CHAPTER VII

.

SCIENTIFIC WRITERS.

As the sciences divide and subdivide themselves more and more, the works which treat of them become less and less the subject of strictly literary history. Besides this truth, it is necessary to remember the fact that a large number of treatises, scientific in subject, were in the eighteenth century professedly popularised and addressed to unprofessional audiences. Fontenelle, D'Alembert, and many other authors already mentioned, were _savants_, but their manner of handling their subjects was far from being strictly or wholly scientific. Yet there remain a certain number of writers, who, their reputation being derived wholly or mainly from their treatment of subjects of science and erudition, are better dealt with separately.

[Sidenote: Buffon.]

The head and chief of these is beyond all question Buffon. George Louis Leclerc, who was made Count de Buffon by Louis XV., was born at Montbard in Burgundy, on Sept. 7, 1707; his father was a man of wealth and of position in the _noblesse de robe_. Buffon was destined for the law, but early showed an inclination towards science. He became acquainted with a young English nobleman, Lord Kingston, who with his tutor was taking the then usual grand tour, and was permitted by his father to accompany him through France and Italy, and to visit England. On the English language he spent considerable pains, translating Newton, Hales, and Tull the agriculturist. When he returned to France he devoted himself to scientific experiments, and in 1739 he was appointed intendant or director of the Jardin du Roi, which practically gave him command of the national collections in zoology, botany, and mineralogy. He was thus enabled to observe and experiment to his heart's content, and to collect a sufficient number of facts for his vast Natural History. Buffon, however, was only half a man of science. He was at least as anxious to write pompous descriptions and to indulge in showy hypotheses, as to confine himself to plain scientific enquiry. He accordingly left the main part of the hack-work of his _Histoire Naturelle_ (a vast work extending to thirty-six volumes) to assistants, of whom the chief was Daubenton, himself contributing only the most striking and rhetorical passages. The book was very remarkable for its time, as the first attempt since Pliny at a collection of physical facts at once exhaustive, and in a manner systematised, and though there was much alloy mixed with its metal, it was of real value. Buffon's life was long, and he outlived all the other chiefs of the _philosophe_ party (to which in an outside sort of fashion he belonged), dying at Paris in the year 1788. It is perhaps easier to condemn Buffon's extremely rhetorical style than to do justice to it. To a modern reader it too frequently seems to verge on the ridiculous, and to do more than verge on the trivial. It is necessary, however, to take the point of view of the time. Buffon found natural science in a position far below that assigned to literary erudition and to the arts in general estimation. He also found it customary that these arts and letters should be treated in pompous _eloges_. His real interest in science led him to think that the shortest way to raise it was to treat it in the same manner, and there is little doubt that his method was effectual in its degree. It is perhaps curious that he, the author of the phrase 'Le style c'est l'homme,' should have so completely exemplified it. Many authors of elaborate prose have been perfectly simple and unpretentious in private life. Buffon was as pompous and inflated as his style. Anecdotes respecting him are numerous; but perhaps the most instructive is that which tells how, having heard some one speak of the style of Montesquieu, he asked, 'Si M. de Montesquieu avait un style?' It is needless to say that from any just standpoint, even of purely literary criticism, the hollow pomp of the _Histoire Naturelle_ sinks into insignificance beside the nervous and solid yet graceful vigour of the _Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Lesser Scientific Writers.]

No single scientific writer equals the fame of Buffon, but there are not a few who deserve to be mentioned after him. Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, a Breton by birth, who was a considerable mathematician and a physicist of more eccentricity than merit, owes most of his literary celebrity to the patronage of Frederick the Second, and the pitiless raillery of Voltaire, who quarrelled with him on his visit to Berlin, where Maupertuis was president of the Academy. Maupertuis' chief scientific performance was his mission to Lapland to determine the measurement of a degree of longitude in 1736. Of this mission he published an account. At the same time a similar mission was sent to South America under La Condamine, who underwent considerable hardship, and, like Maupertuis, published his adventures when he came back. Mathematics were indeed the favourite study of the time. Clairaut, De Moivre, Euler, Laplace, all wrote in French, or belonged to French-speaking and French-descended races; while Voltaire's own contributions to the reception of Newton's principles in France were not small, and his beloved Madame du Chatelet was an expert mathematician. Voltaire also devoted much attention to chemistry, which was the special subject of such of the Baron d'Holbach's labours as were not devoted to the overthrow of Christianity. It was not, however, till the eve of the Revolution that the most important discoveries in this science were made by Lavoisier and others. The Empire was a much more favourable time for science than for literature. Bonaparte was fond of the society of men of science, and pleased by their usual indifference to politics. Monge, Berthollet, Champollion, were among his favourites. Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier were, however, the chief men of science of this period, and Cuvier at least had no mean command of a literary style sufficient for his purposes. His chief work of a literary-scientific character was his discourse _Sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_. Earlier than this the physician Cabanis, in his _Rapports de Physique et de Morale_, composed a semi-materialist work of great excellence according to eighteenth-century standards. Bichat's _La Vie et la Mort_, the work of an anatomist of the greatest talent, who died young, also belongs to literature.

[Sidenote: Voyages and Travels.]

Some contributions to letters were also made by the voyages of discovery which formed part of the general scientific curiosity of the time. The chief of them is that of Bougainville, 1771, which, giving the first clear notion to Frenchmen of the South Sea Islands, had a remarkably stimulating effect on the imaginations of the _philosophe_ party.

[Sidenote: Linguistic and Literary Study.]

In works of pure erudition more directly connected with literature, the age was less fruitful than its immediate predecessor. The laborious studies of the Benedictines, however, continued. One work of theirs, important to our subject, was projected and in part carried out under the superintendence chiefly of Dom Rivet. This was the _Histoire Litteraire de la France_--a mighty work, which, after long interruption by the Revolution and other causes, was taken up again, and has proceeded steadily for many years, though it has not yet reached the close of the middle ages. This work was part, and a very important part, of a revival of the study of old French literature. The plan of the Benedictines led them at first into the literature of mediaeval Latin. But the works of the Trouveres, of their successors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of the authors of the French Renaissance, also received attention, scattered at first and desultory, but gradually co-ordinating and regulating itself. La Monnoye, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, the President Bouhier, and many others, collected, and in some cases edited, the work of earlier times. The Marquis de Paulmy began a vast _Bibliotheque des Romans_, for which the Comte de Tressan undertook the modernising and reproducing of all the stories of chivalry. Tressan, it is true, had recourse only to late and adulterated versions, but his work was still calculated to spread some knowledge of what the middle ages had actually done in matter of literature. La Curne de Sainte Palaye devoted himself eagerly to the study of the language, manners, and customs of chivalry. Barbazan collected the specially French product of the Fabliau, and, with his successor Meon (who also edited the _Roman du Renart_), provided a great corpus of lighter mediaeval literature for the student to exercise himself upon. By degrees this revived literature forced itself upon the public eye, and before the Republic had given place to the Empire, it received some attention at the hands of official teachers of literature who had hitherto scorned it. M. J. Chenier, Daunou, and others, undertook the subject, and made it in a manner popular; while towards the extreme end of the present period Raynouard and Fauriel added the subject of Provencal literature to that of the literature of Northern France, and helped to propagate the study abroad as well as at home.

In the older fields the renown of France for purely classical scholarship diminished somewhat as compared with the days of Huet, Menage, Dacier, and the Delphin classics. The principal work of erudition was either directed towards the so-called philosophy in its wide sense of enquiry and speculation into politics and manners, or else to mathematics and physics. The Benedictines confined themselves for the most part to Christian antiquity. Yet there were names of weight in this department, such as the President Henault, a writer something after the fashion of Fontenelle, but on classical subjects; and the President de Brosses, also an archaeologist of merit, but chiefly noteworthy as having been among the founders of the science which busies itself with the manners and customs of primitive and prehistoric man[291].

FOOTNOTES:

[291] I owe to M. Scherer the indication of a misprint of '_des_ Brosses' for 'de' in former editions. M. Scherer says that I 'have never heard' of the President's pleasant _Lettres sur l'Italie_, because I do not mention them. He also says that what I do say of De Brosses is 'egalement surprenante pour ce qu'elle avance et par ce qu'elle omet.' I am, therefore, justified in supposing that M. Scherer 'has never heard' of the _Lettres sur Herculanum_, the _Navigations aux Terres Australes_, or the _Culte des Dieux Fetiches_.

INTERCHAPTER IV.

SUMMARY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE.

The eighteenth century was pre-eminently the century of academic literature in France: far more so than the seventeenth, which had seen the foundation of the Academie Francaise. The word 'academy' in this sense was an invention of the Italian humanists, prompted by their Platonic, or perhaps by their Ciceronian, studies. Academies, or coteries of men of letters who united love of society with the cultivation of literature, became common in Italy during the sixteenth century, and from Italy were translated to France. The famous society, which now shares with the original school of Plato the honour of being designated in European language as 'The Academy' without distinguishing epithet, was originally nothing but one of these coteries or clubs, which met at the house of the judicious and amiable, but not

## particularly learned, Conrart. Conrart's influence with Richelieu, the

desire of the latter to secure a favourable tribunal of critics for his own literary attempts, or (to be generous) his foresight and his appreciation of the genius of the French language, determined the Cardinal to establish this society. It was modestly endowed, and was charged with the duty of composing an authoritative Dictionary of the French literary language; a task the slow performance of which has been a stock subject of ridicule for two centuries and a half. The Academy, though it suffered some vicissitudes in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, has survived all changes, and is virtually one of the most ancient existing institutions of France. But, though it from the beginning enjoyed royal and ministerial favour, it was long before it collected a really representative body of members, and it was subjected at first to a good deal of raillery. One of Saint Evremond's early works was a _Comedie des Academistes_; while one of the most polished and severe of his later prose critical studies is a 'Dissertation on the word "Vaste,"' in which the tendency of the Academy to trifling discussions (the curse of all literary societies), the literary indolence of its members, and the pedagogic limitations of its critical standards, are bitterly, though most politely, ridiculed. It did itself little good by lending its name to be the cover for Richelieu's jealousy of the _Cid_, though there is more justice in its _examen_ of that famous play than is sometimes supposed. But the institution was thoroughly germane to the nature, tastes, and literary needs of the French people, and it prospered. Conrart was a tower of strength to it; and in the next generation the methodical and administrative talents of Perrault were of great service, while it so obviously helped the design of Louis XIV. to play the Augustus, that a tradition of royal patronage, which was not afterwards broken, was established. The greatest blots on the Academy were the almost unavoidable servility which rewarded this patronage, and the private rivalries and cliques which have occasionally kept some of the greatest names of French literature out of its lists. Moliere and Diderot are the most shining examples among these, but many others keep them company. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century at least, it became the recognised aim of every Frenchman of letters to belong to the 'forty geese that guard the Capitol' of French literature, as Diderot, not quite a disinterested witness, called them. Throughout the eighteenth century their power was supreme. Competition for the various academic prizes was, in the infancy of periodicals, the easiest and the commonest method by which a struggling man of letters could make himself known; and literary heresy of any kind was an almost certain cause of exclusion from the body when once the dictatorship of Fontenelle (a benevolent autocrat who, being something of a heretic himself, tolerated freethinking in others) had ceased. Moreover, except in rare cases, chiefly limited to persons of rank who were elected for reasons quite other than literary, it was not usual for an author to gain admission to the Academy until he was well stricken in years, and until, as a natural consequence, his tastes were for the most part formed, and he was impatient of innovation.

At first the influence of the Academy was beyond question salutary in the main, if not wholly. Balzac, whose importance in the history of prose style has been pointed out, was one of its earliest members. It was under its wing that Vaugelas undertook the much-needed enquiry into French grammar and its principles as applied to literature. The majority of the early members were connected with the refining and reforming coteries of the Rambouillet and other salons. It was somewhat slow in electing Boileau, though it is to be feared that this arose from no higher motive than the fact that he had satirised most of its members. But Boileau was the natural guiding spirit of an Academy, and it fell more and more under his influence--not so much his personal influence as that of his principles and critical estimates. In short, during the seventeenth century it played the very useful part of model and measure in the midst of a time when the chief danger was the neglect of measures and of models, and it played it very fairly. But by the time that the eighteenth century began, it was by no means of a restraining and guiding influence that France had most need. The exuberance of creative genius between 1630 and 1690 had supplied literature with actual models far more valuable than any scheme of cut-and-dried rules, and it was in need rather of a stimulant to spur it on to further development. Instead of serving as this, the Academy served (owing, it must be confessed, in great part to the literary conservatism of Voltaire and the _philosophes_ generally) as a check and drag upon the spontaneous instincts all through the century, and in all the departments of Belles Lettres. It contributed more than anything else to the mischievous crystallisation of literary ideas, which during this time offers so strange a contrast to the singular state of solution in which were all ideas relating to religion, politics, and morals. The consequence of the propounding of a set of consecrated models, of the constant competition in imitation of those models, and of the reward of diligent and successful imitation by admission into the body, which in its turn nursed and guided a new generation of imitators, was the reduction of large and important departments of literature to a condition of cut-and-driedness which has no parallel in history. The drama in

## particular, which was artificial and limited at its best, was reduced

to something like the state of a game in which every possible move or stroke is known and registered, and in which the sole novelty consists in contriving some permutation of these moves or strokes which shall be, if possible, not absolutely identical with any former combination. So in a lesser degree, it was in poetry, in history, in prose tales, in verse tales. If a man had a loose imagination, he tried to imitate La Fontaine as well as he could in manner, and outbid him in matter; if he thought himself an epigrammatist, he copied J. B. Rousseau; if he was disposed to edification, the same poet supplied him with models; if the gods had made him descriptive, he executed variations in the style of Delille, or Saint Lambert, who had themselves copied others; if he wrote in any other style, he had an eye to the work of Voltaire. Neologism in vocabulary was carefully eschewed, and a natural consequence of this was the resort (in the struggle not to repeat merely) to elaborate and ingenious periphrases, such as those which have been quoted in the chapter on eighteenth-century poetry. In short, literature had got into a sort of treadmill in which all the effort expended was expended merely in the repeated production of certain prescribed motions.

It was partly a natural result of this, and partly an effect of other and accidental causes, that the actual composition of the Academy was in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by no means such as to inspire much respect. But it was all the less likely to initiate or to head any movement of reform. The consequence was, that when the reform came, it came from the outside, not from the inside, that it was violently opposed, and that, though it prevailed, and its leaders themselves quickly forced their way into the sacred precincts, it was as victorious rebels, not as welcomed allies. The further consequence of this, and of the changes of which account will be given briefly in the following book, was the alteration to a great extent of the status of the Academy. It still (though with the old reproach of illustrious outsiders) includes most of the leading men of letters of France, and its membership is still, theoretically, the greatest honour that a French man of letters can receive. But its position is far more ornamental than it was. It hardly pretends to be in any sense legislative: it is an honorary assembly, not a working parliament. The chief circumstance that keeps it before the public is the curious and time-honoured custom which ordains that the academician appointed to receive each new member shall, in the most polished and amiable manner, give the most ironical description he can of the novice's achievements and claims to recognition.

The exact change in literature which has partly caused, and has partly coincided with this change in the relation of the Academy to letters, will shortly be displayed, though in somewhat less detail than those changes which are at a sufficient distance to be estimated by the aid of what has been well called 'the firm perspective of the past.' For cut-and-dried rules of criticism, carefully selected and limited models, narrow range of subject, scanty vocabulary and its corollary periphrasis, stock metaphor and ornament, stiff or fluidly insignificant metre and rhythm, there have been substituted the exact opposites. The gain in poetry is immense, and if it seems to be somewhat exhausted now, it is fair to remember that fifty years is a long flowering time for any special poetic plant, not often equalled in history, and still less often exceeded. The gain in prose has been more dubious. Great prose writers will have to be noticed, but it may perhaps be doubted whether the average value of French prose as prose has not declined. There would be nothing surprising in this, if it be the case; on the contrary, it would be a mere repetition of the experience of the sixteenth century. The language and literature have been flooded with new words, new forms of speech, new ideas, new models. It takes a very long time before the mixture thus produced can settle down (at least in the vessel of the average prose writer) to clearness and brilliancy. It is otherwise in poetry; in the first place because there is no such thing as an average poet, and in the second, because the peculiar conditions of poetry exercise of themselves a refining influence, which is not present in prose. At present it may be said, and not without truth, that, putting the work of the extraordinary writers aside, ordinary French prose has lost some of its former graces--its lucidity, its proportion, its easy march. From being the most childishly prudish of all writers about neologisms and the _mot propre_, the French prose writer has become the most clumsily promiscuous in his vocabulary. He is always using 'square' instead of 'place,' 'le macadam' instead of 'le pave,' 'un caoutchouc' when he means a waterproof overcoat. Much of this, no doubt, is due to the singular inability which the language seems to experience in forming genuine vernacular compounds; an inability from which a few more persons like the much ridiculed Du Bartas might have rescued it. But, however this may be, it must be admitted that, great as have been the benefits of the Romantic movement, it has left the ordinary French prose style of novel and newspaper in a condition of indigestion and disarray.

As for the movement itself, the most brilliant season of romantic productiveness seems to have terminated, after being long represented only by its greatest, earliest, and at the same time latest name. The comparative disorganisation is all the more noticeable. It is in this disorganisation that our history perforce leaves the magnificent literature which we have traced from its source. Unsafe as all prophecy is, there are few things less safe to prophesy about than the progress of literary development. But it is not historically unreasonable to expect, after the splendid harvest of the last half century, what is called a dead season, of longer or shorter duration. There is nothing really discouraging in such seasons either in nature or in art. In each case there is the garnered wealth of the past to fall back upon, and in each there is confidence that the seeming stagnation and death are in truth only the necessary pause and period of gestation which precede and bring about the life of the future.

## BOOK V.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The Romantic Movement.]

The preceding chapter will at once have indicated the defects under which the later classical literature of France laboured, and the remedies which were necessary for them. Those remedies began to be applied early in the reign of Charles X., and the literary revolution which accompanied them is called the Romantic movement. Strictly speaking, this movement did not affect, or rather was not supposed to affect, any branch of letters except the Belles Lettres; really its influence was far wider, and has affected every branch of literary composition. Nor is it yet exhausted, although more than two generations have passed since the current was started. As is usual in the later stages of such things, this influence is in part disguised under the form of apparent reactions, developments, modifications, and other eddies or backwaters of the great wave. But as the Romantic movement was above all things a movement of literary emancipation, it can never be said to be superseded until fresh chains are imposed on literature. Of this there is as yet no sign, except in the puerile and disgusting school of naturalism, a mere scum-flake--to keep up the metaphor--on the surface of the waters.

[Sidenote: Writers of the later Transition.]

The literature of the Revolution, the Empire, and the early Restoration, which has been in part already surveyed, displayed the last effete products of the old classical tradition side by side with the vigorous but nondescript and tentative efforts at reform of Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Courier, and others. So the first products of the new movement found themselves side by side with what may be called a second generation of the transition. The names which chiefly illustrate this second generation must be dealt with before the Romantics proper are arrived at. The chief of them are Beranger, Lamartine, Lamennais, Cousin, Stendhal, Nodier, and the dramatists Alexandre Soumet and Casimir Delavigne. Most of these, while irresistibly impelled half way towards the movement, stood aloof from it in feeling and taste; others, such as Stendhal, exercised upon it an influence not much felt at first, but deep and lasting; one, Nodier, threw in his lot with it frankly and decidedly.

[Sidenote: Beranger.]

Pierre Jean de Beranger is one of the most original and not the least pleasant figures in the long list of French poets. His life, though long, was comparatively uneventful. Despite the particle of nobility, he belonged to the middle class, and rather to the lower than to the upper portion of it; for, if his father was a man of business, his grandfather was a tailor. He himself lived in his youth with an aunt at Peronne, was then apprenticed to a printer, and was so ill off that, in 1804, he was saved from absolute poverty only by the patronage of Lucien Bonaparte, to whom he had sent some of his verses, and who procured him a small government clerkship. He held this for some years. After the Restoration, Beranger, whose political creed was an odd compound of Bonapartism and Republicanism, got into trouble with the government for his political songs. He was repeatedly fined and imprisoned, but each sentence made him more popular. After the Revolution of July, however, he refused to accept any favours from the Orleanist dynasty, and lived quietly, publishing nothing after 1833. In 1848 he was elected to the Assembly, but immediately resigned his seat. He behaved to the Second Empire as he had behaved to the July monarchy, refusing all honours and appointments. He died in 1857. Beranger's poetical works consist entirely of _Chansons_, political, amatory, bacchanalian, satirical, philosophical after a fashion, and of almost every other complexion that the song can possibly take. Their form is exactly that of the eighteenth-century _Chanson_, the frivolity and licence of language being considerably curtailed, and the range of subjects proportionately extended. The popularity of Beranger with ordinary readers, both in and out of his own country, has always been immense; but a somewhat singular reluctance to admit his merits has been shown by successive generations of purely literary critics. In France his early contemporaries found fault with him on the one hand for being a mere _chansonnier,_ and on the other, for dealing with the _chanson_ in a graver tone than that of his masters, Panard, Colle, Gouffe, and his immediate predecessor and in

## part contemporary, Desaugiers. The sentimental school of the Restoration

thought him vulgar and unromantic. The Romantics proper disdained his pedestrian and conventional style, his classic vocabulary. The neo-Catholics disliked his Voltairianism. The Royalists and the Republicans detested, and detest equally, though from the most opposite sides, his devotion to the Napoleonic legend. Yet Beranger deserves his popularity, and does not deserve the grudging appreciation of critics. His one serious fault is the retention of the conventional mannerism of the eighteenth century in point of poetic diction, and he might argue that time had almost irrevocably associated this with the _chanson_ style. His versification, careless as it looks, is really studied with a great deal of care and success. As to his matter, only prejudice against his political, religious, and ethical attitude, can obscure the lively wit of his best work; its remarkable pathos; its sound common sense; its hearty, if somewhat narrow and mistaken, patriotism; its freedom from self-seeking and personal vanity, spite, or greed; its thorough humanity and wholesome natural feeling. Nor can it be fairly said that his range is narrow. _Le Grenier_, _Le Roi d'Yvetot_, _Roger Bontemps_, _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_, _Les Fous_, _Les Gueux_, cover a considerable variety of tones and subjects, all of which are happily treated. Beranger indeed was not in the least a literary poet. But there is room in literature for other than merely literary poets, and among these Beranger will always hold a very high place. The common comparison of him to Burns is in this erroneous, that the element of passion, which is the most prominent in Burns, is almost absent from Beranger, and that the unliterary character which was an accident with Burns was with Beranger essential. The point of contact is, that both were among the most admirable of song writers, and that both hit infallibly the tastes of the masses among their countrymen.

[Sidenote: Lamartine.]

Alphonse Prat de Lamartine was in almost every conceivable respect the exact opposite to Beranger. He was born at Macon, on the 21st of October, 1791, of a good family of Franche Comte, which, though never very rich, had long devoted itself to arms and agriculture only. His father was a strong royalist, was imprisoned during the Terror, and escaped narrowly. Lamartine was educated principally by the Peres de la Foi, and, after leaving school, spent some time first at home and then in Italy. The Restoration gave him entrance to the royal bodyguard; but he soon exchanged soldiering for diplomacy, and was appointed attache in Italy. He had already (1820) published the _Meditations_, his first volume of verse, which had a great success. Lamartine married an English lady in 1822, and spent some years in the French legations at Naples and Florence. He was elected to the Academy in 1829. After the revolution of July he set out for the East, but, being elected by a constituency to the Chamber of Deputies, returned. He acquired much fame as an orator, contributed not a little to the overthrow of Louis Philippe, and in 1848 enjoyed for a brief space something not unlike a dictatorship. Power, however, soon slipped through his hands, and he retired into private life. His later days were troubled by money difficulties, though he wrote incessantly. In 1867 he received a large grant from the government of Napoleon III., and died not long afterwards--in 1869. The chief works of Lamartine are, in verse, the already mentioned _Meditations_ (of which a new series appeared in 1823), the _Harmonies_, 1829, the _Recueillements_, _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_, _Jocelyn_, _La Chute d'un Ange_, the two last being fragments of a huge epic poem on the ages of the world; in prose, _Souvenirs d'Orient_, _Histoire des Girondins_, _Les Confidences_, _Raphael_, _Graziella_, besides an immense amount of work for the booksellers, in history, biography, criticism, and fiction, produced in his later days. Lamartine's characteristics, both in prose and verse, are well marked. He is before all things a sentimentalist and a landscape-painter. He may indeed be said to have wrought into verse what Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand had already expressed in prose, supplying only an additional, and perhaps original, note of meditative tenderness. Lamartine's verse is exquisitely harmonious, and frequently picturesque; but it is deficient in vigour and brilliancy, and marred by the perpetual current of sentimental complaining. Beyond this he never could get; his only important attempt in a different and larger style, the _Chute d'un Ange_, being, though not without merits, on the whole a failure. In harmony of verse and delicate tenderness of feeling his poetry was an enormous advance on the eighteenth century, and its power over its first readers is easily understood. But Lamartine made little, if any, organic change in the mechanism of French poetry, so far as its versification is concerned, while his want of range in subject equally disabled him from effecting a revolution. His best poems, such as _Le Lac_, _Paysage dans le Golfe de Genes_, _Le Premier Regret_, are however among the happiest expressions of a dainty but rather conventional melancholy, irreproachable from the point of view of morals and religion, thoroughly well bred, and creditably aware of the beauties of nature, which it describes and reproduces with a great deal of skill.

[Sidenote: Lamennais.]

The next name on the list belongs to a far stronger, if a less accomplished, spirit than Lamartine. Felicite Robert de Lamennais was born in 1782, at St. Malo. In the confusion of the last decade of the eighteenth century, when, as a contemporary bears witness, even persons holding important state offices had often received no regular education whatever, Lamennais was for the most part his own teacher. He betook himself, however, to literature, and in 1807 was appointed to a mastership in the St. Malo Grammar School. Shortly afterwards he published a treatise on 'The Church during the Eighteenth Century,' and taking orders before long followed it up by others. These placed him in the forefront of the Catholic reaction, of which Chateaubriand from the picturesque, and Joseph de Maistre from the philosophical side, were the leaders. He took priest's orders in 1816, and in 1817 published his _Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_. This is a sweeping defence of the absolute authority of the Church, but the 'rift within the lute' already appears. Lamennais bases this authority, according to a tradition of that very eighteenth century which he most ardently opposes, on universal consent. Although therefore the deductive portion of his argument is in thorough accordance with Roman doctrine, the inductive portion can hardly be said to be so, and it prepared the way for his subsequent change of front. For a time Lamennais contented himself with the hope of establishing a sect of liberal royalist Catholics. A rapid succession of journals, most of which were suppressed, led to the _Avenir_, in which Montalembert, Lacordaire, and others took part, and which, like some English periodicals of a later period, aimed directly at the union of orthodox religious principles of the Roman complexion with political liberalism, and a certain freedom of thought in other directions. The _Avenir_ was definitely censured by Gregory XVI. in 1832, and Lamennais rapidly fell away from his previous orthodoxy. He had established himself in the country with a following of youthful disciples. Of these the best-known now is Maurice de Guerin, a feeble poet who died young, but who, with his abler sister Eugenie, interested Sainte-Beuve, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and others. _Les Paroles d'un Croyant_, which appeared in 1834, united speculative Republicanism of the most advanced kind with a direct defiance of Rome in matter of religion, and this was followed by a long series of works in the same spirit. Lamennais' ardent and ill-balanced temperament, the chief note of which was the most excessive personal vanity, no sooner threw off the yoke of orthodoxy than it ran to the opposite extreme, and the Catholic royalist of the first empire became an atheistic, or at most theistic, democrat. Lamennais died in 1854. He had a great influence both on men and on books in France, and his literary work is extremely remarkable. It bears the marks of his insufficient education and of his excitable temperament. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ the style is altogether apocalyptic in its mystic and broken declamation, full of colour, energy, and vague impressiveness, but entirely wanting in order, lucidity, and arrangement. The earlier works show something of this, though necessarily not so much. Lamennais' literary, as distinguished from his political and social, importance consists in the fact that he was practically the first to introduce this style into French. He has since had notable disciples, among whom Michelet and even Victor Hugo may be ranked.

[Sidenote: Victor Cousin.]

The contrast of the return from Lamennais to Cousin is almost as great as that of the change from Lamartine to Lamennais. The careers of the poet and the philosopher have indeed something in common, for Cousin's delicate, exquisite, and somewhat feminine prose style is a nearer analogue to the poetry of Lamartine even than the latter's own prose, and the sudden decline of Cousin's reputation in philosophy almost matches that of Lamartine's reputation as a poet. Victor Cousin was born in 1792, at Paris, and was one of the most brilliant pupils of the Lycee Charlemagne. He passed thence to the Ecole Normale, and, in the year of the Restoration, became Assistant Professor to Royer Collard at the Sorbonne. He adopted vigorously the doctrines of that philosopher, which practically amounted to a translation of the Scottish school of Reid and Stewart, but he soon combined with them much that he borrowed from Kant and his successors in Germany. This latter country he visited twice; on the second occasion with the unpleasant result of an arrest. He soon returned to France, however, and became distinguished as a supporter of the liberal party. The years immediately before and after the July Revolution were Cousin's most successful time. His lectures were crowded, his eclecticism was novel and popular, and when after July itself he became officially powerful, he distinguished himself by patronising young men of genius. During the reign of Louis Philippe he was one of the most influential of men of letters, though curiously enough, he combined with his political liberalism a certain tendency to reaction in matters of pure literature. After 1848 he retired from public life, and, though he survived for nearly twenty years, produced little more in philosophy. His brilliant but patchy eclecticism had had its day, and he saw it; but he earned new and perhaps more lasting laurels by betaking himself to the study of French literary history, and producing some charming essays on the ladies of the Fronde. Cousin's history is interesting as an instance of the accidental prosperity which in the first half of this century the mixture of politics and literature brought to men of letters. But his own literary merits are very considerable. Without the freedom and originality of the great writers who were for the most part his juniors by ten or twenty years, he possessed a style studied from the best models of the seventeenth century, which, despite a certain artificiality, has great beauty. Besides editions of philosophical classics, the chief works of his earlier period are _Fragments Philosophiques_, 1827, _Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie_, 1827; of his later, _Du Vrai_, _Du Beau et Du Bien_, and his studies on the women of the seventeenth century.

[Sidenote: Beyle.]

The author now to be noticed has found little place hitherto in histories of literature, and estimates of his positive value are even yet much divided. Henri Beyle, who wrote under the name of De Stendhal, was born at Grenoble, in January, 1783. His family belonged to the middle class, though, unfortunately, Beyle allowed himself during the Empire to be called M. _de_ Beyle, and incurred not a little ridicule in consequence. His literary _alias_ was also, it may be noticed, arranged so as to claim nobility. He was a clever boy, but manifested no special predilection for any profession. At last he entered the army, and served in it (chiefly in the non-combatant branches) on some important occasions, including the campaigns of the St. Bernard, of Jena, and of Moscow. He also held some employments in the civil service of the Empire. At the Restoration he went to Italy, which was always his favourite place of residence; but when in 1821 political troubles began to arise, he was 'politely' expelled by the Austrian police. After this he lived chiefly in Paris, making part of his living by the unexpected function of contributing to the London _New Monthly Magazine_. He knew English well, admired our literature, and visited London more than once. Being, as far as he was a politician at all, a Bonapartist, he was not specially interested in the Revolution of 1830; but it was profitable to him, for through some of his friends he was appointed French consul, first at Trieste, and then (the Austrians objecting) at Civita Vecchia. He lived, however, chiefly at Rome, and travelled a good deal. Latterly his health was weak, and he died at Paris, in 1842, of apoplexy. He was buried at Montmartre; but, with his usual eccentricity, his epitaph was by his direction written in Italian, and he was described as a Milanese. Beyle's character, personal and literary, was very peculiar. In temperament, religious views, and social ideas he was a belated _philosophe_ of the Diderot school. But in literature he had improved even on Diderot, and very nearly anticipated the full results of the Romantic movement, while in politics, as has been said, he was an imperialist. His works are pretty voluminous. They consist of novels (_La Chartreuse de Parme_, _Armance_, _Le Rouge et le Noir_, _Memoires d'un Touriste_, etc.); of criticism (_Histoire de la Peinture en Italie_, _Racine et Shakespeare_, _Melanges_); of biography (Lives of Napoleon, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio, etc.); of topographical writing of a miscellaneous kind (_Promenades dans Rome, Naples et Florence_, etc.); and lastly, of a singular book entitled _De l'Amour_, which unites extraordinary acuteness and originality of thought with cynicism of expression and paradox of theory. In this book, and in his novels, Beyle made himself the ancestor of what has been called successively realism and naturalism in France. Perhaps, however, his most remarkable work was Merimee, of whose family he was a friend, and who, far excelling him in merit of style if not in freshness of thought, learnt beyond all doubt from him his peculiar and half-affected cynicism of tone, his curious predilection for the apparently opposed literatures of England and Southern Europe, and not improbably also his imperialism. Beyle is a difficult author to judge briefly, the contradictions, affectations, and oddities in him demanding minute examination. Of his power, intrinsic and exerted on others, there is no doubt.

[Sidenote: Nodier.]

[Sidenote: Delavigne.]

[Sidenote: Soumet.]

The three remaining writers require shorter notice. Charles Nodier, who was born at Besancon in 1780, and died at Paris in 1844, is one of the most remarkable failures of a great genius in French literary history. He did almost everything--lexicography, text-editing, criticism, poetry, romance--and he did everything well, but perhaps nothing supremely well. If an exception be made to this verdict, it must be in favour of his short tales, some of which are exquisite, and all but, if not quite, masterpieces. As librarian of the Mazarin Library, Nodier was a kind of centre of the early Romantic circle, and, though he was more than twenty years older than most of its members, he identified himself thoroughly with their aims and objects. His consummate knowledge of the history and vocabulary of the French tongue probably had no mean influence on that conservative and restorative character which was one of the best sides of the movement. Casimir Delavigne was born at Havre in 1793. He first distinguished himself by his _Messeniennes_, a series of satires or patriotic jeremiads on the supposed degradation of France under the Restoration. Then he took to the stage, and produced successively _Les Vepres Siciliennes_, _Marino Faliero_, _Louis XI_. (well known in England from the affection which several English tragic actors have shown for the title part), _Les Enfants d'Edouard_, etc. He also wrote other non-dramatic poems, most of them of a political character. Casimir Delavigne is a writer of little intrinsic worth. He held aloof from the Romantic movement, less from dislike to its extravagances and its cliquism, than from genuine weakness and inability to appreciate the defects of the classic tradition. He is in fact the direct successor of Ducis and Marie Joseph Chenier, having forgotten something, but learned little. The defects of his poems are parallel to those of his plays. His patriotism is conventional, his verse conventional, his expression conventional, though the convention is in all three cases slightly concealed by the skilful adoption of a certain outward colouring of energy and picturesqueness. He was not unpopular in his day, being patronised to a certain extent by the extreme classical party, and recommended to the public by his liberal political principles. But he is almost entirely obsolete already, and is never likely to recover more than the reputation due to fair literary workmanship in an inferior style. Alexandre Soumet was another dramatist of the same kind, but perhaps of a less artificial stamp. He adhered to the old model of drama, or to something like it, more, apparently, because it satisfied his requirements, than from abstract predilection for it, or from dislike to the new models. His _Norma_ has the merit of having at least suggested the libretto of one of the most popular of modern operas, and his _Une Fete sous Neron_ is not devoid of merit. Soumet was in the early days of the movement a kind of outsider in it, and it cannot be said that at any time he became an enemy, or that his work is conspicuous for any fatal defects according to the new method of criticism. A deficiency of initiative, rather than, as in Delavigne's case, a preference of inferior models, seems to have been the reason why he did not advance further.

[Sidenote: The Romantic Propaganda in Periodicals.]

It was, however, reserved for a younger generation actually to cross the Rubicon, and to achieve the reform which was needed. The assistance which the vast spread of periodical literature lent to such an attempt has been already noted, and it was in four periodical publications that the first definite note of the literary revolution was sounded. In these the movement was carried on for many years before the famous representation of _Hernani_, which announced the triumph of the innovators. These four publications were: first, _Le Conservateur Litteraire_ (a journal published as early as 1819, before the _Odes_ of Victor Hugo, who was one of its main-stays, or even the _Meditations_ of Lamartine had appeared); secondly, the _Annales Romantiques_, which began in 1823, with perhaps the most brilliant list of contributors that any periodical--with the possible exception of the nearly contemporary _London Magazine_--ever had; a list including Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine, Joseph de Maistre (posthumously), Alfred de Vigny, Henri de Latouche, Hugo, Nodier, Beranger, Casimir Delavigne, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and Delphine Gay, afterwards Madame de Girardin. Although not formally, this was practically a kind of annual of the _Muse Francaise_, which had pretty nearly the same contributors, and conducted the warfare in more definitely polemical manner by criticism and precept, as well as by example. Lastly, there was the important newspaper--a real newspaper this--called _Le Globe_, which appeared in 1822. The other Romantic organs had been either colourless as regards politics, or else more or less definitely conservative and monarchical, the middle age influence being still strong. The _Globe_ was avowedly liberal in politics. Men of the greatest eminence in various ways, Jouffroy, Damiron, Pierre Leroux, and Charles de Remusat, wrote in it; but its literary importance in history is due to the fact that here Sainte-Beuve, the critic of the movement, began, and for a long time carried out the vast series of critical studies of French and other literature which, partly by destruction and partly by construction, made the older literary theory for ever obsolete. The various names in poetry and prose of this romantic movement must now be reviewed.

[Sidenote: Victor Hugo.]

Victor Marie Hugo was born at Besancon on the 28th of February, 1802. His father was an officer of distinction in Napoleon's army, his mother was of Vendean blood and of royalist principles, which last her son for a long time shared. His literary activity began extremely early. He was, as has been seen, a contributor to the _Conservateur Litteraire_ at the age of seventeen, and, with much work which he did not choose to preserve, some which still worthily finds a place in his published collections appeared there. Indeed, with his two brothers, Abel and Eugene, he took a principal share in the management of the periodical. His _Odes et Poesies Diverses_ appeared in 1822, when he was twenty, and were followed two years afterwards by a fresh collection. In these poems, though great strength and beauty of diction are apparent, nothing that can be called distinct innovation appears. It is otherwise with the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826, and the _Orientales_ of 1829. Here the Romantic challenge is definitely thrown down. The subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of colour as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms. Two romances in prose, more fantastic in subject and audacious in treatment than the wildest of the _Orientales_, had preceded the latter. The first, _Han d'Islande_, was published anonymously in 1823. It handled with much extravagance, but with extraordinary force and picturesqueness, the adventures of a bandit in Norway. The second, _Bug Jargal_, an earlier form of which had already appeared in the _Conservateur_, was published in 1826. But the rebels, of whom Victor Hugo was by this time the acknowledged chief, knew that the theatre was at once the stronghold of their enemies, and the most important point of vantage for themselves. Victor Hugo's theatrical, or at least dramatic, _debut_ was not altogether happy. _Cromwell_, which was published in 1828, was not acted, and indeed, from its great length and other peculiarities, could hardly have been acted. It is rather a romance thrown into dramatic form than a play. In its published shape, however, it was introduced by an elaborate preface, containing a full exposition of the new views which served as a kind of manifesto. Some minor works about this time need not be noticed. The final strokes in verse and prose were struck, the one shortly before the revolution of July, the other shortly after it, by the drama of _Hernani, ou l'Honneur Castillan_, and the prose romance of _Notre Dame de Paris_. The former, after great difficulties with the actors and with outside influences--it is said that certain academicians of the old school actually applied to Charles X. to forbid the representation--was acted at the Theatre Francais on the 25th of February, 1830. The latter was published in 1831. The reading of these two celebrated works, despite nearly sixty years of subsequent and constant production with unflagging powers on the part of their author, would suffice to give any one a fair, though not a complete, idea of Victor Hugo, and of the characteristics of the literary movement of which he has been the head. The main subject of _Hernani_ is the point of honour which compels a noble Spaniard to kill himself, in obedience to the blast of a horn sounded by his mortal enemy, at the very moment of his marriage with his beloved. _Notre Dame de Paris_ is a picture by turns brilliant and sombre of the manners of the mediaeval capital. In both the author's great failing, a deficient sense of humour and of proportion, which occasionally makes him overstep the line between the sublime and the ridiculous, is sometimes perceivable. In both, too, there is a certain lack of technical neatness and completeness in construction. But the extraordinary command of the tragic passions of pity, admiration, and terror, the wonderful faculty of painting in words, the magnificence of language, the power of indefinite poetical suggestion, the sweep and rush of style which transports the reader, almost against his will and judgment, are fully manifest in them. As a mere innovation, _Hernani_ is the most striking of the two. Almost every rule of the old French stage is deliberately violated. Although the language is in parts ornate to a degree, the old periphrases are wholly excluded; and when simple things have to be said they are said with the utmost simplicity. The cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously reconstructed. Not merely is the practice of _enjambement_ (or overlapping of lines and couplets, as distinct from the rigid separation of them) frequent and daring, but the whole balance and rhythm of the individual line is altered. Ever since Racine the one aim of the dramatist had been to make the Alexandrine run as monotonously as possible. The aim of Victor Hugo was to make it run with the greatest possible variety. In short, the whole theory of the drama was altered. The decade which followed the revolution of July was Victor Hugo's most triumphant period. A series of dramas, _Marion de Lorme_, _Les Roi s'Amuse_, _Lucrece Borgia_, _Marie Tudor_, _Angelo_, _Les Burgraves_, succeeded each other at short intervals, and were accompanied by four volumes of immortal verse, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, _Chants du Crepuscule_, _Les Voix Interieures_, _Les Rayons et les Ombres_. The dramas continued to show Victor Hugo's command of tragic passion, his wonderful faculty of verse, his fertility in moving situations, and in incidents of horror and grandeur; but they did not indicate an increased acquaintance with those minor arts of the playwright, which are necessary to the success of acted dramas, and which many of Hugo's own pupils possessed to perfection. Accordingly, towards the end of the decade, some reaction took place against them, and their author ceased to write for the stage. His purely poetical productions showed, however, an increase at once of poetical and of critical power; and of the four volumes mentioned, each one contains many pieces which have never been excelled in French poetry, and which may be fairly compared with the greatest poetical productions of the same kind in other literatures. Meanwhile, Victor Hugo's political ideas (which never, in any of their forms, brought him much luck, literary or other) had undergone a remarkable change. During the reign of Louis Philippe, he, who had recently been an ardent legitimist, became, first, a constitutional royalist (in which capacity he accepted from the king a peerage), then an extreme liberal, and at last, when the revolution of 1848 broke out, a republican democrat. He was banished for his opposition to Louis Napoleon, and fled, first to Brussels, and then to the Channel Islands, launching against his enemy a prose lampoon, _Napoleon le Petit_, and then a volume of verse, _Les Chatiments_, of marvellous vigour and brilliancy. During the ten years before this his literary work had been for the most part suspended, at least as far as publication is concerned. But his exile gave a fresh spur to his genius. After four years' residence, first in Jersey, then in Guernsey, he published _Les Contemplations_ (2 vols.), a collection of lyrical pieces, not different in general form from the four volumes which had preceded them; and, in 1859, _La Legende des Siecles_, a marvellous series of narrative or pictorial poems representing scenes from different epochs of the history of the world. These three volumes together represent his poetical talent at its highest. He, at other times before and since, equalled but never surpassed them. In _La Legende des Siecles_ the variety of the music, the majesty of some of the pieces and the pathos of others, the rapid succession of brilliant dissolving views, and the complete mastery of language and versification at which the poet arrived, combine to produce an effect not easily paralleled elsewhere. The _Contemplations_, as their name imports, are chiefly meditative. They are somewhat unequal, and the tone of speculative pondering on the mysteries of life which distinguishes them sometimes drops into what is called sermonising, but their best pieces are admirable. During the whole of the Second Empire Victor Hugo continued to reside in Guernsey, publishing, in 1862, a long prose romance, _Les Miserables_, one of the most unequal of his books; then another, the exquisite _Travailleurs de la Mer_, as well as a volume of criticism on _William Shakespeare_, some passages in which rank among the best pieces of ornate prose in French; and, in 1869, _L'Homme qui Rit_, a historical romance of a somewhat extravagant character, recalling his earliest attempts in this kind, but full of power. A small collection of lyric verse, mostly light and pastoral in character, had appeared under the title of _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_. The Revolution which followed the troubles of France, in 1870, restored Victor Hugo to his country only to inflict a bitter, though passing, annoyance on him. He had somewhat mistaken the temper of the National Assembly at Bordeaux to which he had been elected. He even found himself laughed at, and he retired to Brussels in disgust. Here he was identified by public opinion with the Communists, and subjected to some manifestations of popular displeasure, which, unfortunately, his sensitive temperament and vivid imagination magnified unreasonably. Returning to France after the publication of nearly his weakest book, _L'Annee Terrible_, he lived quietly, but as a kind of popular and literary idol, till his death in 1885. Of his abundant later (including not a little posthumous) work _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, another historical romance, and two books of poetry (a second series of the _Legende des Siecles_, 1877, and _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, 1881) at their best, equal anything he has ever done. The second _Legende_ is inferior to the first in variety of tone and in vivid pictorial presentment, but equals it in the declamatory vigour of its best passages. _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_ is, perhaps, the most striking single book that Victor Hugo produced, containing as it does lyric and narrative work of the very finest quality, and a drama of an entirely original character, which, after more than sixty years of publicity, showed a new side of the author's genius.

This somewhat minute account of Victor Hugo's work must be supplemented by some general criticism of his literary characteristics. As will probably have been observed, from what has already been said, there were remarkable gaps in his ability. In purely intellectual characteristics, the characteristics of the logician and the philosopher, he was weak. He was also, as has been said, deficient in the sense of humorous contrast, and in the perception of strict literary proportion. Long years of solitary pre-eminence, and of the frequently unreasonable worship of fools as well as of wise men, gave him, or encouraged in him, a tendency to regard the universe too much from the point of view of France in the first place, Paris in the second, and Victor Hugo in the third. His unequalled skill in the management of proper names tempted him to abuse them as instruments of sonority in his verse. He is often inaccurate in fact, presenting in this respect a remarkable resemblance to his counterpart and complement Voltaire. The one merit which swallowed up almost all others in classical and pseudo-classical literature is wanting in him--the sense of measure. He is a childish politician, a visionary social reformer. But, when all this has been said, there remains a sum total of purely literary merits which suffices to place him on a level with the greatest in literature. The mere fact that he is equally remarkable for the exquisite grace of his smaller lyrics, and for the rhetorical magnificence of his declamatory passages, argues some peculiar and masterly idiosyncrasy in him. No poet has a rarer and more delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed and dazzling excellence of the manner. This is the special test of poetry, and there is none other. The technical means by which Victor Hugo produces these effects have been already hinted at. They consist in a mastery of varied versification, in an extraordinary command of pictorial language, dealing at once with physical and mental phenomena, and, above all, in a certain irresistible habit of never allowing the iron to grow cold. Stroke follows stroke in the exciting and transporting process in a manner not easily paralleled in other writers. Other poets are often best exhibited by very short extracts, by jewels five words long. This is not so with Victor Hugo. He has such jewels, but they are not his chief titles to admiration. The ardour and flow, as of molten metal, which characterise him are felt only in the mass, and must be sought there. What has been said of his verse is true, with but slight modifications, of his prose, which is however on the whole inferior. His unequalled versification is a weapon which he could not exchange for the less pointed tool of prose without losing much of his power. His defects emerge as his merits subside. But taking him altogether, it may be asserted, without the least fear of contradiction, that Victor Hugo deserves the title of the greatest poet hitherto, and of one of the greatest prose writers of France. Such a faculty, thrown into almost any cause, must have gone far to make it triumph. But in a cause of such merits, and so stoutly seconded by others, as that of the destruction of the classical tradition which had cramped and starved French literature, there could be no doubt of success when a champion such as Victor Hugo took up and carried through to the end the task of championship.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.]

