Part 13

Pierre Corneille, the author of _Le Cid_, _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, and other plays of greater and less note, flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century (the time of our English Civil Wars and Commonwealth), and was followed by Racine, the author of _Phèdre_, _Esther_, and _Athalie_, and the contemporary of our poet Dryden. When it is said that these two dramatists possess in full the French characteristics, it is meant that they show all the French virtues of elegance, good sense, and polish of style, and all the French defects of servility to rule, coldness, and consequent monotony. There can be nothing more unlike than the typical drama of Corneille and the typical drama of Shakespeare. The Frenchman deliberately adopts the so-called “Aristotelian” and “classical,” but really Senecan and pedantic, rule of the unities, of time, of place, and of action; that is to say, his plays contain the development of but one action, which proceeds in the same place and within a time equal to that of the representation itself. To these conventions, which can have no natural or divine right to call themselves “laws,” Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists are strangers. A Shakespearean play—described as “romantic” in antithesis to “classical”—carries us from place to place, from year to year, and embraces, if it so chooses, a number of loosely related actions and episodes. Its unity is the unity of a whole story, not of a situation or climax. Corneille, to use his own words, had an aversion to putting Paris, Rome, and Constantinople on the same stage. The result is that there is often no background of place or time at all. This was but one difference. Again, Shakespeare’s tragedies are performed, if he thinks fit, with all their slayings, suicides, and mutilations full in the face of the audience. In the French theatre, as in the Greek, these actions are regularly perpetrated out of sight and are merely reported upon the stage.

French tragedy is mostly the working out of a moral situation. English tragedy holds the mirror up to manifold nature. The French tragedy is “heroic,” it seeks to interest and to elevate the soul by heroic sentiments dramatically displayed. We meet with heroes who are altogether noble, and with the opposite characters who are altogether base. They are “ideal” personages, who do little else but deliver artistic declamatory speeches in the manner of Seneca. On the other hand, the English tragedy represents men as they are, with all their complexities, inconsistencies, and shortcomings. The French do not, or did not, understand the English drama any better than we understand theirs. They call it irregular and inartistic. Voltaire at one period declared Shakespeare “a drunken savage, without the least spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.” We, on the other hand, grow weary of the continuous and unrelieved progress of the one and only action, and of the vagueness of background and lack of individuality in “the ideal action performed by ideal characters.” The French portray types, not characters. The great masters accepted a fixed architecture for their plays and fixed limitations to work under, and their merit is that, despite these cramping conditions, they produced works of so elevated a literary and so exalted a moral style. It is not meant that Corneille, Racine, and the minor dramatists were as much alike as larger and smaller peas. A manifest difference, for example, which renders the plays of Racine more generally interesting than those of Corneille, is that Racine chooses subjects which come nearer home to most human beings. He brings us into one part, at least, of the practical human world, the world of love. The fault of French tragic drama is excess of rule and restraint; the fault of English drama had, by the time of the post-Shakespeareans, come to be excess of licence and consequent bad taste bordering on absurdity.

In the midst of the French influence upon English literature, which set in towards the end of the seventeenth century—the only time when Englishmen as a body have shown a readiness to submit to a prescribed code of critical principles—it is not unnatural that the English drama also should copy the French. The imitation, however, was by no means good as such. The English tragedy of the Restoration aims at being “heroic” tragedy, turns declamation into rant and bombast, and ideal character into impossible perfection. Fortunately the copying in this region was of comparatively brief duration. Of those whom it affected Dryden was the least guilty. He came to a theatre which had been but newly opened under Charles II, after the Puritan tyranny, and, as with everything else under Charles, the theatre endeavoured to take its tone from France. Dryden had himself been largely influenced by French critical ideas. He did not, it is true, agree entirely with the French principles; nevertheless, he found submission necessary. On the one side he had before him the magnificent “romantic” and “irregular” drama of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans, on the other the new heroic and “regular” tragedies of France. He attempted to combine the better elements of both, and failed through falling between two stools. That he was conscious of a deliberate choice is clear from his own words: “Let any man, who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense—many of their plots were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story.” He mentions in particular _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _Winter’s Tale_, and _Measure for Measure_, and he goes on to quote the classical rules concerning unity of action, with its “beginning, middle, and end,” and the rest; and thereto he adds as his authorities the names of French critics of the school of Boileau, the now unremembered Bossu and Rapin. He does not, indeed, admire the French coldness and monotony, and his own object, though not that of his contemporaries, was, as has been already stated, to combine the better elements of both the French and English style. It is a grief to note that, in keeping with this view, it was thought no literary sin at this time to mutilate and adapt the plays of Shakespeare till they more or less suited the current taste. Dryden’s own dramas, _Tyrannic Love_, _Secret Love_, _Aurengzebe_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ are largely indebted to French originals, and have fallen between the two stools. Whereas Shakespeare and Corneille alike survive, no one now can act, and very few care to read, the plays of Dryden. Another play which is of some repute, the _Cato_ of Addison, would certainly either not have been written, or would have been a less cold and declamatory thing than it is, if Addison had not lived in an age when France was England’s teacher in dramatic and other literary rules.

