but has clothed them in language of great elegance and 
 individuality, which is likely to give him a lasting place in 
 the history of French literature. The direction of M. Kenan's 
 studies has been, as has been said, chiefly ecclesiastical, but 
 the manner of them is much the same as that of a large 
 number of scholars, less distinguished as literary artists, who 
 
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 have devoted themselves to criticism and research in philo- 
 sophy, theology, history, political and literary, philology, 
 and other branches of modern science. Thus in France, as 
 in other countries, men have rather been engaged in collect- 
 ing materials for future literature, than in manufacturing it 
 themselves. Of these various branches of enquiry, too 
 numerous to be dwelt on here, the study of Old French 
 language and literature may be singled out both as character- 
 istic and interesting in itself, and as specially suitable to our 
 present purpose. It has been said that at the close of the 
 last century some attention was paid to the long neglected 
 writers of old France by the critics of the Empire. The be- 
 ginnings of the Romantic movement stimulated this yet more. 
 An eloquent exponent of the study was found in Fauriel 
 (1772-1844), and soon the patient industry of Germany began 
 to found a regular science of Old French, and to draw forth its 
 treasures from the obscurity of manuscript. French scholars 
 themselves were not behindhand: with M. Paulin Paris at 
 their head, they set to work to disinter the buried literature 
 of the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth 
 centuries, while the professed litterateurs of the romantic 
 school, headed by Sainte-Beuve and The'ophile Gautier, 
 performed the same service for the printed but almost equally 
 forgotten books of the sixteenth and early seventeenth. A 
 great venture of the studious Benedictines, the Histoire 
 Litte'raire de la France, was received and continued, and for 
 the last sixty years not a year has passed without the publi- 
 cation of editions of the poems, chronicles, romances, and 
 plays of the past. The immense riches of early French 
 literature have as yet prevented the task from being com- 
 pleted, but by this time a sufficiently full acquaintance with 
 at least the main features of every part of French literature is 
 possible to the student Perhaps the best idea that can be 
 
138 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 given of the gain resulting from these studies may be suggested 
 by mentioning that the first three chapters of this primer, the 
 materials of which are now open to any one, could not have 
 been written sixty or seventy years ago without a life's 
 labour, and that the very names of most of the boo s and 
 authors mentioned in them were then unknown, even to the 
 best-informed Frenchmen. The Chansons de Gestes were 
 known only in late prose versions, the Fabliaux only by 
 extracts and analyses, the Arthurian romances, like the Chan- 
 sons, only in late prose forms, and the lyric poems, the 
 mysteries, and the less noteworthy prose works, not at all. 
 Boileau, in the seventeenth century, had made French literature 
 practically begin with Villon, and though there had always been 
 isolated students of the middle ages, they had been exceptions, 
 and had laboured under great difficulties. One of the most 
 illustrious workers in the field of French literature of all times 
 was the late M. Littre (1801-1881), author of the only com- 
 plete and satisfactory French dictionary. M. Littre was an 
 ardent student of the middle ages, contributed to the Histoire 
 Litte'raire^ and in many ways earned the gratitude of his 
 fellow-students. But even his work does not include any- 
 thing like an exhaustive lexicon of the older language, and 
 indeed, as will be evident from what has just been said, such 
 a lexicon was until recently hardly possible. It has, however, 
 now been begun, and it is probable that if M. Godefroy, who 
 has undertaken it, is able to finish his work, a few years will 
 see the completion of the apparatus necessary for the study 
 of French literature. At present an exaggerated idea prevails 
 even in France of the difficulties of the language, and the 
 French are as a rule less well acquainted with their own 
 early writers than any other nation which has reached an 
 equal point of civilisation. Perhaps however, though there 
 is more excuse for us, England is not quite in a position 
 
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE. 139 
 
 to throw stones at -them for their shortcomings in this 
 respect. 
 
 Such is a brief view of the present state of French litera- 
 ture, and such, as far as this little book can attempt to show 
 it, have been the fortunes of this great section of human 
 thought and human art as applied to written speech. It is 
 perhaps more interesting than any other literature, because of 
 the long space of time which it covers without any sensible 
 break in the manifestation of real and living literary activity. 
 In all other literary histories, ancient and modern, there is to 
 be met with either a short period of consummate activity, or 
 a long history broken by gaps of trance and suspended 
 vitality. The literatures of Greece and Rome are examples 
 of the first ; all modern European literatures, including our 
 own, of the second. The oldest monuments of English 
 literature are older by perhaps six or seven hundred years 
 than the oldest monuments of French literature proper. But 
 they are not intelligible to modern Englishmen without much 
 pains, and they are followed by centuries of sterility and 
 stagnation. The history of French literature from the Chanson 
 de Roland to the latest work of M. Victor Hugo is continuous 
 without a single break ; and the Chanson de Roland itself can, 
 as has been said, be read by a person only acquainted with 
 modern French with at least as much facility as that with 
 which a modern Englishman can read Chaucer. Thus we 
 have spread over a period of nearly eight hundred years, 
 a complete picture of the thought, the character, and the 
 history of the nation. Nowhere can the student find such 
 an opportunity of determining how far the literary utterances 
 of a people correspond to their national character, what ten- 
 dencies in the long run assert themselves most in literary 
 forms, how far foreign influence can decide the intellectual 
 and artistic development of peoples, how far consummate 
 