It is very seldom that the two different forces of criticism and creation work together as they did in the case of the Romantic movement. Each had numerous representatives, but the point of importance is that each was represented by one of the greatest masters. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the critic not merely of the Romantic movement, but of the nineteenth century, and in a manner the first scientific and universal critic that the world has seen, was born at Boulogne on the 23rd of December, 1804. His father held an office of some importance; his mother was of English blood. He was well educated, first at his native town, then at Paris. He began by studying medicine, but very soon turned to literature, and, as has been said, distinguished himself on the _Globe_. The most important of his articles in this paper were devoted to the French literature of the sixteenth century, and these were published as a volume, in 1828, with great success. Sainte-Beuve at once became the critic _en titre_ of the movement, though he did not very long continue in formal connection with it. It was some time, however, before he resigned himself to purely critical work. _Les Poesies de Joseph Delorme_, _Les Consolations_, and _Volupte_ were successive attempts at original composition, which, despite the talent of their author, hardly made much mark, or deserved to make it. He did not persevere further in a career for which he was evidently unfitted, but betook himself to the long series of separate critical studies, partly of foreign and classical literature, but usually of French, which made his reputation. The papers to which he chiefly contributed were the _Constitutionnel_ and the _Moniteur_, and during the middle of this century his Monday _feuilletons_ of criticism were the chief recurring literary event of Europe. These studies were at intervals collected and published in sets under the titles _Critiques et Portraits Litteraires_, _Portraits Contemporains_, _Causeries du Lundi_, and _Nouveaux Lundis_, the last series only finishing with his death in 1869. Besides this he had undertaken a single work of great magnitude in his _Histoire de Port Royal_, on which he spent some twenty years. He was elected to the Academy in 1845, and after the establishment of the Empire he was one of the few distinguished literary men who took its side. The first reward that he obtained was a professorship in the College de France; but some years before his death he received the senatorship, a lucrative position, and one which interfered very little with the studies of the occupant. In character Sainte-Beuve strongly resembled some of the epicureans of his favourite seventeenth century; but whatever faults he may have had were redeemed by much good-nature and an entire absence of literary vanity.

[Sidenote: His Method.]

[Sidenote: Dangers of the Method.]

The importance of Sainte-Beuve in literature is historically, and as a matter of influence, superior even to that of the great poet with whom he was for some time in close friendship, though before very long their stars fell apart. Until his time the science of criticism had been almost entirely conducted on what may be called pedagogic lines. The critic either constructed for himself, or more probably accepted from tradition, a cut-and-dried scheme of the correct plan of different kinds of literature, and contented himself with adjusting any new work to this, marking off its agreements or differences, and judging accordingly. Here and there in French literature critics like Saint-Evremond, Fenelon, La Bruyere in part, Diderot, Joubert, had adopted another method, but the small acquaintance which most Frenchmen possessed of literature other than their own stood in the way of success. Sainte-Beuve was the first to found criticism on a wide study of literature, instead of directing a more or less narrow study of literature by critical rules. Victor Hugo himself has laid down, in the preface to the _Orientales_, one important principle--the principle that the critic has only to judge of the intrinsic goodness of the book, and not of its conformity to certain pre-established ideas. There remains the difficulty of deciding what is intrinsically good or bad. To solve this, the only way is, first, to prepare the mind of the critic by a wide study of literature, which may free him from merely local and national prejudices; and, secondly, to direct his attention not so much to cut-and-dried ideas of an epic, a sonnet, a drama, as to the object which the author himself had before him when he composed his work. In carrying out this principle it becomes obviously of great importance to study the man himself as well as his works, and his works as a whole as well as the particular sample before the judge. Sainte-Beuve was almost the first in France to set the example of the _causerie critique_, the essay which sets before the reader the life, circumstances, aims, society, and literary atmosphere of the author, as well as his literary achievements. This accounts for the extreme interest shown by the public in what had very commonly been regarded as one of the idlest and least profitable kinds of literature. At the same time the method has two dangers to which it is specially exposed. One is the danger of limiting the consideration to external facts merely, and giving a gossiping biography rather than a criticism. The other, and the more subtle danger, is the construction of a new cut-and-dried theory instead of the old one, by regarding every man as simply a product of his age and circumstances, and ticketing him off accordingly without considering his works themselves to see whether they bear out the theory by facts. In either case, the great question which Victor Hugo has stated, 'L'ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?' remains unanswered in any satisfactory measure. Sainte-Beuve himself did not often fall into either error. His taste was remarkably catholic and remarkably fine. The only fault which can justly be found with him is the fault which naturally besets such a critic, the tendency to look too complacently on persons of moderate talent, whose merits he himself is perhaps the first to recognise fully, and to be proportionately unjust to the greater names whose merits, on good systems and bad alike, are universally acknowledged, in whose case it is difficult to say anything new, and who are therefore somewhat ungrateful subjects for the ingenious and delicate analysis which more mixed talents repay. But study of the work of such a man as Sainte-Beuve is an almost absolute safeguard against the intolerance of former days in matter of literature, and this is its great merit.

[Sidenote: Dumas the Elder.]

Around Victor Hugo were grouped not a few writers who were only inferior to himself. But, before mentioning the members of what is called the _cenacle_, or innermost Romantic circle, a third name of almost equal temporary importance to those of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve must be named--that of Alexandre Dumas. This writer, one of the most prolific, and in some respects one of the most remarkable of dramatists and novelists, was the son of a general in the revolutionary army, and was born, on the 23rd of July, 1806, at Villers Cotterets. He had hardly any education; but, coming to Paris at the age of twenty, he was fortunate enough to obtain a clerkship in the household of the Duke of Orleans. He tried literature almost at once, and in 1829 his _Henri III. et sa Cour_ was played, and was a great success. This was a year before _Hernani_, and though Dumas had no pretence to rival Hugo in literary merit, his drama was quite as revolutionary in style, events, language, and general arrangement as Hugo's. But he had not heralded it by any general defiance, and it possessed (what his greater contemporary's dramatic work never fully possessed) the indefinable knowledge of the stage and its requirements, which always tells on an audience. After the Revolution of July, the daring play of _Antony_ achieved an almost equal success, despite its attacks on the proprieties, attacks of which at that time French opinion was not tolerant in a serious play. Then he returned to the historical drama in the _Tour de Nesle_, another play of strong situations and reckless sacrifice of everything else to excitement. After this Dumas published many plays, of which _Don Juan de Marana_ and _Kean_ are perhaps the most extravagant, and _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, 1839, the best. But before long he fell into a train of writing more profitable even than the drama. This was the composition of historical romances something in Scott's manner. The most famous of these, such as the _Three Musketeers_, _La Reine Margot_, and _Monte Cristo_, were produced towards the latter part of the reign of Louis Philippe, his early patron. He travelled a great deal, making books and money out of his travels; and sometimes, as when he was the companion of Garibaldi, finding himself in curious company. No man, probably, ever made so much money by literature in France as Dumas, though he was not equally skilled in keeping it. He died, in the midst of the disasters of his country, on Christmas Eve, 1870. Dumas' literary position and influence are not very easy to estimate, because of the strange extent to which he carried what is called collaboration, and his frank avowal of something very like plagiarism in many of the works which he wrote unassisted. Endeavours have even been made to show that his most celebrated works are the production of hack writers whom he paid to write under his name. Nor is there the least doubt that he did resort on a large scale to something like the practice of those portrait painters who employ their pupils to paint in the draperies, backgrounds, and accessories of their work. But that Dumas was the moving spirit still, and the actual author of what is best and most peculiar in the works that go by his name, is sufficiently proved by the fact that none of his assistants, whose names are in many cases known, and who in not a few instances subsequently attained eminence on their own account, have equalled or even resembled his peculiar style. Dumas' dramatic work is of but little value as literature properly so called. His forte is the already mentioned playwright's instinct, as it may be termed, which made him almost invariably choose and conduct his action in a manner so interesting and absorbing to the audience that they had no time to think of the merits of the style, the propriety of the morals, the congruity of the sentiments. His plays, in short, are intended to be acted, not to be read. Of his novels many are disfigured by long passages of the inferior work to be expected from mere hack assistants, by unskilful insertions of passages from his authorities, and sometimes by plagiarisms so audacious and flagrant, that the reader takes them as little less than an insult. His best work, however, such as the whole of the long series ranging from _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ through _Vingt Ans apres_ to _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_, a second long series of which _La Reine Margot_ is a member, and parts of others, has peculiar and almost unique merits. The style is not more remarkable as such than that of the dramas; there is not always, or often, a well-defined plot, and the characters are drawn only in the broadest outline. But the cunning admixture of incident and dialogue by which Dumas carries on the interest of his gigantic narrations without wearying the reader is a secret of his own, and has never been thoroughly mastered by any one else.

[Sidenote: Honore de Balzac.]

While Dumas thus gave himself up to the novel of incident, two other writers of equally remarkable genius, and of greater merely literary power, also devoted themselves to prose fiction, and by this means exercised a wide influence on their generation. Honore de Balzac was born at Tours, on the 20th of May, 1799. He was fairly well educated, but his father's circumstances compelled him to place his son in a lawyer's office. This Balzac could not endure, and he very shortly betook himself to literature, suffering very considerable hardships. The task he attempted was fiction, and his experience in it was unique. For years he wrote steadily, and published dozens of volumes, not merely without attaining success, but without deserving any. But few of these are ever read now, and when they are opened it is out of mere curiosity, a curiosity which meets with but little return. Yet Balzac continued, in spite of hardship and of ill success, to work on, and in his thirtieth year he made his first mark with _Les Derniers Chouans_, a historical novel, which, if not of great excellence, at least shows a peculiar and decided talent. From this time forward he worked with spirit and success in his own manner, and in twenty years produced the vast collection which he himself termed _La Comedie Humaine_, the individual novels being often connected by community of personages, and always by the peculiar fashion of analytical display of character which from them is identified with Balzac's name. The most successful of these are concerned with Parisian life, and perhaps the most powerful of all are _Le Pere Goriot_, _Eugenie Grandet_, _La Cousine Bette_, _La Peau de Chagrin_, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Seraphita_. The last is the best piece of mere writing that Balzac has produced. He had also a wonderful faculty for short tales (_Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, _Une Passion dans le Desert_, etc.). He tried the theatre, but failed. Notwithstanding Balzac's untiring energy (he would often work for weeks together with the briefest intervals of sleep) and the popularity of his books, he was always in pecuniary difficulties. These were caused partly by his mania for speculation, and partly by his singular habits of composition. He would write a novel in short compass, have it printed, then enlarge the printed sheets with corrections, and repeat this process again and again until the expenses of the mere printing swallowed up great part of the profits of the work. At last he obtained wealth, and, as it seemed, a prospect of happiness. In 1850 he married Madame Hanska, a rich Polish lady, to whom he had been attached for many years. He had prepared for a life of opulent ease at Paris with his wife; but a few months after his marriage he died of heart disease. Balzac is in a way the greatest of French novelists, because he is the most entirely singular and original. It has been said of him, with as much truth as exaggeration, that he has drawn a whole world of character after having first created it out of his own head. Balzac's characters are never quite human, and the atmosphere in which they are placed has something of the same unreality (though it is for the most part tragically and not comically unreal) as that of Dickens. Everything is seen through a kind of distorting lens, yet the actual vision is defined with the most extraordinary precision, and in the most vivid colours. Balzac had great drawbacks. Despite his noble prefix he cannot conceive or draw either a gentleman or a lady. His virtuous characters are usually virtuous in the theatrical sense only; his scheme of human character is altogether low and mean. But he can analyse vice and meanness with wonderful vigour, and he is almost unmatched in the power of conferring apparent reality upon what the reader nevertheless feels to be imaginary and ideal. It follows almost necessarily that he is happiest when his subject has a strong touch of the fantastic. The already mentioned _Peau de Chagrin_--a magic skin which confers wishing powers on its possessor but shrivels at each wish, shortening his life correspondingly--and _Seraphita_, a purely romantic or fantastic tale, are instances of this. Almost more striking than either are the _Contes Drolatiques_, tales composed in imitation of the manner and language of the sixteenth century. Here the grotesque and fantastic incidents and tone exactly suit the writer, and some of the stories are among the masterpieces of French literature. The same sympathy with the abnormal may be noticed in the _Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, where a solitary painter touches and retouches his supposed masterpiece till he loses all power of self-criticism, and at lasts exhibits triumphantly a shapeless and unintelligible daub of mingled colours. Balzac's style is not in itself of the best; it is clumsy, inelastic, and destitute of the order and proportion which distinguish the best French prose, but it is not ill suited to the peculiar character of his work.

[Sidenote: George Sand.]

With Balzac's name is inseparably connected, if only from the striking contrast between them, that of George Sand. Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who took the writing name of George Sand, was born at Paris in 1804, and had a somewhat singular family history, of which it is enough to say here that she was descended through her father's mother from Marshal Saxe, the famous son of Augustus of Saxony and Aurore von Koeningsmarck. At the age of eighteen she married a man named Dudevant, and was very unhappy, though it is rather difficult to determine on whom the blame of the unhappiness ought to rest. They separated after a few years, and she came to Paris, from her home at Nohant in Berry, to seek a living. She found it soon in literature, having met with a friend and companion in the novelist Jules Sandeau, and with a stern and most useful critic in Henri de Latouche. Her first novel of importance was _Indiana_, published in 1832. This was followed by _Valentine_, _Lelia_, _Jacques_, etc. The interest of all or most of these turns on the sufferings of the _femme incomprise_, a celebrated person in literature, of whom George Sand is the historiographer, if not the inventor. A long series of novels of this kind gave way, between 1840 and 1849, first to a series of philosophical rhapsodies, of which _Spiridion_ is the chief, and then to one in which the political aspirations of the socialist Republicans appear. Of these, _Consuelo_, which is perhaps popularly considered the author's masterpiece, was the chief. Her private history was somewhat remarkable, and she succeeded in making at least two men of greater genius than herself, Alfred de Musset and Chopin, utterly miserable. They, however, afforded the subjects of two noteworthy books, _Elle et Lui_, and _Lucrezia Floriani_, the latter perhaps the most characteristic of all her early works. After the establishment of the Second Empire her tastes and habits became quieter. She lived chiefly, and latterly almost wholly, at Nohant, being greatly attached to the country; and she wrote many charming sketches of country life with felicitous introduction of _patois_, such as _La Mare au Diable_, _Francois le Champi_, _La Petite Fadette_. Some voluminous memoirs, published in 1854, dealt with her own early experiences. She lived till the age of seventy-two, dying in 1876, and never ceased to put forth novels which showed no distinct falling off in fertility or imagination, or in command of literary style. She must have written in all nearly a hundred books. As the chief characteristics of Balzac are intense observation, concentrated thought, and the most obstinate and unwearying labour, so the chief characteristic of George Sand is easy improvisation. She had an active and receptive mind which took in the surface of things, whether it was love, or philosophy, or politics, or scenery, or manners, with remarkable and indifferent facility. She had also a style which, if it cannot be ranked among the great literary styles from its absence of statuesque outline, and from its too great fluidity, was excellently suited for the task of improvisation. Her novels, therefore, slipped from her without the slightest mental effort, and appear to have cost her nothing. It is not true, in this case, that what has cost nothing is worth nothing. But even favourable critics admit that it is peculiarly difficult to read a novel of George Sand a second time, and this is perhaps a decisive test. She is, indeed, far more of an improvising novelist than Dumas, to whom the term has more often been applied, though she wrote better French, and attempted more ambitious subjects. The better characteristics of her novels reappeared, perhaps to greater advantage, in her numerous and agreeable letters, especially those to the novelist Flaubert.

[Sidenote: Merimee.]

In striking contrast with these three novelists was Prosper Merimee, also a novelist for the most part, but, unlike them, a comparatively infertile writer[292], and one of the most exquisite masters of French prose that the nineteenth century has seen. Merimee was born in 1803, and was therefore almost exactly of an age with the writers just mentioned. For a time he took a certain share in the Romantic movement, but his distinguishing characteristic was a kind of critical cynicism,

## partly real, partly affected, which made him dislike and distrust

exaggeration of all kinds. He accordingly soon fell off. Possessing independent means, and entering the service of the government, he was not obliged to write for bread, and for many years he produced little, devoting himself as much to archaeology and the classical languages as to French. He accepted the Second Empire apparently from a genuine and hearty hatred of democracy, and was rewarded with the post of senator. But he had to assist Napoleon III. in his _Caesar_, and to dance attendance on the Court, the latter duty being made somewhat less irksome to him by his personal attachment to the Empress. Two collections of letters, which have appeared since his death, one addressed to an unknown lady, and the other to the late Sir Antonio Panizzi, while adding to Merimee's literary reputation, have thrown very curious light on his character, exhibiting him as a man who, with very genuine and hearty affections, veiled them under an outward cloak of cynicism, for fear of being betrayed into vulgarity and extravagance. He died in 1870, at the beginning of the troubles of France, by which he was deeply afflicted. The entire amount of Merimee's work is, as has been said, not large, and during the last twenty years of his life it is almost insignificant. But such as it is, it has an enduring and monumental value, which belongs to the work of few of his contemporaries. He began by a curious practice, which united the romantic fancy for strange countries and strong local colour with his personal longing for privacy and the absence of literary _eclat. Le Theatre de Clara Gazul_--plays, nominally by a Spanish actress--was produced when he was but one-and-twenty; two years later, with an audacious anagram on the title of his previous work, he published, under the title of _La Guzla_, some nominal translation of Dalmatian prose and verse, in which he utilised with extraordinary cleverness the existing books on Slav poetry. _La Famille de Carvajal_ was a further _supercherie_ in the same style. In the very height and climax of the Romantic movement Merimee produced two works, attesting at once his marvellous supremacy of style, his strange critical appreciation of the current forces in literature, his penetrating insight into history, and the satiric background of all his thoughts and studies. These were _La Jacquerie_, and a _Chronique du Regne de Charles IX_. These books, with Balzac's _Contes Drolatiques_ (which they long preceded), are the most happy creative criticisms extant of the middle ages and the Renaissance in France. They are not fair or complete: on the contrary, they are definitely and unfairly hostile. But the mastery at once of human nature and of literary form which they display, the faculty of vivid resurrection indicated by them, the range, the insight, the power of expression, are extraordinary. During the rest of his life Merimee, with some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archaeology, and criticism, confined himself for the most part to the production, at long intervals, of short tales or novels of very limited length. They are all masterpieces of literature, and, like most masterpieces of literature, they indicate, in a comparatively incidental and by-the-way fashion, paths which duller men have followed up to the natural result of absurdity and exaggeration. _Colomba_, _Mateo Falcone_, _La Double Meprise_, _La Venus d'Ille_, _L'Enlevement de la Redoute_, _Lokis_, have equals, but no superiors either in French prose fiction or in French prose. Grasp of human character, reserved but masterly description of scenery, delicate analysis of motive, ability to represent the supernatural, pathos, grandeur, simple narrative excellence, appear turn by turn in these wonderful pieces, as they appear hardly anywhere else except in the author to whom we shall come next. It is noteworthy, however, that Merimee is a master of the simple style in literature as Gautier is of the ornate. One cannot be said to be greater than the other, but between them they exhibit French prose in a perfection which, since the seventeenth century, it had not possessed.

[Sidenote: Theophile Gautier.]

Theophile Gautier was born considerably later than most of the writers just mentioned. His birth-year was 1811, and he was a native of Tarbes in Gascony. His education was partly at the grammar school of that town, and partly at the Lycee Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gerard de Nerval, who was destined to have a great influence on his life. After leaving school he was intended for the profession of art. But, like Thackeray, to whom he had many points of resemblance, he had much less artistic faculty than taste. Gerard introduced him to the circle of Victor Hugo, and he speedily became one of the most fervent disciples of the author of _Hernani_. In a red waistcoat which has become historic, and in a mass of long hair which he continued to wear through life, he was the foremost of the Hugonic _claque_ at the representation of that famous play. Young as he was, he soon justified himself as something more than a hanger-on of great men of letters. In 1830 itself he produced a volume of verse, and this was followed by _Albertus_, an audacious poem in the extremest Romantic style, and by a work which did him both harm and good, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. In this the most remarkable qualities of style and artistic conception were accompanied by a wilful disregard of the proprieties. Before long his unusual command of style, which was partly natural, partly founded on a wide and accurate study of the French writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, recommended him to newspaper work, at which he toiled manfully for the remainder of his life. There was hardly a department of belles lettres which he did not attempt. He travelled in Algeria, in Russia, in Turkey, in Spain, in Italy, in England, and wrote accounts of his travels, which are among the most brilliant ever printed. He was an assiduous critic of art, of the drama and of literature, and the only charge which has ever been brought against his work in this kind is that it is usually too lenient--that his fine appreciation of even the smallest beauties has made him overlook gross defects. His work in prose fiction was incessant, in poetry more intermittent, and all the more perfect. When the Empire established itself, Gautier, who had no political sympathies, but was, in an undecided sort of way, a conservative from the aesthetic point of view, accepted it. But he gave it no active support, beyond continuing to contribute to the _Moniteur_, and received from it no patronage of any kind. Nor did he sacrifice the least iota of principle, insisting, in the very face of _Les Chatiments_, on having his praise of Victor Hugo inserted in the official journal on pain of his instant resignation. He led a pleasant but laborious life in one of the suburbs of Paris, with a household of sisters, daughters, and cats, to all of whom he was deeply attached. Here he lived through the Prussian siege. On the restoration of order he manfully grappled with his journalist work again, all hopes of lucrative appointments having gone with the Empire. But his health had been broken for some time, and he died in 1872. The works by which Gautier will be remembered are, in miscellaneous prose, a remarkable series of studies on curious figures, chiefly of the seventeenth century, called _Les Grotesques_, and a companion series on the partakers in the movement of 1830, besides his descriptive books. In novel writing there must be mentioned an unsurpassed collection of short tales (the best of which is _La Morte Amoureuse_); _Le Roman de la Momie_, a clever _tour de force_ reviving ancient Egyptian life; and, lastly, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, a novel in the manner of Dumas, but fashioned in his own inimitable style. In verse, he wrote, besides work already mentioned, the _Comedie de la Mort_, some miscellaneous poems of later date, and, finally, the _Emaux et Camees_. In prose he is, as has been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as Merimee is the greatest master of the simple style. His mastery over mere language is accompanied by a very fine sense of the total form of his tales, so that the already-mentioned _Morte Amoureuse_ is one of the unsurpassable things of literature. In general writing he has a singular faculty of embalming the most trivial details in the amber of his style, so that his articles can be read again and again for the mere beauty of them. As a poet he is specially noteworthy for the same command of form joined to the same exquisite perfection of language. In _Emaux et Camees_ especially it is almost impossible to find a flaw; language, metre, arrangement, are all complete and perfect, and this formal completeness is further informed by abundant poetic suggestion. The chief fault, if it be a fault, which can be found with Gautier is, that he set himself too deliberately against the tendencies of his age, and excluded too rigidly everything but purely aesthetic subjects of interest from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.

[Sidenote: Alfred de Musset.]

