Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. Edited by Edmund Gosse

A History ofFRENCH LITERATURE

BY

EDWARD DOWDEND. LITT. , LL. D. (DUB. ), D. C. L. (OXON. ), LL. D. (EDIN. )LL. D. (PRINCETON)PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN

LondonWILLIAM HEINEMANNMCMXIV

_First Edition_, 1897_New Impressions_, 1899, 1904, 1907, 1911, 1914

_Copyright, London_ 1897, _by William Heinemann_

PREFACE

French prose and French poetry had interested me during so many yearsthat when Mr. Gosse invited me to write this book I knew that I wasqualified in one particular--the love of my subject. Qualified inknowledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend to knowthe whole of a vast literature. He may have opened many books andturned many pages; he cannot have penetrated to the soul of all booksfrom the _Song of Roland_ to _Toute la Lyre_. Without reaching itsspirit, to read a book is little more than to amuse the eye with printedtype. 

An adequate history of a great literature can be written only bycollaboration. Professor Petit de Julleville, in the excellent_Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française_, at presentin process of publication, has his well-instructed specialist foreach chapter. In this small volume I too, while constantly exercisingmy own judgment, have had my collaborators--the ablest and mostlearned students of French literature--who have written each a partof my book, while somehow it seems that I have written the whole. My collaborators are on my shelves. Without them I could not haveaccomplished my task; here I give them credit for their assistance. Some have written general histories of French literature; some havewritten histories of periods--the Middle Ages, the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries; some have studiedspecial literary fields or forms--the novel, the drama, tragedy, comedy, lyrical poetry, history, philosophy; many have writtenmonographs on great authors; many have written short critical studiesof books or groups of books. I have accepted from each a gift. Butmy assistants needed to be controlled; they brought me twenty thousandpages, and that was too much. Some were accurate in statement of fact, but lacked ideas; some had ideas, but disregarded accuracy ofstatement; some unjustly depreciated the seventeenth century, somethe eighteenth. For my purposes their work had to be rewritten; andso it happens that this book is mine as well as theirs. 

The sketch of mediæval literature follows the arrangement of matterin the two large volumes of M. Petit de Julleville and hisfellow-labourers, to whom and to the writings of M. Gaston Paris Iam on almost every page indebted. Many matters in dispute have hereto be briefly stated in one way; there is no space for discussion. Provençal literature does not appear in this volume. It is omittedfrom the History of M. Petit de Julleville and from that of M. Lanson. In truth, except as an influence, it forms no part of literature inthe French language. 

The reader who desires guidance in bibliography will find it at theclose of each chapter of the History edited by M. Petit de Julleville, less fully in the notes to M. Lanson's History, and an excellent tableof critical and biographical studies is appended to each volume ofM. Lintilhac's _Histoire de la Littérature Française_. M. Lintilhac, however, omits many important English and German titles--amongothers, if I am not mistaken, those of Birsch-Hirschfeld's_Geschichte der Französichen Litteratur: die Zeit der Renaissance_, of Lotheissen's important _Geschichte der Französichen Litteraturim XVII. Jahrhundert_, and of Professor Flint's learned _Philosophyof History_ (1893). 

M. Lanson's work has been of great service in guiding me in thearrangement of my subjects, and in giving me courage to omit manynames of the second or third rank which might be expected to appearin a history of French literature. In a volume like the present, selection is important, and I have erred more by inclusion than byexclusion. The limitation of space has made me desire to say no wordthat does not tend to bring out something essential or characteristic. 

M. Lanson has ventured to trace French literature to the presentmoment. I have thought it wiser to close my survey with the declineof the romantic movement. With the rise of naturalism a new periodopens. The literature of recent years is rather a subject for currentcriticism than for historical study. 

I cannot say how often I have been indebted to the writings of M. Brunetière, M. Faguet, M. Larroumet, M. Paul Stapfer, and other livingcritics: to each of the volumes of _Les Grands Écrivains Français_, and to many of the volumes of the _Classiques Populaires_. M. Lintilhac's edition of Merlet's _Études Littéraires_ has also oftenserved me. But to name my aids to study would be to fill some pages. 

While not unmindful of historical and social influences, I desireespecially to fix my reader's attention on great individuals, theirideas, their feelings, and their art. The general history of ideasshould, in the first instance, be discerned by the student ofliterature through his observation of individual minds. 

That errors must occur where so many statements are made, I am awarefrom past experience; but I have taken no slight pains to attainaccuracy. It must not be hastily assumed that dates here recordedare incorrect because they sometimes differ from those given in otherbooks. For my errors I must myself bear the responsibility; but bythe editorial care of Mr. Gosse, in reading the proof-sheets of thisbook, the number of such errors has been reduced. 

 EDWARD DOWDEN. 

DUBLIN, _June_ 1897. 

CONTENTS

_BOOK THE FIRST_--_THE MIDDLE AGES_

CHAPTER PAGE I. NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY--THE NATIONAL EPIC--THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY--ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY . . . . . . . . 3

 II. LYRICAL POETRY--FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX--FABLIAUX--THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

 III. DIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . 40

 IV. LATEST MEDIÆVAL POETS--THE DRAMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

_BOOK THE SECOND_--_THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_

 I. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

 II. FROM THE PLÉIADE TO MONTAIGNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

_BOOK THE THIRD_--_THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

 I. LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER . . . . . . . . . . . 131

 II. THE FRENCH ACADEMY--PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)--RELIGION (PASCAL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

 III. THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE) . . . . . . . . . . 160

 IV. SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

 V. BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

 VI. COMEDY AND TRAGEDY--MOLIÈRE--RACINE . . . . . . . . . . . 196

 VII. BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS--FÉNELON . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

VIII. TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . 235

_BOOK THE FOURTH_--_THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_

 I. MEMOIRS AND HISTORY--POETRY--THE THEATRE--THE NOVEL . . . 251

 II. MONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE . . . . . . . . . . . 273

 III. DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA--PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS, CRITICS--BUFFON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

 IV. ROUSSEAU--BEAUMARCHAIS--BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE--ANDRÉ CHÉNIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

_BOOK THE FIFTH_--1789-1850

 I. THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE--MADAME DE STAËL-- CHATEAUBRIAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

 II. THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

 III. POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

 IV. THE NOVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396

 V. HISTORY--LITERARY CRITICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437

BOOK THE FIRST_THE MIDDLE AGES_

CHAPTER INARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY--THE NATIONAL EPIC--THE EPIC OFANTIQUITY--ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY

The literature of the Middle Ages is an expression of the spirit offeudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalismand Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, thehomage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those ofamorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art. Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentimentconnected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking temperof France reacted; a literature of satire arose. By degrees thebourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered the chivalricideals. At length the mediæval conceptions were exhausted. Literature dwindled as its sources were impoverished; ingenuitiesand technical formalities replaced imagination. The minds of men wereprepared to accept the new influences of the Renaissance and theReformation. 

INARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY

The oldest monument of the French language is found in the StrasburgOaths (842); the oldest French poem possessing literary merit is the_Vie de Saint Alexis_, of which a redaction belonging to the middleof the eleventh century survives. The passion of piety and the passionof combat, the religious and the warrior motives, found earlyexpression in literature; from the first arose the Lives of Saintsand other devout writings, from the second arose the _chansons degeste_. They grew side by side, and had a like manner of development. If one takes precedence of the other, it is only because by the chancesof time _Saint Alexis_ remains to us, and the forerunners of the_Chanson de Roland_ are lost. With each species of poetry_cantilènes_--short lyrico-epic poems--preceded the narrative form. Both the profane and what may be called the religious _chanson degeste_ were sung or recited by the same jongleurs--men of a classsuperior to the vulgar purveyors of amusement. Gradually the poemsof both kinds expanded in length, and finally prose narrative tookthe place of verse. 

The Lives of Saints are in the main founded on Latin originals; thenames of their authors are commonly unknown. _Saint Alexis_, a taleof Syriac origin, possibly the work of Tedbalt, a canon of Vernon, consists of 125 stanzas, each of five lines which are bound togetherby a single assonant rhyme. It tells of the chastity and poverty ofthe saint, who flies from his virgin bride, lives among beggars, returns unrecognised to his father's house, endures the insults ofthe servants, and, dying at Rome, receives high posthumous honours;finally, he is rejoined by his wife--the poet here adding to thelegend--in the presence of God, among the company of the angels. Someof the sacred poems are derived from the Bible, rhymed versions ofwhich were part of the jongleur's equipment; some from the apocryphalgospels, or legends of Judas, of Pilate, of the Cross, or, again, from the life of the Blessed Virgin. The literary value of these isinferior to that of the versified Lives of the Saints. About the tenthcentury the marvels of Eastern hagiography became known in France, and gave a powerful stimulus to the devout imagination. A certainrivalry existed between the claims of profane and religiousliterature, and a popular audience for narrative poems designed foredification was secured by their recital in churches. Wholly fabuloussome of these are--as the legend of St. Margaret--but they were noton this account the less welcome or the less esteemed. In certaininstances the tale is dramatically placed in the mouth of a narrator, and thus the way was in a measure prepared for the futuremystery-plays. 

More than fifty of these Lives of Saints are known, composed generallyin octosyllabic verse, and varying in length from some hundreds oflines to ten thousand. In the group which treats of the national saintsof France, an element of history obscured by errors, extravagances, and anachronisms may be found. The purely legendary matter occupiesa larger space in those derived from the East, in which the religiousideal is that of the hermit life. The celebrated _Barlaam et Joasaph_, in which Joasaph, son of a king of India, escaping from his father'srestraints, fulfils his allotted life as a Christian ascetic, istraceable to a Buddhist source. The narratives of Celtic origin--suchas those of the Purgatory of St. Patrick and the voyages of St. Brendan--are coloured by a tender mysticism, and sometimes charm uswith a strangeness of adventure, in which a feeling for externalnature, at least in its aspects of wonder, appears. The Celtic saintsare not hermits of the desert, but travellers or pilgrims. Among thelives of contemporary saints, by far the most remarkable is that ofour English Becket by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence. Garnier hadhimself known the archbishop; he obtained the testimony of witnessesin England; he visited the places associated with the events ofBecket's life; his work has high value as an historical document;it possesses a personal accent, rare in such writings; a genuinedramatic vigour; and great skill and harmonious power in its stanzasof five rhyming lines. 

A body of short poems, inspired by religious feeling, and oftentelling of miracles obtained by the intercession of the Virgin orthe saints, is known as _Contes pieux_. Many of these were the workof Gautier de Coinci (1177-1236), a Benedictine monk; he translatesfrom Latin sources, but with freedom, adding matter of his own, andin the course of his pious narratives gives an image, far fromflattering, of the life and manners of his own time. It is he whotells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in hisadventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three daysby her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiteratemonk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his _Ave Maria_, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that camefrom his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; andof the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of disorder, yetstill addressed a daily prayer to the Virgin, and who, returning afterlong years, found that the Blessed Mary had filled her place, andthat her absence was unknown. The collection known as _Vies des Pères_exhibits the same naïveté of pious feeling and imagination. Man isweak and sinful; but by supernatural aid the humble are exalted, sinners are redeemed, and the suffering innocent are avenged. EvenThéophile, the priest who sold his soul to the devil, on repentancereceives back from the Queen of Heaven the very document by whichhe had put his salvation in pawn. The sinner (_Chevalier au barillet_)who endeavours for a year to fill the hermit's little cask at runningstreams, and endeavours in vain, finds it brimming the moment onetear of true penitence falls into the vessel. Most exquisite in itsfeeling is the tale of the _Tombeur de Notre-Dame_--a poor acrobat--ajongleur turned monk--who knows not even the _Pater noster_ or the_Credo_, and can only offer before our Lady's altar his tumbler'sfeats; he is observed, and as he sinks worn-out and faint before theshrine, the Virgin is seen to descend, with her angelic attendants, and to wipe away the sweat from her poor servant's forehead. If therebe no other piety in such a tale as this, there is at least the pietyof human pity. 

IITHE NATIONAL EPIC

Great events and persons, a religious and national spirit, and agenius for heroic narrative being given, epic literature arises, asit were, inevitably. Short poems, partly narrative, partly lyrical, celebrate victories or defeats, the achievements of conquerors ordefenders, and are sung to relieve or to sustain the passion of thetime. The French epopee had its origin in the national songs of theGermanic invaders of Gaul, adopted from their conquerors by theGallo-Romans. With the baptism of Clovis at Reims, and the acceptanceof Christianity by the Franks (496), a national consciousness beganto exist--a national and religious ideal arose. Epic heroes--Clovis, Clotaire, Dagobert, Charles Martel--became centres for the popularimagination; an echo of the Dagobert songs is found in _Floovent_, a poem of the twelfth century; eight Latin lines, given in the _Viede Saint Faron_ by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux, preserve, in theirninth-century rendering, a fragment of the songs which celebratedClotaire II. Doubtless more and more in these lost _cantilènes_ theGerman element yielded to the French, and finally the two streamsof literature--French and German--separated; gradually, also, thelyrical element yielded to the epic, and the _chanson de geste_ wasdeveloped from these songs. 

In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against Islam, a great epicfigure appeared; on his person converged the epic interest; he maybe said to have absorbed into himself, for the imagination of thesingers and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and even, at a later time, of his successors; their deeds became his deeds, their fame was merged in his; he stood forth as the representativeof France. We may perhaps regard the ninth century as the period ofthe transformation of the _cantilènes_ into the _chansons de geste_;in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth century--reduced to prosefrom hexameters, but not completely reduced--discovered at La Haye(and named after the place of its discovery), is found an epic episodeof Carlovingian war, probably derived from a _chanson de geste_ ofthe preceding century. In each _chanson_ the _gesta_, [1] the deedsor achievements of a heroic person, are glorified, and large as maybe the element of invention in these poems, a certain historical basisor historical germ may be found, with few exceptions, in each. Rolandwas an actual person, and a battle was fought at Roncevaux in 778. William of Orange actually encountered the Saracens at Villedaignein 793. Renaud de Montauban lived and fought, not indeed againstCharlemagne, but against Charles Martel. Ogier, Girard de Roussillon, Raoul de Cambrai, were not mere creatures of the fancy. Even whenthe narrative records no historical series of events, it may expresstheir general significance, and condense into itself something ofthe spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy madea conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasyhad been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth, its conventional types of character, its endlessly-repeatedincidents of romance--the child nourished by wild beasts, the combatof unrecognised father and son, the hero vulnerable only in one point, the vindication of the calumniated wife or maiden; and by theover-labour of fantasy, removed far from nature and reality, the epicmaterial was at length exhausted. 

[Footnote 1: _Gestes_ meant (1) deeds, (2) their history, (3) theheroic family. ]

The oldest surviving _chanson de geste_ is the SONG OF ROLAND, andit is also the best. The disaster of Roncevaux, probably first sungin _cantilènes_, gave rise to other chansons, two of which, of earlierdate than the surviving poem, can in a measure be reconstructed fromthe Chronicle of Turpin and from a Latin _Carmen de proditioneGuenonis_. These, however, do not detract from the originality ofthe noble work in our possession, some of the most striking episodesof which are not elsewhere found. The oldest manuscript is at Oxford, and the last line has been supposed to give the author'sname--Touroude (Latinised "Turoldus")--but this may have been thename of the jongleur who sang, or the transcriber who copied. Thedate of the poem lies between that of the battle of Hastings, 1066, where the minstrel Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland, and the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and he may havebeen one of the Norman William's followers in the invasion of England. 

More than any other poem, the _Chanson de Roland_ deserves to be namedthe Iliad of the Middle Ages. On August 15, 778, the rearguard ofCharlemagne's army, returning from a successful expedition to thenorth of Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque mountaineersin the valley of Roncevaux. Among those who fell was Hrodland (Roland), Count of the march of Brittany. For Basques, the singers substituteda host of Saracens, who, after promise of peace, treacherously attackthe Franks, with the complicity of Roland's enemy, the traitor Ganelon. By Roland's side is placed his companion-in-arms, Olivier, brave butprudent, brother of Roland's betrothed, _la belle Aude_, who learnsher lover's death, and drops dead at the feet of Charlemagne. In factbut thirty-six years of age, Charlemagne is here a majestic old man, _à la barbe fleurie_, still full of heroic vigour. Around him arehis great lords--Duke Naime, the Nestor of this Iliad; ArchbishopTurpin, the warrior prelate; Oger the Dane; the traitor Ganelon. Andoverhead is God, who will send his angels to bear heavenwards thesoul of the gallant Roland. The idea of the poem is at once nationaland religious--the struggle between France, as champion ofChristendom, and the enemies of France and of God. Its spirit is thatof the feudal aristocracy of the eleventh century. The charactersare in some degree representative of general types, but that of Rolandis clearly individualised; the excess of soldierly pride which willnot permit him, until too late, to sound his horn and recallCharlemagne to his aid, is a glorious fault. When all his comradeshave fallen, he still continues the strife; and when he dies, it iswith his face to the retreating foe. His fall is not unavenged onthe Saracens and on the traitor. The poem is written in decasyllabicverse--in all 4000 lines--divided into sections or _laisses_ ofvarying length, the lines of each _laisse_ being held together bya single assonance. [2] And such is the form in which the best _chansonsde geste_ are written. The decasyllabic line, derived originally frompopular Latin verse, rhythmical rather than metrical, such as theRoman legionaries sang, is the favourite verse of the older chansons. The alexandrine, [3] first seen in the _Pèlerinage de Jérusalem_ ofthe early years of the twelfth century, in general indicates laterand inferior work. The _laisse_, bound in one by its identicalassonance, might contain five lines or five hundred. In chansons oflate date the full rhyme often replaces assonance; but inducing, asit did in unskilled hands, artificial and feeble expansions of thesense, rhyme was a cause which co-operated with other causes in thedecline of this form of narrative poetry. 

[Footnote 2: _Assonance_, _i. E. _ vowel-rhyme, without an agreementof consonants. ]

[Footnote 3: Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixthaccented syllable. In the decasyllabic line the cesura generallyfollowed the fourth, but sometimes the sixth, tonic syllable. ]

Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achievements of one epicpersonage or one heroic family fell into a group, and the idea ofcycles of songs having arisen, the later poets forced many independentsubjects to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charlemagne), or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon of Mayence. The secondof these had, indeed, a genuine cyclic character: it told of theresistance of the south of France to the Mussulmans. The last cycleto develop was that of the Crusades. Certain poems or groups of poemsmay be distinguished as _gestes_ of the provinces, including the_Geste des Lorrains_, that of the North (_Raoul de Cambrai_), thatof Burgundy, and others. [4] Among these may be placed the beautifultale of _Amis et Amiles_, a glorification of friendship between manand man, which endures all trials and self-sacrifices. Other poems, again, are unconnected with any of these cycles; and, indeed, thecyclic division is more a convenience of classification than a factin the spontaneous development of this form of art. The entire periodof the evolution of epic song extends from the tenth or eleventh tothe fifteenth century, or, we might say, from the _Chanson de Roland_to the _Chronique de Bertrand Duguesclin_. The eleventh centuryproduced the most admirable work; in the twelfth century the chansonsare more numerous, but nothing was written of equal merit with theSong of Roland; after the death of Louis VII. (1180) the old epicmaterial was rehandled and beaten thin--the decadence was alreadyin progress. 

[Footnote 4: The epopee composed in Provençal, sung but nottranscribed, is wholly lost. The development of lyric poetry in theSouth probably checked the development of the epic. ]

The style in which the _chansons de geste_ are written is somethingtraditional, something common to the people and to the time, ratherthan characteristic of the individual authors. They show little ofthe art of arranging or composing the matter so as to produce an unityof effect: the narrative straggles or condenses itself as if byaccident; skill in transitions is unknown. The study of characteris rude and elementary: a man is either heroic or dastard, loyal ora traitor; wholly noble, or absolutely base. Yet certain types ofmanhood and womanhood are presented with power and beauty. The feelingfor external nature, save in some traditional formulæ, hardly appears. The passion for the marvellous is everywhere present: St. Maurice, St. George, and a shining company, mounted on white steeds, will ofa sudden bear down the hordes of the infidel; an angel stands gloriousbehind the throne of Charlemagne; or in narrative of Celtic originangels may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to whomeven kings owe homage, rules over all; Jesus and Mary are watchfulof the soldiers of the cross; Paradise receives the souls of thefaithful. As for earth, there is no land so gay or so dear as _ladouce France_. The Emperor is above all the servant and protectorof the Church. As the influence of the great feudal lords increased, they are magnified often at the expense of the monarchy; yet evenwhen in high rebellion, they secretly feel the duty of loyalty. Therecurring poetic epithet and phrase of formula found in the _chansonsde geste_ often indicate rather than veil a defect of imagination. Episodes and adventures are endlessly repeated from poem to poem withvarying circumstances--the siege, the assault, the capture, the duelof Christian hero and Saracen giant, the Paynim princess amorous ofa fair French prisoner, the marriage, the massacre, and a score ofother favourite incidents. 

The popularity of the French epopee extended beyond France. Everycountry of Europe translated or imitated the _chansons de geste_. Germany made the fortunate choice of _Roland_ and _Aliscans_. InEngland two of the worst examples, _Fierabras_ and _Otinel_, werespecial favourites. In Norway the chansons were applied to the purposeof religious propaganda. Italy made the tales of Roland, Ogier, Renaud, her own. Meanwhile the national epopee declined in France; a breathof scepticism touched and withered the leafage and blossom ofimagination; it even became possible to parody--as in _Audigier_--theheroic manner. The employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and ofthe alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, encouraged what maybe called poetical padding. The influence of the Breton romancesdiverted the _chansons de geste_ into ways of fantasy; "We shall neverknow, " writes M. Léon Gautier, "the harm which the Round Table hasdone us. " Finally, verse became a weariness, and was replaced by prose. The decline had progressed to a fall. 

IIITHE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY

Later to develop than the national epopee was that which formed thecycle of antiquity. Their romantic matter made the works of theGreco-Roman decadence even more attractive than the writings of thegreat classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry withthe singers of the _chansons de geste_. These poems, which mediævaliseancient literature--poems often of portentous length--have beenclassified in three groups--epic romances, historical orpseudo-historical romances, and mythological tales, including theimitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first group (about1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, preceded by thestory of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chiefsources of Benoit were versions, probably more or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed to the PhrygianDares, an imaginary defender of the city, and the Cretan Dictys, oneof the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on a slendersuggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work, and amongthese by far the most interesting and admirable is the story of Troilusand Briseida, known better to us by her later name of Cressida. ThroughBoccaccio's _Il Filostrato_ this tale reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it gave rise to the strange, half-heroic, half-satirical play of Shakespeare. 

Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting Virgil to thetaste of his contemporaries in his _Eneas_, where the courtship ofthe Trojan hero and Lavinia is related in the chivalric manner. Allthese poems are composed in the swift octosyllabic verse; the _Troy_extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of the personagesare classical, the spirit and life of the romances are whollymediæval: Troilus, and Hector, and Æneas are conceived as if knightsof the Middle Ages; their wars and loves are those of gallantchevaliers. The _Romance of Julius Cæsar_ (in alexandrine verse), the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing in the second halfof the thirteenth century, versifies, with some additions from theCommentaries of Cæsar, an earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin(about 1240) of Lucan's Pharsalia--the oldest translation in proseof any secular work of antiquity. Cæsar's passion for Cleopatra inthe Romance is the love prescribed to good knights by the amorouscode of the writer's day, and Cleopatra herself has borrowed somethingof the charm of Tristram's Iseult. 

If _Julius Cæsar_ may be styled historical, the ROMAN D'ALEXANDRE, a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the form of which this romancegave its name--"alexandrine" verse), the work of Lambert le Tort andAlexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legendary. All--ornearly all--that was written during the Middle Ages in French on thesubject of Alexander may be traced back to Latin versions of a Greekcompilation, perhaps of the first century, ascribed to Callisthenes, the companion of Alexander on his Asiatic expedition. [5] It isuncertain how much the _Alexandre_ may owe to a Provençal poem onthe same subject, written in the early years of the twelfth century, probably by Albéric de Briançon, of which only a short fragment, butthat of high merit, has been preserved. From his birth, and hiseducation by Aristotle and the enchanter Nectanebus, to the division, as death approaches, of his empire between his twelve peers, the storyof Alexander is a series of marvellous adventures; the imaginarywonders of the East, monstrous wild beasts, water-women, flower-maidens, Amazons, rain of fire, magic mountains, magicfountains, trees of the sun and of the moon, are introduced with aliberal hand. The hero is specially distinguished by the virtue ofliberality; a jongleur who charms him by lays sung to the flute, isrewarded with the lordship of Tarsus, a worthy example for thetwelfth-century patrons of the poet. The romance had a resoundingfame. 

[Footnote 5: Not quite all, for certain borrowings were made fromthe correspondence of Alexander with Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, and from the _Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisum_. ]

Of classical poets, Ovid ranked next to Virgil in the esteem of theMiddle Ages. The mythology of paganism was sanctified by theassumption that it was an allegory of Christian mysteries, and thusthe stories might first be enjoyed by the imagination, and then beexpounded in their spiritual meaning. The _Metamorphoses_ suppliedChrétien de Troyes with the subject of his _Philomena_; other writersgracefully dealt with the tales of _Piramus_ and of _Narcissus_. Butthe most important work founded upon Ovid was a versified translationof the _Metamorphoses_ (before 1305) by a Franciscan monk, ChrétienLegouais de Sainte-Maure, with appended interpretations, scientific, historical, moral, or religious, of the mythological fables. Ovid's_Art of Love_, of which more than one rendering was made, aided inthe formation or development of the mediæval theory of love and theamorous casuistry founded upon that theory. 

IVROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY

Under the general title of the _Épopée courtoise_--the Epopee ofCourtesy--may be grouped those romances which are either works ofpure imagination or of uncertain origin, or which lead us back toByzantine or to Celtic sources. They include some of the mostbeautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. Appearing first aboutthe opening of the twelfth century, later in date than the early_chansons de geste_, and contemporary with the courtly lyric poetryof love, they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and gracefulaspect; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often surprises ofbeauty; they are bright in colour, and varied in the play of life;the passions which they interpret, and especially the passion of love, are felt with an exquisite delicacy and a knowledge of the workingsof the heart. They move lightly in their rhymed or assonanced verse;even when they passed into the form of prose they retained somethingof their charm. Breton harpers wandering through France and Englandmade Celtic themes known through their _lais_; the fame of King Arthurwas spread abroad by these singers and by the _History_ of Geoffreyof Monmouth. French poets welcomed the new matter of romance, infusedinto it their own chivalric spirit, made it a receptacle for theirideals of gallantry, courtesy, honour, grace, and added their ownbeautiful inventions. With the story of King Arthur was connectedthat of the sacred vessel--the graal--in which Joseph of Arimatheaat the cross had received the Saviour's blood. And thus the rude Breton_lais_ were elevated not only to a chivalric but to a religiouspurpose. 

The romances of Tristan may certainly be named as of Celtic origin. About 1150 an Anglo-Norman poet, BÉROUL, brought together thescattered narrative of his adventures in a romance, of which a largefragment remains. The secret loves of Tristan and Iseut, theirwoodland wanderings, their dangers and escapes, are related with fineimaginative sympathy; but in this version of the tale the fatallove-philtre operates only for a period of three years; Iseut, withTristan's consent, returns to her husband, King Marc; and then asecond passion is born in their hearts, a passion which is theoffspring not of magic but of natural attraction, and at a criticalmoment of peril the fragment closes. About twenty years later (1170)the tale was again sung by an Anglo-Norman named THOMAS. Here--againin a fragment--we read of Tristan's marriage, a marriage only in name, to the white-handed Iseut of Brittany, his fidelity of heart to hisone first love, his mortal wound and deep desire to see the Queenof Cornwall, the device of the white or black sails to announce theresult of his entreaty that she should come, his deception, and thedeath of his true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenthcentury was composed a long prose romance, often rehandled andexpanded, upon the same subject, in which Iseut and Tristan meet atthe last moment and die in a close embrace. 

_Le Chèvrefeuille_ (The Honeysuckle), one of several _lais_ by atwelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in England, but a native ofFrance, tells gracefully of an assignation of Tristan and Iseut, theirmeeting in the forest, and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de Francewrote with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy ofthe heart, and with a skill in narrative construction which was rareamong the poets of her time. In _Les Deux Amants_, the manly prideof passion, which in a trial of strength declines the adventitiousaid of a reviving potion, is rewarded by the union in death of thelover and his beloved. In _Yonec_ and in _Lanval_ tales of love andchivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in which the elementof wonder is subdued to beauty. But the most admirable poem by Mariede France is unquestionably her _Eliduc_. The Breton knight Eliducis passionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the oldKing of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. Her tokens ofaffection, girdle and ring, are received by Eliduc in silence; for, though her passion is returned, he has left in Brittany, unknown toGuilliadon, a faithful wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcendinglove of the wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, andherself retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and live incharity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart for the wrongthat they have done. In the end they part; Eliduc embraces thereligious life, and the two loving women are united as sisters inthe same abbey. 

Wace, in his romance of the _Brut_ (1155), which renders into versethe _Historia_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes the earliest mentionof the Round Table. Whether the Arthurian legends be of Celtic orof French origin--and the former seems probable--the French romancesof King Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic sources; theymay be said to begin with CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, whose lost poem onTristan was composed about 1160. Between that date and 1175 he wrotehis _Erec et Enide_ (a tale known to us through Tennyson's idyll ofGeraint and Enid, derived from the Welsh _Mabinogion_), _Cligès_, _Le Chevalier de la Charrette_, _Le Chevalier au Lion_, and _Perceval_. In _Cligès_ the maidenhood of his beloved Fénice, wedded in form tothe Emperor of Constantinople, is guarded by a magic potion; likeRomeo's Juliet, she sleeps in apparent death, but, happier than Juliet, she recovers from her trance to fly with her lover to the court ofArthur. The _Chevalier de la Charrette_, at first unknown by name, is discovered to be Lancelot, who, losing his horse, has condescended, in order that he may obtain sight of Queen Guenièvre, and in passionatedisregard of the conventions of knighthood, to seat himself in a cartwhich a dwarf is leading. After gallant adventures on the Queen'sbehalf, her indignant resentment of his unknightly conduct, estrangement, and rumours of death, he is at length restored to herfavour. [6] While _Perceval_ was still unfinished, Chrétien de Troyesdied. It was continued by other poets, and through this romance thequest of the holy graal became a portion of the Arthurian cycle. A_Perceval_ by ROBERT DE BORON, who wrote in the early part of thethirteenth century, has been lost; but a prose redaction of theromance exists, which closes with the death of King Arthur. The great_Lancelot_ in prose--a vast compilation--(about 1220) reduces thevarious adventures of its hero and of other knights of the King totheir definitive form; and here the achievement of the graal isassigned, not to Perceval, but to the saintly knight Sir Galaad;Arthur is slain in combat with the revolter Mordret; and Lancelotand the Queen enter into the life of religion. Passion and piety arealike celebrated; the rude Celtic legends have been sanctified. Theearlier history of the sacred vase was traced by Robert de Boron inhis _Joseph d'Arimathie_ (or the _Saint-Graal_), soon to be rehandledand developed in prose; and he it was who, in his _Merlin_--alsopresently converted into prose--on suggestions derived from Geoffreyof Monmouth, brought the great enchanter into Arthurian romance. Bythe middle of the thirteenth century the cycle had received its fulldevelopment. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century, in_Perceforest_, an attempt was made to connect the legend of Alexanderthe Great with that of King Arthur. 

[Footnote 6: Chrétien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the loveof Lancelot for the Queen. ]

Beside the so-called Breton romances, the _Épopée courtoise_ may betaken to include many poems of Greek, of Byzantine, or of uncertainorigin, such as the _Roman de la Violette_, the tale of a wrongedwife, having much in common with that novel of Boccaccio with whichShakespeare's _Cymbeline_ is connected, the _Floire etBlanchefleur_; the _Parténopeus de Blois_, a kind of "Cupid andPsyche" story, with the parts of the lovers transposed, and others. In the early years of the thirteenth century the prose romancerivalled in popularity the romance in verse. The exquisite_chante-fable_ of _Aucassin et Nicolette_, of the twelfth century, is partly in prose, partly in assonanced _laisses_ of seven-syllableverse. It is a story of the victory of love: the heir of Count Garinof Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of unknown birth, purchased from the Saracens, who proves to be daughter of the Kingof Carthage, and in the end the lovers are united. In one remarkablepassage unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the peasant, whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with the lighter troublesof the aristocratic class. 

In general the poems of the _Épopée courtoise_ exhibit much of thebrilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry as idealised bythe imagination; dramatic situations are ingeniously devised; theemotions of the chief actors are expounded and analysed, sometimeswith real delicacy; but in the conception of character, in therecurring incidents, in the types of passion, in the creation ofmarvel and surprise, a large conventional element is present. Loveis independent of marriage, or rather the relation of wedlock excludeslove in the accepted sense of the word; the passion is almostnecessarily illegitimate, and it comes as if it were an irresistiblefate; the first advance is often made by the woman; but, though atwar with the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennoblinginfluence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage andself-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the Spanish _Amadisdes Gaules_, something of the spirit of the mediæval romances wascarried into the chivalric and pastoral romances of the seventeenthcentury. 

CHAPTER IILYRICAL POETRY--FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX--FABLIAUX--THE ROMANCEOF THE ROSE

ILYRICAL POETRY

Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have come down to us, song and dance were a part of the life of the people of the Northas well as of the South of France; religious festivals were celebratedwith a gaiety which had its mundane side; love and malicious sportdemanded an expression as well as pious joy. But in tracing the formsof lyrical verse anterior to the middle of the twelfth century, whenthe troubadour influence from the South began to be felt, we mustbe guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later poetry, inwhich--and especially in the refrains--earlier fragments have beenpreserved. 

The common characteristic which distinguishes the earlier lyrics isthe presence in them of an objective element: they do not merely renderan emotion; they contain something of a story, or they suggest asituation. In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imaginedsinger is commonly a woman. The _chanson d'histoire_ is also knownas _chanson de toile_, for the songs were such as suited "the spinstersand the knitters in the sun. " Their inspiring motive was a girl'sjoy or grief in love; they lightly outline or suggest the facts ofa miniature drama of passion, and are aided by the repeated lyricalcry of a refrain. As yet, love was an affair for the woman; it wasshe alone who made a confession of the heart. None of these poemsare later than the close of the twelfth century. If the author berepresented as actor or witness, the poem is rather a _chanson àpersonnages_ than a _chanson d'histoire_; most frequently it is awife who is supposed to utter to husband, or lover, or to the poet, her complaint of the grievous servitude of marriage. The _aube_ is, again, a woman's song, uttered as a parting cry when the lark atdaybreak, or the watcher from his tower, warns her lover to depart. In the _pastourelle_--a form much cultivated--a knight and ashepherdess meet; love proposals are made, and find a responsefavourable or the reverse; witnesses or companions may be present, and take a part in the action. The _rondet_ is a dancing-song, inwhich the refrain corresponds with one of the movements of the dance;a solo-singer is answered by the response of a chorus; in the progressof time the _rondet_ assumed the precise form of the modern triolet;the theme was still love, at first treated seriously if not tragically, but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It is conjectured thatall these lyrical forms had their origin in the festivities of May, when the return of spring was celebrated by dances in which womenalone took part, a survival from the pagan rites of Venus. 

The _poésie courtoise_, moulded in form and inspired in its sentimentby the Provençal lyrics, lies within the compass of about one hundredand thirty years, from 1150 to 1280. The Crusade of 1147 served, doubtless, as a point of meeting for men of the North and of the South;but, apart from this, we may bear in mind the fact that the mediævalpoet wandered at will from country to country and from court to court. In 1137, Louis VII. Married Éléonore of Aquitaine, who was an ardentadmirer of the poetry of courtesy. Her daughters inherited her taste, and themselves became patronesses of literature at the courts of theirhusbands, Henri de Champagne and Thibaut de Blois. From these courts, and that of Paris, this poetry of culture spread, and the earliersingers were persons of royal or noble rank and birth. The chief periodof its cultivation was probably from 1200 to 1240. During thehalf-century before its sudden cessation, while continuing to be afashion in courts and high society, it reached the wealthy bourgeoisieof the North. At Arras, where Jacques Bretel and Adam de la Halle, the hunchback, were eminent in song, it had its latest moments ofsplendour. 

It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the imagination, dealing with an elaborated theory of love; the simple and spontaneouscry of passion is rarely heard. According to the amorous doctrine, love exists only between a married woman and the aspirant to her heart, and the art of love is regulated by a stringent code. Nothing canbe claimed by the lover as a right; the grace of his lady, who isplaced far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favourhe must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotonyof artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities ofexpression, and sought-out delicacies of style. In the earlierchansons some outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionallypresent; but, as the amorous metaphysics developed, what came to beadmired was the skill shown in manipulating a conventional sentiment;the lady became an abstraction of exalted beauty, the lover aninterpreter of the theory of love; the most personal of passions lostthe character of individuality. Occasionally, as in the poems of theChâtelain de Couci, of Conon de Béthune, of Thibaut de Champagne, and of Adam de la Halle, something personal to the writer may bediscerned; but in general the poetry is that of a doctrine and ofa school. 

In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvère was foundedrather on his music than his verse. The metrical forms were various, and were gradually reduced to rule; the _ballette_, of Provençalorigin, was a more elaborate _rondet_, consisting of stanzas andrefrain; the _estampie_ (_stampôn_, to beat the ground with the foot)was a dancing-song; the lyric _lai_, virtually identical with the_descort_, consisted of stanzas which varied in structure; the_motet_, a name originally applied to pieces of church music, wasfreer in versification, and occasionally dealt with popular themes. Among forms which cannot be included under the general title ofchansons, are those in dialogue derived from the Provençalliterature; in the _tenson_ or _débat_ the two interlocutors put forththeir opinions on what theme they may please; in the _jeu parti_ oneof the imagined disputants proposes two contrary solutions of somepoetical or amorous question, and defends whichever solution hisassociate refuses to accept; the earliest _jeu parti_, attributedto Gace Brulé and Count Geoffroi of Brittany, belongs to the secondhalf of the twelfth century. The _serventois_ were historical poems, and among them songs of the crusades, or moral, or religious, orsatirical pieces, directed against woman and the worship of woman. To these various species we should add the songs in honour of thesaints, the sorrows of the Virgin uttered at the foot of the cross, and other devout lyrics which lie outside the _poésie courtoise_. With the close of the thirteenth century this fashion of artificiallove-lyric ceased: a change passed over the modes of thought andfeeling in aristocratic society, and other forms took the place ofthose found in the _poésie courtoise_. 

IIFABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX

The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages to giveprominence to that part of classical literature which seemed bestsuited to the purpose of edification caused the fables of Phædrusand Avianus to be regarded with special honour. Various renderingsfrom the thirteenth century onwards were made under the title of_Isopets_, [1] a name appropriated to collections of fables whetherderived from Æsop or from other sources. The twelfth-century fablesin verse of Marie de France, founded on an English collection, includeapologues derived not only from classical authors but from the talesof popular tradition. A great collection made about 1450 bySteinhoewel, a physician of Ulm, was translated into French, andbecame the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in theremote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The æsthetic value ofthe mediæval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small;the didactic intention was strong, the literary art was feeble. 

[Footnote 1: The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed authorof the fables of Phædrus, while that of Phædrus was still unknown. ]

It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the ROMAN DE RENARD. The cycle consists of many parts or "branches" connected by a commontheme; originating and obscurely developed in the North, in Picardy, in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it suddenly appeared inliterature in the middle of the twelfth century, and continued toreceive additions and variations during nearly two hundred years. The spirit of the _Renard_ poems is essentially bourgeois; the heroesof the _chansons de geste_ achieve their wondrous deeds by strengthand valour; Renard the fox is powerful by skill and cunning; thegreater beasts--his chief enemy the wolf, and others--are no matchfor his ingenuity and endless resources; but he is powerless againstsmaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the sparrow. The names of thepersonages are either significant names, such as Noble, the lion, and Chanticleer, the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, thewolf, Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass; and ascertain of these proper names are found in the eastern district, ithas been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia in the tenth centuryfirst told in Latin the wars of fox and wolf, and that throughtranslations the epic matter, derived originally from populartradition, reached the trouvères of the North. While in a certaindegree typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual;Renard is not the representative merely of a species; he is Renard, an individual, with a personality of his own; Isengrin is not merelya wolf, he is the particular wolf Isengrin; each is an epic individual, heroic and undying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influenceon certain branches of the Romance; but the vital substance of theepic is derived from the stores of popular tradition in which materialfrom all quarters--the North of Europe and the Eastern world--hadbeen gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such material thechief difficulty lies in preserving a just measure between thebeast-character and the imported element of humanity. Little bylittle the anthropomorphic features were developed at the expenseof verisimilitude; the beast forms became a mere masquerade; theromances were converted into a satire, and the satire lost ratherthan gained by the inefficient disguise. 

The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only in afragmentary way, but they can be in part reconstructed from the Latin_Isengrinus_ of Nivard of Ghent (about 1150), and from the German_Reinhart Fuchs_, a rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henrile Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isengrin are heresung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries against the lessercreatures; the spirit of these early branches is one of frank gaiety, untroubled by a didactic or satirical intention. In the branches ofthe second period the parody of human society is apparent; some ofthe episodes are fatiguing in their details; some are intolerablygross, but the poem known as the Branch of the Judgment is masterly--anironical comedy, in which, without sacrifice of the primitivecharacter of the beast-epic, the spirit of mediæval life istransported into the animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renardbefore King Noble and his court, is for a moment worsted; the foxis vindicated, when suddenly enters a funeral cortège--Chanticleerand his four wives bear upon a litter the dead body of one of theirfamily, the victim of Renard's wiles. The prayers for the dead arerecited, the burial is celebrated with due honour, and Renard issummoned to justice; lie heaped upon lie will not save him; at lasthe humbles himself with pious repentance, and promising to seek God'spardon over-sea, is permitted in his pilgrim's habit to quit the court. It is this Judgment of Renard which formed the basis of the _ReinekeFuchs_, known to us through the modernisation of Goethe. 

From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the Renard Romancesdeclined. The Judgment was imitated by inferior hands, and the beastswere more and more nearly transformed to men; the spirit of gaietywas replaced by seriousness or gloom; Renard ceased to be alight-footed and ingenious rogue; he became a type of human fraudand cruelty; whatever in society was false and base and mercilessbecame a form of "renardie, " and by "renardie" the whole world seemedto be ruled. Such is the temper expressed in _Le Couronnement Renard_, written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed chiefly againstthe mendicant orders, in which the fox, turned friar for a season, ascends the throne. _Renard le Nouveau_, the work of a poet of Lille, Jacquemart Gelée, nearly half a century later, represents again thetriumph of the spirit of evil; although far inferior in executionto the _Judgment_, it had remarkable success, to which the allegory, wearying to a modern reader, no doubt contributed at a time whenallegory was a delight. The last of the Renard romances, _Renard leContrefait_, was composed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiasticwho had renounced his profession and turned to trade. In his leisurehours he spun, in discipleship to Jean de Meun, his interminable poem, which is less a romance than an encyclopædia of all the knowledgeand all the opinions of the author. This latest _Renard_ has a valueakin to that of the second part of _Le Roman de la Rose_; it is apresentation of the ideas and manners of the time by one who freelycriticised and mocked the powers that be, both secular and sacred, and who was in sympathy with a certain movement or tendency towardssocial, political, and intellectual reform. 

IIIFABLIAUX

The name _fabliaux_ is applied to short versified tales, comic incharacter, and intended rather for recitation than for song. Out ofa far larger number about one hundred and fifty have survived. Theearliest--_Richeut_--is of the year 1159. From the middle of thetwelfth century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry offeudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic observation;and even in the _chansons de geste_, in occasional comic episodes, something may be seen which is in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous stories, having much in common under their variousdisguises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and peoples. The theory which traces the French fabliaux to Indian originals isunproved, and indeed is unnecessary. The East, doubtless, contributed its quota to the common stock, but so did other quartersof the globe; such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only theparticular form which they assume being determined by localconditions. 

The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong especially to the northand north-east of France, and they continued to be put forth by theirrhymers until about 1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginningof the thirteenth century being the period of their greatestpopularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise a laugh amongfolk disposed to good humour; by degrees something of art and skillwas attained. The misfortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustiblestore of merriment; if woman and the love of woman were idealisedin the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, and exhibited heras the pretty traitress of a shameless comedy. If religion washonoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter ofmirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks. Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross--ribald but notvoluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. Itsufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown intorhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement areno slight or common merits in mediæval poetry, and something of thesocial life of the time is mirrored in these humorous narratives. 

To regard them as a satire of class against class, inspired byindignation, is to misconceive their true character; they are ratherminiature comedies or caricatures, in which every class in turnprovides material for mirth. It may, however, be said that with thewriters of the fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an articleof faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular rank ordignified churchmen occasionally appeared; but what we may call theprofessional rhymers and reciters were the humbler jongleursaddressing a bourgeois audience--degraded clerics, unfrocked monks, wandering students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternatingwith misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century these errantjongleurs ceased to be esteemed; the great lord attached a minstrelto his household, and poetry grew more dignified, more elaborate inits forms, more edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grewtoo often dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written; but the ageof the jongleurs was over. _Virelais_, _rondeaux_, _ballades_, _chants royaux_ were the newer fashion; and the old versified taleof mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of the century a thing ofthe past. 

IVTHE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

The most extraordinary production in verse of the thirteenth centuryis undoubtedly _Le Roman de la Rose_. It is indeed no singleachievement, but two very remarkable poems, written at two differentperiods, by two authors whose characters and gifts were not only alien, but opposed--two poems which reflect two different conditions ofsociety. Of its twenty-two thousand octosyllabic lines, upwards offour thousand are the work of GUILLAUME DE LORRIS; the remainder isthe work of a later writer, JEAN DE MEUN. 

Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and Montargis. Here, about the year 1200, the earlier poet was born. He was a scholar, at least as far as knowledge of Latin extends, and learned above allin the lore of love. He died young, probably before 1230, and duringthe five years that preceded his death the first part of _Le Romande la Rose_ was composed. Its subject is an allegorised tale of love, his own or imagined, transferred to the realm of dreams. The writerwould fain win the heart of his beloved, and at the same time he wouldinstruct all amorous spirits in the art of love. He is twenty yearsof age, in the May-morn of youth. He has beheld his beautiful lady, and been charmed by her fairness, her grace, her courtesy; she hasreceived him with gentleness, but when he declares his love she growsalarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her affection; buther parents intervening, throw obstacles between the lovers. Such, divested of ornament, allegory, and personification, is the themeof the poem. 

To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win the maiden; herfears, her virgin modesty and pride, her kindness, her pity, are thecompany of friends or foes by whom the rose is surrounded; and toharmonise the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed inthe setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by theriver-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the walls of a fairorchard, owned by Déduit (Pleasure), of which the portress is Oiseuse(Idleness); on the walls are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Poverty, and other evil powers; but unterrified by these, he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf, among whomis Beauty, led by the god of Love. Surrounded by a thorny hedge isthe rosebud on which all his desire now centres. He is wounded bythe arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns his commandmentsand the evils and the gains of love. Invited by Bel-Accueil, the sonof Courtoisie, to approach the rose, he is driven back by Danger andhis companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison descends froma tower and discourses against the service of Love; Ami offers hisconsolations; at length the lover is again admitted to the floweryprecinct, finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy ofa kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around the rose; theserviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and with a long lament of thelover, the poem (line 4068) closes. 

Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or did he die whileit was still but half composed? We may conjecture that it wanted littleto reach some dénouement--perhaps the fulfilment of the lover'shopes; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment actually broughtthe love-tale to its issue. But even if the story remained withoutan end, we possess in Guillaume's poem a complete mediæval Art ofLove; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliantdescription, vivid personifications, and something of ingeniousanalysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Agedisciple of Ovid and of Chrétien de Troyes owes more than half itscelebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely oppositespirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun. 

The contrast is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined andgraceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemlycelebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of acceptedideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardentspeculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one whocared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with thesentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, eager to instruct, toarouse, to inflame his fellows in a multitude of matters whichconcerned the welfare of their lives. He was little concerned forthe lover and his rose, but was deeply interested in the conditionof society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of knowledge. He turned from ideals which seemed spurious to reason and to nature;he had read widely in Latin literature, and found much that suitedhis mood and mind in Boethius' _De Consolatione Philosophiæ_ and inthe _De Planctu Naturæ_ of the "universal doctor" of the twelfthcentury, Alain de Lille, from each of which he conveyed freely intohis poem. Of his life we know little; Jean Clopinel was born at Meunon the Loire about the year 1240; he died before the close of 1305;his continuation of Guillaume's _Roman_ was made about 1270. His laterpoems, a _Testament_, in which he warned and exhorted hiscontemporaries of every class, the _Codicille_, which incited toalmsgiving, and his numerous translations, prove the unabated energyof his mind in his elder years. 

The rose is plucked by the lover in the end; but lover and rose arealmost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopædia of the knowledge of his time. Reasondiscourses on the dangers of passion, commends friendship oruniversal philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against theinstability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets charityhigh above justice; if love be commendable, it is as the device ofnature for the continuation of the species. The way to win woman andto keep her loyalty is now the unhappy way of squandered largess;formerly it was not so in the golden age of equality, before privateproperty was known, when all men held in common the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of the future. The god of Love and hisbarons, with the hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant--a bitter satirist ofthe mendicant orders--besiege the tower in which Bel-Accueil isimprisoned, and by force and fraud an entrance is effected. The oldbeldame, who watches over the captive, is corrupted by promises andgifts, and frankly exposes her own iniquities and those of her sex. War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus, sworn enemyof chastity, aiding the assailants. Nature, devoted to thecontinuance of the race, mourns over the violation of her laws byman, unburdens herself of all her scientific lore in a confessionto her chaplain Génius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover'sparty with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity. Thetriumph of the lover closes the poem. 

The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; the love-storybecomes a mere frame for setting forth the views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric ideal, his satire upon the monkishvices, his revolutionary notions respecting property and government, his advanced opinions in science, his frank realism as to therelations of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature which he had studied. He is a powerful satirist, and passages of narrative and descriptionshow that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the languagewith the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacksall sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; hisprolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moralreformer he sometimes topples into immorality. The success of thepoem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It wasattacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its influenceon the progress of literature--encouraging, as it did, to excess theart of allegory and personification--if less than has commonly beenalleged, was unquestionably important. 

CHAPTER IIIDIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY

IDIDACTIC LITERATURE

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Agesis abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldomoriginal in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of viewof literary style. In great part it is translated or derived fromLatin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turnedfrom the vanities of youth--fabliau or romance--and now aimed atedification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy mustneeds be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be foundin stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings inthe alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the gameof chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. Theearliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versifiedfrom the Latin _Physiologus_, itself a translation from the work ofan Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoologythe lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is God;the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen, " which blaze whenthey approach each other, are representative of man and woman. A_Bestiaire d'Amour_ was written by Richard de Fournival, in whichthe emblems serve for the interpretation of human love. A Lapidary, with a medical--not a moral--purpose, by Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, was translated more than once into French, and had, indeed, anEuropean fame. 

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopædias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such namesas _Image du Monde_, _Mappe-monde_, _Miroir du Monde_. Of theseencyclopædias, the only one which has a literary interest is the_Trésor_ (1265), by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote inFrench in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapesnot wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the allegorisingspirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived from Latin originals;his politics are his own. The _Somme des Vices et des Vertus_, compiledin 1279 by Friar Lorens, is a well-composed _trésor_ of religion andmorals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us through theCanterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. The moral experience ofa man of the world is summed up in the prose treatise on "The FourAges of Man, " by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With thisedifying work may be grouped the so-called _Chastiements_, counselson education and conduct, designed for readers in general or for somespecial class--women, children, persons of knightly or of humblerank; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of courtesy andof manners. [1] Other writings, the _États du Monde_, present a viewof the various classes of society from a standpoint ethical, religious, or satirical, with warnings and exhortations, which commonlyconclude with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of hell. With such a scene of terror closes the interesting _Poème Moral_ ofÉtienne de Fougères, in which the life of St. Moses, the convertedrobber, serves as an example to monks, and that of the converted Thaïsto ladies who are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderationcontrasts with the bitter satire in the _Bible_ by Guiot de Provins, and with many shorter satirical pieces directed against clericalvices or the infirmities of woman. The _Besant de Dieu_, by Guillaumele Clerc, a Norman poet (1227), preaches in verse, with eloquenceand imaginative power, the love of God and contempt of the world fromthe texts of two Scripture parables--that of the Talents and thatof the Bridegroom; Guillaume anticipates the approaching end of theworld, foreshown by wars, pestilence, and famine, condemns in thespirit of Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, andmourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy Sepulchre. 

[Footnote 1: Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in thehistory of manners and ideas, may here be mentioned--the _Livre duChevalier de la Tour-Landry_ (1372), composed for the instructionof the writer's daughters, and the _Ménagier de Paris_, a treatiseon domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use ofhis young wife. ]

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the mostinteresting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards theclose of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, andexpressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed--the Villon of his age--deployed his vivid and ardent powersin many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, offabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality;the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were giftsthat compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his losteye, his faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. Thepersonification of vices and virtues, occasional in the _Besant_ andother poems, becomes a system in the _Songe d'Enfer_, a pilgrim'sprogress to hell, and the _Voie de Paradis_, a pilgrim's progressto heaven, by Raoul de Houdan (after 1200). The _Pèlerinage de laVie Humaine_--another "way to Paradise"; the _Pèlerinage del'Âme_--a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven; and the _Pèlerinagede Jésus-Christ_--a narrative of the Saviour's life, by Guillaumede Digulleville (fourteenth century), have been imagined by some tohave been among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life maybe represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage; in another it is aknightly encounter; there is a great strife between the powers ofgood and evil; in _Le Tornoiement Antecrist_, by Huon de Méri, Jesusand the Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, St. Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur, Launcelot, andGawain, contend against Antichrist and the infernal barons--Jupiter, Neptune, Beelzebub, and a crowd of allegorical personages. But thebattles and _débats_ of a chivalric age were not only religious; thereare battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, battlesof the seven arts. A disputation between the body and the soul, afavourite subject for separate treatment by mediæval poets, is foundalso in one of the many sermons in verse; the _Débat des Trois Mortset des Trois Vifs_ recalls the subject of the memorable painting inthe Campo Santo at Pisa. 

IISERMONS

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is notuntil Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century that we finda series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronouncedin French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though preparedin the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to layaudiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons inthe macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, whichappear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On theother hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons werepronounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and thatthe macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhapswe may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designedfor the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thoughtworthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remainto us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem tohave been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St. Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a Frenchtranslation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not hiseloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude orcurious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, aresimpler in manner and more practical in their teaching; but in thesecharacteristics they stand apart from the other sermons of the twelfthcentury. 

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was trulylaicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work ofthe pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught;collections of anecdotes and illustrations--_exempla_--for theenlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed;rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse wereproposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought andinvention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade. The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. WhenGERSON preached at court or to the people towards the close of thefourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practicalduties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, hissermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descentfrom Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirthor bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of MichelMenot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure ofsin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in theirexhibition of learning, have at least an historical value inpresenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century. 

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance. Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years beforethe days of Erasmus and of Budé; but they were not scholars inspiredby genius, and they contented themselves with the task of translators, undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. If they failed tocomprehend the spirit of antiquity, none the less they did somethingtowards quickening the mind of their own time and rendering the Frenchlanguage less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a later age. All that was then known of Livy's history was rendered into Frenchin 1356 by the friend of Petrarch, Pierre Berçuire. On the suggestionof Charles V. , Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the king thatthe aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version of St. Augustine's_De Civitate Dei_, and Denis Foulechat, with very scanty scholarship, set himself to render the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury. Thedukes of Bourbon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of lettersand encouraged their translators. We cannot say how far this movementof scholarship might have progressed, if external conditions hadfavoured its development. In Jean de Montreuil, secretary of CharlesVI. , the devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have anexample of the true humanist before the Renaissance. But the seemingdawn was a deceptive aurora; the early humanism of France was cloudedand lost in the tempests of the Hundred Years' War. 

IIIHISTORY

While the mediæval historians, compilers, and abbreviators fromrecords of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an agedeficient in the critical spirit, and produced works of little valueeither for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to us, in livingpictures or sagacious studies of events and their causes, some ofthe chief treasures of the past. History at first, as composed forreaders who knew no Latin, was comprised in those _chansons de geste_which happened to deal with matter that was not wholly--or almostwholly--the creation of fancy. Narrative poems treating ofcontemporary events came into existence with the Crusades, but ofthese the earliest have not survived, and we possess only rehandlingsof their matter in the style of romance. What happened in France mightbe supposed to be known to persons of intelligence; what happenedin the East was new and strange. But England, like the East, wasforeign soil, and the Anglo-Norman trouvères of the eleventh andtwelfth centuries busied themselves with copious narratives in rhyme, such as Gaimar's _Estorie des Engles_ (1151), Wace's _Brut_ (1155)and his _Roman de Rou_, which, if of small literary importance, remainas monuments in the history of the language. The murder of Becketcalled forth the admirable life of the saint by Garnier dePont-Sainte-Maxence, founded upon original investigations; HenryII. 's conquest of Ireland was related by an anonymous writer; hisvictories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly described byJordan Fantosme. But by far the most remarkable piece of versifiedhistory of this period, remarkable alike for its historical interestand its literary merit, is the _Vie de Guillaume le Maréchal_--William, Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III. --a poem of nearly twentythousand octosyllabic lines by an unknown writer, discovered by M. Paul Meyer in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpieceof Anglo-Norman historiography, " writes M. Langlois, "is assuredlythis anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and henceforth classic. "

Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the fitting mediumfor historical narrative, and verse was given over to theextravagances of fantasy. Compilations from the Latin, translationsfrom the pseudo-Turpin, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust, Suetonius, and Cæsar were succeeded by original record and testimony. GEOFFROY DE VILLEHARDOUIN, born between 1150 and 1164, Marshal ofChampagne in 1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate withthe Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders to the East. He wasprobably a chief agent in the intrigue which diverted the fourthCrusade from its original destination--the Holy Land--to the assaultupon Constantinople. In the events which followed he had a prominentpart; before the close of 1213 Villehardouin was dead. During hislast years he dictated the unfinished Memoirs known as the _Conquêtede Constantinople_, which relate the story of his life from 1198 to1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who impresses his ownpersonality on what he wrote: a brave leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an enthusiast possessed by the more extravagantideas of chivalry; much more was he a politician and diplomatist, with material interests well in view; not, indeed, devoid of a certainimaginative wonder at the marvels of the East; not without his momentsof ardour and excitement; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudalloyalty, the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his vassal;deeply conscious of the need of discipline in great adventures;keeping in general a cool head, which could calculate the sum of profitand loss. 

It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of affairs, and wastoo experienced a man of the world to be quite frank as a historian:we can hardly believe, as he would have us, that the diversion ofthe crusading host from its professed objects was unpremeditated;we can perceive that he composes his narrative so as to form anapology; his recital has been justly described as, in part at least, "un mémoire justificatif. " Nevertheless, there are passages, suchas that which describes the first view of Constantinople, whereVillehardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a grave simplicity, sometimeswith baldness, disdaining ornament, little sensible to colour orgrace of style; but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his realgrasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary dignity, and when his words become vivid we know that it is because he hadseen with inquisitive eyes and felt with genuine ardour. Happily forstudents of history, while Villehardouin presents the views of anaristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same extraordinaryadventure can be seen, as they struck a simple soldier, in the recordof Robert de Clari, which may serve as a complement and a counterpoiseto the chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The unfinished_Histoire de l'Empereur Henri_, which carries on the narrative ofevents for some years subsequent to those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what hadoriginally formed a _chanson de geste_. 

