A Short History of French Literature

Helvétius

Between these philosophers, in the local and temporary sense of the word, who dealt only with what would now be called the sociological side of philosophy in its bearings on politics, religion, ethics, and economics, and the strictly philosophical school of Condillac and his followers, a small but very influential sect of materialists, who were yet not purely philosophical materialists, has to be considered. Three members of this school have importance in literature – La Mettrie, Helvétius, and Holbach. La Mettrie was a native of Britanny: he entered the medical service of the French army, acquired a speedy reputation for heterodoxy and disorderly living, and fled for shelter to the general patron of heterodox Frenchmen, Frederick of Prussia; at whose court he died, at a comparatively early age, it is said in consequence of a practical joke. La Mettrie's chief work is a paradoxical exercise in materialist physics called L'Homme-Machine, in which he endeavours to prove the purely automatic working of the human frame, and the absence of any mind in the spiritualist sense. This he followed by a similar but less original work, called L'Homme-Plante, and by some other minor publications. La Mettrie was a very unequal thinker and writer, but he has, as Voltaire (who disliked him) expressed it, traits de flamme both in thought and style. Claude Adrian Helvétius was of Swiss descent, and of ample fortune. Born in 1715, he was appointed to the high post of Farmer-General when he was little more than twenty-three; but he did not hold this appointment very long, and became Chamberlain to the Queen. He was very popular in society, and was of a benevolent and philanthropic disposition, though he seems to have got into trouble at his country seat of Voré by excessive game preserving. He married, in 1751, the beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, who was long afterwards one of the chief centres of literary society in Paris. In 1758 his book De l'Esprit appeared, and made a great sensation, being condemned as immoral, and burnt by the hangman. Helvétius subsequently travelled in England and Germany, dying in 1771. A second treatise, De l'Homme, which appeared posthumously, is much inferior to De l'Esprit in literary merit. It was even more fiercely assailed than its predecessor, and Diderot himself, the leader of the more active section of the philosophe party, wrote an elaborate refutation of it, which, however, has only recently been published. The book De l'Esprit is wanting in depth, and too anecdotic in style for a serious work of philosophy, though this very characteristic makes it all the more amusing reading. It endeavours to make out a theory of morals based on what is called the selfish system; and it was the naked manner in which this selfish system of ethics, and the materialist metaphysics which it implies, are manifested in the book which gave occasion to its ill repute. As a mere work of literature, however, it is well, and in parts even brilliantly written, and amid much that is desultory, inconclusive, and even demonstrably unsound, views of extreme shrewdness and originality on social abuses and inconsistencies are to be found.

Système de la Nature.

None of the writers hitherto mentioned made open profession of atheism, and it is doubtful whether even Diderot deserves the appellation of a consistent atheist. There was, however, a large anti-theistic school among the philosophes, which increased in numbers and strength towards the outbreak of the Revolution. The most striking work by far of this school (which included Damilaville, Naigeon, and a few other names of no great distinction in literature) was the Système de la Nature, which appeared in 1770. This remarkable book, which even Voltaire and Frederick II. set themselves seriously to refute, contains a complete materialist system in metaphysics and theology. It represents the existence of God as a mere creation of the superstition of men, unable to assign a cause for the evils under which they suffer, and inventing a supernatural entity to satisfy themselves. The book (to consider its literary style only) is extremely unequal, passages of remarkable vigour alternating with long and dreary tracts of inconclusive and monotonous declamation. It appeared under the name of a dead man, Mirabaud, a person of some slight and chiefly official name in science and letters. It is, however, believed, if not certainly known, to be the work of the Baron d'Holbach (who unquestionably wrote various other books of a similar tendency), with the assistance of divers of his friends, and especially of Diderot. The Système is a very singular production, animated by a kind of fanatical, and in parts almost poetical aspiration after the annihilation of all supernatural belief, which is hardly to be found elsewhere except in Lucretius. It had great influence, though that influence was one of repulsion as well as of conversion, and it may be said to be, up to the present day, the furthest step taken in the direction of philosophical as opposed to political Nihilism. It should, however, be observed that in parts there is a strong political tinge observable in it.

Condillac.