The most happily-gifted, save one, of the great men of 1830, the weakest beyond comparison in will, in temperament, in faculty of improving his natural gifts, has yet to be mentioned. Alfred de Musset was born at Paris in 1810. His father held a government place of some value; his elder brother, M. Paul de Musset, was himself a man of letters, and at the same time deeply attached to his younger brother; and the family, though after the death of the father their means were not great, constantly supplied Alfred with a home. He was, fortunately or unfortunately, thrown, when quite a boy, into the society of Victor Hugo, the _cenacle_ or inner clique of the Romantic movement. When only nineteen Musset published a volume of poetry, which showed in him a poetic talent inferior only to Hugo's own, and, indeed, not so much inferior as different. These _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_ were quickly followed up by a volume entitled _Un Spectacle dans un Fauteuil_, and Musset became famous. Unfortunately for him, he became intimate with George Sand, and the result was a journey to Italy, from which he returned equally broken in health and in heart. His temperament was of almost ultra-poetic excitability, and he had a positively morbid incapacity for undertaking any useful employment, whether it was in itself congenial or no. Thus he refused a well-paid and agreeable position in the French embassy at Madrid; and though he had written admirable prose tales for his own pleasure, he was either unwilling or unable to write them under a regular commission. As he grew older he unfortunately became addicted to the constant and excessive use of stimulants. He was elected to the Academy in 1852, but produced little of value thereafter, and died in 1857. Alfred de Musset's work, notwithstanding his comparatively short life and his want of regular energy, is not inconsiderable in amount, and in quality is of the highest merit and interest. His poems, its most important item, are deficient in strictly formal merit. He is a very careless versifier and rhymer, and his choice of language is far from exquisite. He has, however, a wonderful note of genuine passion, somewhat of the Byronic kind, but quite independent in species, and entirely free from the falsetto which spoils so much of Byron's work. Besides this his lyrics are, in what may be called 'song-quality,' scarcely to be surpassed. _Les Nuits_, a series of meditative poems in the form of dialogues between the poet and his muse on nights in the month of May, August, October, and December; _Rolla_, an extravagant but powerful tale of the _maladie du siecle_; the addresses to Lamartine and to Malibran, and a few more poems, yield to no work of our time in genuine, original, and passionate music. Next to his poems in subject, though not in merit, may be ranked the prose _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_. His prose tales, _Emmeline_, _Frederic et Bernerette_, etc., are of great merit, but inferior relatively to his poems, and to his remarkable dramas. These latter are among the most original work of the century. It was some time before they commended themselves to audiences in France, but they have long won their true position. They are of very various kinds. Some, and perhaps the happiest, are of the class called, in French, _proverbes_, dramatic illustrations, that is to say, of some common saying, _Il ne faut jurer de rien: Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, etc. The grace and delicacy of these, the ingenuity with which the story is adapted to the moral, the abundant wit (for wit is one of Musset's most prominent characteristics) which illustrates and pervades them, make them unique in literature. Others, such as _Les Caprices de Marianne_, _Le Chandelier_, are regular comedies, admitting, as against the classical tradition, that a comedy may end ill; and others, as _Lorenzaccio_, nearly attain to the dignity of the historic play. The dramatic instinct in Musset was very strong, and may, perhaps, be said to have exceeded in volume, originality, and variety, if not in intensity, the purely poetical. Altogether, Musset is the most remarkable instance in French literature, and one of the most remarkable in the literature of Europe, of merely natural genius, hardly at all developed by study, and not assisted in the least by critical power and a strong will. What, perhaps, distinguished him most is the singular conjunction of the most fervid passion and the most touching lyrical 'cry' with the finest wit, and with unusual dramatic ability.

[Sidenote: Influence of the Romantic Leaders.]

These eight sum up whatever is greatest and most influential in the generation of 1830. Victor Hugo gave direction and leading to the movement, identified it with his own masterly and commanding genius, furnished it, at brief intervals, with consummate examples. Sainte-Beuve supplied it with the necessary basis of an immense comparative erudition, by which he was enabled to disengage and to exhibit to those who run the true principles of literary criticism, and to point the younger generation to the sources of a richer vocabulary, a more flexible and highly-coloured style, a more cosmopolitan appreciation. Alexandre Dumas, with less strictly literary virtue than any other of the group, occupied the important vantage grounds of the theatre and the lending library in the Romantic interest. Balzac, equalling the others in the range of his field, added the special example of a minute psychological analysis, and of the most untiring labour. George Sand taught the secret of utilising to the utmost the passing currents of personal and popular sentiment and thought. Merimee, the master least followed, supplied, in the first place, the necessary warning against a too enthusiastic following of school models; and, in the second, himself held up a model of prose style of severity and exactness equal to the finest examples of the classical school, yet possessing to the full the romantic merits of versatile adaptability, of glowing colour, of direct and fearless phrase. Gautier exhibited, on the one hand, a model of absolute perfection in formal poetry, the workmanship of a gem or a Greek vase; on the other, the model of a prose style so flexible as to serve the most ordinary purposes, so richly equipped as to be equal to any emergency, and yet, in its most elaborate condition, worthy to rank with his own verse. Lastly, again as an outsider (a position which he shares in the group with Merimee, though in very different fashion), Musset brought the most natural and unaffected tears and laughter by turns, to correct the too scholastic and literary character of the movement, and to show how the most perfectly artistic effect could be produced with the least apparatus of formal study or preparation.

Under the influence partly of these men, and directly exercised by them,

## partly of the general movement of which they were the leaders and

exponents, the literature of France has developed itself for the rest of the century. It remains to give a brief sketch of its principal ornaments during that time. Many names, whose work is intrinsically of all but the highest interest and merit, will have to be rapidly dispatched, but their chief achievements and their significance in the general march can at least be indicated.

[Sidenote: Minor Poets of 1830.]

At the head of the poets of this minor band has to be mentioned Millevoye, who might, perhaps with equal or greater appropriateness, have found a place in the preceding book. He is chiefly remarkable as the author of one charming piece of sentimental verse, _La Chute des Feuilles_; and as the occasion of an immortal criticism of Sainte-Beuve's, 'Il se trouve dans les trois quarts des hommes un poete qui meurt jeune tandis que l'homme survit.' The peculiarity of Millevoye and his happiness was that he did not survive the death of the poet in him, but died at the age of thirty-four. Except the piece just mentioned, he wrote little of value, and his total work is not large. But he may be described as a simpler, a somewhat less harmonious, but a less tautologous Lamartine, to whom the gods were kind in allowing him to die young. A curious contrast to Millevoye is furnished by his contemporary, Ulric Guttinguer. Guttinguer was born in 1785, and, like Nodier, he joined himself frankly to the Romantic movement, and was looked up to as a senior by its more active promoters. Like Millevoye, he has to rest his fame almost entirely on one piece, the verses beginning, 'Ils ont dit: l'amour passe et sa flamme est rapide;' but, unlike him, he lived to a great age, and was a tolerably fertile producer. By the side of these two poets ranks Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who shares, with Louise Labe and Marie de France, the first rank among the poetesses of her country. Madame Desbordes-Valmore was born in 1787, and died in 1859. Her first volume of poems was published in 1819, and, as in all the verse of this time, the note of sentiment dominates. She continued to publish volumes at intervals until 1843, and another was added after her death. Great sweetness and pathos, with a total absence of affectation, distinguish her work. Perhaps her best piece is the charming song, in a kind of irregular rondeau form, _S'il avait su_. Jean Polonius, whose real name was Labenski, was a Russian, who contributed frequently to the _Annales Romantiques_, and subsequently published two volumes of French poetry. Emile and Antoni Deschamps were the translators of the Romantic movement. Antoni accomplished a complete translation of Dante, Emile translated from English, German, and Italian poets indifferently. They also published original poems together, and separately. Madame Tastu was also a translator, or rather a paraphraser, and an author of original poems of a sentimental kind. Lastly, Jean Reboul, a native of Nimes, and born in a humble situation, deserves a place among these.

Three poets deserving of all but the first rank, and belonging to the generation of 1830 itself, require each a somewhat longer notice.

[Sidenote: Alfred de Vigny.]

Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches, on the 27th of March, 1799. He was a man of rank, and his marriage in 1826 with an Englishwoman of wealth gave him independence. He left the army, in which he had served for some years, in 1828, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1864, in literary ease. He had been for some time a member of the Academy. His poetical career was peculiar. Between 1821 and 1829 he produced a small number of poems of the most exquisite finish, which at once attained the popularity they deserved, and were repeatedly reprinted. But for thirty-five years he published hardly anything else in verse, his _Poemes Philosophiques_ not appearing (at least as a volume) until after his death. Yet he was by no means idle. He had written and published in 1826 the prose romance of _Cinq Mars_, and he followed this up, though at considerable intervals, with others, as well as with dramas, of which _Chatterton_ is the best and best known. He also translated _Othello_ and _The Merchant of Venice_. Alfred de Vigny may perhaps be best described as a link between Andre Chenier and the Romantic poets. He is not much of a lyrist, his best and most famous poems (_Moise_, _Eloa_, _Dolorida_) being in Alexandrines, and the general form of his verse inclines to that of the eighteenth-century elegy, while it has much of the classical (not pseudo-classical) proportion and grace of Chenier. But his language, and in part his versification, are romantic, though quieter in style than those of most of his companions, whom it must be remembered he for the most part forestalled. In _Moise_ much of what has been called Victor Hugo's 'science of names' is anticipated, as well as his large manner of landscape and declamation. _Eloa_ suggests rather Lamartine, but a Lamartine with his weakness replaced by strength, while _Dolorida_ has a strong flavour of Musset. The remarkable thing is that in each case the peculiarities of the poet to whom Vigny has been compared were not fully developed until after he wrote, and that therefore he has the merit of originality. It is probable, however, that, exquisite as his poetical power was, it lacked range, and that he, having the rare faculty of discerning this, designedly limited his production. The best of the posthumous poems already mentioned are fully worthy of his earlier ones, but they display no new faculty.

[Sidenote: Auguste Barbier.]

If Alfred de Vigny is a poet of few books, Auguste Barbier is a poet of one. Born in 1805, Barbier never formed part of the Romantic circle, properly so called, but he shared to the full its inspiring influence. He began by an historical novel of no great merit, but the revolution of 1830 served as the occasion of his _Iambes_, a series of extraordinarily brilliant and vigorous satires, both political and social. The most famous of all these is _La Curee_, a description of the ignoble scramble for place and profit under the new Orleanist government. No satirical work in modern days has had greater success, and few have deserved it more; the weight and polish of the verse being altogether admirable. Satire is, however, a vein which it is very difficult to work for any length of time with any novelty, as may be seen sufficiently from the fact that the works of all the best satirists, ancient and modern, are contained in a very small compass. Barbier endeavoured to secure the necessary variety of subjects by going to Italy in _Il Pianto_, and to England in _Lazare_, but without success, though both contain many examples of the nervous and splendid verse in which he excels. During the last forty years of his life he wrote much, and he was elected to the Academy in 1869, but _Les Iambes_ will remain his title to fame.

[Sidenote: Gerard de Nerval.]

A name far less generally known, but deserving of being known very well indeed, is that of Gerard de Nerval, or, as his right appellation was, Gerard Labrunie. He was born in 1805, and was one of the most distinguished pupils of the celebrated Lycee Charlemagne, where he made the acquaintance of Theophile Gautier. Gerard (as he is most generally called) was a man of delicate and far-ranging genius, afflicted with the peculiar malady which weighs on some such men, and which may perhaps be described as an infirmity of will. He was not idle, and there was no reason why he should not be prosperous. At an early age he translated _Faust_, to the admiration of Goethe. His _Travels in the East_ were widely read, and every newspaper in Paris was glad of his co-operation; yet he was frequently in distress, and died in a horrible and mysterious manner, either by his own hand or murdered by night prowlers. He has been more than once compared to Poe, whom, however, he excelled both in amiability of temperament and in literary knowledge. But the two have been rightly selected by an excellent judge as being, in company with a living English poet, the chief masters of the poetry which 'lies on the further side between verse and music.' Most of Gerard's work is in prose, taking the form of fantastic but exquisite short tales entitled _Les Filles de Feu_, _La Boheme Galante_, etc. His verse, at least the characteristic part of it, is not bulky; it consists partly of folksongs slightly modernised, partly of sonnets, partly of miscellaneous poems. But, if the expression 'prose poetry' be ever allowable, which has been doubted, it is seldom more applicable than to much of Gerard de Nerval's work, both in his description of his travels and in avowed fiction.

Some minor names remain to be mentioned. Mery, one of the most fertile authors of the century, was a writer of verse as well as of prose, and displayed much the same talent of brilliant improvisation in each capacity. Auguste Brizeux, a Breton by birth, made himself remarkable by idyllic poetry (_Marie_, _La Fleur d'Or_) chiefly dealing with the scenery and figures of his native province. Amedee Pommier is a fertile and not inelegant verse writer, of no very marked characteristics. Charles Dovalle, who was shot in one of the miserable duels between journalists so common in France, at the age of twenty-two, would probably have done remarkable work had he lived. Hegesippe Moreau, to whom a life but very little longer was vouchsafed, devoted himself

## partly to bacchanalian and satirical work, for which he had not the

slightest genius, but produced also some poems of country life, which rank among the sweetest and most natural of the century. Much of his work is little more than a corrupt following of Beranger. In the same way the imitation of Lamartine was not fortunate for Victor de Laprade (_Psyche_, _Les Symphonies_, _Les Voix de Silence_). This imitation is not so much in subject (for M. de Laprade was a philosopher rather than a sentimentalist) as in manner and versification. His verse is also much more strongly impregnated than Lamartine's with classical culture. With due allowance for difference of dates and countries, there is a considerable resemblance between Laprade and Southey. Both had the same accomplishment of style, the same unquestioning submission to the dogmas of Christianity, the same width of literary information. It is unfortunate for France that Laprade was somewhat deficient in humour, a rare growth on her soil at all times.

[Sidenote: Curiosites Romantiques.]

[Sidenote: Petrus Borel.]

[Sidenote: Louis Bertrand.]

All these names are more or less widely known, but there is a class of 'oublies et dedaignes,' as one of their most faithful biographers has called them, who belong to the movement of 1830, and whose numbers are probably, while their merit is certainly, greater than is the case at any other literary epoch. Few of them can be mentioned here, but those few are worthy of mention, and it may perhaps be said that the native vigour of most of them, though warped and distorted for the most part by oddities of temperament or the unkindness of fortune, equals, if it does not surpass, that of many of their more fortunate brethren. The first of these is Petrus Borel, one of the strangest figures in the history of literature. Very little is known of his life, which was spent partly at Paris and partly in Algeria. He was perhaps the most extravagant of all the Romantics, surnaming himself 'Le Lycanthrope,' and identifying himself with the eccentricities of the _Bousingots_, a clique of political literary men who for a short time made themselves conspicuous after 1830. Borel wrote partly in verse and partly in prose. His most considerable exploit in the former was a strange preface in verse to his novel of _Madame Putiphar_; his best work in prose, a series of wild but powerful stories entitled _Champavert_. His talent altogether lacked measure and criticism, but it is undeniable. Auguste Fontaney was born in 1803 and died in 1837, having, like many of the literary men of his day, served for a short time in diplomacy. He was a frequent contributor to the early Romantic periodicals, and somewhat later to the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_. His work is very unequal, but at its best it is saturated with the true spirit of poetry. Felix Arvers, like our own Blanco White, has obtained his place in literary history by a single sonnet, one of the most beautiful ever written. Auguste de Chatillon was both poet and painter; his chief title to remembrance in the former capacity being a volume of cheerful verse entitled _A l'Auberge de la Grand' Pinte_. Napoleon Peyrat, who, after the fashion of those times (in which Auguste Maquet, a fertile novelist, and a journalist, and a collaborateur of Alexandre Dumas, called himself Augustus Mackeat, and Theophile Dondey anagrammatised his surname into O'Neddy), dubbed himself Napol le Pyreneen, survives, and justly, in virtue of a single short poem on _Roland_, possessed of extraordinary _verve_ and spirit. Last of all has to be mentioned Louis Bertrand, a poet possessed of the rarest faculty, but unfortunately doomed to misfortune and premature death. Born at Ceva in Piedmont, in 1807, and brought up at Dijon, he came to Paris, found there but scanty encouragement, and died in a hospital in 1841. His only work of any importance, _Gaspard de la Nuit_, a series of prose ballads arranged in verses something like those of the English translation of the Bible, and testifying to the most delicate sense of rhythm, and the most exquisite power of poetical suggestion, did not appear until after his death. He and Borel perhaps only of the names contained in this paragraph represent individual and solid talent: the others are chiefly noteworthy as instances of the extraordinary stimulating force of the time on minds which in other days would probably have remained indocile to poetry, or at least unproductive of it.

[Sidenote: Second Group of Romantic Poets.]

Three distinct stages are perceptible in French poetry since the date of the Romantic movement, and we have now exhausted the remarkable names belonging to the first. Another opens with those poets who, being born in or about 1820, came to years of discretion in time to see the first force of the movement spent, and found the necessity of striking out something of a new way for themselves. Of this group three names stand pre-eminently forward, those of Baudelaire, Banville, and Leconte de Lisle, while some others may be mentioned beside them.

[Sidenote: Theodore de Banville.]

Theodore de Banville was born in 1820, of a good family, his father being an officer in the navy. He began to write very early with the _Cariatides_, and continued for fifty years to be active in prose and poetry. M. de Banville displayed at once a remarkable mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and it is in the exhibition of this that he chiefly excelled. Under his auspices not merely the graceful metrical systems of the Pleiade, but the older forms of the mediaeval poets, Ballades, Rondeaux, Triolets, etc., were once more brought into fashion. But M. de Banville was by no means only a clever versifier. His serious poetry (_Cariatides_, _Stalactites_, _Odelettes_, _Les Exile's_, _Trente-six Ballades_) is full of poetical language and sentiment, his lighter verse (_Occidentales_, _Odes Funambulesques_) is charming, his prose is excellent, and he was no mean hand at drama (_Gringoire_).

[Sidenote: Leconte de Lisle.]

As M. de Banville sought for poetical novelty in an elaborate manipulation of the formal part of poetry, so M. Leconte de Lisle has sought it in a wide range of subject. He is a great translator of Greek verse. But in his original poems (_Poesies Antiques_, _Poesies Barbares_, _Poemes et Poesies_) he has gone not merely to the classics but to the East and to mediaeval times for his inspiration. A tendency to load his verse with exotic names in unusual forms (he was one of the first Frenchmen to adopt the fashion of spelling Greek names with a strict transliteration) has brought, not perhaps altogether undeservedly, the charge of affectation on M. Leconte de Lisle. But he is a poet of no small power, not merely in outlandish subjects such as _Le Massacre de Mona_, _Le Sommeil du Condor_, _Le Runoia_, etc., but in much simpler work, such as the beautiful _Requies_.

[Sidenote: Charles Baudelaire.]

Charles Baudelaire had a more original talent than either of these. Although a very careful writer, he is not studious of bizarre rhythm, nor are his subjects for the most part outlandish. He chose, however, to illustrate a peculiar form of poetical melancholy by dwelling on subjects many of which would have been better left alone, while others were treated in a manner unsuited to the time. His _Fleurs du Mal_, therefore, as his chief work is entitled, had to undergo expurgation before it was allowed to be published, and has never been popular with the general public. But its best pieces, as well as the best of some singular _Petits Poemes en Prose_, partly inspired by Louis Bertrand, have extraordinary merit in the way of delicate poetical suggestion and a lofty spiritualism. Baudelaire was also a very accomplished critic, his point of view being less exclusively French than that of almost any other French writer of the same class. He translated Poe and De Quincey.

[Sidenote: Minor Poets of the Second Romantic Group.]

[Sidenote: Dupont.]

The minor poets of this second Romantic school may again be grouped together. Charles Coran, a miscellaneous poet of talent, anticipated the school of which we shall shortly have to give some notice, that of the _Parnassiens_. Josephin Soulary is remarkable for the extreme beauty of his sonnets, in devoting himself to which form he anticipated a general tendency of contemporary poets both English and French. Auguste Vacquerie, better known as a critic, a dramatist, and a journalist, began as a lyrical and miscellaneous poet, and achieved some noticeable work. Gustave Le Vavasseur attempted, not without success, to revive the vigorous tradition of Norman poetry. Pierre Dupont, better known than any of these, seemed at one time likely to be a poet of the first rank, but unfortunately wasted his talent in Bohemian dawdling and disorder. His songs were the delight of the young generation of 1848, and two of them, _Le Chant des Ouvriers_ and _Les Boeufs_, are still most remarkable compositions. Louis Bouilhet (whose best poem is _Melaenis_) has some resemblance to M. Leconte de Lisle, though he went still further afield for his subjects. He had no small power, but the defect of the old descriptive poetry revived in him, and in some of his contemporaries and followers, the defect necessarily attendant on forgetfulness of the fact that description by itself, however beautiful it may be, is not poetry. With these may be mentioned Gustave Nadaud, a song-writer pure and simple, free from almost any influence of school literature, a true follower of Beranger, though with much less range, wit, and depth.

[Sidenote: The Parnasse.]

Except Dupont and Nadaud, all the poets just mentioned may be said to belong more or less to the school of Gautier--the school, that is to say, which attached preponderant importance to form in poetry. Towards the middle of the Second Empire a crowd of younger writers, who had adopted this principle still more unhesitatingly, grew up, and formed what has been known for some years, partly seriously, partly in derision, as the _Parnassien_ school. The origin of this term was the issue, in 1866 (as a sort of poetical manifesto preluding the great Exhibition of the next year), of a collection of poetry from the pens of a large number of poets, from Theophile Gautier and Emile Deschamps downwards. This was entitled _Le Parnasse Contemporain_, after an old French fashion. Another collection of the same kind was begun in 1869, interrupted by the war, and continued afterwards; and a third in 1876: while the _Parnassien_ movement was also represented in several newspapers, the chief of which was _La Renaissance_. Another nickname of the poets of this sect (which, however, included almost all French writers of verse, even Victor de Laprade being counted in) was _les impassibles_, for their presumed devotion to art for art's sake, and their scorn of didactic, domestic, and sentimental poetry. Their numbers were very great, and none, save a few, can be mentioned here. Perhaps the chief of the original _Parnassiens_ were MM. Sully Prudhomme and Francois Coppee, the former of whom experienced some reaction and affected what is called 'thoughtful verse,' while M. Coppee, having taken to domestic subjects, is as popular as any contemporary French poet, and in at least one instance (_Le Luthier de Cremone_) has achieved success at the theatre. A poet of great gifts, the latest of the vagabond school of Villon, was Albert Glatigny, who lived as a strolling actor, and died young. Many of his poems, but especially the _Ballade des Enfans sans Souci_, have singular force and pathos. It would hardly be fair to mention any other names, because a singular evenness of talent and general characteristics manifests itself among these poets. All sacrifice something to the perfection of form, or, to speak more correctly and critically, most are saved only by the perfection of their form, which is as a rule far superior to that of English minor poets. Of late years the _Parnasse_ as a single group has broken up somewhat, and during the last decade some isolated poets of promise have appeared. M. Maurice Bouchor recurred to the bacchanalian model for inspiration; M. Paul Deroulede is tyrtaean and bellicose. Both of these may be said to be representative of reaction against the _Parnasse_. The new naturalist school, which has produced such singular work in prose fiction, is represented in poetry by M. Richepin and M. Guy de Maupassant. The former, with much unworthy work, produced in _La Mer_ and elsewhere excellent things. The latter, despite an unfortunate licence of subject, showed himself the strongest and most accomplished versifier who has made his appearance in France for the last twenty years. But after his first efforts he appeared to abandon himself almost entirely to prose. M. Paul Verlaine, a poet known from the early days of the Parnasse, has more recently produced work of increased but very unequal merit, exaggerating the faults but showing some of the charm of Baudelaire; and, partly under his, partly under foreign influence, a still younger school has begun to make experiments in prosody which are not uninteresting, but which are too minute for notice here.

[Sidenote: Minor and later Dramatists.]

[Sidenote: Scribe.]

[Sidenote: Ponsard.]

[Sidenote: Emile Augier.]

[Sidenote: Eugene Labiche.]

[Sidenote: Dumas the Younger.]

[Sidenote: Victorien Sardou.]