The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth century declinedamong Anglo-Norman writers, but was continued in Flanders and inFrance. Prose translations and adaptations of Latin chronicles, ancient and modern, were numerous, but the literary value of manyof these is slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of nationalhistory in Latin had for a long while been in process of formation. Utilising this corpus and the works from which it was constructed, one of the monks of the Abbey--perhaps a certain Primat--compiled, in the second half of the century, a History of France in thevernacular--the _Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis_--with whichlater additions were from time to time incorporated, until underCharles V. The _Grandes Chroniques de France_ attained theirdefinitive form. [2] Far more interesting as a literary compositionis the little work known as _Récits d'un Ménestrel de Reims_ (1260), a lively, graceful, and often dramatic collection of traditions, anecdotes, dialogues, made rather for the purposes of popularentertainment than of formal instruction, and expressing the ideasof the middle classes on men and things. Forgotten during severalcenturies, it remains to us as one of the happiest records of themediæval spirit. 

[Footnote 2: The _Chroniques_ were continued by lay writers to theaccession of Louis XI. ]

But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth century gavebirth, the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, by JEAN DE JOINVILLE, standspre-eminent. Joinville, born about 1224, possessed of such literaryculture as could be gained at the Court of Thibaut IV. Of Champagne, became a favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis duringhis six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The memory of the Kingremained the most precious possession of his follower's elder years. It is probable that soon after 1272 Joinville prepared anautobiographic fragment, dealing with that period of his youth whichhad been his age of adventure. When he was nearly eighty, Jeanne ofNavarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, invited the old seneschal to puton record the holy words and good deeds of Saint Louis. Joinvillewillingly acceded to the request, and incorporating the fragment ofautobiography, in which the writer appeared in close connection withhis King, he had probably almost completed his work at the date ofQueen Jeanne's death (April 2, 1305); to her son, afterwards LouisX. , it was dedicated. His purpose was to recite the pious words andset forth the Christian virtues of the royal Saint in one book ofthe History, and to relate his chivalric actions in the other; butJoinville had not the art of construction, he suffered from thefeebleness of old age, and he could not perfectly accomplish hisdesign; in 1317 Joinville died. Deriving some of his materials fromother memoirs of the King, especially those by Geoffroy de Beaulieuand Guillaume de Nangis, he drew mainly upon his own recollections. Unhappily the most authoritative manuscripts of the _Histoire deSaint Louis_ have been lost; we possess none earlier than the closeof the fourteenth century; but by the learning and skill of a moderneditor the text has been substantially established. 

We must not expect from Joinville precision of chronology orexactitude in the details of military operations. His recollectionscrowd upon him; he does not marshal them by power of intellect, butabandons himself to the delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable, spirited talker, who has much to tell; he succeeds in giving us twoadmirable portraits--his own and that of the King; and unconsciouslyhe conveys into his narrative both the chivalric spirit of his time, and a sense of those prosaic realities which tempered the ideals ofchivalry. What his eyes had rested on lives in his memory, with allits picturesque features, all its lines and colours, undimmed by time;and his curious eyes had been open to things great and small. Heappears as a brave soldier, but, he confesses, capable of mortal fear;sincerely devout, but not made for martyrdom; zealous for his master'scause, but not naturally a chaser of rainbow dreams; one who enjoysgood cheer, who prefers his wine unallayed with water, who lovessplendid attire, who thinks longingly of his pleasant château, andthe children awaiting his return; one who will decline futurecrusading, and who believes that a man of station may serve God wellby remaining in his own fields among his humble dependants. ButJoinville felt deeply the attraction of a nature more under thecontrol of high, ideal motives than was his own; he would not himselfwash the feet of the poor; he would rather commit thirty mortal sinsthan be a leper; but a kingly saint may touch heights of piety whichare unattainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes us feelthat Louis is not the less a man because he is a saint. Certain humaninfirmities of temper are his; yet his magnanimity, his sense ofjustice, his ardent devotion, his charity, his pure self-surrenderare made so sensible to us as we read the record of Joinville thatwe are willing to subscribe to the sentence of Voltaire: "It is notgiven to man to carry virtue to a higher point. "

During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of feudalismdeclined; the old faith and the old chivalry were suffering a decay;the bourgeoisie grew in power and sought for instruction; it was anage of prose, in which learning was passing to the laity, or wasadapted to their uses. Yet, while the inner life of chivalry failedday by day, and self-interest took the place of heroic self-surrender, the external pomp and decoration of the feudal world became morebrilliant than ever. War was a trade practised from motives of vulgarcupidity; but it was adorned with splendour, and had a show ofgallantry. The presenter in literature of this glittering spectacleis the historian JEAN FROISSART. Born in 1338, at Valenciennes, ofbourgeois parents, Froissart, at the age of twenty-two, adisappointed lover, a tonsured clerk, and already a poet, journeyedto London, with his manuscript on the battle of Poitiers as an offeringto his countrywoman, Queen Philippa of Hainault. For nearly five yearshe was the _ditteur_ of the Queen, a sharer in the life of the court, but attracted before all else to those "ancient knights and squireswho had taken part in feats of arms, and could speak of them rightly. "His patroness encouraged Froissart's historical inquiries. In the_Chroniques_ of Jean le Bel, canon of Liège, he found material readyto his hand, and freely appropriated it in many of his most admirablepages; but he also travelled much through England and Scotland, notingeverything that impressed his imagination, and gathering withdelight the testimony of those who had themselves been actors in theevents of the past quarter of a century. He accompanied the BlackPrince to Aquitaine, and, later, the Duke of Clarence to Milan. Thedeath of Queen Philippa, in 1369, was ruinous to his prospects. Fora time he supported himself as a trader in his native place. Thenother patrons, kinsfolk of the Queen, came to his aid. The firstrevised redaction of the first book of his Chronicles was his chiefoccupation while curé of Lestinnes; it is a record of events from1325 to the death of Edward III. , and its brilliant narrative of eventsstill recent or contemporary insured its popularity witharistocratic readers. Under the influence of Queen Philippa'sbrother-in-law, Robert of Namur, it is English in its sympathies andadmirations. Unhappily Froissart was afterwards moved by his patron, Gui de Blois, to rehandle the book in the French interest; and onceagain in his old age his work was recast with a view to effacing thelarge debt which he owed to his predecessor, Jean le Bel. The firstredaction is, however, that which won and retained the general favour. If his patron induced Froissart to wrong his earlier work, he madeamends, for it is to Gui de Blois that we owe the last three booksof the history, which bring the tale of events down to theassassination of Richard II. Still the curé of Lestinnes and the canonof Chimai pursued his early method of travel--to the court of Gaston, Count of Foix, to Flanders, to England--ever eager in hisinterrogation of witnesses. It is believed that he lived to the closeof 1404, but the date of his death is uncertain. 

Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional modes ofhis time. His vast romance _Méliador_, to which Wenceslas, Duke ofBrabant, contributed the lyric part--famous in its day, long lostand recently recovered--is a construction of external marvels andsplendours which lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But asa brilliant scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpassed. His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted as exact; heis credulous rather than critical; he does not always test or controlthe statements of his informants; he is misled by their prejudicesand passions; he views all things from the aristocratic standpoint;the life of the common people does not interest him; he has no senseof their wrongs, and little pity for their sufferings; he does notstudy the deeper causes of events; he is almost incapable ofreflection; he has little historical sagacity; he acceptsappearances without caring to interpret their meanings. But what avivid picture he presents of the external aspects of fourteenth-centurylife! What a joy he has in adventure! What an eye for the picturesque!What movement, what colour! What a dramatic--or should we saytheatrical?--feeling for life and action! Much, indeed, of thevividness of Froissart's narrative may be due to the eye-witnesses fromwhom he had obtained information; but genius was needed topreserve--perhaps to enhance--the animation of their recitals. If heunderstood his own age imperfectly, he depicted its outward appearancewith incomparable skill; and though his moral sense was shallow, andhis knowledge of character far from profound, he painted portraitswhich live in the imagination of his readers. 

The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of everykind--compilations of general history, domestic chronicles, such asthe _Livre des Faits du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut_, official chronicles both of the French and Burgundian parties, journals and memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet wasa lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of documents, but without his predecessor's genius. On the French side the so-called_Chronique Scandaleuse_, by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of the time ofLouis XI. , to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers ofhis party. 

In PHILIPPE DE COMMINES we meet the last chronicler of the MiddleAges, and the first of modern historians. Born about 1445, in Flanders, of the family of Van den Clyte, Commines, whose parents died early, received a scanty education; but if he knew no Latin, his acquaintancewith modern languages served him well. At first in the service ofCharles the Bold, in 1472 he passed over to the cause of Louis XI. His treason to the Duke may be almost described as inevitable; forCommines could not attach himself to violence and folly, and wasnaturally drawn to the counsels of civil prudence. The bargain wasas profitable to his new master as to the servant. On the King's deathcame a reverse of fortune for Commines: for eight months he was crampedin the iron cage; during two years he remained a prisoner in theConciergerie (1487-89), with enforced leisure to think of thepreparation of his _Mémoires_. [3] Again the sunshine of royal favourreturned; he followed Charles VIII. To Italy, and was engaged indiplomatic service at Venice. In 1511 he died. 

[Footnote 3: Books I. -VI. , written 1488-94; Books VII. , VIII. , written 1494-95. ]

The _Mémoires_ of Commines were composed as a body of material fora projected history of Louis XI. By Archbishop Angelo Cato; the writer, apparently in all sincerity, hoped that his unlearned French mightthus be translated into Latin, the language of scholars; happily wepossess the Memoirs as they left their author's mind. And, thoughCommines rather hides than thrusts to view his own personality, everypage betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was no artisteither in imaginative design or literary execution; he was beforeall else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher afterthe causes of events, an analyst of motives, a psychologist ofindividual character and of the temper of peoples, and, after afashion, a moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little, or not at all, for the coloured surface of life; his chief concernis to seize the master motive by which men and events are ruled, tocomprehend the secret springs of action. He is aristocratic in hispolitics, monarchical, an advocate for the centralisation of power;but he would have the monarch enlightened, constitutional, andpacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; andknowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of goodfaith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipatesMontesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view whichhe takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Havingascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlledby the wisest calculation, he takes refuge in a faith in Providence;he finds God necessary to explain this entangled world; and yet hismorality is in great part that which tries good and evil by the testof success. By the intensity of his thought Commines sometimes becomesstriking in his expression; occasionally he rises to a graveeloquence; occasionally his irony is touched by a bitter humour. Butin general he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty, under the control of a dry and circumspect intelligence. 

CHAPTER IVLATEST MEDIÆVAL POETS--THE DRAMA

ILATEST MEDIÆVAL POETS

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of transitionfrom the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The national epopeewas dead; the Arthurian tales were rehandled in prose; under theinfluence of the _Roman de la Rose_, allegory was highly popular, and Jean de Meun had shown how it could be applied to thesecularisation of learning; the middle classes were seeking forinstruction. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined, but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced to rule; ballade, chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were the established forms, andlyric verse was often used for matter of a didactic, moral, orsatirical tendency. Even Ovid was tediously moralised (_c_. 1300)in some seventy thousand lines by Chrétien Legouais. Literarysocieties or _puys_[1] were instituted, which maintained the rulesof art, and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; aformal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry acceptedproudly the name of "rhetoric. " At the same time there is gain inone respect--the poets no longer conceal their own personality behindtheir work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real orsimulated passions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical, yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and mannersof the age. 

[Footnote 1: _Puy_, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seatof the judges of the artistic competition. ]

The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT. Born about 1300, he served as secretary to the King of Bohemia, whofell at Crécy. He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province ofChampagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of hiscontemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are deployed at lengthin his _Jugement du Roi de Navarre_; he relates with dull prolixitythe history of his patron, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, inhis _Prise d'Alexandrie_; the _Voir dit_ relates in varying verseand prose the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in herteens, Peronne d'Armentières, who gratified her coquetry with an oldpoet's adoration, and then wedded his rival. 

In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also a native ofChampagne (_c_. 1345-1405), was a disciple of Machaut: if he was nota poet, he at least interests a reader by rhymed journals of his ownlife and the life of his time, written in the spirit of an honestbourgeois, whom disappointed personal hopes and public misfortunehad early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, twelve hundred ballades, nearly two hundred rondeaux, a vast unfinished satire on woman, the_Miroir de Mariage_, fatigued even his own age, and the official courtpoet of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the conventionalmodes; his historical poems, celebrating events of the day, haveinterest by virtue of their matter; as a moralist in verse he deploresthe corruption of high and low, the cupidity in Church and State, and, above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infirmitiesof women. The earliest Poetic in French--_L'art de dictier et de ferechançons, balades, virelais, et rondeaulx_ (1392)--is the work ofEustache Deschamps, in which the poet, by no means himself a masterof harmonies, insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse. 

The exhaustion of the mediæval sources of inspiration is still moreapparent in the fifteenth-century successors of Deschamps. Butalready something of the reviving influence of Italian culture makesitself felt. CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by her parentage and placeof birth (_c_. 1363), was left a widow with three young children atthe age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuinelyric cry; but when in her poverty she practised authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often atonce facile and pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining thehonour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun; in her prose_Cité des Dames_ she celebrates the virtues and heroism of women, with examples from ancient and modern times; in the _Livre des TroisVertus_ she instructs women in their duties. When advanced in years, and sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan-song in honour ofJoan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of life, a patriot and ascholar, she only needed one thing--genius--to be a poet ofdistinction. 

A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of Scotland, kissedthe lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest man in France, because fromthat "precious mouth" had issued so many "good words and virtuoussayings. " The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAINCHARTIER. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose he must beremembered with honour, both for his patriotic ardour, and for theharmonious eloquence (modelled on classical examples) in which thatardour found expression. His first work, the _Livre des Quatre Dames_, is in verse: four ladies lament their husbands slain, captured, lost, or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt. Many of his other poemswere composed as a distraction from the public troubles of the time;the title of one, widely celebrated in its own day, _La Belle Damesans Mercy_, has obtained a new meaning of romance through itsappropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose _QuadrilogueInvectif_, in which suffering France implores the nobles, the clergy, the people to show some pity for her miserable state. If Froissarthad not discerned the evils of the feudal system, they were patentto the eyes of Alain Chartier. His _Livre de l'Espérance_, where theoratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares neitherthe clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, who forget theirduty to their country in wanton self-indulgence; yet his last word, written at the moment when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures forbattle, is one of hope. His _Curial_ (_The Courtier_) is a satireon the vices of the court by one who had acquaintance with itscorruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain Chartier was newto French prose, and is hardly heard again until the seventeenthcentury. 

The last grace and refinements of chivalric society blossom in thepoetry of CHARLES D'ORLÉANS, "la grâce exquise des choses frêles. "He was born in 1391, son of Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italianmother, Valentine of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of RichardII. Of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother bythe stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the battlefieldof Agincourt he passed to England, where he remained a prisoner, closely guarded, for twenty-five years. It seems as if events shouldhave made him a tragic poet; but for Charles d'Orléans poetry wasthe brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder years atthe little court of Blois were a season of delicate gaiety, when heenjoyed the recreations of age, and smiled at the passions of youth. He died in 1465. Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power offeeling finds expression in his verse; he does not contribute newideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but he rendered the old materialand made the accepted moulds of verse charming by a graciouspersonality and an exquisite sense of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson, each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting his gems. He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter joys of love, the pleasureof springtide, the song of the birds, the gliding of a stream or acloud; or, as an elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguingardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day comes round, hisgood physician "Nonchaloir" advises him to abstain from choosing amistress, and recommends an easy pillow. The influence of Charlesd'Orléans on French poetry was slight; it was not until 1734 thathis forgotten poems were brought to light. 

In the close of the mediæval period, when old things were passingaway and new things were as yet unborn, the minds of men inclinedto fill the void with mockery and satire. Martin Lefranc (_c_. 1410-61)in his _Champion des Dames_--a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, inwhich there is much spirit and vigour of versification--balances oneagainst another the censure and the praise of women. Coquillard, withhis railleries assuming legal forms and phrases, laughs at love andlovers, or at the _Droits Nouveaux_ of a happy time when licence hadbecome the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his keen observation, satirises with direct, incisive force, the manners and morals of hisage. Martial d'Auvergne (_c_. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his_Vigiles de Charles VII. _, a poem written according to the scheme ofthe liturgical Vigils, is eloquent in his expression of the wrongs ofthe poor, and in his condemnation of the abuses of power and station. If the _Amant rendu Cordelier_ be his, he too appears among those whojest at the follies and extravagance of love. His prose _Arrêtsd'Amour_ are discussions and decisions of the imaginary court whichdetermines questions of gallantry. 

Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death was everpresent to the mind of a generation from which hope and faith seemedto fail; it was the time of the _Danse Macabré_; the skeleton becamea grim humourist satirising human existence, and verses written forthe dance of women were ascribed in the manuscript which preservesthem to Martial d'Auvergne. 

Passion and the idea of death mingle with a power at once realisticand romantic in the poetry of FRANÇOIS VILLON. He was born in poverty, an obscure child of the capital, in 1430 or 1431; he adopted the nameof his early protector, Villon; obtained as a poor scholar hisbachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a _maîtreès arts_; but already he was a master of arts less creditable thanthose of the University. In 1455 Villon--or should we call himMonterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil, Desloges, Mouton (aliasesconvenient for vagabondage)?--quarrelled with a priest, and killedhis adversary; he was condemned to death, and cheered his spiritswith the piteous ballade for those about to swing to the kites andthe crows; but the capital punishment was commuted to banishment. Next winter, stung by the infidelity and insults of a woman to whomhe had abandoned himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding hisfriends a jesting farewell in the bequests of his _Petit Testament_. Betrayed by one who claimed him as an associate in robbery, Villonis lost to view for three years; and when we rediscover him in 1461, it is as a prisoner, whose six months' fare has been bread and waterin his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XI. , recentlyconsecrated king, freed the unhappy captive. Before the year closedhe had composed his capital work, the _Grand Testament_, and provedhimself the most original poet of his century. And then Villondisappears; whether he died soon after, whether he lived for halfa score of years, we do not know. 

While he handles with masterly ease certain of the fifteenth-centuryforms of verse--in particular the ballade--Villon is a modern in hisabandonment of the traditional machinery of the imagination, itsconvention of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realisedmoralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modernin the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon hiswork, in the complexity of his feelings, passing from mirth to despair, from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memoriesor aspirations; he is modern in his passion for the real, and in thosegleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgarsurroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out his scornand indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, orcries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his miserable past, he yet is a passionate lover of life; and shadowing beauty and youthand love and life, he is constantly aware of the imminent andinexorable tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are fewand simple--ideas common to all men; but they take a special colourfrom his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with apoignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperateimaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in itself--thatof the _enfant perdu_ of genius--and so typical of a class, that thetemptation to create a Villon legend is great; but to magnify hisproportions to those of the highest poets is to do him wrong. Hispassionate intensity within a limited range is unsurpassed; butVillon wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth. 

In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with an admirableskill and science in literary form, Villon stands alone. Forothers--Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, Molinet, Crétin--poetry wasa cumbrous form of rhetoric, regulated by the rules of those artsof poetry which during the fifteenth century appeared at notinfrequent intervals. The _grands rhétoriqueurs_ with theircomplicated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete allegory, their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion of the MiddleAges, and to the need of new creative forces for the birth of a livingliterature. 

There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable prose-writerof the time--ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His residence in Rome (1422) hadmade him acquainted with the tales of the Italian _novellieri_; hewas a friend of the learned and witty Poggio; René of Anjou entrustedto him the education of his son; when advanced in years he becamethe author certainly of one masterpiece, probably of three. If hewas the writer of the _Quinze Joies de Mariage_, he knew how to maska rare power of cynical observation under a smiling face: the Churchhad celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed Virgin; he wouldironically depict the fifteen afflictions of wedded life, in scenesfinely studied from the domestic interior. How far the _Cent Nouvellesnouvelles_ are to be ascribed to him is doubtful; it is certain thatthese licentious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose, the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models. The _PetitJehan de Saintré_ is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; theirony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts thereader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. Thewriter was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace. The anonymous farce of _Pathelin_, and the _Chronique de petit Jehande Saintré_, are perhaps the most instructive documents which wepossess with respect to the moral temper of the close of the MiddleAges; and there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe bothworks to the same hand. 

IITHE DRAMA

The mediæval drama in France, though of early origin, attained itsfull development only when the Middle Ages were approaching theirterm; its popularity continued during the first half of the sixteenthcentury. It waited for a public; with the growth of industry, theuprising of the middle classes, it secured its audience, and in somemeasure filled the blank created by the disappearance of the _chansonsde geste_. The survivals of the drama of the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies are few; the stream, as we know, was flowing, but it ranunderground. 

The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical offices of theChurch. At Christmas and at Easter the birth and resurrection of theSaviour were dramatically recited to the people by the clergy, withinthe consecrated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text;but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as actors in thedrama. By degrees the vernacular encroached upon the Latin anddisplaced it; the scene passed from the church to the public placeor street; the action developed; and the actors were priests supportedby lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone. 

The oldest surviving drama written in French (but with interspersedliturgical sentences of Latin) is of the twelfth century--the_Représentation d'Adam_: the fall of man, and the first great crimewhich followed--the death of Abel--are succeeded by the processionof Messianic prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and thespectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who darted to and froamidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth century, only two religious piecesremain. Jean Bodel, of Arras, was the author of _Saint Nicholas_. The poet, himself about to assume the cross, exhibits a handful ofCrusaders in combat with the Mussulmans; all but one, a supplicantof the saint, die gloriously, with angelic applause and pity;whereupon the feelings of the audience are relieved by the mirth andquarrels of drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of thetreasure entrusted to his safeguard; miracles, and generalconversion of the infidels, conclude the drama. The miracle of_Théophile_, the ambitious priest who pawned his soul to Satan, andthrough our Lady's intercession recovered his written compact, isby the trouvère Rutebeuf. These are scanty relics of a hundred years;yet their literary value outweighs that of the forty-two _Miraclesde Notre Dame_ of the century which followed--rude pieces, oftentrivial, often absurd in their incidents, with mystic extravagancesanctifying their vulgar realism. They formed, with two exceptions, the dramatic repertory of some mediæval _puy_, an associationhalf-literary, half-religious, devoted to the Virgin's honour; theirrhymed octosyllabic verse--the special dramatic form--at timesborders upon prose. One drama, and only one, of the fourteenth century, chooses another heroine than our Lady--the _Histoire de Grisélidis_, which presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those marvelsof wifely patience celebrated for other lands by Boccaccio, byPetrarch, and by Chaucer. 

The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of themediæval sacred drama. The word _mystère_, [2] first appropriated totableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royalprivilege which in 1402 conferred upon the association known as the_Confrérie de la Passion_ the right of performing the plays of ourRedemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesushad appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacredstory, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together withthe lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days of St. Dominicand St. Louis; it even includes, in an extended sense, subjects fromprofane history--the siege of Orleans, the destruction of Troy--butsuch subjects are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century. 

[Footnote 2: Derived from _ministerium_ (_métier_), but doubtlessoften drawing to itself a sense suggested by the _mysteries_ ofreligion. ]

For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm forthe stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France. The _Confrères de la Passion_, needing a larger repertoire, foundin young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose veinwas copious. His _Passion_, written about the middle of the fifteenthcentury, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-fourthousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers andfour crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was anunprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Grebanwas rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumphwhen it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdoneeither by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaborationwith his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous _Actes desApôtres_, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of fivehundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, thehappiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than fortydays. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever wassupposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is onlyless vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteriescomprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portionof what was written. 

Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except inoccasional passages of natural feeling or just characterisation, their historical importance was great; they met a nationaldemand--they constituted an animated and moving spectacle ofuniversal interest. A certain unity they possessed in the fact thateverything revolved around the central figure of Christ and thecentral theme of man's salvation; but such unity is only to bediscovered in a broad and distant view. Near at hand the confusionseems great. Their loose construction and unwieldy lengthnecessarily endangered their existence when a truer feeling forliterary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave riseto a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief wassecured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravestimport. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace--a passageof pastoral, a song, a naïve piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgarriot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to thefurthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit tointerdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the senseof reverence and even of common propriety. They had scandalisedserious Protestants; the Catholics declined to defend what wasindefensible; the humanists and lovers of classical art inRenaissance days thought scorn of the rude mediæval drama. Thoughit died by violence, its existence could hardly have been prolongedfor many years. But in the days of its popularity the performanceof a mystery set a whole city in motion; carpenters, painters, costumiers, machinists were busy in preparation; priests, scholars, citizens rehearsed their parts; country folk crowded to everyhostelry and place of lodging. On the day preceding the first morningof performance the personages, duly attired--Christians, Jews, Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests--defiled through thestreets on their way to the cathedral to mass. The vast stage hardby the church presented, with primitive properties, from right toleft, the succession of places--lake, mountain, manger, prison, banquet-chamber--in which the action should be imagined; and fromone station to another the actors passed as the play proceeded. Atone end of the stage rose heaven, where God sat throned; at the other, hell-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged. Music aided theaction; the drama was tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime in one. Theactors were amateurs from every class of society--clergy, scholars, tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the _noblesse_. InParis the Confraternity of the Passion had almost an exclusive rightto present these sacred plays; in the provinces associations wereformed to carry out the costly and elaborate performance. To the_Confrères de la Passion_--bourgeois folk and artisans--belonged thefirst theatre, and it was they who first presented plays at regularintervals. From the Hospital of the Trinity, originally a shelterfor pilgrims, they migrated in 1539 to the Hôtel de Flandres, andthence in 1548 to the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Their famous place ofperformance passed in time into the hands of professional actors;but it was not until 1676 that the Confrérie ceased to exist. 

Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach of continuityduring its long history. The jongleurs of the Middle Ages were theimmediate descendants of the Roman mimes and histrions; theirdeclamations, accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards thedramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly forgotten in theschools; the liturgical drama and the sacred pieces developed fromit had an indirect influence as encouraging dramatic feeling, andproviding models which could be applied to other uses. The earliestsurviving _jeux_ are of Arras, the work of ADAM DE LA HALLE. In the_Jeu d'Adam_ or _de la Feuillée_ (_c_. 1262) satirical studies ofreal life mingle strangely with fairy fantasy; the poet himself, lamenting his griefs of wedlock, his father, his friends arehumorously introduced; the fool and the physician play theirlaughable parts; and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens haveprepared a banquet under _la feuillée_, grant or refuse the wishesof the mortal folk in the traditional manner of enchantresses amiableor perverse. The _Jeu de Robin et Marlon_--first performed at Naplesin 1283--is a pastoral comic opera, with music, song, and dance; thegood Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival, hercavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy inventions happilyexecuted; but they stand alone. It is not until we reach the fifteenthcentury that mediæval comedy, in various forms, attained its trueevolution. 

The Moralities, of which sixty-five survive, dating, almost all, from1450 to 1550, differed from the Mysteries in the fact that theirpurpose was rather didactic than religious; as a rule they handledneither historical nor legendary matter; they freely employedallegorical personification after the fashion of the _Roman de laRose_. The general type is well exemplified in _Bien-Avisé, Mal-Avisé_, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Progress, with twopilgrims--one who is instructed in the better way by all thepersonified powers which make for righteousness; the other findinghis companions on the primrose path, and arriving at the everlastingbonfire. Certain Moralities attack a particular vice--gluttony orblasphemy, or the dishonouring of parents. From satirising the socialvices of the time, the transition was easy to political satire orinvective. In the sixteenth century both the partisans of theReformation and the adherents to the traditional creed employed theMorality as a medium for ecclesiastical polemics. Sometimes treatingof domestic manners and morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama, presenting the conditions under which character is formed. Sometimesagain it approached the farce: two lazy mendicants, one blind, theother lame, fear that they may suffer a cure and lose their tradethrough the efficacy of the relics of St. Martin; the halt, mountedon the other's back, directs his fellow in their flight; by ill luckthey encounter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb;the recovered cripple swears and rages; but the man born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks forth in praise to God. The higher Morality naturally selected types of character for satireor commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as thatof Molière lay in germ in this species of the mediæval drama. At alate period examples are found of the historical Morality. Thepathetic _l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu_ exhibits in its action andits stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of thepseudo-classical tragedy of the Pléiade checked the development ofthis species. The very name "Morality" disappears from the theatreafter 1550. 

The _sottie_, like the Morality, was a creation of the fifteenthcentury. Whether it had its origin in a laicising of the irreverentcelebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools whichsometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farcein which the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-earedcap, distributed between them the several rôles of human folly. Associations of _sots_, known in Paris as _Enfants sans Souci_, knownin other cities by other names, presented the unwisdom or madnessof the world in parody. The _sottie_ at times rose from a merediversion to satire; like the Morality, it could readily adapt itselfto political criticism. The _Gens Nouveaux_, belonging perhaps tothe reign of Louis XI. , mocks the hypocrisy of those sanguinereformers who promise to create the world anew on a better model, and yet, after all, have no higher inspiration than that old greedfor gold and power and pleasure which possessed their predecessors. Louis XII. , who permitted free comment on public affairs from actorson the stage, himself employed the poet Pierre Gringoire to satirisehis adversary the Pope. In 1512 the _Jeu du Prince des Sots_ was givenin Paris; Gringoire, the _Mère-Sotte_, but wearing the Papal robesto conceal for a time the garb of folly, discharged a principal part. Such dangerous pleasantries as this were vigorously restrained byFrançois I. 

A dramatic monologue or a _sermon joyeux_ was commonly interposedbetween the _sottie_ and the Morality or miracle which followed. Thesermon parodied in verse the pulpit discourses of the time, with textduly announced, the customary scholastic divisions, and anincredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the dramaticmonologues of the fifteenth century is found at least one littlemasterpiece, which has been ascribed on insufficient grounds toVillon, and which would do no discredit to that poet's genius--the_Franc-Archer de Bagnolet_. The francs-archers of Charles VII. --arural militia--were not beloved of the people; the _miles gloriosus_of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his valour, encounters astuffed scarecrow, twisting to the wind; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are rendered in a monologue which expounds theaction of the piece with admirable spirit. 

If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national epopee, the farce may be regarded as to some extent the dramatic inheritorof the spirit of the fabliau. It aims at mirth and laughter for theirown sakes, without any purpose of edification; it had, like thefabliau, the merit of brevity, and not infrequently the fault ofunabashed grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of littleconsequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an audacity ofpolitical or ecclesiastical criticism which transformed it into adramatised pamphlet. In general it chose its matter from the ludicrousmisadventures of private life: the priest, the monk, the husband, the mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant are theagents in broadly ludicrous intrigues; the young wife lords it overher dotard husband, and makes mockery of his presumptive heirs, in_La Cornette_ of Jean d'Abondance; in _Le Cuvier_, the husband, whosemany household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge--the list, which he deliberately recites while his wife flounders helpless inthe great washing-tub, does not include the task of effecting herdeliverance. 

Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent, one farce standsout pre-eminent, and may indeed be called a comedy of manners andof character--the merry misfortunes of that learned advocate, _Maître Pierre Pathelin_. The date is doubtless about 1470; the author, probably a Parisian and a member of the Basoche, is unknown. Withall his toiling and cheating, Pathelin is poor; with infinite artand spirit he beguiles the draper of the cloth which will make himselfa coat and his faithful Guillemette a gown; when the draper, losingno time, comes for his money and an added dinner of roast goose, beholdMaître Pathelin is in a raging fever, raving in every dialect. Wasthe purchase of his cloth a dream, or work of the devil? To add tothe worthy tradesman's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wooland eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly appears in courtto defend the accused, and having previously advised his client toaffect idiocy and reply to all questions with the senseless utterance_bée_, he triumphantly wins the case; but the tables are turned whenMaster Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain no other responsethan _bée_ from the instructed shepherd. The triumph of rogue overrogue is the only moral of the piece; it is a satire on fair dealingand justice, and, though the morals of a farce are not to be gravelyinsisted on, such morals as _Maître Pathelin_ presents agree wellwith the spirit of the age which first enjoyed this masterpiece ofcaricature. 

The actors in mediæval comedy, as in the serious drama, were amateurs. The members of the academic _puys_ were succeeded by the members ofguilds, or _confréries_, or _sociétés joyeuses_. Of these societiesthe most celebrated was that of the Parisian _Enfants sans Souci_. With this were closely associated the Basochiens, the corporationof clerks to the _procureurs_ of the Parlement of Paris. [3] It maybe that the _sots_ of the capital were only members of the _basoche_, assuming for the occasion the motley garb. In colleges, scholarsperformed at first in Latin plays, but from the fifteenth centuryin French. At the same time, troupes of performers occasionally movedfrom city to city, exhibiting a Mystery, but they did not hold togetherwhen the occasion had passed. Professional comedians were broughtfrom Italy to Lyons in 1548, for the entertainment of Henri II. AndCatherine de Médicis. From that date companies of French actors appearto become numerous. New species of the drama--tragedy, comedy, pastoral--replace the mediæval forms; but much of the genius of Frenchclassical comedy is a development from the Morality, the _sottie_, and the farce. To present these newer forms the service of trainedactors was required. During the last quarter of the sixteenth centurythe amateur performers of the ancient drama finally disappear. 

[Footnote 3: This corporation, known as the _Royaume de la Basoche_(_basilica_), was probably as old as the fourteenth century. ]

BOOK THE SECOND_THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER IRENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

The literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by two chiefinfluences--that of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation. WhenFrench armies under Charles VIII. And Louis XII. Made a descent onItaly, they found everywhere a recognition of the importance of art, an enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the æsthetic as well as thescholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in life, an universalcuriosity, a new confidence in human reason. To Latin culture a Greekculture had been added; and side by side with the mediæval masterof the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imaginative reason, Plato, was held in honour. Before the first quarter of the sixteenthcentury closed, France had received a great gift from Italy, whichprofoundly modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristicsof her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery of Christianantiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time the religious movement madecommon cause with the Renaissance; but the grave morals, theopposition of grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theologyafter a time alienated the Reforming party from the mere humanismof literature and art. An interest in general ideas and a capacityfor dealing with them were fostered by the study of antiquity bothclassical and Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, andby the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas in art undera presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise thought and form, wasthe great work of the seventeenth century; but before this could beeffected it was necessary that France should enjoy tranquillity afterthe strife of the civil wars. 

Learning had received the distinction of court patronage when LouisXII. Appointed the great scholar Budé his secretary. Around FrancisI. , although he was himself rather a lover of the splendour andornament of the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learningand poets gathered. On the suggestion of GUILLAUME BUDÉ he endowedprofessorships of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, to which were added thoseof medicine, mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in thisprojected foundation of the Collège de France an important step wasmade towards the secularisation of learned studies. The King's sister, MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplishedwoman of her time, represents more admirably than Francis the geniusof the age. She studied Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and, when forty, occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent as wellas her intellect; she was gay and mundane, and at the same time shewas serious (with even a strain of mystical emotion) in her concernfor religion. Although not in communion with the Reformers, shesympathised with them, and extended a generous protection to thosewho incurred danger through their liberal opinions. Her poems, _Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses_ (1547), show themediæval influences forming a junction with those of the Renaissance. Some are religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mysteriesand her eloquent _Triomphe de l'Agneau_ appears the _Histoire desSatyres et Nymphes de Diane_, imitated from the Italian of Sannazaro. Among her latest poems, which remained in manuscript until 1896, area pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the death of herbrother Francis I. ; a second dramatic poem, _Comédie jouée au Montde Marsan_, in which love (human or divine) triumphs over the spiritof the world, over superstitious asceticism, and over the wiser temperof religious moderation. _Les Prisons_ tells in allegory of herservitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the desire for humanknowledge, until at last the divine love brought her deliverance. The union of the mundane and the moral spirit is singularly shownin Marguerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation ofBoccaccio, the _Heptaméron des Nouvelles_ (1558). 

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth; probably Margueritecomposed them a few years before her death; perhaps their licenceand wanton mirth were meant to enliven the melancholy hours of herbeloved brother; certainly the writer is ingenious in extractingedifying lessons from narratives which do not promise edification. They are not so gross as other writings of the time, and this isMarguerite's true defence; to laugh at the immoralities of monks andpriests was a tradition in literature which neither the spirit ofthe Renaissance nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company ofladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their return from thePyrenean baths, beguile the time by telling these tales, and the piouswidow Dame Oisille gives excellent assistance in showing how theytend to a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in number thetales of the Decameron, is incomplete. Possibly Marguerite was aidedby some one or more of the authors of whom she was the patroness andprotector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription ofthe _Heptaméron_ to Bonaventure des Périers. 

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with favour at her courtwas CLÉMENT MAROT, the versifier, as characterised by Boileau, of"elegant badinage. " His predecessors and early contemporaries in theopening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of theso-called _rhétoriqueurs_, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, nowdecrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification andpedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the moreliving tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jeanle Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse thanfor his prose work, _Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie_, in which the Trojan origin of the French people is set forth withsome feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition. Clément Marot, born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a poet's son, was for a time in theservice of Francis I. As _valet de chambre_, and accompanied hismaster to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner. Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the GenevanCalvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possibleby the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy, in 1544. 

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle Ages; he editedthe _Roman de la Rose_ and the works of Villon; his immediate masterswere the _grands rhétoriqueurs_; but the spirit of the Renaissanceand his own genius delivered him from the oppression of theirauthority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt and thepromise of freedom found in the Reforming party. A light andpleasure-loving nature, a temper which made the prudent conduct oflife impossible, exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectorswhom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, he glided withoutfatal mishap. He did not bring to poetry depth of passion or solidityof thought; he brought what was needed--a bright intelligence, a senseof measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, _esprit_. Escaping, afterhis early _Temple de Cupido_, from the allegorising style, he learnedto express his personal sentiments, and something of the gay, bourgeois spirit of France, with aristocratic distinction. Hispoetry of the court and of occasion has lost its savour; but whenhe writes familiarly (as in the _Épître au Roi pour avoir été derobé_), or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat and the lion), heis charmingly bright and natural. None of his poems--elegies, epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, rondeaux, pastorals, ballades--overwhelm us by their length; he was not a writer of vastimaginative ambitions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in theirkind, with happy turns of thought and expression in which art seemsto have the ease of nature. The satirical epistle supposed to be sent, not by Marot, but by his valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, isspirited in its insolence. _L'Enfer_ is a satiric outbreak ofindignation suggested by his imprisonment in the Châtelet on thecharge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine Psalmsadded to his glory, and brought him the honour of personal dangerfrom the hostility of the Sorbonne; but to attempt such a translationis to aim at what is impossible. His gift to French poetry isespecially a gift of finer art--firm and delicate expression, felicity in rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and gracein poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic line. A greatpoet Marot was not, and could not be; but, coming at a fortunate moment, his work served literature in important ways; it was a return fromlaboured rhetoric to nature. In the classical age his merit wasrecognised by La Bruyère, and the author of the _Fables_ and the_Contes_--in some respects a kindred spirit--acknowledged a debt toMarot. 

From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite of Navarre. Ofhis contemporaries, who were also disciples, the most distinguishedwas MELIN DE SAINT-GELAIS, and on the master's death Melin passedfor an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly, as one whoin slender work sought for elegance, and fell into a manneredprettiness. While preserving something of the French spirit, hesuffered from the frigid ingenuities which an imitation of Italianmodels suggested to him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelaisbrought the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the _blason_, whichcelebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, a jewel, a flower, a preciousstone; lyrical inspiration was slender, but clearness and grace wereworth attaining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art servedto lead the way towards Ronsard and the Pléiade. 

The most powerful personality in literature of the first half of thesixteenth century was not a poet, though he wrote verses, but a greatcreator in imaginative prose, great partly by virtue of his nativegenius, partly because the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for scienceand learning was thronging in his veins--FRANÇOIS RABELAIS. Bornabout 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modeststation, he received his education in the village of Seuillé and atthe convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of theschools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury. For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the cell andcloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. In books, but notthose of a monastic library, he found salvation; mathematics, astronomy, law, Latin, Greek consoled him during his period ofuncongenial seclusion. His criminal companions--books which mightbe suspected of heresy--were sequestrated. The young Bishop ofMaillezais--his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac, who had aided hisstudies--and the great scholar Budé came to his rescue, and passingfirst, by favour of the Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais, before long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest, beganhis wanderings of a scholar in search of universal knowledge. In1530-31 he was at Montpellier, studying medicine and lecturing onmedical works of Hippocrates and Galen; next year, at Lyons, one ofthe learned group gathered around the great printers of that city, he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and was knownas a scientific author. Towards the close of 1532 he re-edited thepopular romance _Chroniques Gargantuines_, which tells theadventures of the "enormous giant Gargantua. " It was eagerly read, and brought laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients. Learning, he held, was good, but few things in this world arewholesomer than laughter. The success of the _Chroniques_ seems tohave moved him to write a continuation, and in 1533 appeared_Pantagruel_, the story of the deeds and prowess of Gargantua's giantson, newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealedthe name of François Rabelais. It forms the second of the five bookswhich make up its author's famous work. A recast or rather a newcreation of the Chronicles of Gargantua, replacing the original_Chroniques_, followed in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 thatthe second and--in its complete form--the third books of _Pantagruel_appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The last book wasposthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full), and the inferiority of style, together with the more bitter spirit of its satire, have led manycritics to the opinion that it is only in part from the hand of thegreat and wise humourist. 

Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as physician to theFrench ambassador, Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris. He pursued hisscientific studies in medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic, and had all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains ofantiquity. Some years of his life were passed in wandering from oneFrench university to another. Fearing the hostility of the Sorbonne, during the last illness of his protector Francis I. , he fled to theimperial city of Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal duBellay, in 1549. Next year the author of _Pantagruel_ was appointedcuré of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps as a concession to publicopinion, he resigned his clerical charges on the eve of thepublication of his fourth book. Rabelais died probably in 1552 or1553, aged about sixty years. 

On his death it might well have been said that the gaiety of nationswas eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less asthe enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholarand man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversationwere in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and evena habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a nobleideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay theequilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in himwas so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; andlaughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of thisabounding life. After the mediæval asceticism and the intellectualbondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak andexplosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man. He would enjoy the world to the full, and yet at the same time thereis something of stoicism in his philosophy of life; while gailyaccepting the good things of the earth, he would hold himself detachedfrom the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous sanity. Let us return--such is his teaching--to nature, honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the intellect and to the moral feeling;let us take life seriously, and therefore gaily; let us face deathcheerfully, knowing that we do not wholly die; with light in theunderstanding and love in the heart, we can confront all dangers anddefy all doubts. 

He is the creator of characters which are types. Hisgiants--Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel--are giants of goodsense and large benevolence. The education of Pantagruel presentsthe ideal pedagogy of the Renaissance, an education of the wholeman--mind and body--in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties andword-spinning of the effete mediæval schools. Friar John is the monkwhose passion for a life of activity cannot be restrained; hisviolence is the overflow of wholesome energy. It is to his care thatthe Abbey of Thelema is confided, where young men and maidens areto be occupied with every noble toil and every high delight, an abbeywhose rule has but a single clause (since goodness has no rule savefreedom), "Do what you will. " Of such a fraternity, love and marriageare the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derivedfrom the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare'sFalstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit;he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such adisreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wickedlewd rogue, " he is "the most virtuous man in the world, " and we cannotpart with him. Panurge would marry, but fears lest he may be the victimof a faithless wife; every mode of divination, every source ofprediction except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangsthreatening; it only remains to consult the oracle of La DiveBouteille. The voyaging quest is long and perilous; in each islandat which the adventurers touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuseis exhibited for ridicule; the word of the oracle is in the end themysterious "Drink"--drink, that is, if one may venture to interpretan oracle, of the pure water of wisdom and knowledge, and let theunknown future rest. 

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste of his time;his severer censures of Church and State were disguised by hisbuffoonery; flinging out his good sense and wise counsels with aliberal hand, he also wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. Ifhe is gross beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from theevil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless morals becorrupted by a belief in the goodness of the natural man. The graverwrongs of his age--wars of ambition, the abuse of public justice, the hypocrisies, cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics, distrust of the intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life--arevigorously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, truth; hepleads for the right of manhood to a full and free development ofall its powers; and if questions of original sin and divine gracetrouble him little, and his creed has some of the hardihood of theRenaissance, he is full of filial gratitude to _le bon Dieu_ for Hisgift of life, and of a world in which to live strongly should be tolive joyously. 

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of prose tales whowere his contemporaries and successors; but they want his broad goodsense and real temperance. BONAVENTURE DES PÉRIERS, whom Margueriteof Navarre favoured, and whose _Nouvelles Récréations_, with moreof the tradition of the French fabliaux and farces and less of theItalian manner, have something in common with the stories of the_Heptaméron_, died in desperation by his own hand about 1543. HisLucianic dialogues which compose the _Cymbalum Mundi_ show theaudacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the Renaissanceengendered in ill-balanced spirits. With all his boldness and ardourRabelais exercised a certain discretion, and in revising his own textclearly exhibited a desire to temper valour with prudence. 

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais published thesecond and best book of his _Pantagruel_, in which the ideality andthe realism of the Renaissance blossom to the full, there was a certainrevival of the chivalric romance. The Spanish _Amadis des Gaules_(1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a distant echoof the Romances of the Round Table. The gallant achievements ofcourtly knights, their mystical and platonic loves, were a delightto Francis I. , and charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the firsttime, the literature of Spain reached France, and the influence of_Amadis_ reappears in the seventeenth century in the romances ofd'Urfé and Mdlle. De Scudéry. 

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently and amply inthe writings of Rabelais, the genius of the Reformation finds itshighest and most characteristic utterance through one whom Rabelaisdescribes as the "demoniacle" of Geneva--JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). Thepale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, whose lifewas a long disease, yet whose indomitable will sustained him amidbodily infirmities, present a striking contrast to the sanguinehealth and overflowing animal spirits of the good physician whoreckoned laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not merelya Reformer: he was also a humanist, who, in his own way, made a profoundstudy of man, and who applied the learning of a master to thedetermination of dogma. His education was partly theological, partlylegal; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the rigour, theseverity, and the formal procedures of the law. Indignation againstthe imprisonment and burning of Protestants, under the pretence thatthey were rebellious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity; silence, he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King an eloquent letter, in which he maintained that the Reformed faith was neither new nortending towards schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucidand logical exposition of Protestant doctrine--the _ChristianæReligionis Institutio_. It placed him, at the age of twenty-seven, as leader in the forefront of the new religious movement. 

But the movement was not merely learned, it was popular, and Calvinwas resolved to present his work to French readers in their own tongue. His translation--the _Institution_--appeared probably in 1541. Perhaps no work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so greatan influence. It consists of four books--of God, of Jesus as a Mediator, of the effects of His mediatorial work, and of the exterior formsof the Church. The generous illusion of Rabelais, that human natureis essentially good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallenand condemned under the law; all his righteousness is as filthy rags;God, of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity predestinated somemen to eternal life and others to eternal death; the Son of God cameto earth to redeem the elect; through the operation of the Holy Spiritin the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are justified throughHis righteousness imputed to them, and are sanctified in their hearts;the Church is the body of the faithful in every land; the officersof the Church are chosen by the people; the sacraments aretwo--baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of system, hisclearness, and the logical enchainment of his ideas, Calvin iseminently French. On the one side he saw the Church of Rome, with--ashe held--its human tradition, its mass of human superstitions, intervening between the soul and God; on the other side were thescepticism, the worldliness, the religious indifference of theRenaissance. Within the Reforming party there was the conflict ofprivate opinions. Calvin desired to establish once for all, on thebasis of the Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which shouldimpose itself upon the minds of men as of divine authority, whichshould be at once a barrier against the dangers of superstition andthe dangers of libertine speculation. As the leaders of the FrenchRevolution propounded political constitutions founded on the ideaof the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth a creedproceeding, if we may so put it, from a conception of the absoluterights of God. Through the mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, we are what we are. 

It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the greatest writerof the sixteenth century. He learned much from the prose of Latinantiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectualenergy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impresshis ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained. In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France thatthere should also be a Renaissance of moral rigour; if freedom wasneedful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it may be admittedthat Calvin's reason is sometimes the dupe of Calvin's reasoning. 

His _Life_ was written in French by his fellow-worker in theReformation, Théodore de Bèze, who also recorded the history of theReformed Churches in France (1580). Bèze and Viret, together withtheir leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition andexhortation, and in Bèze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. AtCalvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, tocomplete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the _TragédieFrançaise du sacrifice d'Abraham_, designed to inculcate the dutyof entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave andrestrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne. 

CHAPTER IIFROM THE PLÉIADE TO MONTAIGNE

The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethicalideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; itbrought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might wellunite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne'searly friend--the friend in memory of all his life--ÉTIENNE DE LABOÉTIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarchor his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the_Mesnagerie_) that we remember La Boétie; it is rather for hiseloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the _Discours de laServitude Volontaire_ or _Contr'un_, written at sixteen--revisedlater--in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invectiveagainst tyranny. Before La Boétie's premature death the morals ofantiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers inthe pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives(1559), to be followed, some years later, by his _OEuvres Moralesde Plutarque_. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only inhis Plutarch, but in his rendering of the _Daphnis et Chloé_ of Longus, and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his senseof the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinctthe genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greekoriginal and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-createdthan translated Plutarch. "We dunces, " wrote Montaigne, "would havebeen lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it, we now venture to speak and write; . . . It is our breviary. " The lifeand the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not ofscholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school ofmanners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To lovePlutarch, " said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry ofNavarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth. "

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity as Amyotconveyed to the general mind of France that was wanting to Ronsardand the group of poets surrounding him. Their work was concernedprimarily with literary form; of the life of the world and generalideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The transitionfrom Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly through the school ofLyons. In that city of the South, letters flourished side by sidewith industry and commerce; Maurice Scève celebrated his mistressDélie, "object of the highest virtue, " with Petrarchan ingenuities;and his pupil LOUISE LABÉ, "la belle Cordière, " sang in her sonnetsof a true passion felt, as she declares, "en ses os, en son sang, en son âme. " The Lyonese poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas, rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pléiade. PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a château a few leagues from Vendôme, inthe year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. As page, was in Scotland with James V. , and later had the prospect of adistinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on aserious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threwhimself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boyAntoine de Baïf he received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, JeanDaurat, soon to be principal of the Collège Coqueret. At the Collegea group of students--Ronsard, Baïf, Joachim du Bellay, RemiBelleau--gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which, by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, andincluding Daurat, became the constellation of the Pléiade. The sevenassociates read together, translated and imitated the classics; acommon doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn ofthe vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous andexquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, theyflung out their manifesto--the _Défense et Illustration de la LangueFrançaise_ by Du Bellay, the most important study in literarycriticism of the century. With this should be considered, as lessimportant manifestoes, the later _Art Poétique_ of Ronsard, and hisprefaces to the _Franciade_. To formulate principles is not alwaysto the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need abanner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Againstthe popular conception of the ignorant the Pléiade maintained thatpoetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantryof humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admittedof literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece orRome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellencesof its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by wordsof local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, byjudicious developments of the existing families of words, by therecovery of words that have fallen into disuse. 

It is unjust to the Pléiade to say that they aimed at overloadingpoetic diction with neologisms of classical origin; they sought toinnovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at theformation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turnedaway from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desireda select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; theyrecommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elderforms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions orre-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as _épiceries_; and theirplace is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, bythe elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by thepractice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes areto be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine andfeminine rhymes; the cæsura is to fall in accordance with the meaning. Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the ground ofclassical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause. "The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse amongthe Greeks and Romans"--in this statement is indicated the chiefservice rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of thePléiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed onlater writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself aliketo the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo. 

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French classical school; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to reform the reformation of the Pléiade, and towin for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors. Unfortunately from its origin the French classical school had in itthe spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it frompopular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pléiadefailed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome areadmirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because theyare founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason. They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independentof it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literaryart, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to thesterilisation of art. That error found its correction in theliterature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrineset forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of theconsequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, onthe other hand, never made the assumption, common enough in theseventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observanceof the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotionmust be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for theinstinctive movements of poetic sensibility. 

During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets. " Tassosought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in hispraise; Brantôme placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and MaryStuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. On one occasion invited him tosit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied withhis art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a nationalcalamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true selfin a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafnessperhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we thinkof him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora. "

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he wasa humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three booksof the _Odes_ he attempted to rival Pindar; in the _Amours deCassandre_ he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon[1] andHorace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourthand fifth books, the period of the _Amours de Marie_ and the _Hymnes_. From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an eloquent declaimer on public events in the _Discours des Misèresde ce Temps_, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished_Franciade_. During the last ten years of his life he gave freerexpression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; andto these years belong the admirable sonnets to Hélène de Surgères, his autumnal love. 

[Footnote 1: _i. E. _ the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in1554, by Henri Estienne. ]

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of atime when the great affair was the organisation of social life, andas a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions, were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In hisimitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song, and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt toreproduce the passionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of hismodel. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handlingof sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyricalcombinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier;among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he wasdeficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and anexquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessedas a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. Hisambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy fromthe imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, andequally unfortunate in its form--the rhyming decasyllabic verse. 

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, asit were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the _Discours des Misères de ce Temps_ and the_Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX. _, Ronsard isoriginal and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of theseventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for externalnature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes fromthe curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he isan admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautifulvariation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" existsthan his sonnet _Quand vous serez bien vieille_, unless it be hisdainty ode _Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose_. Passionate in thedeepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincereand tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase ofemotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almostmodern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventorof new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entirerhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity invarious metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the meredexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired andsustained by the sentiment of metre. 

Of the other members of the Pléiade, one--Jodelle--is rememberedchiefly in connection with the history of the drama. Baïf (1532-89), son of the French ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophoclesand Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took fromVirgil's Georgics the inspiration of his _Météores_, was guided bythe Anacreontic poems in his _Passe-Temps_, and would fain rivalTheognis in his most original work _Les Mimes_, where a moral orsatiric meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He desired toconnect poetry more closely with music, and with this end in viewthought to reform the spelling of words and to revive the quantitativemetrical system of classical verse. [2] REMI BELLEAU (1528-77)practised the Horatian ode and the sonnet; translated Anacreon;followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his _Bergerie_ of connectedprose and verse, where the shepherds are persons of distinctionarrayed in a pastoral disguise; and adapted the mediæval _lapidary_(with imitations of the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of theRenaissance in his _Amours et Nouveaux Éschanges des PierresPrécieuses_. These little myths and metamorphoses of gems areingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for nature which Belleaupossessed is seen at its best in the charming song _Avril_, includedin his somewhat incoherent _Bergerie_. Among his papers was found, after his death, a comedy, _La Reconnue_, which, if it has littledramatic power, shows a certain instinct for satire. 

[Footnote 2: The "Baïfin verse, " French not classical, is of fifteensyllables, divided into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables. ]

These are minor lights in the poetical constellation; but the starof JOACHIM DU BELLAY shines with a ray which, if less brilliant thanthat of Ronsard, has a finer and more penetrating influence. Du Bellaywas born about 1525, at Liré, near Angers, of an illustrious family. His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy haunts his verse. Like Ronsard he suffered from deafness, and he has humorously sungits praises. _Olive_, fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic orPetrarchan mistress, Mlle. De Viole (the letters of whose name aretransposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same moment as theearliest _Odes_ of Ronsard; but before long he could mock in sprightlystanzas the fantasies and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It wasnot until his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousinCardinal du Bellay, the French ambassador, that he found his realself. In his _Antiquités de Rome_ he expresses the sentiment of ruins, the pathos of fallen greatness, as it had never been expressed before. The intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his brokenhealth, an unfortunate passion for the Faustina of his Latin verses, and the longing for his beloved province and little Liré depressedhis spirits; in the sonnets of his _Regrets_ he embodied his intimatefeelings, and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of thePontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein had, indeed, already shown itself in his mocking counsel to _le Poète courtisan_:the courtier poet is to be a gentleman who writes at ease; he is notto trouble himself with study of the ancients; he is to produce onlypieces of occasion, and these in a negligent style; the rarer andthe smaller they are the better; and happily at last he may ceaseto bring forth even these. Possibly his _poète courtisan_ was Melinde Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet Du Bellay is charming; his _JeuxRustiques_, while owing much to the _Lusus_ of the Venetian poetNavagero, have in them the true breath of the fields; it is his _douce_province of Anjou which inspires him; the song to _Vénus_ in itshappiest stanzas is only less admirable than the _Vanneur de Blé_, with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellayis associated. The personal note, which is in general absent fromthe poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in thebest pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness thecomplete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at theage of thirty-five. 

The Pléiade served literature by their attention to form, by theirskill in poetic instrumentation; but they were incapable ofinterpreting life in any large and original way. In the hands of theirsuccessors poetry languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPEDESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his reproductionand imitation of Italian models; as a courtier poet he reducedliterary flattery to a fine art; but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of passion is a laboured kind of _esprit_. A copy ofhis works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives; the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished, probably because the writerwas unwilling to pursue an adversary whom death had removed from hisway. Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire wasdeveloped by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and to him we owe an _ArtPoétique_ (1575) which adapts to his own time the teaching ofAristotle and Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT(1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth andmockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of Frenchcitizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily andcourageously. The villanelle _J'ai perdu ma tourterelle_ and the odeon May-day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments. 

The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in some degreeprepared by plays of the sixteenth century, written in Latin--thework of Buchanan, Muret, and others--by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euripides, translations from Italian comedy, andrenderings of one Spanish model, the highly-popular _Celestina_ ofFernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The firstperformance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency wasthat of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by his friends of the Collège de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the newclassical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy andcomedy came to be written solely with a view to publication in print. The mediæval drama still held the stage. 

JODELLE'S _Cléopâtre_ (1552), performed with enthusiasm by amateurs, was therefore a false start; it was essentially literary, and nottheatrical. Greek models were crudely imitated, with a lack of almosteverything that gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca wasmore accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy toimitate--his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his excess ofemphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic canons, formulated byScaliger in his Poetic, were rigorously applied. Unity of place ispreserved in _Cléopâtre_; the time of the action is reduced to twelvehours; there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a ghost(in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's death; of actionthere is none, the stage stands still. If Jodelle's _Didon_ has someliterary merit, it has little dramatic vitality. The oratoricalenergy of Grévin's _Jules César_, the studies of history in _La Mortde Daire_ and _La Mort d'Alexandre_, by Jacques de La Taille, do notcompensate their deficiency in the qualities required by the theatre. One tragedy alone, _La Sultane_, by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid itsviolences and extravagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action andscenic effect. 

Could the mediæval mystery and classical tragedy be reconciled? TheProtestant Reformer Bèze, in his _Sacrifice d'Abraham_, attemptedsomething of the kind; his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the lifeof David--one of them admirable in its rendering of the love of Michol, daughter of Saul--were published in 1556 by Loys Des-Masures: thestage arrangements are those of the mediæval drama, but the unityof time is observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alternatestrains. No junction of dramatic systems essentially opposed provedin the end possible. When Jean de La Taille wrote on a biblical subjectin his _Saül le Furieux_, a play remarkable for its impressiveconception and development of the character of Saul, he composed it_selon l'art_, and in the manner of "the old tragic authors. " He isuncompromising in his classical method; the mediæval drama seemedinartificial to him in the large concessions granted by the spectatorsto the authors and actors; he would have what passes on the stageapproximate, at least, to reality; the unities were accepted notmerely on the supposed authority of Aristotle, but because they werean aid in attaining verisimilitude. 

The most eminent name in the history of French tragedy of the sixteenthcentury is that of ROBERT GARNIER (1534-90). His discipleship toSeneca was at first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggerationhis master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement in his scenes, he proceeded in later plays to accumulate action upon action withoutreducing the action to unity. At length, in _Les Juives_ (1583), whichexhibits the revolt of the Jewish King and his punishment byNabuchodonosor, he attained something of true pity and terror, beautyof characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in the plaintivesongs of the chorus. Garnier was assuredly a poet; but even in _LesJuives_, the best tragedy of his century, he was not a master ofdramatic art. If anywhere he is in a true sense dramatic, it is inhis example of the new form of tragi-comedy. _Bradamante_, derivedfrom the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto, shows not only poeticimagination, but a certain feeling for the requirements of thetheatre. 

Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's _Eugène_, iseither a development of the mediæval farce, indicated in point ofform by the retention of octosyllabic verse, or an importation fromthe drama of Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, ofPlautus were translated; but, in truth, classical models had littleinfluence. Grévin, while professing originality, really follows thetraditions of the farce. Jean de La Taille, in his prose comedy _LesCorrivaux_, prepared the way for the easy and natural dialogue ofthe comic stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-centurycomedies are those translated in prose from the Italian, with suchobvious adaptations as might suit them to French readers, by PIERREDE LARIVEY (1540 to after 1611). Of the family of the Giunti, he hadgallicised his own name (_Giunti_, i. E. _Arrivés_); and theoriginality of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name;they served at least to establish an Italian tradition for comedy, which was not without an influence in the seventeenth century; theyserved to advance the art of dialogue. If any comedy of the periodstands out as superior to its fellows, it is _Les Contents_ (1584), by Odet de Turnèbe, a free imitation of Italian models united withsomething imported from the Spanish _Celestina_. Its intrigue is anItalian imbroglio; but there are lively and natural scenes, such ascan but rarely be found among the predecessors of Molière. In generalthe comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly confused in plot, conventional in its types of character, and too often as grosslyindecent as the elder farces. Before the century closed, the pastoraldrama had been discovered, and received influences from both Italyand Spain; the soil was being prepared for that delicate flower ofpoetry, but as yet its nurture was little understood, nor indeed canit be said to have ever taken kindly to the climate of France. 

While on the one hand the tendencies of the Pléiade may be describedas exotic, going forth, as they did, to capture the gifts of classicaland Italian literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenuouslythat thus only could French literature attain its highestpossibilities. In the scholarship of the time, side by side with thehumanism which revived and restored the culture of Greece and Rome, was another humanism which was essentially national. The historicalorigins of France were studied for the first time with something ofa critical spirit by CLAUDE FAUCHET in his _Antiquités Gauloises etFrançoises_ (1579-1601). His _Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue etPoésie Françoise_, in spite of its errors, was an effort towardsFrench philology; and in calling attention to the trouvères and theirworks, Fauchet may be considered a remote master of the school ofmodern literary research. ESTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615), the juristwho maintained in a famous action the cause of the University againstthe Jesuits, in his _Recherches de la France_ treated with learningand vigour various important points in French history--civil andecclesiastical--language, literary history, and the foundation ofuniversities. HENRI ESTIENNE (1531-98), who entered to the full intothe intoxication of classical humanism, was patriotic in hisreverence for his native tongue. In a trilogy of little treatises(1565-79), written with much spirit, he maintained that of modernlanguages the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek, attemptedto establish its superiority to Italian, and much more to Spanish, and mocked the contemporary fashion of Italianised French. 

The study of history is supported on the one hand by such eruditeresearch as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; on the other hand it issupported by political philosophy and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense of the word, the sixteenth century made no largeand coherent contribution; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and clashed together; the rivaltheologies of the Roman and Reformed Churches contended in a strugglefor life. PIERRE DE LA RAMÉE (1515-72) expressed the revolt ofrationalism against the methods of the schoolmen and the authorityof Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote in Latin, and his _Dialectique_, the first philosophical work in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls withinthe province of literary history. 

The philosophy of politics is represented by one great name, thatof JEAN BODIN (1529-96), whose _République_ may entitle him to bestyled the Montesquieu of the Renaissance. In an age which tendedtowards the formation of great monarchies he was vigorouslymonarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign might well bethought needful, in the second half of the century, as a barrieragainst anarchy; but Bodin was no advocate of tyranny; he condemnedslavery, and held that religious persecution can only lead to adissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by Bodin asa free man under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varietiesof race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France inthe earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methodsand unilluminated style of the mediæval chronicles;[3] in the secondhalf of the century they imitated with little skill the models ofantiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe were writtenwith conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de la Popelinière, andwith personal and party passion, struggling against his well-meantresolves, by Agrippa d'Aubigné. The great _Historia mei Temporis_of De Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was ahighly-important contribution to literature, but it is written inLatin. 

[Footnote 3: The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirablefor its clearness, grace, and simplicity. ]

With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have been longpre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and already in the sixteenthcentury such personal recitals are numerous. The wars of FrançoisI. And of Henri II. Gave abundant scope for the display of individualenterprise and energy; the civil wars breathed into the deeds of menan intensity of passion; the actors had much to tell, and a motivefor telling it each in his own interest. 

The _Commentaires_ of BLAISE DE MONLUC (1502-77) are said to havebeen named by Henri IV. "the soldier's Bible"; the Bible is one whichdoes not always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon ofhonourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the instinct of battlein his blood; from a soldier he rose through every rank to be theKing's lieutenant of Guyenne and a Marshal of France; during fiftyyears he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great general, amorous of danger, and at length, terribly disfigured by wounds, hesat down, not to rest, but to wield his pen as if it were a swordof steel. His _Commentaires_ were meant to be a manual for hardycombatants, and what model could he set before the young aspirantso animating as himself? In his earlier wars against the foreign foesof his country, Monluc was indeed a model of military prowess; thecivil wars added cruelty to his courage; after a fashion he wasreligious, and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for hereticsand adversaries of his King. An unlettered soldier, Monluc, by virtueof his energy of character and directness of speech, became a mostimpressive and spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh forstern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean rocks he hadformerly observed a lonely monastery, in view at once of Spain andFrance; there it was his wish to end his days. 

From the opposite party in the great religious and political strifecame the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue, the simple and beautiful recordof her husband's life by Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career, written in an old age of gloom and passion, by D'Aubigné. The ideasof Henri IV. --himself a royal author in his _Lettres missives_--areembodied in the _OEconomies Royales_ of the statesman Sully, whosesecretaries were employed for the occasion in laboriously recitinghis words and deeds as they had learnt them from their chief. Thesuperficial aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals--orlack of morals--of the time, are lightly and brightly exhibited byPIERRE DE BOURDEILLE, lord of BRANTÔME, Catholic abbé, soldier andcourtier, observer of the great world, gossip of amorous secrets. His _Vies des Hommes Illustres et des Grands Capitaines_, his _Viesdes Dames Illustres et des Dames Galantes_, and his _Mémoires_contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication during hislifetime, but the author cherished the thought of his posthumousrenown. Brantôme, wholly indifferent to good and evil, had a vividinterest in life; virtue and vice concerned him alike and equally, if only they had vivacity, movement, colour; and although, as withMonluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn to authorship, he wrote with a naïve art, an easy grace, and abundant spirit. Tocorrect and complete Brantôme's narrative as it related to herself, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV. , prepared herunfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series ofautobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her account of the nightof St. Bartholomew is justly celebrated; the whole record, indeed, is full of interest; but there were passages of her life which itwas natural that she should pass over in silence; her sins of omission, as Bayle has observed, are many. [4]

[Footnote 4: The _Mémoires-Journeaux_ of Pierre de l'Estoile are agreat magazine of the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity. The _Lettres_ of D'Ossat and the _Négotiations_ of the PresidentJeannin are of importance in the records of diplomacy. ]

The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant literature, in which the extreme parties contended with passion, while betweenthese a middle party, the aspirants to conciliation, pleaded for theways of prudence, and, if possible, of peace. FRANÇOIS HOTMAN, theeffect of whose Latin _Franco-Gallia_, a political treatisepresenting the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that ofRousseau's _Contrat Social_, launched his eloquent invective againstthe Cardinal de Lorraine, in the _Epistre envoyée au Tigre de laFrance_. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend of Philip Sidney, in his_Vindiciæ contra Tyrannos_, justified rebellion against princes whoviolate by their commands the laws of God. D'Aubigné, in his_Confession de Sancy_, attacked with characteristic ardour theapostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that threefoldrecanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, in his _Tableau des Différands de la Religion_, mingles theologicalerudition with his raillery against the Roman communion. HenriEstienne applied the spirit and learning of a great humanist toreligious controversy in the second part of his _Apologie pourHérodote_; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian may well betrue, he sarcastically maintains, when in this sixteenth century theabuses of the Roman Church seem to pass all belief. On the other hand, Du Perron, a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and citationsof the heretics. As the century drew towards its close, violencedeclined; the struggle was in a measure appeased. In earlier daysthe Chancellor, Michel de l'Hospital, had hoped to establish harmonybetween the rival parties; grief for the massacre of St. Bartholomewhastened his death. The learned Duplessis-Mornay, leader and guideof the Reformed Churches of France, a devoted servant of Henri ofNavarre, while fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attachedto the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme partisan. Thereconciliation of Henri IV. With the Church of Rome, which deliveredFrance from anarchy, was, however, a grief to some of his most loyalsupporters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most eminent. 

The cause of Henri against the League was served by the manuscriptcirculation of a prose satire, with interspersed pieces of verse, the work of a group of writers, moderate Catholics or convertedProtestants, who loved their country and their King, the _SatireMénipée_. [5] When it appeared in print (1594; dated on the title-page1593) the cause was won; the satire rose upon a wave of success, likea gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody of the Estates ofthe League which had been ineffectually convoked to make choice ofa king. Two Rabelaisian charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine, offer their drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre; the virtuesof the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are manifold--it willchange the blackest criminal into a spotless lamb, it will transforma vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's hat, and at need can accomplish ascore of other miracles. Presently the buffoon Estates file past totheir assembly; the hall in which they meet is tapestried withgrotesque scenes from history; the order of the sitting is determined, and the harangues begin, harangues in which each speaker exposes hisown ambitions, greeds, hypocrisies, and egoism, until Monsieurd'Aubray, the orator of the _tiers état_, closes the debate with aspeech in turn indignant, ironical, or grave in its commiserationfor the popular wrongs--an utterance of bourgeois honesty and goodsense. The writers--Canon Pierre Leroy; Gillot, clerk-advocate ofthe Parliament of Paris; Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry; JeanPasserat, poet and commentator on Rabelais; Chrestien and Pithou, two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events--met in aroom of Gillot's house, where, according to the legend, Boileau wasafterwards born, and there concocted the venom of their pamphlet. Its wit, in spite of some extravagances and the tedium of certainpages, is admirable; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral prudencealternate; and it had the great good fortune of a satire, that ofcoming at the lucky moment. 

[Footnote 5: Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus theGadarene, had called his satires _Saturæ Menippeæ_; hence the title. ]

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. Two ofthese--Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas, and Agrippad'Aubigné--are eminent. The fame of DU BARTAS (1544-90) was indeedEuropean. Ronsard sent him a pen of gold, and feared at a later timethe rivalry of his renown; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse;the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the rendering bySylvester; long afterwards Goethe honoured him with praise beyondhis deserts. To read his poems now, notwithstanding passages of vividdescription and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would needrare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the fact that whilehe was a disciple of the Pléiade, a disciple crude, intemperate, andprovincial, he deserted Greece and Rome, and drew his subjects fromHebraic sources. His _Judith_ (1573), composed by the command ofJeanne d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-emphaticstyle. _La Sepmaine, ou la Création en Sept Journées_, appeared in1578, and within a few years had passed through thirty editions. DuBartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic;but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and stillbeginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopædia of the works of creationweighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival of theday of rest. 

THÉODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNÉ (1550-1630) was not among the admirersof Du Bartas. His natural temper was framed for pleasure; at anothertime he might have been known only as a poet of the court, of lightersatire, and of love; the passions of the age transformed him intoan ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical culture waswide and exact; at ten years old he translated the _Crito_; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were at his command. He might, hadFrance been at peace with herself, have appeared in literature asa somewhat belated Ronsardist; but his hereditary cause became hisown. While still a child he accepted from his father, in presenceof the withering heads of the conspirators of Amboise, the oath ofimmitigable vengeance. Pursuits, escapes, the camp, the battle-field, the prison, the court made up no small part of his life of vicissitudeand of unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from thelethargy of pleasure; he warned the King against the crime ofapostasy; he dreaded the mass, but could cheerfully have acceptedthe stake. Extreme in his rage of party, he yet in private affairscould show good sense and generosity. His elder years were darkenedby what he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling awayfrom the faith of that son who, by an irony of fate, became the fatherof Madame de Maintenon. Four times condemned to death, he died inexile at the age of eighty. 

D'Aubigné's satirical tale, _Les Aventures du Baron de Fæneste_, contrasts the man who _appears_--spreading his plumes in the sunshineof the court--with the man who _is_, the man who lives upon his estate, among his rustic neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his peopleand his native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigné is little more thana degenerate issue from the Pléiade. It is in his vehement poem ofmourning and indignation and woe, _Les Tragiques_, begun in 1577 butnot published till 1616, that his power is fully manifested. ToD'Aubigné, as its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuveexactly applies: "Juvénal du xvi. Siècle, âpre, austère, inexorable, hérissé d'hyperboles, étincelant de beautés, rachetant une rudessegrossière par une sublime énergie. " In seven books it tells of themisery of France, the treachery of princes, the abuse of public lawand justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, thevengeance of God against the enemies of the saints, and the finaljudgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusersof those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty. The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained or hard andmetallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress the heart; but the cry oftrue passion is heard in its finer pages; from amid the turmoil andsmoke, living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which illuminatethe gloom. The influence of _Les Tragiques_ may still be felt inpassages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant eloquence. 

In the midst of strife, however, there were men who pursued thedisinterested service of humanity and whose work made for peace. Thegreat surgeon Ambroise Paré, full of tolerance and deeply pious, advanced his healing art on the battle-field or amid the ravages ofpestilence, and left a large contribution to the literature of science. Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the inventor of"rustic figulines, " the designer of enamelled cups and platters, buta true student of nature, who would substitute the faithfulobservation of phenomena for vain and ambitious theory. Olivier deSerres, another disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helpedto enrich France by supporting Henri IV. In the introduction of theindustry in silk, and amassed his knowledge and experience in hisadmirably-written _Théâtre d'Agriculture_. At a later date Antoinede Montchrestien, adventurous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal, the writer of tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with theclassical school of later years, became the advocate of aprotectionist and a colonial policy in his _Traicté de l'OEconomiePolitique_; the style of his essay towards economic reform has someof the passion and enthusiasm of a poet. 

A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time was soughtby some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621), eminent as a magistrate, did not desert his post of duty; he pleadedeloquently, as chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, onbehalf of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on Frencheloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of public speaking abovelaboured pedantry to true human discourse. But while taking part inthe contentious progress of events, he saw the flow of human affairsas from an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends whichform his treatise _De la Constance et Consolation ès CalamitésPubliques_, Du Vair's counsels are those of courage and resignation, not unmingled with hope. He rendered into French the stoical moralsof Epictetus; and in his own _Sainte Philosophie_ and _PhilosophieMorale des Stoïques_ he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather thanwith genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to show how humanreason can lead the way to those ethical truths which are the guidinglights of conduct. 

Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be found bylimitation; a few established truths will, after all, carry us fromthe cradle to the grave; and beyond the bounds of certitude lies alimitless and fascinating field for observation and dubiousconjecture. Amid the multitude of new ideas which the revival ofantiquity brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival churches, amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how delightful to possessone's soul in quiet, to be satisfied with the needful knowledge, smallthough it be, which is vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind withevery opinion and every varying humour of that curious and waywardcreature man! And who so wayward, who so wavering as one's self inall those parts of our composite being which are subject to the playof time and circumstance? Such, in an age of confusion working towardsclearness, an age of belligerency tending towards concord, were thereflections of a moralist, the most original of his century--Michelde Montaigne. 

MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was born at a château inPérigord, in the year 1533. His father, whom Montaigne alwaysremembered with affectionate reverence, was a man of original ideas. He entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to attachhim to the people; educated him in Latin as if his native tongue;roused him at morning from sleep to the sound of music. From his sixthto his thirteenth year Montaigne was at the Collège de Guyenne, wherehe took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by Muret andBuchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father as councillor in the court_des aides_ of Périgueux, the members of which were soon afterwardsincorporated in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had notdestined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy; he saw too manysides of every question; he chose rather to fail in justice than inhumanity. In 1565 he acquired a large fortune by marriage, and havinglost his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to enjoya tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling through books. He had published, a year before, in fulfilment of his father's desire, a translation of the _Theologia Naturalis_ of Raimond de Sebonde, a Spanish philosopher of the fifteenth century; and now he occupiedhimself in preparing for the press the writings of his dead friendLa Boétie. Love for his father and love for his friend were the twopassions of Montaigne's life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat, in company with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour fortranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to enrich the marginsof his books with notes, and his earliest essays may be regarded asan extension of such notes; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, hisfavourites; afterwards, the volume which he read with most enjoyment, and annotated most curiously, was that of his own life. 

And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward monotony andinternal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. Hewas of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic";a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing brightcompanions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood;a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things tothe best; cheerful among his children; careless of exercisingauthority; incapable of household management; trustful and kindtowards his neighbours; indulgent in his judgments, yet warm in hisadmiration of old, heroic virtue. His health, which in boyhood hadbeen robust, was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. Hetravelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a serious amusement, the varieties of men and manners. While still absent from France, in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; hehesitated in accepting an honourable but irksome public office; theKing permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed. Two years laterthe mayor was re-elected; it was a period of difficulty; a Catholicand a Royalist, he had a heretic brother, and himself yielded to thecharm of Henri of Navarre; "for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, forthe Guelph a Ghibelline. " When, in 1585, pestilence raged in Bordeaux, Montaigne's second period of office had almost expired; he quittedthe city, and the election of his successor took place in his absence. His last years were brightened by the friendship--almost filial--ofMlle. De Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards editor, of the_Essais_. In 1592 Montaigne died, when midway in his sixtieth year. 

The first two books of the _Essais_ were published by their authorin 1580; in 1588 they appeared in an augmented text, with the additionof the third book. The text superintended by Mlle. De Gournay, basedupon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is of the year1595. 

The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to unity, may be foundin the fact that all its topics are concerned with a commonsubject--the nature of man; that the writer accepts himself as theexample of humanity most open to his observation; and that the sametranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere present. Man, asconceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven, while between the extremes lies the averageman, who may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances makehim. And as the species varies indefinitely, so each individual variesendlessly from himself: his conscience controls his temperament; histemperament betrays his conscience; external events transform himfrom what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral being upon therock of philosophical dogma? The rock gives way under our feet, andscatters as if sand. Such truth as we can attain by reason is relativetruth; let us pass through knowledge to a wise acceptance of ourignorance; let us be contented with the probabilities which are allthat our reason can attain. The truths of conduct, as far as theyare ascertainable, were known long since to the ancient moralists. Can any virtue surpass the old Roman virtue? We believe in God, although we know little about His nature or His operations; and whyshould we disbelieve in Christianity, which happens to be part ofthe system of things under which we are born? But why, also, shouldwe pay such a compliment to opinions different from our own as toburn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva to the Pope ofRome? Let each of us ask himself, "Que sais-je?"--"What do I reallyknow?" and the answer will serve to temper our zeal. 

While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the conclusions of theintellect, when they pass beyond a narrow bound, he pays a homageto the force of will; his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarchis ardent. An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through hisimagination; but for us and for himself, who are no heroes, theappropriate form of Stoical virtue is moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference, or at most a disinterested curiosity, inmatters which lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life, such as it is; let us resign ourselves to death; and let theresignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend ourselves in attemptedreforms of the world, of society, of governments, is vain. The worldwill go its own way; it is for us to accept things as they are, toobserve the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile at themif we please, and to extract our private gains from a view of thereformers, the enthusiasts, the dogmatists, the credulous, thecombatants; there is one heroism possible for us--the heroism of goodsense. "It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine, " so weread on the last page of Florio's translation of the _Essais_, "fora man to know how to enjoy his being loyally. We seek for otherconditions because we understand not the use of ours; and go out ofourselves, forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We maylong enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, yet must we go withour legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sitwe upon our own tail. The best and most commendable lives, and bestpleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common mould and human model;but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handledmore tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is the protectorof health and fountain of all wisdom; but blithe and social. " Andwith a stanza of Epicurean optimism from Horace the Essay closes. 

Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of Montaigne. It is conveyed to the reader without system, in the most informalmanner, in a series of discourses which seem to wander at their ownwill, resembling a bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery, enlivened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from history, observations of curious manners and customs, offering constantly toview the person of Montaigne himself in the easiest undress. The style, although really carefully studied and superintended, has an air oflight facility, hardly interposing between the author and his reader;the book is of all books the most sociable, a living companion ratherthan a book, playful and humorous, amiable and well bred, learnedwithout pedantry, and wise without severity. 

During the last three years of his life Montaigne enjoyed thefriendship of a disciple who was already celebrated for his eloquenceas a preacher. PIERRE CHARRON (1541-1603), legist and theologian, under the influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philosopher. It was as a theologian that he wrote his book of the _Trois Verités_, which attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, the truth ofChristianity, and the exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion. It was as a philosopher, in the _Traité de la Sagesse_, that hesystematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. Instead ofputting the question, "Que sais-je?" Charron ventures the assertion, "Je ne sais. " He exhibits man's weakness, misery, and bondage to thepassions; gives counsel for the enfranchisement of the mind; andstudies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and valiance. God has created man, says Charron, to know the truth; never can heknow it of himself or by human means, and one who despairs of reasonis in the best position for accepting divine instruction; a Pyrrhonistat least will never be a heretic; even if religion be regarded asan invention of man, it is an invention which has its uses. Not afew passages of the _Sagesse_ are directly borrowed, with slightrehandling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair; but, instead ofMontaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and formalindictment of humanity; we miss the genial humour and kindly temperof the master; we miss the amiable egotism and the play of a versatilespirit; we miss the charm of an incomparable literary style. 

BOOK THE THIRD_THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER ILITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER

With the restoration of order under Henri IV. The delights of peacebegan to be felt; a mundane society, polished and pleasure-loving, began to be constituted, and before many years had passed theinfluence of women and of the _salon_ appeared in literature. Shouldsuch a society be permitted to remain oblivious to spiritual truth, or to repose on the pillow of scepticism provided by Charron andMontaigne? Might it not be captured for religion, if religion werepresented in its most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy, a gentle discipline of the heart? If one who wore the Christian armourshould throw over his steel some robe of courtly silk, with floraladornments, might he not prove a persuasive champion of the Cross?Such was the hope of FRANÇOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva, when, in 1608, he published his _Introduction à la Vie Dêvote_. Theangelic doctor charmed by his mere presence, his grace of person, his winning smile, his dove's eyes; he showed how amiable piety mightbe; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms; he strewed the pathto heaven with roses; he conquered by docility; yet under hissweetness lay strength, and to methodise and popularise moralself-superintendence was to achieve much. The _Traité de l'Amour deDieu_ (1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mysticaldevotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every child of God. With his tender and ardent devotion, something of a poet's sentimentfor nature was united; but mysticism and poetry were both subservientto his aim of regulating the conduct of the heart; he desired to showhow one may remain in the world, and yet not be of the world; by personalconverse and by his spiritual letters he became the director ofcourtiers and of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which hefounded at Annecy expresses his spirit--_flores fructusqueperennes_--flowers for their own sake, but chiefly for the sake offruit. Much of the genius for holiness of the courtly saint has passedinto the volume of reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion anddisciple--_l'Esprit de Saint François de Sales_. 

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen and ladies meet toadmire and be admired, needs other outlets for its imagination thanthat of the primrose way to Paradise. The labour of the fields hadinspired Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his _Théâtred'Agriculture_, a work directed towards utility; the romance of thefields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a French Arcady, werethe inspiration of the endless prose bucolics found in the _Astrée_of HONORÉ D'URFÉ. The Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passedfrom Italy to Spain; through the _Diana_ of the Spanish Montemayorit passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife there wasa fascination in visions of a peace, into which, if warfare entered, the strange irruption only enhanced an habitual calm. A wholegeneration waited long to learn the issue of the passion of Celadonand Astrée. The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610, or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when its authorwas no longer living. [1] The scene is laid in the fields of d'Urfé'sfamiliar Forez and on the banks of the Lignon; the time is ofMerovingian antiquity. The shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicionof faithlessness from the presence of his beloved Astrée, seeks deathbeneath the stream; he is saved by the nymphs, escapes the amorouspursuit of Galatea, assumes a feminine garb, and, protected by theDruid Adamas, has the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess. At length he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches;true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the devouring lionsof the Fountain of Love, the beasts refuse their prey; the venerableDruid discreetly guides events; Celadon's fidelity receives itsreward in marriage, and the banks of the Lignon become a scene ofuniversal joy. The colours of the _Astrée_ are faded now as thoseof some ancient tapestry, but during many years its success wasprodigious. D'Urfé's highest honour, of many, is the confession ofLa Fontaine:--

 "_Étant petit garçon je lisais son roman, Et je le lis encore ayant la barbe grise. _"

The _Astrée_ won its popularity, in part because it united the oldattraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that of the newerpastoral; in part because it idealised the gallantries and developedthe amorous casuistry of the day, not without a real sense of thepower of love; in part because it was supposed to exhibit idealportraits of distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of anumerous progeny; and as the heroic romance of the seventeenth centuryis derived in direct succession from the loves of Celadon and Astrée, so the comic romance, beside all that it owes to the tradition ofthe _esprit gaulois_, owes something to the mocking gaiety with whichd'Urfé exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of hisinconstant shepherd Hylas. 

[Footnote 1: It should be noted that the close of the _Astrée_ isby D'Urfé's secretary Baro. ]

In the political and social reconstruction which followed the civiland religious wars, the need of discipline and order in literaturewas felt; in this province, also, unity under a law was seen to bedesirable. The work of the Pléiade had in a great measure failed;they had attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetrywas still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice and fantasyto obedience to law was the work of FRANÇOIS DE MALHERBE. Born atCaen in 1555, he had published in 1587 his _Larmes de Saint Pierre_, an imitation of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which hismaturer judgment must have condemned. It was not until about hisfortieth year that he found his true direction. Du Vair, with whomhe was acquainted, probably led him to a true conception of the natureof eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understanding, withno affluence of imagination and no excess of sensibility, Malherbewas well qualified for establishing lyrical poetry upon the basisof reason, and of general rather than individual sentiment. He chosethe themes of his odes from topics of public interest, or foundedthem on those commonplaces of emotion which are part of the possessionof all men who think and feel. If he composed his verses for somegreat occasion, he sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be regardedby the community at large; if he consoled a friend for losses causedby death, he held his personal passion under restraint; he generalised, and was content to utter more admirably than others the acceptedtruths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the inevitable doomof death. What he gained by such a process of abstraction, he lostin vivid characterisation; his imagery lacks colour; the movementof his verse is deliberate and calculated; his ideas are rigorouslyenchained one to another. 

It has been said that poetry--the overflow of individual emotion--isoverheard; while oratory--the appeal to an audience--is heard. Theprocesses of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyricalcry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquencethrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenthcentury in France--its odes, its satires, its epistles, its nobledramatic scenes--and much of its prose literature are of the natureof oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of suchprose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of thelanguage, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employthe standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the peopleof Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrumentof the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things wereachieved by his successors. He methodised and regulatedversification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning alllicence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to thesense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said thathe rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which heprescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery ofgenius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thoughtno pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic ofordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and untilthe day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived. 

Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the historyof seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age torationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. Itcannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he hadinitiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lackedsustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a truefeeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the _Bergeries_(1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience neededfor perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than anartist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example, and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art wasat a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau. 

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While hepleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice ofMATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephewof the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and tothe memory of the Pléiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retortwas speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of wordsand syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than _proserde la rime et rimer de la prose_. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to acertain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the geniusof his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances toobservation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his mastersHorace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writingshe had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious, like those of the Pléiade, butvigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedyhe anticipates some of Molière's feeling for the humorousperversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, andpopular. The classical school of later years could not reject Regnier. Boileau declared that no poet before Molière was so well acquaintedwith the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal studyof life he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled againstformal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let hisideas and passions lead him where they would. His satires are thoseof a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brushwith a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and itstypes of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general intheir intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle, "le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid muchthat is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whoseveil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses withgrowing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way sheshould not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe. Regnier confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life; hadit been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; asit was, he passed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victimof his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure. 

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, whilehonouring the genius of Malherbe, pronounced, like Regnier, forfreedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of geniusshould be a law to himself--a poet whom his contemporaries esteemedtoo highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustlydepreciated--THÉOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, Théophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. Hehas been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the firstof the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic _Pyrameet Thisbé_, though disfigured by those _concetti_ which the ItalianMarini--an honoured guest at the French court--and the invasion ofSpanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touches of genuinepathos. The odes of Théophile are of free and musical movement, hisdescriptions of natural beauty are graciously coloured, his judgmentin literary matters was sound and original; but he lacked the patientworkmanship which art demands, and in proclaiming himself on the sideof freedom as against order, he was retrograding from the positionwhich had been secured for poetry under the leadership of Malherbe. 

With social order came the desire for social refinement, and followingthe desire for refinement came the prettinesses and affectations ofover-curious elegance. Peace returned to France with the monarchyof Henri IV. , but the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherinede Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother was a great Romanlady, and whose father had been French ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, anda few years later opened her _salon_ of the Hôtel de Rambouillet tosuch noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiersof womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged anddecorated for the purposes of pleasure; the _chambre bleue_ becamethe sanctuary of polite society, where Arthénice (an anagram for"Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch thelute was well; to converse with wit and refinement was something moreadmirable; the _salon_ became a mart for the exchange of ideas; thefashion of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and thedaintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither cameMalherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century, Saint-Évremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his playsfrom the _Cid_ to _Rodogune_; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he had neverheard one preach so early or so late. 

As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angélique attained an age to dividetheir mother's authority in the _salon_, its sentiment grewquintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity. They censured _Polyeucte_; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic"perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid theirheads together over Descartes' _Discours de la Méthode_, andprofoundly admired the philosopher; they were enraptured by themadrigals on flowers, more than three score in number, offered asthe _Guirlande de Julie_ on Mademoiselle's fête; they gravely debatedthe question which should be the approved spelling, _muscadin_ or_muscardin_. In 1649 they were sundered into rival parties--_Uranistes_and _Jobelins_--tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respectivemerits of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The word_précieux_ is said to date from 1650. The Marquise de Rambouilletsurvived Molière's satiric comedy _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ (1659) byseveral years. Mme. De Sévigné, Mme. De la Fayette, Fléchier, thepreacher of fashion, were among the illustrious personages of thedecline of her _salon_. We smile at its follies and affectations; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying things that were petty, it didsomething to refine manners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearnessand grace of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenueto social distinction. Through the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and the_salons_ which both in Paris and the provinces imitated its modes, andpushed them to extravagance, the influence of women on literaturebecame a power for good and for evil. 

The "Works, " as they were styled, of VINCENT VOITURE(1598-1648)--posthumously published--represent one side of thespirit of the _salon_. Capable of something higher, he lived toexhibit his ingenuity and wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turnedverse, now by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, hewas for long a presiding genius in the _chambre bleue_ of Arthénice. His play of mind was unhappily without a subject, and to be wittyon nothings puts a strain on wit. Voiture expends much labour on beinglight, much serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters wereadmired as models of ingenious elegance; the life has long sincepassed from their raillery and badinage, but Voiture may be creditedwith having helped to render French prose pliant for the uses ofpleasure. 

The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at leastduring the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attentionthey may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have everpossessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by taggingplatitudes with points. The _Saint Louis_ of Lemoyne, the _Clovis_of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the _Alaric_ of Scudéry, the_Charlemagne_ of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of thevanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his _LaPucelle d'Orléans_; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificentlyin 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos liestill inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain'sgenius; history is ennobled by an allegorical intention; Francebecomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, isthe human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire ofBoileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain. 

In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated from the trammelsof verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend ofFrançois de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urféhad initiated; but the spirit of the _Astrée_ would not unite in asingle stream with the spirit of the _Introduction à la Vie Dévote_. Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which hewaged against the innocent conjunction _car_, never to be admittedinto polite literature, than for his encyclopædic romance_Polexandre_, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, ascopious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for thefirst time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the _Beau Ténébreux_ of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, secureda reading for his unreadable _Endymion_ by the supposed transparenceof his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlinrelieved the amorous exaltations of his _Ariane_, a tale of the timeof Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These arebooks on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries. 

But the romances of LA CALPRENÈDE and of GEORGES and MADELEINE DESCUDÉRY might well be taken down by any lover of literature whopossesses the virtue of fortitude. Since d'Urfé's day the taste forpastoral had declined; the newer romance was gallant and heroic. Legend or history supplied its framework; but the central motive wasideal love at odds with circumstance, love the inspirer of limitlessdevotion and daring. The art of construction was imperfectlyunderstood; the narratives are of portentous length; ten, twelve, twenty volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the adventures. In _Cassandre_, in _Cléopâtre_, in _Pharamond_, La Calprenèdeexhibits a kind of universal history; the dissolution of theMacedonian empire, the decline of the empire of Rome, the beginningsof the French monarchy are successively presented. But the chiefpersonages are idealised portraits drawn from the society of theauthor's time. The spirit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet is transferredto the period when the Scythian Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius; the Prince de Condé masks in _Cléopâtre_ asCoriolan; Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwithstandingthe faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of La Calprenède'sinterminable romances, a certain spirit of real heroism, offspring ofthe writer's ardent imagination and bright southern temper, breathesthrough them. They were the delight of Mme. De Sévigné and of LaFontaine; even in the eighteenth century they were the companions ofCrébillon, and were not forgotten by Rousseau. 

Still more popular was _Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus_. Mdlle. DeScudéry, the "Sapho" of her Saturday _salon_, a true _précieuse_, as good of heart and quick of wit as she was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment and metaphysics of love to match thegasconading exploits of her brother's invention. It was the time notonly of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent adventuresand fantastic chivalry. Under the names of Medes and Persians couldbe discovered the adventurers, the gallants, the fine ladies of theseventeenth century. In _Clélie_ an attempt is made to study thecuriosities of passion; it is a manual of polite love and elegantmanners; in its _carte de Tendre_ we can examine the topography oflove-land, trace the routes to the three cities of "Tendre, " and learnthe dangers of the way. Thus the heroic romance reached its term;its finer spirit became the possession of the tragic drama, whereit was purified and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered insearch of its true self, and had not succeeded in the quest. When_Gil Blas_ appeared, it was seen that the novel of incident must alsobe the novel of character, and that in its imitation of real lifeit could appropriate some of the possessions which by that time comedyhad lost. 

The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not afew of the intimates of the Hôtel de Rambouillet found a relief fromtheir fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in theunedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody ofthe literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at oncea disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the_salon_, author of at least one beautiful ode--_La Solitude_--breathinga gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets deSaint-Sorlin, in his comedy _Les Visionnaires_ (1637), mocked the_précieuses_, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. Oneof his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one isenamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for thestage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imaginedpotency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SORELexpressed, in his _Histoire Comique de Francion_, a Rabelaisian andpicaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the _esprit gaulois_ againstthe homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoralcavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In _Le BergerExtravagant_ (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his ownday--an "anti-romance"--which recounts the pastoral follies of a youngParisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreamsas the _Astrée_ had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded withpedantry. 

The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAULSCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbé, unconcerned withecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigné'sgranddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the mostinfluential woman in all the history of France. In his _VirgileTravesti_ he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, whichtheir own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards tooblivion. His _Roman Comique_ (1651), a short and lively narrativeof the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicatedistresses of the ideal romance. The _Roman Bourgeois_ (1666) ofANTOINE FURETIÈRE is a belated example of the group to which_Francion_ belongs. The great event of its author's life was hisexclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the groundthat he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary theresults of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, thenin progress, of the learned company. His _Roman_ is a remarkable studyof certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplaceworld needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its trivialityacceptable, and such relief Furetière will not afford. 

Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet with a certainkinship to them, lie the more fantastic satires of that fieryswashbuckler--"démon des braves"--CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), _Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune_, and _HistoireComique des États et Empires du Soleil_. Cyrano's taste, caught bythe mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable. To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. Hiscomedy _Le Pédant Joué_ has the honour of having furnished Molièrewith the most laughable scene of the _Fourberies de Scapin_. Thevoyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, theirmanners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacitiesand caprices of invention with a portion of satiric truth; they livedin the memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator ofMicromégas. 

CHAPTER IITHE FRENCH ACADEMY--PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)--RELIGION (PASCAL)

The French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters, expressedthe growing sense that anarchy in literature must end, and thatdiscipline and law must be recognised in things of the mind. It isone of the glories of RICHELIEU that he perceived that literaturehas a public function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair ofthe State. His own writings, or those composed under hisdirection--memoirs; letters; the _Succincte Narration_, which setsforth his policy; the _Testament_, which embodies his counsel instatecraft--belong less to literature than to French history. Buthe honoured the literary art; he enjoyed the drama; he devised plotsfor plays, and found docile poets--his Society of five--to carry outhis designs. 

In 1629 Valentin Conrart, secretary to the King, and one of thefrequenters of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, was accustomed to receiveweekly a group of distinguished men of letters and literary amateurs, who read their manuscripts aloud, discussed the merits of new works, and considered questions of criticism, grammar, and language. Tidings of these reunions having reached Richelieu, he proposed thatthe society should receive an official status. By the influence ofChapelain the objections of certain members were overcome. The_Académie Française_ held its first sitting on March 13, 1634; threeyears later the letters patent were registered; the number of memberswas fixed at forty; when vacancies occurred, new members were co-optedfor life. Its history to the year 1652 was published in the followingyear by Pellisson, and obtained him admission to a chair. Thefunctions of the learned company were to ascertain, as far as possible, the French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as a literarytribunal if members consented to submit their works to its examination. There were hopes that authoritative treatises on rhetoric and poeticsmight be issued with its sanction; but these hopes were not fulfilled. A dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in 1638, was, however, undertaken; progressing by slow degrees, the first editionappeared in 1694. Its aim was not to record every word of which anexample could be found, but to select those approved by the usageof cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent authors. Thus it tended to establish for literary use an aristocracy of words;and while literary expression gained in dignity and intellectualprecision, gained as an instrument of reason and analysis, suchregulation created a danger that it might lose in elements that haveaffinities with the popular mind--vivacity, colour, picturesqueness, variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply interested inthe dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650), a gentleman of Savoie, whose concern for the purity of the language, as determined by thebest usage, led him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreignphraseology. His _Remarques sur la Langue Française_ served as a guideto his fellow-members of the Academy. Unhappily he was wholly ignorantof the history of the language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediatedbetween the scholarship and the polite society of the time. But whileVaugelas was almost wholly occupied with the vocabulary and grammar, Chapelain did much to enforce the principles of the classical schoolupon literary art. The Academy took up the work which the _salons_had begun; its spirit was more robust and masculine than theirs; itwas freer from passing fashions, affectations, prettinesses; itleaned on the side of intellect rather than of sentiment. 

In what may be called the regulation of French prose the influenceof JEAN-LOUIS GUEZ DE BALZAC (1594-1654) was considerable. He hadlearnt from Malherbe that a literary craftsman should leave nothingto chance, that every effect should be exactly calculated. It washis task to apply to prose the principles which had guided his masterin verse. His _Lettres_, of which a first series appeared in 1624, and a second twelve years later, are not the spontaneous intercourseof friend with friend, but rather studious compositions which dealwith matters of learning, literature, morals, religion, politics, events, and persons of the time. Their contents are of littleimportance; Balzac was not an original thinker, but he had the artof arranging his ideas, and of expressing them in chosen wordsmarshalled in ample and sonorous sentences. A certain fire he had, a limited power of imagination, a cultivated judgment, a taste, whichsuffered from bad workmanship; a true affection for rural life. Thesehardly furnished him with matter adequate to support his elevatedstyle. His letters were regarded as models of eloquence; but it iseloquence manufactured artificially and applied to subjects, notproceeding from them. His _Prince_, a treatise on the virtues of kings, with a special reference to Louis XIII. , was received coldly. His_Aristippe_, which dealt with the manners and morals of a court, andhis _Socrate Chrétien_, a study in ethics and theology, were effortsbeyond his powers. His gift to literature was a gift of method andof style; others who worked in marble learned something from hisstudious modellings in clay. 

To regulate thought required an intellect of a different order fromthat of Balzac, "emperor of orators. " It was the task of RENÉ DESCARTES(1596-1650). A child of delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became, under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both inlanguages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the demand andthe necessity of his mind. Solitary investigations in mathematicswere for a time succeeded by the life of a soldier in the Netherlandsand Holland. The stream of thought was flowing, however, underground. Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young volunteer wasin winter quarters at Neuburg, on the Danube, on a memorable day thefirst principles of a new philosophical method presented themselvesto his intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter. After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and a period ofstudious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland for his place of abode(1629), and though often shifting his residence, little disturbedsave by the controversies of philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutchtheologians, he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought. An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court was acceptedin 1649. The change in his habits and the severity of a northern winterproved fatal to the health which Descartes had carefully cherished;in February of 1650 he was dead. 

The mathematical cycle in the development of Descartes' system ofthought preceded the metaphysical. His great achievements inanalytical geometry, in optics, in physical research, hisexplanation of the laws of nature, and their application in his theoryof the material universe, belong to the history of science. Algebraand geometry led him towards his method in metaphysical speculation. How do all primary truths verify themselves to the human mind? Bythe fact that an object is clearly and distinctly conceived. Theobjects of knowledge fall into certain groups or series; in eachseries there is some simple and dominant element which may beimmediately apprehended, and in relation to which the subordinateelements become intelligible. Let us accept nothing on hearsay orauthority; let us start with doubt in order to arrive at certitude;let us test the criterion of certitude to the uttermost. There isone fact which I cannot doubt, even in doubting all--I think, andif I think, I exist--"Je pense, donc je suis. " No other evidence ofthis is needed than that our conception is clear and distinct; inthis clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certitude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking substance. Butthe idea of an infinite, perfect Being is also present to ourintellect; we, finite, imperfect beings, could not have made it;unmake it we cannot; and in the conception of perfection that ofexistence is involved. Therefore God exists, and therefore the lawsof our consciousness, which are His laws, cannot deceive us. We haveseen what mind or spirit signifies--a thinking substance. Reduce ouridea of matter to clearness and distinctness, and what do we find?The idea of an extended substance. Our complex humanity, made up ofsoul and body, comprises both kinds of substance. But thought andextension have nothing in common; their union can only be conceivedas the collocation at a single point of a machine with that whichraises it above a mere machine. As for the lower animals, they areno more than automata. 

Descartes' _Principia_ and his _Meditationes_ were written in Latin. The _Discours de la Méthode_ (1637) and the later _Traité desPassions_ showed how the French language could be adapted to thepurposes of the reason. Such eloquence as is found in Descartes isthat of thought illuminating style. The theory of the passionsanticipates some of the tendencies of modern psychology in itsphysical investigations. No one, however, affirmed more absolutelythan Descartes the freedom of the will--unless, indeed, we regardit as determined by God: it cannot directly control the passions, but it can indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination; itis the supreme mistress of action, however the passions may opposeits fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes was not disposed to bethe martyr of thought. Warned by the example of Galileo, he did notdesire to expose himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions. He separated the province of faith from that of reason: "I revereour theology, " he said; but he held that theology demanded otherlights than those of the unaided powers of man. In its own province, he made the reason his absolute guide, and with results whichtheologians might regard as dangerous. 

The spirit of Descartes' work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the lightof reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed mana spirit; he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the classicalperiod sought also for general truths, and subordinated imaginationto reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries;it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroicvictories of the will. 

Descartes' opponent, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), epicurean in hisphysics, an empiricist, though an inconsistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language as the vehicle for his ideas. A group ofwriters whose tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le Vayer inprose, may serve as representatives of art surrendering itself tovulgar pleasures, and thought doubting even its doubts, and findingrepose in indifference. 

The true successor of Descartes in French philosophy, eminent in thesecond half of the century, was NICOLAS DE MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715). Soul and body, Descartes had shown, are in their very nature alieneach from the other. How then does the soul attain a knowledge ofthe external world? In God, the absolute substance, are the ideasof all things; in God we behold those ideas which matter could neverconvey to us, and which we could never ourselves originate; in Godwe see and know all things. The _Recherche de la Vérité_ (1674-75)was admirably written and was widely read. The theologians found itdangerous; and when six years later Malebranche published his _Traitéde la Nature et de la Grâce_, characterised briefly and decidedlyby Bossuet as "pulchra, nova, falsa, " at Bossuet's request bothArnauld and Fénelon attempted to refute "the extravagant Oratorian. "His place in the evolution of philosophy lies between Descartes andSpinoza, who developed and completed the doctrine of Descartes. Inthe transition from dualism to monism Malebranche served as amediator. 

Religious thought in the seventeenth century, wedded to an austeremorality, is expressed by the writers of Port-Royal, and those whowere in sympathy with them. They could not follow the flowery pathof piety--not the less the narrow path because it was cheerful--pointedout by St. François de Sales. Between nature and grace they saw a deepand wide abyss. In closest connection with them was one man of thehighest genius--author of the _Provinciales_ and the _Pensées_--whosespiritual history was more dramatic than any miracle-play or moralityof the Middle Ages. 

BLAISE PASCAL was born at Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. His father, apresident of the Court of Aids at Clermont, a man of intellect andcharacter, guided his education in languages, natural science, andmathematics. The boy's precocity was extraordinary; at sixteen hehad written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited theastonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study, preying upona nervous constitution, consumed his health and strength; at an earlyage he suffered from temporary paralysis. When about twenty-threehe fell under the religious influences of certain disciples of St. Cyran, read eagerly in the writings of Jansen and Arnauld, andresolved to live for God alone. But to restore his health he was urgedto seek recreation, and by degrees the interests and pleasures ofthe world took hold upon him; the master of his mind was the scepticalMontaigne; he moved in the mundane society of the capital; and ithas been conjectured from hints in his _Discours sur les Passionsde l'Amour_ that he loved the sister of his friend, the Duc de Roannez, and had the vain hope of making her his wife. 

The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart, and neededonly to be reawakened. The reawakening came in 1654 through thepersuasions of his sister, Jacqueline, who had abandoned the worldtwo years previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal. Theabbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight miles fromVersailles, was presided over by Jacqueline Arnauld, the MèreAngélique, and a brotherhood of solitaries, among whom were severalof the Arnauld family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637. With this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually asolitary, associated himself at the close of 1654. An escape fromsudden danger in a carriage accident, and a vision or ecstasy whichcame to him, co-operated in his conversion. After his death, copiesof a fragmentary and passionate writing referring to this period--theso-called "amulet" of Pascal--were found upon his person; its words, "renonciation totale et douce, " and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs dejoie, " express something of his resolution and his rapture. 

The affair of the _Provinciales_, and the design of an apology forChristianity with which his _Pensées_ are connected, together withcertain scientific studies and the deepening passion of religion, make up what remained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, butin his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted by hisascetic practices and the inward flame of his soul, Pascal died onAugust 19, 1662. "May God never leave me" were his last words. 

With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist we are not hereconcerned. In it "we see, " writes a scientific authority, "thestrongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, andseizing upon, mastering, and pursuing further everything that wasfresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of more than twohundred years, we can still point to much in exact science that isabsolutely his; and we can indicate infinitely more which is due tohis inspiration. "

Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have this in common, that both were movements in that revival of Roman Catholicism whichwas stimulated by the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But theJesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art of piety, inwhich a system of accommodation was recognised as a means of drawingworldlings to the Church; the Jansenists held up a severe moral ideal, and humbled human nature in presence of the absolute need andresistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like the Jesuits, but in adifferent spirit, the Port-Royalists devoted themselves much to thetask of education. They honoured classical studies; they honouredscience, dialectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry weresubstantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. Isaac le Maistrede Sacy and others translated and annotated the Bible. Theirtheologian, moralist, and controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of _Essais de Morale_ (1671), if not profound or brilliant, was the possessor of learning, good sense, good feeling, and religiousfaith. Under the influence of St. Cyran, the Port-Royalists were inclose sympathy with the teaching of Jansen, Bishop of Ypres; thewritings of their great theologian Antoine Arnauld were vigorouslyanti-Jesuitical. In 1653 five propositions, professedly extractedfrom Jansen's _Augustinus_, were condemned by a Papal bull. Theinsulting triumph of the Jesuits drew Arnauld again into controversy;and on a question concerning divine grace he was condemned in January1656 by the Sorbonne. "You who are clever and inquiring" (_curieux_), said Arnauld to Pascal, "you ought to do something. " Next day waswritten the first of Pascal's _Lettres à un Provincial_, and on 23rdJanuary it was issued to the public; a second followed within a week;the success was immense. The writer concealed his identity under thepseudonym "Louis de Montalte. "

The _Lettres Provinciales_ are eighteen in number. The first threeand the last three deal with the affair of Arnauld and the Sorbonne, and the questions under discussion as to the nature and the need ofdivine grace. In the opening letters the clearest intellectualinsight and the deepest seriousness of spirit are united with thefinest play of irony, and even with the temper of comedy. The supposedLouis de Montalte, seeking theological lights from a doctor of theSorbonne, finds only how hopelessly divided in opinion are theopponents of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel withspeech. In the twelve letters intervening between the third and thesixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, and deploys an incomparablyskilful attack on the moral theology of the Jesuits. For the rigidthey may have a stricter morality, but for the lax their casuistrysupplies a pliable code of morals, which, by the aid of ingeniousdistinctions, can find excuses for the worst of crimes. With forceof logic, with fineness of irony, with energy of moral indignation, with a literary style combining strength and lightness, Pascalpresses his irresistible assault. The effect of the "ProvincialLetters" was to carry the discussion of morals and theology beforea new court of appeal--not the Sorbonne, but the public intelligenceand the unsophisticated conscience of men. To French prose they addeda masterpiece and a model. 

The subject of the _Provinciales_ is in part a thing of the past;the _Pensées_ deal with problems which can never lose their interest. Among Pascal's papers were found, after his early death, manyfragments which his sister, Madame Périer, and his friends recognisedas of rare value; but the editors of the little volume which appearedin 1670, imagining that they could safeguard its orthodoxy, and evenamend its style, freely omitted and altered what Pascal had written. It was not until 1844 that a complete and genuine text was establishedin the edition of M. Faugère. We can hardly hope to arrange thefragments so as to exhibit the design of that apology for Christianity, with which many of them were doubtless connected, but the mainoutlines of Pascal's body of thought can be clearly discerned. 

The intellect of Pascal, so powerful in its grasp of scientific truth, could find by its own researches no certitude in the sphere ofphilosophy and religion. He had been deeply influenced by thesceptical mind of Montaigne. He found within him a passionate cravingfor certitude; man is so constituted that he can never be at restuntil he rests in knowledge of the truth; but man, as he now exists, is incapable of ascertaining truth; he is weak and miserable, andyet the very consciousness of his misery is evidence of his greatness;"Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;" "Manis but a reed, the feeblest of created things, but a reed whichthinks. " How is this riddle of human nature to be explained? Onlyin one way--by a recognition of the truth taught by religion, thathuman nature is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethronedking. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be overcome? Onlyin one way--through union with God made man; with Jesus Christ, thecentre in which alone we find our weakness and the divine strength. Through Christ man is abased and lifted up--abased without despair, and lifted up without pride; in Him all contradictions are reconciled. Such, in brief, is the vital thought from which Pascal's apologeticproceeds. It does not ignore any of the external evidences ofChristianity; but the irresistible evidence is that derived from theproblem of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit--aproblem which religion alone can solve, and needs which Christ alonecan satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts" are those of an eminent intelligence. But they are more than thoughts; they are passionate lyrical criesof a heart which had suffered, and which had found more thanconsolation; they are the interpretation of the words of hisamulet--"Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie. " The union of the ardourof a poet or a saint with the scientific rigour of a great geometer, of wit and brilliance with a sublime pathos, is among the rarestphenomena in literature; all this and more is found in Pascal. 

CHAPTER IIITHE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE)

The classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century was literary, oratorical, lyrical; it was anything but dramatic. Its lastrepresentative, ANTOINE DE MONTCHRESTIEN (1575-1621), a true poet, and one whose life was a series of strange adventures, wrote, likehis predecessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for thetheatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen not onlyin the chants of the chorus, but in the general character of his dramas, he had little feeling for life and movement; his personages expoundtheir feelings in admirable verse; they do not act. He attempted atragedy--L'Écossaise--on the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, a themebeyond his powers. In essentials he belonged rather to the past, whosetraditions he inherited, than to the future of the stage. But hisfeeling for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for thepathetic founded on admiration, and together with these the firmstructure of his verse, seem to warrant one in thinking of him asin some respects a forerunner of Corneille. 

At the Hôtel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confrères de la Passionstill exhibited the mediæval drama. It passed away when their theatrewas occupied by the company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his paya dramatist of inexhaustible fertility--ALEXANDRE HARDY (_c_. 1560to _c_. 1630). During thirty years, from the opening of theseventeenth century onwards, Hardy, author of some six or sevenhundred pieces, of which forty-one remain, reigned as master of thestage. [1] A skilful improvisor, devoid of genius, devoid of taste, he is the founder of the French theatre; he first made a true appealto the people; he first showed a true feeling for theatrical effects. Wherever material suitable for his purposes could be caughtat--ancient or modern, French, Italian, or Spanish--Hardy made ithis own. Whatever form seemed likely to win the popular favour, thishe accepted or divined. The _Astrée_ had made pastoral the fashion;Hardy was ready with his pastoral dramas. The Italian and Spanishnovels were little tragi-comedies waiting to be dramatised;forthwith Hardy cast them into a theatrical mould. Writing for thepeople, he was not trammelled by the unities of time and place; themediæval stage arrangements favoured romantic freedom. In his desireto please a public which demanded animation, action, variety, Hardyallowed romantic incident to predominate over character; hence, though he produced tragedies founded on legendary or historicalsubjects, his special talent is seen rather in tragi-comedy. Hecomplicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he shortened themonologues, he suppressed or reduced the chorus--in a word, the dramain his hands ceased to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at lengthdramatic. The advance was great; and it was achieved by a hackplaywright scrambling for his crusts of bread. 

[Footnote 1: Or thirty-four pieces, if _Théagène et Cariclée_ bereckoned as only one. ]

But to dramatic life and movement it was necessary that order, discipline, regulation should be added. The rules of the unities werenot observed by Hardy--were perhaps unknown to him. But they wereknown to others. Jean de Schelandre (the pseudonym formed from theletters of his name being Daniel d'Anchères), in his vast drama intwo parts, _Tyr et Sidon_, claimed all the freedom of the mysteriesin varying the scene, in mingling heroic matter with buffoonery. Inthe edition of 1628 a preface appears by François Ogier, a learnedchurchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in accordance withaltered circumstances, should maintain its rights to completeimaginative liberty against the authority of the Greeks, whopresented their works before different spectators under differentconditions. Ogier's protest was without effect. Almost immediatelyafter its appearance the _Sophonisbe_ of Jean de Mairet was given, and the classical tragedy of France was inaugurated on a popular stage. In the preface to his pastoral tragi-comedy _Sylvanire_, Mairet in1631 formulated the doctrine of the unities. The adhesion of Richelieuand the advocacy of Chapelain insured their triumph. The "rules" cameto be regarded as the laws of a literary species. 

The influence of the Spanish drama, seen in the writings of Rotrouand others, might be supposed to make for freedom. It encouragedromantic inventions and ambitious extravagances of style. Much thatis rude and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and labouredingenuity in the dramatic work of Scudéry, Du Ryer, Tristan l'Hermite. A greater dramatist than these showed how Spanish romance couldcoalesce with French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch--the_Cid_; and the _Cid_, calling forth the judgment of the Academy, served to establish the supremacy of the so-called rules of Aristotle. 

PIERRE CORNEILLE, son of a legal official, was born at Rouen in 1606. His high promise as a pupil of the Jesuits was not confirmed whenhe attempted to practise at the bar; he was retiring, and spoke withdifficulty. At twenty-three his first dramatic piece, _Mélite_, acomedy, suggested, it is told, by an adventure of his youth, was givenwith applause in Paris; it glitters with points, and is of acomplicated intrigue, but to contemporaries the plot appeared lessentangled and the style more natural than they seem to modern readers. The tragi-comedy, _Clitandre_, which followed (1632), was a romanticdrama, crowded with extravagant incidents, after the manner of Hardy. In _La Veuve_ he returned to the style of _Mélite_, but with lessartificial brilliance and more real vivacity; it was published withlaudatory verses prefixed, in one of which Scudéry bids the starsretire for the sun has risen. The scene is laid in Paris, and somepresentation of contemporary manners is made in _La Galerie du Palais_and _La Place Royale_. It was something to replace the nurse of eldercomedy by the soubrette. The attention of Richelieu was attractedto the new dramatic author; he was numbered among the five _garçonspoètes_ who worked upon the dramatic plans of the Cardinal; but hedispleased his patron by his imaginative independence. Providinghimself with a convenient excuse, Corneille retired to Rouen. 

These early works were ventures among which the poet was groping forhis true way. He can hardly be said to have found it in _Médée_ (1635), but it was an advance to have attempted tragedy; the grandiose styleof Seneca was a challenge to his genius; and in the famous line--

 "_Dans un si grand revers, que vous reste-t-il? Moi!_"

we see the flash of his indomitable pride of will, we hear the suddenthunder of his verse. An acquaintance, M. De Chalon, who had beenone of the household of Marie de Médicis, directed Corneille to theSpanish drama. The _Illusion Comique_, the latest of his tentativeplays, is a step towards the _Cid_; its plot is fantastical, but insome of the fanfaronades of the braggart Matamore, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which only needed a certain transposition tobecome the language of chivalric heroism. The piece closes with alofty eulogy of the French stage. 

The sun had indeed risen and the stars might disappear when in theclosing days of 1636 the _Cid_ was given in Paris at the Théâtre duMarais; the eulogy of the stage was speedily justified by its author. His subject was found by Corneille in a Spanish drama, _Las Mocedadesdel Cid_, by Guilhem de Castro; the treatment was his own; he reducedthe action from that of a chronicle-history to that of a tragedy;he centralised it around the leading personages; he transferred itin its essential causes from the external world of accident to theinner world of character; the critical events are moral events, victories of the soul, triumphs not of fortune but of the will. Andthus, though there are epic episodes and lyric outbreaks in the play, the _Cid_ definitely fixed, for the first time in France, the typeof tragedy. The central tragic strife here is not one of rival houses. Rodrigue, to avenge his father's wrong, has slain the father of hisbeloved Chimène; Chimène demands from the King the head of her belovedRodrigue. In the end Rodrigue's valour atones for his offence. Thestruggle is one of passion with honour or duty; the fortunes of thehero and heroine are affected by circumstance, but their fate liesin their own high hearts. 

The triumph of Corneille's play was immense. The Cardinal, however, did not join in it. Richelieu's intractable poet had glorified Spainat an inconvenient moment; he had offered an apology for the codeof honour when edicts had been issued to check the rage of the duel;yet worse, he had not been crushed by the great man's censure. Thequarrel of the _Cid_, in which Mairet and Scudéry took an embitteredpart, was encouraged by Richelieu. He pressed the Academy, of whichCorneille was not a member until 1647, for a judgment upon the piece, and at length he was partially satisfied by a pronouncement, drawnup by Chapelain, which condemned its ethics and its violation ofdramatic proprieties, yet could not deny the author's genius. Corneille was deeply discouraged, but prepared himself for futurevictories. 

Until 1640 he remained silent. In that illustrious year _Horace_ and_Cinna_ were presented in rapid succession. From Spain, the land ofchivalric honour, the dramatist passed to antique Rome, the motherand the nurse of heroic virtue. In the _Cid_ the dramatic conflictis between love and filial duty; in _Horace_ it is between love, onthe one side, united with the domestic affections, and, on the other, devotion to country. In both plays the inviolable will is arbiterof the contention. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, as toldby Livy, is complicated by the union of the families through loveand marriage; but patriotism requires the sacrifice of the tendererpassions. It must be admitted that the interest declines after thethird act, and that our sympathies are alienated from the youngerHorace by the murder of a sister; we are required to feel that a privatecrime, the offence of overstrained patriotism, is obliterated in theglory of the country. In _Cinna_ we pass from regal to imperial Rome;the commonwealth is represented by Augustus; a great monarchy isglorified, but in the noblest way, for the highest act of empire isto wield supreme power under the sway of magnanimity, and to remainthe master of all self-regarding passions. The conspiracy of Cinnais discovered; it is a prince's part to pardon, and Augustus risesto a higher empire than that of Rome by the conquest of himself. Inboth _Horace_ and _Cinna_ there are at times a certain overstrain, an excess of emphasis, a resolve to pursue heroism to all extremities;but the conception of moral grandeur is genuine and lofty; the errorof Corneille was the error of an imagination enamoured of the sublime. 

