MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES c MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS, PH.D. (HARV.) BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1910 Copyright, 1896, 1909, BY BENJ. W. WELLS. All rights reserved. bubetsttg JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. //f PREFACE. THIS book is meant to serve as a companion, and possibly a guide, to the better appreciation and enjoy- ment of those authors who mark progress or change in the evolution of literary ideals in France since the Revolution. Until any book that is worth reading is seen in its true perspective, one will not draw from it its full measure of pleasure or profit. To give some clew to the books that are significant, whether as products or as causes of changed critical standards and aesthetic principles, is what is attempted in these chapters. Three introductory chapters sketch the evolution of French literature till the close of the eighteenth cen- tury, that the reader may be reminded of those authors whose influence is still felt and of whom it belongs to the humane life to know. In the more detailed studies that follow, no mention is made of imitators or hack writers, however ephemerally popular, nor of any work that has not literary imagination and artistic form, in order that attention may be concentrated on those writers who stand for something, who mark progress 2056142 VI PREFACE. or change. In estimating their place and function, I have used freely the critical apparatus cited in the foot-notes, but I have never expressed a literary opinion that is not based on examination of the original work, though doubtless my position has been modified by the masters of French criticism, and, as I have used at times, notes made long since and for another purpose, it is possible that I have still unacknowledged debts, to avoid the possibility of which would involve what seems to me an undue sacrifice. This book was first published in 1896. It has been revised throughout, and considerable additions have been made in the later chapters, that new tendencies, new writers, and the new work of those that -had already claimed notice might not fail of mention. BENJAMIN W. WELLS. NEW YORK, May, 1909. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAOKS MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE 1-42 Twelfth century: Romances, lyrics, and fabliaux, 1. Thirteenth century : Lyrics, drama, satire, historical prose, 6. Fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Lyrics and historic prose, 11; The Renascence, 17; Marot, 24; Ronsard, 27. Drama, history, and theology, 31; Rabelais, 33. Fiction, 38; Montaigne, 39. CHAPTER IL THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . 43-81 Poetry: Malherbe, 43; Boileau, 48; La Fontaine, 50. Novels, 54. Essays, 57. Philosophy, 57. Memoirs, 58. Letters, 60. Ora- tory, 62. Drama: Corneille, G5; Racine, 71; Moliere, 75; Regnard, 80. Retrospect, 80. CHAPTER III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 82-118 Voltaire, 82. Lyrics and Epics, 90. Drama: Le Sage, 95; Mari- vaux, 96; Beaumarchais, 99. History, 101. Oratory, 103. Philosophy, 103. Criticism, 106. Fiction: Le Sage, 107; Marivaux, 109; Voltaire, 111; Diderot, 112; Rousseau, 113. CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PACKS MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATKAUBRIAND .... 119-151 Literature under Bonaparte, 1 19. Life and Character of Madame de Stael, 120: Corinne, 128; Allemagne, 129. Life and char- acter of Chateaubriand, 135: Atala, 142; Genie du chris- tianistne, 143; Rene, 145; Martyrs, 147; Itineraire^ 148. Chateaubriand's influence, 148. CHAPTER V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL ........... 152-191 Sources and character of Romanticism, 152. Poetry: Beranger, 158; Lamartine, 159; De Vigny, 162; De Musset, 165; Gau- tier, 169. Drama: Dumas, 176; De Vigny, 178; De Musset, 179. Fiction: De Vigny, 181; De Musset, 182; Gautier, 184; Dumas, 187. Decline of Romanticism, 191. CHAPTER VI. THE YOUNG HCGO ............ 192-224 Early Lyrics, 198. Han d'Islande, 200. Cromwell, 202. Orien- tales, 205. Dramas from Hernani to Les Burgraves, 206. Notre-Dame, 220. Second lyric period, 221. Hugo as a politician, 224. CHAPTER VII. HUGO IN EXILE AND ix TRIUMPH ....... 225-264 Biography, 225. Fiction: Miserables, 232; Travailleurs de la mer, 235; Quatre-vingt-treize, 236. Lyric and epic poetry, 237. Philosophic poetry, 253. Gleanings and posthumous volumes, 253. Hugo's work reflects his mind in its substance and its form, 256. His influence and popularity, 260. CONTENTS. CHAPTER VIII. PAOW THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY ANI> CRITICISM . . . 265-302 Growth of the historic spirit, 265. Thierry, 266. Michelet, 267. Development of criticism, 272. Saiute-Beuve, 274. Taiue, 273. Reuau, 288. Contemporary critics, 299. CHAPTER IX. THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC POETRY 303-352 The Parnassians : Banville, 304 ; Lecontede Lisle, 309; De Heredia, 318; Coppee, 321; Sully-Prudhomme, 324. The Decadents: Baudelaire, 332; Verlaiue, 342. The Symbolists, 350. CHAPTER X. THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA 353-395 Scribe, 353 ; Augier, 356 ; Dumas Jilt, 369 ; Sardou, 379 ; Labiche and minor dramatists. 387 ; the Naturalistic drama, 393 ; Ros- tand and Maeterlinck, 395. CHAPTER XI. MODERN FICTION. I. THE EVOLUTION OF NATURALISM 396-431 George Sand, 307; Henri Beyle (Stendhal), 405; Balzac, 414; Merimee, 427. CHAPTER XII. MODERN FICTION. II. THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL . 432-463 Flaubert, 433; The Brothers Goncourt, 440 ; Zola, 446; Huysmans, 457; Maupassant, 458; Minor novelists, 463. CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIII. PAMI MODERN FICTION. III. TIIE WANING OF NATURALISM 461-503 The Compromisers: Feuillet, Cherbuliez, Fabre, Theuriet, 464; Daudet, 467; Ohnet, 490. Minor novelists, 491. Exotic lic- tiou : Loti, 492. The Psychologists: Bourget, 404 ; Barres, 498; Minor novelists, 498 ; Marcel Provost, 500 ; Paul Margueritte, 501. INDEX 505-510 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. CHAPTEK I. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. BOOKS began to be written in French somewhat later than in English or German, because Latin survived longer in Gaul as the language of the cultured. The English and the Germans had no classical past to check and discourage efforts in what might seem a degraded dialect; and so, long after Charlemagne had made his collection of heroic Teutonic ballads, long after Eng- lish hearts had thrilled to the story of Beowulf, French was still an unwritten language, in which the first stammerings of literary expression had yet to be heard, though even in the middle of the seventh century we read that a bishop of Noyon was chosen " because he understood both Teutonic and Romance, " which would show that many that spoke either tongue understood no other. Romance is the indefinite designation of many dia- lects. What survived in literature is essentially Lo\ Latin with greatly maimed inflections, much confusion of vowels and elision of consonants. A few words recall the Celtic that the Latin had almost wholly dis- placed in the first century of our era ; many more words were retained from their own mother tongue by the i 2 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. conquering Franks. The first to put this new growth to literary use were, naturally, the clergy. The clois- ters furnished the leisure ; the needs of the missionaries and devotees, the motive. Already in the tenth century there were legends of the saints and bits of Bible story that have much simple beauty; and when once this fountain-head had been opened, it poured a rich and constant stream that has not ceased to flow for eight centuries. There are no such dreary wastes in French literature as those that separate Chaucer from Spenser, or Luther from Lessing. There is hardly a generation since the " Chanson de Eoland " that has not had some work of real excellence to show ; and all this literature, even the oldest, has been readily and easily intelligible. No educated Frenchman has ever needed a long prepara- tion to assimilate the literary content of the " Song of Eoland, " and so early French literature has had more direct influence on the culture of the last hundred years than early English has had. Surely no predecessor of Shakspere is so present in the minds of modern writers as Rabelais or Montaigne. To indicate as briefly as pos- sible the relation of these early centuries to our own, is my purpose in this chapter. The first popular literature was metrical, both for the convenience of the reciter who had to memorize it, and also to admit of a musical accompaniment. And since the minstrel depended on the interest he could evoke, he naturally chose the themes that attracted those who had most to give, and were likely to be most lav- ish in the giving. These were the knights and nobles ; and the deeds of their chivalrous ancestors were the subjects that most effectually touched their pride and loosed their purse-strings. When he was the guest of a cloister, the singer might recount the Passion of MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 3 our Lord, of Saint Eulalie, or of Saint Alexis, but in the castle his welcome depended on the local character of his repertory. Hence the groups of " Chansons de geste " (Family Songs) that, when compiled and joined to one another witrl more or less skill, ma4e up the greater part of the literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and continued to be re-edited and further ex- tended in the thirteenth. Such " Chansons " naturally served as a model for those who had recent history to record; and some of these rhymed chronicles Wace's " Eoman de Rou, " for instance have a sort of literary interest. About a hundred of these epic songs have survived the rack of time. The most famous of them all is the story of Roland's death at Roncesvalles (August 15, 778), which indeed no other chanson resembles or approaches in naive realism and rugged beauty. l All of them are written in couplets of careful structure, united by assonance or vowel rhyme. The hero is usually, as in Roland's case, connected with Charle- magne, and with the struggles of Christians and infi- dels; but there is always fighting of some kind, and women play a very subordinate part. Love is over- laid by.the stronger emotions of faith and patriotism in the " Song of Roland, " and by the mere love of brawling in some of the inferior " Chansons, " which differ greatly in this from the freer inventions that were gradually developed from them as literature and culture progressed. Legends of the British King Arthur had attracted the Norman* in England, and were by them brought to France, where most of them had been versified before the end of the twelfth ccn- 1 Tp. Laiison, Litte'rature franchise, p. 20. CUe'l hereafter a ; Lansoa. 4 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. tury, mainly by Chrestien de Troyes, to whom, in turn, England owes the " Morte d 'Arthur," and Ger- many the epics of Hartmann, Wolfram, and Gottfried. These romances, when contrasted with the " Chan- sons, " sh,ow a growing culture arid refinement, a more developed courtesy, and so a more prominent position for women, as was natural on the eve of the " age of chivalry." Idealization shows itself also in the reli- gious background, which in the grail saga becomes very prominent and mystical. Then, too, the form shows more refinement. Assonance is succeeded by true rhyme. But what is more significant is the appeal to a wider public. Tradespeople and bourgeois begin to find a place in the stories, characters that would have had no interest for the public of the " Chansons, " to whom no minstrel would have ventured to intro- duce them. The " Chansons de geste " had been national, if not local, in tone, and the romances were essentially in accord with the medieval spirit; the next stage of development, however, was more purely artificial. Thirst for novelty, aided by the demands of the mo- nastic schools, led to translations and adaptations of classical subjects, especially the legends of Alexander, to one of which in twelve-syllable lines we owe the alexandrine verse that was destined to play a great part in the French prosody of many following centu- ries. Nature, too, begins to interest ; and " Bestiaries, " true " fairy tales of science, " such as that age knew, tell of the strange virtues and habits of animals, while other didactic poems recount similar traits of plants and stones. Lyric poetry now begins to be cultivated by the aristocracy. Troubadours in the south and Truuveres in the north write " liomances " and " Pas ton- MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 5 relies, " dealing always with ladies and shepherdesses, nearly always with love, usually of a rather facile character. Meanwhile the true, uusanctitied esprit gaulois was revealing itself in " Fabliaux, " short stories in verse, frankly coarse, and often brutal, usually comic and satirical, often cynically skeptical of virtue and with touches of what modern Frenchmen call Uayue. These tales were written by men, and they are not tender to feminine foibles. No doubt they give too dark a picture of the national morals ; but they are essentially realistic stories of every-day life, in strong contrast with the artificial " Pastou- relles. " They were to the middle and lower classes as natural as the " Chansons de geste " to the knights. Hence they had in them fruitful seeds of life, and exercised a great and lasting influence. They were so true to unspiritualized human nature that they needed little to adapt them to any age or environment. So the " Fabliaux " have been a storehouse whence the novelists and dramatists of later times have drawn some of their best material. The debt of Boccaccio, of De la Salle, of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Moliere to the old French " Fabliaux " shows that human nature does not greatly change in crossing the Alps or the Channel, nor yet from century to century. From the " Fabliaux " to the drama might seem a natural transition, for many of them were in dialogue. But here the initiative carne from the effort of the clergy to make the Scripture story more real to the unlettered multitude than painting or sculpture could have done. " Miracle Plays " were already acted in French before the close of the twelfth century ; but they have hardly a trace of literary merit, such as would entitle them to rank with the epics and lyrics G MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. of the time. The thirteenth century, however, was to produce in all these fields the best that mediaeval literature has to offer, here as in Germany ; and it is interesting to note that in both countries this re- markable age was followed by a stationary if not retrogressive one. Narrative verse in the thirteenth century, though abundant, shows little invention of new subjects. The tales of chivalrous adventure develop the old themes, with classical reminiscences in the spirit of free fancy and romantic fiction, with less energy but more grace and beauty. And beside this survival there rises the prose tale, drawing its inspiration through Greece by the attrition of the Crusades, as well as from the Latin and the older French epics, which it first equals and then surpasses both in bulk and interest. This indi- cates that while there was still an audience for the minstrel, a reading public was growing that would presently make him superfluous as a narrator and change him to a singer of songs. There is a pretence of didactic purpose in most of the translated talcs of the " Gesta Komanorum " and in the oriental " Seven Wise Masters ; " but original didactic writing is usually in versified fables, in Aesop's manner; and in the hands of Marie de France these attain at the outset a remarkable grace and pathos, though the best work of this genial lady is in the lais, short narrative lyrics, perhaps the most original poems of the century. The songs of Thibaut of Champagne are also very delicate and beautiful. Both poets belong to the high aristocracy and to the earlier half of the century, and their numerous imita- tors were thoroughly aristocratic both in their lives and work. The close of the century shows, however, MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 7 a marked shifting of the centre of production. Its chief authors, Ruteboeuf and Adam de la Halle, belong, by birth and instinct, to the people, and give a dis- tinctly democratic tone to the drama and to social and political satire. The former is a typical Parisian bourgeois of the period, whom poverty compelled to turn his hand to hack-work of almost every kind, panegyrics, lives of saints and miracle plays, fabliaux, and crusading songs, but who avenged himself in days of compara- tive ease by satirical attacks on his taskmasters, chiefly the clergy and the monks. Some of these, especially the autobiographical " Marriage " and " Complaint, " have still pungency enough to insure their life. But while Ruteboeuf was advancing literature on various lines, his contemporary, Adam de la Halle, was so broadening the French drama that he almost seems its creator. He carried it beyond the religious sphere. He took both his scenes and his characters from the life of his own day and of his native Arras, and so " Le Jeu de la feuille'e " (c. 1262) is the first French comedy of manners. Nor was this his only happy hit In " Robin and Marion " he was first to turn the " Pas- tourelle " into light opera. The invention of these two genres make the century memorable in French dramatic history, though the plays themselves may seem jejune enough to a modern reader. Meantime the fable, under the same democratic impulse, -had developed from the apologue to the epopee in " Renard the Fox, " whose protean forms attest its popularity throughout the Middle Ages. 1 Here are told, with obvious sympathy, the tricks by which 1 The original source seems to have been Flanders. See Lanson, p. 89. 8 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the Fox outwits the authority of the Lion, the strength of the Bear, and the envy of lesser enemies. It thus lends itself easily to the freest social and political satire, of which the moral basis, like that of the " Fabliaux, " is cynical skepticism that mocks honor, duty, loyalty, and has unqualified admiration for worldly shrewdness. The scheme admitted an indefi- nite addition of new episodes, until at last this product of many authors and several generations reached the huge bulk of thirty thousand lines, and seemed likely to die of its own hypertrophy, even while eager imitators were composing new poems on its model. The obvious danger of satirical allegory is artificial elaboration that makes it both unintelligible and wearisome. This is the fault of " Renard, " and in a still greater degree of the " Romance of the Rose, " a more brilliant poem of nearly equal length, in which the Middle Ages found an exhaustless mine of mi- sogynist irony. The wit is of the keenest, but the allegory is too fine spun ; and delightful as the poem is in parts, few will have the patience to unravel its tangled plot, in this age that cannot digest the " Faerie Queene. " But in its day its fame was very great; it claimed a translation from Chaucer, and some knowl- edge of its character belongs even to general literary culture. " The Romance of the Rose" is not a homogeneous work. Guillaurne de Loris began it in the aristocratic part of the century ; Jean de Meung finished it in the wholly different democratic spirit that marked Adam and Rutebosuf. The former planned a scholarly alle- gory of the Rose of beauty guarded by the virtues from the vices and from the Lover, whom some assist and others hinder in his effort to pluck and bear her from MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 9 the well -defended garden. Guillaume is often truly poetic and occasionally realistic, yet there is small trace in these pretty conceits of anything but serious moralizing. But when Jean took *ip the parable, in a continuation some four times the length of the original, he maintained, indeed, the essential thread of the allegory, but allowed himself the freest scope for the display of a varied reading and wide learning, and for satirical digressions that enter nearly every field of what was then current in science and speculation, in philosophy, physics, and theology. These give the poem its chief interest to-day, though to the student of mediaeval manners it offers pictures that would be sought in vain elsewhere, and in its peculiar vein it has probably never been equalled. Jean de Meimg was the first popularizer of rationalism, of Nature as the guide of life. He is the true predecessor of Rabe- lais, of Montaigne, and of Voltaire ; and though he never ceased to imagine, himself a devout Catholic, he is essentially Protestant at heart. Nature, to him, is the source of beauty ; to live according to Nature is true morality. If he appears sometimes crude and even cynical in his judgments of those who seem most to contradict Nature, the monks and women, he is in the main a severe moralist; and though his work is a strange and ill-ordered medley, he is surely the most original thinker who wrote in French before the Renaissance. The historical prose of the thirteenth century is probably more read than any of its purely literary productions, perhaps because both Villehardouin at the beginning and Joinville at the close of this period were closer students of real life than the poets. Ville- hardouin writes what might pass for a prose chanson de 10 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. geste if it were not known to be the account of a sobei eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade, or, as he more justly calls it, of the Conquest of Constantinople, for Christians, not Saracens, were its victims. No account of this mad adventure could lack a spice of romance ; but Villehardouin put into it all the childlike naivete' of his time, all the energy of a man of action, all the piety of the ages of faith, all the enthusiasm that par- ticipation in a great task could inspire in a generous soul. Thus his Chronicle, as Saintsbury has said, gives a better idea of chivalry and feudalism at their best, than any other single work. It mirrors the life of the Middle Ages, as'the " Eomance of the Rose " does its thought. It has much of the charm of Froissart, and will never seem old so long as hearts are young. During the century others continued the tradition, though they did not attain the excellence of the Cru- sader, and toward its close the monks of St. Denis be- gan to compile their official history in French ; but that was not literature. On the other hand, Joinville's biog- raphy of his friend and master, Louis IX. the Saint, has a peculiar grace and charm that six centuries have not made to fade. Louis died in 1270, but Joinville wrote a generation later in advanced old age. The century that separates him from Villehardouin was, as we haAje seen, one of disillusionment; sentiment was yielding to satire, and this was reflected in history as it had been in the epic and lyric poetry. Joinville is more reflective, more inquisitive too. He is a little skeptical about the merit of fighting for fighting's sake, and has his doubts about the value of knight-errantry. There is a great deal of keen though playful satire in the anecdotes that he recalls of the good king. It seems as though the same moral lassitude which in MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 11 Germany had followed the collapse of Frederic II. 