The progress of French drama during the last half century is of somewhat less importance to literature, but of even more to social history, than that of poetry. The greatest masters of drama have already been mentioned among the eight typical names of 1830, even Balzac having attempted it, though without much success. The most famous and successful playwrights, however, as distinguished from the producers of literary dramas, have yet to be noticed[293]. Pixerecourt, a melodramatist and a book-collector, achieved his first success with a play on the well-known story of the Dog of Montargis (itself dating back to the earliest days of the Chansons de Gestes), in 1814, and followed it up with a long succession of similar pieces. Two years later Eugene Scribe, who had been born in 1791, made his _debut_, as far as success goes, with _Une Nuit de la Garde Nationale_. Scribe was one of the most prolific, one of the most successful, and one of the least literary of French dramatists. For nearly half a century he continued, sometimes alone, and sometimes in collaboration, to pour forth vaudevilles, dramas, and comedies, almost all of which were favourably received. Scribe was generous to his associates, and would sometimes acknowledge the communication of a bare idea by a share in the profits of the play which it suggested. He had also an almost unrivalled knowledge of the _technique_ of the theatre, and not a little wit. But his style is loose and careless, and his dramas do not bear reading. His most important later plays are _Valerie_, 1822; _Le Mariage d'Argent_, 1827; _Bertrand et Raton_, 1833; _Le Verre d'Eau_, 1840; _Une Chaine_, 1841; _Bataille de Dames_, 1851. One of the less famous partakers in the first Romantic movement, Bouchardy, distinguished himself, in succession to Pixerecourt, as a Romantic melodramatist, his most famous works being _Le Sonneur de Saint Paul_, and _Lazare le Patre_. In 1843 a kind of reaction was supposed to be about to take place, the signs of which were the performance of the _Lucrece_ of Ponsard in that year, and of the _Cigue_ of Emile Augier the year after. Ponsard, however, was only a Romantic whose colour was deadened by his inability to attain more brilliant tones. His succeeding plays, _Agnes de Meranie_, _Charlotte Corday_, _L'Honneur et l'Argent_, showed this sufficiently. M. Emile Augier is a more remarkable and a more independent figure. In so far as he represents a protest against Romanticism at all (which he does only very partially), it is because he shared in the growing tendency towards realism, that is, to a recurrence in the Romantic sense to the _tragedie bourgeoise_ of the preceding century, and because also he gave no countenance to the practice, in which some of the early Romantics indulged, of representing immoral personages as interesting. Almost all M. Augier's dramas, such as _L'Aventuriere_, 1849, which is his masterpiece, _Gabrielle_, 1849, _Diane_, 1852, _Le Mariage d'Olympe_, 1855, _Le Fils de Giboyer_, 1862, and others of more recent date, are distinctly on the side of the angels. But the author does not make the excellence of his intention a reason for passing off inferior work, and he is justly recognised as one of the leaders of French drama in the latter half of the century. About this same time (1845) was the date of the appearance of a fertile and successful playwright of the less exalted class, M. Dennery (_Don Cesar de Bazan_, _L'Aieule_). Auguste Maquet, another of the old guard of Romanticism, distinguished himself by helping to adapt to the stage the novels of Dumas the elder, which he had already helped to write; and one of his colleagues on Dumas' staff, M. Octave Feuillet, who was shortly to make a great reputation for himself as a novelist, appeared on the boards with _Echec et Mat_. During the whole of this decade (1840-1850) Delphine Gay, the beautiful and accomplished wife of the journalist Emile de Girardin, was a frequent and successful play-writer. Soon afterwards M. Legouve, son of the academician of the same name, and himself an academician, began to collaborate with Scribe in works of more importance (_Adrienne Lecouvreur_) than the latter had before attempted; while George Sand and her former friend, Jules Sandeau, were also drawn into the inevitable theatrical vortex. In collaboration with Augier, Sandeau produced, from one of his own novels, one of the best plays of the century, _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, 1855. Eugene Labiche, who had been born in 1815, distinguished himself, in 1851, by _Le Chapeau de Paille d'Italie_, and in it laid the foundation of a long career of success in the lighter kind of play which, at last, conducted him to the Academy. His best-known play is _Le Voyage de M. Perrichon_. The year 1852 was memorable for the French stage, for it saw the production of _La Dame aux Camelias_, the first important play of Alexandre Dumas _fils_. Without much of his father's talent for novel-writing, M. Dumas has been both a more successful, and perhaps a better, dramatist. Most of his plays have been directed to some burning question of the social or ethical kind, and it has been his practice to re-issue them after a time, with argumentative prefaces, in a very singular style. _Diane de Lys_, _Le Demi-Monde_, _La Question d'Argent_, _Le Fils Naturel_, _Le Supplice d'une Femme_ (nominally composed with Emile de Girardin), _Les Idees de Madame Aubray_, _Une Visite de Noces_, and _L'Etrangere,_ are his chief works. In 1854 appeared a now almost forgotten work by Victorien Sardou, who was destined to be the favourite dramatist of the Second Empire, and to share with MM. Augier and Dumas _fils_ the chief rank among the dramatists of the last half of the century. Seven years later _Nos Intimes_ gave him a great success, and, in 1865, _La Famille Benoiton_ a greater, which he followed up with _Nos Bons Villageois_, 1866. Since that time he has written many plays, of which the finest by far, and one of the few comedies of this age likely to become classical, is the admirable _Rabagas_--a satire of the keenest on the interested politicians, who, in France as elsewhere, take up demagogy as a trade. M. Sardou has attempted serious work in various plays, the best of which is, perhaps, _Patrie_, but it is not his forte. Satirical observation of manners, and especially of the current political and social follies of the day, is what he can do best, and in this peculiar line he has few equals. But he is admitted to be one of the most unequal of writers. A peculiar offspring of the Second Empire are the brilliant burlesques of Offenbach, which owed at least part of their brilliancy to the librettos composed for them by MM. Meilhac and Halevy. The first-named of these had produced successful dramas as far back as 1859. The collaborateurs did not confine themselves to furnishing words for M. Offenbach's music, but attempted the prose drama frequently and with success, _Froufrou_ being their most important work in this way. M. Gondinet and M. Pailleron also deserve notice as successful manufacturers of light plays, the latter in especial having an excellent wit (_Le monde ou l'on s'ennuie_, _Le Chevalier Trumeau_). This may also be asserted of M. Halevy, who has latterly, in _Les Petites Cardinal_ and other non-dramatic sketches, shown himself to even greater advantage than on the stage. Indeed the Cardinal family may be said to be the most striking literary creation of its kind for years.

In a different class and earlier, Joseph Autran, a poet of the school of Lamartine, obtained a great reputation by his tragedy of _La Fille d'Eschyle_, which procured him a seat in the Academy, and gave him the opportunity of writing not a few volumes of polished, but not very vigorous, poetry. M. Theodore de Banville, who has tried most paths in literature, produced, in 1866, a short play, with the old mystery-writer Gringoire for hero and title-giver; a play which is admirably written, and which has kept its place on the stage. M. Francois Coppee's graceful _Luthier de Cremone_ has already been mentioned. Another literary dramatist, to distinguish the class from those who are playwrights first of all, is M. Henri de Bornier, who obtained some success, in 1875, with _La Fille de Roland_, and, in 1880, with _Les Noces d'Attila_. Both these are good, though not consummate, specimens of the poetical drama.

[Sidenote: Classes of Nineteenth-Century Fiction.]

## Active, however, as was the cultivation of poetry proper and of the

drama, it is not likely that the nineteenth century will be principally known in French literary history either as a poetical, or as a dramatic age. Its most creative production is in the field of prose fiction. It is particularly noteworthy that every one of the eight names which have been set at its head is the name of a novelist, and that the energy of most of these authors in novel-writing has been very considerable. Their production may be divided into two broad classes--novels of incident, of which Hugo and Dumas were the chief practitioners, and which derive chiefly from Sir Walter Scott; and novels of character, which, with a not inconsiderable admixture of English influence, may be said to be legitimately descended from the indigenous novel created by Madame de la Fayette, continued by Marivaux and still more by Prevost, and maintained, though in diminished vivacity, by later writers. Of this school George Sand and Balzac are the masters, though much importance must also be assigned to Stendhal. At first the novelists of 1830 decidedly preferred the novel of incident, the literary success of which in the hands of Hugo, and its pecuniary success in the hands of Dumas, were equally likely to excite ambitions of different kinds.

[Sidenote: Minor and later Novelists.]

[Sidenote: Jules Janin.]

A rival of both of these in popularity during the reign of Louis Philippe, though infinitely inferior to both in literary skill, was Eugene Sue. With him may be classed another voluminous manufacturer of exciting stories, Frederic Soulie, and somewhat later Paul Feval, with next to them Amedee Achard and Roger de Beauvoir. A better writer than any of these was Jules Janin, whose literary career was long and prosperous, but not uniform. Janin began with a strange story, in the extremest Romantic taste, called _L'Ane Mort et la Femme Guillotinee_. This at a later period he represented as an intentional caricature, which is not on the whole likely. He followed it up with _Barnave_, a historical novel full of exciting incident. Both these books, however, with grave defects, have power perhaps superior to that shown in anything that Janin did later. Being an exceedingly facile writer, and lacking that peculiar quality of style which sometimes precludes popularity with the many as much as it secures it with the few, he became absorbed in journalism, in the furnishing of miscellaneous articles, prefaces, and so forth, to the booksellers, and finally in theatrical criticism, where he reigned supreme for many years. None of his later novels need remark. With Janin may be mentioned M. Alphonse Karr, who however has been more of a journalist than of a novelist. His abundant and lively work has not perhaps the qualities of permanence. But his _Voyage autour de mon Jardin_, his _Sous les Tilleuls_, and the satirical publication known as _Les Guepes_, deserve at least to be named. Here too may be noticed M. Barbey d'Aurevilly whose works critical and fictitious (the chief being probably _L'Ensorcelee_) display a very remarkable faculty of style, perhaps too deliberately eccentric, but full of distinction and vigour.

Under the Empire, a fresh group of novelists of incident sprang up. MM. Erckmann and Chatrian produced in collaboration a large number of tales, chiefly dealing with the events of the Revolution and the First Empire in the north-eastern provinces of France. Criminal and legal subjects were great favourites with the late Emile Gaboriau, who naturalised in France the detective novel. His chief follower is M. Fortune du Boisgobey.

[Sidenote: Charles de Bernard.]

The best novelists of the generation of 1830, outside the list of masters, have yet to be noticed. These are Charles de Bernard and Jules Sandeau. Charles de Bernard was at one time Balzac's secretary, but his fashion of work is entirely different from that of his employer. He divides himself for the most part between the representation of the Parisian life of good society and that of country-house manners. His shorter tales are perhaps his best, and many of them, such as _L'Ecueil_, _La Quarantaine_, _Le Paratonnerre_, _Le Gendre_, etc., are admirable examples of a class in which Frenchmen have always excelled. But his longer works, _Gerfaut_, _Les Ailes d'Icare_, _Un Homme Serieux_, etc., are not inferior to them in wit, in accurate knowledge and skilful portraiture of character, in good breeding, and in satiric touches which are always good-humoured.

[Sidenote: Jules Sandeau.]

Jules Sandeau was a novelist of no very different class, but with less wit, with much less satiric intention, and with a greater infusion of sentiment, not to say tragedy. His best novels, _Catherine_, _Mademoiselle de Penarvan_, _Mademoiselle de la Seigliere_, _Le Docteur Herbeau_, are drawn from provincial life, which, from the great size of France and its diversity in scenery and local character, has been a remarkably fertile subject to French novelists. These novels are remarkable for their accurate and dramatic construction (which is such that they have lent themselves in more than one instance to theatrical adaptation with great success) and their pure and healthy morality.

[Sidenote: Octave Feuillet.]

[Sidenote: Murger.]

[Sidenote: Edmond About.]

[Sidenote: Feydeau.]

[Sidenote: Gustave Droz]

Next in order of birth may be mentioned Octave Feuillet, who began, as has been mentioned, by officiating as assistant to Alexandre Dumas. His first independent efforts in novel-writing, _Bellah_ and _Onesta_, were of the same kind as his master's; but they were not great successes, and after a short time he struck into an original and much more promising path. His first really characteristic novel was _La Petite Comtesse_, 1856, and this was followed by others, the best of which are _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, 1858; _Sibylle_, 1862; _M. de Camors_, 1867; and _Julia de Trecoeur_, 1872: the two last being perhaps his strongest books, though the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_ is the most popular. M. Feuillet wrote in a pure and easy style, and exhibited in his novels acquaintance with the manners of good society, and a considerable command of pathos. He was more studious of the proprieties than most of his contemporaries, but has indulged in a somewhat unhealthy sentimentalism. Henry Murger had a very original, though a somewhat limited, talent. He is the novelist of what is called the Parisian _Boheme_, the reckless society of young artists and men of letters, which has always grouped itself in greater numbers at Paris than anywhere else. The novel, or rather the series of sketches, entitled _La Vie de Boheme_ is one which, from the truth to nature, the pathos, and the wit which accompany its caricature and burlesque of manners, will always hold a position in literature. Murger, who experienced many hardships in his youth, was all his life a careless and reckless liver, and died young. His works (all prose fiction, except a small collection of poems not very striking in form but touching and sincere in sentiment) are tolerably numerous, but the best of them are little more than repetitions of the _Vie de Boheme_. Edmond About, a very lively writer, whose liveliness was not always kept sufficiently in check by good taste, oscillated between fiction and journalism, latterly inclining chiefly to journalism. In his younger days he was better known as a novelist, and some of his works, such as _Tolla_ and _Le Roi des Montagnes_, were very popular. More characteristic perhaps are his shorter and more familiar stories (_L'Homme a l'Oreille Cassee_, _Le Nez d'un Notaire_, etc.). In this same group of novelists of the Second Republic and Empire ranks Ernest Feydeau, a morbid and thoroughly unwholesome author, who, however, did not lack power, and once at least (in _Sylvie_) produced work of unquestionable merit. His other novels, _Fanny_, _Daniel_, _La Comtesse de Chalis_, are chiefly remarkable as showing the worst side of the society of the Empire. Among writers of short stories Champfleury, a friend and contemporary of Murger (who has more recently betaken himself to artistic criticism of the historical kind), deserves notice for his amusing extravaganzas, and Gustave Droz for the singularly ingenious and witty series of domestic sketches entitled _Monsieur_, _Madame et Bebe_, and _Entre Nous_. The range of subject in these is wide and not always what is understood by the English word domestic. But the fancy shown in their design and the literary skill of their execution are alike remarkable and worthy of the ancient reputation of France in the short prose tale. Nor have they lacked followers.

[Sidenote: Flaubert.]

The greatest of the Second Empire novelists is unquestionably Gustave Flaubert, who was born in 1821. Having a sufficient income he betook himself early to literature, which he cultivated with an amount of care and elaborate self-discipline rare among authors. In 1848 he contributed to the _Artiste_ newspaper, then edited by Gautier, some fragments of a remarkable fantasy-piece on the legend of St. Anthony, which was not published as a whole till nearly a quarter of a century later. In 1859, being then nearly forty years old, he achieved at once a great success and a great scandal by his novel of _Madame Bovary_, a study of provincial life, as unsparing as any of Balzac's, but more true to actual nature, more finished in construction, and far superior in style. It was the subject of a prosecution, but the author was acquitted. Next, M. Flaubert selected an archaeological subject, and produced, after long study, _Salammbo_, a novel the scene of which is pitched at Carthage in the days of the mercenary war. This book, like the former, has a certain repulsiveness of subject in parts; but the vigour of the drawing and the extraordinary skill in description are as remarkable as ever. _L'Education Sentimentale_, which followed, was Flaubert's least popular work, being too long, and having an insufficiently defined plot and interest. Then appeared the completed _Tentation de St. Antoine_, a book deserving to rank at the head of its class--that of the fantastic romance. Afterwards came _Trois Contes_, exhibiting in miniature all the author's characteristics; and lastly, after his sudden death, in 1881, the unfinished _Bouvard et Pecuchet_. The faults of Flaubert are, in the first place, indiscriminate meddling with subjects best left alone, which he shares with most French novelists; in the second, a certain complaisance in dealing with things simply horrible, which is more peculiar to him; in the third, an occasional prodigality of erudite detail which clogs and impedes the action. His merits are an almost incomparable power of description, a mastery of those types of character which he attempts, an imagination of extraordinary power, and a singular satirical criticism of life, which does not exclude the possession of a vein of romantic and almost poetical sentiment and suggestion. He is a writer repulsive to many, unintelligible to more, and never likely to be generally popular, but sure to retain his place in the admiration of those who judge literature as literature.

[Sidenote: The Naturalists. Emile Zola.]

The name of Flaubert has been much invoked, and his reputation has been not a little compromised, by a small but noisy school of novelists and critics who call themselves naturalists, and affect to preach and practice a new crusade for the purpose of revolutionising poetry, fiction, and the drama. These persons, whose leader is M. Emile Zola, a busy and popular novelist, an unsuccessful dramatist, and a critic of great industry, include the brothers Goncourt (one of whom is now dead) and a number of younger writers who deserve no notice, except M. Guy de Maupassant, whose prose, if too often ill employed, is as vigorous as his verse, and who in his excellent _Pierre et Jean_ broke his naturalist chains. The naturalists affect to derive from Stendhal, through Balzac and Flaubert. That is to say, they adopt the analytic method, and devote themselves chiefly to the study of character. But they go farther than these great artists by objecting to the processes of art. According to them, literature is to be strictly 'scientific,' to confine itself to anatomy, and, it would appear, to morbid anatomy only. The Romantic treatment, that is to say, the presentation of natural facts in an artistic setting, is rigidly proscribed. Everything must be set down on the principle of a newspaper report, or, to go to another art for an illustration, as if by a photographic camera, not by an artist's pencil. Now it will be obvious to any impartial critic that the pursuance of this method is in itself fatal to the interest of a book. The reader, unless of the very lowest order of intellect, does not want in a novel a mere reproduction of the facts of life, still less a mere scientific reference of them to causes. Accordingly, the naturalist method inevitably produces an extreme dulness. In their search for a remedy, its practitioners have observed that there are certain divisions of human action, usually classed as vice and crime, in which, for their own sake, and independently of pleasure in artistic appreciation of the manner in which they are presented, a morbid interest is felt by a large number of persons. They therefore, with businesslike shrewdness, invariably, or almost invariably, select their subjects from these privileged classes. The ambition of the naturalist, briefly described without epigram or flippancy, but as he would himself say scientifically, is to mention the unmentionable with as much fulness of detail as possible. In this business M. Emile Zola has not hitherto been surpassed, though many of his pupils have run him hard. Unfortunately, for those who are proof against the attraction of disgusting subjects merely because they are disgusting, M. Zola is one of the dullest of writers. His style is also very bad, possessing for its sole merits a certain vulgar vigour which is occasionally not ineffective, and a capacity for vivid description. He is deeply learned in _argot_, or slang, the use of which is one of the naturalist instruments, and his works are therefore not useless as repertories of expressions to be avoided. M. Zola's criticisms are more interesting than his novels, consisting chiefly of vigorous denunciations of all the good writers of his own day.

M. Victor Cherbuliez, besides political and miscellaneous work of inferior relative power, has produced a series of novels (_Le Comte Kostia_, _Le Roman d'une Honnete Femme_, _Meta Holdenis_, _Samuel Brohl et Cie_) which are remarkable for style, construction, and wit. M. Alphonse Daudet, beginning early, produced in his first stage a charming collection of _Lettres de mon Moulin_, and a pathetic autobiographic novel _Le Petit Chose_. In his second, attempting the manner of Dickens, he obtained with _Jack_, 1873, and _Froment Jeune et Risler Aine_, 1874, great popularity. His later works, _Le Nabab_, _Les Rois en Exil_, _Numa Roumestan_, _L'Evangeliste_, _L'Immortel_, shew, in their condescending to the satisfaction of vulgar curiosity as to living or lately dead persons, a great falling off. The capacity of M. Daudet (whose _Tartarin de Tarascon_ with its sequel is wholly admirable extravaganza) cannot be doubted: his taste is deplorable. Of still more recent novelists two only can be mentioned: M. Georges Ohnet (_Serge Panine_, _Le Maitre de Forges_, _La Grande Marniere_) whose popularity with readers is only equalled by the unanimous disfavour with which all competent critics regard him, and M. Viaud ('Pierre Loti'), a naval officer, whose work (_Aziyade_, _Le Mariage de Loti_, _Mon Frere Yves_, _Madame Chrysantheme_), midway between the novel, the autobiography, and the travel-book displays some elegance and much 'preciousness' of style and fancy.

[Sidenote: Journalists and Critics.]

[Sidenote: Paul de Saint-Victor.]

[Sidenote: Hippolyte Taine.]

After the Revolution the fortune of journalism was assured, and though under the subsequent forms of government it was subjected to a rigid censorship, it was too firmly established to be overthrown. Almost all men of letters flocked to it. The leading article or unsigned political and miscellaneous essay has never been so strong a feature of French journalism as it has been of English. On the other hand, the _feuilleton_, or daily, weekly, and monthly instalment of fiction or criticism, has been one of its chief characteristics. Many, if not most, of the most celebrated novels of the last half century have originally appeared in this form, publication in independent parts, which was long fashionable in England, never having found favour in France. In the same way, though weekly reviews devoted wholly or mainly to literary criticism have, for some reason, never been successful with the French as they have with us, daily journalism has given a greater space to criticism, and especially to theatrical criticism. All French criticism subsequent to 1830 may be said to derive, whether it deals with literature, with the theatre, or with art, from three masters, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Janin. The method of the first has been sufficiently explained. Gautier's was rather the expression of a fine critical appreciation in the most exquisite style, and Janin's, the far easier, and, after a short time, unimportant plan of gossiping amiably and amusingly about, it might be the subject, it might be something quite different. The only successor to Gautier was Paul de Saint-Victor, who, however, was inferior to his master in appreciative power, and exaggerated his habit of relying on style to carry him through. Paul de Saint-Victor was not a frequent writer, and his collected works as yet do not fill many volumes. _Hommes et Dieux_, which is perhaps the principal of them, exhibits a deficiency of catholicity in literary appreciation. His latest book, _Les Deux Masques_, an unfinished study of the history of the stage, contains much brilliant writing, but is wanting in solid qualities. As a theatrical critic, Janin was succeeded by a curiously different person, M. Francisque Sarcey, who has chiefly been noteworthy for severity and a kind of pedagogic common sense, as unlike as possible to the good-humoured gossip of Janin. M. de Pontmartin was an acrid but vigorous critic on the royalist and orthodox side. M. Hippolyte Taine, chief of Sainte-Beuve's followers, has somewhat caricatured his master's method. Sainte-Beuve's principle was, it must be remembered, to examine carefully the circumstances of his author's time, in order to ascertain their bearing upon him. In M. Taine's hands this wise practice changed itself into a theory--the theory that every man is a kind of product of the circumstances, and that, by examining the latter, the man is necessarily explained. M. Taine chose for his principal exercising ground the history of English literature. He produced under that title a series of studies often acute, always brilliant in style, but constantly showing the faults of the critical method just indicated. Of other literary critics, the two chief besides M. Taine are M. Edmond Scherer and M. Emile Montegut. The latter is a critic of a very fine and delicate appreciation. A short essay of his on Boccaccio may be specified as one of the best of French contemporary critical exercises. M. Scherer has a good deal of common sense, a considerable acquaintance with literature, and a clear, straightforward, and vigorous style. His judgment, however, is much limited by prejudice, and some of his studies, such as those on Baudelaire and Diderot, show that he is an untrustworthy judge of what is not commonplace.

[Sidenote: Academic Critics.]

A separate school of criticism, of a more academic character than that represented by most of the names just mentioned, has existed in France during the greater part of the century, and during a great part of it has found its means of utterance partly in the University chairs and in treatises crowned by the Academy, partly in a well-known fortnightly periodical, the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_. The master of this school of criticism may be said to have been Villemain, 1790-1870, who represents the classical tradition corrected by a very considerable study of other European languages besides French. Not the least part of the narrowness of the older classical school was due to its ignorance of these languages, and its consequent incapacity to make the necessary comparisons. Villemain's criticism, though not quite so flexible as it might have been, was on the whole sound, and the same variety of the art, though with more limitations, was represented by Guizot. Not a few critics of merit of the same kind were born at the close of the last century, or at the beginning of this. Among them may be mentioned M. Nisard, a bitter opponent of the Romantic movement, and a prejudiced critic of French literature, but a writer of very considerable knowledge, and of some literary merit; Eugene Geruzez, author of by far the best history of French literature in a small compass, and of many separate treatises of value; Alexandre Vinet, a Swiss, and a Protestant, who died at no very advanced age, leaving much work of merit; and Saint-Marc Girardin, who busied himself nearly as much in journalism and politics as in literary criticism proper, but whose professorial _Cours de Litterature Dramatique_ is a work of interest, exhibiting a kind of transition style between the older and newer criticism. Michelet, Quinet, M. Renan, and others, who will be mentioned under other heads, have also been considerable as critics. Philarete Chasles was a lively writer, who devoted himself especially to English literature, and whose judgment in matters literary was not quite equal to his affection for them. The critics of the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_ proper include, besides not a few authors named elsewhere, Gustave Planche, a person of curious idiosyncrasy, chiefly remarkable for the ferocity of his critiques; Saint Rene Taillandier, a dull man of industry; and M. Caro, a man of industry who was not dull. Latterly some younger writers have endeavoured (chiefly in its pages) to set up a kind of neo-classical school, which is equally opposed to modern innovations, and to the habit of studying old French, that is, French before the sixteenth century. The chief of these advocates of a return to the Malherbe-Boileau dungeon is M. Ferdinand Brunetiere. We must not omit among the older generation M. Lenient, the author of two admirable volumes on the History of French Satire; among the younger, M. Paul Stapfer, the author of an excellent study of 'Shakespeare et l'Antiquite,' M. Jules Lemaitre, a brilliant critic, who is perhaps a little more brilliant than critical, and M. Emile Faguet, whose criticism is as sound as it is accomplished.