140 FRENCH LITERATURE. 
 
 individual genius can produce perfect work against what 
 may be called the national grain. The answers to these 
 questions can only be obscurely indicated in a small hand- 
 book like the present, and the student must seek his full 
 satisfaction in larger works, or in his own independent read- 
 ing. These pages have chiefly endeavoured to set before the 
 learner such a general view of the outline of French literary 
 history as he may best be able to fill up for himself after- 
 wards. No writer of great importance has been omitted, and 
 the literary tendency of all such persons has been indicated, 
 though of necessity in a kind of shorthand. It has been 
 found, in the course of many generations of scholars, that 
 such a general view is of no small value in order to pre- 
 vent the student in his reading from attaching undue value 
 to isolated authors who happen to attract him, and from 
 passing over others who deserve careful and elaborate atten- 
 tion. The filling up of a correctly drawn outline is com- 
 paratively easy, while study without such an outline must, in 
 the circumstances of most students, too often result in mis- 
 application and mistake. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 About, Edmond, 144. 
 Academy, 66, 70, 74. 
 Adam de la Halle, 22, 33. 
 Adenes le Roi, 16, 17. 
 Alexander of Bernay, 8. 
 Alexandrines, 8, 53, 80, 115. 
 Amadis of Gaul, 59. 
 Amyot, 59. 
 
 Arthurian Romances, 6, 7? T 3> 1 6. 
 Assises de Jerusalem, 29. 
 Aubigne, Agrippa d', 53. 
 Aucassin et Nicole tie, 1 8. 
 Audefroi le Bastard, n, 33. 
 
 Ballade, 36, 38. 
 
 Balzac, Honorede, 122, 123. 
 
 Balzac, Jean de, 66. 
 
 Banville, Theodore de, 131, 133. 
 
 Barante, 124. 
 
 Barbier, 121. 
 
 Barthelemy, 96. 
 
 Basselin, Oliver, 39, 64. 
 
 Baudelaire, 131. 
 
 Bauduin de Sebourc, 35. 
 
 Bayle, 88. 
 
 Beaumarchais, 103, 104. 
 
 Benedict de Sainte-More, 8, 10. 
 
 Beranger, 103, 107, no, in. 
 
 Bergerat, Cyrano de, 67. 
 
 Bernard, Charles de, 122. 
 
 Bestiarius, IO. 
 
 Beyle, 112. 
 
 Boileau, 76, 80, 81, 87. 
 
 Bonald, 107, no. 
 
 Bornier, Henri de, 132. 
 
 Borron, Robert de, 6. 
 
 Bossuet, 76, 86, 87. 
 
 Bouciqualt, 40. 
 Bourdaloue, 76, 86. 
 Brantome, 58. 
 Buff on, 91, 99. 
 
 Calvin, 49, 55. 
 
 Carlovingian Et hies, 13, 14. 
 
 Castoiements, 1 8, 42. 
 
 Cent Nouvelles Nonvelles, 41 . 
 
 Chamfort, 103, 104. 
 
 Chansons, 19. 
 
 Chansons de Gestes, 3, 4, 5, 7 *5 
 
 *7 35> 40. 
 
 Chanson de Roland, I, 4, 15, 137. 
 Charles d'Orleans, 38. 
 Charron, 62. 
 
 Chartier, Alain, 36, 38, 42. 
 Chateaubriand, 103, 107, 108. 
 Chenier, Andre, 103, 106. 
 Chenier, M. J., 106. 
 Cherbuliez, V., 134. 
 Chretien de Troyes, 6, 8. 
 Christine de Pisan, 38, 42. 
 Citizens of Paris, 40. 
 Comines, Philippe de, 40. 
 Commentary on Jonah, 9. 
 Condillac, 98. 
 Condorcet, 94. 
 Constant, Benjamin, 112. 
 Coppee, Fran9ois, 132. 
 Coquillart, 38. 
 Corneille, Pierre, 72, 73, 74, 75, 
 
 76, 77. 79- 
 
 Corneille, Thomas, 88. 
 Courier, P. L., 103, 107, no, 126. 
 Cousin, Victor, 125. 
 Crebillon, 80, 93. 
 
142 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 D'Alembert, 98. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 135. 
 