'a efforts for the emancipation of the human mind, the discouraged consciousness of the failure of the Cru- sades, and the growing weight of the ecclesiastical yoke, had here the same effect that it was having in the Empire, driving men to a critical, questioning spirit, to thoughts they were fain to veil in allegory and satire. And Joinville's work is interesting also from a rhetorical side. In him French prose proved its fitness for literary use. It was no longer an experi- ment, and it is essentially on the lines of his style that it grew and perfected itself. Indeed, so long as the mediaeval spirit continued, so long as education and especially classical culture was confined to the few, till the minds of men were enlarged and their horizons broadened, no radical change could be expected in literature. The French had already expressed their tender feelings in lyrics, their heroic aspirations in chansons, their life in the chronicles, their social views in satires. They were restless, questioning, expectant. Under these condi- tions an arrested literary development is almost inevi- table. There might be no decline. Good work might continue to be done on the old lines ; but presently the disillusionment spread and deepened. They felt that the old social system was cracking. It took no prophet to see that feudalism was doomed. But a new literature coul'd arise only with a new enthusiasm ; and that enthusiasm came after two centuries of expectation from the inspiring breath of Italian culture and the classical Renaissance. In poetry this intervening period counts the notable names of Charles d'Orle'ans and Fransois Villon l in 1 Orleans, b. 1391, d. 1465. Villou, b. 1431, d. about 1463. 12 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. a numerous company, whose ingenuity was exercised less over matter than form. It has been said that " their poetry was all technique, and all their tech- nique was difficulty. " They invented a great number of metrical arrangements, more or less artificial, such as the ballade, with its equivocal and retrograde vari- ations, the rondeau, rondel, triolet, virelay, and the chanson royal, 1 which some English poets are exer- cising their skill to imitate to-day, so that these men enjoy a sort of esoteric cult and some real revival of popularity. For no one can read D 'Orleans' graceful, nonchalant verses without delight, though their ethical value is of the slightest, and the fickle muse surely deserts him if ever he presumes to be serious. Bitter experience of the uncertainties of politics had made him pay for the honor of a high command at Agincourt with a long imprisonment in England, whence he re- turned a devoted disciple of the god Nonchaloir, and felt no more pressing duty than to set up a poetic court at Blois, where the best talent of the age was soon assembled. As " an idle singer of an empty day, " he had quite peculiar gifts. His favorite subjects are the changing seasons and light-hearted lover's fancies, with O O o counsels against melancholy and care, and exhortations to friendship and good-humor. D 'Orleans is never great, but he is nearly always healthy and cheerful. The Parisian Villon strikes a deeper note. He was a greater and a more original poet, though a less worthy man. Poor as Ruteboeuf, he was even more of a reckless vagabond ; and his best work, like his prede- cessor's, was in satires, his " Testaments," in which he made mock bequests to various friends and enemies, with autobiographical details and allusions that are 1 These metrical forms are briefly described in Lanson, p. 142, note. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 13 interesting whenever they happen to be still intelli- gible. The chief attraction of Villon to-day, however, is the short poems interspersed in these long satires, some of which bid fair to maintain their place among the best lyrics of the world. The " Ballad of the Ladies of Long-Ago, " with its refrain, " But where are last year's snows," 1 is familiar to all lovers of poetry. Almost as famous is the " Epitaph in the form of a Ballad which Villon wrote for himself and his Compan- ions when expecting to be hung with them. " In this poem of death there is an antinomy of grim humor and naive pathos that can hardly be excelled. But though in our own day Villon has been called " the first French writer who is frankly and completely modern, " he will always be the poet of the few, the poets' poet, and " caviare to the general. " After his death French poets grew steadily more artificial, endeavoring to atone by self-imposed restraints for the lack of genius to rise above them, precisely as the Mastersingers were doing in contemporary Germany, and with much the same result. Meantime, in the drama, the brilliant innovations of Adam de la Halle remained unfruitful for a time, while the Miracle Play was developing into the Mystery, where a freer use of allegory and mythology fostered originality and encouraged associations of actors inde- pendent of the clergy, or at least apart from them. Such companies were quicker to anticipate or respond to pop- ular demands ; and in the fifteenth century they pre- sented not only the " Fall of Troy, " but the very recent siege of Orleans, and the national heroine Joan of Arc, whose ashes were hardly cold. But the esprit gaulois has 1 Mais oil sont les neiges d'antan (Ballade des dames du temps jadis). 14 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. a natural affinity for comedy, and this century revived also Adam's happy inspiration in its moral allegories, farces, and soties. The first are the most artificial, and their vogue may well seem remarkable to a modern reader. " La Condemnation du banquet " is perhaps the best, yet it is but a wearisome girding at " Glut- tony," who has for his interlocutors such dramatis personce as " Dinner," " Supper," " Pastime," " Good- Company, " " I-Drink-to-You, " as well as various diseases and medical appliances, and a chorus to ob- trude the obvious moral. The soties and. farces are far more interesting. Some of them are comic monologues, and occasionally they look like parodies on the ser- mons of the time, which themselves are often hardly more than parodies, as one may see in the famous dis- courses of the Viennese Abraham a Sancta-Clara. But the larger part are realistic scenes of middle and low life, full of action and often of brutal buffoonery such as would appeal to the not very delicate taste of the populace. Their spirit, like that of the older fabliaux, is one of social distrust, of shrewdness and trickery. Charity and gentleness are mocked, astuteness is ad- mired. Each man lives in dread of being duped by his neighbor. But we have a Frenchman's testimony that this is " the lower type of the French nature in its pure vulgarity. " J Some of these little farces and jests are so short that they seem meant to precede or follow a more serious performance. Others are long enough for independent production, and have no small comic verve. " Le Cuvier, " for instance, shows as much dramatic spirit as the best of the old fabliaux. A yet more noted medieval farce is the " Maitre Pathelin" (1470), 1 Lausou, p. 214. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 15 which, in the seventeenth century, was worked over into a regular comedy that owed its success almost wholly to the vis comica of the original ; and two sequels in the fifteenth century attest its popularity without equalling its merits. All of these plays were written in verse, chiefly for the benefit of the actors who memorized them, but also in deference to tradition. Except in outward form, however, they are essentially prosaic, and must have gained little but monotony from their couplets and long succession of octosyllabic lines. Yet the force of this custom has continued almost to our own day, though the suppler alexandrine has given some measure of relief to comedy and added stateliness to the classic tragedy. The number of farces that remain is very great, and doubtless as many have perished. --With them comedy is fairly launched, and has never since ceased to be one of the most popular and important forms of French literature. Meantime the prose that would have been in place here, takes in Froissart complete possession of the historical field, where Joinville had won only toleration. This courtier and diplomat of the later fourteenth century (1337-1410), who witnessed much of the Hundred Years' War, and busily inquired of all he did not see, was able to draw a picture of the conflict between France and England that became nt once immensely popular, and has continued to delight boyhood and old age ever since for its vivid pictur- esqueness of description and its enthusiastic chivalry of sentiment Froissart is not a meticulously accurate historian, still less a social philosopher; but for o battle, or a pageant, or a tragic scene like the surren- der of Calais, it will be hard to match him in French 16 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. or, indeed, in any literature. None ever equalled his brilliant and sympathetic picture of chivalry, with all its high-hearted ideals and all its disdain of the mass of humanity. For Froissart the common people hardly exist. But the times were even then changing, and a keen though untrained interest in the condition of the masses is attested by the minute curiosity of Juvenal des Ursins and Jean de Troyes, who wrote, somewhat later than Froissart, the former of the mad Charles VI. , the latter of the shrewd diplomat Louis XI. and his scandalous court, that were to furnish to Philippe de Commynes the subject of the Memoirs by which he in- augurated diplomatic history. But perhaps the most important contributor to the literary prose of this century was Antoine de la Salle, author of the graceful " Petit Jean de Saintre, " of the biting " Quinze joies du mariage, " and of the brilliant " Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " " Petit Jean " is a pretty story of chivalrous love, a pure bit of romantic imagi- nation ; for ere this Louis XI. had made chivalry a thing of the past in France. The " Fifteen Joys, " as its name implies, is a satire on women, as bright and as unjust as the " Romance of the Rose," but, unlike that famous poem, of far more than antiquarian in- terest, for it is still popular in cheap editions on the Paris book-stalls. Each of the " Joys" tells of some ill-assorted match, and each chapter ends with the misery that will come of it to the husband who " shall end miserably his days. " The poor fellow is either led by the nose, or plundered of his goods, or made a laughing-stock to his friends. Some of the character- sketches are very lively and dramatic in form, and they are well worth reading, in spite of their archaic flavor, as specimens of early Renaissance literature and wit MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 17 But Antoine de la Salle's great work is the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles, " a collection of tales gathered, it was said, from the lips of Prince Louis and his courtiers while he was in Burgundy under the protec- tion of Duke Philippe, another lover of the esprit gaulois. But neither the future Louis XI. nor his courtiers were the inventors of the best of these tales, many of them quite too good to be new. They are drawn in part from old fabliaux, in part from Italian and Latin collections. But, as with Chaucer and Shakspere, it is not in the substance but in the treat- ment that De la Salle's individuality lies, and here his merit is very great There had been good naive prose in Villehardouin, in Joinville, and in Froissart, but De la Salle is the -first prose artist who takes an interest in his art His work shows growing artistic sense and power. Some of the " Hundred New Tales " are really polished, and it added to their effect that they appealed to a much wider circle than any other form of writing would have done. If at times they have a frankness of speech that does not accord with squeamish man- ners, their humor on the whole is sound and healthy, and nearly always true to human nature, superior in this regard to Boccaccio's " Decamerone, " though yield- ing of course to that masterpiece in grace of style. It may be remarked that De la Salle's efforts for French prose were ably seconded by the homilists of the time, whose sermons readied another class, and so carried the same seed to other fields. And now we are on the eve of that wonderful and cardinal epoch in the history of the French and indeed of the European mind, the Renaissance. 1 That all 1 The remainder of this chapter first appeared in " The Sewanec Review, " as did also parts of chapters II, III. VIII, and IX. 13 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. literature, and indeed all forms of national life, are processes of evolution, is a truth now almost univer- sally recognized among critics worthy of the name ; but there are periods when external influences seem to a superficial observer to interrupt the continuity of development, when changes are more rapid and more radical than at others ; and from this point of view the sixteenth century is absolutely unique in French litera- ture. For however varied the expression of that age may be, protestant, pagan, humanistic, there is in it no place and no representative for the manner or the matter of mediaeval literature. Calvin, Rabelais, and Konsard drew all of them their inspiration from antiq- uity, all of them were practically ready to make a tabula rasa of the centuries that separate Augustine from Boccaccio, but each went to antiquity with a differ- ent mind, and drew from it a different lesson. Calvin seeks primitive Christianity ; Rabelais Greek natural- ism ; Montaigne the skeptical and practical realism of Rome ; Ronsard turns with a passionate longing to the sun of classic art. So we have to follow out, in this century and in those that succeed, three main tendencies, not indeed without subdivisions and intertwinings, for literary psychology is not a geometric science, and a strict classification attains clearness only by inaccuracy ; but still as elements sufficiently distinct from one another to make it profitable to ask in every case in what pro- portion they enter into each great writer's work and genius. There is first the temper that recoils from the abuses of the Church and from what it regards as the accretions of mediaeval ethics, and seeks to restore from the Bible, and the Fathers that suit their purpose, a " primitive Christianity " to their mind. These are MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 19 the Protestants, the Huguenots, sober, serious, earnest, religious men, whom France will miss from her intel- lectual and still more from her moral life, when she has persecuted and banished them. Uncomfortable, intransigent, morose sometimes and bitter like our own Puritans, but, after all, the moral salt of the earth, whom perhaps one would not like to be one's self, but whom one is quite proud to have had for an ancestor. Then there are the Gallios, men who see that there is something rotten in the Church of their fathers, but do not think that they were born to set it right; men who love ease, beauty, grace, and have a sort of dilettante joy of life. These are the human- ists, who toy with Theocritus and Horace, are fasci- nated with Anacreon, and have a more distantTadmi ra- tion for the truly popular epic of Homer than for the courtly epic of Virgil, but who see in it all a play of fancy, not a philosophy of life. And finally there are the neo-pagans, who find in the bankruptcy of mediae- valism the bankruptcy of Christianity, who think to have done at once with Saint Augustine and with Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose ambition is a na'ive hedonism more easy to their age than to ours, who find the old Church more tolerant than the new, and so remain as a rule nominally Catholic, and are seldom called upon to suffer more than temporary inconvenience for their thinly masked heresies. The causes of this sudden outburst of independent thought were numerous, and have been often indicated. The discovery of America, and, still more, the dis- covery of the solar system, had changed man's point of view of his place in Nature. As Faguet 1 observes, " The narrow world of the middle ages, with its sky 1 Seizicinc sicclo, Av.int-propos, p. vii. 2J MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. very low and its God very close, disappeared almost suddenly. We were living in a little low house, where we were watched from the top of a neighboring tower by a severe and good master, who had given us his law, followed us with his eyes, sent us frequent messengers, protected us, punished us, and held us always in his hand. And suddenly we were living in an out-of-the- way corner of the immense universe. Heaven with- drew into measureless space, and God fled into infin- ity. " That knowledge was indeed too wonderful for that generation. Many lost for a time the feeling of the personality of deity. The science of God might be exalted, 'clarified, but the love of God grew cold, and men of philosophic mind felt nearer to the school of Athefls than to the school of Alexandria or of Hippo, far nearer than to the Angelic or to the Mystic Doctor. It is a commonplace to connect the renaissance with the invention of printing and the spread of classical learning, but even here there is perhaps some misap- prehension. Many of the classics had been known and used by literary men habitually and constantly since the age of Eede. The " Romance of ,the Rose " reeks with antiquity of a certain kind; Villon has even traces of the classic lyric spirit. Of course, when manuscripts of ancient authors were printed, they were more widely read. But the point of importance is that they were read in a new spirit and seen in a wholly new light. For just at the time when print- ing was invented, and the inventors looked about them for books to print, it happened that the national liter- ature was at a low ebb, having indeed been steadily degenerating since the thirteenth century in France as in Germany, while at the same time it chanced that, through the fall of Constantinople and other external MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 21 causes, a vast number of classical manuscripts became for the first time available. Hence the books first mul- tiplied with some natural exceptions, such as the " Bible " and the " Imitation of Christ " were the clas- sics ; and these books thus obtained a vantage ground in the minds of the reading public that they could hardly have attained had they been obliged to contest the favor of the once popular writers of the thirteenth century, whom time and the widening of the human mind had now crowded from view. This, again, has been admirably expressed by Faguet : " On one side were the classics and the writings of the sixteenth century, printed, portable, legible, inconceivably mul- tiplied ; on the other side the medieval books, manu- scripts, hard to handle, to take in, to read, or to find. So printing gradually suppressed the middle ages, and by presenting antiquity and the sixteenth century to eye and mind under the same forms, in the same styles and types, and as it were in the same language, it expressed and asserted emphatically that continua- tion of antiquity by the sixteenth century that was dimly in all minds, and cast, in like measure, the middle ages into the shade as though they had not been. " 1 Herein lies the significance of the word " renaissance, " a new birth of,, an old life after ages of quiescence which men despise and make haste to forget, almost as much repelled by their own tradition as they are attracted to a foreign past It was a state of mind unique in history, and full of