Among the representatives of art criticism Viollet-le-Duc as a writer on architecture, and Charles Blanc (brother of Louis) as an authority on decorative art generally, made before their deaths reputations sufficiently exceptional to be noticed here. Here also, as representatives of other classes of literature, the names of Hector Berlioz, the great composer, author of letters and memoirs of great interest; of Henri Monnier, an artist not much less skilful with his pen than with his pencil in satirical sketches of Parisian types (especially his famous 'Joseph Prudhomme'); of Charles Monselet, a miscellaneous writer whose sympathies were as wide and his temper as genial as his literary faculty was accomplished; of X. Doudan, whose posthumous remains and letters attracted much attention after a life of silence; and of the Genevese diarist Amiel, selections from whose vast journal of philosophical sentimentalism and miscellaneous reflection have also been popular, may be cited.

[Sidenote: Linguistic and Literary Study of French.]

The revived study of old French literature just noticed is the only department of the literature of erudition which can receive notice here, for prose science and classical study fall equally out of our range of possible treatment here. The _Histoire Litteraire_ was revived, and has been steadily proceeded with. Every department of old French literature has been studied, latterly in vigorous rivalry with the Germans. The most important single name in this study has been that of the late M. Paulin Paris, who edited reprints of all sorts with untiring energy, and in a thoroughly literary spirit. The Chansons de Gestes have been the especial care of M. Paulin Paris, his son M. Gaston Paris (_Histoire Poetique de Charlemagne_), and M. Leon Gautier, who has written, and is now republishing in an altered and improved form, a great work on the early French epics. The Arthurian romances have been more studied in Germany and Belgium than in France, though valuable work has been done in them by M. Paulin Paris, M. Hucher, and others. The Fabliaux have recently appeared in a nearly complete edition, by M. de Montaiglon. M. P. Meyer has thrown new light on the _Roman d'Alixandre_. The _Roman du Renart_, also published by Meon, has been undertaken again by M. Ernest Martin. The separate authors of the later ages have, in almost every case, been the subject of much careful work, and for some years past a 'Societe des Anciens Textes Francais' has existed for the express purpose of publishing unprinted MSS. This society has undertaken the great collection of _Miracles de Notre Dame_, the works of Eustache Deschamps, and other important tasks. A great deal of excellent work in the same direction has been done in Belgium by members of the various Academies. The great classics of France, from the sixteenth century onward, have been the object of constant and careful editing, such as the classics of no other country have enjoyed. Nor has the linguistic part of the study been omitted. The two chief monuments of this are the great dictionary of Littre, and the complement of it, now in course of publication, by M. Godefroy, which contains a complete lexicon of the older tongue. Among the collections of old French literature, the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne may be especially noticed. This, besides many reprints of isolated authors, contains invaluable examples of the early theatre, a still more precious collection of scattered poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and one of miscellanies of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Under the Empire the government began the publication of all the Chansons de Gestes, but the enterprise was unfortunately interrupted at the tenth volume.

[Sidenote: Philosophical Writers.]

[Sidenote: Comte.]

The branches of literature, other than the Belles Lettres, which naturally retain, longer than those which busy themselves with science as it is now understood, the literary interest, are philosophy, theology, and history. In philosophy France has produced, during the present century, only one name of the first importance. As has been the case with all other European nations, her philosophical energies have chiefly been devoted to the historical side of philosophy, a tendency specially encouraged by the already-mentioned influence of Cousin. Damiron, the chief authority in French on the materialist schools of the eighteenth century; M. Jules Simon and Vacherot, who busied themselves chiefly with the Alexandrian philosophers--Cousin it should be remembered was the editor of Proclus--and Charles de Remusat, a man of great capacity, who, among other rather unexpected literary occupations, devoted himself to Abelard, Thomas a Becket, and other representatives of scholasticism, illustrate this tendency. The philosophy of the middle ages was also the subject of one of the clearest and best-written of philosophical studies, the _De la Philosophie Scolastique_ of B. Haureau. The name, however, of the century in French philosophical literature is that of Auguste Comte, the founder of what is called Positivism. He was born at Montpelier three or four years before the end of the last century, and died at Paris in September, 1857. Comte passed through the discipline of initiation in the Saint Simonian views--Saint Simon was a descendant of the great writer of that name, who developed a curious form of communism very interesting politically, but important to literature only from the remarkable influence it had upon his contemporaries--but, like most of Saint Simon's disciples, soon emancipated himself. To discuss Comte's philosophical views would be impossible here. It is sufficient to say that the cardinal principle of his earlier work, the _Cours de Philosophie Positive_, is that the world of thought has passed through successively a theological stage and a metaphysical stage, and is now reduced to the observation and classification of phenomena and their relations. On the basis cleared by this sweeping hypothesis, Comte, in his later days (under the inspiration of a lady, Madame Clotilde de Vaux, if he himself be believed), developed a remarkable construction of positive religion. This was indignantly rejected by his most acute followers, the chief of whom was the philologist and critic Littre. Outside of Comtism, France has not produced many writers on philosophy, except philosophical historians. M. Taine, in his _De l'Intelligence_, turned his acute intellect and ready pen in this direction for a moment, but not with much success. Perhaps from the literary view the most important philosophical writer in French for the last half century is M. Renan, who will find his place more appropriately in the next paragraph. Between Saint Simon and Comte, if space allowed, notice would have to be taken of many political writers of the middle of the century, whose visionary and for the most part communistic views had a considerable but passing influence, such as Cabet, Fourier, Pierre Leroux, and the violent and not wholly sane but vigorous Proudhon. Here, however, nothing but bare mention, and that only for completeness' sake, can be given to them.

[Sidenote: Theological Writers. Montalembert.]

[Sidenote: Ozanam.]

[Sidenote: Lacordaire.]

[Sidenote: Ernest Renan.]

In theology, as represented in literature, the dominant interest of the period belongs at first to the continuators of the Liberal-Catholic school of Lamennais. The greatest of these, beyond all question, was Charles Forbes de Montalembert, whose mother was a Scotchwoman, and his father French ambassador in Sweden. He was born in April, 1810, and died on the 13th of March, 1870. Montalembert was young enough to come under the influence of Lamennais only indirectly, and at the extreme end of that writer's orthodox period. His immediate master was rather the eloquent Abbe Lacordaire. His father was a peer of France, and Montalembert succeeded early to his position, which gave him an opportunity of supporting the great contention of the Liberal Catholics under Louis Philippe, the right to establish schools for themselves. Being devoted first of all to the defence of ecclesiastical interests by every legitimate means, and having no anti-Republican prejudices, Montalembert was able to accept the second Revolution, though not the Second Empire, and he continued to be one of the most moderate, but dangerous, opponents of the government of Napoleon III. His chief works, which have much brilliancy and vigour, are his 'Life of Elizabeth of Hungary,' his 'Life and Times of St. Anselm,' his _Avenir Politique de l'Angleterre_, and, most of all, his great work on 'The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard.' A fellow worker with Montalembert, though earlier cut off, was Frederic Ozanam, a brilliant student and lecturer in mediaeval history, who was the chief literary critic of the Neo-Catholic movement during the later years of Louis Philippe's reign. Ozanam's chief work was his study on Dante. About this time a considerable resurrection of pulpit eloquence took place. Its chief representative was the already-mentioned Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who was born in 1802, and died in 1861. Lacordaire was a partner of Lamennais in the _Avenir_. But, unlike his master, he took the papal reproof obediently, and continued to preach in the orthodox sense. He entered the order of St. Dominic in 1840, but was nevertheless elected to the Assembly, in 1848, as a compliment, doubtless, to the fervent radicalism he had displayed earlier. Lacordaire's literary reputation is almost entirely confined to his sermons, the most famous of which were preached at Notre Dame. Other celebrated preachers of the middle of the century were, on the Catholic side, the Pere Felix, and on the Protestant, Athanase Coquerel. Of the extreme orthodox party, during the Second Empire, the chief names from the point of view of literature were those of Monseigneur Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans, and the journalist, Louis Veuillot. The former, one of the most eloquent and one of the ablest men of his time in France, began with a certain liberalism, but gradually hardened into extremer views, distinguishing himself in his place in the Academy by violent opposition to the admission of M. Littre, as a positivist. The latter, as editor of the journal _L'Univers_, brought remarkable wit and a faculty of slashing criticism, not often equalled, to the service of his party, indulging, however, too often in mere scurrility. From this same literary point of view, the chief name in the theological literature of this period is once more on the unorthodox side. Since the days of Joseph de Maistre the church had far more than held her own in the literary arena; but the discouragement given at Rome to the followers of Lamennais seemed to bring ill luck with it. Ernest Renan, who, with some faults, is one of the most remarkable masters of French style in our time, was born in 1823, at Treguier in Britanny. He was intended for the priesthood, and was educated for the most part at clerical seminaries. On arriving, however, at manhood, he did not feel inclined to take orders; accepted the place of usher at a school, and soon distinguished himself by linguistic studies, especially on the Semitic languages. He also exercised himself a good deal in literary criticism and as a journalist of all work on the staffs of the _Journal des Debats_ and the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_. His first really remarkable work, published in 1850, is _Averroes et l'Averroisme_, a book injured by the author's want of sympathy with the thought of the middle ages, but full of research and of reflection. This gained him a post in the Paris Library. He then produced several works, dealing more or less with the Hebrew Scriptures. In 1860 he had a government mission to Phoenicia and Palestine, which enabled him to examine the Holy Land very attentively. On his return he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the College de France, but the outcry against his unorthodoxy was so great that he was suspended. He began about this time to publish his famous series of _Origines du Christianisme_ with, for a first volume, a _Vie de Jesus_, imbued with a curious kind of eclectic and romantic rationalism. This has been followed by numerous volumes dealing with the early ages of Christianity. In 1870 he made himself conspicuous by a letter to Strauss on the subject of the Franco-German War. After the catastrophe he confined himself for a time to literary and philosophical studies. Recently, however, besides working at his _Origines_, which are now completed, he has produced some half-political, half-fanciful studies of great literary excellence, such as _Caliban_, a satire on democracy, and _La Fontaine de Jouvence_, a brilliant mediaeval fantasy-piece, covering a violent attack on Germany. M. Renan is, in point of style, perhaps the most considerable prose writer of France now living who is a prose writer only. His prejudices are strong, and his strictly argumentative and logical faculty rather weak. In temperament he is what may be called a sentimental rationalist. But his literary knowledge is extraordinarily wide and very accurate, while his literary sympathies, though somewhat irregular in their operation, are warm. These peculiarities reflect themselves in his style, which is a direct descendant of that of Rousseau through M. Renan's own countryman, Chateaubriand. As a describer of scenery he is unmatched among his contemporaries. He has an extraordinary power of vivid and interesting narration inclining somewhat to the over-picturesque. No one is able more cleverly to seize on the most striking and telling features of a landscape, a book, a character, and, by adroit dwelling on these, to present the whole as vividly as possible to his readers. No one again is more thoroughly master of a certain rather vague but telling eloquence which deals chiefly with the moral feelings and the domestic affections, and exercises an amiably softening influence on those who submit themselves to it. M. Renan in style is rather an orator than a writer, though the extreme care and finish which he bestows on his work give him a high place in literature proper.

[Sidenote: Historians. Thierry.]

In history a group of distinguished names, besides a still larger number of names only less individually distinguished, deserve notice. First among these, in order of time, may be mentioned the two brothers Amedee and Augustin Thierry, the former of whom was born in 1787, and died in 1873, while the latter, born in 1795, died in 1856. Both devoted themselves to historical studies. But, while Amedee employed himself almost wholly on the history of Gaul during Roman times and on Roman history, Augustin, who was by far the more gifted of the two, took a wider range. He was born and educated at Blois, and for some time devoted himself to politics and sociology, being a disciple of Saint Simon, and a fellow-worker of Comte. He soon, however, betook himself to history, and in 1825 published his 'History of the Norman Conquest in England.' Blindness followed, but he was able to continue his work. In 1835 he published _Dix Ans d'Etudes Historiques_, and in 1840, what is perhaps his best work, _Recits des Temps Merovingiens_, a book which has few rivals as exhibiting in a fascinating light, but without any sacrifice of historical accuracy to mere picturesqueness, the circumstances and events of an unfamiliar time. His last work of importance was an essay on the Tiers Etat and its origin. Thierry is an excellent example of an historian handling, with little guidance from predecessors, a difficult and neglected but important age.

[Sidenote: Thiers.]

Far less important as a historian, but distinguished by his double character of statesman and _litterateur_, in which he was more fortunate than his two rivals in the same double career, Guizot and Lamartine, was Louis Adolphe Thiers, who was born at Marseilles, of the lower middle class, in 1797. He was brought up for the law, being educated at Marseilles and at Aix. Then he went to Paris, and after a short time obtained work on the _Constitutionnel_ as supporter of the liberal opposition during the Restoration. His _Histoire de la Revolution Francaise_ appeared between 1823-1827, and brought him much reputation, which was very ill deserved as far as fulness and accuracy of information are concerned. French readers, however, have ever been indifferent to mere accuracy, and are given to admire even a superficial appearance of order and clearness; at any rate, the book, added to his considerable reputation as a political writer, made him famous. A paper, which he founded in the beginning of 1830, the _National_, had much share in bringing about the Revolution of that year. After it Thiers was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Aix, and in a short time became a renowned debater. He held office again and again under Louis Philippe, and was believed to be in favour of a warlike policy. When he retired from office he began his principal literary work (a continuation of his first), 'The History of the Consulate and the Empire.' He took no part in the Revolution of 1848, and accepted the Republic, but was banished at the _coup d'etat_, though not for long. In 1863 he re-entered the Chamber, having constantly worked at his History, which tended not a little to reconstruct the Napoleonic legend. Yet he was a steady though a moderate opponent of the Second Empire. On its downfall, Thiers, as the most distinguished statesman the country possessed, undertook the negotiations with the enemy--a difficult task, which he performed with extreme ability. He then became President of the Republic, which post he held till 1873. He died on the 3rd of September, 1877. The chief fault of Thiers as a historian is his misleading partiality, which is especially displayed in his account of Napoleon's wars, and reaches its climax in that of the battle of Waterloo. He has, however, great merits in lucidity of arrangement, in an eloquent, if rather declamatory style, and in a faculty of conveying a considerable amount of information without breaking the march of his narrative.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

By a curious coincidence, the chief rival of Thiers in politics (at least during the greater part of his life) was of his own class and condition, and, like him, primarily a man of letters. Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot was, however, ten years the senior of Thiers, having been born in 1787, at Nimes. Guizot was a Protestant, and his father perished in the Terror. He was educated at Geneva, but went to Paris early, and produced in 1809 (being then only twenty-two) a dictionary of synonyms. After this he did miscellaneous literary work of various kinds, and at the Restoration filled, as a moderate Royalist, various posts under government, being appointed, among other things, to a history professorship at the Sorbonne. He became more and more liberal, and in 1824 his lectures were forbidden. His literary activity, was, however, incessant, his greatest work being a collection of early French historical writings in thirty-one volumes. He also paid much attention to the history of England, and published, in 1826, a _Histoire de la Revolution d'Angleterre_. This was followed by many other works, of which his 'History of Civilisation in Europe,' and 'History of Civilisation in France,' are the best known. He had been elected a member of the Chamber before the Revolution of 1830, and after it he was appointed minister of Public Instruction, having the powerful support of the Broglie family. He was afterwards ambassador to London, and then Prime Minister, being, it is said, very much to blame for the Revolution of February. He escaped to London with some difficulty, and, though he revisited France, had to return to England at the advent of Louis Napoleon. He was not, however, a permanent exile, but was allowed to enjoy his estate at Val Richer in Normandy. He died in 1874, having been incessantly occupied on literary work of all kinds (chiefly connected with French and English history) for the last half century of his life. The chief of these in bulk was a voluminous history of France not completed till after his death. Guizot's enormous fertility (for not a twentieth of his works has been mentioned) perhaps injuriously affected his style, which is not remarkable. Sound common sense and laborious acquaintance with facts are his chief characteristics.

[Sidenote: Mignet.]

A companion of Thiers at college, and a _protege_ of his during his years of power, was Francois Mignet. Born a year before his friend, he outlived him. Mignet, too, wrote, and at the same time as Thiers, a History of the French Revolution of curiously different character. He became secretary of the Institute, and in 1837 a member of the Academy. His chief later works were on the 'Spanish Succession,' on Mary Stuart, and on Charles the Fifth after his abdication, with, last of all, the rivalry of Charles V. and Francis I. Mignet is as trustworthy as Thiers is the reverse. But his historical manner is exceedingly dry, as also is his style, though it is correct and not inelegant.

[Sidenote: Michelet.]

A very different writer was Jules Michelet, the most original and remarkable historian in point of style that France has ever produced. Born at Paris, in 1798, he was also educated there, and became a schoolmaster. Soon after he came of age he was transferred to the Ecole Normale. The Revolution of 1830, owing to the influence of Cousin and Guizot, opened great opportunities for historical students, and Michelet was enabled to publish not a few historical treatises, some of a rather specialist nature, others popular abstracts of French history. In 1838 he was appointed to a chair in the College de France, and, in conjunction with his friend Quinet, he took part in the violent polemic against the Jesuits which distinguished the time. He had already for some years begun his strange and splendid _Histoire de France_, 1833-1867, but he accompanied its progress with a crowd of little books of a controversial and miscellaneous character. Shortly before the Revolution of 1848 he began, and soon after the _coup d'etat_ finished, his _Histoire de la Revolution_. He declined to take the oaths to the Empire, and so lost the place in the Record Office which he then held. He died in 1874, and, notwithstanding his incessant literary activity during his life, various unpublished works have appeared since, one of which, describing the hunger-pinched population of the Riviera, is a masterpiece of his volcanic style. This style is characteristic not only of his great history, but also of his smaller books, of which _Des Jesuites_, _Du Pretre_, _Du Peuple_, _L'Oiseau_, _L'Insecte_, _L'Amour_, _La Sorciere_ (the last perhaps the most remarkable of all), are especially noteworthy. It is entirely unlike the style of any previous French writer, except that of Lamennais, who was, however, rather Michelet's contemporary than his predecessor, and that of Victor Hugo, in some of his more recent work. Broken and irregular in construction, it is extraordinarily vivid in colour, and striking in the outline of its presentment. The _History of France_ is a book to which little justice can be done in the space here available. It is strongly prejudiced by Michelet's republican and anti-Catholic views, and, like all picturesque histories, it brings into undue relief incidents and personages which have happened to strike the author's imagination. But it is extraordinarily stimulating, full of energy and life, and almost unequalled in the power with which the writer restores and revives the past.

[Sidenote: Quinet.]

A bosom friend of Michelet, and his compeer in the attack on the Jesuits, was Edgar Quinet, who was born near Bourg in 1803, and died in 1875. He was brought up for the most part at his country home in a retired situation, where he early showed not only great devotion to literature, but a curious tendency towards philosophic mysticism. He travelled in Germany when young, and his translation of Herder's _Philosophie der Geschichte_ introduced him to Cousin, and gave him some profit and much reputation. He was sent to Greece on a government mission, and after a time received a professorship, first at Lyons, and then at Paris, though his republicanism did not recommend him. He was an

## active supporter of the Revolution of February, and a consistent

opponent of the Empire, during which he remained in exile. Quinet's works, both in poetry and prose, are numerous. The chief are a great prose poem, or dramatic allegory, called _Ahasuerus_, 1834, a work on the early French epics (insufficiently informed, but appreciative and enthusiastic), _Le Genie des Religions_, 1843 (a series of discourses full of the widest and vaguest generalisation, but stimulating and generous), _Les Revolutions d'Italie_, _Merlin l'Enchanteur_, 1861 (another curious book something after the fashion of _Ahasuerus_), a nondescript miscellany on history and science entitled _La Creation_, 1869, and _La Revolution_, 1865. His poems (in verse) are _Promethee_, _Napoleon_, _Les Esclaves_, of which the first and last are dramatic in form. His style and thought were strongly tinged with mysticism, and with a singular undogmatic pietism, as well as with strong but speculative republicanism in politics. He is thus not a historian to consult for facts (though his knowledge both of history and literature was accurate and wide), but an inspiriting generaliser on the philosophy of history. Both in Michelet and in Quinet there is an affectation of the seer, as well as an undue fluency of language, and an absence of precision in form and place, which detract from their otherwise high literary value. The collected works of the first exceed fifty volumes, those of the second fill nearly thirty; and much of this vast total is ephemeral in interest and unchastened in form. Although neither was a journalist, both exhibit the defects of a period of journalism.

[Sidenote: Tocqueville.]

The last of the greater names calling for mention is that of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was born, of a noble Norman family, at Verneuil, in 1805. Tocqueville was educated for the bar, and called to it after the Restoration. But after the revolution of July he exchanged his appointment in the magistracy for a travelling mission to America, to examine the prisons and penitentiaries of the United States. He, however, studied something else than prisons, and, in 1835, published his famous work on 'Democracy in America.' He married an Englishwoman, and soon afterwards entered the Chamber. During the Republic he occupied positions of some importance. The Empire dismissed him from public life, but gave him the opportunity of writing his second great book on the _Ancien Regime_. His health was, however, weak, and he died, in 1859, of consumption. The characteristics of Tocqueville as a historian (or rather as a philosophic essayist on history) are great purity and clearness of style, unusual logical power, and an entire absence of prepossession. He is one of the few historians who have treated democracy without either enthusiastic love for it on the one hand, or fanatical dislike and fear of it on the other; and his two books are, and are likely to remain, classics.

[Sidenote: Minor Historians.]

A very rapid survey must suffice for the remainder of the names in this division. A. de Barante, among numerous other works of merit, is best known by a careful and detailed history of the Dukes of Burgundy; J. A. Buchon, Petitot, J. A. Michaud, and J. Poujoulat, produced invaluable collections of the chronicles and memoirs in which France is so rich. J. J. Ampere occupied himself chiefly with Roman history, and with the history of France and French literature in the Gallo-Roman time. A. Beugnot, besides other work, arranged a precious collection of feudal law. Emile de Bonnechose wrote a good short history of France. Louis Blanc (an important actor in the Revolution of 1848) produced an elaborate and well-written history of the Revolution from the moderate republican side, and afterwards reprinted from newspapers some curious letters from England during his exile here. In opposition chiefly to Thiers, P. Lanfrey, in a laborious history of Napoleon, entirely overthrew the Napoleonic legend, and damaged, it would seem irreparably, the character of its hero. Philippe de Segur gave a history of the Russian campaign of Napoleon. Mortimer-Ternaux accomplished a valuable history of the Terror. M. Henri Martin was the author of the only recent history of France on a scale which challenges comparison with Michelet. It has no extraordinary literary merit, and its author was something of a partisan. But it is full, sober, and fairly accurate. In recent days M. Taine, deserting literary and philosophical criticism for history, executed a new and remarkable history of the Revolution, which, by once more putting its horrors in a clear and fair light, very much irritated the partisans of the 'ideas of 89.' The Duke d'Aumale has made something more than a mere addition to the works of 'Royal and Noble Authors,' in his History of the Princes of Conde. The Duke de Broglie, a politician, upon whom the political changes of France enforced political retirement, has produced a series of historical works on the 18th century and has edited the interesting memoirs of his father, the patron of Guizot. Of other recent memoirs by far the most remarkable, whether as literature or history, are those of Madame de Remusat, mother of Charles de Remusat, who died early in the Restoration period, but whose memoirs and letters, not published till after her son's death (but already referred to here), have given her a posthumous reputation hardly inferior to that of any of the literary ladies before her and not likely soon to wane.