But are there not heroisms of religion as pure as those of patriotism?And must we go back to pagan days to find the highest virtue? Or candivine grace effect no miracles above those of the natural will?Corneille gives his answer to such a challenge in the tragedy of_Polyeucte_ (1643). It is the story of Christian martyrdom; a homagerendered to absolute self-devotion to the ideal; a canticle intonedin celebration of heavenly grace. Polyeucte, the martyr, sacrificesto his faith not only life, but love; his wife, who, while she knewhim imperfectly, gave him an imperfect love, is won both for God andfor her husband by his heroism; she is caught away from her tendernessfor Sévère into the flame of Polyeucte's devout rapture; and throughher Sévère himself is elevated to an unexpected magnanimity. Thefamily, the country, the monarchy, religion--these in turn werehonoured by the genius of Corneille. He had lifted the drama froma form of loose diversion to be a great art; he had recreated it asthat noblest pastime whose function is to exercise and invigoratethe soul. 

The transition from _Polyeucte_ to _Le Menteur_, of the same year, is among the most surprising in literature. [2] From the most elevatedof tragedies we pass to a comedy, which, while not belonging to thegreat comedy of character, is charmingly gay. We expect no gravemoralities here, nor do we find them. The play is a free and originaladaptation from a work of the Spanish dramatist Alarcon, but inCorneille's hands it becomes characteristically French. YoungDorante, the liar, invents his fictions through an irresistiblegenius for romancing. His indignant father may justly ask, Has hea heart? Is he a gentleman? But how can a youth with such a prettywit resist the fascination of his own lies? He is sufficientlypunished by the fact that they do not assist, but rather trouble, the course of his love adventure, and we demand no further poeticaljustice. In Corneille's art, tragedy had defined itself, and comedywas free to be purely comic; but it is also literary--light, yet solidin structure; easy, yet exact in style. The _Suite du Menteur_, founded on a comedy by Lope de Vega, has a curious attraction of itsown, half-fantastic as it is, and half-realistic; yet it has sharedthe fate of all continuations, and could not attain the popularityof its predecessor. It lacks gaiety; the liar has sunk into a rascal, and we can hardly lend credence to the amendment in his mendacioushabit when he applies the art of dissimulation to generous purposes. 

[Footnote 2: _Polyeucte_ may possibly be as early as 1641. ]

These are the masterpieces of Corneille. Already in _Pompée_, although its date is that of _Polyeucte_, while the great dramatistis present throughout, he is not always present at his best. It shouldnot surprise us that Corneille preferred Lucan to Virgil. Somethingof the over-emphasis of the _Pharsalia_, his original, has enteredinto the play; but the pomp of the verse is no vulgar pomp. A graverfault is the want of a dramatic centre for the action, which tendstoo much towards the epic. Pompey is the presiding power of thetragedy; his spirit dominates the lesser characters; but he does notappear in person. The political interest develops somewhat to thesubordination of the personal interest. Corneille's unhappy theoryof later years, that love is unworthy of a place in high tragedy, save as an episode, is here exemplified in the passion of Cæsar forCleopatra; but, in truth, love is too sovereign a power to admit ofits being tagged to tragedy as an ornament. 

Until 1636 Corneille was seeking his way. From 1636 to 1644 his geniussoared on steady pinions. During the eight years that followed hetriumphed, but he also faltered. _Rodogune_ (1644), which hepreferred to all his other plays, is certainly, by virtue of theenormity of the characters, the violence of the passions, the vastnessof its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies; it is constructedwith the most skilful industry; from scene to scene the emotion isintensified and heightened until the great fifth act is reached; butif by incomparable audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, it isan ideal of horror. _Théodore_, a second play of martyrdom, fell farbelow _Polyeucte_. _Heraclius_ is obscure through the complicationof its intrigue. _Don Sanche d'Aragon_, a romantic tragi-comedy, isless admirable as a whole than in the more brilliant scenes. In thehistorical drama _Nicomède_ (1651), side by side with tragicsolemnities appears matter of a familiar kind. It was the last greateffort of its author's genius. The failure of _Pertharite_, in 1652, led to the withdrawal of Corneille from the theatre during seven years. He completed during his seclusion a rendering into verse of the_Imitation of Jesus Christ_. When he returned to the stage it waswith enfeebled powers, which were overstrained by the effort of hiswill; yet he could still write noble lines, and in the tragedy-balletof _Psyché_, in which Quinault and Molière were his collaborators, the most charming verses are those of Corneille. His young rivalRacine spoke to the hearts of a generation less heroic and swayedby tenderer passion, and the old man resented the change. Domesticsorrows were added to the grief of ill success in his art. Livingsimply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last ten years ofhis life were years of silence. He died in 1684, at the age ofseventy-eight. 

The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordinary, but in whatis extraordinary it seeks for truth. He finds the marvellous in thetriumphs of the human will. His great inventive powers were appliedto creating situations for the manifestation of heroic energy. History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed to justify whatotherwise could not be accepted as probable. Great personages suitedhis purpose, because they can deploy their powers on the amplest scale. His characters, men and women, act not through blind, instinctivepassion, but with deliberate and intelligent force; they reason, andtoo often with casuistical subtlety, about their emotions. At lengthhe came to glorify the will apart from its aims and ends, when tendingeven to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He thought muchof the principles of his art, and embodied his conclusions in criticaldissertations and studies of his own works. He accepted the rule ofthe unities of place and time (of which at first he was ignorant)as far as his themes permitted, as far as the rules served toconcentrate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in verseof a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapidstatement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords;in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge oflatent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action. His faults, like his virtues, are great; and though faults and virtuesmay be travestied, both are in reality alike inimitable. 

Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they deserve thatname--Du Ryer, Tristan, Scudéry, Boisrobert, and others--JEAN ROTROU(1610-50) had the magnanimity to render homage to the master of hisart. While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that he wouldlive for the dramatic art. His facility was great, and he had thefaults of a facile writer, who started on his career at the age ofnineteen. He could not easily submit to the regulation of theclassical drama, and squandered his talents in extravaganttragi-comedies; but his work grew sounder and stronger towards theclose. _Saint Genest_ (1645), which is derived, but in no servilefashion, from Lope de Vega, recalls _Polyeucte_; an actor of the timeof Diocletian, in performing the part of a Christian martyr, ispenetrated by the heroic passion which he represents, confesses hisfaith, and receives its crown in martyrdom. The tragi-comedy _DonBernard de Cabrère_ and the tragedy _Venceslas_ of the following yearexhibit the romantic and passionate sides of Rotrou's genius. Theintemperate yet noble Ladislas has rashly and in error slain hisbrother; he is condemned to death by his father Venceslas, King ofPoland, and he accepts his doom. The situation is such as Corneillemight have imagined; but Rotrou's young hero in the end is pardonedand receives the kingdom. If their careless construction and unequalstyle in general forbade the dramas of Rotrou to hold the stage, theyremained as a store from which greater artists than he could drawtheir material. His death was noble: the plague having broken outat Dreux, he hastened from Paris to the stricken town, disregardingall affectionate warnings, there to perform his duty as a magistrate;within a few days the inhabitants followed Rotrou's coffin to theparish church. 

THOMAS CORNEILLE, the faithful and tender brother of "le grandCorneille, " and his successor in the Academy, belongs to a youngergeneration. He was born in 1625, and did not die until near the closeof the first decade of the eighteenth century. As an industriousplaywright he imitated his brother's manner, and reproduced hissituations with a feebler hand. Many of his dramas are of Spanishorigin, comic imbroglios, tragic extravagances; they rather diverteddramatic art from its true way than aided its advance. Perhaps forthis reason they were the more popular. His _Timocrate_ (1656), drawnfrom the romance of _Cléopâtre_, and itself a romance written forthe stage, had a success rarely equalled during the century. The herois at once the enemy and the lover of the Queen of Argos; under onename he besieges her, under another he repels his own attack; he ishated and adored, the conquered and the conqueror. The languors ofconventional love and the plaintive accents of conventional griefsuited the powers of the younger Corneille. His _Ariane_ (1672)presents a heroine, Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, who reminds usof one of Racine's women, drawn with less certain lines and faintercolours. In _Le Comte d'Essex_ history is transformed to a romance. Perhaps the greatest glory of Thomas Corneille is that his receptionas an Academician became the occasion for a just and eloquent tributeto the genius of his brother uttered by Racine, when the bitternessof rivalry was forgotten and the offences of Racine's earlier yearswere nobly repaired. 

CHAPTER IVSOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS

Before noticing the theories of classical poetry in the writings ofits master critic, Boileau, we must glance at certain writers whobelonged rather to the world of public life and of society than tothe world of art, but who became each a master in literary craft, as it were, by an irresistible instinct. Memoirs, maxims, epistolarycorrespondence, the novel, in their hands took a distinguished placein the hierarchy of literary art. 

FRANÇOIS VI. , DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Prince de Marsillac, was bornin 1613, of one of the greatest families of France. His life is dividedinto two periods--one of passionate activity, when with romanticardour he threw himself into the struggles of the Fronde, only tobe foiled and disillusioned; and the other of bitter reflection, consoled by certain social successes, loyal friendships, and anunique literary distinction. His _Maximes_ are the brief confessionof his experience of life, an utterance of the pessimism of anaristocratic spirit, moulded into a form proper to the little worldof the _salon_--each maxim a drop of the attar not of roses but ofsome more poignant and bitterly aromatic blossom. In the circle ofMme. De Sablé, now an elderly _précieuse_, a circle half-Epicurean, half-Jansenist, frivolously serious and morosely gay, thecomposition of maxims and "sentences" became a fashion. Those of LaRochefoucauld were submitted to her as to an oracle; five years weregiven to shaping a tiny volume; fifteen years to rehandling andpolishing every phrase. They are like a collection of medals struckin honour of the conquests of cynicism. The first surreptitiousedition, printed in Holland in 1664, was followed by an authorisededition in 1665; the number of maxims, at first 317, rose finallyin 1678 to 504; some were omitted; many were reduced to the extremeof concision; under the influence of Mme. De la Fayette, in the latertexts the indictment of humanity was slightly attenuated. "Il m'adonné de l'esprit, " said Mme. De la Fayette, "mais j'ai réformé soncoeur. "

The motto of the book, "Our virtues are commonly vices in disguise, "expresses its central idea. La Rochefoucauld does not absolutely denydisinterested goodness; there may be some such instinctive virtuelying below all passions which submit to be analysed; he does notconsider the love of God, the parental or the filial affections; butwherever he applies analysis, it is to reduce each apparentlydisinterested feeling to self-love. "We all have strength enough toendure the misfortunes of another;" "When vices desert us, we flatterourselves with the belief that it is we who desert them;" "With truelove it is as with apparitions--every one talks of them, but fewpersons have seen them;" "Virtues lose themselves in self-interestas rivers lose themselves in the sea;" "In the adversity of our bestfriends we always find something which does not displease us"--suchare the moral comments on life graven in ineffaceable lines by LaRochefoucauld. He is not a philosophic thinker, but he is apenetrating and remorseless critic, who remains at one fixed pointof view; self-interest is assuredly a large factor in human conduct, and he exposes much that is real in the heart of man; much also thatis not universally true was true of the world in which he had moved;whether we accept or reject his doctrine, we are instructed by astatement so implacable and so precise of the case against humannature as he saw it. Pitiless he was not himself; perhaps his artisticinstinct led him to exclude concessions which would have marred theunity of his conception; possibly his vanity co-operated in producingphrases which live and circulate by virtue of the shock theycommunicate to our self-esteem. The merit of his _Maximes_ as examplesof style--a style which may be described as lapidary--isincomparable; it is impossible to say more, or to say it moreadequately, in little; but one wearies in the end of the monotonyof an idea unalterably applied, of unqualified brilliance, ofunrelieved concision; we anticipate our surprise, and its purposeis defeated. Traces of preciosity are found in some of the earliestsentences; that infirmity was soon overcome by La Rochefoucauld, andhis utterances become as clear and as hard as diamond. 

He died at the age of sixty-seven, in the arms of Bossuet. His_Memoires_, [1] relating to the period of the Fronde, are written withan air of studied historical coldness, which presents a strikingcontrast to the brilliant vivacity of Retz. 

[Footnote 1: Ed. 1662, surreptitious and incomplete; complete ed. , 1868-1884. ]

The most interesting figure of the Fronde, its portrait-painter, itsanalyst, its historian, is CARDINAL DE RETZ (1614-1679). Italian byhis family, and Italian in some features of his character, he had, on a scale of grandeur, the very genius of conspiracy. When his firstwork, _La Conjuration de Fiesque_, was read by Richelieu, the judgmentwhich that great statesman pronounced was penetrating--"Voilà undangereux esprit. " Low of stature, ugly, ill-made, short-sighted, Retz played the part of a gallant and a duellist. Never had any oneless vocation for the spiritual duties of an ecclesiastic; but, beinga churchman, he would be an illustrious actor on the ecclesiasticalstage. There was something demoniac in his audacity, and with thespirit of turbulence and intrigue was united a certain power ofself-restraint. When fallen, he still tried to be magnificent, thoughin disgrace: he would resign his archbishopric, pay his enormous debts, resign his cardinalate, exhibit himself as the hero in misfortune. "Having lived as a Catiline, " said Voltaire, "he lived as an Atticus. "In retirement, as his adventurous life drew towards its close, hewrote, at the request of Madame de Caumartin, those Memoirs whichremained unpublished until 1717, and which have insured him a placein literature only second to Saint-Simon. 

It was an age remarkable for its memoirs; those of Mlle. De Montpensier, of Mme. De Motteville, of Bussy-Rabutin are only a few of many. The_Mémoires_ of Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historicalinterest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging facts and datesso that he might superbly figure in the drama designed for futuregenerations, he falsifies the literal truth of things; but he laysbare the inner truth of politics, of life, of character, withincomparable mastery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in earlyyears with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde are expoundedin pages of profound sagacity. His narrative has all the impetuosity, all the warmth and hues of life, all the tumult and rumour of action;he paints, but in painting he explains; he touches the hidden springsof passion; his portraits of contemporaries are not more vivid intheir colours than they are searching in their psychology: and inhis style there is that negligent grandeur which belongs rather tothe days of Louis XIII. Than to the age of his successor, when languagegrew more exact for the intelligence, but lost much of its passionand untamed energy. 

The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature, may be saidto have reached perfection, with scarcely an historical development, in the letters of MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ. The letters of Balzac are rhetoricalexercises; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of Shakespeare, "heavy lightness, serious vanity. " Mme. De Sévigné entered into thegains of a cultivated society, in which graceful converse had becomea necessity of existence. She wrote delightfully, because sheconveyed herself into her letters, and because she conversed freelyand naturally by means of her pen. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, bornin 1626, deprived of both parents in her earliest years, was carefullytrained in literary studies--Latin, Italian, French--under thesuperintendence of her uncle, "le bien bon, " the Abbé de Coulanges. Among her teachers were the scholar Ménage and the poet Chapelain. Married at eighteen to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri deSévigné, she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children, thedaughter whom she loved with excess of devotion, and a son, whoreceived from his mother a calmer affection. She saw the life of thecourt, she was acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented theHôtel de Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of preciosity, "onesuperfluous ribbon, " says Nisard, "in a simple and elegant toilet"), she knew and loved the country and its rural joys, she read withexcellent judgment and eager delight the great books of past andpresent times. 

When her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France, " was married in1669 to M. De Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant-General of Provence, Mme. De Sévigné, desiring to be constantly one with her, at leastin thought, transferred into letters her whole life from day to day, together with much of the social life of the time during a periodof nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen to trot, throwing thereins, as she says, upon its neck; but if her letters areimprovisations, they are improvisations regulated by an exquisiteartistic instinct. Her imagination is alert in discovering, combining, and presenting the happiest meanings of reality. She isgay, witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace ofmalignity; amiable rather than passionate, except in the ardour ofher maternal devotion, which sometimes proved oppressive to adaughter who, though not unloving, loved with a temperate heart;faithful to friends, loyal to those who had fallen into misfortune, but neither sentimental nor romantic, nor disposed to thegenerosities of a universal humanity; a woman of spirit, energy, andgood sense; capable of serious reflection, though not of profoundthought; endowed with an exquisite sense of the power of words, and, indeed, the creator of a literary style. While her interests werein the main of a mundane kind, she was in sympathy with Port-Royal, admired the writings of Pascal, and deeply reverenced Nicole. Domestic affairs, business (concern for her children having involvedher in financial troubles), the aristocratic life of Paris andVersailles, literature, the pleasures and tedium of the country, thedulness or gaiety of a health-resort, the rise and fall of those inpower, the petty intrigues and spites and follies of the day--these, and much besides, enter into Mme. De Sévigné's records, records madeupon the moment, with all the animation of an immediate impression, but remaining with us as one of the chief documents for the socialhistory of the second half of the seventeenth century. In April 1696Mme. De Sévigné died. 

Beside the letters addressed to her daughter are others--far fewerin number--to her cousin Bussy-Rabutin, to her cousin Mme. DeCoulanges, to Pomponne, and other correspondents. In Bussy's_Mémoires et Correspondance_ (1696-97) first appeared certain of herletters; a collection, very defective and inaccurate, was publishedin 1726; eight years later the first portion of an authorised textwas issued under the sanction of the writer's grand-daughter;gradually the material was recovered, until it became of vast extent;even since the appearance of the edition among the _Grands Écrivainsde la France_ two volumes of _Lettres inédites_ have been published. 

Among the other letter-writers of the period, perhaps the mostdistinguished were Mme. De Sévigné's old and attached friend Mme. De la Fayette, and the woman of supreme authority with the King, Mme. De Maintenon. A just view of Mme. De Maintenon's character has beenlong obscured by the letters forged under her name by La Beaumelle, and by the bitter hostility of Saint-Simon. On a basis of ardour andsensibility she built up a character of unalterable reason and goodsense. Her letters are not creations of genius, unless practicalwisdom and integrity of purpose be forms of genius. She does not gossipdelightfully; at times she may seem a little hard or dry; but herreason is really guided by human kindness. "Her style, " wrote a highauthority, Döllinger, "is clear, terse, refined, often sententious;her business letters are patterns of simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be characterised as womanly yet manly, so well do theycombine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with the strengthand lucidity of a masculine mind. " The foundation of Saint-Cyr, forthe education of girls wellborn but poor, was the object of herconstant solicitude; there she put out her talents as a teacher andguide of youth to the best interest; there she found play for herbest affections: "C'est le lieu, " she said, "de délices pour moi. "

The friend of Madame de Sévigné, the truest woman whom LaRochefoucauld had ever known, MADAME DE LA FAYETTE was the authorof two historical works, of which one is exquisite--a memorial ofher friend the Duchess of Orleans, and of two--perhapsthree--romances, the latest of which, in the order of chronology, is the masterpiece of seventeenth-century fiction. Marie de la Vergne, born in 1634, a pupil of Ménage, married at twenty-one to M. De laFayette, became the trusted companion of the bright and graciousHenrietta of England. It is not that part of Madame's life, when sheacted as intermediary between Louis XIV. And her brother, CharlesII. , that is recorded by her friend: it is the history of her heart. Nothing is more touching in its simplicity than the narrative ofMadame's last moments; it serves as the best possible comment on thepathetic Funeral Oration of Bossuet. We have no grounds for assertingthat the married life of Madame de la Fayette was unhappy, exceptthrough the inadequacy of a husband whose best qualities seem to havebeen of a negative kind. During the fifteen years which preceded thedeath of La Rochefoucauld her friendship for him was the centre ofher existence. She seemed to bear about with her some secret grief;something remained veiled from other friends than he, and they namedher _le Brouillard_. She outlived her friend by thirteen years, andduring ten was widowed. In 1693 she died. 

Her earliest novel, _La Princesse de Montpensier_ (1662), a tale ofthe days of the Valois and of St. Bartholomew, is remarkable for itstruthful pictures of the manners of the court, its rendering ofnatural and unexaggerated feeling, and for the fact that it treatsof married life, occupying itself with such themes as have been dealtwith in many of its modern successors. The _Zayde_, of eight yearslater, was written in collaboration with Segrais. It is in _LaPrincesse de Clèves_ (1678) that the genius and the heart of Madamede la Fayette find a perfect expression. The Princess, married toa husband who loves her devotedly, and whom she honours, but whosefeelings she cannot return, is tempted by the brilliant Duc de Nemoursand by the weakness of her own passion, to infidelity. She resolvesto confide her struggle to her husband, and seek in him a protectoragainst herself. The hard confession is made, but a grievous andinevitable change has passed over their lives. Believing himselfdeceived, M. De Clèves is seized by a fever and dies, not withoutthe consolation of learning his error. Nemours renews his vows andentreaties; the Princess refuses his hand, and atones for her errorin cloistered seclusion. The tale has lost none of its beauty andpathos after a lapse of two centuries. Does it reveal the hidden griefof the writer's life? And was her friend, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, delivered from his gout and more than a score of years, transformedby Madame de la Fayette into the foiled lover of her tale?

CHAPTER VBOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE

The great name in criticism of the second half of the seventeenthcentury is that of Boileau. But one of whom Boileau spoke harshly, a soldier, a man of the world, the friend of Ninon de l'Enclos, asceptical Epicurean, an amateur in letters, Saint-Évremond(1613-1703), among his various writings, aided the cause of criticismby the intuition which he had of what is excellent, by a finenessof judgment as far removed from mere licence as from the pedantryof rules. Fallen into disfavour with the King, Saint-Évremond wasreceived into the literary society of London. His criticism is thatof a fastidious taste, of balance and moderation, guided by tradition, yet open to new views if they approved themselves to his culture andgood sense. Had his studies been more serious, had his feelings beenmore generous and ardent, had his moral sense been less shallow, hemight have made important contributions to literature. As it was, to be a man of the world was his trade, to be a writer was only anadmirable foible. 

NICOLAS BOILEAU, named DESPRÉAUX, from a field (pré) of his father'sproperty at Crosne, was born in Paris, 1636, son of the registrarof the Grand Chambre du Palais. His choice of a profession lay betweenthe Church and that with which his father was connected--the law;but though he made some study of theology, and was called to the bar, his inclination for literature could not be resisted. His whole life, indeed, was that of a man of letters--upright, honourable, serious, dignified, simple; generous to the friends whose genius he couldjustly applaud; merciless to books and authors condemned by his reason, his good sense, his excellent judgment. He was allied by an ardentadmiration to Racine, and less intimately to Molière, La Fontaine, and Chapelle; Jansenist through his religious sympathies, andclosely attached to the venerable Arnauld; appointed historiographerto the King (1677) together with Racine; an Academician by the King'sdesire, notwithstanding the opposition of his literary enemies. Inhis elder years his great position of authority in the world of letterswas assured, but he suffered from infirmities of body, and from anincreasing severity of temper. In 1711 he died, bequeathing a largesum of money to the poor. 

Boileau's literary career falls into three periods--the first, militant and destructive, in which he waged successful war againstall that seemed to him false and despicable in art; the second, reconstructive, in which he declared the doctrine of what may betermed literary rationalism, and legislated for the FrenchParnassus; the third, dating from his appointment as historiographer, a period of comparative repose and, to some extent, of decline, butone in which the principles of his literary faith were maintainedand pressed to new conclusions. His writings include twelve satires(of which the ninth, "A son Esprit, " is the chief masterpiece); twelveepistles (that to Racine being pre-eminent); the literary-didacticpoem, _L'Art Poétique_; a heroi-comical epic, _Le Lutrin_;miscellaneous shorter poems (among which may be noted the admirableepitaph on Arnauld, and an unhappy ode, _Sur la Prise de Namur_, 1693);and various critical studies in prose, his Lucianic dialogue _LesHéros de Roman_, satirising the extravagant novels not yet dismissedto oblivion, and his somewhat truculent _Réflexions sur Longin_ beingspecially deserving of attention. The satires preceded in date theepistles; of the former, the first nine belong to the years 1660-67;the first nine of the epistles to the years 1669-77; three satiresand three epistles may be described as belated. The year 1674 ismemorable as that in which were published _L'Art Poétique_ and thefirst four _chants_ of _Le Lutrin_. 

The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intellectual, animatedby ideas; but it is an error to suppose that a sensuous element isabsent from his verse. It is verse of the classical school, firm andclear, but it addresses the ear with a studied harmony, and whatBoileau saw he could render into exact, definite, and vivid expression. His imagination was not in a large sense creative; he was whollylacking in tenderness and sensibility; his feeling for externalnature was no more than that of a Parisian bourgeois who enjoys fora day the repose of the fields; but for Paris itself, its variousaspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and theprecise rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touchis like that of a Dutch painter. As a moralist, he is not searchingor profound; he saw too little of the inner world of the heart, andknew too imperfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals withliterature--and a just judgment in letters may almost be called anelement in morals--all his penetration and power become apparent. 

To clear the ground for the new school of nature, truth and reasonwas Boileau's first task. It was a task which called for courage andskill. The public taste was still uncertain. Laboured and lifelessepics like Chapelain's _La Pucelle_, petty ingenuities in metre likethose of Cotin, violence and over-emphasis, extravagances ofsentiment, faded preciosities, inane pastoralisms, gross or vulgarburlesques, tragedies languorous and insipid, lyrics of pretendedpassion, affectations from the degenerate Italian literature, super-subtleties from Spain--these had still their votaries. And theconduct of life and characters of men of letters were often unworthyof the vocation they professed. "La haine d'un sot livre" was aninspiration for Boileau, as it afterwards was for our English satiristPope; and he felt deeply that dignity of art is connected with dignityof character and rectitude of life--"Le vers se sent toujours desbassesses de coeur. " He struck at the follies and affectations ofthe world of letters, and he struck with force: it was a needful duty, and one most effectively performed. Certain of the Epistles, whichare written with less pitiless severity and with a more accomplishedmastery of verse, continue the work of the Satires. From Horace hederived much, something from Juvenal, and something from hispredecessor Regnier; but he had not the lightness nor the _bonhomie_of Horace, nor his easy and amiable wisdom. 

In the _Art Poétique_ Boileau is constructive; he exhibits the truedoctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted genius, fire, imagination--the gifts of heaven--what should be the self-imposeddiscipline of a poet? Above all, the cultivation of that power whichdistinguishes false from true, and aids every other faculty--thereason. "Nothing, " declares Boileau, "is beautiful save what istrue;" nature is the model, the aim and end of art; reason and goodsense discern reality; they test the fidelity of the artisticimitation of nature; they alone can vouch for the correspondence ofthe idea with its object, and the adequacy of the expression to theidea. What is permanent and universal in literature lives by the aidof no fashion of the day, but by virtue of its truth to nature. Andhence is derived the authority of the ancient classics, which havebeen tried by time and have endured; these we do not accept as tyrants, but we may safely follow as guides. 

To study nature is, however, before all else to study man--that is, human nature--and to distinguish in human nature what is universaland abiding from what is transitory and accidental; we cannot beexpected to discover things absolutely new; it suffices to give towhat is true a perfect expression. Unhappily, human nature, asunderstood by Boileau, included little beyond the court and the town. Unhappily his appreciation of classical literature was defective;to justify as true and natural the mythology of Greece he has to regardit as a body of symbols or a moral allegory. Unhappily his surveyof literature was too narrow to include the truths and the splendoursof Mediæval poetry and art. For historical truth, indeed, he hadlittle sense; seeking for what is permanent and universal, he hadlittle regard for local colour and the truth of manners. To secureassent from contemporary minds truth must assume what they take tobe its image, and a Greek or Roman on the stage must not shock thedemand for verisimilitude made by the courtly imagination of the daysof Louis Quatorze. Art which fails to please is no longer art. 

To the workmanship, the technique of poetry, Boileau attaches a highimportance. Its several species--idyl, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, rondeau, ballade, madrigal, satire, epic, tragedy, comedy--areseparated from one another by fixed boundaries, and each is subjectto its own rules; but genius, on occasion, may transcend those rules, and snatch an unauthorised grace. It is difficult to understand whyfrom among the _genres_ of poetry Boileau omitted the fable; perhapshe did not regard its form, now in verse and now in prose, as defined;possibly he was insensible of the perfection to which the fable inverse had been carried by La Fontaine. The fourth _chant_ of the _ArtPoétique_ is remarkable for its lofty conception of the position ofthe poet; its counsels express the dignity of the writer's ownliterary life. He has been charged not only with cruelty as a satirist, but with the baseness of a flatterer of the great. It would be morejust to notice the honourable independence which he maintained, notwithstanding his poetical homage to the King, which was aninevitable requisition. Boileau's influence as a critic ofliterature can hardly be overrated; it has much in common with theinfluence of Pope on English literature--beneficial as regards hisown time, somewhat restrictive and even tyrannical upon latergenerations. 

_Le Lutrin_ (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque which degradesa noble theme, but, like Pope's far more admirable _Rape of the Lock_, a heroi-comic poem humorously exalting humble matter of the day. Ittells of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position of alectern, combats in which the books of a neighbouring publisher serveas formidable projectiles. The scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle andthe Palais de Justice. Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation ofvisible detail, and his skill in versification, served him here betterthan did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of him lessas a poet than as the classical guardian and legislator of poetry. He was an emancipator by directing art towards reason and truth; whenlarger interpretations of truth and reason than his became possible, his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint. 

All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by the most easy andnatural of the singers of his time--one whose art is like nature inits freedom, while yet it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art. JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at Château-Thierry, in Champagne, son of the "maître des eaux et forêts. " His education was less ofa scholastic kind than an education derived from books read for hisown pleasure, and especially from observation or reverie among thewoods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, and insect, so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slipping away from theologyand law, he passed ten years, from twenty-three to thirty-three, inseeming indolence, a "bon garçon, " irreclaimably wayward as regardsworldly affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed hisgenius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of old poets, story-tellers, translators, and already practising his art of verse. Nothing that was not natural to him, and wholly to his liking, wouldhe or could he do; but happily he was born to write perfect verses, and the labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a delight. He allowed himself to be married to a pretty girl of fifteen, andpresently forgot that he had a wife and child, drifted away, and agreedin 1659 to a division of goods; but his carelessness and egoism werewithout a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child rather thanof a man. 

In 1654 he published a translation of the _Eunuch_ of Terence of smallworth, and not long after was favoured with the patronage of Fouquet, the superintendant of finance. To him La Fontaine presented his_Adonis_, a narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious, expressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to be foundin poetry of the time, and reviving some of the bright Renaissancesense of antiquity. The genius of France is united in La Fontaine'swritings with the genius of Greece. But the verses written by commandfor Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-constructed andunfinished _Songe de Vaux_, partly in prose, partly in verse, wasdesigned to celebrate his patron's Château de Vaux. 

Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue _Clymène_, a dramaticfantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus learns by the aid of theMuses the loves of Acante (La Fontaine) and Clymène (Madame X . . . ), a rural beauty, whom the god had seen wandering on the banks ofHippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La Fontaine didnot desert him, pleading in his _Élégie aux Nymphes de Vaux_ on behalfof the disgraced minister. As a consequence, the poet retired fora time from Paris to banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is againin Paris or at Château-Thierry, his native place, where the Duchessede Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, pleasure-loving, bestowedon him a kind protection. His tedious paraphrase of _Psyché_, andthe poem _Quinquina_, in which he celebrates the recovery from illnessof the Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather thanof native impulse; but the tendencies of her salon, restrained neitherby the proprieties of the classical doctrine in literature nor thoseof religious strictness, may have encouraged him to the productionof his _Contes_. 

In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place in Boileau'srooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distinguished group, which includedMolière, Chapelle, Racine, and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the_bonhomme_, who escaped from the toil of conversation which did notinterest him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charmingtalker with companions of his choice. Probably to Boileau's urgencyis due the first original publication of La Fontaine, a little volumeof _Nouvelles en Vers_ (1664-1665), containing the _Joconde_, a talefrom Ariosto, and a comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almostimmediately there followed a collection of ten _Contes_, with theauthor's name upon the title-page, and at various later dates werepublished added tales, until five parts completed the series. Thesuccess was great, but great also was the scandal, for the _bonhomme_, drawing from Boccaccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais, Petronius, Athenæus, and other sources, had exhibited nomore regard for decency than that which bestows the graces oflightness, brightness, wit, and gaiety upon indecency. His unabashedapology was that the artistic laws of the _conte_ obliged him todecline the laws of modesty; and among those who applauded his taleswere the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. De Sévigné. It is indeedimpossible not to applaud their skill in rapid and easy narrative, and the grace, freedom, and spontaneity of the verse. 

The first six books of the _Fables_ appeared in 1668; the next fivein two parts, in 1678 and 1679; the twelfth and last book in 1694. When the _Psyché_ was published, soon after the first group of the_Fables_, the prose and verse were placed in a graceful setting, whichtells of the converse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and Molière (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the unfinishedgardens of Versailles, where the author of _Psyché_, named happilyPolyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends), will read his romance for his literary comrades. 

 "_J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique, La ville et la campagne, enfin tout: il n'est rien Qui ne me soit souverain bien Jusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur mélancolique. _"

Some of his friends before long had passed away, but others came tofill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed bythe amiable and cultivated Mme. De Sablière, and when she dismissedother acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her LaFontaine. " The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner thanto Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted(1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. Henceforth to be _sage_. When Mme. De Sablière died, Hervart, maître des requêtes, one dayoffered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I wason my way there, " replied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of _Contes_, the _bonhomme_ tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple, " saidhis nurse, "that God will not have courage to damn him. " "He was themost sincere and candid soul, " wrote his friend Maucroix, who hadbeen intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have everknown; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth inall his life. "

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his_Fables_. The comedies in which he collaborated, the _Captivité deSaint Malc_, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, themiscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the_Contes_, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the _Fables_ theplay of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imaginationwas unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated mosthappily in a narrow compass. The _Fables_, however, contain much inlittle; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative;they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for theobservation of human character and society; they form, as he himselfhas said--

 "_Une ample comédie à cents actes divers Et dont la scène est l'univers. _"

He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulistswho had preceded him--Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder Frenchwriters--"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui sont du Midi;" but he maybe said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending toan express moral, he converted the fable into a _conte_, in whichnarrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have anindependent value, and the moral is little more than an accident. This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection--Booksvii. -ix. --which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He doesnot impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret thedeepest passions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertainingcomedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even withmelancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at thevanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at thesame time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle orweak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality ofindulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what ischaracteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but hishumanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironicalpresentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from thegrand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey. 

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the classicalschool of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elderFrench literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light byinstinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that theperfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiringdiligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, hewas an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free asit is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is lightand swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:

 "_Aurait-il imprimé sur le front des étoiles Ce que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles?_"

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without;its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like abreeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation ofthe writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity, he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of hiscentury the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of hisfeeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. Ifwe do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer, "we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, "mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naïf que le premier, " and withall the charm of verse superadded. 

CHAPTER VICOMEDY AND TRAGEDY--MOLIÈRE--RACINE

I

The history of comedy, from Larivey to Molière, is one of arresteddevelopment, followed by hasty and ill-regulated growth. During thefirst twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardlybe said to have existed; whatever tended to beauty or elevation, tookthe form of tragi-comedy or pastoral; what was rude and popular becamea farce. From the farce Molière's early work takes its origin, butof the repertory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed, in these performances was left to the improvisation of the burlesqueactors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Garguille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the populace; but the _farces tabariniques_can hardly be dignified with the name of literature. 

In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by Mairet in his_Galanteries du Duc d'Ossone_. The genius of Rotrou, follower thoughhe was of Plautus, tended towards the tragic; if he is really gay, it is in _La Soeur_ (1645), a bright tangle of extravagant incidents. For Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material; the way to the Spanishdrama was opened by d'Ouville, the only writer of the time devotedspecially to comedy, in _L'Esprit Follet_ (1641); once opened, itbecame a common highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in_Jodelet_ and _Don Japhet d'Arménie_ his own burlesque humour. Thecomedy of contemporary manners appears with grace and charm inCorneille's early plays; the comedy of character, in his admirable_Le Menteur_. Saint-Évremond satirised literary affectations in _LaComédie des Académistes_; these and other follies of the time arepresented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, _LesVisionnaires_. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant inthe character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical _Pédant Joué_ of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years which preceded_Les Précieuses Ridicules_. 

Their general character is extravagance of resources in the plot, extravagance of conception in the characters. Yet in both intrigueand characters there is a certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and humorous, are variously mingled to produce theimbroglio; the same typical characters--the braggart, the parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous old man, the designingwoman, the knavish valet, the garrulous nurse--play their mirthfulparts. If the types are studied from real life rather than adoptedfrom Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to absurdity. Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy of imagination and thefiner touch of a dexterous artist. 

JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, who, when connected with the stage, namedhimself MOLIÈRE, was born in January 1622, in Paris, the son of aprosperous upholsterer, Jean Poquelin, and Marie Cressé, his wife. Educated at the Collège de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupilsthe Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the futuretraveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient reason to doubtthat he and some of his friends afterwards received lessons inphilosophy from Gassendi, whose influence must have tended to loosenhim from the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independenceof thought. A translation by Molière of the great poem of Lucretiushas been lost, but a possible citation from it appears in the secondact of the _Misanthrope_. Legal studies followed those of philosophy. But Molière had other ends in view than either those of an advocateor of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. In 1643, atthe age of twenty-one, he decided to throw in his lot with thetheatrical company in which Madeleine Béjart and her brothers wereleading members. The _Illustre Théâtre_ was constituted, but Parislooked askance at the illustrious actors; debt, imprisonment, andrelease through friendly aid, formed the net result of Molière's firstexperiment. 

The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early days of thefollowing year to try their fortune in the provinces. It is needlessto follow in detail their movements during twelve years--twelve yearsfruitful in experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes, years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a comedy, founded on the Italianof Nicolo Barbieri, _L'Étourdi_, saw the light, and Molière revealedhimself as a poet. Young Lélie, the _Étourdi_, is enamoured of thebeautiful Célie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old and rich, haspurchased from corsairs. Lélie's valet Mascarille, who is the lifeof the play, invents stratagem on stratagem to aid the lover, andis for ever foiled by his master's indiscretions, until the inevitablehappy dénouement arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional; thecharm is in the vivacity and colour of the style. In 1656 _Le DépitAmoureux_ was given with applause at Béziers; much is derived fromthe Italian of Secchi, something perhaps from Terence; the tenderscenes of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrastingwith the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid and valet, stilllive, if the rest of the play be little remembered. 

The years of apprenticeship were over when, in 1658, Molière and hiscompany once more in Paris presented, by command, before the King, Corneille's _Nicomède_, and, leave being granted, gave his farce inthe Italian style, the _Docteur Amoureux_, before pleased spectators. The company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's brother, withthe Petit-Bourbon as theatre, and there, in November 1659, was enactedMolière's first satiric play on contemporary manners, _LesPrécieuses Ridicules_. We do not need the legendary old man cryingfrom the pit "Courage, Molière! voilà la bonne comédie" to assureus that the comic stage possessed at length a masterpiece. Thedramatist had himself known the précieuses of the provinces; throughthem he might with less danger exhibit the follies of the Hôtel deRambouillet and the _ruelles_ of the capital. The good bourgeoisGorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two précieuses, toestablish himself in Paris. Their aspirant lovers, unversed in theaffectations of the salon, are slighted and repelled; in revenge theyemploy their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts ofmen of fashion and of taste. The exposure and confusion of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus, close the piece. It was afarce raised to the dignity of comedy. Molière's triumph was thetriumph of good sense. 

After a success in _Sganarelle_ (1660), a broad comedy of vulgarjealousy, and a decided check--the only one in his dramatic career--inthe somewhat colourless tragi-comedy _Don Garcie de Navarre_ (1661), Molière found a theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, whichwas happily suited to his genius. _L'École des Maris_ (1661) contraststwo methods of education--one suspicious and severe, the other wiselyindulgent. Two brothers, Ariste and Sganarelle, seek the hands oftheir wards, the orphan sisters Isabelle and Léonor; the amiableAriste, aided by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded withhappiness; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion. The dramais a plea, expressing the writer's personal thoughts, for nature andfor freedom. The comedy of manners is here replaced by the comedyof character. Its success suggested to Fouquet that Molière mightcontribute to the amusement of the King at the fêtes of the Châteaude Vaux; in fifteen days the dramatist had his bright improvisation_Les Fâcheux_ ready, a series of character sketches in scenes ratherthan a comedy. The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hintedto Molière that another bore might with advantage be added to thecollection--the sportsman whose talk shall be of sport. AtFontainebleau he duly appeared before his Majesty, and unkindspectators recognised a portrait of the Marquis de Soyecourt. 

Next February (1662) Molière, aged forty, was married to the actressArmande Béjart, whose age was half his own--a disastrous union, whichcaused him inexpressible anxiety and unhappiness. In _L'École desFemmes_ of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself inactual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from childhood by themethod of jealous seclusion and in infantile ignorance; but love, in the person of young Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos inthe anguish of Arnolphe; yet it is not the order of nature thatmiddle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon innocentaffections. The charming Agnès belongs of right to Horace, and theover-wise, and therefore foolish, Arnolphe must quit the scene withhis despairing cry. Some matter of offence was found by the devoutin Molière's play; it was the opening of a long campaign; the_précieuses_, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples ofAristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms. Molière for theoccasion ignored the devout; upon the others he made brilliantreprisals in _La Critique de l'École des Femmes_ (1663) and_L'Impromptu de Versailles_ (1663). 

Among those who war against nature and human happiness, not the leastdangerous foe is the religious hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, Molièrepresented before the King the first three acts of his greatcharacter-comedy _Tartufe_. Instantly Anne of Austria and the King'sconfessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to work; the publicperformance of "The Hypocrite" was inhibited; a savage pamphlet wasdirected against its author by the curé of Saint-Barthélemy. Privaterepresentations, however, were given; _Tartufe_, in five acts, wasplayed in November in presence of the great Condé. In 1665 Molière'scompany was named the servants of the King; two years later a verbalpermission was granted for the public performance of the play. Itappeared under the title of _L'Imposteur_; the victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the blow fell; by order of the President, M. De Lamoignon, the theatre was closed. Molière bore up courageously. The King was besieging Lille; Molière despatched two of his comradesto the camp, declaring that if the Tartufes of France should carryall before them he must cease to write. The King was friendly, butthe Archbishop fulminated threats of excommunication against any onewho should even read the play. At length in 1669, when circumstanceswere more favourable, Louis XIV. Granted the desired permission; inits proper name Molière's play obtained complete freedom. Bourdalouemight still pronounce condemnation; Bossuet might draw terriblemorals from the author's sudden death; an actor, armed with the swordof the comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theologianswere not wholly wrong; the tendency of Molière's teaching, like thatof Rabelais and like that of Montaigne, is to detach morals fromreligion, to vindicate whatever is natural, to regard good sense andgood feeling as sufficient guides of conduct. 

There is an accent of indignation in the play; the follies of menand women may be subjects of sport; base egoism assuming the garbof religion deserves a lash that draws the blood. Is it no act ofnatural piety to defend the household against the designs of greedyand sensual imposture; no service to society to quicken thepenetration of those who may be made the dupes of selfish craft? WhileOrgan and his mother are besotted by the gross pretensions of thehypocrite, while the young people contend for the honest joy of life, the voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the sagacious Cléante, and that of frank good sense through the waiting-maid, Dorine. Suddenly a providence, not divine but human, intervenes in therepresentative of the monarch and the law, and the criminal at themoment of triumph is captured in his own snare. 

When the affair of _Tartufe_ was in its first tangle, Molière produceda kind of dramatic counterpart--_Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre_(1665). In Don Juan--whose valet Sganarelle is the faithful criticof his master--the dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulityand scorn of all religion are united with the most complete morallicence; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day, and Don Juan insheer effrontery will invest himself for an hour in the robe of apenitent. Atheist and libertine as he is, there is a certain glamourof reckless courage about the figure of his hero, recreated by Molièrefrom a favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while a vigorousstudy of character, is touched with the light of romance. 

These are masterpieces; but neither _Tartufe_ nor _Don Juan_expresses so much of the mind of Molière as does _Le Misanthrope_(1666). His private griefs, his public warfare, had doubtless a littlehardened and a little embittered his spirit. In many respects it isa sorry world; and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misanthropistAlceste is nobly fanatical on behalf of sincerity and rectitude. Howdoes his sincerity serve the world or serve himself? And he, too, has his dose of human folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartlesscoquette? Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for whatit is; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more settled misanthropyin such cynical acquiescence than there is in the intractable virtueof Alceste? Alone of Molière's plays, _Le Misanthrope_ has thatShakespearean obscurity which leaves it open to variousinterpretations. It is idle to try to discover actual originals forthe characters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried toCélimène, "C'est pour mes péchés que je vous aime, " the actors whostood face to face were Molière and the wife whom he now met onlyon the stage. 

Molière's genius could achieve nothing higher than _Tartufe_ and the_Misanthrope_. His powers suffered no decline, but he did not againput them to such strenuous uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of_Amphitryon_, freely derived from Plautus, was succeeded by anadmirable comedy in prose, _Georges Dandin_, in which the folly ofunequal marriage between the substantial farmer and the fine ladyis mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the year closed Molière, continuing to write in prose, returned to Plautus, and surpassed himin _L'Avare_. To be rich and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity;but Harpagon is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a rulingpassion will admit one of subordinate influence. _Le BourgeoisGentilhomme_ (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who suffer fromthe social ambition to rise above their proper rank, is whollyoriginal; it mounts in the close from comedy to the extravagance offarce, and perhaps in the uproarious laughter of the play we maydiscover a touch of effort or even of spasm. The operatic _Psyché_(1671) is memorable as having combined the talents of Molière, Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of Lulli. 

In _Les Femmes Savantes_ (1672) Molière returned to an early theme, with variations suited to the times. The Hôtel de Rambouillet wasclosed; the new tribe of _précieuses_ had learnt the Cartesianphilosophy, affected the sciences, were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Something of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled strangely with the pretensions to science and thepedantries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait incaricature from the Abbé Cotin) is the Tartufe of spurious culture;Vadius (a possible satire of Ménage) is a pedant, arrogant and brutal. Shall the charming Henriette be sacrificed to gratify her mother'sdomineering temper and the base designs of an impostor? The forcesare arrayed on either side; the varieties of learned and elegant follyin woman are finely distinguished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois father with his rude common-sense; the sage Ariste;the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be faulty, but whosewit is sound and clear; and Henriette herself, the adorable, whomto know is more of a liberal education than to have explored all theGreek and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final issue ofthe encounter between good sense, good nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot be uncertain. 

_Le Malade Imaginaire_ was written when Molière was suffering fromillness; but his energy remained indomitable. The comedy continuedthat long polemic against the medical faculty which he had sustainedin _L'Amour Médecin_, _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_, and other plays. Molière had little faith in any art which professes to mend nature;the physicians were the impostors of a learned hygiene. It was thedramatist's last jest at the profession. While playing the part ofArgan on February 17, 1673, the "Malade Imaginaire" fell dying onthe stage; he forced a laugh, but could not continue his part; atten o'clock he was no more. Through the exertions of his widow areligious funeral was permitted to an actor who had died unfortifiedby the rites of the Church. 

Many admirable though slighter pieces served as the relief of hismind between the effort of his chief works. In all, gaiety and goodsense interpenetrate each other. Kindly natured and generous, Molière, a great observer, who looked through the deeds of men, wasoften taciturn--_le contemplateur_ of Boileau--and seeminglyself-absorbed. Like many persons of artistic temperament, he lovedsplendour of life; but he was liberal in his largess to those whoclaimed his help. He brought comedy to nature, and made it a studyof human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal and unnatural. He preached the worth of human happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous tolerance. He does not indulge in heroics, and yet thereis heroism in his courageous outlook upon things. The disciple ofMolière cannot idealise the world into a scene of fairyland; he willconceive man as far from perfect, perhaps as far from perfectible;but the world is our habitation; let us make it a cheerful one withthe aid of a sane temper and an energetic will. As a writer, Molièreis not free from faults; but his defects of style are like theaccidents that happen within the bounds of a wide empire. His statureis not diminished when he is placed among the greatest Europeanfigures. "I read some pieces of Molière's every year, " said Goethe, "just as from time to time I contemplate the engravings after thegreat Italian masters. For we little men are not able to retain thegreatness of such things within ourselves. "

To study the contemporaries and immediate successors of Molière incomedy--Thomas Corneille, Quinault, Montfleury, Boursault, Baron--would be to show how his genius dominates that of all hisfellows. The reader may well take this fact for granted. [1]

[Footnote 1: An excellent guide will be found in Victor Fournel's_Le Théâtre au xvii. Siècle, La Comédie_. ]

II

With the close of the sanguinary follies of the Fronde, with theinauguration of the personal government of Louis XIV. And the triumphof an absolute monarchy, a period of social and politicalreorganisation began. The court became the centre for literature;to please courtiers and great ladies was to secure prosperity andfame; the arts of peace were magnificently ordered; the conditionswere favourable to ideals of grace and beauty rather than of proudsublimity; to isolate one's self was impossible; literature becamethe pastime of a cultivated society; it might be a trivial pastime, but in fitting hands it might become a noble pleasure. 

The easier part was chosen by PHILIPPE QUINAULT, the more arduousby Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had given his first comedy as earlyas 1653; in tragedies and tragi-comedies which followed, he heapedup melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon charactersstrongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A frigid sentimentalityreplaces passion, and this is expressed with languorous monotony. Love reigns supreme in his theatre; but love, as interpreted byQuinault, is a kind of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy _Astrate_ (1663)was not the less popular because its sentiment was in the conventionalmode. One comedy by Quinault, _La Mère Coquette_, is happy in itsplot and in its easy style. But he did not find his true directionuntil he declined--or should we rather say, until he rose?--into thelibrettist for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were considerable;he could manipulate his light and fragile material with extraordinaryskill. The tests of truth and reality were not applied to such verse;if it was decorative, the listeners were satisfied. The operaflourished, and literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. Butthe libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade arerepresentative of the time, and in his mythological or chivalricinventions Benserade sometimes could attain to the poetry of gracefulfantasy. 

Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the moment whenRacine appeared. Born at La Ferté-Milon in 1639, son of a procureurand comptroller of salt, JEAN RACINE lost both parents while a child. His widowed grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After sixyears' schooling at Beauvais the boy passed into the tutelage of theJansenists, and among his instructors was the devout and learnedNicole. Solitude, religion, the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides--these were the powers that fostered his genius. Alreadyhe was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued his studiesin Paris, where the little abbé Le Vasseur, who knew the _salons_and haunted the theatre, introduced him to mundane pleasures. Racine's sensitive, mobile character could easily adapt itself tothe world. His ode on the marriage of the King, _La Nymphe de la Seine_, corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river was highlyimproper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But might not the worldcorrupt the young Port-Royalist's innocence? The company of ladiesof the Marais Theatre and that of La Fontaine might not tend toedification. So thought Racine's aunts; and, with the expectationthat he would take orders, he was exiled to Uzès, where his unclewas vicar-general, and where the nephew could study the _Summa_ oftheology, but also the Odyssey, the odes of Pindar, Petrarch, andthe pretty damsels who prayed in the cathedral church. 

In 1663 he was again in Paris, was present at royal levées, and inBoileau's chambers renewed his acquaintance with La Fontaine, andbecame a companion of Molière. His vocation was not that of anecclesiastic. Two dramatic works of earlier date are lost; his firstpiece that appeared before the public, _La Thébaïde_, was presentedin 1664 by Molière's company. It is a tragedy written in discipleshipto Rotrou and to Corneille, and the pupil was rather an imitator ofCorneille's infirmities than of his excellences. _Alexandre_followed towards the close of the ensuing year--a feeble play, inwhich the mannered gallantry of the time was liberally transferredto the kings of India and their Macedonian conqueror. But amoroussighs were the mode, and there was a young grand monarch who mightdiscover himself in the person of the magnanimous hero. The successwas great, though Saint-Évremond pronounced his censures, andCorneille found ridiculous the trophies erected upon the imaginedruins of his own. Discontented with the performers at the Palais-Royal, Racine offered his play to the Hôtel de Bourgogne; Molière's bestactress seceded to the rival house. Racine's ambition may excuse, but cannot justify an injurious act; a breach between the friendswas inevitable. 

Boileau remained now, as ever, loyal--loyal for warning as well asfor encouragement. Nicole, the former guide of Racine's studies, inhis _Visionnaires_, had spoken of dramatic poets as "publicpoisoners. " The reproach was taken to himself by Racine, and in twoletters, written with some of the spirit of the _Provinciales_, heturned his wit against his Jansenist friends. Thanks to Boileau'swise and firm counsel, the second of these remained unpublished. 

Madame de Sévigné was the devoted admirer of the great Corneille, but when she witnessed his young rival's _Andromaque_ she yieldedto its pathos six reluctant tears. On its first appearance in 1667a triumph almost equal to that of the _Cid_ was secured. Never beforehad grace and passion, art and nature, ideality and truth, been sounited in the theatre of France. Racine did not seek for novelty inthe choice of a subject; Euripides had made Andromache familiar tothe Greek stage. The invention of Racine was of a subtler kind thanthat which manufactures incidents and constructs a plot. Like Raphaelin the art of painting, he could accept a well-known theme and renewit by the finest processes of genius. He did not need an extraordinaryaction, or personages of giant proportions; the simpler the intrigue, the better could he concentrate the interest on the states of a soul;the more truly and deeply human the characters, the more apt werethey for betraying the history of a passion. In its purity of outline, its harmony of proportions, _Andromaque_ was Greek; in its sentiment, it gained something from Christian culture; in its manners, therewas a certain reflection of the Versailles of Louis XIV. It was atonce classical and modern, and there was no discordance betweenqualities which had been rendered, to borrow a word from Shakespeare, "harmonious charmingly. " With _Andromaque_ French tragedy ceased tobe oratorical, and became essentially poetic. 

Adversaries there were, such as success calls forth; the irritablepoet retorted with epigrams of a kind which multiply and perpetuateenmities. His true reprisal was another work, _Britannicus_, establishing his fame in another province of tragedy. But before_Britannicus_ appeared he had turned aside, as if his genius neededrecreation, to produce the comedy, or farce, or buffoonery, orbadinage, or mockery (for it is all these), _Les Plaideurs_. It maybe that his failure in a lawsuit moved Racine to have his jest atthe gentlemen of the Palais; he and his friends of the tavern of the_Mouton Blanc_--Furetière among them--may have put their witstogether to devise material for laughter, and discussed how far _TheWasps_ of Aristophanes could be acclimatised in Paris. At first theburlesque was meant for an Italian troupe, but Scaramouche left thetown, and something more carefully developed would be expected atthe Hôtel de Bourgogne. The play was received with hisses, but Molièredid not fear to laugh at what was comic, whether he laughed accordingto the rules or against them. A month later, at a court performance, Louis XIV. Laughed loudly; the courtiers quickly discovered Racine'swit, and the laughter was echoed by all loyal citizens. In truth, there is laughing matter in the play; the professional enthusiasmof Dandin, the judge, who wears his robe and cap even in bed, therage and rapture of litigation in Chicanneau and the Countess, havein them something of nature beneath the caricature; in the buffoonerythere is a certain extravagant grace. 

_Les Plaideurs_, however, was only an interlude between graverefforts. _Britannicus_ (1669), founded on the Annals of Tacitus, exhibits with masterly power Nero's adolescence in crime; the youngtiger has grace and strength, but the instinct of blood needs onlyto be awakened within him. Agrippine is a superb incarnation ofwomanly ambition, a Roman sister of Athalie. The play was at firstcoldly received; Corneille and his cabal did not spare their censures. In a preface Racine struck back, but afterwards repented of his bitterwords and withdrew them. The critics, as he says in a later preface, disappeared; the piece remained. His conception of tragedy incontrast with that of Corneille was defined by him in memorablewords--what is natural should be sought rather than what isextraordinary; the action should be simple, "chargée de peu dematière"; it should advance gradually towards the close, sustainedby the interests, sentiments, and passions of the personages. 

The sprightly Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans, seems to haveconceived the idea of bringing the rivalry between the old dramaticpoet and his young successor to a decisive test. She proposed to each, without the other's knowledge, a subject for a tragedy--the parting, for reasons of State policy, of two royal lovers, Titus, Emperor ofRome, and Bérénice, Queen of Palestine. Perhaps Henriettamischievously thought of the relations of her friend Marie de Manciniwith Louis XIV. The plays appeared almost simultaneously in November1670; Corneille's was before long withdrawn; Racine's _Bérénice_, in which the penetrating voice of La Champmeslé interpreted thesorrows of the heroine, obtained a triumph. Yet the elegiac subjectis hardly suited to tragedy; a situation rather than an action ispresented; it needed all the poet's resources to prevent the scenesfrom being stationary. In Bérénice there is a suavity in grief whichgives a grace to her passion; the play, if not a drama of power, isthe most charming of elegiac tragedies. 

_Bajazet_ (1672), a tragedy of the seraglio, although the rôle ofthe hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury of Eastern passion, a love resembling hate, is represented in the Sultana Roxane. In theVizier Acomat, deliberate in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomedto fail in his characters of men. The historical events werecomparatively recent; but in the perspective of the theatre, distancemay produce the idealising effect of time. The story was perhaps foundby Racine in _Floridon_, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of_Mithridate_ (1673), the noble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queenand slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chastity, fidelity, sacrifice;gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty courage. The play unitesthe passions of romance with a study of large political interestshardly surpassed by Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against_Bajazet_ could only whisper its malignities when _Mithridate_appeared. 

_Iphigénie_, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was given atthe fêtes of Versailles in the summer of 1674. The French Iphigeniais enamoured of Achilles, and death means for her not only departurefrom the joy of youth and the light of the sun, but the loss of love. Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situation with crossand counter loves: Ériphile is created to be the jealous rival ofIphigénie, and to be her substitute in the sacrifice of death. Theingenious transpositions, which were necessary to adapt a Greek playto Versailles in the second half of the seventeenth century, calledforth hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a competing_Iphigénie_, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was produced in the springof 1675; it was born dead, and five days later it was buried. 

The hostilities culminated two years later. It is commonly said thatRacine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror andtheir truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on _Phèdre_. The Duchesse deBouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegancein literature, and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on thesame subject was ordered from Pradon; and to insure her victory theDuchess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as Boileau declares, engaged the front seats of two theatres for six successiveevenings--the one to be packed with applauding spectators, the otherto exhibit empty benches, diversified with creatures who could hiss. Nothing could dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degradethat of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree sensitive, andsuch a desperate plot against his fame might well make him pause andreflect. 

_Phèdre_, like _Iphigénie_, is a new creation from Euripides. Itssingular beauty has been accurately defined as a mingling of horrorand compassion, of terror and curiosity. It is less a drama than onegreat part, and that part consists of a diseased state of the soul, a morbid conflict of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch astudy in the pathology of passion. The greatness of the rôle of theheroine constitutes the infirmity of the play as a whole; the othercharacters seem to exist only for the sake of deploying the inwardstruggle of which Phèdre is the victim. Love and jealousy rage withinher; remorse follows, for something of Christian sentiment isconveyed by Racine into his classical fable. Never had his power asa psychologist in art been so wonderfully exhibited; yet he hadelsewhere attained more completely the ideal of the drama. In thesuccession of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last thatit is lesser than the first and greater. _Phèdre_ lacks the balanceand proportion of _Andromaque_; but never had Racine exhibited thetempest and ravage of passion in a woman's soul on so great a scaleor with force so terrible. 

The cabal might make him pause; his own play, profoundly moralisedas it was, might cause him to consider. Events of the day, crimesof passion, adulteries, poisonings, nameless horrors, might agitatehis spirit. Had he not fed the full-blown passions of the time? Whatif Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners should betrue? Probably various causes operated on the mobile spirit of Racine;certainly the Christian, of Jansenist education, who had slumberedwithin him, now awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adoptthe Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that he shouldregulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded, and found hiscontentment in a wife who was ignorant of his plays, and in childrenwhose inclinations and training were religious. The penitent washappy in his household, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicoleand Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he did not renouncethe court. Was not the King the anointed vicegerent of God, who couldnot be too much honoured? He accepted, with Boileau as fellow-labourer, the position of the King's historiographer, and endeavoured to fulfilits duties. 

