Part 11

Only the name of Omer-Talon (1595-1652) really illustrates the legal annals of France at this period on the bench, and that of Olivier Patru (1604-1681) at the bar. Thus it happened that the interests of many different classes of persons were concentrated upon moralizings, which took indeed very different forms in the hands of Pascal and other grave and serious thinkers of the Jansenist complexion in theology, and in those of literary courtiers like Saint-Evremond (1613-1703) and La Rochefoucauld, whose chief object was to depict the motives and characters prominent in the brilliant and not altogether frivolous society in which they moved. Both classes, however, were more or less tempted by the cast of their thoughts and the genius of the language to adopt the tersest and most epigrammatic form of expression possible, and thus to originate the "_pensee_" in which, as its greatest later writer, Joubert, has said, "the ambition of the author is to put a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word." The great genius and admirable style of Pascal are certainly not less shown in his _Pensees_ than in his _Provinciales_, though perhaps the literary form of the former is less strikingly supreme than that of the latter. The author is more dominated by his subject and dominates it less. Nicole, a far inferior writer as well as thinker, has also left a considerable number of _Pensees_, which have about them something more of the essay and less of the aphorism. They are, however, though not comparable to Pascal, excellent in matter and style, and go far to justify Bayle in calling their author "l'une des plus belles plumes de l'Europe." In sharp contrast with these thinkers, who are invariably not merely respecters of religion but ardently and avowedly religious, who treat morality from the point of view of the Bible and the church, there arose side by side with them, or only a little later, a very different group of moralists, whose writings have been as widely read, and who have had as great a practical and literary influence as perhaps any other class of authors. The earliest to be born and the last to die of these was Charles de Saint-Denis, seigneur de saint-Evremond (1613-1703). Saint-Evremond was long known rather as a conversational wit, some of whose good things were handed about in manuscript, or surreptitiously printed in foreign lands, than as a writer, and this is still to a certain extent his reputation. He was at least as cynical as his still better known contemporary La Rochefoucauld, if not more so, and he had less intellectual force and less nobility of character. But his wit was very great, and he set the example of the brilliant societies of the next century. Many of Saint-Evremond's printed works are nominally works of literary criticism, but the moralizing spirit pervades all of them. No writer had a greater influence on Voltaire, and through Voltaire on the whole course of French literature after him. In direct literary value, however, no comparison can be made between Saint-Evremond and the author of the _Sentences et maximes morales_. Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), has other literary claims besides those of this famous book. His _Memoires_ were very favourably judged by his contemporaries, and they are still held to deserve no little praise even among the numerous and excellent works of the kind which that age of memoir-writers produced. But while the _Memoires_ thus invite comparison, the _Maximes et sentences_ stand alone. Even allowing that the mere publication of detached reflections in terse language was not absolutely new, it had never been carried, perhaps has never since been carried, to such a perfection. Beside La Rochefoucauld all other writers are diffuse, vacillating, unfinished, rough. Not only is there in him never a word too much, but there is never a word too little. The thought is always fully expressed, not compressed. Frequently as the metaphor of minting or stamping coin has been applied to the art of managing words, it has never been applied so appropriately as to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The form of them is almost beyond praise, and its excellencies, combined with their immense and enduring popularity, have had a very considerable share in influencing the character of subsequent French literature. Of hardly less importance in this respect, though of considerably less intellectual and literary individuality, was the translator of Theophrastus and the author of the _Caracteres_, La Bruyere. Jean de la Bruyere (1645-1696), though frequently epigrammatic, did not aim at the same incredible terseness as the author of the _Maximes_. His plan did not, indeed, render it necessary. Both in England and in France there had been during the whole of the century a mania for character writing, both of the general and Theophrastic kind, and of the historical and personal order. The latter, of which our own Clarendon is perhaps the greatest master, abound in the French memoirs of the period. The former, of which the naive sketches of Earle and Overbury are English examples, culminated in those of La Bruyere, which are not only light and easy in manner and matter, but also in style essentially amusing, though instructive as well. Both he and La Rochefoucauld had an enduring effect on the literature which followed them--an effect perhaps superior to that exercised by any other single work in French, except the _Roman de la rose_ and the _Essais_ of Montaigne.

Controversy between Ancients and Moderns.