FOOTNOTES:

[292] Merimee's work is not absolutely despicable in bulk, for it extends to some eighteen volumes pretty closely packed. But much of these is occupied with familiar letters, and much more with merely miscellaneous writing. His finished and definitely literary publications do not amount to a third of the whole.

[293] In this notice of the acting drama of France, with which, as contrasted with the literary theatre, the present writer has comparatively little acquaintance, he is considerably indebted to Mr. Brander Matthews' useful _French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_. London and New York; 1882.

CONCLUSION.

In the five books of this _History_ the reader has, it is believed, before him a sufficient though necessarily brief description of the various men and works whereof knowledge is desirable to enable him to perceive the main outlines of the course of French literature. In the interchapters some attempt has been made to sum up the general phenomena of that literature as distinguished from its particular accomplishments during the chief periods of its development. Beyond this neither the scale of the book, nor its plan as indicated in the preface, has permitted of indulgence in generalising criticism. But it has been suggested by authorities whose competence is not disputable that something in the nature of a summary of these summaries, pointing out briefly the general history, accomplishments, and peculiarities of the French tongue in its literary aspect during the ten centuries of its existence, is required, if only for the sake of a symmetrical conclusion. It may be urged on the other side that the history of literature--like all other histories, and perhaps more than all other histories--is never really complete, and that there is consequently some danger in attempting at any given time to treat it as finished. He must have been a miraculously acute critic who, if he had attempted such treatment of the present subject sixty or seventy years ago, would not have found his results ludicrously falsified by the event but few years afterwards. But this drawback only applies to generalisation of the pseudo-scientific kind which attempts to predict: it can be easily guarded against by attending to the strict duties of the historian and, without attempting to speak of the future, dealing only with the actually accomplished past.

The first thing, and perhaps the most important thing, which must strike anyone who looks upon French literature as a whole, is that, taking all conditions together, it is the most complete example of a regularly and independently developed national literature that presents itself anywhere. It is no doubt inferior in the point of independence to Greek, but then it has a much longer course, considered as the exponent of national character. It has a shorter course than English, and it is not more generally expository of national characteristics; but then it is for a great part of that course infinitely more independent of foreign influences, and, unlike English, it has scarcely any breaks or dead seasons in its record. Compared with Latin (which as a literature may be said to be entirely modelled on Greek) it is exceptionally original: compared with Spanish and Italian it has been exceptionally long-lived and hale in its life: compared with German it was exceptionally early in attaining the full possession of its faculties. Just as (putting aside minor and somewhat pedantic considerations) no country in Europe has so long and so independently developed a political history, so in none has literary history developed itself more independently and for a longer space of continuous time. No foreign invasion sensibly affects the French tongue; no foreign influence sensibly alters the course of French literature. It has been shown at intervals during this history how little direct influence classical models had on the original forms of literature in France, how completely German and Celtic contributions of subject were assimilated, how the Provencal examples of form were rather independently followed than literally or slavishly adopted. The dawn or rather the twilight of the Renaissance seemed to threaten a more powerful and dangerous admixture. But the native genius of the language triumphed, and finally, in the Pleiade reforms, reduced to harmlessness the Rhetoriqueur innovations and the simultaneous danger of Italianising. The criticism of Malherbe, harmful in some ways, served as a counterpoise to the danger of Spanish influence which was considerable in the early years of the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth the idiosyncrasy of French was so strong that, great as was the effect successively produced by English and by German, it was unable to do more than slightly modify French literature itself. Yet again the singular [Greek: autarkeia] of French may be seen by turning from its general accomplishments at different times to its particular forms. No one of these was directly adopted from any foreign, not even from any classical example, with the doubtful exception of the classical tragedy. The French made their own epic, their own lyric, their own comic and miscellaneous drama. They may be said almost to have invented the peculiar and striking kind of history called the memoir, which has characteristics distinguishing it radically from the classical commentary. They apparently invented the essay, and though they only borrowed the beast-fable, they are entitled to the credit of having seen in it the germ of the short verse tale which has no direct moral bearing. All the nations of Europe, so to speak, sent during the middle ages their own raw material of subject to be worked up by French or French-speaking men into literary form. France therefore gives (next to Greece, and in some respects even before Greece) the most instructive and trustworthy example extant of the chronology and order of spontaneous literary development--first poetry, then drama, then prose: in poetry, first epic, then lyric, then didactic and miscellaneous verse: in drama, first ceremonial and liturgic pieces, then comedy, then artificial tragedy: in prose, first history, then miscellaneous work, and lastly artificial and elaborate fiction. It is a curious and somewhat complex phenomenon that the cycle which began with verse fiction should apparently end with fiction in prose, but the foregoing pages will have shewn sufficiently how dangerous it would be to generalise from this.

One thing however may be safely concluded from the mere fact of this remarkable resistance to foreign influence, or rather from the still more remarkable power of assimilation which this resistance implies. The literature which has been able to exert both must have very strongly marked general characteristics of its own. As a matter of fact French literature has these characteristics: and a brief enumeration and description of them may complete, more appropriately than anything else could do, the survey of its history. French literature, notwithstanding the revolution of fifty years ago, is generally and rightly held to be the chief representative among the greater European literatures of the classical rather than the romantic spirit. It is therefore necessary to define what is meant by these much controverted terms; and the definition which best expresses the views of the present writer is one somewhat modified from the definition given by Heine. The terms classic and romantic apply to treatment not to subject, and the difference is that the treatment is classic when the idea is represented as directly and with as exact an adaptation of form as possible, while it is romantic when the idea is left to the reader's faculty of divination assisted only by suggestion and symbol. Of these two modes of treatment France has always inclined to the classic: during at least two centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, she relied upon it almost wholly. But the fertility of her mediaeval and Renaissance literature in strictly romantic examples, and the general tendency of the literature of the nineteenth century, have shewn a romantic faculty inferior, but only inferior, to the classical. To illustrate this statement by a contrast, it may be pointed out that in Greek the romantic element is almost in abeyance, while in English all without exception of our greatest masterpieces have been purely romantic. Or to put the matter in yet other words, the sense of the vague is, among authors of the highest rank, rarely present to a Greek, always present to an Englishman, and alternately present and absent, but oftener absent, to a Frenchman.

The qualities which this general differentia has developed in French may now be enumerated.

The first is a great and remarkable _sobriety_. It is true that there is nothing more extravagant than an extravagant Frenchman, but that is the natural result of reaction. As a rule, the contributions of matter which France received so abundantly from other nations are always toned and sobered by her in their literary formation. The main materials of her wonderful mediaeval literature of fiction were furnished by Wales, by Germany, and by the East; all of them, to judge by the later but more or less independent handlings which we have from indigenous sources, must have teemed with the supernatural. In the Chansons de Gestes, in the Arthurian romances, and even in the earlier Romans d'Aventures, the supernatural, though recognised as became a devout age and country, is yet to a certain extent rationalised. It rarely obtrudes itself, and it still more rarely presents itself with exaggerated attributes. A continual spirit of criticism exhibits itself throughout French literature; it always, as represented by its most numerous and on the whole most famous representatives, tends to order, to measure, to symmetry.

The next characteristic is abundant and almost superabundant _wit_. The terms wit and humour have been argued over even more than classical and romantic, and it is equally impossible to enter into the controversy here. Suffice it to say that, according to the most satisfactory definition of humour (thinking in jest while feeling in earnest), wit might be defined to be thinking in jest without interrogating the consciousness as to whether the feeling is earnest or not. At a very early period, as soon indeed as the French spirit had thoroughly emerged from its German-Latin-Celtic swaddling clothes, this faculty of half reckless thinking in jest made its appearance. In classical literature wit is notoriously absent with rare exceptions (Aristophanes and Lucian being almost the only ones of importance); in scarcely any other modern literature does it make its appearance early. But it shows in French by the twelfth century, and it increases during every century that succeeds: while joined to sobriety it begets that satirical criticism, which is so noteworthy a secondary product of French.

A third quality closely connected with the two former but not, like satirical criticism, simply derived from them, is the close _attention to form_ which has always distinguished French. At the present time, despite the great advance made by other literatures and a certain falling off in itself, French prose is on the average superior in formal merit to any other prose written in a modern language. If we look back for eight hundred years, French verse is found to be more carefully and artistically arranged than the corresponding poetical beginnings of any other European country. In the excogitation of careful rules and the deft carrying out of those rules no literature can on the whole approach this except Greek. No literature therefore, with that exception, gives so much of the pleasure which is given by the spectacle of not unreasonable difficulty skilfully overcome in a game which is well played.

A fourth merit is to be found in the _inventiveness_ of Frenchmen of letters. In no literature is there a greater variety, and in none is that variety so obviously the effect not of happy blundering but of organised and almost scientific development of the possibilities of art. The wonderful fertility with which the early Trouveres handled and re-handled the motives of the Arthurian and Carlovingian legends has been noticed; and, as a very different but complementary instance, the surprising success and variety with which a scheme so limited as that of the classical tragedy was applied, deserves mention. At the present day in one important department of literature (the drama) inventiveness is almost limited to Frenchmen, and there are few periods of their present history at which they have not in this respect led the van in one department or in another.

Yet another characteristic must be noted, which is, in respect to matter, the complement of the already mentioned attention to form. This is the singular _clearness_ and _precision_ with which not merely the greatest Frenchmen of letters, but all save the least, are accustomed to put their meaning. Whereas the two great classical languages, from the licence of order given by their abundant inflections and complicated syntax, are sometimes enigmatic; whereas German notoriously lends itself to the wrapping up of a simple meaning in a cloud of words; whereas English seems to encourage those who use it not indeed to obscurity but to desultoriness and beating about the bush, French properly used is almost automatically clear and precise. Rivarol's somewhat sententious conceit that the French language has a 'probite attachee a son genie' is not a conceit merely. That this lucidity is sometimes accompanied by want of depth is quite true, but it is equally true that it is often mistaken for it. There is no want of depth in Descartes or in Malebranche, yet there are no clearer writers in the whole range of philosophic literature.

To these main characteristics others which are in a way corollaries might be added, such as urbanity, ease, ready adaptation to different classes of subject, and the like. But those already dwelt upon are the principal, and they have sufficed to make French, as far as general usefulness and interest go, the best vehicle of expression in prose among European languages. In poetry it is not quite the same. Most of the qualities just enumerated are in poetry but of secondary use, some of them are almost directly unfavourable to the vagueness, the indefinite suggestion, the 'making the common uncommon,' which are necessary to poetry. The clearness of French prose has a tendency to become colourless in French poetry, its sobriety turns to the bald, its wit to conceits and prettinesses, its inventiveness to an undue reliance on complicated devices for creating an artificial attraction, its sense of form and rule to dryness and lack of passion. Moreover the merely sonorous qualities of French render it a difficult instrument for the production of varied poetical sounds. It is almost wholly destitute of quantity, and the intonation which supplies that want is of such a kind that hardly any foot but the iambus is possible in it. On the other hand its terminations admit of elaborate and harmonious rhymes (indeed French poetry without rhyme is a practical impossibility), and the abundance of mute _e_ endings has facilitated the adoption of an artificial source of variation of sound in the so-called 'masculine and feminine' rhyming which is in its perfection almost peculiar to the language. With these aids and by the most elaborate attention to metre and euphony, the great poets of France have been enabled to surmount to a very large extent the corresponding difficulties of their prosody. But they have not on the whole been equally fortunate in surmounting the difficulties caused by the very genius of the language--the clear, sober, critical _ethos_ of French. This is an enemy to mystery, to vagueness, to what may be called the twilight of sense--all things more or less necessary to the highest poetry. It will not I think be alleged by any impartial reader of this book that its author is insensible to the majesty or to the charm of French verse. But it is impossible for me to admit that that majesty and that charm are shewn in the highest degree (in the degree in which not merely Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Shelley, Heine, shew them, but many minor names in Greek, in English, and in German), by any but a very few Frenchmen, and by these in more than comparatively few places. A very competent and obliging French critic has said that it is impossible for any Frenchman to agree with me exactly in my estimate of La Fontaine, and probably there is no better instance than La Fontaine of the fundamental difference of conception of poetry which corresponds to the English channel. Inexhaustibly inventive, full of criticism of life, a master of harmonious language, managing rhythms and metres with a skill only the more artful that it seems so artless, La Fontaine yet has too little of dawn or sunset, still less of twilight or moonlight, too much of the light of common day to deserve, according to my estimate, the title of poet in the highest degree. The same may be said of most other French poets except a few who are to be found almost exclusively in the middle ages, in the Renaissance, and in the nineteenth century. Only in one form of the highest poetry, the passionate declamation which is in effect oratory of the most picturesque kind, France has never been wanting, and in this she has for half the time been mightily helped by the possession of the magnificent Alexandrine metre.

[294]At the close of the eleventh century and at the beginning of the twelfth we find the vulgar tongue in France not merely in full organisation for literary purposes, but already employed in most of the forms of poetical writing. An immense outburst of epic and narrative verse has taken place, and lyrical poetry, not limited as in the case of the epics to the north of France, but extending from Roussillon to the Pas de Calais, completes this. The twelfth century adds to these earliest forms the important development of the mystery, extends the subjects and varies the manner of epic verse, and begins the compositions of literary prose with the chronicles of St. Denis and of Villehardouin, and the prose romances of the Arthurian cycle. All this literature is so far connected purely with the knightly and priestly orders, though it is largely composed and still more largely dealt in by classes of men, trouveres and jongleurs, who are not necessarily either knights or priests, and in the case of the jongleurs are certainly neither. With a possible ancestry of Romance and Teutonic _cantilenae_, Breton _lais_, and vernacular legends, the new literature has a certain pattern and model in Latin and for the most part ecclesiastical compositions. It has the sacred books and the legends of the saints for examples of narrative, the rhythm of the hymns for a guide to metre, and the ceremonies of the church for a stimulant to dramatic performance. By degrees also in this twelfth century forms of literature which busy themselves with the unprivileged classes begin to be born. The fabliau takes every phase of life for its subject; the folk-song acquires elegance and does not lose raciness and truth. In the next century, the thirteenth, mediaeval literature in France arrives at its zenith and remains there until the first quarter of the fourteenth. The early epics lose something of their savage charm, the polished literature of Provence quickly perishes. But in the provinces which speak the more prevailing tongue nothing is wanting to literary development. The language itself has shaken off all its youthful incapacities, and, though not yet well adapted for the requirements of modern life and study, is in every way equal to the demands made upon it by its own time. The dramatic germ contained in the fabliau and quickened by the mystery produces the profane drama. Ambitious works of merit in the most various kinds are published; _Aucassin et Nicolette_ stands side by side with the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, the _Jeu de la Feuillie_ with the _Miracle de Theophile_, the _Roman de la Rose_ with the _Roman du Renart_. The earliest notes of ballade and rondeau are heard; endeavours are made with zeal, and not always without understanding, to naturalise the wisdom of the ancients in France, and in the graceful tongue that France possesses. Romance in prose and verse, drama, history, songs, satire, oratory, and even erudition, are all represented and represented worthily. Meanwhile all nations of Western Europe have come to France for their literary models and subjects, and the greatest writers in English, German, Italian, content themselves with adaptations of Chretien de Troyes, of Benoist de Sainte More, and of a hundred other known and unknown trouveres and fabulists. But this age does not last long. The language has been put to all the uses of which it is as yet capable; those uses in their sameness begin to pall upon reader and hearer; and the enormous evils of the civil and religious state reflect themselves inevitably in literature. The old forms die out or are prolonged only in half-lifeless travesties. The brilliant colouring of Froissart, and the graceful science of ballade- and rondeau-writers like Lescurel and Deschamps, alone maintain the literary reputation of the time. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the translators and political writers import many terms of art, and strain the language to uses for which it is as yet unhandy, though at the beginning of the next age Charles d'Orleans by his natural grace and the virtue of the forms he used, emerges from the mass of writers. Throughout the fifteenth century the process of enriching or at least increasing the vocabulary goes on, but as yet no organising hand appears to direct the process. Villon stands alone in merit as in peculiarity. But in this time dramatic literature and the literature of the floating popular broadsheet acquire an immense extension--all or almost all the vigour of spirit being concentrated in the rough farce and rougher lampoon, while all the literary skill is engrossed by insipid _rhetoriqueurs_ and pedants. Then comes the grand upheaval of the Renaissance and the Reformation. An immense influx of science, of thought to make the science living, of new terms to express the thought, takes place, and a band of literary workers appear of power enough to master and get into shape the turbid mass. Rabelais, Amyot, Calvin, and Herberay fashion French prose; Marot, Ronsard, and Regnier refashion French verse. The Pleiade introduces the drama as it is to be and the language that is to help the drama to express itself. Montaigne for the first time throws invention and originality into some other form than verse or than prose fiction. But by the end of the century the tide has receded. The work of arrangement has been but half done, and there are no master spirits left to complete it. At this period Malherbe and Balzac make their appearance. Unable to deal with the whole problem, they determine to deal with part of it, and to reject a portion of the riches of which they feel themselves unfit to be stewards. Balzac and his successors make of French prose an instrument faultless and admirable in precision, unequalled for the work for which it is fit, but unfit for certain portions of the work which it was once able to perform. Malherbe, seconded by Boileau, makes of French verse an instrument suited only for the purposes of the drama of Euripides, or rather of Seneca, with or without its chorus, and for a certain weakened echo of that chorus, under the name of lyrics. No French verse of the first merit other than dramatic is written for two whole centuries. The drama soon comes to its acme, and during the succeeding time usually maintains itself at a fairly high level until the death of Voltaire. But prose lends itself to almost everything that is required of it, and becomes constantly a more and more perfect instrument. To the highest efforts of pathos and sublimity its vocabulary and its arrangement are still unsuited, though the great preachers of the seventeenth century do their utmost with it. But for clear exposition, smooth and agreeable narrative, sententious and pointed brevity, witty repartee, it soon proves itself to have no superior and scarcely an equal in Europe. In these directions practitioners of the highest skill apply it during the seventeenth century, while during the eighteenth its powers are shown to the utmost of their variety by Voltaire, and receive a new development at the hands of Rousseau. Yet, on the whole, it loses during this century. It becomes more and more unfit for any but trivial uses, and at last it is employed for those uses only. Then occurs the Revolution, repeating the mighty stir in men's minds which the Renaissance had given, but at first experiencing more difficulty in breaking up the ground and once more rendering it fertile. The faulty and incomplete genius of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael gives the first evidence of a new growth, and after many years the romantic movement completes the work. That movement occupied almost the whole of two generations and though at the close of the second its force may appear to be spent, the results remain, and no new or reactionary movement is visible, and the efforts of the Romantics themselves have been crowned with an almost complete regeneration of letters, if not of language. The poetical power of French has been once more triumphantly proved, and its productiveness in all branches of literature has been renewed, while in that of prose fiction there has been almost created a new class of composition.

Finally, we may sum up even this summary. For volume and merit taken together the product of these eight centuries of literature excels that of any European nation, though for individual works of the supremest excellence they may perhaps be asked in vain. No French writer is lifted by the suffrages of other nations--the only criterion when sufficient time has elapsed--to the level of Homer, of Shakespeare, or of Dante, who reign alone. Of those of the authors of France who are indeed of the thirty but attain not to the first three, Rabelais and Moliere alone unite the general suffrage; and this fact roughly but surely points to the real excellence of the literature which these men are chosen to represent. It is great in all ways, but it is greatest on the lighter side. The house of mirth is more suited to it than the house of mourning. To the latter, indeed, the language of the unknown minstrel who told Roland's death, of him who gave utterance to Camilla's wrath and despair, and of him who in our day sang how the mountain wind makes mad the lover who cannot forget, has amply made good its title of entrance. But for one Frenchman who can write admirably in this strain there are a hundred who can tell the most admirable story, formulate the most pregnant reflexion, point the acutest jest. There is thus no really great epic in French, few great tragedies, and those imperfect and in a faulty kind, little prose like Milton's or like Jeremy Taylor's, little verse (though more than is generally thought) like Shelley's or like Spenser's. But there are the most delightful short tales, both in prose and in verse, that the world has ever seen, the most polished jewellery of reflexion that has ever been wrought, songs of incomparable grace, comedies that must make men laugh so long as they are laughing animals, and above all such a body of narrative fiction, old and new, prose and verse, as no other nation can show for art and for originality, for grace of workmanship in him who fashions, and for certainty of delight to him who reads.

FOOTNOTES:

[294] The courtesy of Messrs. A. and C. Black allows me to repeat the following passage from an article of mine in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. For this repetition I may borrow from a better writer than myself the excuse that a man cannot say exactly the same thing in two different sets of words so as to please himself, or perhaps others.

INDEX.

About, Edmond (1828-1885), novelist and journalist, 559.

Academic influences, 486, 506-508. criticism, 564.

Academie Francaise, 334, 353, 367, 504-508.

Actors, societies of, 122.

Adalbert, St., 3.

_Adam, mystery of_, 111.

Adam de la Halle (13th cent.), trouvere and dramatist, 69, 70.

Adenes le Roi (13th cent.), trouvere, 23 note 1, 93, 95.

_Adolescence Clementine_, 174.

_Adolphe_, 435.

Aguesseau, H.F. d' (1668-1751), orator, 457, 480.

Aisse, Mlle. (1693-1733), letter-writer, 445.

Alba, 31.

_Albigensian War, Chronicle of_, 30.

Alembert, Jean le Rond d' (1717-1785), encyclopaedist, 419, 462, 481, 483, 499.

Alexander of Bernay (12th cent.), trouvere, 43.

Alexandrines, 75, 76, 213, 300.

_Aliscans_, 19, 22.

_Alixandre, Chanson d'_, 43.

Allainval, Leonor J. C. Soulas d' (1700-1753), dramatist, 412.

Allegory, 81.

_Almanach de nos Grands Hommes_, 466.

_Alzire_, 408.

_Amphitryon_, 312.

_Amadas et Idoine_, 97.

_Amadis of Gaul_, 237, 319, 320.

_Amants Magnifiques_, 312.

Amerval, Eloy d' (15th cent.), poet, 172.

_Amis et Amiles_, 12, 21, 147. story of, 16. passage from, 18.

Amyot, Jacques (1513-1594), translator, 232, 234, 246, 270.

_Ancien Theatre Francais_, 117 seqq.

_Anciennes Poesies Francaises_, 181, 182.

Andrieux, Francois G. J. S. (1759-1833), dramatist and poet, 403, 414.

_Andromaque_, 302.

_Andromede_, 298.

_Antioche, Chanson d'_, 20, 39, 48, 99.

_Antiquites de Rome_, 203.

_Antony_, 530.

_Apologie pour Herodote_, 166, 194.

Argenson, Rene Louis de Voyer, Marquis d' (1694-1757), memoir-writer, 442.

Arnauld, A. (1612-1694), Port Royalist, 338, 374.

Arnault, A. V. (1766-1834), poet and fabulist, 403.

Arthur, 34. tale of, its origins, 34, 151.

ARTHURIAN ROMANCES, 34-42, 46 note.

Arthurian cycle, French order of, 35, 97. Romances, spirit and literary value of, 38. comedy of, 48. social characteristics of, 46.

Arvers, Felix (1806-1851), poet, 548.

_Asseneth_, 147.

_Assises de Jerusalem_, 144.

Assonance, 11, 27, 63.

_Astree_, 319.

_Athalie_, 302, 303, 306.

Auberi of Besancon (12th cent.), poet, 28.

Aubignac, Francois Hedelin, Abbe d' (1604-1676), dramatist, novelist, and critic, 293, 322.