In all this century of so-called philosophy, France possessed hardly more than one really eminent and considerable metaphysician. This was Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, brother of the Abbé de Mably, who was born in 1715, and died in 1780. Condillac himself was an abbé, and possessing a sufficient benefice, he lived for the most part quietly upon it, and took no part in the political, or even the literary life of the times. In 1746 he published his Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances Humaines; in 1749 his Traité des Systèmes, a work critical rather than constructive; and in 1754 the Traité des Sensations, his principal work, which completes his theory. The influence of Locke was the most powerful single influence in the philosophe movement of France, and Condillac took up Locke's work at exactly the point where his master had faltered. He set to work to show with great plausibility that, according to Lockeian principles, the addition of ideas of reflection to ideas of sensation is unsustainable, and that all ideas without exception are merely transformed sensations. One of the illustrations which he used to support his views, that of a statue supposed to be endowed with a single sense, and successively developing first the others, and then the powers usually classed as reflection, is famous in the history of philosophy. It concerns us only as giving an instance of the method of Condillac, which is remarkable for vividness and adaptation to the ordinary comprehension. Unlike the style of Locke himself, Condillac's style is not in the least slovenly, but polished and lucid, excellently suited to such a public as that of the eighteenth century, which was at once intelligent enough to understand, and educated enough to demand, finish of manner in discussing abstract points.

After Condillac the history of philosophy in France during the rest of the period is of no great interest to literature. He himself was continued and represented chiefly by Destutt de Tracy. The reaction against the extreme idealist and materialist constructions of Locke respectively, which had been brought about in England by Reid and Stewart, acquired in the last years of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, a considerable following in France. Its chiefs were Maine de Biran, Royer Collard (who also obtained reputation as an orator and parliamentary politician), and Jouffroy. They belong, however, rather to the history of philosophy than to that of literature.

Joseph de Maistre.

After this long list of writers who advocated, more or less openly, revolution in matters political and religious, but especially in the latter, two authors who with Chateaubriand, but in a definitely philosophical manner, set the example of reaction, and who to a great extent indicated the lines which it was to follow, must be mentioned. These are Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald. Joseph, Count de Maistre, was born at Chambéry, in 1753, of a noble Savoyard family, which is said to have come originally from Languedoc. His father held important employments in the duchy, and Joseph himself entered its civil service. When, after the French Revolution, Savoy was invaded, and in a short time annexed, he returned to Lausanne, and there wrote Considérations sur la France, his first work of importance. For some years he was employed at Turin in the administration of such of his continental dominions as were left to the King of Sardinia; and then, after the practical annexation of Piedmont, he held a similar employ in the island of Sardinia itself. At the beginning of the present century, he was sent to St. Petersburg to plead the cause of his master. Here he remained till after the overthrow of Napoleon, and wrote, though he did not publish, most of his books. In 1816 he returned to Turin, and died a few years afterwards – in 1821. The three chief works of Joseph de Maistre are Du Pape, 1817, De l'Église Gallicane, and the unfinished Soirées de St. Pétersbourg. The two first compose a complete treatise on the power and position of the pope in relation both to the temporal and to the ecclesiastical form of national government. The author is the most uncompromising of ultramontanes. According to him the pope is the source of all authority on earth, and temporal princes are little more than his delegates. Except in relation to religious error, Joseph de Maistre is not hostile to a certain ordered measure of liberty accorded by their rulers to peoples and individuals. But, strongly impressed by the social and moral, as well as the political and religious anarchy brought about first by the philosophe movement, and then by the Revolution, he sees the only chance of rescue in the establishment of a hierarchy of government culminating in that from which there is no appeal, the single authority of the pope. He is thus a legitimist with a difference. The Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, which are unfinished and not entirely uniform in plan, deal nominally with the providential government of the world, but diverge to a large number of subjects. It is in this book that the author develops the kind of modified terrorism which is often, though not altogether justly, considered to be his chief characteristic, eulogising the executioner as the foundation of society.