_17th-century Savants._--Of the literature of the 17th century there only remains to be dealt with the section of those writers who devoted themselves to scientific pursuits or to antiquarian erudition of one form or another. It was in this century that literary criticism of French and in French first began to be largely composed, and after this time we shall give it a separate heading. It was very far, however, from attaining the excellence or observing the form which it afterwards assumed. The institution of the Academy led to various linguistic works. One of the earliest of these was the _Remarques_ of the Savoyard Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1595-1650), afterwards re-edited by Thomas Corneille. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy itself when it had as yet but a brief one. The famous _Examen du Cid_ was an instance of the literary criticism of the time which was afterwards represented by Rene Rapin (1621-1687), Dominique Bouhours (1628-1702) and Rene de Bossu (1631-1680), while Adrien Baillet (1649-1706) has collected the largest thesaurus of the subject in his _Jugemens des savants_. Boileau set the example of treating such subjects in verse, and in the latter part of the century _Reflexions_, _Discourses_, _Observations_, and the like, on

## particular styles, literary forms and authors, became exceedingly

numerous. In earlier years France possessed a numerous band of classical scholars of the first rank, such as Scaliger and Casaubon, who did not lack followers. But all or almost all this sort of work was done in Latin, so that it contributed little to French literature properly so-called, though the translations from the classics of Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (1606-1664) have always taken rank among the models of French style. On the other hand, mathematical studies were pursued by persons of far other and far greater genius, and, taking from this time forward a considerable position in education and literature in France, had much influence on both. The mathematical discoveries of Pascal and Descartes are well known. Of science proper, apart from mathematics, France did not produce many distinguished cultivators in this century. The philosophy of Descartes was not on the whole favourable to such investigations, which were in the next century to be pursued with ardour. Its tendencies found more congenial vent and are more thoroughly exemplified in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This, of Italian origin, was mainly started in France by Charles Perrault (1628-1703), who thereby rendered much less service to literature than by his charming fairy tales. The opposite side was taken by Boileau, and the fight was afterwards revived by Antoine Houdar[d, t] de la Motte (1672-1731), a writer of little learning but much talent in various ways, and by the celebrated Madame Dacier, Anne Lefevre (1654-1720). The discussion was conducted, as is well known, without very much knowledge or judgment among the disputants on the one side or on the other. But at this very time there were in France students and scholars of the most profound erudition. We have already mentioned Fleury and his ecclesiastical history. But Fleury is only the last and the most popular of a race of omnivorous and untiring scholars, whose labours have ever since, until the modern fashion of first-hand investigations came in, furnished the bulk of historical and scholarly references and quotations. To this century belong le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698), whose enormous _Histoire des empereurs_ and _Memoires pour servir a l'histoire ecclesiastique_ served Gibbon and a hundred others as quarry; Charles Dufresne, seigneur de Ducange (1614-1688), whose well-known glossary was only one of numerous productions; Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), one of the most voluminous of the voluminous Benedictines; and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741), chief of all authorities of the dry-as-dust kind on classical archaeology and art.

_Opening of the 18th Century._--The beginning of the 18th century is among the dead seasons of French literature. All the greatest men whose names had illustrated the early reign of Louis XIV. in profane literature passed away long before him, and the last if the least of them, Boileau and Thomas Corneille, only survived into the very earliest years of the new age. The political and military disasters of the last years of the reign were accompanied by a state of things in society unfavourable to literary development. The devotion to pure literature and philosophy proper which Descartes and Corneille had inspired had died out, and the devotion to physical science, to sociology, and to a kind of free-thinking optimism which was to inspire Voltaire and the Encyclopedists had not yet become fashionable. Fenelon and Malebranche still survived, but they were emphatically men of the last age, as was Massillon, though he lived till nearly the middle of the century. The characteristic literary figures of the opening years of the period are d'Aguesseau, Fontenelle, Saint-Simon, personages in many ways interesting and remarkable, but purely transitional in their characteristics. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) is, indeed, perhaps the most typical figure of the time. He was a dramatist, a moralist, a philosopher, physical and metaphysical, a critic, an historian, a poet and a satirist. The manner of his works is always easy and graceful, and their matter rarely contemptible.

J. B. Rousseau.

Voltaire (poetry).