Of French comedy a different story must be told. It is impossible to mention the name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, the contemporary of Corneille and Racine, without feeling that we are naming the world’s best writer of comedy pure and simple, next to Aristophanes. What Shakespeare might have done if he had written comedies alone, we cannot tell. Wherever his mature plays offer us undiluted comedy, it is superlatively comic. Yet we do not think of him primarily in connection with Aristophanes and Molière, but rather as the writer of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_. If we named an English author whose genius in many respects recalls Molière, it would perhaps be Sheridan, the writer of the _School for Scandal_. In Molière there comes out the best side of the peculiar French genius, the Gallic wit, the trenchant satire without brutality, the keen entertainment without vulgarity. Molière at his zenith makes comedy a work of art, and of refined art; a comedy which edifies while it delights, and which delights without appealing to the lower elements of our nature. It is a humorous feast of the delighted reason, not a pandering to a mere taste for “lungs tickle o’ the sere.” His _Précieuses Ridicules_ is keen and killing criticism of the silly affectations of a literary coterie; his _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ slays the ignorant parvenu, and his _Tartuffe_ the hypocrite.

This comedy, delightful now to read as it was then to see, could not but seize hold upon Englishmen of the Restoration times and later still. Molière was copied, adapted, translated by English writers, and that not merely for reading, but for acting purposes. Dryden translated _L’Etourdi_ as _Sir Martin Mar-all_; Vanbrugh turned _Le Dépit Amoureux_ into _The Mistake_; Wycherley offered _The Plain Dealer_ as a version of _Le Misanthrope_; Fielding’s _Mock-Doctor_ is _Le Médecin Malgré Lui_, his _Miser_ is Molière’s _L’Avare_; Colley Cibber converted _Tartuffe_ into _The Non-Juror_.

So much at least does English literature proper owe to French tragedy and comedy. Of the constant plagiarism and adaptation of French plays in modern times nothing need be said, since these things have been for the most part hardly literature in the proper meaning of the term.

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Meanwhile French prose-writing, which had been of such easy simplicity in Montaigne, passed for a while under the bad influence of the Spanish _estilo culto_, and of the English Euphuism. This was the day of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and of the Précieuses, with their finical refinements and affectations of speech. In the subject-matter of literature the Spanish influence showed itself first in the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé (1608), a wearisome and unnatural “pastoral romance,” prompted by the _Diana_ of the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor. To this work are to be affiliated the “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who are shortly to be mentioned. As for the prose vehicle itself, apart from these vagaries of its use, it may be said that, ever since French literature reached its golden age in the middle of the seventeenth century, its characteristics have been much the same as those of French verse, namely, clearness of order, precision of statement, good sense of thinking, a triumph of reasonable and exact expression.