Twelve years after his withdrawal from the theatre, Racine, at therequest of Madame de Maintenon, composed his Biblical tragedy of_Esther_ (1688-89) for her cherished schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr. Thesubject was not unaptly chosen--a prudent and devout Esther now helpedto guide the fortunes of France, and she was surrounded at Saint-Cyrby her chorus of young daughters of Sion. _Esther_ was rendered bythe pupils, with graceful splendours, before the King, and the delightwas great. The confidante of the Persian Queen indeed forgot herwords; at Racine's hasty complaint the young actress wept, and thepoet, weeping with her, wiped away her tears. 

_Esther_ is a melodious play, exquisite in its refined style anddelicate versification; but the characters are faintly drawn. Itsnovelty lay in its lyrical movements and in the poetical uses of itsfinely-imagined spectacle. Madame de Maintenon or her directorsfeared that the excitement and ambitions of another play in costumemight derange the spirits of her girls, and when _Athalie_ was recitedat Versailles, in January 1691, it was little of an event; the playpassed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed, would have beenno fitting tribute to its solemn beauty. All Racine's religiousfeeling, all his domestic tenderness are united in _Athalie_ withhis matured feeling for Greek art. The great protagonist is the DivineBeing; Providence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child(for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre) was thecentre of the action; the interests were political, or rather national, in the highest sense; the events were, as formerly, the developmentsof inward character; but events and characters were under thepresiding care of God. The tragedy is lyrical, not merely throughthe chorus, which expresses common emotions of devout joy and fear, indignation, praise, and rapture. The chorus is less developed here, and its chants are less impressive than in _Esther_. There is, however, a lyrism, personal and modern, in the prophetic inspiration of theHigh Priest, and Racine anticipated that his boldness in presentingthis might be censured by his contemporaries. The unity of place, which had been disregarded in _Esther_, is here preserved; the sceneis the temple at Jerusalem; and by its impressive grandeur, and theawful associations of the place, the spectacle may be said to takepart in the action of the play. Perhaps it would be no exaggerationto assert that grandeur and beauty are nowhere else so united in Frenchdramatic art as in _Athalie_; perhaps it might truly be describedas flawless in majesty and grace. 

A light disfavour of the King saddened, and perhaps hastened, theclose of Racine's life. Port-Royal was regarded as a centre ofrebellious heresy; and Racine's piety to his early masters was humbleand devout. He had further offended by drawing up a memorandum onthe sufferings of the French people resulting from the wars. Madamede Maintenon assured him that the cloud would pass; but the favourof death, accepted with tranquillity, came before the returningfavour of the poet's master. He died in April 1699, soon after hehad entered his sixtieth year. 

The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its truth tonature--truth, that is, in its interpretation and rendering of humanpassion. Historical accuracy and local colour concerned him as faras they were needful with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude. The fluctuations of passion he studies to most advantage in hischaracters of women. Love, in all its varieties, from the passionof Roxane or Phèdre to the pure devotion of Bérénice, Iphigénie, orMonime; maternal tenderness or the tenderness of the foster-mother(Andromaque, Clytemnestre, Josabeth); female ambition (Agrippine, Athalie)--these are the themes of his exposition. His style has beenjustly characterised as a continual creation; its audacity underliesits suavity; its miracles are accomplished with the simplest means. His vocabulary is singularly small, yet with such a vocabulary hecan attain the rarest effects. From sustained dignity he can passsuddenly, when the need arises, to the most direct familiarity. Themusic of his verse is seldom rich or sonorous; it is at once a purevehicle for the idea and a delicate caress to the senses. 

CHAPTER VIIBOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS--FÉNELON

I

"A man set under authority"--these words, better than any other, define Bossuet. Above him was God, represented in things spiritualby the Catholic Church, in things temporal by the French monarchy;below him were the faithful confided to his charge, and those whowould lead the faithful astray from the path of obedience andtradition. Duty to what was above him, duty to those placed underhim, made up the whole of Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend, to extend the tradition he had received, was the first of duties. All his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator weredirected to this object. He wrote and spoke to dominate the intellectsof men and to subdue their wills, not for the sake of personal power, but for the truth as he had received it from the Church and from themonarchy. 

JACQUES-BÉNIGNE BOSSUET was born in 1627, at Dijon, of a middle-classfamily, distinguished in the magistracy. In his education, pursuedwith resolute ardour, the two traditions of Hellenism and Hebraismwere fused together: Homer and Virgil were much to him; but the Bible, above all, nourished his imagination, his conscience, and his will. The celebrity of his scholarship and the flatteries of Parisian_salons_ did not divert him from his course. At twenty-five he wasa priest and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent at Metz, a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants and Jews, whereBossuet fortified himself with theological studies, preached, panegyrised the saints, and confuted heretics. His fame drew him toParis, where, during ten years, his sermons were among the greatevents of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of Condom, but, beingappointed preceptor to the Dauphin, he resigned his bishopric, anddevoted himself to forming the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull, who might one day be the vicegerent of God for his country. Bishopof Meaux in 1681, he opened the assembly of French clergy next yearwith his memorable sermon on the unity of the Church, and by hisauthority carried, in a form decisive for freedom while respectfultowards Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties ofthe Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese, controversy againstProtestantism, the controversy against Quietism, in which Fénelonwas his antagonist, devotional writings, strictures upon the stage, controversy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of RichardSimon, filled his energetic elder years. He ceased from a life ofglorious labour and resolute combat in April 1704. 

The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries on Holy Scripture, devotional treatises, and letters, fall into three chief groups: theeloquence of the pulpit, controversial writings, and writingsdesigned for the instruction of the Dauphin. 

Political eloquence could not exist where power was grasped by thehands of one great ruler. Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth andelevation which come with political freedom; it contented itself withsubtleties of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. Thepulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul had preachedwith unction and a grave simplicity, and Bossuet, his disciple, felthis influence. But the offering which Bossuet laid upon the altarmust needs be costly, an offering of all his powers. While anunalterable good sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of hisintellect demanded plenitude of expression; his imagination, if itdealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at times in theway of magnificence, which was natural to it; and his lyricalenthusiasm, fed by the prophetic poetry of the Old Testament, couldnot but find an escape in words. He sought no literary fame; hissermons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast mass ofhis discourses he printed one, a sermon of public importance--thaton the unity of the Church. 

At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations were published. These, with his address on the profession of Louise de La Vallière, were all that could be read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by hiscontemporaries. His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared, but he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by followingthe words of a manuscript. After his death his papers had perilousadventures. By the devotion of his first editor, Déforis, nearly twohundred sermons were after many years recovered; later students havepresented them with as close an approximation as is possible to theiroriginal form. Bossuet's first manner--that of the years at Metz--issometimes marred by scholastic subtleties, a pomp of quotations, toocurious imagery, and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating. During the period when he preached in Paris he was master of all hispowers, which move with freedom and at the same time with a majesticorder; his grandeur grows out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux heexhorted his flock out of the abundance of his heart, often withoutthe intermediary of written preparation. 

He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined byauthority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, notindependent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and whiletruly human yet resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogmanor morals are presented in the manner of the schools; both are madeliving powers by the preacher's awe, adoration, joy, charity, indignation, pity; in the large ordonnance of his discourse eachpassion finds its natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme;his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas; he is lucid, rapid, energetic; then suddenly some aspect of his subject awakens a lyricalemotion, and the preacher rises into the prophet. 

Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in which doctrine andmorals are enforced by great examples. His _Oraisons Funèbres_ preach, for the uses of the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else doeshe so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the glory oflife as when he stands beside the bier and reviews the achievementsor presents the characters of the illustrious deceased. Observingas he did all the decorum of the occasion, his discourses do notdegenerate into mere adulation; some are historic surveys, magnificent in their breadth of view and mastery of events. Hepresents things as he saw them, and he did not always see aright. Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor; the revocation of the edictof Nantes is the laudable act of a king who is a defender of the faith. The intolerance of Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart asfrom the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tenderness whichbreaks forth in many places, and signally in the discourse occasionedby the death of the Duchess of Orleans. This, and the eloquentmemorials of her mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of thePrince de Condé, touch the heights and depths of the passions properto the grave. 

Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently representedby his _Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique_ (published 1671) andthe _Histoire des Variations des Églises Protestantes_ (1688). Thelatter, in its fifteen books, is an attempt to overwhelm thecontending Protestant communions by one irresistible attack. Theirdiversities of error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faithof the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, theAlbigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed and slain, asopponents are slain in theological warfare--to rise again. Historyand theology co-operate in the result. The characters of theProtestant Reformers are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, andan art which can bring into relief what the work of art requires. Why the children of the infallible Church rose up in disobedienceagainst their mother is left unexplained. The great heresy, Bossuetwas persuaded, had almost reached its term; the intellectual chaoswould soon be restored to universal order under the successors ofInnocent XI. 

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular autobiography of MadameGuyon[1] throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was acontention between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emotionalreligion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of theCatholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful andarmed for obedience and command--the "man under authority"--herightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising fromself-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structureof orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion;it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned. The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a systemof belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was buta spurious love, leading to destruction. 

[Footnote 1: Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897, by T. T. Allen. ]

Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion--these were in turnmet by the champion of tradition, and, as he trusted, were subdued. Another danger he perceived, not in the unregenerate will or wanderingheart, but in the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right inviewing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. But hisscholarship was here defective. He succeeded in suppressing anedition of the _Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament_. There wereprinters in Holland beyond the reach of Bossuet's arm; and Simoncontinued the work which others have carried further with the aidsof more exact science. 

To doubt the government of His world by the Divine Ruler, who assignsus our duty and our place, is to sap the principles of authority andof obedience. The doctrine of God's providence is at the centre ofall Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal passions. On earth, the powers that be; in France, the monarch; in heaven, agreater Monarch (we will not say a magnified Louis XIV. ) presidingover all the affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educatehis indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how God is above man, as man is above the brute. Monarchy--as he showed in his _PolitiqueTirée de l'Écriture Sainte_--is hereditary and absolute; butabsolute power is not arbitrary power; the King is God's subject, and his laws must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The _Discourssur l'Histoire Universelle_ (1681) was written in the first instancefor the Dauphin; but its purpose was partly apologetic, and Bossuet, especially in the second part of the book, had the errors offree-thinkers--Spinoza and Simon--before his mind. 

The seventeenth century had not contributed largely to historicalliterature, save in the form of memoirs. Mézeray, in the first halfof the century, Fleury, in the second, cannot be ranked among thosewriters who illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesianphilosophy viewed historical studies with haughty indifference. Bossuet's _Discours_ is a vindication of the ways of God in history, a theology of human progress. He would exhibit the nations andgenerations of human-kind bound each to each under the Providentialgovernment. The life of humanity, from Adam to Charlemagne, is mappedinto epochs, ages, periods--the periods of nature, of the law, andof grace. In religion is found the unity of human history. By religionis meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity is meant theCatholicism of Rome. 

Having expounded the Divine policy in the government of the world, Bossuet is free to study those secondary causes which have determinedthe rise and fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and withmajestic skill, he presents the movements of races and peoples. Hissympathy with the genius of ancient Rome proceeds not only from hiscomprehensive grasp of facts, but from a kinship between his own andthe Roman type of character. The magnificent design of Bossuet wasmagnificently accomplished. He hoped to extend his studies, and applyhis method to other parts of his vast subject, but the hope was notto be fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of historyhe is not; he is the theologian who marshals facts under an accepteddogma. A conception of Providence may indeed emerge from theresearches of a devout investigator of the life of humanity as theirlast result; but towards that conception the secular life and thevarious religions of the world will contribute; the ways of the DivineSpirit will appear other than those of the anthropomorphic Ruler ofBossuet's imagination. He was not an original thinker; he would havescorned such a distinction--"l'hérétique est celui qui a uneopinion"; he had received the truth, and only gave it extendedapplications. He is "le sublime orateur des idées communes. "

More than an orator, before all else he was a combatant. Falling athis post as the eighteenth century opened, he is like some majestic, white-haired paladin of old romances which tell of the strife betweenFrench chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell; the age ofgrowing incredulity and novel faiths was inaugurated; the infidelspassed over the body of the champion of conservative tradition. 

II

Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher less highly thanthey esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. The life of LOUIS BOURDALOUE(1632-1704) is told in the words of Vinet: "He preached, confessed, consoled, and then he died. " It does credit to his hearers that theyvalued him aright--a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, withdowncast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; hiseloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave andplain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality. He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowdat St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended thepulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Condé, "there is our enemy!"Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions with theelaborate skill of a tactician; he sought to capture the judgment;he reached the heart through a wise director's knowledge of its inmostprocesses. When his words were touched with emotion, it was theinvoluntary manifestation of the life within him. His studies ofcharacter sometimes tended to the form of portraits of moral types, features in which could be identified with actual persons; but inthese he was the moralist, not the satirist. During four-and-thirtyyears Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the breadof life--plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. Hedoes not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is better--henourishes. 

Bourdaloue pronounced only two _Oraisons Funèbres_, and those underthe constraint of duty. He thought the Christian pulpit was meantfor less worldly uses than the eulogy of mortal men. The _OraisonFunèbre_ was more to the taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose unequalrhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of Turenne; more to thetaste of the elegant FLÉCHIER, Bishop of Nîmes. All the literarygraces were cultivated by Fléchier (1632-1710), and his eloquenceis unquestionable; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit. He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed in the schoolof preciosity, a haunter of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; knowing thesurface of society, he knew as a moralist how to depict its mannersand the evil that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life likeBossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's serious zeal; to savesouls was indeed important; to exhibit his talents before the Kingwas also important. But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deepersprings than lay in Fléchier's mundane spirit. Already the decadencehas begun. 

Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN (1677-1730), clear, logical, energetic, with negligences of style and sudden flashes ofgenius. But he belongs to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhapsthan to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abundant, yetindicative of the decline, is displayed in the discourses of thelatest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-BAPTISTE MASSILLON(1663-1742), who belongs more to the eighteenth than to theseventeenth century. "He must increase, " said Bourdaloue, "but I mustdecrease. " Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural grace, sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the rhetorical art, sincerely devout, yet with waverings towards the world, had somethingin his genius that resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feelingfor human passions, give his sermons qualities which contrast withthe severer manner of Bourdaloue. They are simple in plan; thepreacher's art lay in deploying and developing a few ideas, andinfusing into them an imaginative sensibility; he is facile andabundant; faultless in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yetthe opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV. --"God aloneis great, my brethren"--are noble in their simplicity; and the thoughtof Jesus suddenly appearing in "the most august assembly of theworld"--in the chapel at Versailles--startled the hearers of thesermon on the "small number of the elect. " "There is an orator!" criedthe actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" but no actor would haveinstituted a comparison between himself and Bourdaloue. "When oneenters the avenue at Versailles, " said Massillon, "one feels anenervating air. "

He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice around him; hetried to meet it, tracing the scepticism of the time to itsill-regulated passions; but he met scepticism by morality detachedfrom dogma. The _Petit Carême_, preached before Louis XV. When a childof eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment: the young Kingwould grow into the father of his people; the days of peace wouldreturn. Great and beneficent kings are not effeminately amiable; itwere better if Massillon had preached "Be strong" than "Be tender. "Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Massillon, and loved to hearthe musical periods of the _Petit Carême_ read aloud at meal-time. To be the favourite preacher of eighteenth-century philosophers isa distinction somewhat compromising to an exponent of the faith. 

III

Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy concerning Quietismmight have found the approval of the philosophers for some of hispolitical opinions. His religious writings would have spoken to themin an unknown tongue. 

FRANÇOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FÉNELON was born in Périgord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious family. Of one whose intellect andcharacter were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of allopposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simonnoticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality wasexpressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pourcesser de le regarder. " During the early years of his clerical careerhe acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and asmissionary among the unconverted Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointedtutor to the King's grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, and from apassionate boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindlydocile. Fénelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of Cambrai (1695), which removed him from the court, was in fact a check to his ambition. His religious and his political views were regarded by Louis XIV. As dangerous for the Church and the monarchy. 

Through his personal interest in Mme. Guyon, and his sympathy withher mystical doctrine in religion--one which inculcated completeabnegation of the will, and its replacement by absolute surrenderto the Divine love--he came into conflict with Bossuet, and aftera fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which Fénelon displayedthe utmost skill and energy as tactician and dialectician, he receiveda temperate condemnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of theDauphin (1711), which left his former pupil heir to the throne, revived Fénelon's hopes of political influence, but in the next yearthese hopes disappeared with the decease of the young Duc de Bourgogne. At Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like a saintand a _grand seigneur_, Fénelon died six months before Louis XIV. , in 1715. 

"The most original intellect--if we set Pascal aside--of theseventeenth century"--so Fénelon is described by one excellentcritic. "Antique and modern, " writes his biographer, M. Paul Janet, "Christian and profane, mystical and diplomatic, familiar and noble, gentle and headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating theeighteenth century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believinglike a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fénelon is one of the mostoriginal figures which the Catholic Church has produced. " His firstpublication was the treatise _De l'Éducation des Filles_ (written1681, published 1687), composed at the request of his friends theDuc and Duchesse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition ofthe dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort to form hermind. It honours the reason, opposes severity, would make instruction, as far as possible, a delight, and would exhibit goodness in a graciousaspect; commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning, indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness ofdisposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts to a dignifiedsimplicity in dress. The range of studies recommended is narrow, butfor Fénelon's time it was liberal; the book marks an epoch in thehistory of female education. 

For his pupil the Duc de Bourgogne, Fénelon wrote his graceful prose_Fables_ (which also include under that title short tales, allegories, and fairy stories), the _Dialogues des Morts_, aiming at theapplication of moral principles to politics, and his _Télémaque_, named in the first (incomplete) edition _Suite du IVe Livre del'Odyssée_ (1699). In this, for long the most popular of tales forthe young, Fénelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ampleexpression; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in search ofhis father Ulysses, under the warning guidance and guardianship ofMinerva disguised as Mentor. Imitations and borrowings fromclassical authors are freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose, a romance of education, designed at once to charm the imaginationand to inculcate truths of morals, politics, and religion. Thedidactic purpose is evident, yet it remains a true work of art, fullof grace and colour, occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vividand forcible. 

Fénelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those ofan idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to thecontrol of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravaganceof the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; hedesired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate betweenthe crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisationwhich should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs;in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican. These ideas are put forth in his _Direction pour la Conscience d'unRoi_ and the _Plan de Gouvernement_. Louis XIV. Suspected thepolitical tendency of _Télémaque_, and caused the printing of thefirst edition to be suspended. Fénelon has sometimes been regardedas a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been somethingchimerical, have rendered revolution impossible. 

Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combativeenergy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knowshim only through his _Lettres Spirituelles_, which tend towards theeffacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuetpleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a falsemysticism; Fénelon, against confounding true mysticism with what isfalse. In his _Traité de l'Existence de Dieu_ he shows himself a boldand subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument fromdesign in nature and from the reason in man; the second part--of alater date--follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived fromour idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctionsFénelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpassed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His _Dialogues sur l'Éloquence_ seek toreplace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded withdivisions and subdivisions, and supported with a multitude ofquotations, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its fervency. 

The admirable _Lettre à l'Académie_, Fénelon's latest gift toliterature, states the case of the ancients against the moderns, andof the moderns against the ancients, with an attempt at impartiality, but it is evident that the writer's love was chiefly given to hisfavourite classical authors; simplicity and natural beauty attractedhim more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He feared thatthe language was losing some of its richness and flexibility; hecondemns the use of rhyme; he is hardly just to Racine, but honourshimself by his admiration of Molière. In dealing with historicalwritings he recognises the importance of the study of governments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time values highlya personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soulwas added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something thatwas almost feminine was united with the reserved power and authorityof a man. 

CHAPTER VIIITRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fénelon. The factsof the moral world, as seen in society, were studied, analysed, andportrayed by La Bruyère and Saint-Simon. 

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE (1645-96), a Parisian of the _bourgeoisie_, appointed preceptor in history to the grandson of the great Condé, saw with the keen eyes of a disenchanted observer the spectacle ofseventeenth-century society. In 1688, appended to his translationof the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only important work, _Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce Siècle_; revised and enlargededitions followed, until the ninth was published in 1696. "I restoreto the public, " he wrote, "what the public lent me. " In a series ofsixteen chapters, each consisting of detached paragraphs, hisstudies of human life and of the social environment are presentedin the form of maxims, reflections, observations, portraits. For themaxims a recent model lay before him in the little volume of LaRochefoucauld; portraits, for which the romances of Mlle. De Scudéryhad created a taste, had been exhibited in a collection formed byMlle. De Montpensier--the growth of her _salon_--in collaborationwith Segrais (_Divers Portraits_, 1659). Aware of his mastery as apainter of character, La Bruyère added largely to the number of hisportraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to identify hischaracter-sketches with living persons, enhanced the interestexcited by the work; but in many instances La Bruyère aims atpresenting a type rather than an individual, a type which had beenindividualised by his observation of actual persons. 

A profound or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employingbase means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure lefta certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around himas a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to notethe infirmities of those who took part in the game which he haddeclined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he seerealities through a roseate veil; he neither thinks basely of humannature nor in a heroic fashion: he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to reformation, but actually, perhaps, more in the wayof an observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all else a"naturalist, " a naturalist with a sufficient field for investigation, though the life of the provinces and that of the fields (save in theirmore obvious aspect of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The valueof his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from the fact thathe is not pledged to a system, that he can take up various pointsof view, and express the results of many moods of mind. Now he issevere, and again he is indulgent; now he appears almost a cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender; now he is grave, andin a moment mirthful; while for every purpose and in every mood hehas irony at his command. He divines the working of the passions witha fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every outward betrayalor indication of the hidden processes of the heart. 

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and authorship, personal merit, women, the heart, society and conversation, the giftsof fortune, the town, the court, men in high station, the King andcommonwealth, the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion, customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formalsystem, those notes on life and studies of society that had graduallyaccumulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des EspritsForts, " expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably wasnot insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundaneportion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of thewhole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have beentoo rigid, too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of LaBruyère. "Different things, " he says, "are thought out by differentmethods, and explained by diverse expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument, a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simplecomparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by description, orby portraiture. " His book contains all these, and his stylecorresponds with the variety of matter and method--a style, asVoltaire justly characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque. "Among all the different modes in which a single thoughtmay be expressed, " wrote La Bruyère, "only one is correct. " To findthis exact expression he sometimes over-labours his style, andsearches the vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word. In his desire for animation the periodic structure of sentence yieldsto one of interruptions, suspensions, and surprises. He is at oncea moralist and a virtuoso in the literary art. 

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the composition of his_Mémoires_ belong to the eighteenth century; but his mind was mouldedduring his early years, and retained its form and lineaments. He maybe regarded as a belated representative of the great age of LouisXIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer age by virtue of hissense that political reform was needed, his designs of politicalreform were derived from the past rather than pointed towards thefuture. LOUIS DE ROUVRAY, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, was born at Versaillesin 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could be tracedto Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis XIII. , had been nameda duke and peer of France in 1635; from his father descended to theson a devotion to the memory of Louis XIII. , and a passionateattachment to the dignity of his own order. 

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired some Latin, andwas a diligent reader of French history. In 1691 he was presentedto the King and was enrolled as a soldier in the musketeers. Hepurchased by-and-by what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalryregiment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had transformeda feudal army into one where birth and rank were subjected to officialcontrol; and in 1702, when others received promotion and he was passedover, he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate and happymarriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly at Versailles until thedeath of the King, and obtained the most intimate acquaintance withwhat he terms the mechanics of the court. He had many grievancesagainst Louis XIV. , chief among them the insult shown to the nobilityin the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; and he justlyregarded Madame de Maintenon as his enemy. 

The death of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whose party he belonged, wasa blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the Regent remained his friend. He helped, on a diplomatic mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriageof Louis XV. ; yet still was on fire with indignation caused by thewrongs of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled onhistorical grounds to form the great council of the monarchy, andalmost as rightful partners in the supreme power. His political lifeclosed in 1723 with the death of the Regent. He lived in retirementat his château of La Ferté-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his wifeand his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), Saint-Simon died. 

When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's _Mémoires_ in asoldier's hour of leisure, he conceived the idea of recording hisown experiences, and the _Mémoires_ of Saint-Simon were begun. Duringlater years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated in hishands, but the definitive form which they took was not determineduntil, in his retirement at La Ferté-Vidame, the _Journal_ of Dangeaucame into his hands. Dangeau's _Journal_ is dry, colourless, passionless, without insight and without art; but it is awell-informed and an exact chronicle, extending over the years from1684 to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur à faire vomir"; itsservility towards the King and Madame de Maintenon enraged him; butit exhibited facts in an orderly sequence; it might serve as a guideand a clue among his own reminiscences; on the basis of Dangeau'sliteral transcript of occurrences he might weave his own brilliantrecitals and passionate presentations of character. ThusSaint-Simon's _Mémoires_ came to be written. 

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic power of observation;nothing escaped his vision, and his passions enabled him to penetratethrough what he saw to its secret meanings. He had gatheredinformation from those who knew the mysteries of the palace and thecourt; great persons, court ladies, even valets and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is true that the passions which often lit up the truth sometimesobscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated waswelcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on hisimpartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details. Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a senseof the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feelingof duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, hisviolence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more ofteninspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth ofstyle, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyricaloutcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the largestyle of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkleand gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensityof his imagination. 

The _Mémoires_, the final preparation of which was the work of hiselder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His manuscripts werebequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose withSaint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried amongthe public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before theclose of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 thata true _editio princeps_, substantially correct, was published. Theviolences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered noobstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romanticmovement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner something more of habitual concentration thecomparison would not be unjust. 

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speakof any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, itis the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation thatidea emerged to the light. At first a religious question wascomplicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religiousquestion was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadableepic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith affordedmaterial for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poetthan the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the third_chant_ of his _Art Poétique_, replied--the mysteries of theChristian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be tricked out to gratifythe fancy. 

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT(1628-1703), who had burlesqued the _Æneid_, written light andfragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante inpatristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishesbetween partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a momentfor gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem_Le Siècle de Louis le Grand_, in which the revolt against theclassical tyranny was formulated, and contemporary authors wereglorified at the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau murmured, indignant; Racine offered ironical commendations; otherAcademicians patriotically applauded their own praises. Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro. 

Fontenelle, in his _Discours sur l'Églogue_ and a _Digression surles Anciens et les Modernes_, widened the field of debate. Were treesin ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why maynot modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checksthe progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so muchas admiration of the ancients. " Genius is bestowed by Nature on everyage, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In hisdialogues entitled the _Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes_(1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of progress; that we are the trueancients of the earth, wise with inherited science, more exact inreasoning, more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to ahigher plane by Christianity, by the invention of printing, and bythe favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine in his charming _Épître_to Huet, La Bruyère in his _Caractères_, Boileau in his ill-tempered_Réflexions sur Longin_, rallied the supporters of classicism. Gradually the fires smouldered or were assuaged; Boileau and Perraultwere reconciled. 

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical forms, paida homage to popular tradition in his delightful _Contes de ma Mèrel'Oie_ (if, indeed, the tales be his), which have been a joy togenerations of children. With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy addedto the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty yearsafter the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients andthe Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progresshad separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltingsof Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against awell-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier--indignantat Lamotte's _Iliade_, recast in the eighteenth-century taste--a newquestion was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenthcentury--that of the relative merits of prose and verse. 

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versifiednone the less. The age was indeed an age of prose--an age when the_salons_ discussed the latest discovery in science, the latestdoctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasmpassed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetryof the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramasor elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about thatidea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfittinginauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to thepast. 

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille'ssister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Modernsturned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to boththe seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred yearswhich made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelleto develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as theCydias of La Bruyère, "un composé du pédant et du précieux, " was anaspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who tried tocompensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. Theorigin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy_Aspar_. His operas fluttered before they fell; his _Églogues_ hadnot life enough to flutter. The _Dialogues des Morts_ (1683) is ayoung writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show hiswit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of greatreputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelleddisciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, passionless, but curious for all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, adissolver of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and theworld of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who smiled butnever condescended to laugh, an intelligence supple, subtle, anduntiring. 

In 1686 he published his _Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes_, evening conversations between an astronomer and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned coquetries with science, forwhich he asked no more serious attention than a novel might require, while he communicated the theories of Descartes and the discoveriesof Galileo, suggested that science is our safest way to truth, andthat truth at best is not absolute but relative to the humanunderstanding. The _Histoire des Oracles_, in which the cargo of Dutcherudition that loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened, glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle would show thatthe pagan oracles were not delivered by demons, and did not ceaseat the coming of Jesus Christ; innocent opinions, but apt toillustrate the origins and growth of superstitions, from which wetoo may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of truereligion and sound philosophy. Of course God's chosen people are notlike unguided Greeks or Romans; and yet human beings are much thesame in all times and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, andFontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was a prophet, sinceFather Baltus wished it so to be, and held the opinion to be orthodox. 

Appointed perpetual secretary of the _Académie des Sciences_ in 1697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty years the panegyrics of those whohad been its members. These _Éloges des Académiciens_ aremasterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generouswithout ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity--"If I had my hand fullof truths, I should take good care before I opened it. " He never losta friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible, "and "Every one is right. " "It is not a heart, " said Madame de Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain. " It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible forhim to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, stilltranquil and alert. 

A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy wasconstructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his_Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, of which the first editionwas published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreterin Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the generalhistory of Europe, from the close of the mediæval period, andespecially the records in every age of mythologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wideextent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found restnot in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably and endlessly pursued. 

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. In its placecame a boundless curiosity, a penetrating sagacity. His vastaccumulations of knowledge were like those of the students of theRenaissance. The tendencies of his intellect anticipate thetendencies of the eighteenth century, but with him scepticism hadnot become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly where reasonand research led, and saw no cause why religion and morals more thanany other subjects should not be submitted to the scrutiny of rationalinquiry. Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone to errorthan apt to find the truth, why should any opinions be held sacred?Let us ascertain and expose the facts. In doing so, we shall learnthe lesson of universal tolerance; and if the principle of authorityin matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be considered anevil? Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding, remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea ofProvidence be a superstition, why should not man guide his life bygood sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs withthe battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone therefrom the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquilirony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; thedisputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the morallicences of men and women are singular and often diverting. Why notinstruct and entertain our minds with the facts of the world?

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and sometimes heavycolumns of his text; the entertainment will be found in the ramblinggossip, interspersed with illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almostevery eminent writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle'sDictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all that was addedto knowledge in his periodical publication, _Nouvelles de laRépublique des Lettres_ (begun in 1684). He called himself acloud-compeller: "My gift is to create doubts; but they are no morethan doubts. " Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a geniusfor criticism as his; and it was light not only for France, but forEurope. 

BOOK THE FOURTH_THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER IMEMOIRS AND HISTORY--POETRY--THE THEATRE--THE NOVEL

I

The literature of the second half of the seventeenth century wasmonarchical, Christian, classical. The eighteenth century was tolose the spirit of classical art while retaining many of its forms, to overthrow the domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy. It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas, which more andmore came to utilise art as their vehicle. Political speculation, criticism, science, sceptical philosophy invaded literature. Theinfluence of England--of English free-thinkers, political writers, men of science, essayists, novelists, poets--replaced the influenceof Italy and Spain, and for long that of the models of ancient Greeceand Rome. The century of the philosophers was eminently social andmundane; the _salons_ revived; a new preciosity came into fashion;but as time went on the _salons_ became rather the mart of ideasphilosophical and scientific than of the daintinesses of letters andof art. Journalism developed, and thought tended to action, applieditself directly to public life. While the work of destructivecriticism proceeded, the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid;the free play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchisementof the passions; the work of Voltaire was followed by the work ofRousseau. 

Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. The old order of thingshad suffered a decline. War, famine, public debt, oppressive taxationhad discredited the monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised thegross licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict ofNantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a substantial partof the moral conscience of France. The bitter feud of brother-bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon, hurling defiance against each other for the loveof God, had made religion a theme for mockery. Port-Royal, once therefuge of serious faith and strict morals, was destroyed. The bull_Unigenitus_ expelled the spiritual element from French Christianity, reduced the clergy to a state of intellectual impotence, and madea lasting breach between them and the better part of the laity. Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving its power. Sciencehad come to fill the place left void by religion. The period of theRegency (1715-23) is one of transition from the past to the newerage, shameless in morals, degraded in art; the period of Voltairefollowed, when intellect sapped and mined the old beliefs; withRousseau came the explosion of sentiment and an effort towardsreconstruction. A great political and social revolution closed thecentury. 

The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in the correspondenceof many distinguished persons, both men and women. Among the formerthe _Mémoires_ of Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. De Staäl(1684-1750) are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued byirony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear exactness. The Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting, daughter of a poor painter, but educated with care, drew delicately in her literary art with anetcher's tool, and her hand was controlled by a spirit which had init something of the Stoic. The _Souvenirs_ of Mme. De Caylus(1673-1729), niece of Mme. De Maintenon--"jamais de créature plusséduisante, " says Saint-Simon--give pictures of the court, charmingin their naïveté, grace, and mirth. Mme. D'Épinay, designing to tellthe story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction, becamein her _Mémoires_ the chronicler of the manners of her time. Thesociety of the _salons_ and the men of letters is depicted in theMemoirs of Marmontel. These are but examples from an abundantliterature constantly augmented to the days of Mme. De Campan andMme. Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the mid-centuryis presented by the historian Duclos (1704-1772) in his_Considérations sur les Moeurs de ce Siècle_, and with reparationfor his previous neglect of the part played in society by women inhis _Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du XVIIIe Siècle_. 

As much or more may be learnt from the letter-writers as from thewriters of memoirs. If Voltaire did not take the first place by hiscorrespondence, so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it mightjustly be assigned to his friend Mme. Du Deffand (1697-1780), whoselucid intelligence perceived everything, whose disabused heartseemed detached until old age from all that most interested herunderstanding. For clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert, for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoffrin, for passion whichkindles the page to Mdlle. De Lespinasse, for sensibility and romanceripening to political ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland. Among the philosophers Diderot pours the torrent, clear or turbid, of his genius into his correspondence with affluent improvisation;D'Alembert is grave, temperate, lucid; the Abbé Galiani, the littleMachiavel--"a pantomime from head to foot, " said Diderot--the gayNeapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris, that "capitalof curiosity, " is at once wit, cynic, thinker, scholar, and buffoon. These, again, are but examples from an epistolary swarm. 

While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in memoirs andletters, it did not forget the life of past centuries. The studiousBenedictines, who had already accomplished much, continued theirerudite labours. Nicolas Fréret (1688-1749), taking all antiquityfor his province, illuminated the study of chronology, geography, sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly narrated thehistory of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with little of the spirit ofhistorical fidelity, displayed certain gifts of an historical artist. The school of scepticism was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, whodoubted the authenticity of all records of the past except those ofhis own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the principles ofhistorical certitude occupied the Academy of Inscriptions duringmany sittings from 1720 onwards, and produced a body of importantstudies. While the Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate thatthere is a natural order in social circumstances, a philosophy ofhistory, which bound the ages together, was developed in the writingsof Montesquieu and Turgot, if not of Voltaire. The _Esprit des Lois_, the _Essai sur les Moeurs_, and Turgot's discourses, delivered in1750 at the Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and waystowards a new and profounder conception of the life of societies orof humanity. By Turgot for the first time the idea of progress wasaccepted as the ruling principle of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowedComte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, andpositive, through which the mind of humanity is alleged to havetravelled. 

In the second half of the century, history tended to becomedoctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory--a pamphlet in the form oftreatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in the interest of socialisticideas, which correspond to those of modern collectivism. Mably, inspired at first by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advancedto a communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew towards a close, bringing together the ideas of economists and historians, tracedhuman progress through the past, and uttered ardent prophecies ofhuman perfectibility in the future. 

II

Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth century upon ashallow soil. The more serious and the more ardent mind of the timewas occupied with science, the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposedthe great art of the preceding century had given way. The analyticintellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions of a brilliantsociety were unfavourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry. The tyranny of the "rules" remained when the enthusiasm which foundguidance and a safeguard in the rules had departed. The languageitself had lost in richness, variety, harmony, and colour; it wasan admirable instrument for the intellect, but was less apt to rendersensations and passions; when employed for the loftier purposes ofart it tended to the oratorical, with something of over-emphasis andstrain. The contention of La Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalisesand deforms ideas, expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte'sown cold and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory. 

Chaulieu (1639-1720), the "poëte de la bonne compagnie, " ananacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, survived the classicalcentury, and sang his songs of facile, epicurean delights; his friendLa Fare (1644-1712) survived, but slept and ate more than a songstershould. Anthony Hamilton (1646?-1720) wrote graceful verses, and inhis brilliant _Mémoires de la Vie du Comte de Gramont_ became thehistorian of the amorous intrigues of the court of Charles II. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. DeMaintenon's authority had in his sacred _Cantates_ been pious bycommand, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming epigrams--andfor epigram he had a genuine gift--to the Society of the Temple. Hemanufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefullysecured the fine disorder required in that form of art by factitiousenthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. When Rousseaudied, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned for "le premier chantre du monde, "reborn as the Orpheus of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc'snumerous productions--and by virtue of two stanzas--has not thatsanctity ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanctity which forbidsany one to touch them. Why name their fellows and successors in theeighteenth-century art of writing poems without poetry?

Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of _Athalie_, in hisversified discourses on _La Grâce_ and _La Réligion_ was devout andedifying, but with an edification which promotes slumber. If a poetin sympathy with the philosophers desired to edify, he described thephenomena of nature as Saint-Lambert (1716-1803) did in his_Saisons_--"the only work of our century, " Voltaire assured theauthor, "which will reach posterity. " To describe meant to draw outthe inventory of nature's charms with an eye not on the object buton the page of the Encyclopædia, and to avoid the indecency of naminganything in direct and simple speech. The _Seasons_ of Saint-Lambertwere followed by the _Months_ (_Mois_) of Roucher (1745-94)--"themost beautiful poetic shipwreck of the century, " said the maliciousRivarol--and by the _Jardins_ of Delille (1738-1813). When Delilletranslated the _Georgics_ he was saluted by Voltaire as the AbbéVirgil. [1] The _salons_ heard him with rapture recite his verses asfrom the tripod of inspiration. He was the favourite ofMarie-Antoinette. Aged and blind, he was a third with Homer and Milton. In death they crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourningcrowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. And yet Delille's_Jardins_ is no better than a patchwork of carpet-gardening, in whichthe flowers are theatrical paper-flowers. If anything lives from thedescriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detachedlines from the writings of Lemierre. 

[Footnote 1: Or was this Rivarol's ironical jest?]

The successor of J. -B. Rousseau in the grand ode was Écouchard Lebrun(1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he wanted to equal Pindar was someforgetfulness of self, some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, someharmony, a touch of genius; a certain dignity of imagination heexhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured Buffon andwas the friend of André Chénier, we have said in his praise that whichgives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if heoften falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. Itwas not the great lyric but _le petit lyrisme_ which blossomed andran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile lovesand trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merelyfrivolous or merely depraved. Grécourt; Piron; Bernard, the curledand powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetière, "King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who couldflutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray inParis from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dearTibullus" of Voltaire--what a swarm of butterflies, soiled orshining!

If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from the rest, oneis surely JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET (1709-77), whose parrot_Vert-Vert_, instructed by the pious Sisters, demoralised by theboatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happybadinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunateNICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and lessgifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embitteredenough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers andthe society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRECLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking LaFontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies, and penetrating good sense, yet can tell a story with pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentlepropriety. 

In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, Voltairestands high among his contemporaries; they give us a measure of hisrange and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenthcentury wrote in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalistBuffon; its supreme lyrist was the author of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. 

III

In the history of French tragedy only one name of importance--thatof Crébillon--is to be found in the interval between Racine andVoltaire. Campistron feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly, imitated Racine; Duché followed him in sacred tragedy; LaGrange-Chancel (author of the _Philippiques_, directed against theRegent) followed him in tragedies on classical subjects. If any piecedeserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the _Manlius_(1698) of La Fosse, a work--suggestive rather of Corneille than ofRacine--which was founded on the _Venice Preserved_ of Otway. Theart of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocativesof scenic decoration and more rapid and more convulsive action. 

PROSPER JOLYOT DE CRÉBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent reader ofseventeenth-century romances, transported the devices of romance, its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its disguises, its surprises, its discoveries, into the theatre, and substituted a tragedy ofviolent situations for the tragedy of character. His _Rhadamiste etZénobie_ (1711), which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism, notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult to follow, was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To be atrocious within therules was to create a new and thrilling sensation. Torrents of tearsflowed for the unhappy heroine of La Motte's _Inès de Castro_ (1723), secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned only whenthe fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's effort to renovateclassical tragedy was that of a writer who loved the theatre, firstfor its own sake, afterwards as an instrument for influencing publicopinion, who conceived tragedy aright as the presentation ofcharacter and passion seen in action. His art suffered from hisextreme facility, from his inability (except it be in _Zaïre_) toattain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to conquer hisspectators in the readiest ways, by striking situations, or, at alater date, by the rhetoric of philosophical doctrine and sentiment. 

There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside Voltaire. Pironand Gresset are remembered, not by their tragedies, but each by asingle comedy. Marmontel's Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory;as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as thecurtain fell on his _Cléopâtre_, was a sound critic of theirmediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as thelove of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot theapple, and his widow of Malabar to die in flames upon the stage. 

Saurin in _Spartacus_ (1760) declaimed and dissertated in the mannerof Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky moment showed, in his _Siège deCalais_ (1765), that rhetorical patriotism had survived the SevenYears' War; he was supposed to have founded that national, historicdrama which the President Hénault had projected; but with the _Siègede Calais_ the national drama rose and fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) wasthe latest writer who compounded classical tragedy according to theapproved recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare becameknown to the French public through the translation of Letourneur. Before that translation began to appear, JEAN-FRANÇOIS DUCIS(1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "SaintGuillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashionpresented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; KingLear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis camea generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple andheroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophersand sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature. " Shakespeare'stranslation is as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is thedaughter of King Claudius; the Queen dies by her own hand; old Montagueis a Montague-Ugolino who has devoured his sons; Malcolm is believedto be a mountaineer's child; Lear is borne on the stage, sleepingon a bed of roses, that he may behold a sunrise; Hédelmone (Desdemona)is no longer Othello's wife; Iago disappears; Desdemona'shandkerchief is not among the properties; and Juliet's lark isvoiceless. Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs. 

Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance of Regnard, the actorBaron, Molière's favourite pupil, had given a lively play--_L'Hommeà bonne Fortune_ (1686). JEAN-FRANÇOIS REGNARD (1655-1709) escapedfrom his corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorrycompany of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of inexhaustiblegaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest of comic styles. His_Joueur_ (1696) is a scapegrace, possessed by the passion of gaming, whose love of Angélique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will consolehimself for lost love by another throw of the dice. His _LégataireUniversel_, greedy, old, and ailing, is surrounded by pitiless rogues, yet the curtain falls on a general reconciliation. Regnard's moralsmay be doubtful, but his mirth is unquestionable. 

Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had a truer powerof observation, and as quick an instinct for theatrical effects; heexhibits in the _Chevalier à la Mode_ and the _Bourgeoises à la Mode_, if not with exact fidelity, at least in telling caricature, thestruggle of classes in the society around him, wealth ambitious forrank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same spirit ofcynical gaiety inspires the _Double Veuvage_ of Charles RivièreDufresny (1655?-1724), where husband and wife, each disappointed infalse tidings of the other's death, exhibit transports of feignedjoy on meeting, and assist in the marriage of their respective lovers, each to accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such plays asthese the _Turcaret_ (1709) of Lesage appears as the creation of atype, and a type which verifies itself as drawn with a realism powerfuland unfaltering. 

In striking contrast with Lesage's bold and bitter satire are thecomedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life andcharacter, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by thesensuality of the day. Philippe Néricault Destouches (1680-1754) hadthe ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means toread moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked wascomic power. In his most celebrated piece, _Le Glorieux_, he returnsto the theme treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruinednoblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and something ofromance are added to comedy. 

Already those tendencies which were to produce the so-called _comédielarmoyante_ were at work. Piron (1689-1773), who regarded it withhostility, undesignedly assisted in its creation; _Les Fils Ingrats_, named afterwards _L'École des Pères_, given in 1728, the story ofa too generous father of ungrateful children, a play designed formirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than to excite laughter. Piron's special gift, however, was for satire. In _La Métromanie_he smiles at the folly of the aspirant poet with all his cherishedillusions; yet young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of agenerous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller representativesof good sense can make no claim. It is satire also which gives whatevercomic force it possesses to the one comedy of Gresset that is notforgotten: _Le Méchant_ (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal theheart of his friend's beloved; soubrette and valet conspire to exposethe traitor; but Cléon, who loves mischief in the spirit of sport, though unmasked, is little disconcerted. Brilliant in lines andspeeches, _Le Méchant_ is defective in its composition as a whole. 

The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the severityof outline, was accompanied by a development of the emotional orsentimental element in drama. As sensibility was quickened, andwealth and ease increased, little things came to be felt as important. The middle class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should emperorsand kings, queens and princesses occupy the stage? Why neglect thejoys and griefs of every-day domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue"were to be honoured, why not seek them here? Man, the new philosophytaught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined tovirtue; if it strays through force of circumstance into vice or folly, should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thuscomedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the geniusof tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the _comédielarmoyante_, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama, was born of this union. 

In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSÉE (1692-1754) the new type isalready formed. The relations of wife and husband, of father and child, form the theme of all his plays. In _Mélanide_, father and son, unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed tobe dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and isreconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innategoodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. LaChausée's morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestictragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views ofhuman nature, may trace their ancestry to _Mélanide_. 

For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the appropriate vehicle, so Diderot maintained, is prose. Diderot, among his many gifts, didnot possess a talent for dramatic writing. But as a critic hisinfluence was considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy heperceived a place for the serious drama; to right and left, on eitherside of the centre, were spaces for forms approximating, the one totragedy, the other to comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy hewholly condemned; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unitycontaining its own principle of life. The function of the theatreis less to represent character fully formed than to study the naturalhistory of character, to exhibit the environments which determinecharacter. Its purpose is to moralise life, and the chief means ofmoralisation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow ofthe inherent goodness of human nature. 

Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, and only provedhis own incapacity as a writer for the stage. His friend SEDAINE(1719-97) was more fortunate. Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenthcentury, _Le Philosophe sans le savoir_ alone survives. It is littlemore than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has life andreality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is to be married; but onthe same day his son, resenting an insult to his father, must exposehis life in a duel. Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his youngmaster's place of danger; Antoine's daughter, Victorine, half-unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. Hopes andfears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk habitation. Sedaine madea true capture of a little province of nature. When Mercier(1740-1814) tried to write in the same vein, his "nature" was thatof declamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents. Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and romantic;happily he repented him of his lugubrious sentiment, and restoredto France its old gaiety in the _Barbier de Séville_ and the inimitable_Mariage de Figaro_; but amid the mirth of _Figaro_ can be heard thedetonation of approaching revolutionary conflict. 

IV

The history of the novel in the eighteenth century corresponds withthe general movement of ideas; the novel begins as art, and proceedsto propagandism. ALAIN-RENÉ LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, in 1668, belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenthcentury. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was thehonourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man of genius, andwho maintained his own independence and that of his wife and childrenby the steadfast diligence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer, no preacher of ideas; he observed life and human nature with shrewdcommon-sense, seeing men in general as creatures in whom good andevil are mixed; his imagination combined and vivified all he hadobserved; and he recorded the results of his study of the world ina style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these were notattained without the careful practice of literary art. 

From translations for the readers of fiction and for the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from these to work which maybe called truly original. Directed by the Abbé de Lyonne to Spanishliterature, he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what wasbrilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish dramatists, and toavoid what was strained and extravagant. In his _Crispin Rival deson Maître_ (1707), in which the roguish valet aspires to carry offhis master's betrothed and her fortune, he borrows only the idea ofMendoza's play; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, thecharacters are his own. His prose story of the same year, _Le DiableBoiteux_, owes but little to the suggestion derived from Guevara;it is, in fact, more nearly related to the _Caractères_ of La Bruyère;when Asmodeus discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofsof the city, a succession of various human types are presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyère, contemporaries attempted to identifythese with actual living persons. 

In his remarkable satiric comedy _Turcaret_, and in his realisticnovel _Gil Blas_, Lesage enters into full possession of his own genius. _Turcaret, ou le Financier_, was completed early in 1708; the effortsof the financiers to hinder its performance served in the end toenhance its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser ofwealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, who in her turnis the victim of a more contemptible swindler. Lesage, presentinga fragment of the manners and morals of his day, keeps us inexceedingly ill company, but the comic force of the play lightensthe oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the firstmasterpiece of the eighteenth-century _comédie de moeurs_. 

Much of Lesage's dramatic work was produced only for the hour or themoment--pieces thrown off, sometimes with brilliance and wit, forthe _Théâtres de la Foire_, where farces, vaudevilles, and comic operawere popular. They served to pay for the bread of his household. Hisgreat comedy, however, a comedy in a hundred acts, is the story of_Gil Blas_. Its composition was part of his employment during manyyears; the first volumes appeared in 1715, the last volume in 1735. The question of a Spanish original for the story is settled--therewas none; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history Lesageborrowed what suited his purpose, without in any way compromisinghis originality. To the picaresque tales (and among these may be noteda distant precursor of _Gil Blas_ in the _Francion_ of Charles Sorel)he added his own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgaradventures we are given a broad picture of social life; the comedyof manners and intrigue grows, as the author proceeds, into a comedyof character, and to this something of the historical novel is added. The unity of the book is found in the person of Gil Blas himself:he is far from being a hero, but he is capable of receiving allimpressions; he is an excellent observer of life, his temper is bright, he is free from ill-nature; we meet in him a pleasant companion, andaccompany him with sympathy through the amusing Odyssey of his variedcareer. 

As a moralist Lesage is the reverse of severe, but he is far frombeing base. "All is easy and good-humoured, " wrote Sir Walter Scott, "gay, light, and lively; even the cavern of the robbers is illuminatedwith a ray of that wit with which Lesage enlightens his whole narrative. It is a work which renders the reader pleased with himself and withmankind, where faults are placed before him in the light of folliesrather than vices, and where misfortunes are so interwoven with theludicrous that we laugh in the very act of sympathising with them. "In the earlier portion incidents preponderate over character; in theclose, some signs of the writer's fatigue appear. Of Lesage's othertales and translations, _Le Bachelier de Salamanque_ (1736) takesdeservedly the highest rank. 

With PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX (1688-1763) the novelceases to be primarily a study of manners or a romance of adventures;it becomes an analysis of passions to which manners and adventuresare subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have proceededfrom Addison; by his novels he prepared the way for Richardson andfor Rousseau. His early travesties of Homer and of Fénelon's_Télémaque_ seem to indicate a tendency towards realism, butMarivaux's realism took the form not so much of observation of societyin its breadth and variety as of psychological analysis. If he didnot know the broad highway of the heart, he traversed many of itssecret paths. His was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious, unconcerned about general ideas; and yet, while untiring in hisanatomy of the passions, he was not truly passionate; his heart maybe said to have been in his head. 

In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a revival ofpreciosity, which Molière had never really killed, and in the _salon_of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux may have learned something of hismetaphysics of love and something of his subtleties or affectationsof style. He anticipates the sensibility of the later part of thecentury; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound, and it isrelieved by intellectual vivacity. His conception of love has in itnot a little of mere gallantry. Like later eighteenth-century writers, he at once exalts "virtue, " and indulges his fancy in a licence whichdoes not tend towards good morals or manners. His _Vie de Marianne_(1731-41), which occupied him during many years, is a picture ofsocial life, and a study, sometimes infinitely subtle, of the emotionsof his heroine; her genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maidenpride; the hypocrite, M. De Climal--old angel fallen--is a new varietyof the family of Tartufe. _Le Paysan Parvenu_ (1735-36), which tellsof the successes of one whom women favour, is on a lower level ofart and of morals. Both novels were left unfinished; and while bothattract, they also repel, and finally weary the reader. [2] Theirinfluence was considerable in converting the romance of adventuresinto the romance of emotional incident and analysis. 

[Footnote 2: The twelfth part of _Marianne_ is by Madam Riccoboni. Only five parts of the _Paysan_ are by Marivaux. ]

The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important than his workin prose fiction. His comedy has been described as the tragedy ofRacine transposed, with love leading to marriage, not to death. Loveis his central theme--sometimes in conflict with self-love--andwomen are his protagonists. He discovers passion in its germ, andtraces it through its shy developments. His plays are little romanceshandled in dramatic fashion; each records some delicate adventureof the heart. He wrote much for the Comédie-Italienne, where he didnot suffer from the tyranny of rules and models, and where his gracefulfancy had free play. Of his large repertoire, the most admirablepieces are _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_ (1730) and _Les FaussesConfidences_ (1732). In the former the heroine and her chambermaidexchange costumes; the hero and his valet make a like exchange; yetlove is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other through theirdisguises. In _Les Fausses Confidences_ the young widow Araminte iswon to a second love in spite of her resolve, and becomes the happyvictim of her own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants. The "marivaudage" of Marivaux is sometimes a refined and novel modeof expressing delicate shades and half-shades of feeling; sometimesan over-refined or over-subtle attempt to express ingenuities ofsentiment, and the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic. No one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of weighingflies' eggs in gossamer scales. 

The Abbé A. -F. PRÉVOST D'EXILES (1697-1763) is remembered by a singletale of rare power and beauty, _Manon Lescaut_, but his work inliterature was voluminous and varied. Having deserted hisBenedictine monastery in 1728, he led for a time an irregular andwandering life in England and Holland; then returning to Paris, hegained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the booksellers. In his journal, _Le Pour et le Contre_, he did much to inform hiscountrymen respecting English literature, and among his translationsare those of Richardson's _Pamela_, _Sir Charles Grandison_, and_Clarissa Harlowe_. Many of his novels are melodramatic narrativesof romantic adventure, having a certain kinship to our later romancesof Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity, blood and tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of passion, we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the imagination, buttranscribing the impulsive speech of his own tumultuous heart. The_Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité_, _Cléveland_, _Le Doyen deKillerine_ are tragic narratives, in which love is the presidingpower. 

_Manon Lescaut_, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the firstof these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible passion. The heroineis divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and herlove for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy andinfirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which hassubdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion toManon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of herpiteous death. The admirable literary style of _Manon Lescaut_ isunfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact withthe motions of a human heart. 

In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the onehand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it wasinvaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritatingsensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or tophilosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms ofbelief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his _Contes Moraux_(1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His moreambitious _Bélisaire_ seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the_genre ennuyeux_. His _Incas_ is exotic without colour or credibility. Florian, with little skill, imitated the _Incas_ and _Télémaque_, or was feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower ofthe Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns or all together. Three names are eminent--that of Diderot, who flung his good and evilpowers, mingling and fermenting, into his novels as into all else;that of Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its restraints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior, and presented theglories of external nature in _La Nouvelle Héloise_; that of Bernardinde Saint-Pierre, who reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, andon the other to Chateaubriand. 

CHAPTER IIMONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE

I

The author of _De l'Esprit des Lois_ was as important in the historyof European speculation as in that of French literature; butinevitable changes of circumstances and ideas have caused hisinfluence to wane. His life was one in which the great events werethoughts. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de MONTESQUIEU, was bornin 1689 at La Brède, near Bordeaux. After his years of education bythe Oratorians, which left him with something of scepticism in hisintellect, and something of stoicism in his character, he pursuedlegal studies, and in 1716 became President of the Parliament ofBordeaux. The scientific researches of his day attracted him;investigating anatomy, botany, natural philosophy, the history ofthe earth, he came to see man as a portion of nature, or at leastas a creature whose life is largely determined by natural laws. Witha temper of happy serenity, and an admirable balance of faculties, he was possessed by an eager intellectual curiosity. "I spend mylife, " he said, "in examining; everything interests, everythingsurprises me. "

Nothing, however, interested him so much as the phenomena of humansociety; he had no aptitude for metaphysical speculations; hisfeeling for literature and art was defective; he honoured the antiqueworld, but it was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals ofRoman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved him. At the sametime he was a man of his own generation, and while essentially serious, he explored the frivolous side of life, and yielded his imaginationto the licence of the day. 

With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a multitude ofreaders, the _Lettres Persanes_ (1721) contain a serious criticismof French society in the years of the Regency. It matters little thatthe idea of the book may have been suggested by the Siamese travellersof Dufresny's _Amusements_; the treatment is essentially original. Things Oriental were in fashion--Galland had translated the _ArabianNights_ (1704-1708)--and Montesquieu delighted in books of travelwhich told of the manners, customs, religions, governments of distantlands. His Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical, theother the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their friends by letterof all the aspects of European and especially of French life, andreceive tidings from Persia of affairs of the East, including thetroubles and intrigues of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. Thespirit of the reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. Isexpressed in Montesquieu's pages; the spirit also of religiousfree-thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny. Asense of the dangers impending over society is present, and of theneed of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring, ironical, licentiousas the _Persian Letters_ are, the prevailing tone is that of judiciousmoderation; and already something can be discerned of the large viewsand wise liberality of the _Esprit des Lois_. The book is valuableto us still as a document in the social history of the eighteenthcentury. 

In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished acquaintances, amongothers that of Mlle. De Clermont, sister of the Duke de Bourbon. Perhaps it was in homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, whichpretends to be a translation from the Greek, _Le Temple de Gnide_(1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by the artificialities, long since faded, of his own day--"naught remains, " writes M. Sorel, "but the faint and subtle perfume of a _sachet_ long hidden in a_rococo_ cabinet. " Although his publications were anonymous, Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy in 1728, and almostimmediately after this he quitted France for a long course of travelthroughout Europe, undertaken with the purpose of studying themanners, institutions, and governments of foreign lands. At Venicehe gained the friendship of Lord Chesterfield, and they arrivedtogether in England, where for nearly two years Montesquieu remained, frequently hearing the parliamentary debates, and studying theprinciples of English politics in the writings of Locke. His thoughtson government were deeply influenced by his admiration of the Britishconstitution with its union of freedom and order attained by a balanceof the various political powers of the State. On Montesquieu's returnto La Brède he occupied himself with that great work which resumesthe observations and meditations of twenty years, the _Esprit desLois_. In the history of Rome, which impressed his imagination withits vast moral, social, and political significance, he found a signalexample of the causes which lead a nation to greatness and the causeswhich contribute to its decline. The study made at this point of viewdetached itself from the more comprehensive work which he hadundertaken, and in 1734 appeared his _Considérations sur les Causesde la Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romains_. 

Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but in the spirit of atheologian expounding the course of Divine Providence in humanaffairs. Montesquieu studied the operation of natural causes. Hisknowledge, indeed, was incomplete, but it was the knowledge affordedby the scholarship of his own time. The love of liberty, the patrioticpride, the military discipline, the education in public spiritattained by discussion, the national fortitude under reverses, thesupport given to peoples against their rulers, the respect for thereligion of conquered tribes and races, the practice of dealing atone time with only a single hostile power, are pointed out ascontributing to the supremacy of Rome in the ancient world. Itsdecadence is explained as the gradual result of its vast overgrowth, its civil wars, the loss of patriotism among the soldiery engagedin remote provinces, the inroads of luxury, the proscription ofcitizens, the succession of unworthy rulers, the division of theEmpire, the incursion of the barbarians; and in treating this portionof his subject Montesquieu may be said to be wholly original. A short_Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate_ may be viewed as a pendant to the_Considérations_, discussing a fragment of the subject in dramaticform. Montesquieu's desire to arrive at general truths sometimes ledhim to large conclusions resting on too slender a basis of fact; butthe errors in applying his method detract only a little from theservice which he rendered to thought in a treatment of history atleast tending in the direction of philosophic truth. 

The whole of his mind--almost the whole of his existence--is embodiedin the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It lacks the unity of a ruling idea;it is deficient in construction, in continuity, in cohesion; muchthat it contains has grown obsolete or is obsolescent; yet in theliterature of eighteenth-century thought it takes, perhaps, thehighest place; and it must always be precious as the self-revealmentof a great intellect--swift yet patient, ardent yet temperate, liberal yet the reverse of revolutionary--an intellect that beforeall else loved the light. It lacks unity, because its author's mindwas many-sided, and he would not suppress a portion of himself tosecure a factitious unity. Montesquieu was a student of science, whobelieved in the potency of the laws of nature, and he saw that humansociety is the product of, or at least is largely modified by, naturallaw; he was also a believer in the power of human reason and humanwill, an admirer of Roman virtue, a citizen, a patriot, and a reformer. He would write the natural history of human laws, exhibit theinvariable principles from which they proceed, and reduce the studyof governments to a science; but at the same time he would exhibithow society acts upon itself; he would warn and he would exhort; hewould help, if possible, to create intelligent and patriotic citizens. To these intentions we may add another--that of a criticism, touchedwith satire, of the contemporary political and social arrangementsof France. 

And yet again, Montesquieu was a legist, with some of the curiosityof an antiquary, not without a pride in his rank, interested in itsorigins, and desirous to trace the history of feudal laws andprivileges. The _Esprit des Lois_ is not a doctrinaire expositionof a theory, but the record of a varied life of thought, in whichthere are certain dominant tendencies, but no single absolute idea. The forms of government, according to Montesquieu, arethree--republic (including both the oligarchical republic and thedemocratic), monarchy, despotism. Each of these structuralarrangements requires a principle, a moral spring, to give it forceand action: the popular republic lives by virtue of patriotism, publicspirit, the love of equality; the aristocratic republic lives by thespirit of moderation among the members of the ruling class; monarchylives by the stimulus of honour, the desire of superiority anddistinction; despotism draws its vital force from fear; but each ofthese principles may perish through its corruption or excess. Thelaws of each country, its criminal and civil codes, its system ofeducation, its sumptuary regulations, its treatment of the relationof the sexes, are intimately connected with the form of government, or rather with the principle which animates that form. 

Laws, under the several forms of government, are next considered inreference to the power of the State for purposes of defence and ofattack. The nature of political liberty is investigated, and therequisite separation of the legislative, judicial, andadministrative powers is exhibited in the example set forth in theBritish constitution. But political freedom must include the libertyof the individual; the rights of the citizen must be respected andguaranteed; and, as part of the regulation of individual freedom, the levying and collection of taxes must be studied. 

From this subject Montesquieu passes to his theory, once celebrated, of the influence of climate and the soil upon the various systemsof legislation, and especially the influence of climate upon the slavesystem, the virtual servitude of woman, and the growth of politicaldespotism. Over against the fatalism of climate and naturalconditions he sets the duty of applying the reason to modify theinfluences of external nature by wise institutions. Nationalcharacter, and the manners and customs which are its direct expression, if they cannot be altered by laws, must be respected, and somethingeven of direction or regulation may be attained. Laws in relationto commerce, to money, to population, to religion, are dealt within successive books. 

The duty of religious toleration is urged from the point of view ofa statesman, while the discussions of theology are declined. Verynoteworthy is the humble remonstrance to the inquisitors of Spainand Portugal ascribed to a Jew of eighteen, who is supposed to haveperished in the last _auto-da-fé_. The facts of the civil order arenot to be judged by the laws of the religious order, any more thanthe facts of the religious order are to be judged by civil laws. Herethe great treatise might have closed, but Montesquieu adds what maybe styled an historical appendix in his study of the origin anddevelopment of feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was littleregarded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity; at a time when mediævalhistory was ignored, he was a student of the forgotten centuries. 

Such in outline is the great work which in large measure modifiedthe course of eighteenth-century thought. Many of its views have beensuperseded; its collections of facts are not critically dealt with;its ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence; butMontesquieu may be said to have created a method, if not a science;he brought the study of jurisprudence and politics, in the widestsense, into literature, laicising and popularising the wholesubject; he directed history to the investigation of causes; he ledmen to feel the greatness of the social institution; and, whileretiring from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, forhis own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind operatingover a vast field in the interests of truth, the spectacle of a greatnature that loved the light, hating despotism, but fearing revolution, sane, temperate, wisely benevolent. In years tyrannised over byabstract ideas, his work remained to plead for the concrete and thehistorical; among men devoted to the absolute in theory and theextreme in practice, it remained to justify the relative, to demanda consideration of circumstances and conditions, to teach men howlarge a field of reform lay within the bounds of moderation and goodsense. 

The _Esprit des Lois_ was denounced by Jansenists and Jesuits; itwas placed in the Index, but in less than two years twenty-two editionshad appeared, and it was translated into many languages. The authorjustified it brilliantly in his _Défense_ of 1750. His later writingsare of small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining years, he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumination of hisgreat fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at the age of sixty-six, inthe spirit of a Christian Stoic. 

II

The life of society was studied by Montesquieu; the inward life ofthe heart was studied by a young moralist, whose premature loss waslamented with tender passion by Voltaire. 

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de VAUVENARGUES, though neither a thinkernor a writer of the highest order, attaches us by the beauty of hischaracter as seen through his half-finished work, more than any otherauthor of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. He was born(1715) at Aix, in Provence, received a scanty education, served inthe army during more than ten years, retired with broken health andfound no other employment, lived on modest resources, enjoyed theacquaintance of the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and highesteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of thirty-two. His knowledge of literature hardly extended beyond that of his Frenchpredecessors of the seventeenth century. The chief influences thatreached him came from Pascal, Bossuet, and Fénelon. His learning wasderived from action, from the observation of men, and fromacquaintance with his own heart. 

The writings of Vauvenargues are the fragmentary _Introduction à laConnaissance de l'Esprit Humain_, followed by _Réflexions etMaximes_ (1746), and a few short pieces of posthumous publication. He is a moralist, who studies those elements of character which tendto action, and turns away from metaphysical speculations. His earlyfaith in Christianity insensibly declined and disappeared, but hisspirit remained religious; he believed in God and immortality, andhe never became a militant philosopher. He thought generously of humannature, but without extravagant optimism. The reason, acting alone, he distrusted; he found the source of our highest convictions andour noblest practice in the emotions, in the heart, in the obscuredepths of character and of nature. Here, indeed, is Vauvenargues'originality. In an age of ill living, he conceived a worthy idealof conduct; in an age tending towards an exaggerated homage to reason, he honoured the passions: "Great thoughts come from the heart"; "Weowe, perhaps, to the passions the greatest gains of the intellect";"The passions have taught men reason. "

Vauvenargues, with none of the violences of Rousseau's temperament, none of the excess of his sensibility, by virtue of his recognitionof the potency of nature, of the heart, may be called a precursorof Rousseau. Into his literary criticism he carries the sametendencies: it is far from judicial criticism; its merit is that itis personal and touched with emotion. His total work seems but afragment, yet his life had a certain completeness; he knew how toact, to think, to feel, and after great sufferings, borne withserenity, he knew how to die. 

III

The movement of Voltaire's mind went with that of the general mindof France. During the first half of the century he was primarily aman of letters; from about 1750 onwards he was the aggressivephilosopher, the social reformer, using letters as the vehicle ofmilitant ideas. 

Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary of good family, FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET, who assumed the name VOLTAIRE (probably ananagram formed from the letters of _Arouet l. J. _, that is _le jeune_), was educated by the Jesuits, and became a precocious versifier oflittle pieces in the taste of the time. At an early age he wasintroduced to the company of the wits and fine gentlemen who formedthe sceptical and licentious Society of the Temple. Old Arouetdespaired of his son, who was eager for pleasure, and a reluctantstudent of the law. A short service in Holland, in the household ofthe French ambassador, produced no better result than a fruitlesslove-intrigue. 

Again in Paris, where he ill endured the tedium of an attorney's office, Voltaire haunted the theatres and the _salons_, wrote light verseand indecorous tales, planned his tragedy _OEdipe_, and, inspiredby old M. De Caumartin's enthusiasm for Henri IV. , conceived the ideaof his _Henriade_. Suspected of having written defamatory versesagainst the Regent, he was banished from the capital, and whenreadmitted was for eleven months, on the suspicion of more atrociouslibels, a prisoner in the Bastille. Here he composed--according tohis own declaration, in sleep--the second canto of the _Henriade_, and completed his _OEdipe_, which was presented with success beforethe close of 1718. The prisoner of the Bastille became the favouriteof society, and repaid his aristocratic hosts by the brilliant salliesof his conversation. 

A second tragedy, _Artémire_, afterwards recast as _Mariamne_, wasill received in its earlier form. Court pensions, the death of hisfather, and lucky financial speculations brought Voltaireindependence. He travelled in 1722 to Holland, met Jean-BaptisteRousseau on the way, and read aloud for his new acquaintance _Le Pouret le Contre_, a poem of faith and unfaith--faith in Deism, disbeliefin Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely wit atRousseau's expense and mutual hostility. Unable to obtain theapprobation for printing his epic, afterwards named _La Henriade_, Voltaire arranged for a secret impression, under the title _La Ligue_, at Rouen (1723), whence many copies were smuggled into Paris. Theyoung Queen, Marie Lecszinska, before whom his _Mariamne_ and thecomedy _L'Indiscret_ were presented, favoured Voltaire. Hisprospects were bright, when sudden disaster fell. A quarrel in thetheatre with the Chevalier de Rohan, followed by personal violenceat the hands of the Chevalier's bullies, ended for Voltaire, not withthe justice which he demanded, but with his own lodgment in theBastille. When released, with orders to quit Paris, he thought ofhis acquaintance and admirer Bolingbroke, and lost no time in takingrefuge on English soil. 

Voltaire's residence in England extended over three years (1726-29). Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Chesterfield, Pope, Swift, Gay, Thomson, Young, Samuel Clarke were among his acquaintances. He discovered thegenius of that semi-barbarian Shakespeare, but found the onlyreasonable English tragedy in Addison's "Cato. " He admired the epicpower of Milton, and scorned Milton's allegory of Sin and Death. Hefound a master of philosophy in Locke. He effected a partial entranceinto the scientific system of Newton. He read with zeal the writingsof those pupils of Bayle, the English Deists. He honoured Englishfreedom and the spirit of religious toleration. In 1728 the _Henriade_was published by subscription in London, and brought the authorprodigious praise and not a little pelf. He collected material forhis _Histoire de Charles XII. _, and, observing English life andmanners, prepared the _Lettres Philosophiques_, which were to makethe mind of England favourably known to his countrymen. 

_Charles XII. _, like _La Ligue_, was printed at Rouen, and smuggledinto Paris. The tragedies _Brutus_ and _Ériphyle_, both of which showthe influence of the English drama, were coldly received. Voltairerose from his fall, and produced _Zaïre_ (1732), a kind ofeighteenth-century French "Othello, " which proved a triumph; it washeld that Corneille and Racine had been surpassed. In 1733 a littlework of mingled verse and prose, the _Temple du Goût_, in which recentand contemporary writers were criticised, gratified the self-esteemof some, and wounded the vanity of a larger number of hisfellow-authors. The _Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais_, whichfollowed, were condemned by the Parliament to be burnt by the publicexecutioner. With other audacities of his pen, the storm increased. Voltaire took shelter (1734) in Champagne, at Cirey, the château ofMadame du Châtelet. 

Voltaire was forty years of age; Madame, a woman of intellect andvaried culture, was twelve years younger. During fifteen years, whenhe was not wandering abroad, Cirey was the home of Voltaire, and Madamedu Châtelet his sympathetic, if sometimes his exacting companion. To this period belong the dramas _Alzire_, _Zulime_, _L'EnfantProdigue_, _Mahomet_, _Mérope_, _Nanine_. The divine Émilie wasdevoted to science, and Voltaire interpreted the Newtonianphilosophy to France or discussed questions of physics. Manyadmirable pieces of verse--ethical essays in the manner of Pope, lighter poems of occasion, _Le Mondain_, which contrasts the goldenage of simplicity with the much more agreeable age of luxury, andmany besides--were written. Progress was made with the shamelessburlesque on Joan of Arc, _La Pucelle_. In _Zadig_ Voltaire gave thefirst example of his sparkling tales in prose. Serious historicallabours occupied him--afterwards to be published--the _Siècle deLouis XIV. _ and the great _Essai sur les Moeurs_. In 1746, with thesupport of Madame de Pompadour, he entered the French Academy. Thedeath of Madame du Châtelet, in 1749, was a cruel blow to Voltaire. He endeavoured in Paris to find consolation in dramatic efforts, entering into rivalry with the aged Crébillon. 

Among Voltaire's correspondents, when he dwelt at Cirey, was the CrownPrince of Prussia, a royal _philosophe_ and aspirant French poet. Royal flatteries were not more grateful to Voltaire than philosophicand literary flatteries were to Frederick. Personal acquaintancefollowed; but Frederick would not receive Madame du Châtelet, andVoltaire would not desert his companion. Now when Madame was dead, when the Pompadour ceased from her favours to the poet, when Louisturned his back in response to a compliment, Frederick was to securehis philosopher. In July 1750 Voltaire was installed at Berlin. Fora time that city was "the paradise of _philosophes_. "

The _Siècle de Louis XIV. _ was published next year. Voltaire'sinsatiable cupidity, his tricks, his tempers, his vindictiveness, shown in the _Diatribe du Docteur Akakia_ (an embittered attack onMaupertuis), alienated the King; when "the orange" of Voltaire'sgenius "was sucked" he would "throw away the rind. " With unwillingdelays, and the humiliation of an arrest at Frankfort, Voltaireescaped from the territory of the royal "Solomon" (1753), andattracted to Switzerland by its spirit of toleration, found himselfin 1755 tenant of the château which he named Les Délices, near Geneva, his "summer palace, " and that of Monrion, his "winter palace, " inthe neighbourhood of Lausanne. His pen was busy: the tragedy_L'Orphelin de la Chine_, tales, fugitive verses, the poem on theearthquake at Lisbon, with its doubtful assertion of Providence asa slender counterpoise to the certainty of innumerable evils in theworld, pursued one another in varied succession. Still keeping inhis hands Les Délices, he purchased in 1758 the château and demesneof Ferney on French soil, and became a kind of prince and patriarch, a territorial lord, wisely benevolent to the little community whichhe made to flourish around him, and at the same time the intellectualpotentate of Europe. 

Never had his brain been more alert and indefatigable. The years from1760 to 1778 were years of incessant activity. Tragedy, comedy, opera, epistles, satires, tales in verse, _La Pucelle_, [1] _Le PauvreDiable_ (admirable in its malignity), literary criticism, acommentary on Corneille (published for the benefit of the greatdramatist's grandniece), brilliant tales in prose, the _Essai surles Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations_, the _Histoire de l'Empire deRussie sous Pierre le Grand_, with other voluminous historical works, innumerable writings in philosophy, in religious polemics, includingmany articles of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, in politics, injurisprudence, a vast correspondence which extended his influenceover the whole of Europe--these are but a part of the achievementof a sexagenarian progressing to become an octogenarian. 

[Footnote 1: First authorised edition, 1762; surreptitiously printed, 1755. ]

His work was before all else a warfare against intolerance and infavour of free thought. The grand enemy of intellectual libertyVoltaire saw in the superstition of the Church; his word of commandwas short and uncompromising--_Écrasez l'Infâme_. Jean Calas, aProtestant of Toulouse, falsely accused of the murder of his son, who was alleged to have been converted to the Roman communion, wastortured and broken on the wheel. Voltaire, with incredible zeal, took up the victim's cause, and finally established the dead man'sinnocence. Sirven, a Protestant, declared guilty of the murder ofhis Roman Catholic daughter, was beggared and banished; Voltairesucceeded, after eight years, in effecting the reversal of thesentence. La Barre was tortured and decapitated for alleged impiety. Voltaire was not strong enough to overpower the French magistracysupported now by the French monarch. He turned to Frederick with arequest that he would give shelter to a colony of _philosophes_, whoshould through the printing-press make a united assault upon_l'Infâme_. 

In the early days of 1778, Voltaire, urged by friends, imprudentlyconsented to visit Paris. His journey was like a regal progress; hisreception in the capital was an overwhelming ovation. In March hewas ailing, but he rose from his bed, was present at a performanceof his _Irène_, and became the hero and the victim of extravagantpopular enthusiasm. In April he eagerly pleaded at the French Academyfor a new dictionary, and undertook himself to superintend the letterA. In May he was dangerously ill; on the 26th he had the joy of learningthat his efforts to vindicate the memory of the unfortunate CountLally were crowned with success. It was Voltaire's last triumph; fourdays later, unshriven and unhouseled, he expired. Seldom had sucha coil of electrical energy been lodged within a human brain. Hisdesire for intellectual activity was a consuming passion. His loveof influence, his love of glory were boundless. Subject to spasmsof intensest rage, capable of malignant trickery to gain his ends, jealous, mean, irreverent, mendacious, he had yet a heart open tocharity and pity, a zeal for human welfare, a loyalty to his rulingideas, and a saving good sense founded upon his swift and clearperception of reality. 

Voltaire's mind has been described as "a chaos of clear ideas. " Itis easy to point out the inconsistencies of his opinions, yet certaindominant thoughts can be distinguished amid the chaos. He believedin a God; the arrangements of the universe require a designer; theidea of God is a benefit to society--if He did not exist, He mustbe invented. But to suppose that the Deity intervenes in the affairsof the world is superstition; He rules through general laws--Hisexecutive; He is represented in the heart of man by Hisviceroy--conscience. The soul is immortal, and God is just; thereforelet wrong-doers beware. In _L'Histoire de Jenni_ the youthful herois perverted by his atheistic associates, and does not fear to murderhis creditor; he is reconverted to theism, and becomes one of thebest men in England. As to the evil which darkens the world, we cannotunderstand it; let us not make it worse by vain perplexities; letus hope that a future life will right the balance of things; and, meanwhile, let us attend to the counsels of moderation and good sense;let the narrow bounds of our knowledge at least teach us the lessonof toleration. 

Applied to history, such ideas lead Voltaire, in striking contrastwith Bossuet, to ignore the supernatural, to eliminate theProvidential order, and to seek the explanation of events in humanopinion, in human sentiments, in the influence of great men, evenin the influence of petty accident, the caprice of _sa Majesté leHasard_. In the epoch of classical antiquity--which Voltaireunderstood ill--man had advanced from barbarism to a condition ofcomparative well-being and good sense; in the Christian and mediævalperiod there was a recoil and retrogression; in modern times has beguna renewed advance. In fixing attention on the _esprit et moeurs_ ofnations--their manners, opinions, institutions, sentiments, prejudices--Voltaire was original, and rendered most importantservice to the study of history. Although his blindness to thesignificance of religious phenomena is a grave defect, his historicalscepticism had its uses. As a writer of historical narrative he isadmirably lucid and rapid; nor should the ease of his narrationconceal the fact that he worked laboriously and carefully amongoriginal sources. With his _Charles XII. _, his _Pierre le Grand_, his _Siècle de Louis XIV. _, we may class the _Henriade_ as a pieceof history; its imaginative power is not that of an epic, but it isan interpretation of a fragment of French history in the light ofone generous idea--that of religious toleration. 

Filled with destructive passion against the Church, Voltaire, inaffairs of the State, was a conservative. His ideal for France wasan intelligent despotism. But if a conservative, he was one of areforming spirit. He pleaded for freedom in the internal trade ofprovince with province, for legal and administrative uniformitythroughout the whole country, for a reform of the magistracy, fora milder code of criminal jurisprudence, for attention to publichygiene. His programme was not ambitious, but it was reasonable, andhis efforts for the general welfare have been justified by time. 

As a literary critic he was again conservative. He belonged to theclassical school, and to its least liberal section. He regardedliterary forms as imposed from without on the content of poetry, notas growing from within; passion and imagination he would reduce tothe strict bounds of uninspired good sense; he placed Virgil aboveHomer, and preferred French tragedy to that of ancient Greece; fromhis involuntary admiration of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm; ifhe admired Corneille, it was with many reservations. Yet his tastewas less narrow than that of some of his contemporaries; he had atrue feeling for the genius of the French language; he possessed, after the manner of his nation and his time, _le grand goût_; hehonoured Boileau; he exalted Racine in the highest degree; and, tothe praise of his discernment, it may be said that he discovered_Athalie_. 

The spectacular effects of _Athalie_ impressed Voltaire'simagination. In his own tragedies, while continuing theseventeenth-century tradition, he desired to exhibit more strikingsituations, to develop more rapid action, to enhance the dramaticspectacle, to add local colour. His style and speech in the theatrehave the conventional monotonous pomp, the conventional monotonousgrace, without poetic charm, imaginative vision, or those flasheswhich spring from passionate genius. When, as was frequently the case, he wrote for the stage to advocate the cause of an idea, to preachtolerance or pity, he attained a certain height of eloquence. Whateversensibility there was in Voltaire's heart may be discovered in _Zaïre_. _Mérope_ has the distinction of being a tragedy from which the passionof love is absent; its interest rests wholly on maternal affection. _Tancrède_ is remarkable as an eighteenth-century treatment of thechivalric life and spirit. The Christian temper of tolerance andhumanity is honoured in _Alzire_. 

Voltaire's incomparable gift of satirical wit did not make him awriter of high comedy: he could be grotesque without lightness orbrightness. But when a sentimental element mingles with the comic, and almost obscures it, as in _Nanine_ (a dramatised tale derivedfrom Richardson's _Pamela_), the verse acquires a grace, and certainscenes an amiable charm. _Nanine_, indeed, though in dramatic form, lies close to those tales in verse in which Voltaire mingled happilyhis wisdom and his wit. "The philosophy of Horace in the languageof La Fontaine, this, " writes a critic, "is what we find from timeto time in Voltaire. " In his lighter verses of occasion, epigram, compliment, light mockery, half-playful, half-serious sentiment, heis often exquisite. 

No part of Voltaire's work has suffered so little at the hands oftime as his tales in prose. In his contributions to the satire ofhuman-kind he learned something from Rabelais, something from Swift. It is the satire of good sense impatient against folly, and armedwith the darts of wit. Voltaire does not esteem highly the wisdomof human creatures: they pretend to knowledge beyond their powers;they kill one another for an hypothesis; they find ingenious reasonsfor indulging their base or petty passions; their lives are underthe rule of _sa Majesté le Hasard_. But let us not rage in Timon'smanner against the human race; if the world is not the best of allpossible worlds, it is not wholly evil. Let us be content to mockat the absurdity of the universe, and at the diverting, if irritating, follies of its inhabitants. Above all, let us find support in work, even though we do not see to what it tends; "Il faut cultiver notrejardin"--such is Voltaire's word, and the final word of Candide. Withlight yet effective irony, Voltaire preaches the lesson of good sense. When bitter, he is still gay; his sad little philosophy of existenceis uttered with an accent of mirth; his art in satirical narrativeis perfect; he is not resigned; he is not enraged; he is indignant, but at the same time he smiles; there is always the last resourceof blindly cultivating our garden. 

In Voltaire's myriad-minded correspondence the whole man may befound--his fire, his sense, his universal curiosity, his wit, hismalignity, his goodness, his Protean versatility, his ruling ideas;and one may say that the whole of eighteenth-century Europe pressesinto the pages. He is not only the man of letters, the student ofscience, the philosopher; he is equally interested in politics, insocial reform, in industry, in agriculture, in political economy, in philology, and, together with these, in the thousand incidentsof private life. 

CHAPTER IIIDIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA--PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS, CRITICS--BUFFON

I

"When I recall Diderot, " wrote his friend Meister, "the immensevariety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of his knowledge, therapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I ventureto liken his character to Nature herself, exactly as he used toconceive her--rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort . . . Without any dominating principle, without a master, and without aGod. " No image more suitable could be found; and his works resemblethe man, in their richness, their fertility, their variety, and theirdisorder. A great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left nobody of coherent thought, no piece of finished art; but he was thegreatest of literary improvisators. 

DENIS DIDEROT, son of a worthy cutler of Langres, was born in 1713. Educated by the Jesuits, he turned away from the regular professions, and supported himself and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for theParis booksellers--translations, philosophical essays directedagainst revealed religion, stories written to suit the appetite forgarbage. From deism he advanced to atheism. Arguing in favour of therelativity of human knowledge in his _Lettre sur les Aveugles_ (1749), he puts his plea for atheism into the lips of an English man of science, but the device did not save him from an imprisonment of three months. 

In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of the English"Cyclopædia" of Chambers, applied to Diderot for assistance. Hereadily undertook the task, but could not be satisfied with a meretranslation. In a Prospectus (1750) he indicated the design of the"Encyclopædia" as he conceived it: the order and connection of thevarious branches of knowledge should be set forth, and in dictionaryform the several sciences, liberal arts, and mechanical arts shouldbe dealt with by experts. The homage which he rendered to scienceexpressed the mind of his time; in the honour paid to mechanical toiland industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called anorganiser of modern democracy. At his request JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT(1717-83) undertook the direction of the mathematical articles, andwrote the _Discours Préliminaire_, which classified the departmentsof human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's conceptions, and gave asurvey of intellectual progress. It was welcomed with warm applause. The aid of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and a host of less illustrious writers was secured; but the vastenterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical party; theJesuits were active in rivalry and opposition; Rousseau deserted andbecame an enemy; D'Alembert, timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew. In 1759 the privilege of publication was revoked, but the Governmentdid not enforce its own decree. Through all difficulties and dangersDiderot held his ground. One day he wrote a fragment of the historyof philosophy; the next he was in a workshop examining theconstruction of some machine: nothing was too great or too small forhis audacity or his patience. To achieve the work, tact was neededas well as courage; at times he condescended to disguise his realopinions, striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, though thelast plates of the _Encyclopédie_ were not issued until 1772. Whenall was finished, the scientific movement of the century wasmethodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of thepast was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truthsand all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtainedits _Summa_. 

But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, and in manydirections, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardenthaste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance;a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkablepieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after hisdeath. His novel _La Religieuse_--influenced to some extent byRichardson, whom he superstitiously admired--is a repulsive exposureof conventual life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder. _Jacques le Fataliste_, in which the manner is coarsely imitated fromSterne, a book ill-composed and often malodorous, contains, amongits heterogeneous tales, one celebrated narrative, the _Histoire deMme. De la Pommeraye_, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithlesslover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a masterpiece, it iscertainly _Le Neveu de Rameau_, a satire and a character-study ofthe parasite, thrown into the form of dialogue, which he handled withbrilliant success; it remained unknown until the appearance of aGerman version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript copy. 

In his _Salons_, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criticism of thepictorial art in France. His eye for colour and for contour wasadmirable; but it is less the technique of paintings that he studiesthan the subjects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Suchcriticism may be condemned as literary rather than artistic; it was, however, new and instructive, and did much to quicken the public taste. Diderot pleaded for a return to nature in the theatre; for a bourgeoisdrama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched with pathos, studied from real life, and inspired by a moral purpose; for thepresentation on the stage of "conditions" rather than individualtypes--that is, of character as modified by social environments andthe habits which they produce. He maintained that the actor shouldrather possess than be possessed by his theme, should be the masterrather than the slave of his sensibility. 

The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in his own plays, the _Père de Famille_ and the _Fils Naturel_, are poor affectationsof a style supposed to be natural, and are patently doctrinaire intheir design, laboured developments of a moral thesis. One piece inwhich he paints himself, _Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?_ and this alone, falls little short of being admirable, and yet it fails of truesuccess. 

A coherent system of thought cannot be found in Diderot's writings, but they are pregnant with ideas. He is deist, pantheist, atheist;he is a materialist--one, however, who conceives matter not as inert, but quick with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality;and presently his morals become the doctrines of an anarchical licence. All the ideas of his age struggle within him, and are never reducedto unity or harmony; light is never separate in his nature from heat, and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts which aresometimes the anticipations of scientific genius; he almost leapsforward to some of the conclusions of Darwin. His great powers andhis incessant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity. Diderotwas never rich. The Empress Catherine of Russia magnificentlypurchased his library, and entrusted him with the books, as herlibrarian, providing a salary which to him was wealth. He travelledto St. Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous and delicategift. But her imperial generosity was not greater than his own; hewas always ready to lavish the treasures of his knowledge and thoughtin the service of others; no small fragment of his work was a freegift to his friends, and passed under their name; Holbach and Raynalwere among his debtors. 

His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man and of the groupof philosophers to which he belonged; the letters addressed to Mlle. Volland, to whom he was devotedly attached during many years, arefrank betrayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened hislast days, but the days of sorrow were few. In July 1784, Diderotdied. His reputation and influence were from time to time enhancedby posthumous publications. Other writers of his century impressedtheir own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon society;no other writer mingled his genius so completely with external things, or responded so fully and variously to the stimulus of the spiritof his age. 

II

The French philosophical movement--the "Illumination"--of theeighteenth century, proceeds in part from the empiricism of Locke, in part from the remarkable development of physical and naturalscience; it incorporated the conclusions of English deism, andadvanced from deism to atheism. An intellectual centre for themovement was provided by the _Encyclopédie_; a social centre was foundin Parisian _salons_. It was sustained and invigorated by the passionfor freedom and for justice asserting itself against the despotismand abuses of government and against the oppressions and abuses ofthe Church. The opposing forces were feeble, incompetent, disorganised. The methods of government were, in truth, indefensible; religion had surrendered dogma, and lost the austerityof morals; within the citadel of the Church were many professed andmany secret allies of the philosophers. 

While in England an apologetic literature arose, profound in thoughtand adequate in learning, in France no sustained resistance wasoffered to the inroad of free thought. Episcopal fulminations rolledlike stage thunder; the Bastille and Vincennes were holiday retreatsfor fatigued combatants; imprisonment was tempered with cajoleries;the censors of the press connived with their victims. The ChancellorD'AGUESSEAU (1668-1751), an estimable magistrate, a dignified orator, maintained the old seriousness of life and morals, and received thereward of exile. The good ROLLIN (1661-1741) dictated lessons to youthdrawn from antiquity and Christianity, narrated ancient history, anddiscoursed admirably on a plan of studies with a view to form theheart and mind; an amiable Christian Nestor, he was not a man-at-arms. The Abbé Guenée replied to Voltaire with judgment, wit, and erudition, in his _Lettres de quelques Juifs_ (1769), but it was a single victoryin a campaign of many battles. The satire of Gilbert, _Le Dix-huitièmeSiècle_, is rudely vigorous; but Gilbert was only an angry youth, disappointed of his fame. Fréron, the "Wasp" (_frélon_) of Voltaire's_L'Écossaise_, might sting in his _Année Littéraire_, but there weresharper stings in satire and epigram which he must endure. Palissotmight amuse the theatrical spectators of 1760 with his ridiculousphilosophers; the _Philosophes_ was taken smilingly by Voltaire, andwas sufficiently answered by Morellet's pamphlet and the_bouts-rimés_ of Marmontel or Piron. The _Voltairomanie_ ofDesfontaines is only the outbreak of resentment of the accomplishedand disreputable Abbé against a benefactor whose offence was to havesaved him from the galleys. 

The sensationalist philosophy is inaugurated by JULIEN OFFRAY DE LAMETTRIE (1709-51) rather than by Condillac. A physician, makingobservations on his own case during an attack of fever, he arrivedat the conclusion that thought is but a result of the mechanism ofthe body. Man is a machine more ingeniously organised than the brute. All ideas have their origin in sensation. As for morals, they arenot absolute, but relative to society and the State. As for God, perhaps He exists, but why should we worship this existence more thanany other? The law of our being is to seek happiness; the law of societyis that we should not interfere with the happiness of others. Thepleasure of the senses is not the only pleasure, but it has thedistinction of being universal to our species. 

La Mettrie, while opposing the spiritualism of Descartes, is moreclosely connected with that great thinker, through his doctrine thatbrutes are but machines, than with Locke. It is from Locke--thoughfrom Locke mutilated--that ÉTIENNE BONNOT DE CONDILLAC (1715-80)proceeds. All ideas are sensations, but sensations transformed. Imagine a marble statue endowed successively with the several humansenses; it will be seen how perceptions, consciousness, memory, ideas, comparison, judgment, association, abstraction, pleasure, desireare developed. The _ego_ is but the bundle of sensations experiencedor transformed and held in recollection. Yet the unity of the _ego_seems to argue that it is not composed of material particles. Condillac's doctrine is sensationalist, but not materialistic. Condillac's disciple, the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), proceededto investigate the nature of sensibility itself, and to develop thephysiological method of psychology. The unnecessary soul whichCondillac preserved was suppressed by Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836);his ideology was no more than a province of zoology. 

The morals of the sensationalist school were expressed byCLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVÉTIUS (1715-71), a worthy and benevolentfarmer-general. The motive of all our actions is self-love, thattendency which leads us to seek for pleasure and avoid pain; but, by education and legislation, self-love can be guided and trainedso that it shall harmonise with the public good. It remained for aGerman acclimatised to Paris to compile the full manifesto ofatheistic materialism. At Holbach's hospitable table thephilosophers met, and the air was charged with ideas. To condensethese into a system was Holbach's task. Diderot, Lagrange, Naigeonmay have lent their assistance, but PAUL-HENRY THIRY, BARON D'HOLBACH(1723-89) must be regarded as substantially the author of the _Systèmede la Nature_ (1770), which the title-page prudently attributed tothe deceased Mirabaud. What do we desire but that men should be happy, just, benevolent? That they may become so, it is necessary to deliverthem from those errors on which political and spiritual despotismis founded, from the chains of tyrants and the chimeras of priests, and to lead them back from illusions to nature, of which man is apart. We find everywhere matter and motion, a chain of material causesand effects, nor can we find aught beside these. An ever-circulatingsystem of motions connects inorganic and organic nature, fire andair and plant and animal; free-will is as much excluded as God andHis miraculous providence. The soul is nothing but the brain receivingand transmitting motions; morals form a department of physiology. Religions and governments, as they exist, are based on error, anddrive men into crime. But though Holbach "accommodated atheism, " asGrimm puts it, "to chambermaids and hairdressers, " he would not hurryforward a revolution. All will come in good time; in some happierday Nature and her daughters Virtue, Reason, and Truth will alonereceive the adoration of mankind. [1]

[Footnote 1: The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-93)endeavoured to reconcile his sensationalism with a religious faithand a private interpretation of Christianity. ]

Among the friends of Holbach and Helvétius was C. -F. De Chasseboeuf, Count de VOLNEY (1757-1820), who modified and developed the ethicsof Helvétius. An Orientalist by his studies, he travelled in Egyptand Syria, desiring to investigate the origins of ancient religions, and reported what he had seen in colourless but exact description. In _Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires_, herecalls the past like "an Arab Ossian, " monotonous and grandiose, and expounds the history of humanity with cold and superficialanalysis clothed in a pomp of words. His faith in human progress, founded on nature, reason, and justice, sustained Volney during therise and fall of the Girondin party. 

A higher and nobler spirit, who perished in the Revolution, but ceasednot till his last moment to hope and labour for the good of men, wasJ. -A. -N. De Caritat, Marquis de CONDORCET (1743-94). Illustrious inmathematical science, he was interested by Turgot in politicaleconomy, and took a part in the polemics of theology. While lyingconcealed from the emissaries of Robespierre he wrote his _Esquissed'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain_. It is aphilosophy of the past, and almost a hymn in honour of humanperfectibility. The man-statue of Condillac, receiving, retaining, distinguishing, and combining sensations, has gradually developed, through nine successive epochs, from that of the hunter and fisherto the citizen of 1789, who comprehends the physical universe withNewton, human nature with Locke and Condillac, and society with Turgotand Rousseau. In the vision of the future, with its progress inknowledge and in morals, its individual and social improvement, itslessening inequalities between nations and classes, the philosopherfinds his consolation for all the calamities of the present age. Condorcet died in prison, poisoned, it is believed, by his own hand. 

The economists, or, as Dupont de Nemours named them, the physiocrats, formed a not unimportant wing of the philosophic phalanx, now inharmony with the Encyclopædic party, now in hostility. The sense ofthe misery of France was present to many minds in the opening of thecentury, and with the death of Louis XIV. Came illusive hopes ofamelioration. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), filled withardent zeal for human happiness, condemned the government of thedeparted Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual peace; among hisdreams arose projects for the improvement of society which werejustified by time. Boisguillebert, and Vauban, marshal of France andmilitary engineer, were no visionary spirits; they pleaded for aserious consideration of the general welfare, and especially thewelfare of the agricultural class, the wealth-producers of thecommunity. To violate economic laws, Boisguillebert declared, is toviolate nature; let governments restrain their meddling, and permitnatural forces to operate with freedom. 

Such was the doctrine of the physiocratic school, of which FRANÇOISQUESNAY (1694-1774) was the chief. Let human institutions conformto nature; enlarge the bounds of freedom; give play to the spiritof individualism; diminish the interference of government--"laissezfaire, laissez passer. "[2] Agriculture is productive, let itsburdens be alleviated; manufactures are useful but "sterile": honour, therefore, above all, to the tiller of the fields, who hugs natureclose, and who enriches humankind! The elder Mirabeau--"ami deshommes"--who had anticipated Quesnay in some of his views, and himselfhad learnt from Cantillon, met Quesnay in 1757, and thenceforthsubordinated his own fiery spirit, as far as that was possible, tothe spirit of the master. From the physiocrats--Gournay andQuesnay--the noble-minded and illustrious TURGOT (1727-81) derivedmany of those ideas of reform which he endeavoured to put into actionwhen intendant of Limoges, and later, when Minister of Finance. Byhis _Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses_, Turgot prepared the way for Adam Smith. 

[Footnote 2: This phrase had been used by Boisguillebert and by theMarquis d'Argenson before Gournay made it a power. On D'Argenson(1694-1757), whose _Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France_were not published until 1764, see the study by Mr. Arthur Ogle(1893). ]

In 1770 the Abbé Galiani, as alert of brain as he was diminutive ofstature, attacked the physiocratic doctrines in his _Dialogues surle Commerce des Blés_, which Plato and Molière--so Voltairepronounced--had combined to write. The refutation of the _Dialogues_by Morellet was the result of no such brilliant collaboration, andGaliani, proposed that his own unstatuesque person should be honouredby a statue above an inscription, declaring that he had wiped outthe economists, who were sending the nation to sleep. The fame ofhis _Dialogues_ was perhaps in large measure due to the party-spiritof the Encyclopædists, animated by a vivacious attack upon thephysiocrats. The book was applauded, but reached no second edition. 

An important body of articles on literature was contributed to the_Encyclopédie_ by JEAN-FRANÇOIS MARMONTEL. As early as 1719 aremarkable study in æsthetics had appeared--the _RéflexionsCritiques sur la Poésie et la Peinture_, by the Abbé Dubos. Art isconceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid sensations andemotions apart from the painful consequences which commonly attendthese in actual life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats of"physical causes in the progress of art and literature, " anticipatesthe views of Montesquieu on the influence of climate, and studiesthe action of environment on the products of the imagination. In 1746Charles Batteux, in his treatise _Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un mêmePrincipe_, defined the end of art as the imitation of nature--notindeed of reality, but of nature in its actual or possible beauty;of nature not as it is, but as it may be. The articles of Marmontel, revised and collected in the six volumes of his _Éléments deLittérature_ (1787), were full of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in observation, as they often were, if notpenetrating or profound. In his earlier _Poétique Française_--"apetard, " said Mairan, "laid at the doors of the Academy to blow themup if they should not open"--he had shown himself strangelydisrespectful towards the fame of Racine, Boileau, and the poetRousseau. 

The friend of Marmontel, Antoine-Léonard Thomas (1732-85), honourably distinguished by the dignity of his character and conduct, a composer of _Éloges_ on great men, somewhat marred by strain andoratorical emphasis, put his best work into an _Essai sur les Éloges_. At a time when Bossuet was esteemed below his great deserts, Thomas--almost alone--recognised his supremacy in eloquence. As thecentury advanced, and philosophy developed its attack on religionand governments, the classical tradition in literature not onlyremained unshaken, but seemed to gain in authority. The firstlieutenant of Voltaire, his literary "son, " LAHARPE (1739-1803)represents the critical temper of the time. In 1786 he began hiscourses of lectures at the Lycée, before a brilliant audience composedof both sexes. For the first time in France, instruction in literature, not trivial and not erudite, but suited to persons of general culture, was made an intellectual pleasure. For the first time the historyof literature was treated, in its sequence from Homer to modern times, as a totality. Laharpe's judgments of his contemporaries were oftenmisled by his bitterness of spirit; his mind was not capacious, hissympathies were not liberal; his knowledge, especially of Greekletters, was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV. , andhe felt the beauty of its art. No one has written with finerintelligence of Racine than he in his _Lycée, ou Cours de Littérature_. As the Revolution approached he sympathised with its hopes and fears;the professor donned the _bonnet rouge_. The storm which burstsilenced his voice for a time; in 1793 he suffered imprisonment; andwhen he occupied his chair again, it was a converted Laharpe whodeclaimed against philosophers, republicans, and atheists, thetyrants of reason, morals, art and letters. 

The finest and surest judgment in contemporary literature was thatof a gallicised German--MELCHIOR GRIMM (1723-1807). As Laharpe wasbound in filial loyalty to Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternalattachment to the least French of eighteenth-century Frenchauthors--Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was ameasure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his intellect rose clear, light, and sure, with no mists of sentiment about it, and no cloudsof fancy. During thirty-seven years, as a kind of private journalist, he furnished princely and royal persons of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Poland, with "Correspondence, " which reflected as from a mirror allthe lights of Paris to the remote North and East. His own philosophy, his political views, were cheerless and arid; but he could judge thework of others generously as well as severely. No one of his generationso intelligently appreciated Shakespeare; no one more happilyinterpreted Montaigne. By swift _aperçu_, by criticism, by anecdote, by caustic raillery, or serious record, he makes the intellectualworld of his day pass before us and expound its meanings. TheRevolution, the dangers of which he divined early, drove him fromParis. In bidding it farewell he wished that he were in his grave. 

III

Buffon, whose power of wing was great, and who did not love the heatand dust of combat, soared smoothly above the philosophic strife. Born in 1707, at Montbard, in Burgundy, GEORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, createdComte de BUFFON by Louis XV. , fortunate in the possession of riches, health, and serenity of heart and brain, lived in his domestic circle, apart from the coteries of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinitepatience his proper ends. The legend describes him as a pompousOlympian even in his home; in truth, if he was majestic--like a marshalof France, as Hume describes him--he was also natural, genial, andat times gay. His appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the RoyalGarden, now the _Jardin des Plantes_, turned his studies frommathematical science to natural history. 

The first volumes of his vast _Histoire Naturelle_ appeared in 1749;aided by Daubenton and others, he was occupied with the succeedingvolumes during forty years, until death terminated his labours in1788. The defects of his work are obvious--its want of method, itsdisdain of classification, its abuse of hypotheses, its humanisingof the animal world, its pomp of style. But the progress of science, which lowered the reputation of Buffon, has again re-established hisfame. Not a few of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have beenthe divinations of genius; and if he wrote often in the ornate, classical manner, he could also write with a grave simplicity. 

In his _Discours de Réception_, pronounced before the French Academyin 1753, he formulated his doctrine of literary style, insisting thatit is, before all else, the manifestation of order in the evolutionof ideas; ideas alone form the basis and inward substance of style. Rejecting merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of naturalphenomena, viewing classifications as no more than a convenience ofthe human intellect, refusing to regard final causes as a subjectof science, he envisaged nature with a tranquil and comprehensivegaze, and with something of a poet's imagination. He perceived thatthe globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long seriesof changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to sound geological study;he expounded the geography of species, and almost divined the theoryof their transformation or variability; he recognised in some degreethe struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; heregarded man as a part of nature, but as its noblest part, capableof an intellectual and moral progress which is not the mere resultof physical laws. 

Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as a thinker, he enlarged thebounds of literature by annexing the province of natural history asMontesquieu had annexed that of political science. His vision of theuniverse was unclouded by passion, and part of its grandeur is derivedfrom this serenity. He studied and speculated with absolute freedom, prepared to advance from his own ideas to others more in accordancewith observed phenomena. "He desired to be, " writes a critic, "andalmost became, a pure intelligence in presence of eternal things. "How could he concern himself with the strifes and passions of a dayto whom the centuries were moments in the vast process of evolvingchange? In André Chénier he found a disciple who would fain have beenthe Lucretius of the new system of nature. 

CHAPTER IVROUSSEAU--BEAUMARCHAIS--BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE--ANDRÉ CHÉNIER

I

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU the man is inseparable from Rousseau thewriter; his works proceed directly from his character and his life. Born at Geneva in 1712, he died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhoodwas followed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of his thirdresidence with Madame de Warens, until 1741, though his vagabondagedid not wholly cease, he was collecting his powers and educating hismind with studies ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years inParis, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way towards thelight; it was the period of his gayer writings, ballet, opera, comedy, and of the articles on music contributed to the _Encyclopédie_: hehad not yet begun to preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourthperiod of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his masterpiecesexcept the _Confessions_. From 1762 until his death, while his tempergrew darker and his reason was disturbed, Rousseau was occupied withapologetic and autobiographic writings. 

His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His father, awatchmaker, filled the child's head with the follies of romances, which they read together, and gave him through Plutarch's Lives asense of the exaltations of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature wasquickened and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. Froma notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he passed underthe harsh rule of an engraver of watches, learning the vices thatgrow from fear. At sixteen he fled, and found protection at Annecy, under Madame de Warens, a young and comely lady, recently convertedto the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as devoid of moralprinciples as any creature in the Natural History. Sent to Turin forinstruction, Rousseau renounced his Protestant faith, and soon afterfound in the good Abbé Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard vicar. Some experience of domestic service was followed by a year at Annecy, during which Rousseau's talent as a musician was developed. Fromeighteen to twenty he led a wandering life--"starved, feasted, despaired, was happy. " Rejoining Madame de Warens at Chambéry in 1732, he interested himself in music, physics, botany, and was more andmore drawn towards the study of letters. He methodised his reading(1738-41), and passionately pursued a liberal system ofself-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical. 

Rousseau's relations with his _bonne maman_, Madame de Warens, hadbeen troubled by the latest of her other loves. In 1741 he set offfor Paris, bearing with him the manuscript of a new system of musicalnotation, which was offered to the Académie des Sciences, and wasdeclared neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experimentin life as secretary to the French Ambassador at Venice closed, afterfourteen months, with his abrupt dismissal. Again in Paris, Rousseauobtained celebrity by his operas and comedies, was received in the_salons_, and associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm. He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and vulgardrudge, Thérèse Le Vasseur, for his companion; their children wereabandoned to the care of the Foundling Hospital. 

In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rousseau, on the roadto visit his friend, read in the _Mercure de France_ that the Academyof Dijon had proposed as the subject for a prize to be awarded nextyear the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributedto purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain andoverwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the passions. With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment ofcivilisation; in 1750 the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplifyhis own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularitiesof assumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fictitiousone) of a moral reformer. Famous as author of the _Discours_ and theopera _Le Devin de Village_, presented before the King, he returnedto his native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestantcommunion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize at Dijon, on thequestion, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is itauthorised by the law of nature?" Rousseau failed to obtain the prize, but the _Discours sur l'Inégalité_ was published (1755) with adedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had discovered in privateproperty the source of all the evils of society. 

In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of his politicaltreatise, the _Contrat Social_, and filled his heart with the beautyof those prospects which form an environment for the lovers in hisHéloïse. In 1756 he was established, through the kindness of Madamed'Épinay, in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest ofMontmorency. His delight in the woods and fields was great; hisdelight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his hostess, was a moretroubled passion. Quarrels with Madame d'Épinay, quarrels with Grimmand Diderot, estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the sceneat the Hermitage. 

Authorship, however, had its joys and consolations. The _Lettre àD'Alembert_, a censure of the theatre (1758), was succeeded by _LaNouvelle Héloïse_ (1761), by the _Contrat Social_ (1762), and _Émile_(1762). The days at Montmorency which followed his departure fromthe Hermitage passed in calm. With the publication of _Émile_ thestorms began again. The book, condemned by the Sorbonne, was orderedby the Parliament to be burnt by the common executioner. Rousseauescaped imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not settlenear Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a providential orderof the world, an enemy of the stage--especially in republicanGeneva--Rousseau had flung indignant words against Voltaire, andVoltaire had tossed back words of bitter scorn. Geneva had followedParis in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications; whosedoing could it be except Voltaire's? He fled from his persecutorsto Môtiers, where the King of Prussia's governor afforded himprotection. Renewed quarrels with his countrymen, clericalintolerance, mob violence, an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, oncemore drove him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of Bienne, only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne. Encouraged byHume--"le bon David"--he arrived in January 1766 in London. 

At Wootton, in the Peak of Derbyshire, Rousseau prepared the firstfive books of his _Confessions_. Within a little time he had assuredhimself that Hume was joined with D'Alembert and Voltaire in atriumvirate of persecutors to defame his character and render himan outcast; the whole human race had conspired to destroy him. AgainRousseau fled, sojourned a year at Trye-Château under an assumed name, and after wanderings hither and thither, took refuge in Paris, where, living meanly, he completed his _Confessions_, wrote other eloquentpieces of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebralexcitement by music and botanising rambles. The hospitality of M. De Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly accepted in May 1778; and there, on July 2, he suddenly died; suicide was surmised; the seizure wasprobably apoplectic. 

Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist whose dreamsand visions were inspired by the play of his sensibility upon hisintellect and imagination, and therefore he was the least impersonalof thinkers. Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions;inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid realities;cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he sank deep in the mireof imaginative sensuality; effeminate, he was also indomitable; anuncompromising optimist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness;a passionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establishing the mostunqualified of tyrannies; among the devout he was a free-thinker, among the philosophers he was the sentimentalist of theopathy. Hestands apart from his contemporaries: they did homage to theunderstanding; he was the devotee of the heart: they belonged to abrilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded, dreamed insolitude: they were aristocratic, at least by virtue of theintellectual culture which they represented; he was plebeian in hisorigin, and popular in his sympathies. 

He became a great writer comparatively late in life, under thecompulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the centre of all his moreimportant works, excepting such as are apologetic and autobiographical:Nature has made man good and happy; society has made him evil andmiserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of primitive savagery?No: society cannot retrograde. But in many ways we can ameliorate humanlife by approximating to a natural condition. 

In the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_, the _Discours surl'Inégalité_, and the _Lettre à D'Alembert sur les Spectacles_, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, theinsincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the factitiouspassions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make onewish, " wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours. " By nature all men areborn free and equal; society has rendered them slaves, and impoundedthem in classes of rich and poor, powerful and weak, master and servant, peasant and peer. Rousseau's conception of the primitive state ofnature, and the origin of society by a contract, may not behistorically exact--this he admits; nevertheless, it serves well, he urges, as a working hypothesis to explain the present state ofthings, and to point the way to a happier state. It exhibits propertyas the confiscation of natural rights; it justifies the sacred causeof insurrection; it teaches us to honour man as man, and the simplecitizen more than the noble, the scientific student, or the artist. Plain morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the theatreis a school of manners, purifying the passions; on the contrary, itirritates and perverts them; or it offers to ridicule the man ofstraightforward virtue, as Molière was not ashamed to do in his_Misanthrope_. 

Having developed his destructive criticism against society as it is, Rousseau would build up. In the _Contrat Social_ he would show howfreedom and government may be conciliated; how, through thearrangements of society, man may in a certain sense return to thelaw of nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains;"yet social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having resigned hisindividual liberty by the social pact, how may man recover thatliberty? By yielding his individual rights absolutely to aself-governing community of which he forms a part. The _volontégénérale_, expressing itself by a plurality of votes, resumes thefree-will of every individual. If any person should resist the generalwill, he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be "forcedto be free. " Thus the dogma of the sovereignty of the people isformulated by Rousseau. Government is merely a delegation of powermade by the people as sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects. In Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority be establishedwithout check or qualification, at least equality is secured, for, in the presence of the sovereign people and its manifested will, eachindividual is reduced to the level of all his fellows. 

_La Nouvelle Héloïse_, in the form of a romance, considers thepurification of domestic manners. Richardson's novels are followedin the epistolary style of narration, which lends itself to theexposition of sentiment. The story is simple in its incidents. Saint-Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie resembles thatof Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like Eloisa, has been a consentingparty. Obedient to her father's will, Julie marries Wolmar. In despairSaint-Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friendship and ahome. The lovers meet, are tried, and do not yield to the temptation. Julie dies a victim to her maternal devotion, and not toosoon--"Another day, perhaps, and I were guilty!"

In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance. It might havebeen coldly edifying had not the writer's consuming passion for Madamed'Houdetot, awakening all that he had felt as the lover of Madamede Warens, filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part ofthe romance, passion asserts the primitive rights of nature; in thesecond part, those rights are shown to be no longer rights in anorganised society. But the ideal of domestic life exhibited is onefar removed from the artificialities of the world of fashion: it isa life of plain duties, patriarchal manners, and gracious beneficence. Rousseau the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau thesentimentalist; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive power. The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the penetrating influencesof the beauty of external nature; and both are interpreted withincomparable harmonies of style and poignant lyrical cries, in whichthe violin note outsoars the orchestra. 

A reform of domestic life must result in a reform of education. Rousseau's ideal of education, capable of adaptations andmodifications according to circumstances, is presented in his_Émile_. How shall a child be formed in accordance, not with thevicious code of an artificial society, but in harmony with nature?Rousseau traces the course of Émile's development from birth to adultyears. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by his mother, thechild enjoys the freedom of nature, and at five years old passes intothe care of his father or his tutor. During the earlier years hiseducation is to be negative: let him be preserved from all that isfalse or artificial, and enter upon the heritage of childhood, thegladness of animal life, vigorous delights in sunshine and open air;at twelve he will hardly have opened a book, but he will have beenin vital relation with real things, he will unconsciously have laidthe foundations of wisdom. When the time for study comes, that studyshould be simple and sound--no Babel of words, but a wholesomeknowledge of things; he may have learnt little, but he will know thatlittle aright; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography;he may watch the workman in his workshop; he may practise thecarpenter's trade; he may read _Robinson Crusoe_, and learn the lessonof self-help. Let him ask at every moment, "What is the good of this?"Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history, he will havegrown up laborious, temperate, patient, firm, courageous. 

At fifteen the passions are awake; let them be gently and wisely guided. Let pity, gratitude, benevolence be formed within the boy's heart, so that the self-regarding passions may fall into a subordinate place. To read Plutarch is to commune with noble spirits; to read Thucydidesis almost to come into immediate contact with facts. The fables ofLa Fontaine will serve as a criticism of the errors of the passions. 

And now Émile, at eighteen, may learn the sublime mysteries of thatfaith which is professed by Rousseau's Savoyard vicar. A Will movesthe universe and animates nature; that Will, acting through generallaws, is guided by supreme intelligence; if the order of Providencebe disturbed, it is only through the abuse of man's free-will; thesoul is immaterial and survives the body; conscience is the voiceof God within the soul; "dare to confess God before the philosophers, dare to preach humanity before the intolerant;" God demands no otherworship than that of the heart. With such a preparation as this, Émilemay at length proceed to æsthetic culture, and find his chief delightin those writers whose genius has the closest kinship to nature. Finally, in Sophie, formed to be the amiable companion and helpmateof man, Émile should find a resting-place for his heart. Alas, ifshe should ever betray his confidence!

The _Confessions_, with its sequels in the _Dialogues, ou Rousseaujuge de Jean-Jacques_, and the _Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire_, constitute an autobiographical romance. The sombre colours of thelast six Books throw out the livelier lights and shades of thepreceding Books. While often falsifying facts and dates, Rousseauwrites with all the sincerity of one who was capable of boundlessself-deception. He will reserve no record of shame and vice andhumiliation, confident that in the end he must appear the mostvirtuous of men. As the utterance of a soul touched and thrilled byall the influences of nature and of human life, the _Confessions_affects the reader like a musical symphony in which various movementsare interpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If Rousseauhere is less of the prophet than in his other writings, he is moreof the great enchanter. Should a moral be drawn from the book, theauthor would have us learn that nature has made man good, that societyhas the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his powerto refashion himself to such virtue as the world most needs and mostimpatiently rejects. 

The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-estimated. Herestored the sentiment of religion in an age of abstract deism orturbid materialism. He inaugurated a moral reform. He tyrannised overFrance in the person of his disciple Robespierre. He emancipated thepassions from the domination of the understanding. He liberated theimagination. He caught the harmonies of external nature, and gavethem a new interpretation. [1] He restored to French prose, colour, warmth, and the large utterance which it had lost. He created aliterature in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical assertedits rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew the classicalideal of art, and enthroned the _ego_ in its room. 

[Footnote 1: Among writers who fostered the new feeling for externalnature, Ramond (1755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partlyscientific, partly imaginative, from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees, deserves special mention. ]

II

The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the new life ofpassion--passion social and democratic as the days of Revolutionapproached; passion also personal and private, which, welcomed asa sacred fire, too often made the inmost being of the individual ascene of agitating and desolating conflict. 

The Abbé Raynal (1713-96) made his _Histoire des Deux Indes_ areceptacle not only for just views and useful information, but forevery extravagance of thought and sentiment. "Insert into my book, "he said to his brother philosophers, "everything that you chooseagainst God, against religion, and against government. " In the thirdedition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatrically, withthe inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!"The _salons_ caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, theycould not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It mingledwith a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensity oflife. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for manyspirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temperof Chamfort's maxims and _pensées_ may testify to the vacuity of faithand joy; sentiment and passion came to fill the void; to desire, tolove, to pity, to suffer, to weep, was to live the true life of theheart. 

Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the demon of ennui withthe aid of a cool temperament and a brilliant wit; at sixty-eight, whatever ardour had been secretly stored up in her nature escapedto lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her youngcompanion and reader, who became a rival and robbed her _salon_ ofits brilliance, Mlle. De Lespinasse (1732?-76) might cherish a calmfriendship for D'Alembert. When M. De Guibert came to succeed M. DeMora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of passionin those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and besideEloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil ofRousseau, whose _Nouvelle Héloïse_ was to her as a revelation fromheaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazingdaughter was as the eulogist of Rousseau. 

The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristocratic; passion andsentiment have popular and democratic instincts. "The Revolution wasalready in action, " said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's_Mariage de Figaro_ appeared upon the stage. " If Napoleon's wordsoverstate the fact, we may at least name that masterpiece of comedya symptom of the coming explosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words, an armed Fronde. 

Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-99), son of a watchmaker of Paris, was born under a merry star, with atrue genius for comedy, yet his theatrical pieces were only therecreations of a man of affairs--a demon of intrigue--determined tobuild up his fortune by financial adventures and commercialenterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. Defeated ina trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand livres was disputed, Beaumarchais, in desperate circumstances, made his appeal to publicopinion in four _Mémoires_, which admirably united seriousness, gaiety, argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. "I am acitizen, " he cried--"that is to say, something wholly new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen--that is to say, what you shouldhave been two hundred years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty yearshence. " The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was soon tobecome familiar. 

Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two dramas, _Eugénie_and _Les Deux Amis_, of the tearful, sentimental, bourgeois type, yet with a romantic tendency, which distinguishes at least _Eugénie_from the bourgeois drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure ofthe second may have taught their author the wisdom of mirth; heabandoned his high dramatic principles to laugh and to evoke laughter. _Le Barbier de Séville_, developed from a comic opera to a comedyin five acts, was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectatorsmanifested fatigue; instantly the play reappeared in four acts, Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the fifth wheel fromhis carriage. It delighted the public by the novelty of its aboundinggaiety, a gaiety full and free, yet pointed with wit, a revolvingfirework scattering its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of theamorous tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with theprestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was renewed by a dialoguewhich was alive with scintillating lights. 