_18th-Century Poetry._--The dispiriting signs shown during the 17th century by French poetry proper received entire fulfilment in the following age. The two poets who were most prominent at the opening of the period were the abbe de Chaulieu (1639-1720) and the marquis de la Fare (1644-1712), poetical or rather versifying twins who are always quoted together. They were both men who lived to a great age, yet their characteristics are rather those of their later than of their earlier contemporaries. They derive on the one hand from the somewhat trifling school of Voiture, on the other from the Bacchic sect of Saint-Amant; and they succeed in uniting the inferior qualities of both with the cramped and impoverished though elegant style of which Fenelon had complained. Their compositions are as a rule lyrical, as lyrical poetry was understood after the days of Malherbe--that is to say, quatrains of the kind ridiculed by Moliere, and Pindaric odes, which have been justly described as made up of alexandrines after the manner of Boileau cut up into shorter or longer lengths. They were followed, however, by the one poet who succeeded in producing something resembling poetry in this artificial style, J. B. Rousseau (1671-1741). Rousseau, who in some respects was nothing so little as a religious poet, was nevertheless strongly influenced, as Marot had been, by the Psalms of David. His _Odes_ and his _Cantates_ are perhaps less destitute of that spirit than the work of any other poet of the century excepting Andre Chenier. Rousseau was also an extremely successful epigrammatist, having in this respect, too, resemblances to Marot. Le Franc de Pompignan (1700-1784), to whom Voltaire's well-known sarcasms are not altogether just, and Louis Racine (1692-1763), who wrote pious and altogether forgotten poems, belonged to the same poetical school; though both the style and matter of Racine are strongly tinctured by his Port Royalist sympathies and education. Lighter verse was represented in the 18th century by the long-lived Saint-Aulaire (1643-1742), by Gentil Bernard (1710-1775), by the abbe (afterwards cardinal) de Bernis (1715-1794), by Claude Joseph Dorat (1734-1780), by Antoine Bertin (1752-1790) and by Evariste de Parny (1753-1814), the last the most vigorous, but all somewhat deserving the term applied to Dorat of _ver luisant du Parnasse_. The jovial traditions of Saint-Amant begat a similar school of anacreontic songsters, which, represented in turn by Charles Francois Panard (1674-1765), Charles Colle (1709-1783), Armand Gouffe (1775-1845), and Marc-Antoine-Madeleine Desaugiers (1772-1827), led directly to the best of all such writers, Beranger. To this class Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836) perhaps also belongs; though his most famous composition, the _Marseillaise_, is of a different stamp. Nor is the account of the light verse of the 18th century complete without reference to a long succession of fable writers, who, in an unbroken chain, connect La Fontaine in the 17th century with Viennet in the 19th. None of the links, however, of this chain, with the exception of Jean Pierre Florian (1759-1794) deserve much attention. The universal faculty of Voltaire (1694-1778) showed itself in his poetical productions no less than in his other works, and it is perhaps not least remarkable in verse. It is impossible nowadays to regard the _Henriade_ as anything but a highly successful prize poem, but the burlesque epic of _La Pucelle_, discreditable as it may be from the moral point of view, is remarkable enough as literature.

Chenier.

The epistles and satires are among the best of their kind, the verse tales are in the same way admirable, and the epigrams, impromptus, and short miscellaneous poems generally are the _ne plus ultra_ of verse which is not poetry. The Anglomania of the century extended into poetry, and the _Seasons_ of Thomson set the example of a whole library of tedious descriptive verse, which in its turn revenged France upon England by producing or helping to produce English poems of the Darwin school. The first of these descriptive performances was the _Saisons_ of Jean Francois de Saint-Lambert (1716-1803), identical in title with its model, but of infinitely inferior value. Saint-Lambert was followed by Jacques Delille (1738-1813) in _Les Jardins_, Antoine Marin le Mierre (1723-1793) in _Les Fastes_, and Jean Antoine Roucher (1745-1794) in _Les Mois_. Indeed, everything that could be described was seized upon by these describers. Delille also translated the _Georgics_, and for a time was the greatest living poet of France, the title being only disputed by Escouchard le Brun (1729-1807), a lyrist and ode writer of the school of J. B. Rousseau, but not destitute of energy. The only other poets until Chenier who deserve notice are Nicolas Gilbert (1751-1780)--the French Chatterton, or perhaps rather the French Oldham, who died in a workhouse at twenty-nine after producing some vigorous satires and, at the point of death, an elegy of great beauty; Jacques Charles Louis Clinchaut de Malfilatre (1732-1767), another short-lived poet whose "Ode to the Sun" has a certain stateliness; and Jean Baptiste Gresset (1709-1777), the author of _Ver-Vert_ and of other poems of the lighter order, which are not far, if at all, below the level of Voltaire. Andre Chenier (1762-1794) stands far apart from the art of his century, though the strong chain of custom, and his early death by the guillotine, prevented him from breaking finally through the restraints of its language and its versification. Chenier, half a Greek by blood, was wholly one in spirit and sentiment. The manner of his verses, the very air which surrounds them and which they diffuse, are different from those of the 18th century; and his poetry is probably the utmost that its language and versification could produce. To do more, the revolution which followed a generation after his death was required.

Diderot (plays).