Aubigne, Agrippa d' (1550-1630), poet and historian, 212, 213, 253, 254.

_Aucassin et Nicolette_, 66, 149. extract from, 150.

Audefroy le Bastard (12th cent.), trouvere, 63.

Augier, E. (b. 1822), dramatist, 553.

Aulnoy, Marie C., Comtesse d' (d. 1720), tale-teller, 328.

Autran, Joseph (1813-1877), poet and dramatist, 555.

Baif, Jean Antoine de (1532-1592), poet, 196, 198, 205, 206, 210, 226.

---- Lazare de (?-1547) translator, 219.

Balada, 31.

Ballade, 101.

_Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_, 158.

Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850), novelist, 532, 535, 537, 542.

Balzac, Jean Guez de (1594-1655), essayist and letter-writer, 355, 356.

Banville, Th. de (b. 1820), poet, 549.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, J. (b. 1808), miscellaneous writer, 557.

Barbier, Auguste (1805-1882), poet, 545.

_Barbier de Seville_, 413.

_Barlaam and Josaphat_, 81.

Baron (1643-1729), comic writer and actor, 317.

Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste du (1544-1590), poet, 211, 212.

Barthelemy, Louis, Abbe (1750-1812), scholar, 427.

Bassompierre, Francois, Marechal de, memoir-writer, 337.

_Bastard de Bouillon_, 20, 99.

Baude, Henri (1430-1495), poet, 163.

Baudelaire, C. (1821-1866), poet and critic, 549, 550.

_Baudouin de Sebourc_, 20, 99.

Bayle, P. (1647-1706), philosopher and encyclopaedist, 375.

Beaumarchais, Caron de (1731-1799), dramatist, 413.

_Bele Erembors_, 63.

_Belisaire_, 458.

Bellay, Guillaume (1491-1543) and Martin (?-1559) du, memoir-writers, 256.

Bellay, Joachim du (1524-1560), poet, 202, 204, 207, 210, 219, 270.

Belleau, Remy (1528-1577), poet, 204, 226.

Belloy, Burette de (1727-1775), dramatist, 408.

Benedictine students, 503.

Benoist de Sainte More (1154-1189), trouvere and chronicler, 44, 45, 79.

Benserade, Isaac de (1612-1691), poet, 278.

Beranger, Pierre Jean de (1780-1857), poet, 511, 512.

Bergerac, Cyrano de (1620-1655), dramatist and novelist, 308, 324.

Bergier, Nicolas Sylvestre (1718-1790), theologian, 460.

Berlioz, H. (1803-1869), miscellaneous writer, 566.

Bernard, C. de (1805-1850), novelist, 557.

Beroalde de Verville (1558-1612), tale-teller, 194.

Bersuire, Pierre (1290-1352), translator, 143.

Bertaut, Jean (1552-1611), poet, 338.

_Berte aux grans Pies_, 21, 93.

Bertin, Antoine (1752-1790), poet, 401.

Bertrand, L. (1807-1841), poet, 548.

Berwick, James Fitzjames, Duke of (1660-1734), memoir-writer, 344.

Besenval, Pierre Victor, Baron de (1722-1791), memoir-writer, 442.

Bestiaries, 79, 145.

Beyle, Henri (1783-1842), novelist and critic, 517.

Beza, Theodore (1519-1605), dramatist and translator, 218, 231.

Bible, 78.

_Bibliotheque des Romans_, 502.

Billaut, A. (1600-1662) poet, 280.

Bichat, M. F. X. (1771-1802), scientific writer, 501.

Blanc, L. (1813-1882), historian, 577.

_Blancandin et l'Orguilleuse d'Amour_, 96.

_Blandin de Cornoalha_, 30.

Blason, 210.

_Blasphemateurs_, 121.

_Blonde d'Oxford_, 98.

Blot (1610-1655) poet, 278.

Bodel, Jean (b. 1269), trouvere, 42, 91, 111.

Bodin, Jean (1530-1596), lawyer, 248.

_Boethius_, Provencal poem on, 28, 29.

Boetie, Etienne de la (1530-1563), poet and political writer, 209, 242, 243, 249.

Boileau, Nicolas (1636-1711), poet and critic, 284-287.

Boisrobert, F. Le Metel de (1592-1662), poet and dramatist, 278.

Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de (1754-1840), political writer, 498, 515.

Bordigne, Charles de (16th cent.), poet, 171.

Borel, P. (1809-1859), poet and novelist, 547.

Bornier, H. de (b. 1825), dramatist, 556.

Borron, Robert and Helie de (12th and 13th cent.), 35, 36.

Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), theologian and preacher, 380-383.

Bouchardy, Joseph (1810-1870), dramatist, 553.

Bouchet, Guillaume (d. 1607), tale-teller, 194.

Bouchet, Jehan (1476-1555), historian and poet, 171, 172, 194.

Bouciqualt, Jean le Maigre (d. 1421), memoir-writer, 105.

Bougainville, Louis Antoine de (1729-1811), traveller, 502.

Bouilhet, L. (1821-1872), poet, 550.

Boulainvilliers, Henri de (1658-1722), historian and political writer, 438.

Bourdaloue, Louis (1632-1704), theologian, 387.

_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, 312.

Boursault, Edme (1638-1708), dramatist, 315.

_Bradamante_, 224.

Brantome, Pierre de Bourdeilles, Abbe de (1540-1614), memoir-writer, 249-252.

Brebeuf, Guillaume de (1618-1661), poet, 287.

Breu-doble, 31.

Brienne, Comte de (17th cent.), memoir-writer, 339.

Brizeux, Auguste (1803-1858), poet, 546.

Brodeau, Victor (1470-1540), poet, 177.

Brosses, Ch. de (1709-1777), miscellanist, 503.

Brunetiere, F., critic, 565.

Brueys, D. A. de (1640-1725), dramatist, 317.

_Brun de la Montaigne_, 26, 92.

Brunetto Latini (1220-1294), scholar, 145, 152.

_Bueves de Commarchis_, 93.

Buffon, George Lewis Leclerc, Count de (1707-1788), naturalist, 499.

_Bug Jargal_, 521.

Buttet, Claude (16th cent.), poet, 209.

Cabanis, J. P. G. (1757-1808), scientific writer, 501.

Calmet, Dom Augustin (1672-1757), biblical historian, 440.

Calvin, Jean (1509-1564), theologian, 230, 231.

Campistron (1656-1737), dramatist, 307, 316.

_Candide_, 423.

Canso, 30.

Cantilenae, 7, 62.

_Caracteres_ of La Bruyere, 365.

Carloix, Vincent (16th cent.), memoir-writer, 254.

_Carte de Tendre_, 321.

Cassel, glossary of, 3.

Castelnau, Michel de (1500-1592), memoir-writer, 257.

_Castoiement d'un Pere a son Fils_, 81.

Caylus, Madame de (1673-1729), memoir-writer, 344.

Cazotte, Jacques (1720-1792), novelist, 426.

_Cenacle_, the, 530, 540.

_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_, 148, 283.

Chamfort, N. (1741-1794), moralist and critic, 465, 466.

Champcenetz, (1759-1794), journalist, &c., 464, 465.

Champier, Symphorien (1472-1535), poet, 171.

Chanson, 66, 511, 512.

_Chanson d'Alixandre_, 42, 43, 46.

_Chanson d'Amour_, 66.

_Chanson de Roland_, argument of, 13. passage from, 14.

_Chanson des Albigeois_, 30, 31.

Chansonnettes, 66.

CHANSONS DE GESTES, 2, 6, 7, 9-24, 37, 43, 47, 50, 75, 76, 99.

_Chanson des Rues et des Bois_, 524.

_Chansons du XV'ieme Siecle_, 166.

Chapelain, Jean (1595-1674), poet, 279, 285, 301, 349.

Chapelle, C. E. L. (1626-1686), poet, 278.

Chardry (13th cent.), trouvere, 81.

_Charlemagne a Constantinople, Voyage de_, 21.

Charlemagne in _Chansons_, 13, 14, 19, 22.

Charleval, C. J. L. Faucon de Risseigneur de (1612-1693), poet, 278.

_Charroi de Nimes, le_, 19.

Charron, Pierre (1541-1603), moralist and theologian, 247, 248.

Chartier, Alain (1390-1458), poet, 102, 105, 144, 165, 169, 270. ballade from, 108. extract from _Curial_, 150.

Chasles, P. L. (1798-1873), critic, 565.

Chassignet, J. B. (1578-1620), poet, 276.

Chastellain, Georges (1403-1475), chronicler, 134, 148, 164.

Chateaubriand, Francois Auguste de (1768-1848), novelist and miscellaneous writer, 429, 430.

Chatillon, A. de (1810-1884), poet, 548.

Chaulieu, Abbe de (1639-1720), poet, 288.

Chaussee, Nivelle de la (1692-1754), dramatic poet, 411, 415.

_Chef d'oeuvre Inconnu_, 533.

Chenedolle, C. de (1769-1833), poet, 403, 468.

Chenier, Andre Marie de (1762-1794), poet, 402, 403.

Chenier, Marie Joseph (1764-1811), poet, critic, and journalist, 401, 403, 519.

Cherbuliez, V. (b. 1832), novelist, 562.

_Chetifs_, 20.

_Cheval de Fust_, 93.

_Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, la_, 20.

_Chevalier a la Charrette_, extract from, 40, 41.

_Chevalier as Deux Espees_, 97.

_Chevalier au Cygne_, 20.

_Chevalier au Lyon_, 37, 38.

Chivalry, spirit of, 29, 38.

Cholieres, Sieur de (16th cent.), 194.

Chrestien de Troyes (d. c. 1195), trouvere, 37, 38, 39, 40.

Chrestien, Florent (1541-1596), translator and political writer, 260.

_Christ, Passion du_, 112.

_Chronique de du Guesclin_, 75.

_Chronique de Messire Jacque de Lalaing_, 148.

_Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois_, 131.

_Chronique de Rains_, 130.

_Chronique du Regne de Charles IX_, 537.

_Chronique scandaleuse_ of Jean de Troyes, 136.

_Chroniques_ of Froissart, 132.

_Chroniques Grandes et Inestimables, du Grant et Enorme Geant Gargantua_, 185.

_Chroniques_ of Jean Lebel, 131, 132, 133.

_Chute d'un Ange_, 514.

_Cinna_, 207.

_Cinq Mars_, 544.

Clari, Robert de (12th cent.), chronicler, 130.

Claude, Jean (1619-1687), theologian, 379.

Claveret (17th cent.), dramatist, 293.

_Clelie_, 321.

_Cleomades_, 93. extract from, 94.

_Cleopatre_, drama, 219, 221, 224, 226.

_Cleopatre_, novel, 307, 321.

_Cleveland_, 422.

_Cliges_, 38.

_Clitandre_, 295, 297.

Codes and Legal Treatises, 144.

Colle, Charles (1709-1783), poet, dramatist, and memoir-writer, 404.

Collerye, Roger de (16th cent.), 170, 171.

Colletet, G. (1598-1659), poet, 278.

Collin d'Harleville, J. F. (1755-1806), comic poet and dramatist, 414.

_Combat des Trente_, 75.

_Comedie des Academistes_, 405.

_Comedie des Chansons_, 308.

_Comedie des Comediens_, 308.

_Comedie des Comedies_, 308.

_Comedie des Proverbes_, 308.

Comedie Italienne, 406.

Comedie Larmoyante, 411.

Comines, Philippe de (_c._ 1447-1511), memoir-writer, 159, 160.

Commedia dell' arte, 308.

Commedia erudita, 308.

_Compere Mathieu_, 428.

Comte, A. (1796-1851), philosopher, 568.

_Comtesse de Ponthieu_, 147.

_Condamnation de Banquet_, 121, 219.

Conde, B. and J. de (14th cent.), trouveres, 78.

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), philosopher, 495.

Condorcet, Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (1743-1794), economist and philosopher, 491.

_Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, 541.

_Confession du Vicaire Savoyard_, 487.

_Confessions_, 425, 485, 486, 487, 488.

Confrerie de la Passion (licensed, 1402), 122.

_Conjuration de Fiesque_, 334, 340.

_Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise_, 335.

_Conquete de Constantinople_, 128, 129, 131.

_Conspiration de Walstein_, 334.

Constant, Benjamin (1767-1830), politician and novelist, 432, 435, 487.

_Consuelo_, 534.

_Contes Drolatiques_, 533, 537.

_Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, 540.

_Contes d'Eutrapel_, 193.

_Contes et Joyeux Devis_, 192, 193.

_Contes_ of La Fontaine, 281, 282, 283, 284.

_Contrat Social_, 486, 487.

_Contreditz du Songecreux_, 170.

_Contre-un_, 249.

_Conversation du Pere Canaye_, 361.

Coppee, F. (b. 1842), poet, 551.

Coq-a-l'Ane, 174, 177, 198.

Coquillart, Guillaume (?1421-1510), poet, 162, 164.

Coran, Ch. (b. 1814), poet, 550.

_Corinne_, 432, 433.

Corneille, Pierre (1606-1684), poet and dramatist, 295-301.

Corneille, Thomas (1625-1706), dramatist, 306, 316.

Corrozet, Gilles (1510-1568), poet and fabulist, 178.

Cottin, Madame (1773-1807), novelist, 434, 435.

Coucy, Chatelain de (13th cent.), poet, 68.

---- Mathieu de (15th cent.), chronicler, 135.

Courier, Paul Louis (1772-1825), translator and political pamphleteer, 469, 510.

_Couronnement Loys_, 19.

Cousin, Victor (1792-1868), philosopher, 516.

Couvin, Watriquet de (14th cent.), trouvere, 78.

Crebillon the Elder, C. Jolyot de (1674-1763), dramatist, 407, 408.

Crebillon the Younger, C. P. Jolyot de (1707-1778), novelist, 426.

Cretin, Guillaume (d. 1525), poet, 165, 172, 209, 270.

_Crispin, Rival de son Maitre_, 410.

_Cromwell_, 522.

Cuvier, G. C. (1769-1832), naturalist, 501.

_Cygne, Chevalier au_, 20, 29, 99.

_Cymbalum Mundi_, 190, 248.

Dacier, Madame (1654-1720), 367.

_Dames Galantes_, 251.

Dancourt, F. C. (1661-1725), dramatist, 317.

Dangeau, Ph. de Courcillon, Marquis de (1638-1720), memoir-writer, 345.

_Daniel_, 111.

Daniel, Pere (1649-1728), historian, 334.

_Daphnis et Chloe_, 233.

Dassoucy, C. Coypeau (1605-1674), miscellanist, 324.

Daubenton, Louis Jean Marie (1716-1800), naturalist, 500.

Daudet, A. (b. 1840), novelist, 562.

Daurat, Jean (c. 1507-1588), poet, 196, 198, 203, 206, 211.

_Daurel et Beton_, 23 note 2.

_Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise_, 198, 206.

Deffand, Madame du (1697-1780), letter-writer, 445.

Definition of Chansons de Geste, 11.

_De l'Allemagne_, 432, 433.

_De l'Amour_, 518.

_De l'Eglise Gallicane_, 496.

_De l'Esprit_, 493.

_De l'Homme_, 493.

Delavigne, Casimir (1793-1843), poet, and dramatist, 519.

Delille, Jacques (1758-1813), poet, 400, 507.

Denis Pyramus (13th cent.), poet, 96.

_Depit Amoureux_, 309, 310.

Desaugiers, M. A. M. (1772-1827), poet, 404.

Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), philosopher, 368-374.

Deschamps, Emile (1795-1871), and Antoni (1809-1869), poets, 543.

Deschamps, Eustache (1328-1415), poet, 103, 104.

Descort, 31.

Desfontaines, P. F. Guizot (1685-1745), critic, 460, 461.

Deshoulieres, Madame (1638-1694), poetess, 288.

Desmahis, J. F. E. (1722-1761), dramatist, 413.

Desorgues, J. T. (1763-1808), poet, 401.

Des Periers, B. (1500-1544), tale-teller, 190, 191.

Desportes, Philippe (1546-1606), poet, 214.

Destouches, P. H. (1680-1754), dramatist, 411.

_Deux Bordeors Ribaux_, 50.

_Devin du Village_, 413.

_Diable Amoureux_, 426.

_Diable Boiteux_, 417, 418.

Dialects, 6, 141.

---- and Provincial Literatures, 6.

_Dictionnaire de Trevoux_, 325.

Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), encyclopaedist, 411, 424, 449, 462, 481, 482.

_Discours de la Methode_, 370, 372, 373.

Dits and Debats, 50, 77, 78, 104, 115, 117, 118.

_Dive Bouteille_, 187, 189.

Dolet, Etienne (1509-1544), poet, translator, and printer, 178, 234, 270.

_Dolopathos_, 52, 96.

_Doon de Mayence_, 21.

Dorat, C. J. (1734-1780), poet, 404.

Doublet, Jean (16th cent.), poet, 209.

Dovalle, Ch. (1807-1829), poet, 546.

Droz, G. (b. 1832), novelist, 559.

Dubos, Jean Baptiste (1670-1742), historian, 438.

Du Cange, _see_ Dufresne.

Ducis, J. F. (1733-1816), poet and dramatist, 409.

Duclos, Charles Pinaud (1704-1772), historian and moralist, 423, 442, 457.

Dufresne, Charles (Du Cange) (1614-1688), historian, scholar, 353.

Dufresny, Charles Riviere (1648-1724), dramatist, 315, 316, 317, 476.

Duguay-Trouin, Rene (1673-1736), memoir-writer, 345.

Dulaurens, Henri Joseph (1719-1797), satirist and novelist, 428.

Dumas the Elder, Alexandre (1806-1870), dramatist and novelist, 530, 535, 542.

Dumas the Younger, Alexandre (b. 1824), dramatist and novelist, 554.

Dupanloup, F. A. P. (1802-1878), theologian, 570.

_Du Pape_, 496.

Du Perron, Cardinal (1556-1618), poet and controversialist, 276.

Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), controversialist, 231, 249.

Dupont, P. (1821-1870), poet, 550.

Durant, G. (1550-1615), poet, 260.

Duras, Madame de (1778-1829), novelist, 434.

D'Urfe, Honore (1567-1725), novelist, 319.

_Durmart le Gallois_, 97.

Du Ryer, Pierre (1605-1658), dramatist, 293.

Eastern stories in Early French literature, 52.

_Ecole des Femmes_, 311.

_Ecole des Maris_, 311.

_Emaux et Camees_, 539.

_Emile_, 425, 486.

Encyclopaedia, 480.

_Enfances Godefroy_, 20.

_Enfances Ogier_, 93.

_Enfants sans Souci_, 123.

'Enjambement,' 523.

Epinay, Madame d' (1725-1783), memoir-writer, 443.

Erckmann-Chatrian, novelists, 557.

_Erec et Enide_, 38.

_Esprit des Lois_, 476, 477.

'Esprit Gaulois,' 48, 182, 263.

_Esquisse des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_, 491.

_Essais_ of Montaigne, 242, 243, 354, 365, 372.

_Essai sur les Moeurs_, 439.

_Essai sur les Regnes de Claude et de Neron_, 441, 482.

_Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_, 514.

_Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances Humaines_, 495.

Essayists, historical, 336.

Estienne, Henri (1528-1598), scholar, 166, 194, 237.

Estrees, F. A. d' (17th cent.), memoir-writer, 337.

_Estula_, 52.

_Etourdi_, 309, 310.

_Eugene_, 220, 221.

_Eulalie, St., Song of_, 4, 62.

_Expedition Nocturne_, 435.

_Fables_ of La Fontaine, 281, 282, 283, 327, 403.

_Fabliau des Perdris_, extract from, 58, 59.

Fabliaux, 6, 47-52, 148, 153, 502.

Fabre d'Eglantine, P. F. N. (1755-1794), poet and dramatist, 414.

_Facheux_, 311.

Fagan, C. B. (1702-1755), dramatist, 412.

Farce, 117, 216, 218.

_Farce du Cuvier_, 119.

_Farce de Folle Bobance_, 120.

_Farce du Paste et de la Tarte_, 118.

_Faron, St., Song of_, 3, 8.

Fatrasie, 194, 198, 424.

Fauchet, Claude (1530-1601), critic, 235.

_Fauvel_, 57.

_Femmes Savantes_, 313.

Fenelon, F. de Salignac de la Mothe--(1661-1715), theologian, 383.

Fenin, Pierre de (d. 1506), chronicler, 135.

_Festin de Pierre_, 310, 311.

_Feuilles de Grimm_, 462.

Feuillet, O. (b. 1812), dramatist and novelist, 554, 558.

Feydeau, E. (1821-1874), novelist, 559.

_Fiancee du Roi de Garbe_, 283.

_Fierabras_, 20, 21, 22.

Fievee, Joseph (1767-1839), novelist, etc., 434.

Fitzwarine, story of, 146.

'Five Poets,' the, 278, 295.

_Flamenca_, 30.

Flaubert, G. (1821-1881), novelist, 560, 561.

Flechier, Esprit (1632-1710), preacher, 388.

Fleury, Abbe (1640-1723), historian, 334.

_Flore et Blanchefleur_, 96.

Florian, G. P. de (1755-1794), poet and fabulist, 403.

_Folles Entreprises_, 217.

Fontaine, Charles (1513-1587), poet, 178, 182.

Fontaines, Madame de (d. 1730), novelist, 419.

Fontanes, L. de (1757-1821), poet, 403, 468.

Fontaney, A. C. (?-1837), poet and critic, 547, 548.

Fontenay-Mareuil, F. Duval de (1595-1647), memoir-writer, 336.

Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657-1757), miscellaneous writer, 453.

Forbin, C. de (1656-1733), memoir-writer, 345.

_Fourberies de Scapin_, 313.

_Franc Archier de Bagnolet_, 158.

_Frere Lubin_, 177.

Freron, Elie Catherine (1719-1776), journalist, 460, 474.

Froissart, Jean (1337-1410), historian and poet, 103, 104, 132-135.

Furetiere, Antoine (1620-1688), novelist and miscellaneous writer, 325.

Gaboriau, E. (1835-1873), novelist, 557.

Gace Brule (13th cent.), poet, 69.

_Galerie du Palais_, 297.

Galiani, Abbe (1681-1753), economist and letter-writer, 450, 490.

Gamon, Achille (16th cent.), memoir-writer, 257.

Ganelon, 13, 14, 21.

Garat, D. J. (1749-1833), journalist, etc., 464, 465.

_Gargantua_, 185-187.

_Garin le Loherain_, 20.

Garnier, Robert (1545-c. 1601), dramatist, 224, 225.

_Gaspard de la Nuit_, 548.

Gassendi (1592-1655), Neo-Epicurean philosopher, 375.

Gautier, Theophile (1811-1872), poet, critic, and novelist, 537, 542, 546.

Gaymar, Geoffrey (b. 1149), chronicler, 76.

Gazetteers, the rhyming, 289.

_Genie du Christianisme_, 429, 431.

Genlis, Madame de (1746-1830), novelist, 434, 443.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (12th cent.), historian, 34 sqq.

_Gerard de Roussillon_, 20.

_Gerard de Viane_, 21.

Gerson, Jean Charlier de (1363-1429), theologian, 142.

Geruzez, E. (1799-1865), critic, 565.

_Gesta Romanorum_, 52.

Geste, Meaning of, 10 note 1.

Gielee, Jacquemart (13th cent.), poet, 55.

Gilbert, N. J. L. (1751-1780), poet, 401.

_Gil Blas_, 411, 417, 418.

Gillot, Jacques (16th cent.), political writer, 260.

Ginguene, P. L. (1748-1816), critic, etc., 464.

Girardin, Madame de (1804-1855), dramatist, 554.

_Girartz de Rossilho_, 25, 28, 29.

_Giron le Courtois_, 36, 39.

Glatigny, A., poet, 551.

_Globe_, 520.

_Glorieux_, 411.

Godeau, A. (1605-1672), poet, 278.

Golden Violet, etc., 32, 33.

Gombaud, J. Ogier de (1570-1666), poet, 276.

Gomberville, Marin le Roy Seigneur de (1600-1647), poet and novelist, 278, 322.

Gourville, Jean Herault de (d. 1703), memoir-writer, 343.

Graal, the Holy,