Our own literature of the later part of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier half of the eighteenth, which owes so much to France, is nowhere more manifestly indebted than in respect of that lighter prose which takes the shape of letters and novels, and of what would now be called occasional journalism. The French have always been excellent letter-writers and journalists, as well as admirable novelists. Even the inferior French work, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s interminable pseudo-romantic prolixities—the _Grand Cyrus_, or _Clélie_ with its _Carte de Tendre_—and those of La Calprenède (_Cléopâtre_ and _Cassandre_), was reproduced in England by writers of the calibre of Mrs. Aphra Behn, as well as exploited by Dryden and other post-Restoration dramatists. The novel of adventure, which we associate with the names of Defoe (as in _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_), Fielding (_Joseph Andrews_), and Smollett (_Roderick Random_), and which is known as “picaroon” or “picaresque,” is no doubt ultimately derived from Spain, but its way into England was made through Paul Scarron, a French seventeenth-century novelist, and through his followers and literary heirs, among whom in the early eighteenth century is the renowned Lesage, the author of _Gil Blas_. On the other hand, that class of fiction which deals with character and its analysis, and which appears in English with Richardson, the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Pamela_, dates from Madame de la Fayette, who lived a century earlier than he, although it is perhaps to his contemporary Marivaux that the Englishman is more directly under obligation. The first great exemplar of modern letter-writing, who, after Cicero and Pliny, taught Horace Walpole and Chesterfield how to pen epistles, and who inspired the more or less mock correspondence of Addison in the _Spectator_, was Madame de Sévigné, a contemporary of Madame de la Fayette.

The seventeenth century in France is covered with prose-writers of clear reasoning power, pinnacled in Descartes’ _Discours de la Méthode_ and Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_, and with writers of essays, memoirs, novels, letters, criticisms, character-sketches, and “maxims” in all their various kinds. There is the _essai_, which enlarges on a theme; the _conversation_, an essay in dialogue, like those of Landor; the _pensée_, a miniature essay with narrower theme; and the _maxime_, a pithy sentence forming the cream of a _pensée_. La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and St. Evremond, for example, are familiar names. For our purpose it is enough that these writers preceded our own Addison, Swift, Steele, and Johnson, and that English prose of the Queen Anne period and the earlier eighteenth century was fashioned by France as much as was our verse itself. And as the excellence of prose is perfect clearness and ease, the influence of France herein was wholly good, just as the prosaic influence of its verse had been mainly harmful.

In the same century stands, _sui generis_, La Fontaine, the fertile author of the famous stories and _Fables_, to whom Dryden, Gay, and Prior owe, besides the hint of form, no little suggestion.

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In the eighteenth century French literature is of an inferior order, unproductive of things noble in imagination or of great dramatic works. At its best it is critical, not creative. Until André Chénier at the end of the century, it has practically no poetry to show, since neither the occasional verses of Voltaire, nor his epic _Henriade_, nor his drama _Zaïre_, can properly bear the name. Wit indeed flourished in the epigrams and comedy of Piron, as it could hardly fail to do in French work of the lighter kinds; but it was not till the precursors of the “Romantic movement” of the nineteenth century—for which France was almost as much indebted to the English Byron and the German Goethe as to its own Rousseau and Chateaubriand—that creative poetry appears again with Béranger and Lamartine. The Romantic epoch itself is then embodied in Victor Hugo. So far as the eighteenth century is productive, it is in prose, and chiefly the prose of thought and science. The novel is represented in the picaresque _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ of Lesage early in the century, in the analytical _Marianne_ of Marivaux, in the satirically destructive _Candide_ of Voltaire, in the powerful character study of _Manon Lescaut_ by Prévost, in the sentimental and picturesque _Nouvelle Héloïse_ of Rousseau and _Paul et Virginie_ of Bernardin de St. Pierre, and in the social fiction of Madame de Staël. Of the effect of Lesage upon England we have already spoken. Marivaux appears to have distinctly influenced Richardson, whose _Pamela_ otherwise bears a strange similarity to _Marianne_. But most congenial to the English mind, now on its way to the Romantic revolt, was the work of Rousseau and St. Pierre, in which the notion of a “return to nature” is the dominant note. St. Pierre was the disciple; Rousseau is the master, who, whether in the novel or in his _Confessions_, is the first writer in modern Europe to expatiate upon inanimate nature in connection with the feelings. How much of the “nature-worship” of Wordsworth and his age may be due to this example from France can hardly be estimated, but the name of Rousseau was a familiar one in England, and by him was sown much of the seed which our own revivalists watered.