 Delavigne, Casimir, 118, 12 1. 
 
 Delille, 103, 105. 
 
 Denis Pyramus, 1 7. 
 
 Desaugiers, 112. 
 
 Desbordes- Valmore, Madame, 1 24. 
 
 Descartes, 69. 
 
 Des champs, Antony, 118, 121. 
 
 Deschamps, Emile, 118, 121, 
 
 Deschamps, Eustache, 37. 
 
 Des Periers, 56. 
 
 Diderot, 91, 97, 98. 
 
 Dolopathos, 17. 
 
 Drama, 12, 22, 43, 44, 47, 51, 71, 
 
 72, 73^ 77.93. 106, 115, 123, 
 
 128, 132, 133. 
 Du Bartas, 52. 
 Du Bellay, Joachim, 51. 
 Dumas, Alexandre, 118, 121. 
 (the Younger), 132. 
 
 Encyclopedic, 98, 105. 
 Estienne, Henri, 57. 
 
 Fabliau, II, 12, 21, 23, 46, 47. 
 
 farces, 45, 46, 47, 71. 
 
 Fayette, Madame de la, 85. 
 
 Fenelon, 87. 
 
 Feuillet, Octave, 133, 134. 
 
 Flaubert, 134. 
 
 Fontenelle, 92. 
 
 Freron, 101. 
 
 Froissart, 37, 39. 
 
 Gamier, 71. 
 
 Gautier, Theophile, n 8, 122, 126, 
 
 131. 
 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 6. 
 Gerson, Jean, 43. 
 Gesta Romanorum, 1 8. 
 Gilbert, 100. 
 Godefroy, M., 138. 
 Gresset, 100. 
 Guenee, 101. 
 Guillaume de Lorris, 25. 
 Guizot, 125. 
 
 Halevy, Ludovic, 1 33. 
 Hamilton, 76, 85. 
 
 Hardy, 72. 
 
 Helvetius, 99. 
 
 Heptameron, 56. 
 
 Histoire Utter air e de la France, 137. 
 
 Houx, Jean le, 64. 
 
 Hugo, Francois Victor, 136. 
 
 Victor, no, 119, 129, 130, 131. 
 
 Janin, Jules, 122. 
 
 Jean Clopinel (de Meung), 25. 
 
 Jean de Paris, 41. 
 
 Jodelle, 51, 53, 71. 
 
 Joinville, 27. 
 
 Jongleurs, 8, 9. 
 
 Joubert, 103, 107. 
 
 Juvenal des Ursins, 40. 
 
 Karr, Alphonse, 123. 
 
 Labe, Louise, 52. 
 
 Labiche, Eugene, 133. 
 
 La Brnyere, 76, 82. 
 
 La Fontaine, 76, 84, 85. 
 
 La Harpe, 103, IQ4. 
 
 Lai, 19. 
 
 Lamartine, 117. 
 
 Lambert the Short, 8. 
 
 Lamennais, 117. 
 
 La Mettrie, 99. 
 
 Laprade, Victor de, 124. 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, 76, 82. 
 
 La Salle, Antoine de, 41, 46, 48. 
 
 Lebrun, 105. 
 
 Le Cuvier, 46. 
 
 Lemercier, Nepomucene, 113. 
 
 Le Mierre, 105. 
 
 Le Sage, 91. 
 
 Lespinasse, Mademoiselle de, 101. 
 
 Liber de Creaturis t 10. 
 
 Li Jus Adam, 22. 
 
 Lingua Romana, 2. 
 
 Lisle, Leconte de, 131, 136. 
 
 Littre, 138. 
 
 'Loti, Pierre,' 135. 
 
 Mably, 94. 
 
 Machault, Guillaume de, 37. 
 Maintenon, Madame de, 83. 
 Maistre, Joseph de, 107, no. 
 Xavier de, u'2. 
 

 INDEX. 
 
 143 
 
 Malebranche, 76, 87. 
 Malherbe, 65. 
 Map, Walter, 6, 7. 
 Marguerite of Navarre, 56. 
 Marie de France, 18, 21. 
 Marivaux, 100, 101. 
 Marot, Clement, 49. 
 Massillon, 76, 86. 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 132, 135. 
 Maupertuis, 99. 
 
 Memoirs, 57, 58, 70, 82, 85, IOI. 
 Merimee, 118, 121, 126. 
 Mezeray, 83. 
 Michelet, 125. 
 
 Miracle-plays, 22, 23, 43, 44, 71. 
 Moliere, 76, 77, 78. 
 Monologues, 45, 46. 
 Montaigne, 60. 
 Montchrestien, 72. 
 Montesquieu, 91, 93. 
 Montluc, B. de, 58. 
 Moralities, 45, 71. 
 Mouskes, Philippe, 28. 
 Murger, 133. 
 