Joseph de Maistre is unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century. Paradoxical and strained as his system frequently appears, it is rigorously logical. An ordered theocracy seems to him the only polity capable of giving peace and true prosperity to the world, and he shapes all his theories so as to fit in with this central conception. On detached subjects his thoughts are always vigorous, and often strikingly original. His reading was great, and his skill in polemics of the very highest. No one possesses in larger measure the art of hostile criticism without descending to actual abuse. These merits of themselves imply purely literary accomplishments, clearness, distinctness, forcible expression, in a rare kind and degree. But Joseph de Maistre is more than this as a writer. He possesses, though he only occasionally exercises it, a brilliant faculty of rhetoric. His phrase is more than merely clear and forcible; it has a peculiar incisiveness and sharpness of outline which impress it on the memory, while, sparing as he is of ornament, his rare passages of description and fancy have great merit. The surest testimony to his value is the fact that, though both in his own day and since by far the larger number of writers and thinkers have held views more or less opposed to his, no one whose opinion is itself of the least importance has ever spoken of him without respect and even admiration. Those who, like Lamartine, qualify their admiration with a certain depreciation, show inability to recognise fully the beauty of strength undisguised by conventional elegance and grace of form.

Bonald.

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, who is usually named with Joseph de Maistre as the leader of the Catholic-monarchist reaction, was a weaker thinker, and a writer of less accomplishment, though in both respects he has perhaps been somewhat unfairly criticised. Born at Milhaud, in the district of Rouergue, in 1754, he discharged various civil and military employments in his native province during his youth; was elected in 1790 member of the Departmental Assembly, but emigrated next year; served in Condé's army, and then established himself at Heidelberg. His first work was seized by the Directory, but he returned to France soon afterwards, and was not molested. He published a good deal during the first years of the century, and, like many other royalists, received overtures from Napoleon through Fontanes. These he did not exactly reject, but he availed himself of them very sparingly. The Restoration, on the contrary, aroused him to vigour. It was owing to him chiefly that the law of divorce was altered. He entered the Academy, and in 1823 was made a peer; an honour which he resigned at the revolution of July. He died in 1840.

Bonald's principal work is his Législation Primitive. He also wrote a book on divorce, and a considerable number of miscellaneous political and metaphysical works. His chief subjects of discussion were, first, the theory of the revelation of language; and secondly, the theory of causality: in respect of both of which he combated the materialist school of the eighteenth century. In politics Bonald was a thoroughgoing legitimist and monarchist of the patriarchal school. Although an orthodox and devout Catholic, he does not lay the stress on the temporal power of the pope that the author of Du Pape does. With him the king is the immediate instrument of God in governing. He has been accused of reducing things too much to formulas, and of repeating his formulas too often. But this itself was in great part the effect of reaction against the vague declamation of the philosophes.

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.

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 éloges. 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.

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 Châtelet 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 Révolutions 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.

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.

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 Littéraire 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 Trouvères, 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 Bibliothèque 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 Méon (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. Chénier, 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 Provençal 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, Ménage, 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 Hénault, a writer something after the fashion of Fontenelle, but on classical subjects; and the President de Brosses, also an archæologist 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 - 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 'également 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 Fétiches.].

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 Académie Française. 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 Comédie des Académistes; 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. Molière 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 pavé,' '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

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.

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 Béranger, 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.

Béranger.

Pierre Jean de Béranger 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 Péronne, 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, Béranger, 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. Béranger'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 Béranger 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, Collé, Gouffé, and his immediate predecessor and in part contemporary, Désaugiers. 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 Béranger 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. Béranger indeed was not in the least a literary poet. But there is room in literature for other than merely literary poets, and among these Béranger 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 Béranger, and that the unliterary character which was an accident with Burns was with Béranger 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.

Lamartine.

Alphonse Prat de Lamartine was in almost every conceivable respect the exact opposite to Béranger. He was born at Macon, on the 21st of October, 1791, of a good family of Franche Comté, 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 Pères 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 attaché in Italy. He had already (1820) published the Méditations, 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 Méditations (of which a new series appeared in 1823), the Harmonies, 1829, the Recueillements, Le Dernier Chant du Pélerinage 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 Gênes, 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.

Lamennais.

The next name on the list belongs to a far stronger, if a less accomplished, spirit than Lamartine. Félicité 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'Indifférence en Matière 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 Guérin, a feeble poet who died young, but who, with his abler sister Eugénie, 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.

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 Lycée Charlemagne. He passed thence to the École 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.

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, Mémoires d'un Touriste, etc.); of criticism (Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, Racine et Shakespeare, Mélanges); 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 Mérimée, 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.

Nodier.

Delavigne.