the germs of political, social, and literary revolution. The three elements pagan, humanistic, and protes- tant manifest themselves throughout Europe, but with different degrees and results. In Germany the renas- 1 Faguet, Seizieme siccle, x. 22 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. cence is ethical, religious. The voice of the human- ists is feeble and soon lost in domestic strife, while the pagan element was never deeply rooted among them. Here, therefore, the classical renaissance is deferred for more than three centuries, to spring, like a fully armed Pallas, from the brain of Lessing, and to be the presiding genius of the ideal humanist, Goethe. In England, too, the religious side predom- inates, but always mingled with humanism ; while in the Italy of Boccaccio and the France of Eonsard the movement is more literary, artistic, and at most crypto- pagan, except for the Huguenots, whose spirit in liter- ature hardly extends beyond Calvin and D'Aubigne. Here the normal state of mind is humanistic, eclectic, " with a Christian soul and a pagan art, " an illogical compromise that reaches its supreme expression in Chateaubriand, though it can be seen almost every- where and always in France, as for instance in Boileau's exclusion of Christian mysteries from the domain of poetry, and in the resulting impersonality of the whole literature of the classic school. The pagan element in the renaissance, on the contrary, has predominated only during a part of the eighteenth cen- tury, though it is fundamentally the spirit of Rabelais, of Montaigne, of La Fontaine and of Moliere. This spirit is opposed equally to Catholicism and to Protes- tantism, while the humanists content themselves with reprobating the latter and its congener, Jansenism. The triumph of the pagan renaissance in the age of Voltaire was, however, short. The spirit of the ency- clopaedists yielded to that of the " Genius of Chris- tianity," while the revival of the pagan tradition lias in it an element of Jansenism, and the Reformers have become Frce-Thiukcrs. iSiucc the Romantic School the MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 23 mark of the period lias been a varied individualism. There is uo longer one Spirit of the Time, but many spirits. If now we return to the sixteenth century and seek in it the expression of these various tendencies, we shall find that this age of singular activity owes little to its immediate predecessor, save a style to which De la Salle had given a graceful suppleness and the homi- lists an oratorical flow. In every kind of literary art this century advances by leaps, spurred to activity first and most by the example of the Italian renais- sance, for the ambition of their kings had brought them into repeated and close though disastrous con- tact with that ancient home of art, but impelled also by the revival of learning at home, and by the reli- gious ferment, which was spread by printing and the accompanying diffusion of primary knowledge, and grew, like yeast, by what it fed on. There is noth- ing to compare in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries with the prose satire of the " Me'nippe'e " or the barbed verses of D'Aubigne'; nothing to match the lyrics of Marot, still less of Ilonsard ; nothing like the criticism of Du Bellay or the dignified drama of Jodelle ; no such fiction as blossomed beneath the dainty fingers of Queen Marguerite; no such wit as Beroald's and Des Pe*riers' ; above all, nothing to match tli3 stern force of Calvin, the marvellous well-spring of Rabelais' humor, or the novel charm of Montaigne's essays. Nor must we forget the numerous translations that now first betray a restless search for new inspirations. The drooping taste for idealized adventure receives a fillip from a version of " Amadis of Gaul, " the great ro- mance of Spanish chivalry. Amyot turns into prose that may still arouse admiration, " Daphnis and 24 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Chloe, " that exquisite pastoral of the Greek Long us, as well as Plutarch's lives of the great men of Greece and Rome, that became a repertory for the novelists and dramatists of the next century. It is clear already that we have to deal with a remarkable diversity of genius. Indeed this is, like our own, a century < ,f literary independence, with few rules, save the " Do what thou wilt" of Rabelais' Abley of Thelema, and no enduring literary schools or traditions. It was not till its very close that the ethical and artistic aspi- rations of the renaissance were chastened and united by Malherbe, who " joined with a somewhat heavy hand antique art to modern rationalism," and, though him- self a little man, owes to greater followers the distinc- tion of being first in the classical period. The poetry of the century, with the exception of a portion, and that perhaps not the best, of D'Aubigne"s verse, is humanistic, continuing with greater resources and greater zeal the study of classic art that was already an old tradition in France. But while the middle ages had sought their inspiration chiefly in the more accessible Latin writers, in Ovid and Eocthius, in Livy and the essays of Cicero, Marot, the first of the renaissance poets who need detain our attention, knew and valued Virgil, Martial, Lucian, and the pseudo- Musaeus ; while Ronsard, with his fellows of the Pleiad, seems often to have judged the value of an acquisition by its difficulty, prizing Pindar more than Homer, and finding his most genuine delight first in Petrarch, then in Anacreon. Clement Marot (1497-1544) had the happy fortune to unite northern blood to southern birth, and to com- bine many of the virtues of each. In his ethics he was a sort of dilettante reformer, of the type that MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 25 gathered at the court of the broad-minded and tolerant Princess Marguerite, afterward Queen of Navarre, her- self a lyric poet, whose " Marguerites " show a consider- able development of that personal note which the Pleiad, Malherbe, and Boileau were to deaden in France till the rise of the Romantic School. Under her patronage Marot furthered religious disintegration by his translation of the Psalms, which was very popular, even after it was condemned by the Sorbonue as smack- ing of heresy. Here the subject lent him a dignity that his other work is apt to lack, being in the main pretty rather than beautiful, light rather than strong, graceful rather than grand. His great service to French verse is that he did for it what the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles " had already done for its prose. He restored naturalism and simplicity. For the artificial excess of ornament and allegory he substituted his native grace and delicacy. 1 He is now, and probably will always be, most read for his lighter work, for his songs, epistles, epigrams, animal fables, and the nonsense verses, the " Coq-a-r,me. " And even in these fields he is chiefly known by a very few pieces de resistance of the reading-books and anthologies. All school-boys know "The Kat and the Lion," most will have read Marot's deliciously naive begging letter to King Fran- cis I. (Epist. 11 and 28); but to one who has read the whole body of his work, the songs, satirical -or con- vivial, such as " Frere Lubin," "Dedans Paris," or " An bon vieux temps," will seem more characteristic of his natural diversity, and give us a more human sympathy with one who was always a good fellow, and 1 The instinct of beauty occasionally fails him, yet he falls but seldom into such crass naturalism -aa that of "Le Laid tcton," a com- panion piece to Baudelaire's " Charogne." 26 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. always seemed so when it was not for his interest to cut a long face. Marot's imitators were usually more serious, always less talented than he, though to one of them, Saint- Ge'lais, French verse owes the introduction of the Italian sonnet. The Calvinistic satirist, Agrippa d'Aubigne' (1550-1630), though of a much later period, shared Marot's sympathies rather than those of the free- thinking Pleiad, of whom he is sometimes called a " rebellious " follower. His trenchant satires did much to establish the domination of the alexandrine verse that Eonsard had preached rather than practised. They were also the first worthy work in the manner of Juvenal that France has to show. But even before Marot's death a group of young talents had gathered at the College Coqueret, whose influence was to be temporarily greater and more lasting in some of its phases than that of any which had preceded them. This " Pleiad " of genius supplemented what was best in Marot's naturalism with a fuller measure of the classical spirit, and so set French literature, both in its substance, its form, and its language, in new paths, which those who afterward most blamed their early excesses were most zealous silently to follow. The Pleiad was first in France to preach and practise par- ticular heed to the cadence of the single verse, while lyric poets before them had regarded the stanza as the unit in poetic composition. It was also first to reprove and regulate the once unbridled license of newly coined words and phrases, though even their liberal culture went farther in this than following generations were willing to follow. With delicate feeling they laid stress on the choice and place of words in poetic composition, and completed the discredit of an artificial MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 27 and rhetorical style against which Marot had already raised the standard of revolt But while Marot had the tact to " choose the wheat and let the chaff be still " in the traditional forms, he introduced into literature no new blood. With Ronsard and his brothers of the Pleiad the case is different. They were conscious inno- vators ; their advent could not have been anticipated, and is indeed almost a unique fact in literary history. It was probably in 1541 that Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), then a travelled young soldier of eighteen, left his profession, and the promise of a brilliant career, for studious retirement at Paris and the prized instructions of Daurat, who presently began to gather about him a group of enthusiastic young scholars, such as might have been sought in vain elsewhere in France. Belleau and Bait' had preceded Ronsard; Du Bellay he brought back from a journey to Poictiers; Jodelle and Pontus de Tyard soon joined them to com- plete their "brigade," a name that their number, seven, led them to exchange for Pleiad, when, in 1549, the group first ventured to break their studious silence, and to proclaim their views and purposes in the " Dd- fense et illustration de la langue franchise, " ostensibly by Du Bellay, but really a joint manifesto of the school. The purpose of this famous pamphlet is to urge its readers who have entered the classical camp " to escape from the midst of the Greeks and through the ranks of the Romans, and to come back to the heart of their own well-beloved France," that they may bring with them from those foreign literatures what may be profitable to their own. Now, any man who reads widely in the writings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will find the conviction grow that Fivnch, as a vehicle of literary expression for the 28 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. renaissance mind, was in need of just that new blood that could be drawn from the school of Petrarch and from the revival of classical studies, the source whence Italy had already drawn its fuller life. The men of the Pleiad were no Chauvinists, but yet they were thoroughly national and patriotic in their aims, and quick to learn from their own errors, as well as from those of their erudite predecessors, 1 so that their last work is among their best. In them the humanism of the French renaissance reaches its fullest expression, while of the ethical and philosophic phase of the move- ment they have hardly a trace. Typical of all, except Jodelle, is Konsard; he alone is still generally read by cultured men, apart from special studies, and of him alone it is necessary to speak here. His literary life was a constant triumph. Almost from the outset, and until his death, he was easily first at court and in the popular esteem ; and he held this place after his death, though in Desportes and less talented imitators among the classical decadents, the blood of the French muse began to run thin, till Malherbe gave a new life to Ronsard's revival of classic taste by infusing it with the rationalistic spirit. Konsard asserted his pre-eminence by his mastery of the language and of metre, and by a poetic imagi- nation, without which the most skilful rhymester is only an artisan. In language he encouraged his readers to " a wise boldness in inventing new words, so long as they were moulded and fashioned on a pattern already recognized by the people. " He might have said, with Dante, that language never constrained him to say what he would not ; but he had often constrained lan- guage to say what it would not, though in this regard 1 Especially Le Maire tie Beiges, Ileroet, and Maurice Seeve. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 29 the sum of his offending does not exceed two hundred words. However the case may be now in academic France, Kousard understood for his time exactly what it meant to have a mastery of his own tongue; and though perhaps he strained too much at foreign forms, neglecting the poetic worth that lay in the popular speech, yet in his prose as in his verse there was a vigor and a brilliancy that had not been equalled, and was not exceeded till the appearance of Montaigne's " Essays. " It is curious to note that this crystallization of mod- ern prose which Ronsard inaugurated in France, had its parallels iu the contemporary literatures of Ger- many, Spain, aiid England. In every case it was political unity that gave the first impulse and forced the dialects into subordination to the dominant speech very much what Luther accomplished for the German, and in prosody also he was an innovator and a re- former. He failed indeed to revive the Pindaric ode, the value of which for modern use he greatly exagger- ated; but he restored the alexandrine to its place of honor, though he did not always follow his own teach- ing. He was also first to popularize the sonnet, and he introduced an endless variety of lyric stanzas, whose metres were as graceful as they were original. It is here that his bast work is to be sought, in the groups called " Amours, " " Gaiete's, " and in the later odes, rather than in the classical eclogues and odes, or in the unfinished epic, " La Franciade. " Anthologies never fail to cite " Mignonne, allons voir si la rose," and the sonnet to He'lene beginning " Quand vous serez bie.n vieille ;. " and they seldom omit the " Drenched Cupid," a subject borrowed from Anacreon, and 30 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. interesting because it admits a comparison with La Fontaine. But, charming as these are, it is only pre- scription that causes them to be so uniformly preferred to a score of others, filled with the peculiar naivete and flavor of the renaissance that later centuries so seldom recover. " La petite colornbelle " yields nothing in the comparison with Catullus that it naturally suggests; and " Cupid's School," borrowed from Bion, is treated in a "way to put the creditor under obligations to his debtor. Then, too, there is " L'Alouette" (the Sky- lark), as characteristic of France and of his century as Shelley's is of England and of his. Eonsard is a poet in the fresh vigor of hope. He is not looking with the Englishman's forlorn hope from some Euganean hill for the " green isles that needs must be in the deep, wide sea of misery; " his Skylark is a charming bird to be enjoyed, not to be yearned for as the symbol of what she is not. There is hardly ever a morbid strain in his verses, for Eonsard at his best is the poet of a free and healthy naturalism. Hence the last half- century has been peculiarly favorable to a revival of his fame, which has betrayed some enthusiasts into an ex- cessive admiration. He lacked clear aesthetic stan- dards because he lacked intellectual independence ; but the fact remains that no French poet before Victor Hugo is so much in sympathy with the spirit of our age as Eonsard, while at the same time no poet has a more cheerful note or a more needed message to this pessi- mistic generation. Eonsard lived a happy, hopeful life, and the peace- ful current of his declining years was crowned with the " honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," that should accompany it, and with a peaceful and holy death (December 27, 1585). A hopeful, healthy joy of life, MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 31 rarely crossed by a querulous cloud, remained with him, as with Goethe, to the end. Just so far as this temper has prevailed in it, French literature has been strong aiid helpful. Ronsard did more than any one man to form the literary language of France. It was his humanism, corrected, modified, and then ignored by Malherbe, that dominated the age of Louis XIV., though it was reserved for our own to restore to him his long neglected honor. " The classical spirit was formed in accord with him, without him, and appar- ently in opposition to him. He had it, he did not inspire it He is the final type of it, and he is not its founder; he is its first date, and he is not its source. But that is no fault of his. " l In the drama the Pleiad, represented by Jodelle (1532-1573), was less original and more classical in tone. His " Cleopatra " is the first " regular " tragedy, the first that answers to the distorted conception he had formed of the Aristotelian unities, and his " Eugbne " is the first " regular " comedy. Both were studied, as was all his work, more from the Latin than from the Greek ; but, defective if not mistaken as was his critical conception, his ideas were so in accord with the French spirit on its good and its weak side, that they were industriously imitated, till at the close of the century (1599) Alexander Hardy began the rehabilitation of the national drama at the Hotel de Bourgogne, till then still occupied by the mysteries of the Confraternity of the Passion. The first noteworthy prose work of the sixteenth century, the " Memoirs " of Philippe de Commynes (1445-1511), belongs rather to the fifteenth; but as it was not published till ir>24, his eifect on the 1 Fagiu-t, Selzicme sit'rle, 287. 32 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. literature of the time must be considered with that of the men of the early French renaissance. What strikes one most in the man's writing, as in his life, is his practical and modern common-sense. For the knight-errantry of Froissart he substitutes a diplo- matic shrewdness and a wide curiosity that always fol- lows the what with the why. Successively the servant of Charles the Bold, of Louis XL, and of Charles VIII., he guarded beneath his diplomacy the naive faith of a man whose own experience is full of riddles that some sort of providence alone is able to solve ; but he joins to this an equally naive belief in shrew r dness and i a distrust of over-boldness in the affairs of the world. This undogmatic religiosity is a modern trait; modern, too, are his curiosity, his democratic sympathies, and the natural restraint of his narrative that rarely passes beyond the limits of his immediate observa- tion. Though himself little touched by the renais- sance, his attitude toward the Church ranks him among the ancestors of the humanists, of whom in- deed there is a long line reaching far back into the thirteenth century. On the other hand, Calvin (1509-1564) represented the new spirit of intransigent reform, the attempted restoration of primitive Christianity. Trained both for theology and law, he joined in after life the doctor to the lawgiver, and became at once the Moses and the Aaron of the chosen people who left the flesh-pots of their French bondage to gather in the Genevan Canaan. With his teaching we have nothing to do here save to note its revolt against medievalism ; but the sober logic and classical polish of his style give him a very high place if we regard form alone, the highest place among the prose-writers of his century. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 33 It is sober sense enforced with a lapidarian clearness and precision, and therefore lacking somewhat in sym- pathy and imagination, bent on commanding rather than winning assent, on being understood rather than on being loved ; here, too, " the style is the man, " stern, imperious, lofty, sincere, and sombre, 1 at once borne up and borne down by the all-pervading sense of the immanence of deity. But in the less competent hands of his imitators and successors his style inevi- tably degenerated to pedantic heaviness, though not until it had shown the unguessed powers of French for accurate exposition and subtle disputation. But this century of renascence was distinguished no less and characterized much better by Rabelais, a remarkably keen and learned man, who spent his life in ridiculing with the most bitter satire what he still professed to believe. In his career, as in his work, there appears at first sight a constant vein of insincerity, a Mephistophelian spirit that sees the weak, the laughable, the ridiculous side of that which it holds dearest and holiest; but when work and life are more closely examined, Rabelais' spirit seems rather that of a profound philosopher who discerns the essential antinomy in all apprehension of human truth, so that he rises far above the mere mockery of Lucian or the diabolic ferocity of Swift. Traces of the same philosophic attitude can be found in Reuchlin, in Erasmus, and in other doctors of the Reformation, more learned than bold; but it is in France that this 1 ITe trios occasionally to lighten his sermons with some metaphor from common life or even with vulgar dialect; hut it is heavy fooling, and one feels that he shakes with awkward reluctance this cap and hells. See for instances, r.s well as for a keen study of Calvin's doc- trine, Faguet, Seizieme sii'de, 127-197, and especially 192-193. 