 Musset, Alfred de, 118, 122, 132. 
 Mysteries, 12, 23, 44, 45, 71. 
 
 'Naturalists/ 134, 135. 
 Nennius, 6. 
 
 Nerval, Gerard de, 118, 122. 
 Nodier, Charles, 118, 121. 
 
 Ohnet, Georges, 135. 
 Ozanam, Frederic, 125. 
 
 Pailleron, Edouard, 133. 
 
 Paris, Paulin, 19, 137. 
 
 Parnassiens, 131. 
 
 Parny, 105. 
 
 Pascal, 69, 70. 
 
 Pasquier, 59. 
 
 Pastourelles, II. 
 
 Pathelin, 46. 
 
 Pensees, 70, 81, 82, 107. 
 
 Perrault, 76, 85. 
 
 Petit Jean de Saintre, 41. 
 
 Philippe de Beaumanoir, 29. 
 
 Philippe de Thauu, 10. 
 
 Piron, 68. 
 
 PUiade, 51, 52, 64, 65, 71, 80. 
 
 Port-Royal Logic, 69. 
 Prevost, 101. 
 Provencal, 3, 29, 30, 31. 
 Proverbe, 132. 
 Prudhomme, Sully, 132. 
 
 Quinault, 76, 81. 
 Quinet, 125, 126. 
 
 Rabelais, 54, 55, 56, 61. 
 
 Racan, 65. 
 
 Racine, 72, 79, 85. 
 
 Raoul de Houdenc, 16. 
 
 Regnier, 65. 
 
 Renan, 136. 
 
 Retz, Cardinal de, 84. 
 
 Rhetoriqueurs, n. 49. 
 
 Richelieu, 70. 
 
 Richepin, Jean, 132. 
 
 Rivarol, 103, 104. 
 
 Robin et Marion, 22. 
 
 Rollin, 101. 
 
 Romances, II, 19. 
 
 Roman de la Rose, 25, 26, 33. 
 
 Roman du Renart, 21, 23, 24, 33. 
 
 Romans d'Aventures, 16, 17, 29, 
 
 3i 33, 36. 
 Rondeau, 37, 38. 
 Rondel, 37. 
 Ronsard, 51. 
 Rotrou, 73. 
 Roucher, 103, 105. 
 Rousseau, J. B., 92. 
 
 ~ J- J- 9 1 , 96, 97- 
 Rulhiere, 102. 
 Rutebceuf, 21, 22. 
 
 Saint-Amant, 66. 
 Sainte-Beuve, 118, 120, 121. 
 Saint-Evremond, 76, 8r. 
 Saint Francis of Sales, 68. 
 Saint-Gelais, M. de, 50. 
 Saint- Lambert, 105. 
 Saint-Simon, 76, 83, 93. 
 Sand, George, 123. 
 Sanrleau, Jules, 123. 
 Sardou, V., 132. 
 Sarrasin, 64, 84. 
 Satyre Menippee, 58. 
 Scarron, 67. 
 
144 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Schelandre, 73. 
 
 Scherer, 134. 
 
 Scribe, 123. 
 
 Senancour, 112. 
 
 Sermons, 9, 29, 42, 43, 54, 60, 68, 
 
 86. 
 
 Sermons joyeitx; 45, 46. 
 Seven Wise Men of Rome, 1 8. 
 Sevigne, Madame de, 76, 83. 
 Soties, 45, 46. 
 
 Staal-Delaunay, Madame de, 101. 
 Stae'l, Madame de, 109, 
 St. Eulalia, Hymn of, 2, 3, 30. 
 St. Pierre, Bernardin de, 97. 
 Strasburg On/As, 2. 
 St. Real, J6, 84. 
 St. Victor, Paul de, 135, 136. 
 Sue, Eugene, 123. 
 Sully, Maurice de, 9. 
 Syntipas, 17. 
 
 Tahureau, 52. 
 
 Taine, 133. 
 
 Tallemant des Reaux, 83. 
 
 Thibaut de Champagne, 20. 
 
 Thiers, 125. 
 
 Thomas, 101. 
 
 Translation of the Book of Kings, 9. 
 
 Triolet, 37. 
 
 Troubadours, 31, 32. 
 
 Trouveres, II, 21. 
 
 Trouveurs, 9. 
 
 Turgot, 94. 
 
 Urfe, Honore d', 67. 
 
 Vauvenargnes, 101. 
 Verville, Beroalde de, 57. 
 Viand, Theophile de, 66. 
 Vigny, Alfred de, 118. 
 Villehardouin, 26. 
 Villon, 36, 38. 
 Voltaire, 89, 91, 94. 
 
 Wace, 6, 10. 
 Ysopet, 1 8. 
 Zola, Emile, 135. 
 
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