Passing over the letter-writers and minor essayists, we come to the thinkers, the propagators of freedom of thought, commonly known as the _philosophes_. In this case the impulse came from the English Locke and from contact with, and personal observation of, the liberal circumstances of England, at that time the most advanced in Europe. The crop of French solvent ideas from these sources soon found its way back to our own country. In his _Esprit des Lois_, Montesquieu, a writer of remarkable wisdom, examines the natural basis and evolution of law and custom; the fertile but superficial Voltaire, in various “Letters” and essays, lends his powerful wit to the weakening of accepted authority, especially in religion. Subsequently, in order to crystallize the knowledge which forms the necessary basis to right criticism and reformation, there was undertaken the famous, if not very successful, _Encyclopaedia_, or _Dictionnaire Raisonné_ of sciences and arts, under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert. Falling into the revolutionary current, and being in direct association with the _philosophes_ and Encyclopaedists, the eloquent and passionate Rousseau produced the _Contrat Social_, with its doctrines of equality and fraternity and its innovating theories of education, and the _Confessions_, in which he lays bare his own pettinesses, but with exquisite literary skill. As his follower must be reckoned Chateaubriand, who, so far as expression of temperament goes, passed on his mantle to the English Byron.

If now it is asked on what groups of our English writers French influence is most pronounced and obvious, we should most safely reply that in pre-Renaissance times we must name Chaucer and Gower; then, after a gap of two hundred and fifty years, we may begin once more with Dryden and his contemporaries, the poetic “roisterers,” Dorset and Roscommon, and the comedians Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. In Pope and all his school the influence is manifest and conscious. It is present in Addison and Steele, and in the novelists Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, different as they are; in the letters of Walpole and Chesterfield, and, in more or less measure, consciously and unconsciously, in all the writers of poetry, drama, letters, essays, journals and novels from about the year 1660 for a whole century.