3 34 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. spirit can he most frequently and constantly noted, and the unchallenged leader of its representatives is Francois Rabelais (1495-1553), who is the most com- plete reflection of the too sanguine hopes of the pagan renaissance, of its serious aspirations, its over-hasty generalizations, and its joy of life. Rabelais' satire is put into the form of a burlesque romance of adventures; but the form is a very thin disguise, and the thread of the narrative is of the slen- derest. Throughout, his real interest is in destructive criticism of the political and social conditions of his time. His mind became constructive only when stirred by the worthlessness of mediaeval education or by the abuses of decaying monasticism. The five books l of his great satire, which differ sufficiently from one another to be treated as separate works, appeared at various times between 1532 and 1564, when Rabe- lais had already been eleven years dead, and beyond the reach both of the just indignation and of the petty partisan hate that had pursued him through all his mature years. The first book bears the title " Gar- gantua, " the others " Pantagruel ; " and it is these that merit both the greatest admiration and the greatest reprobation. They are probably more studied to-day than any other work of the time. They are more witty, more caustic, more profoundly skeptical, more unscrupulous, and more unclean than any other book of that age. Indeed their coarseness is perhaps un- paralleled in literature, and serves to hide both the author's wit and his political and pedagogic wisdom. That he should have begun life as a monk, while only 1 Brunetiere, Lanson, and other critics hold th.it the fifth hook is a Huguenot pamphlet of another man and time, though posthumous papers of l?ahe]ais were used in its composition. MIDDLK AGE AND RENASCENCE. 35 his voluntary resignation prevented his ending it as a cure*, illustrates the condition of the Church. In the interval between his leaving the Franciscan clois- ter of Fontenay le Conte and his entory into the pres- bytery of Meudon, he had been a Benedictine canon, a wandering scholar, a student of medicine, a scien- tist, physician to a diplomatic ambassador, and a voluntary exile. Rabelais' book as a whole plays less part in litera- ture than some of the characters in it Gargantua, the giant father of Pantagruel, was generally recog- nized as typical of the good-humored, easy-going roy- alty of Francis I. Panurge, the companion and servant of Pantagruel, and more interesting than his master, embodies, as Saintsbury says, " a somewhat diseased intellectual refinement, and the absence of morality in the wide Aristotelian sense, with the presence of almost all other good qualities. " " He is the principal triumph of Rabelais' character-drawing, and the most original, as well as the most puzzling, figure in the book. A coward, a drunkard, a lecher, a spiteful trickster, a spendthrift, but all the while infinitely amusing." 1 Opposed to him is the lusty animalism of Friar John, whose famous Abbey of Thelema, with its hedonistic motto, " Do what thou wilt, " represents Rabelais' ideal of the " natural life," and the negation of all the restraints, moral and social, that he had learned to know and to hate in his monastic experi- ence. A considerable part of the whole is occupied with Panurge's debate witli himself and with Pan- tagruel as to whether he shall marry, his deliciously humorous recourse to all manner of authorities on 1 Short History of French Literature, p. 186. Encye. Brit., art liabelais, vol. xx. p. 196. 36 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. this matter of universal interest, and his final deter- mination to consult the oracle of the " Dive Bouteille, " which, after various adventures that offer scope to un- bridled satire, finally gives the truly oracular response, " Trinq " (drink), as the solution of this and all other riddles of earth. Of the serious parts of Rabelais' work the best are probably the scattered chapters on the education of Pantagruel, which show great originality and force, and a remarkable anticipation of the modern scientific spirit. But usually, however earnestly Rabelais may feel, his zealous optimism will find some grotesque mask for its expression. Of this comic vein the most striking feature is the unique and astounding vocabu- lary. He will pile up huge lists of cooks or of fan- tastic meats, of dances and of games, or he will take some noun and heap around it all conceivable adjec- tives, sometimes arraying them by the hundreds in columns. 1 The reader is led through as devious paths as those of Tristram Shandy's autobiography. There is a psychological analysis of wonderful keenness, a profusion of learning, a carnival of wit and imagina- tion, the loftiest thoughts and the vilest fancies, all woven together into a mighty maze by " pantagruel- ism, " a militant faith in nature and instinct that by its robust humor and the solvent of its destructive satire becomes the extreme type of the pagan phase of the renaissance, the source of the eighteenth-centuiy ethics and of modern French realism. For independence of all ascetic restraint is Rabelais' philosophy of life, as it had been that of Jean de Meung, and was to be that of Voltaire. But its in- 1 Books i. 22, v. 33, bis. Book iii. 26 lias a list, of 157 ail jet lives. and iii. 38 a list of 210 MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 37 consistency with mediaeval Christianity seems more obvious to us than it did to him, who remained all his life nominally and doubtless sincerely a Catholic, though to him the yoke was certainly lighter than to most who make a Christian profession. Still there is nothing authentic in his work that can be construed into a direct attack on the faith. His position was like that of Erasmus. He was irreverent at times ; but those who find an evidence of infidelity in this, or in his monumental filthiness of speech, are usually unacquainted with the common language of his con- temporaries and predecessors of the ages of faith. Ex- perience has 'shown that these things are less matters of morality than of taste and feeling, of age and race, liabelais had more wit than the rest, and so did better what many tried to do. They have sunk in their inire to oblivion, but the impurity of Rabelais is like an unclean insect wrapped in amber. He must be judged by his time; and even at his coarsest it is always honest fun that inspires his rollicking laugh, never the prurient toying with voluptuousness and the sniggering of the eighteenth-century professors of the science of erotics. The world-wisdom of Eabelais was much that of Goethe. Both were men of vast learning. Goethe had a wider and more delicate culture. Eabelais had, what Goethe greatly lacked, a deeper humor than any other Frenchman, and one of the richest the world lias ever known. So the expression of their common thought is radically different; but both believed in the wortli of life, and that that worth could be realized and en- hanced by the freest development of the whole nature of man, unhampered by ascetic or other artificial tram- mels in ethics or philosophy. Yet it is the fate of tlie 38 MODEKN FKENCll LITEKATUKE. humorist that his humor should mask his more serious thought ; and llabelais, while he has been admired by many and imitated by a few, has not had the in- fluence on the thought or the writing of later genera- tions that might have been anticipated from his great genius. But while Rabelais was thus mocking the inconsis- tent follies of mankind, a group of talented men whom the open-hearted hospitality of Marguerite (1492-1549) had gathered at her court, was developing, by the introduction of tragic sympathy and artistic finish, the traditions of the prose fabliaux- so well inaugurated in the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " 1 The year 1558 was made memorable by the publication of the " llep- tanieron, " which sprang from the immediate circle of that royal lady, and by the " Joyeux devis " of Dos Periers, the only frank skeptic of his time, whose " Cymbalum mundi " earned him a persecution that drove him at last to suicide (1544). His work hardly marks an advance, except in style, on De la Salle. The anecdotes are short, crisp, witty, but with no trace of growing refinement or culture. The seventy- two tales of the " Heptame"ron, " on the other hand, are epoch-making in the aesthetics of prose fiction, because they join to the joy of life that pulses with healthy vigor through all the early pagan renaissance, a refine- ment of manners and morals and a grace of conception that belongs ratlier to the humanists, and a delicacy of observation and description that is peculiarly its own. Meantime the traditions of Eabelais were continued in the latter half of the century by the " Apologie pour 1 Nioolns de Troves and Xool dii Fail arc still earlier imitators of De la Salle, but intrinsically of less importance. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 39 Hdrodote " of the scholarly Heiiri Estienne, J a very amusing attack on the clergy of the time that did much to aid in fixing the classical language of the next century. Then, as a belated fruit of this epoch, there appeared, in 1610, Beroald de Verville's " Moyen de parvenir, " a curious mixture of wit, learning, and vul- garity, with a plenteous store of anecdotes that might have furnished him with another " Cent nouvelles " if he had not preferred to strew them in the freakish dialogue of his mad fratrasie. Between him and Des Pe'riers, both in style and time, is the Abbe* de Bran- tome (1540-1614), ostensibly a writer of contemporary biography, but really a laughing collector of piquant and scandalous stories of the dames de par le monde, told with great gusto and considerable power of char- acter painting, so that his works are reprinted and still read. Prose satire first at this period became an important political weapon in the " Me'nippe'e, " that several lib- eral and patriotic Catholics directed against the League and its desperate defence of Paris in 1593 ; while in his " Essays " Montaigne had already created a new type of prose writing that has gained little at the hands of his successors, for the inventor of the essay is still the most popular essayist. The exuberant hopes of the pagan renaissance, as they appeared in the joyous nature- worship of Rabelais, had not been fulfilled, and to that period of generous expansion there had succeeded a reaction to easy egoism and unaggressive skepticism. This is the temper in 1 Otherwise known as Henry Stephens, from his association witli the Kntjlish reformers in 15.">0. He was the most illustrious of a fa- mous family of French scholars and printers. Fee Kncye. Hrit., xxii. 534 8((. 40 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. which Montaigne chooses the devices "What do I know ? " and " What does it matter ? " He had been a boy of scholarly and sedentary tastes, and carefully trained in the classics. His manhood, though un- eventful, was such as to bring him in contact with all phases of life; and his ripe experience has as its fruit the " Essays," of which two books appeared in 1580, and the more important third book in 1588. No French work has exercised so great and lasting an influ- ence on the writing and thought of the world. 1 Mon- taigne here inaugurates the literature of the public confessional, of loquacious egotism. His " Essays " are indeed, as he says, " a book of good faith. " He takes us into his confidence, and rambles on in delicious and not unmethodical desultoriness. The essays sprang, no doubt, from such note-books as scholarly men used to keep in that age, and gradually rounded themselves into their present form from a few connected thoughts. In the last series, however, there is far more conscious composition, and these essays are nearly four times as long as the earlier ones. The subjects are very varied, and the titles are often mere pegs to hang ideas upon. There is not much about Virgil nor even about Latin poetry in the essay on the " Verses of Virgil, " and there is still less about coaches in " Des Codies. " Nowhere is there any trace of searching for subject or effect. He notes what comes into his mind, and as it comes ; he tells us what lie thinks about what happens to interest him. His work has all the charm of nature and not a little of hidden art. 2 1 Montesquieu's " Spirit of Laws " had more influeiu-e on politics, and Kousseau's novels on the feelings and life of two genf'rations. ' 2 Montaigne was translated into English by Florio in time t bo used by Shakspere, and Florio has had many and distinguished sue- MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 41 In his style and vocabulary Montaigne profited by Eonsard, but he was no blind follower. He saw the danger of indiscriminate innovation. " Keen minds " he says, " bring no new words into the language, but with a cautious ingenuity they apply to it unaccus- tomed mutations. And, " he adds in words that might apply as well to the symbolists of our day as to the rhetoriqueurs of his own, " how little it is in the power of all to do this appears in very many French writers of this century. They are bold enough and disdain to follow the beaten track ; but lack of invention and of discretion ruins them. Their work reveals only a wretched affectation of singularity, with cold and absurd metaphors that amuse rather than elevate their subject. If only such men can gorge themselves with what is novel, they are indifferent to what is effective. To seize the new they will abandon the usual, which is oiteu the stronger and the more vigorous. " It cannot be denied that Montaigne's average prose is better than the average prose of Ronsard, and his best is almost the best that France has to show. Naturally, therefore, it was the subject of narrow criti- cism by Malherbe and the early Academicians. But while Balzac and Vaugelns fettered and puttered, and while Boileau taught the French muse to pick her cautious way along the strait and narrow path of his coldly objective classicism, while the Pleiad was discredited and Ronsard forgotten save by La Bruyere, the naturalists of the sixteenth century lived stubbornly on. Rabelais and Montaigne were still eessors. On Montaigne there is an essay in Kinerson's " 'Representative Men " and two excellent hooks by Paul Staffer, " Montaigne," in the Grands dcrioains f ran fats, and " I a Kainille et les amis tie Montaigne." 42 MODKKN FKENCU LITE K AT U UK. widely read, and their unfettered independence did much to shorten the triumph of literary absolutism, just as the tendency of their thought contributed to shorten the reign of political tyranny. It was not until wise rules had been broken together with cramp- ing fetters by the Eomantic revolt that Konsard was restored to honor by precisely that movement in French literature with which he has least in common ; but no revolution of taste or criticism has ever shaken the universal recognition of the greatness of Eabclais and Montaigne. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 43 CHAPTEE II. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 1 " AT last Malherbe came. " With these words or this thought it has been customary, ever since Boileau's time, to begin the study of the classical century of French literature. According to him, Malherbe was first in France to introduce a correct cadence into prosody. He first " taught the force of a rightly placed word, and brought back the muse to the rules of duty." He improved the language so that " it offered nothing rude to the cultured ear;" he banished en- jamlicmtiit, or the interlocking of verses, and " taught stanzas to close with grace. " 2 This appreciation by one mediocre artisan in verse of the merits of another, if perhaps not altogether " false in fact and imbecile in criticism," is certainly a great exaggeration ; but it represents fairly enough the sentiment of the age of 1 There is helpful criticism for the period covered by this chapter in Petit dc Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaise, vol. iii. ; Faguet, xvii. siecle ; Brunetiere, Etudes critiques and Evolution des genres ; Le Breton, Le Roman au xvii. siecle ; Morillot, Le Homan en France; Lauson, Litte'rature fran^aise; and Korting, Geschichte des franzosischen Romans iin XVII Jahrhuuderts. - Malherbe, 1). 1556, d. 1628. Boileau's lines paraphrased above are : * Knfin Malhprbe vint, et le premier en France, Fit scntir dans les vers line juste cadence, D'un mot mis ii sa place pnseijrna le pouvoir, Et n'duisit la muse aux tvgles du devoir. Pnr re :-ape ('crivain In lanpie pn'-par^e N'ofirit plus rien de rude a I'oroille epurdo. 44 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Louis XIV. , while the fateful error it involved was portentous to French lyric poetry for more than two centuries of pseudo-classical artificiality and stagna- tion. The qualities on which Boileau insists are met- rical polish, meticulous accuracy in rhymes, greater diligence in the rhetorical arrangement, and a more anxious care in the choice of words, the whole joining in what might be justly -described as a zealous and un- tiring pursuit of the commonplace. As might be an- ticipated, then, Malherbe will never shock, but he will never thrill. There is no Hash of genius in the poems, and, so far as can be seen, there was none in the man. Why, then, were these qualities, that fifty years before would not have raised a poet above name- less mediocrity, capable of making a leader in 1600 ? What peculiar conjuncture made readers turn from the kernel to the husk ? What suffered the genius of Ke'gnier to be a voice crying in the wilderness, while a vastly inferior poet became the prophet of successive generations till the Eevolution came to make all things new ? To understand this aberration of aesthetic taste we must loo"k beyond literature to the political and religious world. The renaissance had been a period of unrest, of reaching out in untried directions of ten- tative effort, of a confident iconoclasm, too, and of strongly developed individualism. This is the spirit" of the earlier half of the sixteenth century. Then follows a growing lack of faith in the new learning as a panacea for human ills* but as yet there is no loss of individuality. Each writer strikes out on his own line, cares little for precedent or law in language or metre, so that he can say what he has in him to say. Originality is more prized than correct diction, THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 45 st"en<~ 4 h than polish. So while these men left admi- rable work behind them, each writer's legacy to the world was stamped with a singularity that made it little adapted to form a school or train a succession. The renaissance had sacrificed the old principle of authority to freedom of inquiry i.i many departments of intellectual and ethical life. In literature this free- dom resultad in a division of energy, remarkable in its immediate results, but without promise of healthy development and continuous growth. By the end of the sixteenth century the reaction came. The wars of the League had been a cruel de- ception to the high-strung hopes of a new era of peace and good-will, the sphere of human knowledge had been widened beyond the hope of individual grasp, and the limitation of the mind was brought home to it with crushing weight. The intellectual lassitude that resulted found its expression in criticism rather than in fresh creation. Save Regnier, who appears as one born out of due time, the first half of the seven- teenth century shows no great lyric or epic poet ; and when at last La Fontaine appears, he is a very enfant terrible to his contemporary critics, who praise his defects and bear with his virtues. In prose, too, the best work is critical and analytic. The drama, because more directly in touch with the people, preserved a more independent life, yielding least and latest. P>ut Malherbe expressed the state of mind of the cultured men of the time ; he is the herald of what is typical in the classical school, the " Age of Louis XIV. " His poetry was an art; it could be learned, weighed, meas- ured. You could calculate the percentages of imperfect or cognate rhymes, of incorrect verses, of words and phrases that presumed to stir the mind from a becom- 46 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. ing balance of calm repose. This age understood this poetry ; but when it saw these very qualities trans- fused by the fire of Ronsard's genius, who had done all that was ever claimed for his pedantic successor, that was an individuality that defied mechanical criti- cism, and wearied minds already predisposed to make great sacrifices for order and propriety in the state, and in literature also. This temper of mind, that prefers order and rule to originality and individual- ism, begins to dominate the literature of France with Malherbe ; and it exercised an almost undisputed authority for good and ill till the Romantic revolt in the third decade of our century. " The rule of rules becomes to resemble one another. " So the lyric innovations of the Pleiad were obscured, and its pedantry superseded by a studied rhetorical impersonality, against which Regnier fought a losing fight, though his satires are among the most vigorous that French literature has to show, and contain a powerful attack on Malherbe and the upas-tree of his overweening criticism. Several of lie'gnier's short poems are delightful in their pathos or graceful wit. Maiherbe's merit, on the other hand, is almost wholly formal. He crystallized the language into its classical form. He strove to the best of his ability to prune its unfruitful shoots without impoveiishing its vital force, and in this effort he ranked logical clearness above all other qualities. Thus he sacrificed the lyric and Italian element in the Pleiad to eloquence. He aimed to give to the luxuriant but irregular phraseology and prosody of his predecessors artistic restraints that could not fail to fmther the development of literary form, though Maiherbe's worth appears rather in the work of his successors than in his own. Indeed, lie wrote THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 47 very little, for the most part occasional verses addressed to the court or aristocracy ; but it is hard to read that little without weariness at a mediocrity whose great fault is that it has not virility enough to err. Per- sonally his biographer and pupil, Racan, shows him as a man of petty and presumptuous arrogance, a quality illustrated by his attitude toward Ronsard, whom he h'rst plundered of all that he was capable of valuing and then mocked with systematic depreciation. The spark that helps some of his verses, for instance the " Ode of Consolation, " to an asthmatic life is Ronsard 's ; the spirit that insists on rhyming for eye as well as ear, *hat forbids the linking of words etymologically connected or of proper nouns, that seeks curiously, as his biographer tells us, " for rare and sterile rhymes, " that spirit is all his own. And yet perhaps this very exaggeration of correctness was a necessary protest against the careless negligence of genius, and an essen- tial prelude to the more studied harmonies and the more artistic liberties of the great poets of the last century. Without Malherbe we can conceive perhaps of Verlaine, but hardly of Lamartine, of Hugo, or of Leconte de Lisle. Malherbe 's " Art of Poetry, " like that of the " Meis- tersinger " in Germany, was something that could be taught on a tally -board; and he had worthy disciples, artisans in verse such as Maynard, Racan, with some true poetic gift and a more genuine appreciation of nature, Voiture, a graceful but " idle singer of an empty day, " the anacreontic Saint-Amant, and others whose names are shadows. All of these suffered from the artificial conceits that the literary lights of the Hotel Rambouillet had brought into fashion. But the muse that had been thus " brought back to the 48 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. rules of duty " was presently to be drilled in them by a master of deportment more strict than Malherbe had ever been. This man who did 'most to clip the wings of the French Pegasus was Boileau (1636-1711), a pedantic Parisian bourgeois, whose critical obiter dicta were long regarded as sacred by French critics and French schoolmasters. He was fairly acquainted with Latin, and his lack of familiarity with the Greek poets may be excused by his obvious inability to appre- ciate them ; though in the curious controversy between the Ancients and Moderns that marked the close of the century in France, and found its echo in the pamphlet warfare of Bentley and Temple in England, he loudly proclaimed the superiority of the Ancients, and ranged himself with the Cartesians in opposition to the renaissance spirit. The order and self-restraint of the classical aesthetics attracted his scientific mind ; but he never thoroughly grasped the fundamental principles of Greek literary art, and his indifference to the contemporary literatures of other countries was par- alleled only by his" ignorance of the earlier writers of his own. He did not conceive his critical canons as relative to his time and his environment, but as abso- lute for all times and all races, and hence he felt that he could neglect the past without loss. Still, if Boileau lacked a pure and catholic taste, he had much honest and loyal though stubborn and rough good sense, which he savored with a little epicurean real- ism that made his destructive criticism of his precieux contemporaries usually just, though it may have been unnecessary. Especially should one hold in grateful remembrance the quietus given to the ghost of chival- rous romance by his " Dialogue sur les heros, " though there had not been much real life in that monstrosity THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 49 since the " Roman comique " of Scarron. He did in- deed guide the next generation to a true if narrow naturalism; and though he formulated rather than inspired the dramatic art of Moliere and Racine, he did much to direct their talent as well as that of La Fontaine to its most fruitful channels. He was the dogmatist of the school of 1660 ; and it was his sound common-sense, more perhaps than any other one thing, that spread and prolonged its influence. The positive effect of Boileau's criticism was, how- ever, deadening and narrowing. 1 His rationalistic and Cartesian adaptation of Horace's " Ars poetica " proclaimed with sufficient talent to persuade a degen- erating taste that poetry was artificiality raised to a science. He imposed upon in my men of no genius, and perhaps stifled the genius of some ; his only great scholar who gained by the teaching was Racine. For his talent could profit by instructions that would have trammelled Corneille and amused Moliere. A few lines from Boileau's " Art of Poetry " will serve to suggest his spirit. In tragedy it is essential, he says, - Qu'en un lieu, qu'eu un jour, un seul fait accompli Tienne jusqu'a la flu le theatre rempli. And then it must not have a Christian basis, for De la foi d'un chretien les mysteres terribles D'ornements egayes ne sont pas susceptibles. Even in comedy we must have no naturalistic studies. This is to his mind the great error of Moliere, who 1 Boileau's descriptive verses suggest to Lanson (p. 483) an " un- sentimental Ooppce." Sainte-Benve finds in his poems courage and audacity, but never truth. Op. " Nineteenth Century," December, 1881. 50 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Peut-ctre de sou art cut remporte le prix Si, iiioius aiui du peuple, en ses doctes peintures Jl n'eut pas fait souvent grimacer ses figures. Rather than study the vulgar foibles of mankind, we should " imitons de Marot I'e'le'gant badinage," for ele- gance of language is a prime and universal necessity : Saus la langue, en un mot, 1'auteur le plus divin list touj ours?, quoiqu'il 1'asse, 1111 inecliant ccrivain. And if you would be a good writer of alexandrines, your main care should be Que toujours dans vos vers le sens coupant les mots Suspeude I'heiui^tiche, en marque le repos. Now, Boileau's postulate was sound enough. " Beauty is truth, and truth is nature. " Hence let nature be the sole study. " Tout doit tendre an bon sens, " everything must tend to sober common-sense ; there should be no vagaries of genius. And in all this Boileau was perfectly sincere ; only to him " nature " was a very narrow segment of the sphere seen through glasses that both colored and distorted it. His " nature " is only what is typical, universal ; and his method of attaining it is imitation of classical models and a careful distinction of the classical genres. He applied to form the same principles as to substance. Here, too, lie would have; no freaks, and novelty was condemned without a hearing. Technique to Boileau is second, and hardly second, to inspiration ; and since formal technique tends to stifle inspiration, Boileau's teaching was progressively deadening to the succeeding generations. As different from Boileau as a winding woodland stream from a well-kept canal is La Fontaine, a true THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 51 and naturalistic poet, who calmly ignored the tradi- tional rules of his art and won the hearts of critics who shook their heads. It was impossible to deny his wit and winning grace; and the unambitious fable or tale in which he clothed them seemed to haibor a less dangerous license than more serious efforts would have done. The court and its critics could pardon the frailty of a sylvan muse, when they would have been pitiless to an error of Melpomene. So La Fontaine preserved and handed down the tradition of metrical liberty to the Romantic poets of 1830. La Fontaine's first work of importance, the first book of his " Contes, " dates from 1664 and his forty- third year. Already he had become socially popular, and had been intimately associated with Boileau, Moliere, and Eacine. More " Contes " (] 666) were followed by " Fables " (1668) ; and the year 1671 shows his versatile genius as editor of a volume of mystically religious verse, as author of " Contes, " whose humor was very unrestrained, and of " Fables, " whose equal humor was quite without this gallic spice. These seven years were the best fruitage of his long, easy, and irresponsible life. For La Fontaine seems never to have quite outlived the carelessness of childhood, - a trait that impressed all his friends, and is reflected in the words witli which Louis licensed his election to the Academy (1683) : " II a promis d'etre sage. " After this he wrote only " Fables. " His friends took caie of him when his wife declined the burden. He died, after a tardy conversion to the religiosity that the aged Louis had made popular, in 169."). Endless anec- dotes tell of his guileless simplicity and absent- mindedness. His intimates called him the "good fellow. " Of them all Moliere alone, perhaps, justly 52 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. appreciated his literary importance. " Our wits labor in vain; they will not outlive the bonhomme," he said when once he overheard Boileau and Eacine chaffing their common friend. And he was right, for he has always been more read than either of them ; and as time goes on, it is felt that he was of greater service than they, a consummation doubtless very far from the dreams of either the critic or the tragedian. The " Fables " and the " Contes " have exercised a deep and permanent influence both on French litera- ture and on our own. La Fontaine's miscellaneous work, 1 though often good, is less individual and little read. His " Contes " are essentially fabliaux devel- oped by a studied prosody and delicate feeling for style, coupled with a skill in narration that is the height of art in its apparent ease and naturalness. He is the true continuator of De la Salle, of Des Pe'riers, and of Marguerite. Now, neither he, nor they, nor their Italian fellows, recognized what we to-day hold to be fundamental conventions of decency. Their stories deal very largely with subjects not now admitted to polite literary circles, but then regarded as not unbecoming even by such irreproachable ladies as Madame de Se'vigne'. The same thing is observable in English literature. If these " Contes " are to be read at all, it must be in the simple, naive spirit in which they were written. There is no sniggering about them, no conscious pandering to vice. They represent a phase in the development of European morals, which we may describe as the persistence of the hedon- 1 Ilemon, (Euvres diverses do la Fontaine, gives the best of these, notably the "Voyage en Limousin" and the prose version of " Psyche'," that for its charming grace of style may rank with the best prose of Fenelon and Madame de So'vigne. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 53 istic revolt of the renaissance between the old faitli and the new Cartesian philosophy. 1 It is no longer the lusty joy of life that pulsed in Boccaccio and in Kabe- lais, with their eager love of sense and beauty after centuries of ascetic repression, nor yet the " subtle mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appe- tite, " that we find in Marguerite and Ronsard. The renaissance was no longer a revolutionary force, and what was a passionate cult to Boccaccio becomes in La Fontaine the elfish naturalism of a satyr child. Read in the spirit of the writer, the " Contes " are charming ; but it may be admitted that it is difficult for those who have inherited the traditions of Victorian "propriety" to read the Contes without offense at the sensual ele- ment in their gayety. Yet we have no right to judge the work of one century by the moral standards of another. We may fix the distinction. We need not draw a comparison. There is no need of any snch reserve, however, when we turn to the " Fables. " They were, are, and always will be, wholly delightful in the graceful liveliness of their narration, in the restiained naturalism of their art and the homely worldly wisdom of their unobtru- sive moral. One knows not whether to admire most the varied mastery of the form, the accurnte analysis and observation of human nature, or the boldness with which, in the later books, he uses the fable as a cover for political teaching that is sometimes startlingly radical. As Saintsbury has gracefully said: "The child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in tin 1 consum- mate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in UK; subtl;; reflections on character and 1 Cjj. Lanson, ji .V>2. 54 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. life which it conveys. " Thus, in a double sense, these " Fables " are not of one age, but for all ages, and for all men, except it be poets of the type of Lamartine, who could discern only " limping, disjointed, unequal verses, without symmetry either in the ear or on the page," in stanzas where others find a most original and studied harmony. 1 The " Fables " of La Fontaine are familiar to every French school-boy, acquaintance with his work is pre- sumed in all cultivated society, turns of expression and phrases taken from them fall as naturally from the lips and pens of educated Frenchmen as biblical phrases did, and perhaps still do, from New England Puritans. The universal acquaintance with his work influenced and aided the emancipation of poetry by the school of 1830, especially among those who still did homage to Boileau with their lips though their hearts were elsewhere. For La Fontaine is very great,per- haps supreme ; but it is in a kind of poetry that is not great. Therefore, though he is the best fabulist and best story-teller that is known to French literature, he is not a great poet. But he is the one poet of his century whose poetry is still generally read and en- joyed, while Boileau's verses are studied rather as rhetorical models and as essays in criticism. It w T as natural that the prose of the early part of the seventeenth century should suffer less from artificiality than lyric poetry, the most sensitive of all literary forms ; but it too felt the reaction, and there is nothing to recall the verve of Kabelais, the force of Montaigne, or the grace of Marguerite, in the work 1 Rousseau and his age cared too much for their " state of nature" to care for La Fontaine, but Voltaire toward the close of his life ru- cretted the strictures of his voutli. See his letter to ( 'hanildi t. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 55 of the first third of the century. In fiction the changed spirit shows itself in the influence of the Italian Pas- torals, and in imitations of those Spanish followers of Gongora who were the chief instigators throughout Europe of the style known to English students as Euphuism. This studied affectation showed itself in France, as elsewhere, chiefly in chivalrous romances. The immediate model was the Spanish " Amadis, " that had been translated late in the sixteenth century. Hence these novels will usually be named, at least by readers of Don Quixote, with a certain mocking shrug. The best of them is D'Urfe"s " Astre'e," whose chilly heroine tells of the combat in her soul between love and reason, of which the linked sweetness is prolonged through some five thousand pages, during which her love-sick Celadon learns to know himself sufficiently to discern that a pastoral lover " is no longer man, for he has cast off all wit and judgment. " It is but just to say that Celadon's foil, the inconstant shepherd Hylas, is not without humor, and has touches of quite modern blague. " Astnie " was a pastoral ; the " Grand Cyrus" and " Clelie " of the Scude'rys pictured modern society under the thin disguise of heroic romance. Yet it is only with amused curiosity that one notes to-day the ponderous apparatus of their elaborate allegory, or glances at the explanatory map of " Ten- derland, " with its rivers of Esteem, Gratitude, and Inclination, its villages of Attention, Verses, and Epistles, its lake of Indifference, and its seas of Enmity and Danger. In their day D'Urfe" and the Scude'rys, with other similar though less talented novelists, 1 were immensely popular, and that among the most cultured and aris- 1 E. g., La Calprenedo, Camus, and Gomberville. 56 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. tocratic class. Indeed, the picture of society that " Astre'e " painted was the inspiring cause of the first Parisian salon, which met at the Hotel Rambouillet and took its name from its hostess. The raison d'etre of this coterie, like that of Celadon and his mistress, was the attrition of witty conversation in an exclusive society. But narrow as this circle was, both in its principles and its numbers, it exercised a very impor- tant influence on the whole classical period, for by its unnatural straining after rare and curious conceits, it interrupted the development of a simple and direct style. Thus it fostered an artificiality that, in spite of Moliere's satire, was not wholly banished from French literature till the rise of the Romantic School. But so far as the pastoral or heroic romance was con- cerned, if -the disease was acute the remedy was speedy. The analogy of other literatures would lead us to expect a reaction from over-strained sentiment to coarse natu- ralism. Of this Sorel's " Francion " had given a warning sign as early as 1622, and the old romances received their coup dc grace in Scarron's " Roman comique " (1651), that drew its inspiration from Rabelais and the Spanish novela picaresca, and found its more artistic sequel in Le Sage's " Gil Bias. " 1 A more independent social study that shows the influence of the realistic school of 1660 is Furetiere's- " Roman bourgeois " (1666), a collection of " human documents " for middle-class Parisian life. Meantime the same careful observation was being directed to the study of individual character by Madame de Lafayette, who, in " Mile, de Montpensier, " had discovered that marriage 1 The corresponding English movement, beprnn ly Defor and con- tinued lt\- Smollett, owes much to both Spanish and French picaroon romancers. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 57 was as appropriate as courtship for artistic treatment, and furnished in her exquisite " Princesse de Cleves " (1678) the starting-point of the psychological novel as distinct from romance. But the critics of the time were far from appreciating the real importance of this very popular book. Indeed, just as realism was thus announcing its advent in fiction, the court coterie, attracted by La Fontaine's " Cupid and Psyche, " were seized with a fancy for writing prose fables, fairy tales, of which a vast number were born to an ephemeral life during the closing decades of the century. The best in this shadowy kind is Perrault, the French god- father of " Puss-in -Boots, " of "Red Riding-Hood," The Sleeping Beauty, " and " Tom Thumb. " In the next century this style was continued by Hamilton and many others, and was diverted later by Voltaire to political and philosophical purposes, and to ethical ones by Marrnontel ; while -the " Princesse de Cleves " has no direct literary progeny. Outside the sphere of fiction the prose of the century opens with Jean de Balzac, a rhetorical and pains- taking continuator of Montaigne, who did much to smooth the way for the great prose writers and orators that followed. Aided by tho prestige of the Hotel Rambouillet, and by tho foundation of the French Academy (1634), of which he was a leading member, he set deliberately to work to be to French prose the benefactor that he conceived Malherbe to have been to its poetry ; but his work had value only as a stylistic model. Not so the limpid directness of Descartes and the supple strength of Pascal, the philosophers who illustrate this period. The former's " Discourse on Method " is the starting-point in France of a developed, scientific, argumentative style; while his " Treatise on 58 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the Passions " is the systematic statement of the psy- chological basis of Corneille's tragedies, whose virile energy of will contrasts with the more feminine senti- ment of Racine and the School of 1660. l It was from Descartes as much as from Balzac that Pascal and La Rochefoucauld learned their marvellous mastery over language. Pascal's "Pensdes, " though incomplete, are jas clear as they are keen, as logical as they are charming. They combine the mathematical mind with the poet's vision, while his " Provincial Letters " against the casuistry of the Jesuits remain to this day an unmatched masterpiece of caustic irony and crush- ing contempt, clothed in a style of which one knows not whether most to admire the graceful energy or the brilliant wit. Pascal is the leader of the ascetic reac- tion against the naturalism of the sixteenth century and the facile ethics of Jesuit casuists ; he is also the first of French prose writers who seems thoroughly at home with his rhetorical tools. There has been gradual adaptation to new needs, but French prose has made no great advance, indeed has needed to make none, from his day to ours. After these had gone before, progress became easy in other lines. So Do Retz's " Conspiracy of Fiesco " marks a gain in picturesque historical description ; while his lively, keen, and piquant " Memoirs " show an unscrupulous will and a pen sharpened by use. The worldly wisdom of his maxims yields only to the cruel temper, of La Rochefoucauld's cynical satire. That the underlying pessimism of these men is fairly representative of a general state of mind, is clear from the reception accorded to their work. La Rochefou- cauld, especially, marks an ethical change in the pop- 1 Cp. Lansoii, p. 393. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 59 ular view of life that is an essential prelude to the iconoclastic optimism of the next century. He claims literary notice, however, not only as a representative, but as an individual. Condemned by the failure of the Fronde to retirement, he amused himself and a witty circle of friends, with the luxury of an aristo- cratic seigneur, and with " Memoirs " and " Maxims," in which he pitilessly unfolds the seamy side of life. Personally a good man, affectionate and beloved, he exhibits here the consistent and scornful pessimist; but he is more an aristocrat than a philosopher. He cares little for system or completeness of analysis. He takes up, one by one, such ideas as come to him, and uses them, with prudent reserves, to illustrate his theory, which is, briefly, that every virtue is a product of vices, while these are resolvable into selfishness, " in which all virtues are lost like rivers in the sea. " This conclusion does not excite his anger, but rather amuses his curiosity, and that is much the effect it seems to have had on contemporary readers. Its effect on literary form was much greater. The nature of both influences will appear better from a few cita- tions than from any brief analysis : Vice enters into the composition of virtues just as poisons do into medicines. Prurience collects and tem- pers them, and uses them against the ills of Fife. People think sometimes that we hate flattery, but we hate only the way they flatter. It is not always by valor that men are valiant, nor by virtue that women are chaste. Men would not live long in society if they were not one another's dupes. . . . The world is made up of masks. Old men give good precepts to console themselves for being no longer able to give bad examples. 60 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Our passions are the only orators that always convince. If we resist our passions, it is rather by their weakness than by our strength. We all have strength enough to bear the ills of others. If we had no pride, we should not complain that others had it. We easily forget our faults when no one else knows them. . . . We try to be proud of the faults that we do not wish to forget. We promise according to our hopes ; we keep according to our fears. We pardon those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore. The spirit that animates these " Maxims " can be traced in Voltaire, in Stendhal, and most clearly in the French cynic, Chamfort, and his greater succes- sor, the German Schopenhauer. But their value as literature was much greater and wider ; for it should be clear, even from what has been cited, that in these " distilled thoughts " French prose style has attained a pregnant terseness comparable only to the best verses of Corneille. As Voltaire said, the Maxims " accus- tomed men to think and to express their thoughts with a lively, precise, delicate turn ;" and this epi- grammatic quality has ever since been a characteristic of the best writers of France. But with all this progress in various directions French prose still lacked its La Fontaine, its easy, graceful raconteur. This last step was taken in the letters of Madame de Se'vigne (1626-1696), most charming of all correspondents. There are some three thousand of her letters, addressed for the most part to her rather unsympathetic daughter Madame de Grignon, and to her gay cousin, Bussy-Eabutin, author THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 61 of the amusing but scandalous " Histoire amoureuse des Gaules. " In her younger days she had been an assid- uous frequenter of the Hotel Karabouillet, but she was shrewd enough not to fall into the vagaries that made its blue-stockings the just butt of Moliere. Married in 1644, she was left a widow in 1651 with a son and a daughter, and after three years of retirement, re- turned to Paris in 1654, to be a literary leader there for nearly forty years. It is not, however, till after the marriage of her daughter, in 1669, that the corre- spondence begins to How freely with its inexhaustible stream of court news and town talk, varied with bril- liant reportorial sketches of the baths of Vichy. The succession of letters is interrupted only by rare visits to her daughter, and continues till her death. With the most charming naturalness she " lets her pen trot, bridle on the neck," " diverting herself as much in a chat with her as she labors with other correspondents. " To her daughter she gives, as she says, " the top of all the baskets, the flowers of her wit, head, eyes, pen, style ; and the rest get on as they can. " As natural as La Fontaine, she is a model correspondent, wholly free from the artificiality of Balzac, or even from that balanced poise that in another field added to the glory of Pascal, and was the chief factor in that of Bossuet. For the ultimate result of the criticism of Balzac and of the Academy, of Vaugelas, and the Hotel Ram- bouillet, is not seen in La Rochefoucauld, nor in Se'vigne', but in the elaborate though superficial periods of La Bruyere's " Caracteres, " who at his best suggests Voltaire, and in the polished orations of the court preachers of Louis XIV., whose ambitious energies were roused by the attitude of the king toward Galli- can liberties, and by attacks of able Protestants and Jansenists. Chief among them, and perhaps the 62 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. greatest pulpit orator of modern times, was Bossuet (1627-1704), whose " Oraisons f unebres " and histori- cal pamphlets are masterpieces of clear directness and plastic art drawn from a literary study of the Bible ; while the suppler Fe'nelon (1651-1715), once tutor to the Dauphin, betrays in his style a deeper classical study. His " Teldmaque " was long a model of style for almost all foreign students of Trench, and had an acceptance at home second only to that of La Fontaine's " Fables. " It is refreshing to find that Fe'nelon 's theory was even better than his practice ; for he felt and regretted the restraints to which he yielded, and was keen enough to prophesy in his " Letter to the Academy " that the only result of such trammels to literature as the pur- ists were striving to impose must be poverty ; and dry rot, such as the close of the century was to see. l Other great preachers of the time, whose names are not unknown even outside France, were Massillon, Bourdaloue, and Fiddlier; while allied to them in style and mode of thought is Malebranche, whose chief charm, if not his chief merit, is a language w r hose picturesque clearness masks the misty concep- tions that it irradiates. He marks the highest devel- opment of the classical style, and contrasts in this, as in his philosophy, with his contemporary Bayle, whose " Dictionnaire " (1697) was to the " Philosophers " of the following century at once a storehouse of most varied learning and the ironical herald of their skep- tical infidelity. 2 It was in prose that the language of 1600 had most needed order and reform, and it is in prose that the 1 Lanson's keen analysis of Fe'nelon's character discovers in him an egoistical reactionary, more sentimental than logical, who had much in common with Kousseau, for whom he contributed to prepare the way. 2 Cp. Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, iii. 182 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 63 great permanent advance was gained during this cen- tury. Yet the writers who have left the deepest im- press on the language are not the sententious builders of polished periods, but those who with true artistic sense aimed only to make prose a clear and limpid vehicle of thought. A great gulf separates Sevignd from Montaigne ; but the advance was not due to the rhetoricians, to Balzac and Vaugelas, nor even to the orators, but to the thinkers and raconteurs, who each in his kind had something to say, and cared less for meticulous correctness than for clearness and point No form of literature in 1600 promised less than the drama. At the end of the century it had become what it has remained, the most important form of French literary expression. It is,- therefore, of pecu- liar interest to see whether this great development was due to the classical spirit as represented by Boileau and the critical purists, or whether their influence was not rather a check than a stimulus. A student of com- parative literature, remembering that this is the age of Shakspere and Lope, would look for dramatic activity in France also; and in the first thirty years of the century, while the lyric muse was learning her mincing steps, and prose was beginning to substitute the rapier for the quarter-staff, the number of play- wrights bears witness to the growing popularity of the drama, due in great degree to the efforts of Hardy (1560-1631), who brought the stage more in touch with the audience than had been possible to the classical lucubrations of the school of Jodelle. Hardy's reforms were quite independent of criticism, and dictated by the necessities of the situation. Him- self attached to a dramatic company and writing plays to be acted rather than read, he cared less for scholarly than for popular applause, and declined with a light 64 MODERN FKENC1I LITERATURE. heart the heavy burden of the " unities. " Moreover, being compelled to various and speedy production, he was led to look for subjects in history and fiction, old and new. With some aid from the Italian, but prob- ably none from the Spanish stage, he dramatized what- ever seemed likely to suit the taste of his plebeian audiences ; and so he introduced to the French theatre an element of fresh life and a partial naturalism that acted like a tonic, and induced other writers of more literary culture than he to offer their pieces to his company. One cannot but regret that he ignored or feared the greater freedom of the English stage, whose traditions would have been of priceless service to Cor- neille and Moliere. But Hardy was no imitator. His virtues were due to his dependence on the healthy sense of the theatre-going masses ; and to this, too, may be attributed his chief vice, bombast and rhodomontade to tickle the ears of the groundlings, a weakness from which Shakspere is not wholly free. Hardy died in 1G31, a year memorable in the annals of the French stage, for it saw the proclamation l of the so-called classical unities of time, place, and action. After much battling and varying fortunes, these found favor with Richelieu in 1635, and by 1640 had estab- lished their fateful and exclusive sway in French trag- edy. This minimizing of dramatic conventions suited the rationalistic and unimaginative spirit of the prc- cieux of the Hotel Rambouillet, who now began to take an active interest in the drama, and saw in the " unities " their narrow ideal of nature, good-sense, and rationality. But rules that were proposed in the interest of greater realism were destined to lead before the close of the century to the most deadening artificiality. 1 By Mairet in his preface to " Silvauire." THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 65 The battle of the " unities " had been preceded by the first dramatic work both of Cornell le and of Rotrou. The latter produced his first play at Hardy's theatre while still a genial youth of nineteen (1628), and presently joined the dramatic collaborators of Cardinal Richelieu, where Corneille was his associate, his friend, and, though only three years his senior, finally his master. Rotrou 's really excellent work followed and was obscured by the greater glories of Corneille ; but it is worth noting that in his " Saint-Genest " (1646) he imitated Corneille's favorite " Polyeucte " (1643), in treating on the stage a Christian conversion and mar- tyrdom, quite in accord with the origins of the French drama, but contradicting more recent traditions and arousing the futile anger of the purists. Corneille, if not the greatest, is the first in time of the galaxy that make the literary glory of the age of Louis XIV. , though his best work was done before the advent of that monarch. Born in 1606, he was sixteen years older than Moliere and preceded Racine by a generation. The Jesuits of his native Rouen Educated him for the law, but bashful ness increased his distaste for pleading, and accident co-operated with genius to draw him to dramatic work. His first play, " Mdlite, " was produced in Rouen in 1629. But neither this nor the dramas that followed during the next seven years, though far superior to anything that had preceded them both in .naturalness and vigor, contained more, than a promise of better things to come; and this promise pointed rather to the Spanish drama of intrigue and to the comedy of contemporary society than to the true field of his tragic genius. It is hard to realize that the author of " Horace " began his career by a play in which kissing and pick-a-back are prominent features, pnd single-line repartees, " cat and puss dialogues," P 66 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Butler calls them, are bandied about like shuttle- cocks. But it may seem stranger still to find that he felt called upon to apologize for " his simple and familiar style, " saying that he feared the reader would take simplicity for ill-breeding. So strong was the artificial reaction that Malherbe had heralded, even on the popular stage. But Corneille from the first had the courage of his convictions. He never sacrificed nature to rule, nor his thought to a vowel quantity. And he lost nothing by his daring. His earlier plays, enliv- ened by studies from life and the happy invention of the soubrette, won popular success both at Eouen and at Hardy's theatre in Paris. Thus the poet was drawn to the capital and the passing sunshine of Eichelieu's favor in 1634. This he lost the next year by revising too freely a dramatic concept of the great yet petty Cardi- nal ; but with the public he was a favorite to the last. The contact with the wider life of Paris and his lit- erary associations there awakened dormant powers. " Me'de'e " appeared in 1635, and in two years he had written'the "Cid" (1636), a drama so different from the previous attempts that it hardly bears a trace of the same hand. This work attracted universal in- terest, and placed him at once above all his predeces- sors and contemporaries. Richelieu was jealous; the purists of the Academy took umbrage, less at the liberties he had taken with his Spanish original than at those he had failed to take. Indeed among the coterie of the precAcux the perversion of taste had reached such a point that Scude'ry, a critic of some repute, asserted, and it seems believed, that its subject was ill-chosen, its irregularity unpardonable, its action clumsy, its verses bad, and its beauties stolen. The " Cid " does, indeed, lack the ethical depth and tragic force of "Horace" or " Polyeucte ; " yet, as Boilear THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 07 said, " all Paris has for Rodrigue the eyes of Chimene, " and the drama is the most popular on the stage of all his plays. Corneille could not be as independent of cultured opinion as Hardy. The fierce battle that raged round the " Cid " caused him to withdraw for three years to Rouen. But he had faith in his genius, and with his return to Paris in 1639 there begins a period of almost unparalleled fecundity. The Roman tragedies, " Hor- ace " and " Cinna " (1640), were followed by " Poly- eucte, " a story of Christian martyrdom, a bold venture, for when it was read at the Hotel Rambouillet, " the Christianity was found extremely displeasing" to these delicate souls, who thought heathenism good enough for literature, which, as we have seen, was also Boileau's conviction. Then came " Pompey " and " Rodogune, " a tragedy of terror which marks the cul- mination of a tendency to exaggeration in passion and character that allies Corneille to the Romanticists. These, with " Le Menteur, " the first good French com- edy, and its " Suite, " were all written within five years, which embrace about all of his work that is read and prized to-day. There follows a period of arrest (1645 1652) with some signs of decline, but with flashes of genius as bright as any in his work, and with an occa- sional character of extraordinary vigor such as Phocas in " Hdraclitus. " At length he suspended his dramatic work for seven years (1652-1659), and turned his talent to a versified translation of the " Imitation of Christ," and to critical essays of remarkable frank- ness on his own plnys and other dramaturgical work. P>etween 1659 and 1674 he wrote eleven more trage- dies of unequal mediocrity, though occasional verses showed all the fire of his prime. It was on two of 68 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. these that Boileau composed his famous and ill- natured epigram : Apres 1'Agesilas, Helas, Mais apres 1'Attila, Hola. But Boileau, who thought Kacine " a very clever fellow whom I had a hard time to teach to write verse," is recorded as of the opinion that the three great writers of his day were " Corneille, Moliere, and myself. " The opposition Corneille met from those who followed the school of 1660 was not due to his failing talent, but to the new conception of dra- matic art introduced by Boileau and Racine. Even in old age he never lost popularity ; but he lived in nar- row circumstances, if not in poverty. " I am satiated with glory and hungry for money," he said in these last years, with a grimness that seems to characterize his social relations. He would never curry favor, and Racine tells us he suffered in consequence. He had admirers, but not patrons, and he died in compar- ative neglect in 1684. Indeed the development of taste was leading away from him, and in the next cen- tury his fame suffered a partial eclipse. His own time and ours were more fitted to comprehend and appreci- ate him than the intervening period of iconoclasm and perverted criticism. The first impression made on an attentive reader, even of Corneille 's best work, is his unevenness. Xo poet rises to grander^ heights than he. If we judge him by his best, he will rank with the greatest ; but many a lesser talent is more sustained, and may attain a higher average. Moliere saw this : " My friend Corneille," he said, "has a familiar spirit, who in- spires him with the finest verses in the world ; but sometimes the spirit deserts him, and then it fares ill with him. ; ' Therefore Corneille lends himself THE SEVENTEENTH CKNTURY. 69 admirably to citation. Many of his lines cling to the memory, and any alexandrine with a rush of sound and startling pregnancy of suggestion seems a " Cor- neillian " verse. The latter point may be illustrated ; one must be a Frenchman to feel the former. " I am master of myself as well as of the world, " affirms the Emperor Augustus in " China. " " Rome is no longer in Rome. It is all where I am, " says Ser- torius to Pompey. The assassinated Attila, strangled in his blood, " speaks but in stifled gasps what he imagines he speaks. " What concentrated force in the reply of the father of Horace : " What would you have him do against three ? " " That he should die. " Or in Medea's : " What resource have you in so utter a disaster ? " " Myself ! Myself, I say, and that is enough. " " Follow not my steps, " says Polyeucte, " or leave your errors. " Finally, since these citations might be extended almost indefinitely, consider the closing lines of Cleopatra's curse in " Rodoguue" : To wish you all misfortune together, May a son be born of you who shall resemble me ; and Camille's upon Rome : May 1 with my own eyes see this thunderbolt fall on her, See her houses in ashes and thy laurels in dust, See the last Roman at his last sigh, Myself alone be cause of it, and die of the joy. 1 1 Je suis maitre dc moi comnie do 1'uuivers (China, v. 3). Kome n'est plus dans Home. Elle est toutc oil jc suis (Sertor. iii. 1 ). Ce u'cst plus qu'en sanglots qu'il dit ce qu'il croitdire (Attila, v. 2). Que voulicz-vous qu'il se fit centre trois? Qu'il mourut ! ( Hor. iii. 6). Dans un si grand rovers que vous reste-t-il? Moi ! Moi, dis-je, et c'est assex (Medee, L 2). Ne suivez point mes pas ou quittcz vos errcurs (Poly. v. 3). Et, pour vons soul Pnisse uailre de v( Puisst ; -je de mes y Voir ses niai-ons e Voir le dernier Ho Mfli seule, en t'tre aitez tons les malheurs ensemble, us un lils qui me. ressemble (Kodog. v. 4). MIX y voir tornber re foudre, i cendre, et tes lauriers en poudre, naiu it son dernier soupir, aiisc, et mourir de p!aisir (Hor. iv. 5). 70 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. It is lines like these, and they are many, that jus- tify Faguet in calling Corneille's language " the most masculine, energetic, at once sober and full, that was ever spoken in France, " and his verses " the most beautiful that ever fell from a French pen. " It is such lines that induce Saiutsbury, with perhaps un- guarded enthusiasm, to call him " the greatest writer of France, the only one who, up to our own time, can take rank with the Dantes and Shaksperes of other countries." 