From the success of the _Barbier_ sprang _Le Mariage de Figaro_. Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its performance was notovercome until six years afterwards. By force of public opinion thewatchmaker's son had triumphed over the King. The subject of the playis of a good tradition--a daring valet disputes the claim of alibertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish colourand Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of France. From Regnardthe author had learnt to entangle a varied intrigue; from Lesage heborrowed his Spanish costumes and decoration--Figaro himself is aGil Blas upon the stage; in Marivaux he saw how women may assertthemselves in comic action with a bright audacity. The _Mariage deFigaro_ resumes the past; it depicts the present, as a social satire, and a painting of manners; it conveys into art the experience, thespirit, the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man ofthe world; it creates characters--Almaviva, Suzanne, Figaro himself, the budding Chérubin. It is at the same time--or, rather, becamethrough its public reception--a pamphlet in comedy which announcesthe future; it ridicules the established order with a sprightlyinsolence; it pleads for social equality; it exposes the iniquityof aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice, the greed ofcourtiers, the chicanery of politicians. Figaro, since he appearedin "The Barber of Seville, " has grown somewhat of a moralist and apedant; he must play the part of censor of society, he must representthe spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the cause ofintelligence against the authority of rank and station. Beaumarchaismay have lacked elevation and delicacy, but he knew his craft as adramatist, and left a model of prose comedy from which in later yearsothers of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He restoredmirth to the stage; he rediscovered theatrical intrigue; he createda type, which was Beaumarchais himself, and was also the lightergenius of France; he was the satirist of society; he was thenimble-feathered bird that foretells the storm. 

III

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand andthe romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling forexternal nature attained through him a wider range, embracing theromance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; atthe same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. Headded to French literature a tale in which human passion and thesentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; hecreated two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircledwith a halo of love and sorrow. 

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was anUtopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angrydisputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroicrecord of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancycaught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far froma corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free. 

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagantdesigns upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dreamwas to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrelsfollowed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as anengineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours and soundsand scents impressed themselves on his brain, and were transferredto his collection of notes. When, on returning to Paris, he published(1773) his _Voyage à l'Île de France_, the literature of picturesquedescription may be said to have been founded. Already in this volumehis feeling for nature is inspired by an emotional theism, and isburdened by his sentimental science, which would exhibit a fantasticarray of evidences of the designs for human welfare of an amiableand ingenious Author of nature. Before the book appeared, Bernardinhad made the acquaintance of Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To hisnew disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they rambledtogether, botanising in the environs of Paris. 

For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bordering uponinsanity; but the crisis passed, and he employed himself on the_Études de la Nature_, which appeared in three volumes in 1784. Thetale of _Paul et Virginie_ was not included; for when the author hadread it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had beencontemptuous; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon called for his carriage. The _Études_ accumulate the grotesque notions of Bernardin withreference to final causes in nature: nature is benevolent andharmonious; society is corrupt and harsh; scientific truth is to bediscovered by sentiment, and not by reason; the whole universe isplanned for the happiness of man; the melon is large because it wasdesigned for the family; the pumpkin is larger, because Providenceintended that it should be shared with our neighbours. Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking generation, suffered cruelly atthe hands of its advocate. Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book afeeling of the rich and obscure life and energy of nature; hisdescriptive power is admirable. "He desired, " says M. Barine, "toopen the door for Providence to enter; in fact he opened the doorfor the great Pan, " and in this he was a precursor of much that followedin literature. 

Bernardin's fame was now established. In the sentimental reactionagainst the dryness of sceptical philosophy, in the return to afeeling for the poetical aspect of things, he was looked upon as aleader. In the fourth volume of _Études_ (1788) he had courage toprint the tale of _Paul et Virginie_. It is an idyll of the tropics, written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficentinfluence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils ofcivilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up sideby side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passionmakes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces andthe faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardoursof first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close. Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feelthe life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion. Something was gained by Bernardin from the _Daphnis and Chloe_ ofLongus in the motives and the details of his story, but it isessentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its mostardent admirers was Napoleon. 

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul anda Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithfulhousekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between thedevotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleaguesof the _Institut_. His later writings added nothing to his fame. _LaChaumière Indienne_--the story of a pariah who learns wisdom fromnature and from the heart--has a certain charm, but it lacks the powerof the better portions of _Paul et Virginie_. The _Harmonies de laNature_ is a feeble reflection of the _Études_. Chateaubriand, towhom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition ofthe genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a moregenerous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the nameof God; among the great events of the time his death was almostunnoticed. 

IV

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the laboursof the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revivalof the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for classical art. The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the Eastwith the enthusiasm of an archæologist, presented in his writingsan ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and paintersof the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbé BARTHÉLEMY (1716-95) embodiedthe erudite delights of a lifetime in his _Voyage du Jeune Anacharsisen Grèce_ (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of Hellenismas it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was anideal Greece--the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe--unalterablygracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenthcentury; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We traceits influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's andChateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, theoffspring of a Greek mother and a French father--André Chénier--alatter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of hisown century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art. 

Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRÉ CHÉNIER was educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the FrenchAmbassador for three weary years in England--land of mists, land ofdull aristocrats--returned to France in 1790, ardent in the causeof constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friendsas a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him intoopposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; onthe 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, AndréChénier's head fell on the scaffold. 

Only two poems, the _Jeu de Paume_ and the _Hymne aux Suisses_, werepublished by Chénier; after his death appeared in journals the _JeuneCaptive_ and the _Jeune Tarentine_; his collected poems, alreadyknown in manuscript to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary, were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existencewithout his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regardhim as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studiedand imitated as a master. 

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to itsgraceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in humanreason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certainof his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more thana disciple of Lebrun. His _Élégies_ are rather Franco-Roman thanGreek; these, together with beauties of their own, have thecharacteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundanevoluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem _Hermès_, ofwhich we have designs and fragments, would have been the _De RerumNatura_ of an admiring student of Buffon. 

In his _Églogues_ and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllicpoets of antiquity, and from the Anthology. The Greece of Chénier'simagination is the ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more delicately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than waspossible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. "It is thelandscape-painter's Greece, " writes M. Faguet, "the Greece of fairriver-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around awell-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voicefulsea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blueheavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the lightbreathing of the Cyclades. "

In the _Ïambes_, inspired by the emotions of the Revolution duringhis months of imprisonment, Chénier united modern passion with thebeauty of classic form; satire in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly lyrical. In his versification he attained new andalluring harmonies; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity ofeighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line to line andfrom strophe to strophe. He did over again for French poetry the workof the Pléiade, but he did this as one who was a careful student anda critic of Malherbe. 

BOOK THE FIFTH1789-1850

CHAPTER ITHE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE--MADAME DE STAËL--CHATEAUBRIAND

I

The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a periodof transition. Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand announce the future;the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power thepast, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The greatpolitical concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas unitedwith the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the natureof a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on thestage, but their literary value is insignificant. 

Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet whoperished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of nationaltragedy in his _Charles IX. _; neither he nor the public knew historyor possessed the historical sentiment--his tragedy was arevolutionary "school of kings. " Arnault, Legouvé, NépomucèneLemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or their depthof characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy ofthe time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy waswelcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harlevilledrew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in _Le VieuxCélibataire_ (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Molière to thetaste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism andaccommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of theKing, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in _L'Ami des Lois_, yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins. 

Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's _Pinto_(1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and thedestiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game oftrick-track. In his _Christophe Colomb_ of 1809 he dared to despisethe unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial régime. Baour-Lormian, the translator of _Ossian_ (1801), converted thestory of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and TippooSahib, Mahomet II. , and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish historytransported to Assyria) diversified the stage. The greatest successwas that of Raynouard's _Les Templiers_ (1805); the learned authorwisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Amongthe writers of comedy--Andrieux, Étienne, Duval, and others--Picardhas the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising socialclasses and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixérécourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for theromantic stage. Désaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, wasthe master of the vaudeville. 

Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during theRevolution. The lesser Chénier's _Chanson du Départ_ has in it astirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war withthe acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-_Pindare_, in his ode _Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur_, does notquite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classicalimagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, _LaMarseillaise_ (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itselfto the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. Thepseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are labouredand lifeless. But Creuzé de Lesser, in his _Chevaliers de laTable-Ronde_ (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his_Poésies Ossianiques_, widened the horizons of literature. The_Panhypocrisiade_ of Lemercier, published in 1819, but writtenseveral years earlier--an "infernal comedy of the sixteenthcentury"--is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, andgenius; it bears to Hugo's _Légende des Siècles_ the relation whichthe megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues. 

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we mayfind it in the harmonious melancholy of Chênedollé, in the grace ofFontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. Thespecial character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combinationof the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certainreaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it couldnot attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solelyor chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out whatwas commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literaturein the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had becomea social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militantfunction was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigidambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was onceagain recovered?

The Revolution closed the _salons_ and weakened the influence ofcultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphletfilled the place left vacant by the _salons_. The _DécadePhilosophique_ was the organ of the ideologists, who applied theconceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary andphilosophical criticism. In 1789 the _Journal des Débats_ was founded. Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in thecolumns of the public press. Among the contributors were André Chénier, Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, andrepublican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he didsomething to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice andmercy in his journal, _Le Vieux Cordelier_, and died, with Dantonas his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair. 

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangueswith heroic examples of Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and academic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the "Supreme Being"under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid spirit of the Girondinsfound its highest expression in Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibratingspeech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagination thundered in words whichtended to action; but in general the Mountain cared more for deedsthan words. The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icyapothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like the fall of theknife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, was clear and measured indiscourse, and once in opposition to Mirabeau, defending the royalprerogative, rose beyond himself to the height of a great occasion. 

But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the geniusof a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and astudent, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate lover of his Sophieand of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was acopious author on political subjects. He knew that France neededindividual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined thedangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisationof power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the politicallife of the whole country; he desired to balance the constitutionby playing off the King against the Assembly, and the Assembly againstthe King, and to control the action of each by the force of publicopinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating thelegislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatredof aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might have assisted in theequilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoricrested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarrassed as he began tospeak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, magnificentin gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and passion. His speech, said Madame de Staël, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilfulartist, and fashioning men to his will. " At the sitting of the Assemblyon April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il estmort, " which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honoré Riquetti wasdead. 

"The 18th Brumaire, " writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. Forfifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent. . . . Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators. " As headvanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, andcondensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, nowsimple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, nowgrandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleonwas a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whomhe addressed. His own taste in literature was touched withsentimentality; _Ossian_ and _Werther_ were among his favouritebooks; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empirewas of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition. 

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of theRevolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it wasnecessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throneand the altar. Great scientific names--Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck--testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenthcentury illustrious had not spent its force. Scholarship was layingthe bases for future constructions; Ginguené published in 1811 thefirst volumes of his _Histoire Littéraire de l'Italie_; Fauriel andRaynouard accumulated the materials for their historical, literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away fromsensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towardsspiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in theprimitive fact of consciousness--the _nisus_ of the will--and in theself-recognition of the _ego_ as a cause, an escape from materialism. Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished inpolitics than he was in speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonnefrom the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentaryas a siege-train against the positions of Condillac. 

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the springcame slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chillwas in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of them? infinitedesire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who sharedin his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of itsjoy, Étienne Pivert de SÉNANCOURT published in 1799 his _Rêveries_, a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistanceto sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It wasfollowed in 1804 by _Obermann_, a romance in epistolary form, in whichthe writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixedand sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, norwhat he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without anobject. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps inold age--if ever it come--he may resign himself to the infiniteillusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time thatfifteen years later, when the _Libres Méditations_ appeared, Sénancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnalbrightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement withexistence. 

The work of the professional critics of the time--Geoffroy, De Féletz, Dussault, Hoffman--counts now for less than the words of one who wasonly an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised inpublic. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and ofChateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lackedthe strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. Heread everything; he published nothing; but the _Pensées_, which werecollected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his lettersreveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmedby literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volumein a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement ofstyle. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by theirlack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man ofthe eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clearheights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and somethingof the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculationthan for action. 

II

The movement towards the romantic theory and practice of art wasfostered in the early years of the nineteenth century by two eminentwriters--one a woman with a virile intellect, the other a man withmore than a woman's imaginative sensibility--by GERMAINE DE STAËLand by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth century passinginto the nineteenth, receiving new developments, yet without a breachof continuity; the other represents a reaction against the ideas ofthe age of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons--one, by thedivinations of her ardent intelligence; the other, by his creativegenius. Madame de Staël interpreted new ideas and defined a new theoryof art. Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist. The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliantand incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracleof studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The geniusof the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian_salon_ was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursedin solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors. 

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the celebrated Swiss bankerand future minister of France, a child of precocious intelligenceand eager sympathies, reared amid the brilliant society of hermother's _salon_, a girl whose demands on life were large--demandsof the intellect, demands of the heart--enamoured of the writingsof Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish Ambassador, the Baronde Staël-Holstein, herself a light and an inspirer of theconstitutional party of reform in the early days of the Revolution, in her literary work opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-centurythought. She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but rathercarried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, as a socialupheaval, she failed to understand; her ideal was liberty, notequality; and Necker's daughter was assured that all would be wellwere liberty established in constitutional forms of government. Arepublican among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat amongrepublicans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the yearsof her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, and retreats, she was sustained by her zeal for justice, her pity for the oppressed, and her unquenchable faith in human progress. 

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political pamphlets, an _Essaisur les Fictions_, a treatise on the Influence of the Passions uponthe Happiness of Individuals and Nations (1796), were followed in1800 by her elaborate study, _De la Littérature considérée dans sesRapports avec les Institutions Sociales_. Its central idea is thatof human progress: freedom, incarnated in republican institutions, will assure the natural development of the spirit of man; a greatliterature will be the offspring of progress and of freedom; and eachnation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate the generaladvance. Madame de Staël hoped to cast the spell of her intellectover the young conqueror Bonaparte; Bonaparte regarded a politicalmeteor in feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 1802 thehusband, whom she had never loved, was dead. Her passion for BenjaminConstant had passed through various crises in its troubled career--aseries of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions leadingto attractions, such as may be discovered in Constant's remarkablenovel _Adolphe_. They could neither decide to unite their lives, norto part for ever. Adolphe, in Constant's novel, after a youth ofpleasure-seeking, is disenchanted with life; his love of Ellénoreis that of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for vanityor a new indulgence of egoism; but Ellénore, whose youth is past, will abandon all for him, and she imposes on him the tyranny of herdevotion. Each is the other's torturer, each is the other'sconsolation. In the mastery of his cruel psychology Constantanticipates Balzac. 

Madame de Staël lightened the stress of inward storm by writing_Delphine_, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bringher into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent andfeeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world indoing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death in the wildsof America. [1]

[Footnote 1: In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand. ]

In 1803 Madame de Staël received orders to trouble Paris with hertorrent of ideas and of speech no longer. The illustrious victim ofNapoleon's persecution hastened to display her ideas at Weimar, whereGoethe protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from the stormof her approach, and Schiller endured her literary enthusiasm witha sense of prostration. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to hersons, became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensivemind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she advanced to theconquest of Italy, and had her Roman triumph. England, which she hadvisited in her Revolutionary flights, and Italy conspired in thecreation of her novel _Corinne_ (1807). It is again the history ofa woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom the worldunderstands imperfectly, and whom her English lover, after his fitof Italian romance, discards with the characteristic British phlegm. The paintings of Italian nature are rhetorical exercises; thewriter's sympathy with art and history is of more value; theinterpretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal feeling. Madame de Staël's novels are old now, which means that they once wereyoung, and for her own generation they had the freshness and charmof youth. 

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards religion. AProtestant and a liberal, her spiritualist faith now found supportin the moral strength of Christianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand, an epicurean and a Catholic; she did not care to decorate religionwith flowers, or make it fragrant with incense; it spoke to her notthrough the senses, but directly to the conscience, the affections, and the will. In the chapters of her book on Germany which treat of"the religion of enthusiasm, " her devout latitudinarianism findsexpression. 

The book _De l'Allemagne_, published in London in 1813, after theconfiscation and destruction of the Paris edition by the imperialpolice, prepared the way by criticism for the romantic movement. Ittreats of manners, letters, art, philosophy, religion, interpretingwith astonishing insight, however it may have erred in importantdetails, the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was a Germanyof poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, loyal and sincere, butincapable of patriotic passion, disqualified for action and forfreedom, which she in 1804 had discovered. The life of societyproduces literature in France; the genius of inward meditation andsentiment produces literature in Germany. The literature and art ofthe South are classical, those of the North are romantic; and sincethe life of our own race and the spirit of our own religion are infusedinto romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite growth. Madame de Staël advanced criticism by her sense that art andliterature are relative to ages, races, governments, environments. She dreamed of an European or cosmopolitan literature, in which eachnation, while retaining its special characteristics, should be infruitful communication with its fellows. 

In 1811 Madame de Staël, when forty-five, became the wife of Albertde Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more than twenty years her junior. Their courage was rewarded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland, Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall of Napoleon Madamede Staël was once more in Paris, and there in 1817 she died. The _DixAnnées d'Exil_, posthumously published, records a portion of heragitated life, and exhales her indignation against her imperialpersecutor. The unfinished _Considérations sur la RévolutionFrançaise_, designed originally as an apology for Necker, defendsthe Revolution while admitting its crimes and errors; its true object, as the writer conceived--political liberty--had been in the endattained; her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of arevolutionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with asystem at once popular and aristocratic, was the country in whichshe saw her political aspirations most nearly realised. 

III

FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND was born in 1768, at St. -Malo, of anancient Breton family. Except for the companionship of an elder sister, of fragile health and romantic temper, his childhood was solitary. The presence of the old count his father inspired terror. The boy'ssociety was with the waves and winds, or at the old château of Combourg, with lonely woods and wilds. Horace, Tibullus, _Télémaque_, thesermons of Massillon, nourished his imagination or stimulated hisreligious sentiment; but solitude and nature were his chiefinspirers. 

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfieddreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the armywas procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, somethingof literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quittedFrance, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Passage, set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The newsof the execution of Louis XVI. Decided him to return; a Breton anda royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. Togratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing thefrontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrowcaused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portionof her husband's regard as he could devote to another than himself. 

The episode of war having soon closed--not without a wound and aserious illness--he found a refuge in London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the consolation of friendship with Joubert andFontanes, and there he published in 1797 his first work, the _Essaisur les Révolutions_. The doctrine of human progress had been partof the religion of the eighteenth century; Chateaubriand in 1797 hadfaith neither in social, nor political, nor religious progress. Whybe deceived by the hopes of revolution, since humanity can only circlefor ever through an exhausting round of illusions? The death of hismother and words of a dying sister awakened him from his melancholymood; he resolved to write a second book, which should correct theerrors of the first, and exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion. To the eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross andbarbarous superstition; he would show that it was a religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of art, a spring of poetic thoughtand feeling alike through its dogma and its ritual; he would convertliterature from its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honourthe despised Middle Ages. 

The _Génie du Christianisme_, begun during its author's residencein London, was not completed until four years later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic apology for religion, hepublished his _Atala, ou les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Désert_. It is a romance, or rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for nature, the sensibility to human passion, conceal many infirmities of designand of feeling. Chateaubriand suddenly entered into his fame. 

On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities;the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portalsof Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the_Génie du Christianisme_. Its value as an argumentative defence ofChristianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religionto art, it contained or implied a new system of æsthetics, it wasa glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto ofromanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard toChénier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, whileimitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let usseek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolutionin art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of thenineteenth century the revolution was in active progress. 

The episode of _René_, which was included in the _Génie_, andafterwards published separately, has been described as aChristianised _Werther_; its passion is less frank, and even moreremote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but thesadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly Englishlady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; hedid so during his whole life; and through René we divine the inventorof René carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discernsome features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelingscentre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; butaround his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansivepower, can deploy boundless perspectives. 

Both _Atala_ and _René_, though brought into connection with the_Génie du Christianisme_, are in fact more closely related to theprose epic _Les Natchez_, written early, but held in reserve untilthe publication of his collected works in 1826-31. _Les Natchez_, inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life ofthe Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from thepseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years, his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginativereverie. Famous as the author of the _Génie_, Chateaubriand wasappointed secretary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Ducd'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the _Martyrs_, on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and localcolour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a recordof which was published in his (1811) _Itinéraire de Paris àJerusalem_. 

The _Martyrs_ appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great exampleof that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he hadcontended in the _Génie_; the religion of Christ, he would prove, can create passions and types of character better suited for nobleimaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernaturalmarvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutorDiocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, thedeserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portionsof the scene; heaven and hell are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather a sentiment than a passion, does not succeedin making his supernatural habitations and personages credible evento the fancy. Far more admirable are many of the terrestrial scenesand narrations, and among these, in particular the story of Eudore. 

In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, Chateaubriandhad visited Spain, and it was his recollections of the Alhambra thatmoved him to write, about 1809, the _Aventures du Dernier desAbencérages_, published many years later. It shows a tendency towardsself-restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in harmony withhis effusive imagination. With this work Chateaubriand's inventiveperiod of authorship closed; the rest of his life was in the mainthat of a politician. From the position of an unqualified royalist(1814-24) he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may bedescribed as both royalist and republican. His pamphlet of 1814, _DeBonaparte et des Bourbons_, was declared by Louis XVIII. To be worthan army to his cause. 

In his later years he published an _Essai sur la Littérature Anglaise_and a translation of "Paradise Lost. " But his chief task was therevision of the _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, an autobiography designedfor posthumous publication, and actually issued in the pages of the_Presse_, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, whileChateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its vanity, itsmalicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those whom the writer regardedas his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make itan exposure of all that was worst and much of what was best in hischaracter and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. Récamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely attached, Chateaubriand died in thesummer of 1848. His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Bé, off thecoast of Brittany. 

Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character cannot be admiredwithout grave reserves. But an unique genius, developed at a fortunatetime, enabled him to play a most significant part in the history ofliterature. He was the greatest of landscape painters; he restoredto art the sentiment of religion; he interpreted the romanticmelancholy of the age. If he posed magnificently, there were nativeimpulses which suggested the pose; and at times, as in the_Itinéraire_, the pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas isnot extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion whichmakes the imaginative power its instrument, were his in a supereminentdegree. 

CHAPTER IITHE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

While the imagination of France was turning towards the romance ofthe Middle Ages and the art of Christianity, Hellenic scholarshipwas maintained by Jean-François Boissonade. The representative ofHellenism in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplinedartillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of a Greekmanuscript better than he loved a victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MÉRÉ(1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; inthe history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpiecesof Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy indialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure andin malice. The translator of _Daphnis and Chloe_, wearied by war andwanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines atVeretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincialpopular rights against the vexations of the Royalist reaction. Heis a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, occupied with affairs of theparish. Shall Chambord be purchased for the Duke of Burgundy? shallan intolerant young _curé_ forbid the villagers to dance? shallmagistrates harass the humble folk? Such are the questions agitatingthe country-side, which the vine-dresser Courier will resolve. Thequestions have been replaced to-day by others; but nothing has quitereplaced the _Simple Discours_, the _Pétition pour les Villageois_, the _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, in which the ease of the best sixteenthand seventeenth century prose is united with a deft rapier-play likethat of Voltaire, and with the lucidity of the writer's classicalmodels. 

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was thesatisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE(1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revoltof the soul; when he assailed the authority of the individual reason, it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of theSenate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republicansoldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested againstthe Revolutionary aggression in his _Lettres d'un RoyalisteSavoisien_; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his_Considérations sur la France_, he interpreted the meaning of thegreat political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France--assignedby God the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter ofthe Church--for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacredchastisement accomplished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restoredto an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years Maistreserved the King of Sardinia as envoy and plenipotentiary at theRussian Court, maintaining his dignity in cruel distress upon thesalary of a clerk. Amiable in his private life, he was remorseless--withthe stern charity of an inquisitor--in dogma. In a style ofextraordinary clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas, logically connected, on which to base a complete reorganisation ofEuropean society. Those ideas are set forth most powerfully in thedialogues entitled _Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg_ and thetreatises _Du Pape_ and _De l'Église Gallicane_. 

He honours reason; not the individual reason, source of innumerableerrors, but the general reason, which, emanating from God, revealsuniversal and immutable truth--_quod semper, quod ubique, quod abomnibus_. To commence philosophising we should despise thephilosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes aspecial study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of God, theGrand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in Hishands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciaryavenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is nogovernment without an executioner. But God is pitiful, and allowsus the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is nosociety; without the Catholic Church there is no religion; withoutthe sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic Church. The sovereigntyof the Pope is therefore the keystone of civilisation; his it is togive and take away the crowns of kings. Governments absolute overthe people, the Pontiff absolute over governments--such is theearthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in heaven. To suppose thatmen can begin the world anew from a Revolutionary year One, is thefolly of private reason; society is an organism which grows underprovidential laws; revolutions are the expiation for sins. Such arethe ideas which Maistre bound together in serried logic, and deployedwith the mastery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil fromindividualism to authority could not have found a more absoluteexpression. 

The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic views have muchin common with those of Maistre, and of his teacher Saint-Martin, dwelt on the necessity of language as a condition of thought, andmaintained that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776-1847), half poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic ideas with a theoryof human progress--a social and political palingenesis--which hadin it the elements of political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalismmet in the genius of FÉLICITÉ-ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782-1854); theyengaged after a time in conflict, and in the end the victory lay withhis democratic sympathies. A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowedwith imagination, passion, and eloquence, was more a prophet thana priest. He saw the world around him perishing through lack of faith;religion alone could give it life and health; a Church, freed frompolitical shackles, in harmony with popular tendencies, governed bythe sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The voice ofthe Catholic Church is the voice of humanity, uttering the generalreason of mankind. When the _Essai sur l'Indifférence en Matière deReligion_ appeared, another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But wasa democratic Catholicism possible? Lamennais trusted that it mightbe so, and as the motto of the journal _L'Avenir_ (1830), in whichLacordaire and Montalembert were his fellow-labourers, he chose thewords _Dieu et Liberté_. 

The orthodoxy of the _Avenir_ was suspected. Lamennais, with hisfriends, journeyed to Rome "to consult the Lord in Shiloh, " and inthe _Affaires de Rome_ recorded his experiences. The Encyclical of1832 pronounced against the doctrines dearest to his heart andconscience; he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon hisinmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theocracy failing, he still trusted in the peoples. But the democracy of his desire andfaith was one not devoted to material interests; to spiritualise thedemocracy became henceforth his aim. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_he announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. "It is, "said a contemporary, "a _bonnet rouge_ planted on a cross. " In hiselder years Lamennais believed in a spiritual power, a common thought, a common will directing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul, invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attemptedto give a scientific interpretation and application to the doctrineof the Trinity, are set forth in the _Esquisse d'une Philosophie_. His former associates, Lacordaire, the eloquent Dominican, andMontalembert, the historian, learned and romantic, of Westernmonasticism, remained faithful children of the Church. Lamennais, no less devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above hisgrave, among the poor of Père-Lachaise, no cross was erected. 

The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought assumed other formsthan those of the theocratic school. VICTOR COUSIN (1792-1867), apupil of Maine de Biran and Royer-Collard, became at the age oftwenty-three a lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne. He wasenthusiastic, ambitious, eloquent; with scanty knowledge he spokeas one having authority, and impressed his hearers with the forceof a ruling personality. Led on from Scotch to German philosophy, and having the advantage of personal acquaintance with Hegel, headvanced through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses butin the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity, he recognisedthe source of absolute truth; in the first act of consciousness aredisclosed the finite, the infinite, and their mutual relations. Inthe history of philosophy, in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance ofphilosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution; each systemis true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. With psychologyas a starting-point, and eclecticism as a method, Cousin attemptedto establish a spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domainof thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler. In thewritings of his disciple and friend THÉODORE JOUFFROY (1796-1842)there is a deeper accent of reality. Doubting, and contending withhis doubts, Jouffroy brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisitioninto the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental sciencewith physiology, and applied his remarkable powers of patient andsearching thought to the solution of questions in morals and æsthetics. The school of Cousin has been named eclectic; it should rather benamed spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its originextended beyond philosophy, and are apparent in the literary art ofCousin's contemporaries. 

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist philosophy wasineffectual. Another school of thought issuing from the Revolution, yet opposing its anarchic individualism, aspired to regeneratesociety by the application of the principles of positive science. CLAUDE-HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANÇOIS-CHARLESFOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, have acommon distinction as the founders of modern socialism. Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State controlled in things of themind by men of science, and in material affairs by the captains ofindustry. The aim of society should be the exploitation of the globeby associative effort. In his _Nouveau Christianisme_ he thought todeliver the Christian religion from the outworn superstition, as heregarded it, alike of Catholicism and Protestantism, and to pointout its true principle as adapted to our nineteenth century--thatof human charity, the united effort of men towards the well-beingof the poorest class. 

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientificspirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck outsuggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE(1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward bythem to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consistsof a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. Thequickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship withMme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness ofhis earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt theneed of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from thetheory that all human conceptions advance from the primitivetheological state, through the metaphysical--when abstract forces, occult causes, scholastic entities are invented to explain thephenomena of nature--to the positive, when at length it is recognisedthat human knowledge cannot pass beyond the region of phenomena. Withthese stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstractsciences--those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than withthe application of laws--are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit eachmore complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a neworder of truths; the whole erection, ascending to the science ofsociology, which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrineof human society--a doctrine of the laws of progress as well as ofthe laws of order--is crowned by morals. 

In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power is entrustedto a priesthood of science. Their moral influence will be chieflydirected to reinforcing the social feeling, altruism, as against thepredominance of self-love. The object of religious reverence is notGod, but the "Great Being"--Humanity, the society of the noble livingand the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all thosewho contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude, we render our homage, we direct ouraspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordinationof egoistic desire. Women--the mother, the wife, the daughter--purifyingthrough affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, asangelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence. 

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, andpositive, was accepted by PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809-65), a farmore brilliant writer, a far less constructive thinker, and aidedhim in arriving at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte. Son of a cooper at Besançon, Proudhon had the virtues of a true childof the people--integrity, affection, courage, zeal, untiring energy. Religion he would replace by morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Freeassociations of workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporalauthority, should arise over all the land. _Qu'est-ce que laPropriété?_ he asked in the title of a work published in 1840; andhis answer was, _La Propriété c'est le Vol_. Property, seizing uponthe products of labour in the form of rent or interest, and renderingno equivalent, is theft. Justice demands that service should be repaidby an equal service. Society, freely organising itself on theprinciples of liberty and justice, requires no government; onlythrough such anarchy as this can true order be attained. An apostleof modern communism, Proudhon, by ideas leavening the popular mind, became no insignificant influence in practical politics. 

CHAPTER IIIPOETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL

I

The eighteenth century did homage to the reason; it sought for generaltruths, scientific, social, political; its art was in the main aninheritance, diminished with lapse of time, from the classical artof the preceding century. With Rousseau came an outburst of thepersonal element in literature, an overflow of sensibility, anenfranchisement of the passions, and of imagination as connected withthe passions; his eloquence has in it the lyrical note. The romanticmovement was an assertion of freedom for the imagination, and anassertion of the rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measureless desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentimentof nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew. Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to the rules of classic art. Why should the several literary species be impounded each in itsseparate paddock? Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist'sgenius; let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the lyriccry; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why remain in servitudeto the models of Greece and Rome? Let all epochs and every climecontribute to the enrichment of art. The primitive age was above allothers the age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were thecenturies of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation andtranscendent passion. Honour, therefore, to our mediævalforefathers! It is the part of reason to trust the imagination inthe imaginative sphere. Through what is most personal and intimatewe reach the truths of the universal heart of man. An image may atthe same time be a symbol; behind a historical tableau may lie aphilosophical idea. 

At first the romantic movement was Christian and monarchical. Itsassertion of freedom, its claims on behalf of the _ego_, its licenceof the imagination, were in reality revolutionary. The intellect ismore aristocratic than the passions. The great spectacle of moderndemocracy deploying its forces is more moving than any pallid idealsof the past; it has the grandeur and breadth of the large phenomenaof nature; it is wide as a sunrise; its advance is as the onset ofthe sea, and has like rumours of victory and defeat. The romanticmovement, with no infidelity to its central principle, became modernand democratic. 

Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the romantic movementin France--the passion and mystery of the East; the struggle forfreedom in Greece; the old ballads of Spain; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudalsplendours of Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred;Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, his seekerfor the fountains of living knowledge; Schiller's revolters againstsocial law, and his adventurers of the court and camp. 

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came a renewal oflanguage and of metre. The poetical diction of the eighteenth centuryhad grown colourless and abstract; general terms had been preferredto particular; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced byperiphrases--the cock was "the domestic bird that announces the day. "The romantic poets sought for words--whether noble or vulgar--thatwere coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated withGautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the languagewere recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. Bydegrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity;sentences and periods grew rather than were built; phrases were alive, and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. Verse was mouldedby the feeling that inspired it; the melodies were like those of anEolian harp, long-drawn or retracted as the wind swept or touchedthe strings. Symmetry was slighted; harmony was valued for its ownsake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes satisfied orsurprised the ear, and the poet sometimes suffered through hiscuriosity as a virtuoso. By internal licences--the mobile cesura, new variations and combinations--the power of the alexandrine wasmarvellously enlarged; it lost its monotony and became capable ofevery achievement; its external restraints were lightened; verseglided into verse as wave overtaking wave. The accomplishment of thesechanges was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve werethe chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, Hugocontributed to the later evolution of romantic verse. The influenceon poetical form of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance. 

The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's _Poèmes_, the _Odes_ of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, thoughthe direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to thesame moment belongs the indictment of classical literature by HenriBeyle ("Stendhal") in his study entitled _Racine et Shakespeare_. Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the Arsenal, gathered theyoung revolters--among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Émile Deschamps, afterwards the translator of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Macbeth_, hisbrother Antony, afterwards the translator of the _Divine Comedy_. The first Cénacle was formed; in the _Muse Française_ and in the_Globe_ the principles of the new literary school were expounded andillustrated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, butstill held aloof. 

JEAN-PIERRE DE BÉRANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company ofpoets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, aftervarious experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of largeambitions. In 1815 his first collection of _Chansons_ appeared; thefourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and thepeople, he mediated between the popular and the middle-classsentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden;impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be theembodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love withoutits ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without itsfatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the _Dieu des bonnes gens_. In his elder years a Béranger legend had evolved itself; he was thesage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whompilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolentphilosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-classic taste, Béranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtueof concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama;he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catchthe sentiment of the moment and of the multitude; he could be gaywith touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent ofdeparted youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois hewas a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was ademocrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democraticabsolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Béranger countfor much; in the history of literature the poet has a little nicheof his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elderyears supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, mightbe called modest. 

II

Among the members of the Cénacle was to be seen a poet already famous, their elder by several years, who might have been the master of aschool had he not preferred to dwell apart; one who, born for poetry, chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence. In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume entitled _MéditationsPoétiques_. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to Frenchpoetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than thatof the _Génie du Christianisme_. The well-springs of pure inspirationonce more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic;the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singerthey had for many years desired, and despaired to find. 

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Mâcon in 1790, of royalist parents, had passed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hillsaround his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to lovethe Bible, Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of theSavoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleamsand glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused byItalian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, thecircumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealisedautobiography. A deeper passion of love and grief followed; MadameCharles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's _Raphaël_, the "Elvire" of his_Méditations_, died. Lamartine had versified already in a mannerwhich has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets andelegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard. Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelingsflowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity. Without an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious poetof France. 

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guardof Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attaché to the embassyat Naples; published in 1823 his _Nouvelles Méditations_, and twoyears later _Le Dernier Chant du Pèlerinage d'Harold_ (Byron's ChildeHarold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 tothe legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomaticcareer, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared againas a poet in his _Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses_; travelled inthe East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions inthe _Voyage en Orient_; entered into political life, at first asolitary in politics as he had been in literature, but by degreesfinding himself drawn more and more towards democratic ideas. "Wherewill you sit?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. Hissmiling reply, "On the ceiling, " was symbolical of the fact; but from"the ceiling" his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wiseand well informed, descended with influence. _Jocelyn_ (1836), _LaChute d'un Ange_ (1838), the _Recueillements Poétiques_ (1839), closed the series of his poetical works, though he did not whollycease from song. 

In 1847 Lamartine's idealising _Histoire des Girondins_, brilliantin its romantic portraiture, had the importance of a political event. The Revolution of February placed him for a little time at the headof affairs; as he had been the soul of French poetry, so for a briefhour he was the soul of the political life of France. With the victoryof imperialism Lamartine retired into the shade. He was more thansixty years of age; he had lost his fortune and was burdened withdebt. His elder years were occupied with incessant improvisationsfor the booksellers--histories, biographies, tales, criticism, autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was a gallantstruggle and a sad one. Through the delicate generosity of NapoleonIII. He was at length relieved without humiliating concessions. In1869 Lamartine died in his eightieth year. 

He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formeda portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimableoptimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view ashe soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeedhe knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there wereconsolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith andadoration. His power of vision was not intense or keen; hisdescriptions are commonly vague or pale; but no one could mirror morefaithfully a state of feeling divested of all material circumstance. The pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack the ear, butthey penetrate to the soul. All the great lyric themes--God, nature, death, glory, melancholy, solitude, regret, desire, hope, love--heinterpreted on his instrument with a musician's inspiration. Unhappily he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustiblepatience, which go to make a complete artist; he improvised admirably;he refused to labour as a master of technique; hence his diffuseness, his negligences; hence the decline of his powers after the firstspontaneous inspiration was exhausted. 

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed the best poemsof his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be aphilosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment andnarrative, became the author of _Jocelyn_ and _La Chute d'un Ange_. Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend theAbbé Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents--notyet a priest--takes shelter among the mountains from theRevolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes hiscompanion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship passesinto love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop'slast confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the loverspart; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of passion; how Jocelynattends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hillsand streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles eventsand feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartineacknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to himin childhood--Bernardin's _Paul et Virginie_. 

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragmentof that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which _LaChute d'un Ange_ was another fragment. The later poem, vast indimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work ofLamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of themaiden Daïdha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherentinventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself bysubjugation to the senses, as in _Jocelyn_ we had seen the type ofhumanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It wasa poor jest to say that the title of his poem _La Chute d'un Ange_described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle sovast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he hadaccomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure--hehad brought back the soul to poetry. 

III

Among the romantic poets who made themselves known between 1820 and1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is distinguished by the special character ofhis genius, and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derivedfrom his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at a later date, Musset, found models or suggestions in his writings. He, though for a timeclosely connected with the romantic school, really stands apart andalone. Born in 1797, he followed the profession of his father, thatof arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the disappointmentsof military service at the time of the fall of the Empire and theBourbon restoration. He read eagerly in Greek literature, in the OldTestament, and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early as1815 he wrote his admirable poem _La Dryade_, in which, before AndréChénier's verse had appeared, Chénier's fresh and delicate feelingfor antiquity was anticipated. In 1822 his first volume, _Poèmes_, was published, including the _Héléna_, afterwards suppressed, andgroups of pieces classified as _Antiques_, _Judaïques_, and_Modernes_. Already his _Moïse_, majestic in its sobriety, waswritten, though it waited four years for publication in the volumeof _Poèmes Antiques et Modernes_ (1826). Moses climbing the slopesof Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy burden of genius; hisone aspiration now is for the sleep of death; and it is the lesserleader Joshua who will conduct the people into the promised land. The same volume included _Eloa_, a romance of love which abandonsjoy through an impulse of divine pity: the radiant spirit Eloa, bornfrom a tear of Christ, resigns the happiness of heaven to bringconsolation to the great lost angel suffering under the maledictionof God. Other pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southernviolence of passion, and by the pass of Roncesvalles, with itschivalric associations. 

The novel of _Cinq-Mars_, which had a great success, is a freetreatment of history; but Vigny's best work is rather the embodimentof ideas than the rendering of historical matter. His _Stello_ inits conception has something of kinship with _Moïse_; in three prosetales relating the sufferings of Chatterton, Chénier, and Gilbert, it illustrates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny'smilitary experience suggested another group of tales, the _Servitudeet Grandeur Militaires_; the soldier in accepting servitude findshis consolation in the duty at all costs of strenuous obedience. 

In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took place hismarriage--one not unhappy, but of imperfect sympathy--to an Englishlady, Lydia Bunbury. His interest in English literature was shownby translations of _Othello_ and the _Merchant of Venice_. The formerwas acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who worshippedShakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who bore the shock of hearingthe unclassical word _mouchoir_ valiantly pronounced on the Frenchstage. The triumph of his drama of _Chatterton_ (1835) wasoverwhelming, though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts. Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy. But with therepresentation of _Chatterton_, and at the moment of his highest fame, he suddenly ceased from creative activity. Never was his mind moreenergetic, never was his power as an artist so mature; but, excepta few wonderful poems contributed to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and posthumously collected, nothing was given by him to the worldfrom 1835 to 1863, the year of his death. 

He had always been a secluded spirit; external companionship lefthim inwardly solitary; secret--so Sainte-Beuve puts it--in his"tower of ivory"; touching some mountain-summit for a moment--soDumas describes him--if he folded his wings, as a concession tohumanity. A great disillusion of passion had befallen him; but, apartfrom this, he must have retreated into his own sphere of ideas andof images, which seemed to him to be almost wronged by an attemptat literary expression. He looked upon the world with a disenchantedeye; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself and forall men; without declamation or display, he resigned himself to asilent and stoical acceptance of the lot of man; but out of this calmdespair arose a passionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for thingsevil, such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. _La Colère de Samson_gives majestic utterance to his despair of human love; his _Mont desOliviers_, where Jesus seeks God in vain, and where Judas lurks near, expresses his religious despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, saysVigny, is no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour againstthe heavens or the earth; he would meet death silently when it comes, like the dying wolf of his poem (_La Mort du Loup_), suffering butvoiceless. Wealth and versatility of imagination were not Vigny'sgifts. His dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them; for themhe found apt imagery or symbol; and in verse which has the dignityof reserve and of passion controlled to sobriety, he let them as itwere involuntarily escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is thethinker among the poets of his time, and when splendours of colourand opulence of sound have passed away, the idea remains. In fragmentsfrom his papers, published in 1867, with the title _Journal d'unPoète_, the inner history of Vigny's spirit can be traced. 

IV

To present VICTOR HUGO in a few pages is to carve a colossus on acherry-stone. His work dominates half a century. In the years of exilehe began a new and greater career. During the closing ten years hispowers had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even with deathhe did not retire; posthumous publications astonished and perhapsfatigued the world. 

Victor-Marie Hugo was born at Besançon on February 26, 1802, son ofa distinguished military officer--

 "_Mon père vieux soldat, ma mère Vendéenne. _"

Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to Italy in 1807; inSpain they halted at Ernani and at Torquemada--names remembered bythe poet; at Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant, alarmedthe brothers Eugène and Victor. A schoolboy in Paris, Victor Hugorhymed his chivalric epic, his tragedy, his melodrama--"les bétisesque je faisais avant ma naissance. " In 1816 he wrote in his manuscriptbook the words, "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing. " At fifteenhe was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the "enfant sublime" ofChateaubriand's or of Soumet's praise. 

Founder, with his brothers, of the _Conservateur Littéraire_, heentered into the society of those young aspirants who hoped to renewthe literature of France. In 1822 he published his _Odes et PoésiesDiverses_, and, obtaining a pension from Louis XVIII. , he marriedhis early playfellow Adèle Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramasfollowed in swift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, hisdomineering temper, his incessant activity, became the acknowledgedleader of the romantic school. In 1841 he was a member of the Academy;four years later he was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in1848, the year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Constituant, on the Left in the Legislative Assembly, tending more and more towardssocialistic democracy. The Empire drove him into exile--exile firstat Brussels, then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in hisown imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued demi-god on hissea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall of the Empire, he returned toParis, witnessed the siege, was elected to the National Assembly, urged a continuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognisingGaribaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted by theRight, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels in the interestsof his orphaned grandchildren, he was requested to leave, on theground of his zeal on behalf of the fallen Communists; he returnedto Paris, and pleaded in the _Rappel_ for amnesty. In 1875 he waselected a senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated withenthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor Hugo died. His funeral pomps were such that one might suppose the genius of Franceitself was about to be received at the Panthéon. 

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of willoperated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent thanhis genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow forone's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, neverwas vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. Hewas to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive whenthe sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of passionatevindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem;and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of thepower of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could passwith him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibilitywanted delicacy. His laughter was rather boisterous than fine. Heis a poet who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtlepsychology of lovers' hearts; there was in him a vein of robustsensuality. Children were dear to him, and he knew their pretty ways;a cynical critic might allege that he exploited overmuch the tenderdomesticities. His eye seized every form, vast or minute, definedor vague; his feeling for colour was rather strong than delicate;his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of light and shade; hisear was awake to every utterance of wind or wave; phantoms of soundattacked his imagination; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, hisown sentiments, to material objects; he took and gave back the soulof things. Words for him were living powers; language was a movingmass of significant myths, from which he chose and which heaggrandised; sensations created images and words, and images andwords created ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; nowa solitary breather through pipe or flute; more often the conductorof an orchestra. 

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say toolittle; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literaturemight be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from thefact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fusedin one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of natureand of humanity--

 "_Son âme aux mille voix, que le Dieu qu'il adore Mit au centre de tout comme un écho sonore. _"

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, itbecomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the passions, and the thoughts of the world. He did not soar tranquilly aloft andalone; he was always a combatant in the world and wave of men, orborne joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius was a longprocess. The _Odes_ of 1822 and 1824, the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826, Catholic and royalist in their feeling, show in their form astruggling originality oppressed by the literary methods of hispredecessors--J. -B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. Thisoriginality asserts itself chiefly in the _Ballades_. His early proseromances, _Han d'Islande_ (1823) and _Bug-Jargal_ (1826)--the onea tale of the seventeenth-century man-beast of Norway, the other atale of the generous St. Domingo slave--are challenges of youthfuland extravagant romanticism. _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_ (1829)is a prose study in the pathology of passion. The same year whichsaw the publication of the last of these is also the year of _LesOrientales_. These poems are also studies--amazing studies in colour, in form, in all the secrets of poetic art. The East was popular--Hugowas ever passionate for popularity--and Spain, which he had seen, is half-Oriental. But of what concern is the East? he had seen a sunsetlast summer, and the fancy took him; the East becomes an occasionfor marvellous combinations of harmony and lustrous tinctures; artfor its own sake is precious. 

From 1827, when _Cromwell_ appeared, to 1843, when the epic in drama_Les Burgraves_ failed, Hugo was a writer for the stage, divertingtragedy from its true direction towards lyrical melodrama. [1] In theoperatic libretto _La Esmeralda_ (1836) his lyrical virtuosity wasfree to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form. The librettowas founded on his own romance _Notre-Dame de Paris_ (1831), anevocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of thefifteenth century, its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black andwhite; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, byits tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the otheractors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, anantithesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflictedhumanity appeals for pity. 

[Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter. ]

In the volume of verse which followed _Les Orientales_ after aninterval of two years, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ (1831), Hugo is amaster of his instrument, and does not need to display his miraclesof skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years, but not therefore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were almostinevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here thelyrism is that of memory and of the heart--intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to thetranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, afaith in God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks forth--

 "_Et j'ajoute à ma lyre une corde d'airain. _"

The spirit of the _Chants du Créspuscule_ (1835) is one of doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy isalready waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two thingsthat are majestic--the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popularflood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings. But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of welteringmist. _Les Voix Intérieures_ (1837) resumes the tendencies of thetwo preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. Is reverently saluted;the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people growsclearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear;the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in thesymbolic _La Vache_, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of allliving things. In _Les Rayons et les Ombres_ (1840), Nature is notonly the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's _Le Lac_ and Musset's_Souvenir_ find a companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in the _Tristesse d'Olympio_; reminiscences of childhood aremagically preserved in the poem of the _Feuillantines_. 

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressedhis spirits. In 1843 his daughter Léopoldine and her husband of afew short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so muchto magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exilewho launched his prose invective _Napoléon le Petit_. A year laterappeared _Les Châtiments_, in which satire, with some loss of criticaldiscernment, is infused with a passionate lyrical quality, unsurpassed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur. The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored himto himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errorsof genius. 

The volumes of _Les Contemplations_ (1856) mark the culmination ofHugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The earlier pieces are of the past, from 1830 to 1843, and resemble the poems of the past. A group ofpoems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beautyand pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, innature, and in God. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner. The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and oflight; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom;and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song. 

But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet wasto carry all his lyric passion into an epic presentation, in detachedscenes, of the life of humanity. The first part of _La Légende desSiècles_ was published in 1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From thebirth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages andevents unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beautyand sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals arepursued by the great avengers. The spirit of _Les Châtiments_ isconveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants andpriests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This poem isthe epopee of democratic passions. 

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's romance _LesMisérables_ (1862). The subject now is modern; the book is ratherthe chaos of a prose epic than a novel; the hero is the high-souledoutcast of society; everything presses into the pages; they are turnby turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical (with suchphilosophy as Hugo has to offer), humanitarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic; a vast invention, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in its interest, a nightmare in its tedium. 

We have passed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is not to be presentedas a torso. In the tale _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ (1866) the choralvoices of the sea cover the thinness and strain of the human voices;if the writer's genius is present in _L'Homme qui Rit_ (1869), itoften chooses to display its most preposterous attitudes; the betterscenes of _Quatre-vingt Treize_ (1874) beguile our judgment into thegenerous concessions necessary to secure an undisturbed delight. These are Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the feelingsof youth with a difference, and performed happy caprices of stylein the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_ (1865); sang the incidentsand emotions of his country's sorrow and glory in _L'Année Terrible_(1872), and--strange contrast--the poetry of babyland in _L'Artd'être Grandpère_ (1877). Volume still followed volume--_Le Pape_, _La Pitié Suprême_, _Religions et Religion_, _L'Âne_, _Les QuatreVents de l'Esprit_, the drama _Torquemada_. The best pages in thesevolumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of their author'swritings; the pages which force antithesis, pile up synonyms, developcommonplaces in endless variations, the pages which are hieratic, prophetic, apocalyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of ouradmiration. The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo legend:if theism was his faith, autotheism was his superstition. Yet it iseasy to restore our loyalty, and to rediscover the greatest lyricpoet, the greatest master of poetic counterpoint that France hasknown. 

V

ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having isolated himselffrom the general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolatehimself from youth or love, and the young of two generations werehis advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, hewas a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of theeighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing wasnew and living--poetry. Chénier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, whilestill a boy, to the Cénacle. Spain and Italy were the regions ofromance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems, _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, and--an adolescent Chérubin-Don Juanof song--found himself famous. 

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the lighteffrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegantByron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieceswere well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth";the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness ofechoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain passages and lines hada classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the _Balladeà la Lune_ was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest atthe expense of his own associates. 

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was notdisposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting theromantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of hisown independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certainintellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; hecould not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmitycharacteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him towrite great poetry of an impersonal kind; his _Nuit Vénitienne_ hadbeen hissed at the Odéon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart?He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volumea second appeared, which announced by its title that, while stilla dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the _Spectacle dans unFauteuil_ declared that, though his glass was small, it was from hisown glass that he would drink. 

The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosserpotion. In the drama _La Coupe et les Lèvres_ he exhibited libertinepassion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapableof attaining self-recovery; in _Namouna_, hastily written to fit thevolume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love asconducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; thecomedy _À quoi rêvent les jeunes Filles_, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good proseof wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipatedhimself from the Cénacle, and would neither appeal to the eye withan overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curiousrhymes. Next year (1833) in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ appeared_Rolla_, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared offaith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love;through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge ofdeath. 

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hoursof illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a timecalm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue ofthe sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairingand elegantly corrupt. In _Les Nuits_--two of these (_Mai_, _Octobre_) inspired by the Italian joy and pain--he speaks simplyand directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers--

 "_Après avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore; Il faut aimer sans cesse, après avoir aimé. _"

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the _Lettre àLamartine_, the _Espoir en Dieu_, the _Souvenir_, the elegy _À laMalibran_, the later stanzas _Après une Lecture_ (1842), aremasterpieces of the true Musset--the Musset who will live. 

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreakof a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patrioticsong, _Le Rhin Allemand_, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy receivedhim. "Musset s'absente trop, " observed an Academician; theungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop, " told the truth, and it wasa piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died. 

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, _esprit_, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse--thesewere Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructiveimagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of anartist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the_Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la vérité, " he said. It is not the happiest way ofcommunicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends incynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shortertales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, withbreathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of aLouis-Quinze boudoir. _Pierre et Camille_, with its deaf-and-dumblovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relentinggrandfather "Bonjour, papa, " has a pretty innocence. _Le Fils deTitien_ returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. _Frédéric et Bernerette_ and _Mimi Pinson_ may be said to have createdthe poetic literature of the grisette--gay and good, or erring anddespairful--making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories ofPaul de Kock as a weed. 

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset'sbest _Comédies_ and _Proverbes_ (proverbial sayings exemplified indramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers ofthe _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their scenic qualities were discoveredonly in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented _Un Caprice_and _Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée_ at St. Petersburg. The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, _Lorenzaccio_, was an effort beyond the province and the powers ofMusset. His _André del Sarto_, a tragic representation of the greatpainter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed therelief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations ofa world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as_On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, _Les Caprices de Marianne_, _LeChandelier_, _Il ne faut jurer de rien_, that Musset showed howromantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance ofsensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces ofthe age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freergraces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance ofShakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificialelegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love;sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approachesthe beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land thatlies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest ofour own great enchanter. 

VI

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the lawof Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a handthat moulds and colours--that is all. A child of the South, born atTarbes in 1811, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult'sstudio till the day when, his friend the poet Gérard de Nerval havingsummoned him to take part in the battle of _Hernani_, he swore bythe skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, _Poésies_, appeared in 1830, and was followed intwo years by _Albertus_, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness andhorror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The_Comédie de la Mort_ evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art andlove. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The_Orientales_ was his poetic gospel; but the _Orientales_ is preciselythe volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art mostexclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these earlypoems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured andpicturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far asthey can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tincturedwith vivid pigments. 

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, forpoetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as acritic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his taskin workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressionsthan to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literarycriticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-centurypoets--Théophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others--publishedin 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title _LesGrotesques_, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with therequest of the Minister of Public Instruction, on _Les Progrès de laPoésie Française depuis 1830_. A reader of that memoir to-day willfeel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shiftedas quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft. 

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of lifeor as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all thingsin colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowedwith a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outlineor a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects whichhe beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the mannerof some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium ofa Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collectionof gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skilland precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in oneof his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, andfound that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; onthe faith of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ he had loved the old cathedrals;"the Parthenon, " he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, whichwith me was never very severe. "

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishingthe bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on allsubjects except art had less value than those of the philistine. _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ has lost any pretensions it possessed tosupereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth;such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness--the sense ofmystery he did not in truth possess--on a basis of exactly carvedand exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actorsstrolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days ofLouis XIII. , _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, suggested doubtless byScarron's _Roman Comique_, and patiently retouched during a quarterof a century. 

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the_Émaux et Camées_. He is not without sensibility, but he will notembarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipatedhimself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painteror a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions intocoloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He valueswords as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his littlestanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caringonly to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfalteringhand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, whenRegnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bowersat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue ofits beauty--beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artistsought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonalhe prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even berecognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism. 

These--Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier--are the names whichrepresent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars ofvarying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There wasalso a _via lactea_, from which a well-directed glass can easilydisentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a criticand analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the _Vie, Poésieset Pensées de Joseph Delorme_; a singer of spiritual reverie, modestpleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the _Consolations_and the _Pensées d'Août_; a virtuoso always in his metricalresearches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the_Iambes_, lover of Italian art and nature in _Il Pianto_; AugusteBrizeux, the idyllist, in his _Marie_, of Breton wilds and provincialworks and ways; Gérard de Nerval, Hégésippe Moreau, MadameDésbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and othersdwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms. 

VII

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre. It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which itwas unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_(1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes. The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; thatof its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. Thedrama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent completemanhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whateveris found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elementsan æsthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination;unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity ofaction remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplifythe principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapableof presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for whichhe pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitableto the novel than to the drama. _Cromwell_, which departs little fromthe old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero'sambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figuresdraped in the costumes of historical romance. 

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to whichhe belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for theemancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities whichare non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, in 1830, his _Hernani_ was presented at the Théâtre Français, astrange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade ofyoung supporters engaged in a mêlée with those spectators whorepresented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is anAcademician, " was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculentwaistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm ofGautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory;but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beingsof a fantastic world. In _Marion Delorme_, in _Le Roi s'amuse_, inthe prose-tragedy _Lucrèce Borgia_, Victor Hugo develops a favouritetheme by a favourite method--the moral antithesis of some purity ofpassion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtuediscovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violentcontrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remainsto her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrèce is purified by herinstinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful byvirtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of characteris too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. _Ruy Blas_, like_Marion Delorme_ and _Hernani_, has extraordinary beauties; yet thewhole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister ofstate, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. _Angelo_is pure melodrama; _Marie Tudor_ is the melodrama of history. _LesBurgraves_ rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetryto declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please, symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirableand out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certainsublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these intragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry whichis non-dramatic can entirely justify works which do not accept theconditions proper to their kind. 

The tragedy of _Torquemada_, strange in conception, wonderful--andwonderfully unequal--in imaginative power, was an inspiration ofHugo's period of exile, wrought into form in his latest years. Thedramas of the earlier period, opening with an historical play tooenormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with _Les Burgraves_, whichis an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, theromantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desiredharmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revivedupon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neitherhistoric nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour, " and localcolour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-à-brac. Yeta drama requires some centre of unity. Failing of unity in coherentaction and well-studied character, can a centre be provided by somephilosophical or pseudo-philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy inimagery, was not wealthy in original ideas; in grandiose prefaceshe attempted to exhibit his art as the embodiment of certain abstractconceptions. A great poet is not necessarily a philosophical poet. Hugo's interpretations of his own art are only evidence of the factthat a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity. 

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But it is not by itsphilosophical symbolism that his _Chatterton_ lives; it is by virtueof its comparative strength of construction, by what is sincere inits passion, what is genuine in its pathos, and by the character ofits heroine, Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both Vignyand Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1803-70). Before thebattle of _Hernani_ he had unfolded the romantic banner in his _HenriIII. Et sa Cour_ (1829); it dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations, its ever-changing display of the stageproperties of historical romance. His _Antony_, of two years later, parent of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern life, exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with a bastard, aseducer, a murderer for its hero, and for its ornaments all thoseatrocities which fascinate a crowd whose nerves can bear to beagreeably shattered. Something of abounding vitality, of tinglingenergy, of impetuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for _Antony_, the _Tour de Nesle_, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lostits gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial inthe hands of Frédéric Soulié. When in 1843--the year of Hugo'sunsuccessful _Les Burgraves_--a pseudo-classical tragedy, the_Lucrèce_ of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm wasgreat; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militantthan in the days of _Hernani_; it seemed as if good sense had returnedto the theatre. [2]

[Footnote 2: The influence of the great actress Rachel helped torestore to favour the classical theatre of Racine and Corneille. ]

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by hispatriotic odes, _Les Messéniennes_, suggested by the militarydisasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for thewriter's talent than as indicating the influence of the romanticmovement in checking the development of classical art. Had he beenfree to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remaineda creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidlyapproached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedyhe achieved success; _L'École des Vieillards_ has the originalityof presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a youngwife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the secondquarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of EugèneScribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall thatof the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; heknew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; thetheatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these hewas as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when hetosses his bewildering balls, or smiles at the triumph of hisinexplicable surprises. 

CHAPTER IVTHE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to everytendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paintthe present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to expressprivate and personal sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart, to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. Theliterature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influenceof the romantic movement tended on the one hand towards lyrism, thepassionate utterance of individual emotion--George Sand's earlytales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages. The most impressive of these evocations was assuredly Hugo's_Notre-Dame de Paris_. It was not the earliest; Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_preceded _Notre-Dame_ by five years. The writer had laboriouslymastered those details which help to make up the romantic _mise enscène_; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by theimagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle forwhat he conceived to be ideal truth. In Mérimée's _Chronique deCharles IX. _ (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, thehistorical, or, if not this, the archæological spirit is present;it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history. 

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet;they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history theirvalue is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the handsof Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of _Les TroisMousquetaires_ and its high-spirited fellows. There were times whenno company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' historyis untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; weadmit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronadeof adventure. We throw Eugène Sue to the critics that we may saveAlexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand--orany human hand--could obey its orders; the mine of his inventivefaculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for itsexploitation. He constituted himself the managing director of thiscompany; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output ofthe chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature, and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated herecklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his geniusdecayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protectedby his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of theFranco-Prussian war. 