_18th-Century Drama._--The results of the cultivation of dramatic poetry at this time were even less individually remarkable than those of the attention paid to poetry proper. Here again the astonishing power and literary aptitude of Voltaire gave value to his attempts in a style which, notwithstanding that it counts Racine among its practitioners, was none the less predestined to failure. Voltaire's own efforts in this kind are indisputably as successful as they could be. Foreigners usually prefer _Mahomet_ and _Zaire_ to _Bajazet_ and _Mithridate_, though there is no doubt that no work of Voltaire's comes up to _Polyeucte_ and _Rodogune_, as certainly no single passage in any of his plays can approach the best passages of _Cinna_ and _Les Horaces_. But the remaining tragic writers of the century, with the single exception of Crebillon _pere_, are scarcely third-rate. C. Jolyot de Crebillon (1674-1762) himself had genius, and there are to be found in his work evidences of a spirit which had seemed to die away with _Saint-Genest_, and was hardly to revive until _Hernani_. Of the imitators of Racine and Voltaire, La Motte in _Ines de Castro_ was not wholly unsuccessful. Francois Joseph de la Grange-Chancel (1677-1758) copied chiefly the worst side of the author of _Britannicus_, and Bernard Joseph Saurin (1706-1781) and Pierre-Laurent de Belloy (1727-1775) performed the same service for Voltaire. Le Mierre and La Harpe, mentioned and to be mentioned, were tragedians; but the _Iphigenie en Tauride_ of Guimond de la Touche (1725-1760) deserves more special mention than anything of theirs. There was an infinity of tragic writers and tragic plays in this century, but hardly any others of them even deserve mention. The muse of comedy was decidedly more happy in her devotees. Moliere was a far safer if a more difficult model than Racine, and the inexorable fashion which had bound down tragedy to a feeble imitation of Euripides did not similarly prescribe an undeviating adherence to Terence. Tragedy had never been, has scarcely been since, anything but an exotic in France; comedy was of the soil and native. Very early In the century Alain Rene le Sage (1668-1747), in the admirable comedy of _Turcaret_, produced a work not unworthy to stand by the side of all but his master's best. Philippe Destouches (1680-1754) was also a fertile comedy writer in the early years of the century, and in _Le Glorieux_ and _Le Philosophe marie_ achieved considerable success. As the age went on, comedy, always apt to lay hold of passing events, devoted itself to the great struggle between the Philosophes and their opponents. Curiously enough, the party which engrossed almost all the wit of France had the worst of it in this dramatic portion of the contest, if in no other. The _Mechant_ of Gresset and the _Metromanie_ of Alexis Piron (1689-1773) were far superior to anything produced on the other side, and the _Philosophes_ of Charles Palissot de Montenoy (1730-1814), though scurrilous and broadly farcical, had a great success. On the other hand, it was to a Philosophe that the invention of a new dramatic style was due, and still more the promulgation of certain ideas on dramatic criticism and construction, which, after being filtered through the German mind, were to return to France and to exercise the most powerful influence on its dramatic productions. This was Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the most fertile genius of the century, but also the least productive in finished and perfect work. His chief dramas, the _Fils naturel_ and the _Pere de famille_, are certainly not great successes; the shorter plays, _Est-il bon? est-il mechant?_ and _La Piece et le prologue_, are better. But it was his follower Michel Jean Sedaine (1719-1797) who, in _Le Philosophe sans le savoir_ and other pieces, produced the best examples of the bourgeois as opposed to the heroic drama. Diderot is sometimes credited or discredited with the invention of the _Comedie Larmoyante_, a title which indeed his own plays do not altogether refuse, but this special variety seems to be, in its invention, rather the property of Pierre Claude Nivelle de la Chaussee (1692-1754). Comedy sustained itself, and even gained ground towards the end of the century; the _Jeune Indienne_ of Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794), if not quite worthy of its author's brilliant talent in other paths, is noteworthy, and so is the _Billet perdu_ of Joseph Francois Edouard de Corsembleu Desmahis (1722-1761), while at the extreme limit of our present period there appears the remarkable figure of Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799). The _Mariage de Figaro_ and the _Barbier de Seville_ are well known as having had attributed to them no mean place among the literary causes and forerunners of the Revolution. Their dramatic and literary value would itself have sufficed to obtain attention for them at any time, though there can be no doubt that their popularity was mainly due to their political appositeness. The most remarkable point about them, as about the school of comedy of which Congreve was the chief master in England at the beginning of the century, was the abuse and superfluity of wit in the dialogue, indiscriminately allotted to all characters alike. It is difficult to give particulars, but would be improper to omit all mention, of such dramatic or quasi-dramatic work as the libretti of operas, farces for performance at fairs and the like. French authors of the time from Le Sage downwards usually managed these with remarkable skill.

J. J. Rousseau.