1 It is of them that Voltaire says: " They earned Corneille the name Great to distinguish him, not from his brother Thomas, but from the rest of mankind. " It was said of Corneille's tragedies that they aroused admiration rather than tragic fear. He does not seek to interest us in the fate of his characters, but rather in the indomitable will with which they bear it, and in their haughty disdain for it. His is a drama of situations, not of characters. He delights in extraordinary situations and subjects, and belongs, as Brunetiere happily puts it, to " the School of .the Emphatics. " 2 So it is natural that the " linked sweetness " of amorous talk that takes so large a place in Racine seems to him rather contemptible. There is no philandering or fine-spun sentiment even in the loves of Chimene and Bodrigue, and in " Sertorius " Aristie cuts short her lover with the lines : Let us leave, sir, let us leave for petty souls, This grovelling barter of sighs and loves. But tragedy, with the limitations of Corneille's method, 'forbids the resource of a minor plot, and involves much talk with little action. So his disdain 1 Encyc. Brit. vi. 419. 2 Etiules critiques, i. 310. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 71 of the endless subject of talk leaves him often with scenes and sometimes acts where interest hopelessly flags. Even his noblest work is not without monotony. It is always a like grandeur of soul that he represents, a like admiration that he excites. One who reads many plays of Corneille consecutively finds his appre- ciation dulled, and the public who witnessed them consecutively might have come to the same feeling. Then, too, he has not quite freed the drama from the lyric and epic elements that lay in its origin, but were foreign to its nature. Still there is a permanent qual- ity in his work, as in Shakspere's, a touch of nature that Racine, at his best, lacks. The superb declama- tions of Camille, of Auguste, or of Pompey's widow Corndlie, to name no others, will thrill audiences every- where, as long as the antinomies of love and patriot- ism, honor arid duty, perplex men's souls. But oratory is far from being the only use of language; and by giving to French when in a very plastic state a sen- tentious imprint, Corneille exercised an influence on the future of his mother tongue very great, but not altogether helpful to its healthy growth and further development. The rival of Corneille 's later years was Racine, whom Boileau reckoned as his pupil, so that we may regard him as representative of the regular academic drama. He had a more stable temperament, his work was more even in character and polished in execution, and by close adherence to rule he long and successfully masked the weaker side of his genius. Such formal correctness suited the age of Louis, as it did that of Anne. But in less skilful hands than his, it sank quickly to a mannerism as dreary as it was con- temptible. It is indirectly due to him that tragedy, 72 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. except for Voltaire, hardly lifts its head from the waters of oblivion between his death and the rise of the Romantic School. Eacine began his education at Port-Royal, and owed to that school the development of literary tastes, and a love for Greek, which furnished the basis of his tragic psychology, while that of Corneille had a more Roman sturdiness. He completed his studies at Paris, and at twenty was already author of poems that earned him the rewards of the court and the con- demnation of critics. But he had soon the good for- tune to meet La Fontaine and Moliere, and was persuaded to try tragedy. His first drama, " The Natural Enemies," a study from ^Eschylus' "Seven against Thebes, " is in style a feeble imitation of Cor- neille. His next work, " Alexandre " (1665), was also produced under the influence of Moliere, and marked growing pow r er ; but Racine broke with him that year, and his later pieces were acted in the rival theatre of the Hotel de Bourgogne. He now became the pupil of Boileau, who was inclined to attribute to himself the success of his diligent scholar, not without some justice, for Racine's style was of the kind that is formed by criticism and profits by careful elaboration. This was illustrated by " Andromaque " (1667), a play that " made almost as much talk as the ' Cid, ' " accord- ing to the testimony of Perrault, rousing the admira- tion of the friends and the scorn of the enemies of Boileau. These latter the dramatist, with the critic's co-operation, presently satirized in the Aristophanian " Plaideurs, " which has unique merits, and shows the author more emancipated in his versification than he had been or was to be. Corneille, like most writers of the earlier half of the THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 73 seventeenth century, had subordinated passion to will ; Racine and the School of 1660, in accord with the changed temper of the time, subordinated will to pas- sion. Hence critics said that Racine's tragic talent was limited to the painting of love. To prove them wrong he wrote " Britanuicus " (1669), which went a long way to prove them right. The piece was not a success, and he returned the next year to the old theme with " Be're'nice, " a play that established the ascendency of the young poet over the aging Corneille, who had attempted the same subject The plays that followed, " Bajazet " (1672) and " Mithridate " (1673), show greater suppleness and strength, but it is still the same well-worn theme. Yet they mark the height of the poet's fame, to which " Iphigcnie " (1674) added nothing, while " Phedre " (1677), exaggerating the de- fects of his qualities, failed to hold the popular favor. He seems to have been threatened with prosecution as a corrupter of morals. l Scruples that honor him caused him to withdraw from the stage, as Corneille had done. But his return to it twelve years later in " Esther " (1689) and " Athalie " (1691) showed his genius at its highest point. Indeed some regard " Athalie " as the masterpiece of the entire French drama. The causes of this superiority were also the causes of its lukewarm public reception. Both plays were written for Madame de Maintenon's great school for noblewomen at St. Cyr. Hence, by a happy neces- sity, love-making was suppressed, and a greater scope was given to action, in imitation of sixteenth-century models, than Boileau would have counselled or ap- proved. This glorious aftermath closed the poet's literary career. He died in 1699. 1 Cp. Brunctiere, tpoques du theatre fr.uivais, p. 155, note. 74 MODEKN FKENCH LITERATURE. It accords with Racine's conception of dramatic art that his scenes are laid in foreign countries, where artificial conventions are masked by the strangeness of the environment. But there is no attempt at any local color. The Greece of Agamemnon was not more for- eign to the Versailles of Louis XIV. than it was to the Greece of Racine's " Iphige'nie. " This is least felt in " Les Plaideurs, " in " Esther, " and " Athalie, " for here the poet is more free ; but it should be noted that in all his work the artificiality is in the received notion of tragic art rather than in the literary instinct of the man. At his most plastic period he had been associ- ated with Moliere, and to the last, so far as the con- ventions allowed, he tried to do what Moliere had done in comedy, to study and paint with an honest and naturalistic psychology human passions and feelings, dissociated from any relations of country or age. 1 He aims at a noble simplicity. His ideal, as he states it, is " a simple action, with few incidents, such as might take place in a single day, which, advancing steadily toward its end, is sustained only by the interests and passions of the characters," who, as he says elsewhere, " must be neither too perfect nor too base, so that hearers may recognize themselves in them ; not alto- gether culpable, nor wholly innocent, with a virtue capable of weakness, that their faults may make them less detested than pitied. " His interest, then, is in character, not in action ; while Corneille always sought the complex crises of history. Now, this conception of tragedy is much more akin to comedy than any that had preceded it. It is a 1 lie was reproached for this by Fontanelle, who found his charac- ters so " natural " that they seemed base. Cp. Bruuetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 319. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 75 study of human passion and weakness, as in Moliere ; but here the pitiless analysis is pushed to the point where amused interest yields to dread, and the smile to terror. 1 It is this naturalistic portrayal of passions common to all men of all time that keeps Racine's hold on the minds s>f Frenchmen, in spite of the con- straints of his form; for of all Europeans they perhaps are most willing to condone this trammel to the free development of genius. Yet apart from this his talent was not of supreme rank, fie had not the tragic grandeur of Corneille, 2 still less of Shakspere, and even in his chosen sphere he had not the keen psycho- logical insight of Moliere. We are thus brought to the greatest of all writers of social comedy, incomparably the greatest French writer of his century, and perhaps the greatest name in all their literature, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the first Paris- ian among the great writers of France, in his ethics successor of Rabelais and Montaigne, and predecessor of the rationalists of the next century, of Voltaire and Diderot; who, on becoming identified with the stage, took, and made immortal, the name of Moliere (1622- 1373). His parents were well-to-do, he was carefully educated by the Jesuits, and his philosophical studies with Gassendi, or early associations with such libertins as Lhuillier, left many traces in his work and more in his life. Then, like Corneille, he studied law. But 1 This point is ingeniously elaborated by Faguet, 169 sqq. 2 Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 178, makes this judicious com- parison: " The work of Corneillc, with all its imperfections of detail, is more varied than that of Hacine. It has a surer and quicker effect on the stage ; above all, its inspiration is higher, more generous, more elevated beyond the common order and ordinary conditions of life. But how much it costs to confess it when we come from reading Racine ! " 76 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. presently we find him associated with a dramatic com- pany, " L'lllustre Theatre," which left Paris in 1646 to try its fortune in the provinces. For some years of wandering and precarious existence, during which the company visited almost all the larger cities of France, 1 Moliere furnished their repertoire with light farces, and at length with more finished comedies in the style of the time, " L'Etourdi" (1653 or 1655) and " Le Ddpit amoureux " (1656). This wandering life was a priceless school to him in the study of middle-class men and manners. The future social comedian could hardly have used these years to better advantage. But the company, or at least Moliere, was now financially prosperous; and in 1658, after more than twelve years' absence, he arranged for their return to Paris. In spite of borrowed Italian elements, these early comedies had been enthusiastically received, and indeed they were much the best that France could show. But both were now cast in the shade by " Les Prdcieuses ridi- cules, " the first dramatic satire on cultured society in France. The blue-stockings of the Hotel Rambouillet, or perhaps their bourgeois imitators, who, according to the " Roman bourgeois, " abounded in Paris, their affected language and manners, were held up to such good-humored ridicule that success was immediate and universal. Indeed the play has not yet lost its comic force, for learning has not wholly supplanted the affec- tation of it even among the women of to-day. Equally typical of Moliere is his next play, " Sgnnu- relle " (1660), the first of those gay yet profound 1 We hear of them at Agen, Angonleme, Beziers, Bordeaux, Limoges, Lyons, Moutpellier, Nantes, Narbonne, Nimes, Koueu, Toulouse. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 77 farces, which still hold the stage because they raise first a laugh and then a thoughtful smile. " Don Garcie, " which follows, marks a relapse to the tradi- tional comedy ; but in " L'Ecole des maris, " though the plot is borrowed from Terence's " Adel phi, " there is a study of character and a pathos in the treatment of the aged lover that bears the print of the time and of Moliere's genius. In February of the next year Moliere himself married a young woman of his troupe, more than twenty years bis junior, much to his future sorrow, though she was probably not so black as con- temporary scandal asserted and literary scavengers delight to repeat In 1662 he touched more dangerous ground in " L'ficole des femmes, " a covert naturalistic attack on hypocrisy and literal orthodoxy, by which he raised comedy from a diversion to a living teaching of a phi- losophy of life. Here first comedy became moral satire, and here first the aristocracy was ridiculed. This unchained a storm of rage, nursed by jealousy, such as actor-poet has seldom faced. He replied to his critics first in the witty " Critique de 1'Ecole des femmes " and then in the " Impromptu de Versailles, * where his roused indignation did not scruple to name opponents and caricature rivals whom he scourged with caustic cruelty. In 1664 he renewed his attack on that most contemptible of all vices with three acts of " Tartufe, the Hypocrite, " in which he inaugurates the comedy of characters as distinct from that of man- ners. This open satire of false devotion, which was perhaps also a covert attack on all unnatural moral constraint, earned him from these professors of peace and good-will the pious wish that this " demon in human flesh " might " speedily be burned on earth, that 78 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. he might burn the sooner in hell. " It was five years before he was suffered to act the entire play ; but the king's favor remained constant, and Moliere continued the fight with the yet more daring " Don Juan, " while light farces, such as " L'Amour niddecin, " relieved the serious contest. But, except for " Tartufe/' it is with 1666 that the great manner of Moliere begins with " Le Misan- thrope, " which Boileau, Lessing, and Goethe unite to regard as his profoundest study of human character. Slowly but surely it has won its way to the foremost place in popular esteem also, and is now perhaps the most generally read and quoted of all his plays. Alceste, the noble pessimist soured by experience, Philinte, the easy-going social trimmer, the conceited poetaster Oronte, the witty and censorious Ce'limene are types as enduring as society. Failing health now began to lessen his productivity, though not his wit. But in 1668 he brought out two masterpieces, the extremely witty " Amphitryon, " and " George Dandin, " type of the man who marries above his station and suffers the consequences. Then fol- lowed that wonderful psychic picture " L'Avare, " the Miser. Then for three years (1669-1671), a succes- sion of light farces, among them the immortal " Bour- geois gentilhomme, " marks the recrudescence of his malady ; but in " Les Femmes savantes " the poet re- turned to the subject of the " Pre'cieuses, " and with his maturer powers attacked the admirers of pedantry and the affectation of learning, a subject always new, that in our own day has inspired one of the happiest efforts of the modern stage, " Le Monde -ou 1'on s'ennuie. " This was/his last important work. Already a con- sumptive cough was wearing him away. On February THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 79 17, 1673, as he was acting in a new and almost fiercely bitter farce, " Le Malade imaginaire, " he rup- tured a blood-vessel in a spasm of coughing, and was carried from the stage to die. He was buried half clandestinely; for the Archbishop of Paris, feeling perhaps that Moliere's ethics were as irreconcilable with the received form of Christianity as ever those of liabelais had been, forbade the clergy to say prayers for him. But he had given liberally of his wealth, and the poor crowded to his funeral ; yet the site of his grave is now uncertain. Moliere came at a propitious time, for comedy had not suffered from the false classicism of tragedy ; and if little of merit had yet been done, there was promise in the general interest, both popular and cultured, in the subject. The danger was that Spanish or classical models might be too slavishly followed. In his hands farce became comedy, and so won a dignity and an independence that gave it the freedom of conscious strength. And at the same time he broke a way of escape from the " alexandrine prison " and the bondage of the unities. Some of his very best work was done in prose, and he never allowed verse to fetter his thoughts or be more than a subordinate means to a higher end. Indeed, he could not have polished his work as Racine did. In thirteen years he had written twenty-five plays, seven of them serious masterpieces ; he had been stage-manager, actor, and often manager of the royal festivals at Versailles. Life to him had been work, and it was fitting that he should die in harness. A man of indomitable energy, no dramatist ever united so much wit with so much seriousness as did Moliere. There is often a pathetic, even a sad, background to his work ; but he never allows this to get the better of 80 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. his healthy humor, which depends for its effect, not on intrigue or play of words, but on the unexpected revelations of character that come like flashes in his plays. And here his satire is directed always against those social faults that disguise or suppress natural instincts, not against the excesses of nature. It is not ambition or even hedonism that he scourges, but hypocrisy, pedantry, amorous old age, prudery, ava- rice, or preciosity. 1 The purpose to hold the mirror up to Nature, that she may see her face and mend her ways, gives even his roaring farces an element of true comedy. But this purpose brings with it a tendency to typify phases of character, as with Eacine, rather than to present the complexity of human nature, as with Corneille ; and this disposition was long charac- teristic of .French comedy. 2 In the analysis of charac- ter Shakspere is more profound, and he tells a story with far more dramatic force. Indeed, to Moliere the story, for its own sake, is a v r ery minor matter; but Shakspere has less of the direct contact with and in- fluence on contemporary life that is the result of Moliere 's naturalistic method and his study of the im- mediate environment. This method was that of his successors, of whom Eegnard only need be named, though his best work is disappointing, whether regarded in the light of what had preceded, or of the French comedy of to-day. For the tendency of the coming age was away from the natu- ralistic position. Yet, as one reviews the seventeenth century and the " classical " period, it is clear that naturalism was characteristic of its most successful 1 Cp. Brnnetiere, foucles critiques, iv. 185. 2 Such titles as " The Miser," " The Misanthrope," or Re'gnard's " The Gambler," " The Distraught," illustrate this. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 81 work. Tt began witn an attempt to codify and regu- late the individual conquests of the sixteenth century. Malherbe in poetry, Balzac in prose, undertook to be lawgivers for language and style. Just in so far as the century yielded, and the mental lassitude of the reaction from the Renaissance made it easy to yield, to this gospel of artificiality, stagnation followed. In prose it was least possible to crib and confine ; and here there was the most varied development, from which it was easy to purge the chaff and the tinsel. In the drama the yoke was more felt, and in poetry most of all. But those poets and dramatists who were able to rise above these artificial constraints, and to build upon the foundations laid by the giants of the sixteenth century a structure of their own, the independent stu- dents of nature and society, La Fontaine, Moliere, in a greater degree Corneille, in a less degree Racine, are those who are prized to-day, and prized most for that which the strict " classical " purists would have condemned. 82 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. CHAPTER III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. THE eighteenth century is the age of Voltaire in a sense and to a degree that is unparalleled in European literary history. Even Goethe, who has also his " cen- tury, " is less typical, his sway less undisputed, and his excellence, though greater, less diversified ; for it is the peculiar distinction of Voltaire that there is no department of letters in which he did not hold a prominent place, while in most he stood by common consent at the head. Voltaire is not the author of the best lyrics of the century, but he comes just short of the highest place, being indeed all that a versifier can be who lacks what Horace calls the " divine breath " of poetry. His satires are the keenest, his tales in verse the wittiest, in the language. He is the author of the most correct serious epic and of the wittiest comic epic of his time ; he is incomparably its best novelist and its best dramatist. His essays in physics are said to be cred- itable ; and though he was neither a metaphysician nor a theologian, his works on ethics and theology are, and were, more read and prized than those of any of his philosophical or clerical contemporaries. He was far the* best literary critic of that day, and its most popular historian. Besides this, he was the author of THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. an infinite number of miscellaneous pamphlets, and of a correspondence of appalling volume, almost all of which is interesting, at least, for its polished form. To whatever field of literature we turn, we shall find his mark set up in it. It is not until toward the close of the century that Eousseau, in the ethical and political field, rivals, and for a time overshadows, the philoso- pher of Feruey. Voltaire will introduce us to the century and accompany us through it; Kousseau will furnish its natural epilogue. Voltaire (1694-1778), whose real name of Arouet is seldom given him, was the sou of a wealthy and rather distinguished Parisian notary ; but his early training was at the hands of his skeptical and scholarly god- father, the Abbd de Chateauneuf, and in 1704 he passed into the moulding hands of the Jesuits, who seem to have given him a better education than in later con- troversial years he liked to admit He still saw much of the Abbe, and was far from cloistered. In- deed, during the first year of his school life he so won the attention and interest of his godfather's friend, the famous Ninon de 1'Enclos, that she bequeathed him two thousand livres, " to buy books," she said. He left school in 1711, and pretended to study law; but all his ambitions were clearly literary, and he was already a member of the noted literary circle, " du Temple. " His father, dissatisfied with such vagaries, sent him first to Caen ; then to the Hague, where he got entangled with a young Protestant lady, to the yet more intense disgust of his parent, who actually obtained a lettre de cachet from the king authorizing his son's confinement. But he made no use of it; for Voltaire, always cautions in bis daring, returned to Paris and the law, and occupied his mischievous energy 84 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. in writing libellous poems, until the perplexed father had to send him away once more. It was not till 1715 that he returned to the laxer society of the Re- gency and to his literary circle, whom he presently charmed by his first play, " G^dipe. " But his itching fingers, under the provoking inspiration of the ambi- tious Duchess of Maine, were soon writing epigrams on the Regent himself that invited and justified a brief exile (1716), followed by confinement for ten months in the Bastille and a second short banishment from the capital. Yet, though the witty Orleans did not trust Voltaire, he enjoyed him; and late in 1718 the poet was able to produce " CEdipe " with success at Paris, whence political squibs soon drove him for the fourth time, though the good-humored Regent shortly after gave him a pension, and seems to have employed him in the secret diplomatic service from 1722 to 1725. His social position was already assured by the death of his father, who left him a respectable com- petency ; and he occupied himself during these years as a literary dilettante with an epic, " La Henriade, " and a second tragedy, " Mariamne. " But in 1725 a quar- rel with the Chevalier de Rohan sent him first to the Bastille, then to England, an event of such impor- tance to his development that it forms, like Goethe's visit to Italy, the turning-point in his intellectual life. In England Voltaire got. first of all, a very con- siderable sum of money, which he employed so well in fortunate speculations and investments, that his future life was always free from financial care, and, at the last, almost seignorial. This made it possible for him to be more independent of patronage and lavor than any other literary man iu France ; and lor the work THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 85 he had before him such independence was necessary. Then, too, contact with English clraracter and institu- tions could not but have a deep effect on so mobile a genius. The contrast between France and England, greater then than now, stimulated his mind to more serious thoughts on society and philosophy, and he re- turned to France, more capable, perhaps, than any other Frenchman of seeing the weak sides of her con- stitution and polity, and ready to offer opinions on them, which are often specious, though seldom pro- found. He made also a serious though brief effort to understand Shakspere ; and even if he failed to ap- prehend him, he learned much from the English stage that affected his literary taste and that of the French public also, to whom he was first to introduce one des- tined to have the profoundest influence on the litera- ture of later generations. 1 Even more important to his intellectual development was the study of English science and philosophy, especially of Newton and Locke, by which he systematized his views of nature and religion. After several tentative visits, Voltaire returned to France in 1729, where he continued his dramatic activity with" Zaire" (1732) and some inferior plays, wrote his "History of Charles XII.," and began his comic epic " La Pucelle," the source of much amuse- ment and of much deserved censure through many years of his life. But his restless spirit soon got him in hot water again with a volume of skeptical " Letters on the English, " and with the " Temple of Taste, " a satire on the poetasters of the time, accompanied by some remarks on Pascal, in which the orthodox scented 1 See IVllissier, La Littoraturc contemporame, p. 69, Le Draino Bhakespearieu. 86 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. danger and heresy. They had the book burned, but the author laughed at them from across the frontier in Lorraine. Here, soon after, he settled for some years at Cirey with Madame du Chatelet, the " respectable Emily " of his correspondence, for his hostess ; and it is probable that ties closer than Platonic bound them, though Vol- taire's loves, like Jean- Jacques', were always more cerebral than material, and Emily did not hesitate to supplement his affections by more commonplace attach- ments. He had now ample leisure as well as security, and here first he took up the serious profession of authorship. In 1735, with a cheerful self-confidence that was hardly justified, he produced a treatise on Metaphysics less philosophical, than controversial; in 1736 came a popular exposition of the Newtonian system,, and " Alzire, " a drama of Peru ; and this was followed by " Le Mondain, " whose outspoken opti- mism, if not essentially anti-Christian, could hardly fail to seem so to the representatives of the French establishment. The result was a long and bitter controversy, traces of which can be found in the allusions to the " Jour- nal des TreVoux, " to Fre'ron and Desfontaines, which abound in his epigrams and satires. To-day, how- ever, " Le Mondain " seems far less offensive in its language and tendency than " La Pucelle, " from which he still continued to " snatch a fearful joy, " reading it to friends whenever he got a chance, while he guarded it from publication with ostentatious anxiety. During all these years his pen was tireless. The mass of minor work produced was enormous, and by 1741 he had completed " Merope " and " Mohamet, " dramas second only to " Zaire. " THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 87 Meantime, since 1736, he had been corresponding with the philosophic king, Frederic of Prussia, whom he met in 1740 and visited in 1743. Absence had now restored him to the graces of the Parisian court ; in 1745 he was made royal historiographer, a post honored by the names of Kacine and Boileau ; and in 1746 he entered the Academy. But his literary in- discretions soon obliged him to leave these honors and French soil, still accompanied by the " respectable Emily," whose death at Luneville in 1749 left him a man of fifty-five, famous, rich, but without a home and without a country. It was natural, under these conditions, that he should lend a favorable ear to the invitation of FredeVic to come to share, or, as he would interpret it, to lead, the brilliant group of literary men which that great king had gathered at his court So, after. a year of restless wandering and malicious activity that found its chief expression in satirical tales, he went to Berlin in July, 1750. Voltaire's stay in Germany had more influence on the literary men of that country than it had on him. His quarrels and rupture with Frederic (1753) do not concern us. They were too great intellectually to get on well together, but too great also not to admire cine another genuinely when apart. In his relations with the literary men of Frederic's circle, Voltaire appears in an unfavorable light, showing most strongly here, what he never failed* to show elsewhere, vanity, spiteful- ness, financial unscrupulousness, a great desire to proclaim disagreeable and dangerous truths, and an equally earnest determination at all moral costs to avoid the consequences of so doing. During his three years at Berlin, Voltaire finished his famous essay on the Reign of Louis XIV., and hi? 88 MODERN FRKNCH LITERATURE. fiercest literary lampoon, the " Diatribe du Docteur Akakia, " an insult to his fellow-guest, Maupertuis, which resulted in the severing of their relations, and closed Prussia to him as France was already closed. His " Essai sur les mceurs " now appeared, and made his position even more difficult; so it was natural that after some travels he should turn to Switzerland, then, in spite of provincial narrowness, a noble refuge of free-thought. Here he could lead an independent life; and here, in or near Geneva, he made his " home," the first he had ever had, from 1754 till his death, nearly a quarter of a century later. At first he lived in the suburbs of Geneva; but he soon bought a large estate at Ferney, just across the French frontier, and so administered his domain that the population of Ferney gre\v under his fostering care from fifty at his coming to twelve hundred at his death. But he also prudently acquired various houses of refuge in Savoy, at Lausanne, and in other jurisdictions. He managed his large domain with patriarchal shrewdness, practised the most open hospitality, and permitted himself the luxury of a private theatre, as George Sand did later at Nohant, and also of a church, for which he ob- tained a relic from the Pope. He dedicated it " To God from Voltaire " (Deo erexit Voltaire), and ostenta- tiously communicated there, much to the vexation of his bishop. He made Ferney what Weimar became a half -century later, the Mecca of literary Europe. All flocked to do him homage ; few had the temerity to oppose his dicta. His influence, both in literature and ethics, was felt over all the Continent, and main- tained by epigrams in meteoric showers, and by letters that made the circuit of the literary world. These last, of which the complete edition of his works counts THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 89 some ten thousand, were the chief source of his power, and perhaps the master work of his genius. The most enduring works of this period are, first of all, " Candide, " a prose tale directed against the re- ceived orthodoxy rather than against anything distinc- tively Christian, and for irony perhaps unsurpassed in modern times; then the " Commentary on Corneille," generously undertaken to relieve the necessities of that dramatist's niece; but perhaps most of all, the pam- phlets written in defence of liberty of thought and against the tyranny of persecution, as it was even then being illustrated in France in the cases of Calas, of Sirven, of Espinasse, and others. That these men were mostly Protestants was natural, for only Cath- olics had the power to stiile thought, though the Huguenots might share the desire. The creed for which they suffered contributed nothing to the inter- est he felt in their wrongs. Indeed he had not a whit more sympathy with the infallible Bible than with the infallible Pope, and, like Erasmus, "he had no wish to break with authority on a matter so uncertain, so incapable of proof, and to him so unimportant as orthodoxy, if he could but secure toleration. His often repeated exhortation " Kcrasez I'infame " does not allude, as some have vainly supposed, to the essence of Christianity, still less to the Christ, but to bigoted intolerance based on ignorance and self- seeking, such as he thought he found exemplified in the Jesuits of his time and their helpers, Ere'ron and Palissot; though Voltaire's ethics were really more antagonistic to Jansenists than to Jesuits. They continued the traditions of Rabelais and La Fontaine, but with a naturalism that is less rationalis- tic than hedonistic. 90 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Many years were passed at Ferney in dignified ease, and Voltaire was a frail old man of eighty -four when the triumphs of Beaumarchais' " Barber of Seville * roused his vanity for a journey to Paris to witness the production of his own just completed " Irene. " Its sixth performance, March 16, 1778, was an unequalled ovation for its laurel-crowned author, and one of the three or four great days of French theatrical history. Soon after, Franklin brought him his grandson to be blessed, and at a solemn stance of the Academy they embraced in true sentimental style. He even began another tragedy ; but the old man had over-estimated the power of his body to follow his tireless mind. Presently came a collapse of physical strength so rapid that when the hour came at which all Catholics desire the last sacraments, he had no longer sufficient self- control to maintain the solemn farce of a lifetime. He motioned the priest away, with a weak sincerity that would surely have cast a gloom over his last moments had it been granted him to recover a con- sciousness of his inconsistency. Dying thus (May 30-31), it was necessary to inter him in haste, before the episcopal inhibition should intervene to exclude him from consecrated ground. In 1791 the remains were taken to the Pantheon ; but the sarcophagus, when opened in 1864, was found empty, the mocker mocking even from the grave. We have now to consider the work of Voltaire, and with it the work of his lesser contemporaries in the various fields of his multifarious activity. In lyric poetry not much could be expected of a period that continued the traditions of classical objec- tivity. 1 The first place during the earlier half of the 1 Cp. Bruuetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 48. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 91 century belongs undoubtedly to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who, like Voltaire, was associated with the coterie " du Temple, " and, like him, was in con- stant trouble because he could bridle neither his tongue nor his pen. He, too, was exiled in 1712, and passed the rest of his life at Brussels, continuing more indus- trious to make enemies than others are to get friends. His poetic work is not large. It consists mainly of panegyric or sacred odes, apparently studied from Boileau, and of licentious or cynical epigrams, which show the greater talent of the two, and passed with the classical critics for an imitation of Marot's " e'le'- gant badinage, " as the odes did of his " Psalms. " But J.-B. Rousseau was neither a great man nor a great poet, and to say that he was the best of his time may excuse from speaking of his fellows. A generation later than Rousseau is Piron (1689 1773), probably after Voltaire the most brilliant epi- grammatist of France, but too witty to be on good terms with his fellow wits, and too incapable, as his dramas showed, of any sustained effort, though many of the best lines of his sparkling comedy, " La M'itro- manie, " have passed into the small change of cultured conversation. Another writer of light verse is Gresset, a " one-poem poet. " His " Vert-Vert, " a parrot who passes from a monastery to a nunnery and picks up phrases far from monastic on the journey, is perhaps the best in its kind since La Fontaine, and shows a more kindly humor than the " Cnntes " of Voltaire or the work of his other contemporaries. Gresset, for the greater part of his life, was conneoted with a religious order, and he is one of the very few poets of this time who never pander to vice; but his character, though go.ntle, was weak, and the close of his life was wholly 92 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. under the direction of those who thought the graceful badinage of " Vert- Vert " a matter for fasting and pen- ance. Later fabulists, Florian and Marmontel, pre- served the traditions of the apologue ; but their work has only historic interest. In the honeyed, amorous, or licentious verse of the " glow-worm " type, Voltaire was surpassed, and might well be content to be, by the perfumed lu- bricity of Gentil-Bernard, Dorat, and Parny, the last a Creole who brought at first some breath of fresh life into French verse, but later lost this facile touch, so that his longer poems have .been judiciously pronounced " equally remarkable for blasphemy, obscenity, extrav- agance, and dulness. " It must be allowed that if in this century there is no verse that is extremely good, there is much that is extremely bad, and very little that is worse than these later poems of Parny. But the best in this kind are only triflers. Much later and a step higher are the anacreontic Desaugiers and Eouget de Lisle, whose immortal "Marseillaise" is less characteristic than his convivial verses, which mark the true ancestor of Be'ranger. In the descriptive school of poetry this century pointed with pride to Delille, the French Thomson, whose insatiate thirst for paraphrase turns backgammon into " that noisy game where horn in hand the adroit player calculates an uncertain chance," while sugar masquerades as " the American honey which the African squeezes from the juicy reed. " Poetry became a puzzle till the revolt of the Romanticists brought plain speaking and the mot- propre into fashion again, substituting virility for these elaborate conceits. It need not be said that Voltaire had cultivated all these fields except the sacred canticle. He had written THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 also the only serious epic of the century worthy to be named, though " La Henriade " is poor enough in its jejune correctness; and his " La Pucelle," with all its faults, is still the best comic epic of France. His versified " Contes, " though malicious in their ethical bearing, are the wittiest and best told since La Fon- taine, and his satires are hardly second to the best work of Rdgnier and Boileau. No man had so great a command of vers de societe as he. He never rose to true poetry ; that divine spark was denied him. He lacked the sincerity that springs from noble convic- tions. But he produced an enormous mass of what has been justly called the " ne plus ultra of verse- that is not poetry. " Yet the taste for a truer poetry was not dead in France. These years saw a revival of interest in the great sixteenth-century poets; a collection of the old " Fabliaux " was reprinted, as well as the works of Marot, Villon, and Rabelais ; all of which had its reward in the Romantic School of 1830. But it was reserved for the very close of the century to produce a true poet, and to guillotine him just as he had revealed his promise. Andre" Chdnier (1762-1794), Greek by birth, half Greek by parentage, wholly classical in tastes and studies, attained the aspiration of the Classicists. But, in spite of Che'nier's genius, the more fully he realized his ambition, the more artificial he became; and so he had little' influence in speeding or retarding the development of the Romantic School, which indeed was well advanced before the tardy pub- lication of the greater and better part of his poems (1819). In regular tragedy that had languished since the death of Racine, Voltaire's supremacy was not ques- 94 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. tioned. 1 Indeed, what deserves mention outside his work does so almost wholly because it points to a revolt from traditions that he was anxious to maintain. Among his fifty pieces the comedies are less good than one would anticipate from the general character of his mind ; even " Nanine, " which he drew from Eichard- son's " Pamela, " is only the best among second-class work. But if he never thoroughly mastered the tech- nique of comedy, his best tragedies, some ten, approach more nearly to the correctness of Racine than any work of an age that had nothing to suggest the grandeur of Corneille, still less the profound psychology of -Moliere ; he was the inventor of " local color " in tra- gedy, and in the dexterous management of the tragic form he may have surpassed in " Mdrope " and " Zaire " either of his great predecessors. His idea was to per- fect the tragedy of Eacine, itself the most perfect in his view that the human mind had yet produced. This he hoped to attain by increasing the action and height- ening the spectacular effect. But while he laid stress rightly on these elements of interest, he found him- self unconsciously carried away from Eacine, toward the processes of Corneille, and even to the Shakspere he rejected. Yet his reforms seem timid enough to- day, and at the time attracted little animadversion. For a bolder note of revolt had been sounded by Lamotte's attack on the regular tragedy, challenging the authority of the unities and the prestige of the ancients, though in his own best drama, " Inez de Castro, " Lamotte had lacked the courage of his convic- tions. These were, indeed, far in advance of his time, and the contemporary tragedians, Cre'billon pere and 1 Op. Brniu'tii're, Epoqnes