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popularamong his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Mériméeand the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the predictionhas been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologistof the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as aliterary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of anineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters. During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve waspushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness andenergy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian mannersand Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. Theeighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect;"the only excuse for God, " he declared, "is that he does not exist";in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism, and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of thepassions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, thegreatest of the _condottieri_. He loved the Italian character becausethe passions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaksof nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from ennui, andturned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of hisheart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy. He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the trueclassical writers were romantic in their own day--they sought toplease their time; the pseudo-classical writers attempt to maintaina lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romanticschool, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for localcolour, and an interest in the study of passion; the effusion andexaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry, " and oftensucceeded to perfection. 

His analytical study _De l'Amour_, resting on a sensual basis, hasall the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallowphilosophy. His notes on travel and art anticipate in an informalway the method of criticism which became a system in the hands ofTaine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into theresultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in themechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, which had ahappy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must seek a new career inRestoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of _Le Rouge etle Noir_, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly blackas a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, heends his career under the knife of the guillotine. _La Chartreusede Parme_ exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues ofnineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives asoldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist'splastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingeniousobservations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does notconstitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for theintelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it willgrind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuatehis expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese. 

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affixto the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner sheadvanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, sheobserved, incorporating in her best work the results of a patientand faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatevershe wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is alwaysin a true sense poetic. 

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Parisin 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humbleorigin--a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Herearly years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of hergrandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, shehad a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, thelittle peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes oflife, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up herearliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in herbrain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent;from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank ofa sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights ofreligious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote_Spiridion_. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely, poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundlessdelight; the _Génie du Christianisme_ replaced the _Imitation_;Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heartput on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore wasmarried to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of thosequalities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness. Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scantyallowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son anddaughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital. 

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases andsnuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhapsshe could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; sheproved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; itcould not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning ofan article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted a novel--_Rose et Blanche_. "Sand" and Sandeau werefraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the _quais_ and streetsin masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND. 

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herselfbefore her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only theslightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day andthe next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself infull, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically;her stories were not manufactured; they grew--grew with facility andin free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lélia_, _Jacques_, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. Thesenovels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protestsagainst the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of thesoul--superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal instyle, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and oftenadmirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand hadtranslated her private experiences into romance; yet she, thespectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity whichunderlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to hercreations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwiseand blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged herown life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither herdiscretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came shecould return to her better self. 

Through _André_, _Simon_, _Mauprat_--the last a tale of love subduingand purifying the savage instincts in man--her art advanced insureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to externalinfluences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance andrelations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force ofintelligences stronger than her own--of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, anardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all thediscordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and largegenerosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopesof social reform. Her novels _Consuelo_, _Jeanne_, _Le Meunierd'Angibault_, _Le Péché de M. Antoine_, become expositions of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. Theart suffers. _Jeanne_, so admirable in its rural heroine, wandersfrom nature to humanitarian symbolism; _Consuelo_, in which thewriter studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often losesitself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a moredisinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. GeorgeSand was finding her way. 

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had foundher way; her third manner was attained before the second had lostits attraction. _La Mare au Diable_ belongs to the year 1846; _LaPetite Fadette_, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever an optimist, hailed with joy; _François le Champi_ is but twoyears later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitariantheories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the hutswhere poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was newto French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sandfound deep within herself; she had read the external circumstancesand incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observationas that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documentswith the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beautyand the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw;her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seemsitself to be nature. 

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regionsof France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales forher grandchildren, and romances--_Jean de la Roche_, _Le Marquis deVillemer_, and the rest--for her other grandchildren the public. Thesoul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upona stronger woman's arm, of the girl--neither child nor fullyadult--she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her styleat its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure withoutcommotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beautyas faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujoursplus calme, " was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Nedétruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sanddied. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with aspirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining throughexperience a wisdom for the season of old age. 

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist, " if we add the words"with a remarkable gift for observation. " Her great contemporaryHONORÉ DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist hauntedor attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 atTours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honoréde Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his largeegoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder hisway through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and famewere hard to come at. His tragedy _Cromwell_ was condemned by allwho saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep intheir refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades ofpublisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumberinghimself with debt. At length in 1829 _Le Dernier Chouan_, ahalf-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a measure of favour. 

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting ofbourgeois life, _Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote_, which relates thesorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her nativesphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wieldhis pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted bythe passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that ofthe creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married oneof the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. Morethan once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercialenterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of hisexistence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his_Human Comedy_. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence ofimagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crudematerial on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep;he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of dayreleased him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until theintemperance of toil had worn the strong man out. 

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, littledelicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightnessof touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfectsense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as theequivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without thesentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment ofreligion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as theaccumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake?It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold. 

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seenand handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for _things_, an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict forwealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fiercevolition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the crueltiesof its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperateenergy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender tohis imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beamsand shafts of romantic illumination--sometimes vulgar theatricallights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonderto the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the sensesor those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of anyfragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his readeras a vision from which escape is impossible. 

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and naturaldelicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder--though he triedand half succeeded--to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeoisworld, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his specialsphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street, a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is partof the creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to itsnature, limiting its action. He has created a population of personswhich numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of theseis a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controllingpassion is the centre of moral life--the greed of money, the desirefor distinction, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animalaffection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates frominanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environmentis an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to memberof the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence orconflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell ofthe tide of Paris. 

The change from the Renés and Obermanns of melancholy romance wasgreat. But in the government of Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisietriumphed; and Balzac hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 werehis greatest years, which include the _Peau de Chagrin_, _EugénieGrandet_, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Le Père Goriot_, and othermasterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a Homericcatalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived the idea of connectinghis tales in groups. They acquired their collective title, _La ComédieHumaine_, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating thewhole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, thearmy, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, theprolétariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the menof letters, the actors, . . . The shopkeepers of every degree, thecriminals, " should all appear in his vast tableau of society. Hisrecord should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophicalstudies in narrative and analytic treatises on the passions. Thespirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with VictorHugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry ofpseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imaginationwas not enough; he also would be among the philosophers--and Balzac'sphilosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outsidethe general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attemptsfor the theatre, and the _Contes Drolatiques_, in which thepseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do notentirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural inthe sixteenth than in the nineteenth century. 

V

Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possibleto produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look ofsuperior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-70). With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideaswere influential on his mind, Mérimée possessed the plasticimagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient. "He is a gentleman, " said Cousin, and the words might serve forMérimée's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or GodAlmighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according tothe rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must expressno sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to nofaith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmityof a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may becynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may beironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify hisfellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his privateamusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to beonly a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his wholeattitude may be ridiculous. 

Such a gentleman was Prosper Mérimée. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romanticplays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish _comédienne_. His Illyrian poems, _La Guzla_, were the work of an imaginaryHyacinthe Maglanovich, and Mérimée could smile gently at thecredulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavierde Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, leftit. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of theimagination, and produced such works as _Carmen_ and _Colomba_, eachone a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate localcolour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The publicmust not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them;he is an archæologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller oftales. Mérimée had more sensibility than he would confess; it showsitself for moments in the posthumous _Lettres à une Inconnue_; buthe has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold hissensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears inMérimée inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainfulreserve. [1]

[Footnote 1: It is one of Mérimée's merits that he awakened in Francean interest in Russian literature. ]

CHAPTER VHISTORY--LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth century wasaided by the change which had taken place in philosophical opinion;instead of a rigid system of abstract ideas, which disdained thethought of past ages as superstition, had come an eclecticism guidedby spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and various ageswere viewed with sympathetic interest; the breach of continuity frommediæval to modern times was repaired; the revolutionary spirit ofindividualism gave way before a broader concern for society; thetemper in politics grew more cautious and less dogmatic; the greatevents of recent years engendered historical reflection; literaryart was renewed by the awakening of the romantic imagination. 

The historical learning of the Empire is represented by Daunou, anexplorer in French literature; by Ginguené, the literary historianof Italy; by Michaud, who devoted his best years to a _History ofthe Crusades_. In his _De la Religion_ (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and fulldevelopment. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his _Histoire des Français_, investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economicfacts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, andnot merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. Hiswide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well asFrance; the _Histoire des Républiques Italiennes_ is the chart ofa difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, whichabstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims atno doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his _Histoiredes Ducs de Bourgogne_. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule:"Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum. "

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historicalexponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Cæsarism, by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophicliberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville. 

AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages ofChateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his firstinspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novelsof Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination, " confirmedhim in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarshipof history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and underhis influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peopleswhich should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he partedfrom his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to himthat the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe hadtheir origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the NormanConquest of England. As he read the great collection of the originalhistorians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the moderntravesties named history, indignant against writers withouterudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, whocould not depict. The conflict of races--Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country--remained with him as a dominantidea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he wouldinvolve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he woulddepict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophyovermuch. The _Lettres sur l'Histoire de France_ were followed in1825 by the _Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre_, in which theart of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown. Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of thepast. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and thedry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporarypolitics. His political ardour had given him that historicalperspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancienttext. 

In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, suffered thecalamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries--above all, with the aid of the devotedwoman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The _Récits des TempsMérovingiens_ and the _Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du TiersÉtat_ were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion forperfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a daycontented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring infaultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept hisintellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. OnMay 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, anddictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for therevised _Conquête_. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection, "Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, thegreatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, hewas an initiator. 

The life of FRANÇOIS GUIZOT--great and venerable name--is a portionof the history of his country. Born at Nîmes in 1787, of an honourableProtestant family, he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneilleor a text of Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, imperiousin will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the liberality and thenarrowness of the middle classes, which he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he conceived, lies before the historian: he mustascertain facts; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, studyingthe anatomy and the physiology of society; finally, he must presentthe external physiognomy of the facts. Guizot was not endowed withthe artist's imagination; he had no sense of life, of colour, ofliterary style; he was a thinker, who saw the life of the past throughthe medium of ideas; he does not in his pages evoke a world of animatedforms, of passionate hearts, of vivid incidents; he distinguishessocial forces, with a view to arrive at principles; he considers thoseforces in their play one upon another. 

The _Histoire Générale de la Civilisation en Europe_ and the _Histoirede la Civilisation en France_ consist of lectures delivered from 1828to 1830 at the Sorbonne. [1] Guizot recognised that the study ofinstitutions must be preceded by a study of the society which hasgiven them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not merelythe development of communities, but also that of the individual. Thecivilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited inthat of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectualand social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideasand doctrines have always accompanied great events and publicrevolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found inthe tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenthto the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation orin conflict--royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mindasserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant reformation. The _tiers état_ was constantly advancing in strength. The power ofthe monarchy, dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in thecentury that followed; the power of the people increased. In modernsociety the elements of national life are reduced to two--thegovernment on the one hand, the people on the other; how to harmonisethese elements is the problem of modern politics. As a capital examplefor the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early work, madea special study of the great English revolution of the seventeenthcentury. In Germany, of the preceding century, the revolution wasreligious and not political. In France, of the succeeding century, the revolution was political and not religious. The rare good fortuneof England lay in the fact that the spirit of religious faith andthe spirit of political freedom ruled together, and co-operatedtowards a common result. 

[Footnote 1: The _History of Civilisation in France_ closes with thefourteenth century. ]

The work of FRANÇOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has been censured for itshistorical fatalism. In reality Mignet's mind was too studious offacts to be dominated by a theory. He recognised the great forceswhich guide and control events; he recognised also the power andfreedom of the individual will. His early _Histoire de la RévolutionFrançaise_ is a sane and lucid arrangement of material that came tohis hands in chaotic masses. His later and more important writingsdeal with his special province, the sixteenth century; his method, as he advanced, grew more completely objective; we discern his ideasthrough the lines of a well-proportioned architecture. 

The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method of patientinduction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) to the studyof the great phenomenon of modern democracy. Limiting the area ofinvestigation to America, which he had visited on a public mission, he investigated the political organisation, the manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought and feeling of the United Statesas influenced by the democratic equality of conditions. He wrote asa liberal in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He regardedthe progress of democracy in the modern world as inevitable; heperceived the dangers--formidable for society and for individualcharacter--which accompany that progress; he believed that byforesight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocquevillea philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, hedesigned to disengage from the tangle of events the true historicalsignificance of the Revolution. Only one volume, _L'Ancien Régimeet la Révolution_, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a workof capital importance. In the great upheaval he saw that all was notprogress; the centralisation of power under the old régime remained, and was rendered even more formidable than before; the sentiment ofequality continued to advance in its inevitable career; unhappilythe spirit of liberty was not always its companion, its moderator, or its guide. 

ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors. Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compactnarration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers'_Histoire_ was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its generalconception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionarypatriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and notwithout influence in preparing the spirit of the country for theapproaching Revolution of July. His _Histoire du Consulat et del'Empire_ (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity;journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief ofstricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was thisvast record of his country's glory. He had an appetite for facts;no detail--the price of bread, of soap, of candles--was a matter ofindifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show themtoo clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his passion wasthe pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed upFrance, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, who "made war with his genius and politics with his passions, " mustbe for ever magnified. The _coup d'état_ of the third Napoleon oweda debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleoniclegend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpassedin their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the objectand the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times, and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentationof things. 

JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, thegreatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, wasborn in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous toremain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household;but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watchedhis mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Twosources of consolation he found--the _Imitation_, which told him ofa Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, whichmade him forget all present distress in visions of the vanishedcenturies. Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never lostcourage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross wonby his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis toldhim legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons wasirresistible. 

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the _Précis de l'HistoireModerne_, a modest survey of a wide field, in which genius illuminatedscholarship, and a translation of the _Scienza Nuova_ of Vico, themaster who impressed him with the thought that humanity is in aconstant process of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas. The _Histoire Romaine_ and the _Introduction à l'HistoireUniverselle_ followed; the latter a little book, written withincredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of July. Hisfriend Quinet had taught him to see in history an ever-broadeningcombat for freedom--in Michelet's words, "an eternal July, " and theexposition of this idea was of the nature of a philosophicalentrancement. 

A teacher at the École Normale, appointed chief of the historicalsection of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's substitute at theSorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the Collège deFrance in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people andof his land. The _Histoire de France_, begun in 1830, was completedthirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouringto add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century. 

A passionate searcher among original sources, published andunpublished, handling documents as if they were things of flesh andblood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginativeeye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of humantoilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil'sgift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideasimpregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Micheletset himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him thathis eminent predecessors--Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry--had eachenvisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too littleof the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral life ofthe dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It wasa bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much, but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis;it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the momentof his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy andthe genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate livingcreature, and the character of France itself is discovered in thecohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth andeleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and theirviolence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm ofGothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirationsof the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediævalperiod everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, duringthe Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of thepeople. 

By the thirteenth year of his labours--1843--Michelet had traversedthe mediæval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI. There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which the kings of France received their consecration, a groupor garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, thethought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people shouldbe confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself totreat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once theintervening centuries, and was at work during eight years--from 1845to 1853--on the French Revolution. He found a hero for hisrevolutionary epic in the people. 

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlierRevolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinethad added to their democratic zeal the passions connected with ananticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in_Des Jésuites_, and _Du Prêtre, de la Femme et de la Famille_. Whenthe historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit hadundergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not theperiod of the domination of the Church, and how could it be otherthan evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he must also bea prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but theyare less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium betweenMichelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and hispassions, was disturbed, if not destroyed. 

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the Collège de France, lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swearallegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizardssleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon his spirit. He hadinterpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soulof humbler kinsfolk--the bird, the insect; he would interpret theinarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied otherdocuments--the documents of nature--with a passion of love, readtheir meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs. _L'Oiseau_, _L'Insecte_, _La Mer_, _La Montagne_, are canticles inprose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essaysin science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius. 

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readilystrike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyricaloutbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage assuming the placeof ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregularutterance--these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and marhis profound science in documents. He died at Hyères in 1874, hopingthat God would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joyspromised to those who have sought and loved. 

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Micheletin his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic fatherand a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature andhistory with that tendency to large _vues d'ensemble_ which wasnatural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by discipleshipto Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. Apoet of lofty intentions, in his _Ahasvérus_ (1833)--the wanderingJew, type of humanity in its endless Odyssey--in his _Napoléon_, his_Prométhée_, his vast encyclopædic allegory _Merlin l'Enchanteur_(1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoricof the intellect. 

In the _Génie des Religions_ Quinet endeavoured to exhibit thereligious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving itsspecial character to the political and social idea. _La Révolution_, which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace theRevolutionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by afaithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles ofmodern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinetregarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of theleaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic oftheir violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causesof the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinetwas upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elderyears, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature. _La Création_ (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of humanhistory as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fullyaccomplished, and that a nobler race will enter into the heritageof our humanity. 

II

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been the criticismof taste or the criticism of dogma; in the nineteenth century it becamenaturalistic--a natural history of individual minds and theirproducts, a natural history of works of art as formed or modifiedby social, political, and moral environments, and by the tendenciesof races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed the growthof the comparative study of literatures in an age dominated by thescientific spirit. If we are to name any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. De Staël. The French nation, she explained in_L'Allemagne_, inclines towards what is classical; the Teutonicnations incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say whetherclassical or romantic art should be preferred; it is enough to showthat the difference of taste results not from accidental causes, butfrom the primitive sources of imagination and of thought. 

The historical tendency, proceeding from the eighteenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy, of politics, and ofliterature. While Cousin gave an historical interpretation ofphilosophy, and Guizot applied history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent professor, ABEL-FRANÇOIS VILLEMAIN (1790-1870) wasilluminating literature with the light of history. An accomplishedclassical scholar, a student of English, Italian, and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his _Tableau de la Littérature au Moyen Âge_, and hismore admirable _Tableau de la Littérature au XVIIIe Siècle_, vieweda wide prospect, and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurementof all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of criticism; butinstinctively he directed criticism towards history. He perceivedthe correspondence between literary products and the other phenomenaof the age; he observed the movement in the spirit of a period; hepassed from country to country; he made use of biography as an aidin the study of letters. His learning was at times defective; hisviews often superficial; he suffered from his desire to entertainhis audience or to capture them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain servedletters well, and, accepted as a master by the young critics of the_Globe_, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve. 

While such criticism as that of Villemain was maintained by Saint-MarcGirardin (1801-73), professor of French poetry at the Sorbonne, thedogmatic or doctrinaire school of criticism was represented with rareability by DÉSIRÉ NISARD (1806-88). His capital work, the _Histoirede la Littérature Française_, the labour of many years, isdistinguished by a magisterial application of ideas to the decisionof literary questions. Criticism with Nisard is not a natural historyof minds, nor a study of historical developments, so much as thejudgment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts eachbook on which he pronounces judgment with that ideal of its specieswhich he has formed in his own mind: he compares it with the idealof the genius of France, which attains its highest ends rather throughdiscipline than through freedom; he compares it with the ideal ofthe French language; finally, he compares it with the ideal ofhumanity as seen in the best literature of the world. According tothe result of the comparison he delivers condemnation or awards thecrown. In French literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellousequilibrium of the faculties under the control of reason; it appliesgeneral ideas to life; it avoids individual caprice; it dreads thechimeras of imagination; it is eminently rational; it embodies ideasin just and measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the greatage of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have been in the eighteenthcentury, but these gains were more than counterbalanced by losses. To disprove the saying that there is no disputing about tastes, toestablish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulateintellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim; but in attempting toconstitute an exact science founded upon general principles, he toooften derived those principles from the attractions and repulsionsof his individual taste. Criticism retrograded in his hands; yet, in retrograding, it took up a strong position: the influence of sucha teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies required theguidance or the check of a director. 

The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-AUGUSTINSAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time went on, into the greatcritic of the naturalistic method. In his _Tableau de la PoésieFrançaise au XVIe Siècle_ he found ancestors for the romantic poetsas much older than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsardis older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from author to authorin his _Portraits Littéraires_ and _Portraits Contemporains_, hestudied in all its details what we may term the physiology of each. The long research of spirits connected with his most sustained work, _Port-Royal_, led him to recognise certain types or families underwhich the various minds of men can be grouped and classified. Duringa quarter of a century he investigated, distinguished, defined inthe vast collection of little monographs which form the _Causeriesdu Lundt_ and the _Nouveaux Lundis_. They formed, as it were, a naturalhistory of intellects and temperaments; they established a new method, and illustrated that method by a multitude of examples. 

Never was there a more mobile spirit; but he was as exact andsure-footed as he was mobile. When we have allowed for certainpersonal jealousies or hostilities, and for an excessive attractiontowards what may be called the morbid anatomy of minds, we may giveour confidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist criticSainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, sceptic, believer, socialist, imperialist--he traversed every region of ideas; as soonas he understood each position he was free to leave it behind. Hedid not pretend to reduce criticism to a science; he hoped that atlength, as the result of numberless observations, something like ascience might come into existence. Meanwhile he would cultivate therelative and distrust the absolute. He would study literary productsthrough the persons of their authors; he would examine each detail;he would inquire into the physical characteristics of the subjectof his investigation; view him through his ancestry and among hiskinsfolk; observe him in the process of education; discover him amonghis friends and contemporaries; note the moment when his genius firstunfolded itself; note the moment when it was first touched with decay;approach him through admirers and disciples; approach him throughhis antagonists or those whom he repelled; and at last, if that werepossible, find some illuminating word which resumes the results ofa completed study. There is no "code Sainte-Beuve" by which off-handto pronounce literary judgments; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the method which has best served the study of literaturein the nineteenth century. 

 * * * * *

Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The course of Frenchliterature since 1850 may be studied in current criticism; it doesnot yet come within the scope of literary history. The product ofthese years has been manifold and great; their literary importanceis attested by the names--among many others--of Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non-dramatic poetry; of Augier and theyounger Dumas in the theatre; of Flaubert, Edmond and Jules deGoncourt, Zola, Daudet, Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, infiction; of Taine and Renan in historical study and criticism; ofFromentin in the criticism of art; of Scherer, Brunetière, Faguet, Lemaître, in the criticism of literature. 

The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been the scientificinfluence, turning poetry from romantic egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the drama to naturalism and to the study ofsocial environments, informing history and criticism with the spiritof curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolution. Whetherthe spiritualist tendency observable at the present moment be asymptom of languor and fatigue, or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will determine. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following notes are designed as an indication of some books whichmay be useful to students. 

Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and mosttrustworthy is that at present in course of publication under theeditorship of M. Petit de Julleville, _Histoire de la Langue et dela Littérature française_ (A. Colin et Cie. ). M. Lanson's _Histoirede la Littérature française_ should be in the hands of every student, and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's _Littératurefrançaise_ (2 vols. ). 

The works of Mr. Saintsbury, Géruzez, Demogeot, are widely known, and have proved useful during many years. Much may be learnt and learntpleasantly from Paul Albert's volumes on the literature of thesixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Twovolumes out of five of M. Charles Gidel's _Histoire de la Littératurefrançaise_ (Lemerre) are occupied with literature from 1815 to 1886. M. Hermann Pergamini's _Histoire générale de la Littératurefrançaise_ (Alcan) sometimes gives fresh and interesting views. Fora short school history by an accomplished scholar, none is betterthan M. Petit de Julleville's _Histoire de la Littérature française_, which, in 555 pages, packs a great deal of information. The _Histoireélémentaire de la Littérature française_, by M. Jean Fleury, has beenpopular; it tells much of the contents of great books, and makes noassumption that the reader is already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's _A Primer of French Literature_ (Heath, Boston, U. S. A. ) iswell proportioned and well arranged, but it has room for little morethan names, dates, and the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's_Modern French Literature_ (Roberts, Boston, U. S. A. ) sketches Frenchliterature to Chateaubriand, and treats with considerable fulnessthe literature from Chateaubriand and Mme. De Staël to the presenttime. For the present century M. G. Pellissier's _Le Mouvementlittéraire au XIXe Siècle_ is valuable. 

Of elder histories that by Nisard is by far the most distinguished, the work of a scholar and a thinker. (See the final section of thepresent volume. )

The student will find Merlet's _Études littéraires sur les Classiquesfrançais_ (2 vols. ), revised and enlarged by M. Lintilhac, highlyinstructive; the second volume is wholly occupied with Corneille, Racine, and Molière. 

For the history of the French theatre the best introduction is M. Petit de Julleville's _Le Théâtre en France_; it may be supplementedby M. Brunetière's _Les Époques du Théâtre français_. Learning wideand exact, and original thought, characterise all the work of M. Brunetière; each of his many volumes should be searched by the studentfor what he may need. The studies of M. Faguet on the writers of thesixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are thework of a critic who is penetrating in his psychological study ofauthors, and who, just or unjust, is always suggestive. For numberlesslittle monographs the student may turn to Sainte-Beuve. Monographson a larger scale will be found in the admirable series of _GrandsÉcrivains français_ (Hachette); the _Classiques populaires_ (Lecène, Oudin et Cie. ) are in some instances no less scholarly. The writingsof Scherer, of M. Jules Lemaître, and of M. Anatole France areespecially valuable on nineteenth-century literature. The best studyof French historical literature is Professor Flint's _The Philosophyof History_ (1893). 

Provided with such books as these the student will hardly need thegeneral histories of French literature by German writers. I may nameProf. Bornhak's _Geschichte der Französischen Literatur_, and themore popular history by Engel (4th ed. , 1897). Lotheissen's_Geschichte der Französischen Literatur im XVII. Jahrhundert_ seemsto me the best book on the period. The monographs in German arenumberless. 

The editions of authors in the _Grands Écrivains de la France_ areof the highest authority. The best anthology of French poetry isCrépet's _Les Poètes français_ (4 vols. ). Small anthologies of Frenchpoetry since the fifteenth century, and of French lyrical poets ofthe nineteenth century, are published by Lemerre. 

The list which follows is taken partly from books which I have usedin writing this volume, partly from the Bibliography in M. Lintilhac's_Histoire de la Littérature française_. To name English writers andbooks seems unnecessary. 

THE MIDDLE AGES

_Histoire littéraire de la France_ (a vast repertory on mediævalliterature). 

GASTON PARIS. _La Littérature française au moyen Âge_. 1890. 

AUBERTIN. _Hist. De la Langue et de la Litt. Françaises au moyen Âge_. 2 vols. 1883. 

G. PARIS. _La Poésie du moyen Âge_. 2 vols. 1887. 

LÉON GAUTIER. _Les Épopées françaises_. 2nd edition. 4 vols. 1878-94. 

J. BÉDIER. _Les Fabliaux, Études de Litt. Populaire et d'Histoirelitt. Du moyen Âge_. 1895. 

L. SUDRE. _Les Sources du Roman de Renart_. 1893. 

LENIENT. _La Satire en France au moyen Âge_. 1883. 

E. LANGLOIS. _Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose_. 1890. 

A. DÉBIDOUR. _Les Chroniqueurs_. 2 vols. 1892. (_Classiquespopulaires_. )

A. JEANROY. _Les Origines de la Poésie lyrique en France_. 1889. 

CLÉDAT. _Rutebeuf_. 1891. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

MARY DARMESTETER. _Froissart_. 1894. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

A. SARRADIN. _Eustache Deschamps_. 1879. 

C. BEAUFILS. _Étude sur la Vie et les Poésies de Charles d'Orléans_. 1861. 

A. CAMPAUX. _François Villon_. 1859. 

A. LONGNON. _Étude biographique sur. Fr. Villon_. 1877. 

LECOY DE LA MARCHE. _La Chaire fr. Au moyen Âge_. 1886. 

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Les Mystères_. 2 vols. 1880. 

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Les Comédiens en Fr. Au moyen Âge_. 1885. 

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _La Comédie et les Moeurs en France au moyenÂge_. 1886. 

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Répertoire du Théâtre comique en France au moyenÂge_. 1885. 

FAGUET. _XVIe Siècle_. 1894. (On Commines. )

MERLET. _Études litt. _ (On Villehardouin, Froissart, Commines. )Edited by Lintilhac. 1894. 

L. CLÉDAT. _La Poésie du moyen Âge_. 1893. (_Classiques populaires_. )

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

A. DARMESTETER ET A. HATZFELD. _Le XVIe Siècle en France_. 1878. 

FAGUET. _XVIe Siècle_. 1894. 

SAINTE-BEUVE. _Tableau historique et critique de la Poésie fr. AuXVIe Siècle_. 

L. FEUGÈRE. _Caractères et Portraits litt. Du XVIe Siècle_. 1859. 

EGGER. _L'Hellénisme en France_. 1869. 

FAGUET. _La Tragédie fr. Au XVIe Siècle_. 1883. 

E. CHASLES. _La Comédie en France au XVIe Siècle_. 1862. 

E. BOURCIEZ. _Les Moeurs polies et la Litt. De Cour sous Henri II. _1886. 

P. STAPFER. _Rabelais_. 1889. 

R. MILLET. _Rabelais_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. GEBHART. _Rabelais, la Renaissance et la Réforme_. 1895. 

HAAG ET BORDIER. _La France protestante_. 2nd edition. (Vols. I. -vi. Have appeared. )

F. BUNGENER. _Calvin, sa Vie, son OEuvre et ses Écrits_. 1862. 

A. BIRSCH-HIRSCHFELD. _Geschichte der Französischen Litteratur, seit Anfang des XVI. Jahrhunderts_. Erster Band: _Das Zeitalter derRenaissance_. 1889. 

EBERT. _Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Fr. Tragödie, vornämlich im XVI. Jahrhundert_. 1856. 

F. GODEFROY. _Histoire de la Litt. Fr. Depuis le XVIe Siècle jusqu'ànos Jours_. 1878. 

G. MERLET. _Les grands Écrivains du XVIe Siècle_. 1875. 

C. LENIENT. _La Satire en France, ou la Litt. Militante au XVIe Siècle_. 1886. 

E. COUGNY. _Guillaume du Vair_. 1857. 

A. SAYOUS. _Études litt. Sur les Écrivains fr. De la Réformation_. 1854. 

A. VINET. _Moralistes des XVIe et XVIIe Siècles_. 1859. 

P. STAPFER. _Montaigne_. 1895. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

P. BONNEFON. _Montaigne, l'Homme et l'OEuvre_. 1893. 

SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. _Tableau de la Litt. Fr. Au XVIe Siècle_. 1862. 

CH. NORMAND. _Monluc_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

G. BIZOS. _Ronsard_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

GÉRUZEZ. _Essais d'Histoire litt. _ 1853. 

P. MORILLOT. _Discours sur la Vie et les OEuvres d'Agrippa d'Aubigné_. 1884. 

H. PERGAMINI. _La Satire au XVIe Siècle et les Tragiques d'Agrippad'Aubigné_. 1881. 

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

F. LOTHEISSEN. _Geschichte der Französischen Litteratur im XVII. Jahrhundert_. 2 vols. 1897. 

A. DUPUY. _Histoire de la Litt. Fr. Au XVIIe Siècle_. 1892. 

LE R. PÈRE G. LONGHAYE. _Histoire de la Litt. Fr. Au XVIIe Siècle_. 1895. 

J. DEMOGEOT. _Tableau de la Litt. Fr. Au XVIIe Siècle avant Corneilleet Descartes_. 1859. 

LE DUC DE BROGLIE. _Malherbe_. 1897. (_Grands Écrivains fr_. )

V. COUSIN. _La Société fr. Au XVIIe Siècle_. 1858. 

V. COUSIN. _Mme. De Sablé_. 1882. 

V. COUSIN. _Jacqueline Pascal_. 1878. 

V. COUSIN. _La Jeunesse de Mme. De Longueville_. 1853. 

V. COUSIN. _Mme. De Longueville et la Fronde_. 1859. 

G. LARROUMET. Introduction to edition of _Les Précieuses ridicules_. 1884. 

A. LE BRETON. _Le Roman au XVIIe Siècle_. 1890. 

SAINTE-BEUVE. _Portraits de Femmes_. 1855. 

A. BOURGOIN. _Valentin Conrart_. 1883. 

A. BOURGOIN. _Les Maîtres de la Critique au XVIIe Siècle_. 1889. 

PELLISSON ET D'OLIVET. _Histoire de l'Académie fr. _ 2 vols. 1858. 

E. ROY. _Étude sur Charles Sorel_. 1893. 

P. MORILLOT. _Scarron et le Genre burlesque_. 1888. 

P. MORILLOT. _Le Roman en France depuis 1610 jusqu'à nos Jours_. 

A. FOUILLÉE. _Descartes_. 1893. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

F. BOUILLIER. _Histoire de la Philosophie cartésienne_. 2 vols. 1868. 

E. RIGAL. _Alexandre Hardy et le Théâtre fr. _ 1889. 

E. RIGAL. _Esquisse d'une Histoire des Théâtres de Paris de 1548 à1635_. 1887. 

GUIZOT. _Corneille et son Temps_. 1880. 

G. REYNIER. _Thomas Corneille, sa Vie et son Théâtre_. 1892. 

P. MONCEAUX. _Racine_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

SAINTE-BEUVE. _Port-Royal_. 7 vols. 1888. 

E. DESCHANEL. _Le Romantisme des Classiques_. 1883. 

P. STAPFER. _Racine et Victor Hugo_. 1887. 

G. LARROUMET. _La Comédie de Molière_. 1889. 

H. DURAND. _Molière_. 1889. (_Classiques populaires_. )

MAHRENHOLTZ. _Molières Leben und Werke_. 1881. 

V. FOURNEL. _Le Théâtre au XVIIe Siècle: la Comédie_. 1888. 

H. RIGAULT. _Hist. De la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes_. 1856. 

P. MORILLOT. _Boileau_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

G. LANSON. _Boileau_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

G. LAFENESTRE. _La Fontaine_. 1895. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

H. TAINE. _La Fontaine et ses Fables_. 1879. 

PRÉVOST-PARADOL. _Les Moralistes fr. _ 1865. 

P. JANET. _Les Passions et les Caractères dans la Litt. Du XVIIeSiècle_. 1888. 

PELLISSON. _La Bruyère_. 1892. (_Classiques populaires_. )

JACQUINET. _Des Prédicateurs du XVIIe Siècle avant Bossuet_. 1863. 

G. LANSON. _Bossuet_. 1891. (_Classiques populaires_. )

A. FEUGÈRE. _Bourdaloue, sa Prédication et son Temps_. 1874. 

LEHANNEUR. _Mascaron_. 1878. 

L'ABBÉ FABRE. _Fléchier orateur_. 1885. 

L'ABBÉ BAYLE. _Massillon_ 1867. 

G. BIZOS. _Fénelon_. 1887. (_Classiques populaires_. )

P. JANET. _Fénelon_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

R. VALLERY RADOT. _Mme. De Sévigné_. 1888. (_Classiquespopulaires_. )

G. BOISSIER. _Mme. De Sévigné_. 1887. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

CTE. D'HAUSSONVILLE. _Mme. De la Fayette_. 1891. (_Grands Écrivainsfr. _)

G. BOISSIER. _Saint-Simon_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

J. BOURDEAU. _La Rochefoucauld_. 1895. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

H. HETTNER. _Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts:Zweiter Theil_. 1872. 

VILLEMAIN. _Tableau de la Litt. Au XVIIIe Siècle_. 4 vols. 1841. 

DE BARANTE. _Tableau de la Litt. Fr. Au XVIIIe Siècle_. 1856. 

BERSOT. _Études sur le XVIIIe Siècle_. 1852. 

VINET. _Hist. De la Litt. Fr. Au XVIIIe Siècle_. 1853. 

J. BARNI. _Hist. Des Idées morales et politiques en France au XVIIIeSiècle_. 1865. 

CARO. _La Fin du XVIIIe Siècle_. 1881. 

TAINE. _Les Origines de la France contemporaine_. 1882. (Vol. I. )

A. SOREL. _Montesquieu_. 1889. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

H. LEBASTEUR. _Buffon_. 1888. (_Classiques populaires_. )

M. PALÉOLOGUE. _Vauvenargues_. 1890. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

G. DESNOIRESTERRES. _Voltaire et la Société au XVIIIe Siècle_. 8 vols. 1871-76. 

E. FAGUET. _Voltaire_. 1895. (_Classiques populaires_. )

A. CHUQUET. _J. -J. Rousseau_. 1893. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

H. BEAUDOUIN. _La Vie et les OEuvres de J. -J. Rousseau_. 1871. 

SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. _J. -J. Rousseau, sa Vie et ses Ouvrages_. 2 vols. 1875. 

CH. LENIENT. _La Comédie en France au XVIIIe Siècle_. 2 vols. 1888. 

E. LINTILHAC. _Lesage_. 1893. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. LINTILHAC. _Beaumarchais et ses Ouvres_. 1887. 

A. HALLAYS. _Beaumarchais_. 1897. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

LÉO CLARETIE. _Essai sur Lesage romancier_. 1890. 

LÉO CLARETIE. _Florian_. 1888. (_Classiques populaires_. )

G. LARROUMET. _Marivaux, sa Vie et ses OEuvres_. 1882. 

J. REINACH. _Diderot_. 1894. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

J. BERTRAND. _D'Alembert_. 1889. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

L. SAY. _Turgot_. 1889. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

REVOLUTION AND NINETEENTH CENTURY

E. GERUZEZ. _Hist. De la Litt. Fr. Pendant la Révolution_. 1881. 

E. ROUSSE. _Mirabeau_. 1891. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

DE LESCURE. _Rivarol et la Société fr. Pendant la Révolution etl'Émigration_. 1883. 

DE LESCURE. _Bernardin de Saint-Pierre_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

DE LESCURE. _Chateaubriand_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

G. MERLET. _Tableau de la Litt. Fr. _ 1800-1815. 1883. 

ARVÈDE BARINE. _Bernardin de Saint-Pierre_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivainsfr. _)

SAINTE-BEUVE. _Chateaubriand et son Groupe litt. _ 2 vols. 1889. 

A. BARDOUX. _Chateaubriand_. 1893. (_Classiques populaires_. )

A. SOREL. _Mme. De Staël_. 1893. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

G. BRANDES. _Die Hauptströmungen der Litteratur des 19 Jahrhundert_. Vol. V. 1894. 

E. FAGUET. _Politiques et Moralistes du XIXe Siècle_. 1891. 

G. PELLISSIER. _Le Mouvement littéraire au XIXe Siècle_. 1893. 

TH. GAUTIER. _Histoire de Romantisme_. 1874. 

E. ROD. _Lamartine_. 1893. (_Classiques populaires_. )

E. DESCHANEL. _Lamartine_. 2 vols. 1893. 

E. BIRÉ. _Victor Hugo avant_ 1830. 1883. 

E. DUPUY. _V. Hugo, l'Homme et le Poète_. 1887. 

M. PALÉOLOGUE. _Alfred de Vigny_. 1891. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

DORISON. _Alfred de Vigny, Poète et Philosophe_. 1892. 

A. BARINE. _Alfred de Musset_. 1893. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

A. CLAVEAU. _Alfred de Musset_. (_Classiques populaires_. )

M. DU CAMP. _Théophile Gautier_. 1890. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

G. COGORDAN. _Joseph de Maistre_. 1894. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. SPULLER. _Lamennais, sa Vie et ses OEuvres_. 1893. 

J. SIMON. _Victor Cousin_. 1887. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. CARO. _George Sand_. 1887. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. ROD. _Stendhal_. 1892. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

F. CORRÉARD. _Michelet_. 1887. (_Classiques populaires_. )

P. DE REMUSAT. _Thiers_. 1889. (_Grands Écrivains fr. _)

E. ZÉVORT. _Thiers_. 1892. (_Classiques populaires_. )

A. FILON. _Mérimée et ses Amis_. 1894. 

BRUNETIÈRE. _L'Evolution de la Poésie lyrique en France au XIXeSiècle_. 2 vols. 1894. 

INDEX

Abondance, Jean d', 75

Adam de la Halle, 26, 27, 72

Alarcon, 167

Albéric de Briançon, 17

_Alexis, Vie de Saint_, 4

_Amadis des Gaules_, 23, 92

_Amis et Amiles_, 12

Amyot, Jacques, 96-97

Andrieux, 336

Anne of Austria, 201

Argenson, Marquis d', 304 _note_

Armentières, Peronne d', 59

Arnauld, Antoine, 153, 156-157, 184, 185, 215

Arnauld, Jacqueline, 155

Arnault, 335

Arouet, _see_ Voltaire

Aubigné, Agrippa d', 112, 113, 115, 117-119

_Aucassin et Nicolette_, 22

Aulnoy, Mme. D', 243

Auvergne, Martial d', 63

Baïf, Antoine de, 98, 103

Ballanche, 357

Baltus, 245

Balzac, Guez de, 149-150, 177

Balzac, Honoré de, 404-408

Baour-Lormian, 336, 337

Barante, 412

Barbier, Auguste, 391

Barbieri, Nicolo, 198

_Barlaam et Joasaph_, 5

Barnave, 339

Baron, 207, 229, 262

Bartas, Du, 117

Barthélemy, Abbé, 329

Basoche, La, 76

Bassompierre, 239

Batteux, Charles, 306

Baude, Henri, 63

Bayle, Pierre, 245-247

Beaulieu, Geoffroy de, 51

Beaumarchais, 265, 323-325

Béjart, Armande, 200

Béjart, Madeleine, 198

Bellay, Jean du, 88

Bellay, Joachim du, 98, 99, 100, 104-105

Belleau, Remi, 98, 103-104

Benedictines, the, 254

Benoit de Sainte-More, 15

Benserade, 140, 208

Béranger, J. -P. De, 366-367

Berçuire, Pierre, 46

Bernard, 258

Bernard, Saint, 44

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 272, 325-329

Bernay, Alexandre de, 16

Bernis, 258

Béroul, 19

Bertaut, Jean, 106

Bertin, 258

Beyle, Henri, 366, 398-399

Bèze, Théodore de, 94, 107

Bichat, 341

_Bien-Avisé, Mal-Avisé_, 72

Blanc, Louis, 412

Blois, Gui de, 54

Bodel, Jean, 67

Bodin, Jean, 111

Boétie, La, 96, 122

Boileau, Nicolas, 183-189, 241, 242

Boisguillebert, 304

Boissonade, J. -F. , 354

Bolingbroke, 284

Bonald, Vicomte de, 357

Bonnet, Charles, 302 _note_

Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 139, 153, 202, 219-226, 233, 276

Bouillon, Duchesse de, 190, 191, 214

Bounin, Gabriel, 107

Bourdaloue, 202, 227

Boursault, 207

Brantôme, 113-114

Bretel, Jacques, 26

Brizeux, Auguste, 391

Buchanan, 106

Budé, Guillaume, 82, 87

Buffon, 308-310, 327

Bunbury, Lydia, 373

Bussy-Rabutin, 176, 179

Cabanis, 301

Calas, Jean, 287

Calvin, Jean, 92-94

Campan, Mme. De, 253

Campistron, 259

Camus, Bishop, 132, 141

Cantillon, 305

Cato, Angelo, 56

Caumartin, de, 283

Caumartin, Mme. De, 176

Caylus, Count de, 329

Caylus, Mme. De, 253

_Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_, 66

Chamfort, 322

Chapelain, Jean, 141, 147, 149, 162, 177, 186

Chapelle, 153, 184, 192

Charles, Mme. , 368

Charron, Pierre, 126-127

Chartier, Alain, 60-61

Chastelain, Georges, 65

Chateaubriand, 328, 343, 348-353

Châtelain de Couci, the, 27

Châtelet, Mme. Du, 285, 286

Chaulieu, 256

Chênedollé, 337

Chénier, André, 329-331, 338

Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 335, 337

Chesterfield, Lord, 275

Chrestien, 116

Chrétien de Troyes, 17, 21

Christine de Pisan, 60

Clari, Robert de, 49

Clermont, Mlle. De, 275

Collin d'Harleville, 336

Commines, Philippe de, 55-57

Comte, Auguste, 255, 360-361

Condillac, 301

Condorcet, 255, 303-304

Confrérie de la Passion, 68, 71, 160

Conon de Béthune, 27

Conrart, Valentin, 147

Constant, Benjamin, 345, 411

Coquillard, 63

Coras, 214

Corneille, Pierre, 139, 163-170, 204

Corneille, Thomas, 171-172, 206

Cotin, 186, 205

Coulanges, Abbé de, 177

Coulanges, Mme. De, 179

Courier, Paul-Louis, 354-355

Cousin Victor, 358-359

Crébillon, P. J. De, 259-260

Crétin, 65

Creusé de Lesser, 337

Cuvier, 341

_Cuvier, Le_, 75

Cyrano de Bergerac, 145-146, 197

Dacier, Mme. , 243

D'Aguesseau, 299

D'Alembert, 254, 295

Danchet, 259

Dancourt, 262

Dangeau, 239

Daniel, 254

_Danse Macabré_, 63

Danton, 338, 339

Daubenton, 309

Daunou, 411

Daurat, Jean, 98

_Débats, Journal de_, 338

De Belloy, 261

De Broglie, 412

_Décade Philosophique_, 338

De Féletz, 342

Deffand, Mme. Du, 253, 322

Déforis, 221

Delatouche, 401

Delavigne, Casimir, 395

Delille, 257-258

Désaugiers, 336

Désbordes-Valmore, Mme. , 391

Descartes, René, 150-153

Deschamps, Antony, 366

Deschamps, Émile, 366

Desfontaines, 300

Désmarets de St. -Sorlin, 141, 142, 144, 197, 241

Des-Masures, Loys, 107

Desmoulins, Camille, 338

Desportes, Philippe, 105-106, 137

Despréaux, _see_ Boileau

Destouches, 263

Diderot, Denis, 254, 265, 272, 294-299, 302, 313

Digulleville, Guillaume de, 43

Döllinger, 180

Dorat, 258

Dubos, Abbé, 305

Duché, 259

Ducis, 261

Duclos, 253

Dudevant, Mme. , _see_ Sand, George

Dufresny, 262, 274

Dumas, Alexandre, 394, 397

Dumont, Abbé, 370

Dupont de Nemours, 304

Duplessis-Mornay, 115

Du Ryer, 162, 170

Dussault, 342

Duval, 336

_Eneas_, 16

Enfants san Souci, 74, 76

Épinay, Mme. D', 253, 314

Estienne, Henri, 101 _note_, 110, 115

Estissac, Geoffroy d', 87

Estoile, Pierre de l', 114 _note_

Étienne, 336

Fabre d'Eglantine, 336

Fantosme, Jordan, 47

Fauchet, Claude, 110

Fauriel, 341

Fayette, Mme. De la, 174, 179, 180-182

Fénelon, 153, 230-234

Fléchier, 140, 228

Fleury, 225

_Floovent_, 8

Florian, 259, 272

Fontanes, 337, 349

Fontenelle, 242, 243-245

Foucher, Adèle, 375

Fougères, Étienne de, 42

Foulechat, Denis, 46

Fouquet, 190, 200

Fourier, 359

Fournival, Richard de, 41

_Franc-Archer de Bagnolet_, 74

Francis I. , 82

Frederick the Great, 286, 288

Fréron, 300

Froissart, Jean, 53-55

Furetière, Antoine, 145, 211

Gace Brulé, 27

Gaimar, 47

Gaime, Abbé, 312

Galiani, 254, 305

Galland, 274

Garnier, Robert, 108

Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 6, 47

Gassendi, Pierre, 153

Gautier, Théophile, 365, 387-390, 392

Gautier de Coinci, 6

Gelée, Jacquemart, 31

_Gens Nouveaux_, 74

Geoffrin, Mme. , 254

Geoffroi of Brittany, 28

Geoffroy, 342

Gerson, 44, 45

Gilbert, 258-259, 300

Gillot, 116

Ginguené, 341, 411

Girardin, M. De, 315

Girardin, Saint-Marc, 425

Godeau, 139

Goethe, 297, 345

Gombault, 142

Gomberville, 142

Gournay, 305

Gournay, Mlle. De, 123

_Grandes Chroniques_, 50

Greban, Arnoul, 69

Greban, Simon, 69

Grécourt, 258

Gresset, 258, 260, 263

Grévin, 107

Grignan, Mme. De, 178

Grimm, Melchior, 307

Gringoire, Pierre, 74

_Grisélidis, Histoire de_, 68

Guenée, Abbé, 300

Guevara, 267

Guillaume le Clerc, 42

_Guillaume le Maréchal, Vie de_, 47

_Guirlande de Julie_, 140

Guizot, François, 412, 414-416

Guyon, Mme. , 224, 230

Hamilton, Anthony, 256

Hardouin, 254

Hardy, Alexandre, 161

Helgaire, 8

Helvétius, 301

Hénault, 261

Henri le Glichezare, 30

Herberay des Essarts, 92

Hoffman, 342

Holbach, Baron d', 302

Hospital, Michel de l', 100, 115

Hotman, François, 114

Houdetot, Mme. D', 314, 318

Huet, 242

Hugo, Victor, 365, 375-383, 391-393, 396

Hume, David, 315

Jacot de Forest, 16

Jansen, 156

Jeannin, President, 114 _note_

Jehan de Thuin, 16

Jobelins, 140

Jodelle, 98, 103, 107

Joinville, Jean de, 50-52

Joubert, Joseph, 342-343, 349

Jouffroy, Théodore, 359

La Barre, 288

Labé, Louise, 97

La Beaumelle, 179

Laboureur, Louis le, 141

La Bruyère, 235-238, 242

La Calprenède, 142, 143

Lacordaire, 357, 358

La Fare, 256

La Fontaine, Jean de, 189-195

La Fosse, 259

Lagrange, 302

La Grange-Chancel, 259

Laharpe, 261, 306-307

_La Haye, Fragment of_, 9

Lally, Count, 288

Lamarck, 341

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 329, 367-371

Lambert, Marquise de, 254, 269

Lambert le Tort, 16

Lamennais, 357-358

La Mettrie, 300-301

Lamoignon, de, 202

La Motte-Houdart, 243, 256, 260

Languet, Hubert, 114

Lanoue, 113

Laplace, 341

Larivey, Pierre de, 109

La Rochefoucauld, 173-175, 181, 182

Latini, Brunetto, 41

Laya, Louis, 336

Le Bel, Jean, 53

Lebrun, Écouchard, 258, 337

Le Clerc, 214

Lecomte, Valleran, 160

Lefranc de Pompignan, 256

Lefranc, Martin, 62

Legouais, Chrétien, 17, 58

Legouvé, 335

Le Maire de Belges, Jean, 84

Lemercier, Népomucène, 336, 337

Lemierre, 258, 260

Lemoyne, 141

_L'Empereur qui tua son Neveu_, 73

Leroy, Pierre, 116

Lesage, 262, 266-268

Lespinasse, Mlle. De, 254, 322

Letourneur, 261

Le Vasseur, Thérèse, 313

Lille, Alain de, 37

Lorens, Friar, 41

Lorris, Guillaume de, 34-36

Lyonne, Abbé de, 266

Mably, 255

Machaut, Guillaume de, 59

Maillard, Olivier, 45

Maine de Biran, 341

Maintenon, Mme. De, 118, 145, 179-180, 216, 217

Mairet, Jean de, 162, 165, 196

Maistre, Joseph de, 355-356

Maistre, Xavier de, 409

Malebranche, Nicolas de, 153

Malherbe, François de, 100, 106, 134-136, 331

Mallet du Pin, 338

Marbode, Bishop, 41

Marguerite of Navarre, 82-84

Marguerite of Navarre (wife of Henri IV. ), 114

Marie de France, 20, 28

Marivaux, 262, 269-271

Marmontel, 253, 260, 272, 300, 305-306

Marnix de Ste. Aldegonde, 115

Mascaron, 228

Massillon, J. -B. , 228, 229

Maupertuis, 286

Maynard, 136

Melin de Saint-Gelais, 86, 105

Ménage, 177, 205

_Ménagier de Paris_, 41 _note_

Mendoza, 267

Menot, Michel, 45

Mercier, 265

Méri, Huon de, 43

Mérimée, Prosper, 396, 408-410

Meschinot, 65

Meun, Jean de, 36-39

Mézeray, 225

Michaud, 411

Michel, Jean, 69

Michelet, Jules, 412, 418-422

Mignet, François, 412, 416

Millevoye, 337

Mirabeau, 339-340

Mirabeau (the elder), 281, 305

_Miracles de Notre-Dame_, 68

Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 146, 169, 197-206

Molinet, 65

Monluc, Blaize de, 112-113

Monstrelet, 55

Montaigne, Michel de, 121-126

Montalembert, 357, 358, 412

Montchrestien, Antoine de, 120, 160

Montesquieu, 57, 111, 255, 273-280

Montfleury, 207

Montpensier, Mlle. De, 176, 235

Montreuil, Jean de, 46

Moreau, Hégésippe, 391

Morellet, 300, 305

Morelly, 255

Mornay, Mme. De, 113

Mothe le Vayer, la, 153

Motteville, Mme. De, 176

Muret, 106

Musset, Alfred de, 383-387

Naigeon, 302

Namur, Robert of, 54

Nangis, Guillaume de, 51

Napoleon I. , 340

Napoleon III. , 369

Navagero, 105

Nerval, Gérard de, 388, 391

Nevers, Duc de, 214

Nicole, 156, 178, 208, 209, 215

Ninon, 183

Nisard, Désiré, 425-426

Nivart of Ghent, 30

Nivelle de la Chaussée, 264

Nodier, Charles, 366, 409

Novare, Philippe de, 41

Ogier, François, 162

Oresme, Nicole, 46

Orléans, Charles d', 61-62

Orleans, Duchess of, 180, 212

Ossat, d', 114 _note_

Ouville, d', 196

Ozanam, 412

Palissot, 300

Palissy, Bernard, 119

Paré, Ambroise, 119

Parny, 258

_Partenopéus de Blois_, 22

Pascal, Blaise, 154-159

Pasquier, Estienne, 110

Passerat, Jean, 106, 116

_Pathelin, La Farce de_, 66, 75-76

_Pèlerinage de Jérusalem_, 11

Pellisson, 148

Périer, Mme. , 158

Périers, Bonaventure des, 84, 91

Perrault, Charles, 241-242, 243

Perron, du, 115

Physiocrats, the, 304

Picard, 336

Piron, 258, 260, 263, 300

Pithou, 116

Pixérécourt, 336

Pomponne, 179

Ponsard, 395

Popelinière, L. De la, 112

Poquelin. _See_ Molière

Port-Royal, 155, 252

Pradon, 214

Presles, Raoul de, 46

Prévost, Abbé, 271-272

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 361-362

Provins, Guiot de, 42

Quesnay, François, 304, 305

Quinault, Philippe, 169, 204, 206, 207-208

Quinet, Edgar, 412, 422-423

_Quinze Joies de Mariage_, 66

Rabelais, François, 87-91

Racan, 136

Racine, Jean, 172, 208-218

Racine, Louis, 257

Rambouillet, Hôtel de, 139

Ramée, Pierre de la, 111

Ramond, 321 _note_

Raoul de Houdan, 43

Rapin, 116

Raynal, Abbé, 321-322

Rayounard, 336, 341

Récamier, Mme. , 352

_Récits d'un Ménestrel de Reims_, 50

Regnard, 262

Regnier, Mathurin, 136-138

_Renard, Roman de_, 29

_Représentation d'Adam_, 67

Restif de la Bretonne, 272

Retz, Cardinal de, 175-176

Riccoboni, Mme. , 270 _note_

Richelieu, 147, 162, 176

Rivarol, 338

Robert de Boron, 21, 22

Rocca, Albert de, 347

Rohan, Chevalier de, 284

Rojas, 106

Roland, Mme. , 253, 254, 322

_Roland, Song of_, 9-11

Rollin, 300

Romulus, 28 _note_

Ronsard, Pierre de, 97-103

Rotrou, Jean, 162, 170-171, 196

Roucher, 257

Rouget de Lisle, 337

Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, 256, 283

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 272, 311-321, 327

Roye, Jean de, 55

Royer-Collard, 341

Rutebeuf, 42, 43

Sable, Mme. De, 173

Sablière, Mme. De, 192

Sacy, de, 156

Sagon, 85

Saint-Amand, 144

Saint-Cyran, 156

Sainte-Beuve, 330, 365, 366, 391, 426-427

Saint-Évremond, 139, 183, 197, 209

Saint-Just, 339

Saint-Lambert, 257

Saint-Martin, 355, 357

Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, 304

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 359-360

Saint-Simon, Duc de, 238-241

Sales, François de, 131-132

Salle, Antoine de la, 65-66

Sand, George, 400-404

Sandeau, Jules, 401

Sannazaro, 103

Saurin, Bernard-Joseph, 261

Saurin, Jacques, 228

Scarron, Paul, 145, 197

Scève, Maurice, 97

Schelandre, Jean de, 162

Schiller, 345

Schlegel, A. W. Von, 346

Scribe, Eugène, 395

Scudéry, Georges de, 142, 162, 163, 165, 170

Scudéry, Mlle. De, 92, 142, 143

Sebonde, Raimond de, 122

Secchi, 199

Sedaine, 265

Segrais, 181, 213, 235

Sénancourt, 341-342

Serres, Olivier de, 119, 132

Serviteur, Le Loyal, 112 _note_

Sévigné, Mme. De, 143, 177-179, 191, 210

Simon, Richard, 220, 224, 225

Sirven, 288

Sismondi, 411-412

Sorel, Charles, 144, 268

Soulié, Frédéric, 394

Soyecourt, Marquis de, 200

Staäl-Delaunay, Mme. De, 253

Staël, Mme. De, 343-348

Steinhoewel, 28

Stendhal. _See_ Beyle

_Strasburg Oaths_, 4

Suard, 338

Sue, Eugène, 397

Sully, Maurice de, 44

Surgères, Helène de, 101

Tabarin, 196

Taille, Jacques de la, 107

Taille, Jean de la, 108, 109

Tedbalt, 4

Tencin, Mme. De, 245

Thaon, Philippe de, 40

_Thebes, Romance of_, 15

_Théophile_, 68

Thibaut de Champagne, 27

Thierry, Augustin, 412-414

Thiers, Adolphe, 412, 417-418

Thomas (Anglo-Norman poet), 19

Thomas, A. -L. , 306, 327

Thou, De, 112

Thyard, Pontus de, 98

Tocqueville, A. De, 412, 416-417

_Tour-Landry, Livre du Chevalier de la_, 41 _note_

Touroude, 10

Tracy, Destutt de, 301

Tristan l'Hermite, 162, 170

Turgot, 255

Turnèbe, Odet de, 109

Uranistes, 140

Urfe, Honoré d', 92, 132-134

Vair, Guillaume de, 120, 127, 134

Valenciennes, Henri de, 49

Vallière, Louise de la, 221

Van Dale, 244

Vauban, 304

Vaugelas, 148

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jean, 106

Vauvenargues, 281-282

Vaux, Mme. Clothilde de, 360

Velly, 254

Vergniaud, 339

Vertot, 254

Viau, Théophile de, 138

Vigny, Alfred de, 365, 371-374, 394, 396

Villehardouin, Geoffroy de, 48

Villemain, 424

Villon, François, 63-65, 74

Vincent de Paul, St. , 221

Viole, Mlle. De, 104

_Violette, Roman de la_, 22

Viret, 94

Vivonne, Catherine de, 139

Voiture, Vincent, 139, 140-141

Volland, Mlle. , 298

Volney, 303

Voltaire, 229, 253, 255, 260, 272, 282-293, 314

Wace, 20, 47

Walpole, Horace, 322

Warens, Mme. De, 311, 312, 318

Wenceslas, Duke, 54

THE END

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Short Histories of the Literatures of the WorldEDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE, LL. D. 

Large Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. Each Volume

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATUREBy Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, M. A. 

FRENCH LITERATUREBy Prof. EDWARD DOWDEN, D. C. L. , LL. D. 

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATUREBy the EDITOR

ITALIAN LITERATUREBy RICHARD GARNETT, C. B. , LL. D. 

SPANISH LITERATUREBy JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY

JAPANESE LITERATUREBy WILLIAM GEORGE ASTON, C. M. G. , D. Lit. 

BOHEMIAN LITERATUREBy THE COUNT LÜTZOW, D. Litt. , D. Ph. 

SANSKRIT LITERATUREBy Prof. A. A. MACDONELL, M. A. 

HUNGARIAN LITERATUREBy Dr. RIEDL

AMERICAN LITERATUREBy Prof. W. P. TRENT

RUSSIAN LITERATUREBy K. WALISZEWSKI

CHINESE LITERATUREBy Prof. A. GILES

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