Since that time the influences have been rather the other way, but those from France upon England may perhaps be enumerated as (1) the elaboration of a sentiment for inanimate nature since Rousseau, St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand; (2) the absorption, and sometimes imitation, of French novels, such as _Les Misérables_ and _Notre Dame_ of Hugo, the revived picaroons of Dumas, and the naturalistic work of Zola; (3) the Positivist philosophy of Comte; (4) imitations or plagiarisms of French comedy, such as that of Sardou; (5) lessons from the literary criticism of Ste. Beuve, chiefly derived through Matthew Arnold; (6) stylistic lessons from writers like Flaubert.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF FRENCH LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES. DATES. TYPICAL WORKS. SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE. Epic tales of Chivalry (Chansons de Geste) Various Trouvères (mostly unknown) Twelfth and thirteenth centuries 1. Romances of Charlemagne’s Paladins. 2. Romances of ancient heroes, _e.g._, _Roman de Troie_. 3. Romances of Arthur. Allegorical Epic (Romans) Mostly anonymous, but _Roman de la Rose_ begun by Guillaume de Lorris and completed by Jean de Meung Twelfth and thirteenth centuries _Roman de Renart_ (_Reynard the Fox_), _Roman de la Rose._ Fabliaux Generally anonymous Twelfth and thirteenth centuries These works and their like were practically as familiar to the “reading public” of England as of France during the pre-Chaucerian period, when French was the social, official, and literary language. Some portions were contributed by Anglo-Normans, _e.g._, Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More. Chaucer began by translating and imitating from the French, _e.g._, in his _Romance of the Rose_. His _Canterbury Tales_ include a number of _fabliaux_, and also borrowings from the _romans_. Gower is still more after the same school. The _Romance of the Rose_ and other allegories continued in vogue till the Renaissance. The _Chansons de Geste_ exerted much influence on Italian writers of romantic heroics (Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, etc.), thence again affected England (through Spenser, etc.). The _fabliaux_ were utilized by Boccaccio and the Italian _novellieri_, and thence influenced Elizabethan novel and drama. Poetry: (Other than Drama) Transition to Renaissance. VILLON 1431-1500 Personal lyrics. MAROT 1495-1544 Epistles, elegies, eclogues. Marot and his followers, _e.g._, Saint-Gelais, were an influence upon Wyatt, Spenser, etc. Spenser copies Marot in eclogue. (Till eighteenth century) Pléiade reformers. RONSARD 1524-1585 DU BELLAY _ob._ 1560 Odes, sonnets Spenser begins his poetical work by paraphrasing Du Bellay. The school of Ronsard aided the Italian school in bringing the so-called “classical” forms of verse into England. Apostle of “correctness.” MALHERBE 1556-1628 The influence of the doctrine of “correctness” on English literature begins in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and extends till late in the eighteenth. _See_ “Boileau” below. VOITURE 1598-1648 SAINT-AMANT 1594-1660 Occasional verses, _vers de société_, bacchanalian verse. Models for post-Restoration writers, _e.g._, Dorset, Sedley. LA FONTAINE 1621-1695 _Fables_ and _Contes_ Influenced Dryden, Gay, Prior in similar compositions. Legislator in poetic style. BOILEAU 1636-1711 _L’Art Poétique_, satires, etc. The authority of Boileau was almost as high in England as in France. Pope, Addison, and the “correct” school generally follow him. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ echoes Boileau. Drama: (_a_) Tragedy CORNEILLE 1606-1684 _Cinna_, _Le Cid_, _Polyeucte_, etc. RACINE 1639-1699 _Phèdre_, _Esther Attalie_, etc. Effect of French dramatic principles appears with the re-opening of theatres under Charles II. It is considered necessary to recast Shakespeare, and an effort is made after the “unities.” The “heroic plays” of Dryden’s time are due to a combination of French tragedy with French romance (_e.g._, _Tyrannic Love_, _Conquest of Granada_, etc.). Addison’s Cato is a full attempt at “classical” drama in imitation of the French. (_b_) Comedy MOLIÈRE 1622-1673 _Le Misanthrope_, _Tartuffe_, _L’Avare_, etc. French comedy was imitated, but debased, by Wycherley, Farquhar, etc. Molière was much utilized by post-Restoration dramatists, _e.g._, in Wycherley’s _Plain Dealer_ (= _Misanthrope_), _Country Wife_ (= _L’École des Femmes_ + _L’École des Maris_), Dryden’s _Sir Martin Mar-all_ (= _L’Elounis_). Prose Fiction: (_a_) Allegorical (satirical) RABELAIS 1483-1553 _Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel._ Appreciably the precursor of Swift and Sterne. (_b_) Heroic romances (of sentiment) LA CALPRENÈDE 1602-1663 _Cléopâtre_, etc. MLLE. DE SCUDÉRY 1607-1701 _Le Grand Cyrus_, etc. These long and ranting works were translated into English and were much read. They were imitated by Aphra Behn. Combined with French “classical” tragedy they produced the English “heroic plays,” _e.g._, Dryden’s _Secret Love_ (from the _Grand Cyrus_) and Settle’s _Ibrahim_. (_c_) Picaroon romances (adventures after Spanish models) SCARRON 1610-1660 LESAGE 1668-1747 _Gil Blas_, _Le Diable Boiteux_ DUMAS (the elder) 1803-1870 _Three Musketeers_, etc. This style was taken up in particular by Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett. Of late there has been a recrudescence of Dumas in minor English fiction. (_d_) Character novel MME. DE LA FAYETTE 1633-1693 _Zaide_, _Princesse de Clèves_ MARIVAUX 1688-1763 _Marianne_ BALZAC 1799-1850 Novels of the _Comédie Humaine_ Followed by Richardson (_Clarissa Harlowe_, etc.), who began the vogue which has continued till the present. Essays, moralizings, philosophy MONTAIGNE 1533-1592 _Essais_ The first model of the “Essay” proper. Well known to Elizabethans (Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.). Translated by Florio. PASCAL 1623-1662 _Provincial Letters_, _Pensées_ DESCARTES 1596-1650 _Discours de la Méthode_ LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 1613-1680 _Maxims_ LA BRUYÈRE 1639-1696 _Characters_ MONTESQUIEU 1689-1755 _Esprit des Lois_ VOLTAIRE 1694-1778 _Candide_, _Essai sur les Mœurs_, etc. ROUSSEAU 1712-1778 _Contrat Social_, _Confessions_, etc. CHATEAUBRIAND 1768-1848 _Génie du Christianisme_ COMTE 1798-1857 _Philosophie Positive._ All this literature was widely read and assimilated in England, but precise effects can hardly be specified. Rousseau, however, is the first to evoke the “Nature worship,” or the study of natural influence upon the feelings, which becomes so prominent in the English poetry of the early nineteenth century. The same influence from Chateaubriand is seen in Byron. Letter-writing MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ 1627-1696 The model for English letter-writers of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole being the great exemplar for our own country. The mock-correspondence of the _Spectator_ already shows the vogue. Literary Criticism BOILEAU 1636-1711 (_See_ “Poetry”). STE. BEUVE 1804-1869 _Portraits Littéraires_, _Causeries du Lundi_, etc. Exponent of criticism based on wide knowledge of literature. Matthew Arnold was his avowed disciple.

V

ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH