II. DRAMATISTS…

II. DRAMATISTS

While the influence of Malherbe was thus cramping and withering poetry proper in France, it combined with some other causes to enable drama to attain the highest perfection possible in the particular style practised. In non-dramatic poetry, the only name of the seventeenth century which can be said even to approach the first class is that of La Fontaine, whose verse, except for its technical excellence, is almost as near to prose as to poetry itself. But the names of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere stand in the highest rank of French authors, and their works will remain the chief examples of the kind of drama which they professed. Nor is this difference in any way surprising. It has been already shown that the style of drama introduced into France by the Pleiade, and pursued with but little alteration afterwards, was a highly artificial and a highly limited kind. It lent itself successfully to comparatively few situations; it excluded variety of action on the stage; it gave no opening for the display of complicated character. But these very limitations made it susceptible of very high polish and elaboration within its own limited range, and made such polish and elaboration almost a necessity if it was to be tolerable at all. The correct and cold language and style which Malherbe preached; the regularity and harmony of versification on which he insisted; the strict attention to rule rather than impulse which he urged, all suited a thing in itself so artificial as the Senecan tragedy. They were not so suitable to the more libertine genius of comedy. But here, fortunately for France, the regulations were less rigid, and the abiding popularity of the indigenous farce gave a healthy corrective. The astonishing genius of Moliere succeeded in combining the two influences--the lawless freedom of the old farce, and the ordered decency of the Malherbian poetry. Even his theatre shows some sign of the taint with which 'classical' drama is so deeply imbued, but its force and truth almost or altogether redeem the imperfections of its scheme.

[Sidenote: Montchrestien.]

We have seen that the early tragedy, which was more or less directly reproductive of Seneca, attained its highest pitch in the work of Garnier. This pitch was on the whole well maintained by Antoine de Montchrestien, a man of a singular history and of a singular genius. The date of his birth is not exactly known, but he was the son of an apothecary at Falaise, and belonged to the Huguenot party. Duels and lawsuits succeed each other in his story, and by some means or other he was able to assume the title of Seigneur de Vasteville. In one of his duels he killed his man, and had to fly to England. Being pardoned, he returned to France and took to commerce. But after the death of Henri IV. he joined a Huguenot rising, and was killed in October 1621. Montchrestien wrote a treatise on Political Economy (he is even said to have been the first to introduce the term into French), some poems, and six tragedies, Sophonisbe, or La Cartaginoise, Les Lacenes, David, Aman, Hector, and L'Ecossaise. Racine availed himself not a little of Aman, but L'Ecossaise is Montchrestien's best piece. In it he set the example to a long line of dramatists, from Vondel to Mr. Swinburne, who have since treated the story of Mary Queen of Scots. It is not part of the merit of Montchrestien to have improved on the technical defects of the Jodelle-Garnier model. His action is still deficient, his speeches immoderately long. But his choric odes are of great beauty, and his tirades, disproportionate as they are, show a considerable advance in the power of indicating character as well as in style and versification. Beyond this, however, the force of the model could no further go, and some alteration was necessary. Indeed it is by no means certain that the later plays of this class were ever acted at all, or were anything more than closet drama.

[Sidenote: Hardy.]

[Sidenote: Minor predecessors of Corneille.]

For a not inconsiderable time the fate of French tragedy trembled in the balance. During the first thirty years of the seventeenth century the most prominent dramatist was Alexandre Hardy[233]. He is the first and not the least important example in French literary history of a dramatic author pure and simple, a playwright who was a playwright, and nothing else. Hardy was for years attached to the regular company of actors who had succeeded the Confrerie at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and wrote or adapted pieces for them at the tariff (it is said) of fifty crowns a play. His fertility was immense; and he is said to have written some hundreds of plays. The exact number is variously stated at from five to seven hundred. Forty-one exist in print. Although not destitute of original power, Hardy was driven to the already copious theatre of Spain for subjects and models. His plays being meant for acting and for nothing else, the scholarly but tedious exercitations of the Pleiade school were out of the question. Yet, while he introduced a great deal of Spanish embroilment into his plots, and a great deal of Spanish bombast into his speeches, Hardy still accepted the general outline of the classical tragedy, and, though utterly careless of unity of place and time, adhered for the most part to the perhaps more mischievous unity of action. His best play, Mariamne, is powerfully written, is arranged with considerable skill, and contains some fine lines and even scenes; but, little as Hardy hampered himself with rules, it still has, to an English reader, a certain thinness of interest. A contemporary of Hardy's, Jean de Schelandre, made, in a play[234] which does not seem ever to have been acted, a remarkable attempt at enfranchising French tragedy with the full privileges rather of the English than of the Spanish drama; but this play, Tyr et Sidon, had no imitators and no influence, and the general model remained unaltered. But during the first quarter of the century the theatre was exceedingly popular, and the institution of strolling troops of actors spread its popularity all over France. Nearly a hundred names of dramatic writers of this time are preserved. Most of these, no doubt, were but retainers of the houses or the troops, and did little but patch, adapt, and translate. But of the immediate predecessors of Corneille, and his earlier contemporaries, at least half-a-dozen are more or less known to fame, besides the really great name of Rotrou. Mairet, Tristan, Du Ryer, Scudery, Claveret, and D'Aubignac, were the chief of these. Mairet has been called the French Marston, and the resemblance is not confined to the fact that both wrote tragedies on the favourite subject of Sophonisba. The chief work of Tristan, who was also a poet of some merit, was Marianne (Mariamne), very closely modelled on an Italian original, and much less vigorous, though more polished than Hardy's play on the same subject. Du Ryer had neither Mairet's vigour nor Tristan's tenderness, but he made more progress than either of them had done in the direction of the completed tragedy of Corneille and Racine. Scudery's Amour Tyrannique is vigorous and bombastic. Claveret and D'Aubignac (the latter of whom was an active critic as well as a bad playwright) principally derive their reputation, such as it is, from the acerbity with which they attacked Corneille in the dispute about the Cid; nor should the name of Theophile de Viaud be passed over in this connection. His Pyrame et Thisbe is often considered as almost the extreme example (though Corneille's Clitandre is perhaps worse) of the conceited Spanish-French style in tragedy. The passage in which Thisbe accuses the poniard with which Pyramus has stabbed himself of blushing at having sullied itself with the blood of its master is a commonplace of quotation. Yet, like all Theophile's work, Pyrame et Thisbe has value, and so has the unrepresented tragedy of Pasiphae.

[Sidenote: Rotrou.]

Among these forgotten names, and others more absolutely forgotten still, that of Rotrou[235] is pre-eminently distinguished. Jean de Rotrou (the particle is not uniformly allowed him) was born at Dreux in 1609, and was thus three years younger than Corneille. He went earlier to Paris, however, and at once betook himself to dramatic poetry, his Hypocondriaque being represented before he was nineteen. He formed with Corneille, Colletet, Bois-Robert, and L'Etoile, the band of Richelieu's 'Five Poets,' who composed tragedies jointly on the Cardinal's plans[236]. He also worked unceasingly at the theatre on his own account. Thirty-five pieces are certainly, and five more doubtfully, attributed to him. For some time he had to work for bread, and the only weakness charged against him, a mania for gambling, left him poor, and perhaps prevented him from devoting to his work as much pains as he might otherwise have given. After a time, however, he was pensioned, and appointed to various legal posts which members of his family had previously held at Dreux. His fidelity to his official duty was the cause of his death. He was at Paris when a violent epidemic broke out at Dreux. All who could left the town, and Rotrou was strongly dissuaded from returning. But he felt himself responsible for the maintenance of order, likely at such a time to be specially endangered. He returned at once, caught the infection, and died. Rotrou's plays are too numerous for a complete list of them to be here given, and by common consent two of them, Le Veritable Saint Genest and Venceslas, greatly excel the rest, though vigorous verse and good scenes are to be found in almost all. These plays, it should be observed, were not written until after the publication of Corneille's early masterpieces, though Rotrou had exhibited a play the year before the appearance of Melite. The two poets were friends, and though Corneille in a manner supplanted him, Rotrou was unwavering throughout his life in expressions of admiration for his great rival. Of the two plays just mentioned, Venceslas is the more regular, the better adapted to the canons of the French stage, and the more even in its excellence. Saint Genest is perhaps the more interesting. The central idea is remarkable. Genest, an actor, performs before Diocletian a part in which he represents a Christian martyr. He is miraculously converted during the study of the piece, and at its performance, after astonishing the audience by the fervour and vividness with which he plays his part, boldly speaks in his own person, and, avowing his conversion, is led off to prison and martyrdom. Many of the speeches in this play are admirable poetry, and the plot is far from ill-managed. The play within a play, of which Hamlet and the Taming of the Shrew are English examples, was, at this transition period, a favourite stage incident in France. Corneille's Illusion is the most complicated example of it, but Saint Genest is by far the most interesting and the best managed.

[Sidenote: Corneille.]

There is every reason to believe that though, as has been said, Rotrou's best pieces were influenced by Corneille, the greater poet owed something at the beginning of his career to the example of his friend. Pierre Corneille[237] was born at Rouen in 1606. His father, of the same name, was an official of rank in the legal hierarchy; his mother was named Marthe le Pesant. He was educated in the Jesuits' school, went to the bar, and obtained certain small legal preferments which he afterwards sold. He practised, but 'sans gout et sans succes,' says Fontenelle, his nephew and biographer. His first comedy, Melite, is said to have been suggested by a personal experience. It succeeded at Rouen, and the author took it to Paris. His next attempt was a tragedy or a tragi-comedy, Clitandre, of a really marvellous extravagance. It was followed by several other pieces, in all of which there is remarkable talent, though the author had not yet found his way. He found it at last in Medee, where the famous reply of the heroine 'Que vous reste-t-il?' 'Moi,' struck at once the note which no one but Corneille himself and Victor Hugo has ever struck since, and which no one had ever struck before. Corneille, as has been said above, was one of Richelieu's five poets, but he was indocile to the Cardinal's caprices; and either this indocility or jealousy set Richelieu against Le Cid. This great and famous play was suggested by, rather than copied from, the Spanish of Guillem de Castro. It excited an extraordinary turmoil among men of letters, but the public never went wrong about it from the first. Boileau's phrase--

Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue,

is as sound in fact as it is smart in expression. The Cid appeared in 1636, and for some years Corneille produced a succession of masterpieces. Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte, Le Menteur (a remarkable comic effort, to which Moliere acknowledged his indebtedness), and Rodogune, in some respects the finest of all, succeeded each other at but short intervals. Half-a-dozen plays, somewhat inferior in actual merit, and which had the drawback of coming before a public used to the author and his method, followed, and the last and least good of them, Pertharite, was damned. Corneille, always the proudest of writers, was deeply wounded by this ill-success, and publicly renounced the stage. He devoted himself for some years to a strange task, the turning of the Imitation of A'Kempis into verse. At last Fouquet, the Maecenas of the day, prevailed on him to begin again. He did so with Oedipe, which was successful. It was followed by many other plays, which had varying fates. Racine, with a method refined upon Corneille's own, and a greater sympathy with the actual generation, became the rival of the elder poet, and Corneille did not obey the wise maxim, solve senescentem. Yet his later plays have far more merit than is usually allowed to them.

The private life of Corneille was not unhappy, though his haughty and sensitive temperament brought him many vexations. His gains were small, never exceeding two hundred louis for a play, and though this was supplemented by occasional gifts from rich dedicatees and by a scanty private fortune, the total was insufficient. 'Je suis saoul de gloire et affame d'argent' is one of the numerous sayings of scornful discontent recorded of him. He had a pension, but it was in his later days very ill paid. Nor was he one of the easy-going men of letters who console themselves by Bohemian indulgence. In general society he was awkward, constrained, and silent: but his home, which was long shared with his brother Thomas--they married two sisters--seems to have been a happy one. He retained till his death in 1684, if not the favour of the King and the general public, that of the persons whose favour was best worth having, such as Saint-Evremond and Madame de Sevigne, and his own confidence in his genius never deserted him.

Corneille's dramatic career may be divided into four parts; the first reaching from Melite to L'Illusion Comique; the second (that of his masterpieces), from the Cid to Rodogune; the third, from Theodore to Pertharite; the fourth, that of the decadence, from Oedipe to Surena. The following is a list of the names and dates (these latter being sometimes doubtful and contentious) of his plays. Melite, 1629, a comedy improbable and confused in incident and overdone with verbal pointes, but much beyond anything previous to it. Clitandre, 1630, a tragedy in the taste of the time, one of the maddest of plays. La Veuve, 1634, a comedy, well written and lively. La Galerie du Palais (same year), a capital comedy of its immature kind, bringing in the humours of contemporary Paris. La Suivante, a comedy (same year), in which the great character of the soubrette makes her first appearance. La Place Royale, a comedy, 1635, duller than the Galerie du Palais, which it in some respects resembles. Medee, a tragedy (same year), incomparably the best French tragedy up to its date. L'Illusion Comique, 1636, a tragi-comedy of the extremest Spanish type, complicated and improbable to a degree in its action, which turns on the motive of a play within a play, and produces, as the author himself remarks, a division into prologue (Act i), an imperfect comedy (Acts ii-iv), and a tragedy (Act v). Le Cid, 1636, the best-known if not the best of Corneille's plays, and, from the mere playwright's point of view, the most attractive. Horace, 1639, often, but improperly, called Les Horaces, in which the Cornelian method is seen complete. The final speech of Camille before her brother kills her was as a whole never exceeded by the author, and the 'qu'il mourut' of the elder Horace is equally characteristic. Cinna, 1639, the general favourite in France, but somewhat stilted and devoid of action to foreign taste. Polyeucte, 1640, the greatest of all Christian tragedies. La Mort de Pompee, 1641, full of stately verse, but heavy and somewhat grandiose. Le Menteur, 1642, a charming comedy, followed by a Suite du Menteur, 1643, not inferior, though the fickleness of public taste disapproved it. Theodore, 1645, a noble tragedy, which only failed because the prudery of theatrical precisians found fault with its theme--the subjection of a Christian virgin to the last and worst trial of her honour and faith. Rodogune, 1646, the chef-d'oeuvre of the style, displaying from beginning to end an astonishing power of moving admiration and terror. This play marks the climax of Corneille's faculty. In Heraclius, 1647, no real falling-off is visible; indeed, the character of Phocas stands almost alone on the French stage as a parallel in some sort to Iago. Andromede, 1650, introduced a considerable amount of spectacle and decoration, not unhappily. Don Sanche d'Aragon, 1651, Nicomede, 1652, and Pertharite, 1653 (each of which may possibly be a year older than these respective dates), show what political economists might call the stationary state of the poet's genius. The first two plays produced after the interval, Oedipe, 1659, and La Toison d'Or, 1660, both show the benefit of the rest the poet had had, together with certain signs of advancing years. La Toison d'Or, like Andromede, includes a great deal of spectacle, and is rather an elaborate masque interspersed with regular dramatic scenes than a tragedy. It is one of the best specimens of the kind. In Sertorius, 1662, there are occasional passages of much grandeur and beauty, but Sophonisbe, 1663, is hardly a success, nor is Othon, 1664. Agesilas, 1666, and Attila, 1667, have been (the latter unfairly) damned by a quatrain of Boileau's. But Tite et Berenice, 1670, must be acknowledged to be inferior to the play of Racine in rivalry with which it was produced. Pulcherie, 1672, and Surena, 1674, are last-fruits off an old tree, which, especially the second, are not unworthy of it. Nor was Corneille's contribution to the remarkable opera of Psyche, 1671, inconsiderable. This completes his dramatic work, which amounts to thirty pieces and part of another. It should be added that, to all the plays up to La Toison d'Or, he subjoined in a collected edition very remarkable criticisms of them, which he calls Examens.

The characteristics of this great dramatist are perhaps more uniform than those of any writer of equal rank, and there can be little doubt that this uniformity, which, considering the great bulk of his work, amounts almost to monotony, was the cause of his gradual loss of popularity. We shall not here notice the points which he has in common with Racine, as a writer of the French classical drama. These will come in more suitably when Racine himself has been dealt with. In Corneille the academic criticism of the time found the fault that he rather excited admiration than pity and terror, and it held that admiration was 'not a tragic passion.' The criticism was clumsy, and to a great extent futile, but it has a certain basis of truth. It is comparatively rare for Corneille to attempt, after his earliest period, to interest his hearers or readers in the fortunes of his characters. It is rather in the way that they bear their fortunes, and particularly in a kind of haughty disdain for fortune itself, that these characters impress us. Sometimes, as in the Cleopatre of Rodogune, this masterful temper is engaged on the side of evil, more frequently it is combined with amiable or at least respectable characteristics. But there is always something 'remote and afar' about it, and the application by La Bruyere of the famous comparison between the Greek tragedians is in the main strictly accurate. It follows that Corneille's demand upon his hearers or readers is a somewhat severe one, and one with which many men are neither disposed nor able to comply. It was a greater misfortune for him than for almost any one else that the French and not the English drama was the Sparta which it fell to his lot to decorate. His powers were not in reality limited. The Menteur shows an excellent comic faculty, and the strokes of irony in his serious plays have more of true humour in them than appears in almost any other French dramatist. Had the licence of the English stage been his, he would probably have been able to impart a greater interest to his plays than they already possess, without sacrificing his peculiar faculty of sublime moral portraiture, and certainly without losing the credit of the magnificent single lines and isolated passages which abound in his work. The friendly criticism of Moliere on these sudden flashes is well known. 'My friend Corneille,' he said, 'has a familiar who comes now and then and whispers in his ear the finest verses in the world, but sometimes the familiar deserts him, and then he writes no better than anybody else.' The most fertile familiar cannot suggest fifty or sixty thousand of these finest lines in the world; and the consequence is that, what with the lack of central interest which follows from Corneille's own plan, with the absence of subsidiary interest and relief which is inevitable in the French classical model, and with the drawbacks of his somewhat declamatory style, there are long passages, sometimes whole scenes and acts, if not whole plays of his, which are but dreary reading, and could hardly be, even with the most appreciative and creative acting, other than dreary to witness. It was Corneille's fault that, while bowing himself to the yoke of the Senecan drama, he did not perceive or would not accept the fact that there is practically but one situation, by the working out of which that drama can be made tolerable to modern audiences. This situation is love-making, which in real life necessitates a vast deal of talking, and about which, even on the stage, a vast deal of talking is admissible. The characters of the French classic or heroic play are practically allowed to do nothing but talk, and the author who would make them interesting must submit himself to his fate. Corneille would not submit wholly and cheerfully, though he has, as might be expected, been obliged to introduce love-making into most of his plays.

To a modern reader the detached passages already referred to, and the magnificent versification which is displayed in them, make up the real charm of Corneille except in a very few plays, such as the Cid, Polyeucte, Rodogune, and perhaps a few others. Du Bartas, D'Aubigne, and Regnier, had indicated the capacities of the Alexandrine; Corneille demonstrated them and illustrated them almost indefinitely. He did not indulge in the pedantry of rimes difficiles, by which Racine attracted his hearers, nor was his verse so uniformly smooth as that of his younger rival. But what it lacked in polish and grace it more than made up in grandeur and dignity. The best lines of Corneille, like those of D'Aubigne, of Rotrou, from whom, comparatively stammering as was the teacher, Corneille perhaps learnt the art, and of Victor Hugo, have a peculiar crash of sound which hardly any other metre of any other language possesses. A slight touch of archaism (it is very slight) which is to be discovered in his work assists its effect not a little. The inveterate habit which exists in England of comparing all dramatists with Shakespeare has been prejudicial to the fame of Corneille with us. But he is certainly the greatest tragic dramatist of France on the classical model, and as a fashioner of dramatic verse of a truly poetical kind he has at his best few equals in the literature of Europe.

[Sidenote: Racine.]

The character, career, and work of Racine were curiously different from those of Corneille. Jean Racine[238] was more than thirty years younger than his greater rival, having been born at La Ferte Milon, at no great distance from Soissons, in 1639. His father held an official position at this place, but he died, as Racine's mother had previously died, in the boy's infancy, leaving him without any fortune. His grandparents, however, were alive, and able to take care of him, and they, with other relatives, willingly undertook the task. He was well educated, going to school at Beauvais, from 1650 (probably) to 1655, and then spending three years under the care of the celebrated Port Royalists, where he made considerable progress. A year at the College d'Harcourt, where he should have studied law, completed his regular education; but he was always studious, and had on the whole greater advantages of culture than most men of letters of his time and country. For some years he led a somewhat undecided life. His relations did their best to obtain a benefice for him, and in other ways endeavoured to put him in the way of a professional livelihood; but ill-luck and probably disinclination on his part stood in the way. He wrote at least two plays at a comparatively early age which were refused, and are not known to exist, and he produced divers pieces of miscellaneous poetry, especially the 'Nymphe de la Seine,' which brought him to the notice of Chapelain. At last, in 1664, he obtained a pension of six hundred livres for an ode on the king's recovery from sickness, and the same year La Thebaide was accepted and produced. For the next thirteen years plays followed in rapid, but not too rapid succession. Racine was the favourite of the king, and consequently of all those who had no taste of their own, as well as of some who had, though the best critics inclined to Corneille, between whom and Racine rivalry was industriously fostered. The somewhat indecent antagonism which Racine had shown towards a man who had won renown ten years before his own birth was justly punished in his own temporary eclipse by the almost worthless Pradon. He withdrew disgusted from the stage in 1677. About the same time he married, was made historiographer to the king, and became more or less fervently devout. Years afterwards, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, he wrote for her school-girls at St. Cyr the dramatic sketch of Esther, and soon afterwards the complete tragedy of Athalie, the greatest of his works. Then he relapsed into silence as far as dramatic utterance was concerned. He died in 1699. Thus he presented the singular spectacle, only paralleled by our own Congreve, and that not exactly, of a short period of consummate activity followed by almost complete inaction. That this inaction was not due to exhaustion of genius was abundantly shown by Esther and Athalie. But Racine was of a peculiar and in many ways an unamiable temper. He was very jealous of his reputation, acutely sensitive to criticism, and envious to the last degree of any public approbation bestowed on others. Having made his fame, he seems to have preferred, in the language of the French gaming table, faire Charlemagne, and to run no further risks. He had, however, worse failings than any yet mentioned. Moliere gave him valuable assistance, and he repaid it with ingratitude. With hardly a shadow of provocation he attacked in a tone of the utmost acrimony the Port Royal fathers, to whom he was under deep obligations. The charge of hypocrisy in religious matters which has been brought against him is probably gratuitous, and, in any case, does not concern us here. But his character in his literary relations is far from being a pleasant one.

The following is a list of Racine's theatrical pieces. La Thebaide, 1664, indicates with sufficient clearness the lines upon which all Racine's plays, save the two last, were to be constructed--a minute adherence to the rules, very careful versification and subordination of almost all other interests to stately gallantry--but it is altogether inferior to its successors. In Alexandre le Grand, 1665, the characteristics are accentuated, and what Corneille disdainfully called--

Le commerce rampant de soupirs et de flammes

is more than ever prominent. In Andromaque, 1667, an immense advance is perceptible. The characters become personally interesting (Hermione is perhaps more attractive than any of Corneille's women), and a power of passionate invective not unworthy to be compared with Corneille's, but with more of a feminine character about it, appears. This was followed by Racine's only attempt in the comic sock, Les Plaideurs, 1668, a most charming trifle which has had, and has deserved, more genuine and lasting popularity than any of his tragedies. He returned to tragedy, and rapidly showed the defects of the stereotyped mannerism inevitably imposed on him by his plan. Britannicus, 1669, Berenice, 1670, Bajazet, 1672, and Mithridate, 1673, with all their perfection of technique, announce, as clearly as anything can well do, the fatal monotony into which French tragedy had once more fallen, and in which it was to continue for a century and a half. Iphigenie, 1674, has much more liveliness and variety, the deep pathos and terror of the situation making even Racine's interminable love casuistry natural and interesting. But Phedre, 1677, the last of the series, is unquestionably the most remarkable of Racine's regular tragedies. By it the style must stand or fall, and a reader need hardly go farther to appreciate it. Britannicus was indeed preferred by eighteenth-century judges; but for excellence of construction, artful beauty of verse, skilful use of the limited means of appeal at the command of the dramatist, no play can surpass Phedre; and if it still is found wanting, as it undoubtedly is by the vast majority of critics (including nowadays a powerful minority even among Frenchmen themselves), the fault lies rather in the style than in the author, or at least in the author for adopting the style. Esther, 1689, and Athalie, 1691, on the other hand, while retaining a certain similarity of form and machinery, are radically different from the other plays. It is evident that Racine before writing them had attentively studied the sixteenth-century drama, to the strict form of which with its choruses he returns, and from which he borrows, in some cases directly, the Aman of Montchrestien having clearly suggested passages in Esther. His great poetical faculty has freer play; he escapes the monotonous 'soupirs et flammes' altogether, and the result is in Esther on the whole, in Athalie wholly, admirable.

Racine's peculiarities as a dramatist have been already indicated, but may now be more fully described. He was emphatically one of those writers--Virgil and Pope are the other chief notable representatives of the class--who, with an incapacity for the finest original strokes of poetry, have an almost unlimited capacity for writing from models, for improving the technical execution of their poems, and for adjusting the conception of their pieces to their powers of rendering. These writers are always impossible without forerunners, and not usually possible without critics of the pedagogic kind. Racine was extraordinarily fortunate in his forerunner, and still more fortunate in his critic. He was able to start with all the advantages which thirty years of work on the part of his rival, Corneille, gave him; and he had for his trainer, Boileau, one of the most capable, if one of the most limited and prejudiced, of literary schoolmasters. Boileau was no respecter of persons, and arrogant as he was, he was rather an admirer of Racine than of Corneille; yet, according to a well-known story, he distinguished between the two by saying that Corneille was a great poet, and Racine a very clever man, to whom he himself had taught the knack of easy versification with elaborate rhyming. It is indeed in his versification that both the strength and the weakness of Racine lie, and in this respect he is an exact analogue to the poets mentioned above. He treated the Alexandrine of Corneille exactly as Pope treated the decasyllable of Dryden, and as Virgil treated the hexameter of Lucretius. In his hands it acquired smoothness, softness, polish, and mechanical perfections of many kinds, only to suffer at the same time a compensatory monotony which, when the honied sweetness of it began to cloy, was soon recognised as a terrible drawback. The extraordinary estimation in which Racine is held by those who abide by the classical tradition in France depends very mainly on the melody of his versification and rhymes, but it does not depend wholly upon this. There must also be taken into account the perfection of workmanship with which he carries out the idea of the drama which he practised. What that ideal was must therefore be considered.

It must be remembered that the object of the French drama of Racine's time was not in the least to hold the mirror up to nature. The model which, owing to admiration of the classics, the Pleiade had almost at haphazard followed, rendered such an object simply unattainable. The so-called irregularity of the English stage, which used to fill French critics with alternate wonder and disgust, is nothing but the result of an unflinching adherence to this standard. It is impossible to reproduce the subtilitas naturae in its most subtle example--the character of man--without introducing a large diversity of circumstance and action. That diversity in its turn cannot be produced without a great multiplication of characters, a duplication or triplication of plot, and a complete disregard of pre-established 'common form.' Now this 'common form' was the essence of French tragedy. Following, or thinking that they followed, the ancients, French dramatists and dramatic critics adopted certain fixed rules according to which a poet had to write just as a whist-player has to play the game. There was to be no action on the stage, or next to none, the interest of the play was to be rigidly reduced to a central situation, subsidiary characters were to be avoided as far as possible, the only means afforded to the personages of explaining themselves was by dialogue with confidantes--the curse of the French stage--and the only way of informing the audience of the progress of the action was by messengers. Corneille accepted these limitations partially, and without too much good-will, but he evaded the difficulty by emphasising the moral lesson. The ethical standard of his plays is perhaps higher on the whole than that of any great dramatist, and the wonderful bursts of poetry which he could command served to sugar the pill. But Racine was not a man of high moral character, and he was a man of great shrewdness and discernment. He evidently distrusted the willingness of audiences perpetually to admire moral grandeur, whether he did or did not hold that admiration was not a tragic passion. Probably he would have put it that it was not a passion that would draw. Love-making, on the contrary, would draw, and love-making accordingly is the staple of all his plays. But the defect which has attended all French literature, which was aggravated enormously by this style of drama, and which is noticeable even in his greater contemporaries, Corneille and Moliere, manifested itself in his work almost inevitably. If there is one fault to be found with the creations of French literary art, it is that they run too much into types. It has been well said that the duty of art is to give the universal in the particular. But to do this exactly is difficult. It is the fault of English and of German literature to give the particular without a sufficient tincture of the universal, to lose themselves in mere 'humours.' It is the fault of French literature to give the type only without differentiation. An ill-natured critic constantly feels inclined to alter the lists of Racine's dramatis personae, and instead of the proper names to substitute 'a lover,' 'a mother,' 'a tyrant,' and so forth. So great an artist and so careful a worker as Racine could not, of course, escape giving some individuality to his creations. Hermione, Phedre, Achille, Berenice, Athalie, are all individual enough of their class. But the class is the class of types rather than of individuals. After long debate this difference has been admitted by most reasonable French critics, and they now confine themselves to the argument that the two processes, the illustration of the universal by means of the particular, and the indication of the particular by means of the universal, are processes equally legitimate and equally important. The difficulty remains that, by common consent of mankind--Frenchmen not excluded--Hamlet, Othello, Falstaff, Rosalind, are fictitious persons far more interesting to their fellow-creatures who are not fictitious than any personages of the French stage. There is, moreover, a simple test which can be applied. No one can doubt that, if Shakespeare had chosen to adopt the style, and had accepted the censorship of a Boileau, he could easily have written Phedre. It would be a bold man who should say that Racine could, with altered circumstances but unaltered powers, have written Othello.

[Sidenote: Minor Tragedians.]

The style of tragedy which was likely to be successful in France had been pointed out so clearly by Corneille and by Racine that it could not fail to find imitators. As usual, the weakness of the style was more fully manifested by these imitators than its strength. The best of them was Thomas Corneille, the younger brother of Pierre. A much more facile versifier than his brother, he produced a large number of plays, of which Camma, Laodice, Ariane, Le Comte d'Essex, have considerable merit. Thomas Corneille succeeded his brother in the Academy, and died at a great old age. He was an active journalist and miscellaneous writer as well as a dramatist, and his principal misfortune was that he had a brother of greater genius than himself. Pradon, whose success against Phedre so bitterly annoyed Racine, was a dramatist of the third, or even the fourth class, though he enjoyed some temporary popularity. Campistron, a follower rather than a rival of Racine, was a better writer than Pradon, but pushed to an extreme the softness and almost effeminacy of subject and treatment which made Corneille contemptuously speak of his younger rival and his party as 'les doucereux.' Quinault, before writing good operas and fair comedies, wrote bad tragedies. The only other authors of the day worth mentioning are Duche and Lafosse. Lafosse is a man of one play, though as a matter of fact he wrote four. In Manlius he gave Roman names and setting to the plot of Otway's Venice Preserved, and achieved a decided success.

[Sidenote: Development of Comedy.]

The history of French comedy is remarkably different from that of French tragedy. In the latter case a foreign model was followed almost slavishly; in the former the actual possessions of the language received grafts of foreign importation, and the result was one of the capital productions of European literature. Whether the popularity of the indigenous farce of itself saved France from falling into the same false groove with Italy it is not easy to say, but it is certain that at the time of the Renaissance there was some danger. At first it seemed as if Terence was to serve as a model for comedy just as Seneca served as a model for tragedy. The first comedy, Eugene, is strongly Terentian, though even here a greater freedom of movement, a stronger infusion of local colour is observable than in Didon or Cleopatre. So, too, when the Italian Larivey adapted his remarkable comedies the vernacular savour became still stronger. Yet it was very long before genuine comedy was produced in France. The farces continued, and kinds of dramatic entertainment, lower even than the farce, such as those which survive in the work of the merry-andrew Tabarin[239], were relished. The Spanish comedy, with its strong spice of tragi-comedy, was imitated to a considerable extent. A few examples of the Commedia erudita, or Terentian play, continued to be produced at intervals; and the stock personages of the Commedia dell'arte, Harlequin, Scaramouch, etc., at one time invaded France, and, under cover of the comic opera and the Foire pieces, made something of a lodgment. In the earlier years of the seventeenth century, moreover, a considerable number of fantastic experiments were tried. We have a Comedie des Proverbes, in which the action is altogether subordinate to the introduction of the greatest possible number of popular sayings; a Comedie des Chansons spun out of a vast and precious collection of popular songs; a Comedie des Comedies, which is a cento made up of extracts from Balzac, the moralist and letter-writer; a Comedie des Comediens, in which the famous actors of the day are brought on the stage in their own persons[240], etc., etc. While French comedy was thus endeavouring to find its way in all manner of tentative and sometimes grotesque experiments, dramatists of talent occasionally struck, as if by accident, into some of the side paths of that way, and directed their successors into the way itself. The early comedies of Corneille have been spoken of; despite the improbability of their Spanish plots, they show a distinct feeling after real excellence. The eccentric Cyrano de Bergerac, especially in his Pedant Joue, furnished Moliere with hints, and displayed considerable comic power. Scarron, a not dissimilar person, whose Roman Comique shows the interest he felt in the theatre, also wrote comedies, the chief of which were extremely popular, the character of Jodelet in the play of the same name (1645) becoming for the time a stock one both in name and type. Scarron's other chief pieces were Don Japhet d'Armenie, L'Heritier ridicule, La Precaution inutile. It was in the Menteur of Corneille that Moliere himself considered that true comedy had been first reached, and it was this play which set him on the track. But French comedy of the seventeenth century, before Moliere, is one of the subjects which have hardly any but a historical and antiquarian interest. Although far less artificial than contemporary tragedy, it is inferior as literature. It was attempted by writers of less power, and it is disfigured by too frequent coarseness of language and incident. It was on the whole the lowest of literary styles during the first half of the century. With Moliere it became at one bound the highest.

[Sidenote: Moliere.]

Jean Baptiste Poquelin[241], afterwards called Moliere, was born at Paris, probably in January 1622, in the Rue St. Honore. The Poquelin family seem to have come from Beauvais. Some hypotheses as to a Scotch origin have been disproved. Moliere's father was an upholsterer, holding an appointment in the royal household, and of some wealth and position. Moliere himself had every advantage of education, being at school at the famous Jesuit College de Clermont, and afterwards studying philosophy (under Gassendi) and law. He was, according to some accounts, actually called to the bar. At his majority he seems to have received a considerable share of his mother's fortune, and thus to have become independent. He joined some other young men of fair position in establishing a theatrical company called L'Illustre Theatre, which, however, failed with heavy loss to him, notwithstanding the assistance of a family of professional actors and actresses, one of whom, Madeleine Bejart, figures prominently in his private history. He was not to be thus disgusted with his profession. In 1646 he set out on a strolling tour through the provinces, and was absent from the capital for nearly thirteen years. The notices of this interesting part of his career which exist are unfortunately few, and, like many other points connected with it, have given rise to much controversy. It is sufficient to say that he returned to Paris in 1658, and on the 24th of October performed with his troupe before the court. He had long been a dramatist as well as an actor, and had written besides minor pieces, most of which are lost, the Etourdi and the Depit Amoureux. Moliere soon acquired the favour of the king, and the Precieuses Ridicules, the first of his really great works, gained for him that of the public. In 1662 he married Armande Bejart, the younger sister of Madeleine--a marriage which brought him great unhappiness, though it was probably not without influence on some of his finest work. The king was godfather to the first child of the marriage, and Moliere was a prosperous man. He became valet-de-chambre to Louis, and it was some insolence of his noble colleagues which is alleged, in a late and improbable though famous story, to have occasioned the incident of his partaking of the king's en cas de nuit. The highest point of his genius was shortly reached; Tartuffe, the Festin de Pierre, and Le Misanthrope being the work of three successive years, 1664-6. Tartuffe brought him some trouble because it was supposed to be irreligious in tendency, or at least to satirise the profession of religion. These, his three greatest comedies, were not all warmly received, and he fell back upon lighter work, producing in rapid succession farce-comedies for the public theatre, and divertissements of divers kinds for the court until his death in February 1673, which happened almost on the stage.

The following is a complete list of Moliere's work which has come down to us. During his provincial sojourn he had written many slight pieces half-way in kind between the Italian comedy and the native farce. Of these two only survive, Le Medecin Volant and La Jalousie du Barbouille. Both have considerable merit, and Moliere subsequently worked up their materials, as no doubt he did those of the lost pieces. L'Etourdi, 1653, is a regular comedy in five acts, still strongly Italian in style and somewhat improbable in circumstances, but full of sparkle and lively action and dialogue. Le Depit Amoureux, 1654, is even better and more independent. Nothing had yet been seen on the French stage so good as the quarrels and reconciliation of the quartette of master, mistress, valet, and soubrette. But Les Precieuses Ridicules, 1659, struck an entirely different note. The stage had been employed often enough for personal satire, but it had not yet been made use of for the actual delineation and criticism of contemporary manners as manners and not as the foibles of individuals. The play was directed against the affectations and unreal language of the members of literary coteries which, with that of the Hotel Rambouillet as the chief, had long been prominent in French society. It has but a single act, but in its way it has never been surpassed either as a piece of social satire or a piece of brilliant dialogue illustrating ludicrous action and character. Sganarelle, 1660, relapses into the commonplaces of farce, and has no moral or satirical intention, but is amusing enough. Don Garcie de Navarre, 1661, may be called Moliere's only failure. He styles it a comedie heroique, and it is in fact a kind of anticipation of Racine's manner, but applied to less serious subjects. The jealousy of the hero is, however, the only motive of the piece, and its exhibition is rather tiresome than anything else. The play is monotonous and unrelieved by action. The genius of the author reappeared in its appropriate sphere in L'Ecole des Maris (same date), where a Terentian suggestion is adapted and carried out with the greatest skill. Then, still in the same prolific year, Moliere returned to social satire in Les Facheux, an audacious lampoon on the forms of fashionable boredom common among the courtiers of the time. In 1662 appeared L'Ecole des Femmes, which is generally considered the best of Moliere's plays before Tartuffe. A certain slyness about the character of Agnes is its only drawback. This gave occasion to the brilliant and most amusing Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes, 1663. Here the author is once more the satirist of contemporary society, which he introduces as criticising his own work. L'Impromptu de Versailles (same date), according to a curious habit which Moliere did not originate, brings the author himself and his troupe in their own names and persons before the spectator. Le Mariage Force, 1664, a slight piece, was worked up into a ballet for the court. La Princesse d'Elide (same date) is Moliere's most important court piece, or comedie-ballet, and, though necessarily artificial, has great beauty. Next in point of composition came The Hypocrite, that is to say Tartuffe, but the difficulties which this met with made Le Festin de Pierre, 1665, appear first. This is a tragi-comic working up of the Don Juan story, and is of a different class from any other of Moliere's comedies. It has been thought, but without sufficient ground, that Moliere here gave expression to a modified form of the freethinking which was so common at the time. It may, perhaps, be more truly regarded as an excursion into romantic comedy--the comedy which, like Shakespeare's work, is not directly satiric on society or on individuals, but tells stories poetically and in dramatic form with comic touches. It is noteworthy that Don Juan is of all Moliere's heroes least exposed to the charge of being an abstraction rather than a man. The pleasant trifle, L'Amour Medecin (same date), was succeeded by Le Misanthrope, 1666. Here Moliere's special vein of satire was worked most deeply and to most profit, though the reproach that the handling is somewhat too serious for comedy is not undeserved. Alceste the impatient but not cynical hero, Celimene the coquette, Oronte the fop, Eliante the reasonable woman, Arsinoe the mischief-maker, are all immortal types. The admirable farce-comedy of the Medecin malgre Lui (same date), founded upon an old fabliau, followed, and this was succeeded almost immediately by the graceful pastoral of Melicerte, the amusing Pastorale Comique, and the slight sketch of Le Sicilien, ou L'Amour Peintre. At last, in 1667, Tartuffe got itself represented. It is a vigorous and almost ferocious satire on religious pretension masking vice, and many of its separate strokes are of the dramatist's happiest. Here however, more than elsewhere, is felt the drawback of the method. Comparing Tartuffe with Iago, we have all the difference between a skilful but not wholly probable presentation of wickedness in the abstract, and a picture of a wicked man. In Amphitryon, 1668, Moliere measured himself with Plautus and produced an admirable play. George Dandin (same date), the working up of La Jalousie du Barbouille, is one of the happiest of his sketches of conjugal infelicity. Then came L'Avare (same date), in which Moliere was once more indebted to the ancients and to his French predecessors, but in which he amply justified his borrowings. At this time he extended his field and brought his knowledge of provincial and bourgeois life to bear. M. de Pourceaugnac, 1669, is an ingenious satire, pushed to the verge of burlesque and farce, on the country squires of France. Les Amants Magnifiques, 1670, shows the writer once more in his capacity of court playwright. But Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (same date) is the most audacious and by far the most successful of the wonderful extravaganzas in which a sound and perennial motive of satire on society is wrapped up, the theme this time being the bourgeoisie of Paris, of which the author was himself a member. Psyche, 1671, is, perhaps, the most remarkable example of collaboration in literature, Moliere, Pierre Corneille, and Quinault, the greatest comic dramatist, the greatest tragic dramatist, and the greatest opera librettist of the day, having joined their forces with a result not unworthy of them. Les Fourberies de Scapin (same date) is again farce, but farce such as only Moliere could write; and in La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas (same date) the theme of M. de Pourceaugnac is taken up with a certain heightening of colour and manner. Les Femmes Savantes, 1672, brings the reader back to what is as emphatically 'la bonne comedie' as its original Les Precieuses Ridicules. The tone and treatment are more serious than in the older piece and deal with a different variety of feminine coxcombry, but the effect is not less happy, and is free from the broader elements of farce. Lastly, Le Malade Imaginaire, 1673, the swan-song of Moliere, combined both his greatest excellences, the power of raising audacious farce into the region of true comedy and the power of satirising social abuses with a pitiless but good-humoured hand. The main theme here is the absurdity of the current practice of medicine, but as usual the genius of the writer veils the fact of the drama being a drama with a purpose.

The unique individuality and the extraordinary merit of the various pieces which make up Moliere's theatre have made it necessary to give a tolerably minute account of them, and that account will to a certain extent dispense us from dealing with his general characteristics at great length, especially as a few remarks on French comedy of the Molieresque kind as a whole will have to be given at the end of this chapter. Independently of the characters which Moliere shares with all the great names of literature, his fertility and justness of thought, the felicity of the expression in which he clothes it, and his accurate observation of human life, there are two points in his drama which belong, in the highest degree, to him alone. One is the extraordinary manner in which he manages to imbue farce and burlesque with the true spirit of refined comedy. This manner has been spoken of by unfriendly critics as 'exaggerated,' but the reproach argues a deficiency of perception. Even the most roaring farces of Moliere, even such pieces as M. de Pourceaugnac and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, demand rank as legitimate comedy, owing to his unmatched faculty of intimating a general purpose under the cloak of the merely ludicrous incidents which are made to surround the fortunes of a particular person. This general purpose (and here we come to the second point) is invariably a moral one. Of all dramatists, ancient and modern, Moliere is perhaps that one who has borne most constantly in mind the theory that the stage is a lay-pulpit and that its end is not merely amusement, but the reformation of manners by means of amusing spectacles. Occasionally, no doubt, he has pushed this purpose too far and has missed his mark. He has never given us, and perhaps could not have given us, such examples of dramatic poetry of the non-tragic sort as Shakespeare and Calderon have given. Indeed, it seems to be a mistake to call Moliere a poet at all, despite his extraordinary creative faculty. He was too positive, too much given to literal transcription of society, too little able to convey the vague suggestion of beauty which, as cannot be too often repeated, is of the essence of poetry. But, if we are content to regard drama as a middle term between poetry and prose, he, with the two poets just named, must be appointed to the first place in it among modern authors. In brilliancy of wit he is, among dramatists, inferior only to Aristophanes and Congreve. But he took a less Rabelaisian licence of range than Aristophanes, and he never, like Congreve, allows his action to drift aimlessly while his characters shoot pleasantries at one another. If we leave purely poetic merit out of the question and restrict the definition of comedy to the dramatic presentment of the characters and incidents of actual life, in such a manner as at once to hold the mirror up to nature and to convey lessons of morality and conduct, we must allow Moliere the rank of the greatest comic writer of all the world. Castigat ridendo mores is a motto which no one challenges with such a certainty of victory as he.

Although the number and the diversity of Moliere's works were well calculated to encourage imitators, it was some time before the imitators appeared. Unlike Racine, whose method was at once caught up, Moliere saw during his lifetime no one who could even pretend to be a rival. Those who are now classed as being in some degree of his time were for the most part in their cradles when his masterpieces were being acted. Regnard, the best of them, was born two years after the appearance of Le Depit Amoureux and only three years before the appearance of Les Precieuses Ridicules. Baron was his pupil and adoring disciple. Dufresny was but just of age, and Dancourt but ten years old, at his death. Brueys and Palaprat (the Beaumont and Fletcher, mutatis mutandis, of the French stage) did not make up their curious association till long after that event, at the date of which Le Sage was five years old. Quinault, Boursault, and Montfleury alone were in active rivalry with him, and though none of them was destitute of merit, the merit of none of them was in the least comparable to his. He owed this advantage, for such it was, to his relatively early death and to the wonderfully short space of time in which his masterpieces were produced. Moliere is identified with the age of Louis XIV., yet Les Precieuses Ridicules was written years after the king's nominal accession, and even after his actual assumption of the reins of government from the hands of Mazarin, while Le Malade Imaginaire was acted by its dying author more than forty years before the great king's reign ended.

[Sidenote: Contemporaries of Moliere.]

The three authors just mentioned as actually contemporary with Moliere require no very lengthy notice. Quinault may almost be said to have founded a new literary school (in which none of his pupils has surpassed him) by the excellence of his operas. Of these Armida is held the best. His comedies proper are not quite so good as his operas, but much better than his tragedies. One of them, L'Amant Indiscret, supplied Newcastle and Dryden with hints to eke out L'Etourdi, and most of them show a considerable command of comic situation, if not of comic expression. Montfleury, whose real name was Antoine Jacob, was, like Moliere, an actor. He belonged to the old or rival company of the Hotel de Bourgogne, and was born in 1640. He wrote sixteen comedies, partly on contemporary subjects and partly adaptations of Spanish originals. The two best are La Femme Juge et Partie and La Fille Capitaine. They belong to an older style of comedy than Moliere's, being both extravagant and coarse, but there is considerable vis comica in them. Boursault, who was born in 1638 and died in 1701, had still more merit, though he too was an enemy of Moliere. His Mercure Galant is his principal play, besides which Esope a la Cour, Esope a la Ville, and Phaeton may be mentioned. He was decidedly popular both as a man and a writer. Vanbrugh imitated more than one of his plays. In all these comedies a certain smack of the pre-Molieresque fancy for Comedies des Chansons and other tours de force may be perceived. Besides these three writers others of Moliere's own contemporaries wrote comedies with more or less success. La Fontaine himself was a dramatist, though his dramas do not approach his other work in excellence. Thomas Corneille wrote comedies, but none of importance; and Campistron attained a certain amount of success in comic as in tragic drama. No one of these, however, approached the authors of the younger generation who have been mentioned.

[Sidenote: The School of Moliere-Regnard.]

Jean Francois Regnard, the second of French comic dramatists in general estimation (though it is doubtful whether any single piece of his equals Turcaret), was born at Paris in 1656, and lived a curious life. He was heir to considerable wealth and increased it, singular to say, by gambling. He had also a mania for travelling, and when he was only two-and-twenty was captured by an Algerian corsair and enslaved. After some adventures of a rather dubious character he was ransomed, but continued to travel for some years. At last he returned to France, bought several lucrative offices and an estate in the country, and lived partly there and partly at Paris, writing comedies and indulging largely in the pleasures of the table. He died at his chateau of Grillon in 1710, apparently of a fit of indigestion; but various legends are current about the exact cause of his death. He wrote twenty-three plays (including one tragedy of no value) and collaborated with Dufresny in four others. Many of these pieces were comic operas. At least a dozen were represented by the 'Maison de Moliere.' The best of them are Le Joueur, Le Distrait, Les Menechmes, Le Legataire, the first and the last named being his principal titles to fame. Regnard trod as closely as he could in the steps of Moliere. He was destitute of that great dramatist's grasp of character and moral earnestness; but he is a thoroughly lively writer, and well merited the retort of Boileau (by no means a lenient critic, especially to the young men who succeeded his old friend), when some one charged Regnard with mediocrity, 'Il n'est pas mediocrement gai.'

Baron the actor was born in 1643 and died in 1729, after having long been the leading star of the French stage. He wrote, though it is sometimes said that he was aided by others, seven comedies. One of these, L'Andrienne, is a clever adaptation of Terence, and another, L'Homme aux Bonnes Fortunes, has considerable merit in point of writing and of that stage adaptability which few writers who have not been themselves actors have known how to master.

Charles Riviere Dufresny, a descendant of 'La Belle Jardiniere,' one of Henri IV.'s village loves, was born in 1648 and died in 1724. He was a great favourite of Louis XIV. and a kind of universal genius, devoting himself by turns to almost every branch of literature and of the arts. He was, however, incurably desultory, and was besides a man of disorderly life. His comedies were numerous and full of wit and knowledge of the world, but somewhat destitute of finish. Besides those in which Regnard collaborated he was the author of eleven pieces, of which L'Esprit de Contradiction, Le Double Veuvage, La Coquette de Village, and La Reconciliation Normande are perhaps the best.

Florent Carton Dancourt was born in 1661 and died in 1725. He too was a favourite of Louis XIV., but, unlike Dufresny, he was an actor as well as an author. Towards the end of his days, having made a moderate fortune, he betook himself to a country life and to the practice of religious duties. His theatre is considerable, extending to twelve volumes. The great peculiarity of his comedies is that they deal almost exclusively with the middle class. Les Bourgeoises de Qualite and Le Chevalier a la Mode, perhaps also Le Galant Jardinier and Les Trois Cousines, deserve mention.

The collaboration of Brueys and Palaprat resulted in the modern version of the famous mediaeval farce, L'Avocat Pathelin, and in an excellent piece of the Moliere-Regnard type, Le Grondeur. Some other plays of less merit were written by the friends, while each is responsible for two independent pieces. Both were Provencals, David Augustin de Brueys having been born at Aix in 1640, Jean Palaprat at Toulouse ten years later. Brueys, who, as an abbe converted by Bossuet and engaged actively in propagating his new faith, had some difficulty in appearing publicly as a dramatic author, is understood to have had the chief share in the composition of the joint dramas.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Molieresque Comedy.]

The general characteristics of this remarkable comedy are not hard to define. Based as it was, after Moliere had once set the example, on the direct study of the actual facts of society and human nature, it could not fail to appeal to universal sympathy in a very different degree from the artificial tragedy which accompanied it. It was, moreover, far less trammelled by rules than the sister variety of drama. Unities did not press very heavily on the comic dramatist; his choice and number of characters, his licence of action on the stage, and so forth, were unlimited; he could write in prose or verse at his pleasure, and, if he chose verse, he was bound to a much less monotonous kind of it than his tragic brother. Consequently the majority of the objections which lie against the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, and which make the work of their imitators almost unreadable, leave Moliere and his followers unscathed. One drawback only remained, the drawback already commented on in the case of tragedy, and admitted by French critics themselves in some such terms as that Shakespeare took individuals, Moliere took types. The advantage of the latter method for enforcing a moral lesson is evident; its literary disadvantages are evident likewise. It leads to an ignoring of the complexity of human nature and to an unnatural prominence of the 'ruling passion.' The highest dramatic triumphs of single character in comedy, Falstaff, Rosalind, Beatrice, become impossible. As it has been remarked, the very titles of these plays, Le Misanthrope, Le Joueur, Le Grondeur, show their defects. No man is a mere misanthrope, a mere gambler, a mere grumbler; and the dramatist who approaches comedy from the side of Moliere is but too apt to forget the fact in his anxiety to enforce his moral and deepen the strokes of his general type.

FOOTNOTES:

[233] Ed. Stengel. 5 vols. Marburg, 1884. Cf. Rigal, Alexandre Hardy. Paris, 1889.

[234] This singular work has been published in vol. 8 of the Ancien Theatre Francais in the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. It consists of two parts (or, as the author calls them, days), and fills some two hundred pages. The traditions of the classical drama are thrown to the winds in it, and the liberty of action, the abundance of personages, the bustle and liveliness of the presentation are almost equal to those of the contemporary English theatre.

[235] Ed. Viollet-le-Duc. Also in a convenient selection of his best plays, by L. de Ronchaud. Paris, 1882.

[236] It is pretty generally known that Richelieu himself (besides other dramatic work) composed the whole, or nearly the whole, of a play Mirame, which he had sumptuously performed, and which was fathered by Desmarest. It possessed no merit.

[237] Ed. Marty-Laveaux. 12 vols. Paris, 1862-67.

[238] Ed. Mesnard. 8 vols. Paris, 1867.

[239] The work of (or attributed to) this singular and obscure person has been edited by M. G. Aventin in 2 vols, of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne (Paris, 1858). The name was certainly assumed, and the date and history of the bearer are quite uncertain. The third decade of the seventeenth century seems to have been his most flourishing time. He was the most remarkable of a class of charlatans, others of whom bore the names of Gaultier-Garguille, Gros-Guillaume, etc., and the work which goes under his name is typical of a large mass of facetiae. It consists of dialogues between Tabarin and his master, of farcical adventures in which figure Rodomont (the typical hero of romance) and Isabelle (the typical heroine), etc., etc.

[240] These will be found in the dramatic collection of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne already cited, as well as other pieces, of which the most remarkable is the Corrivaux of Troterel (1612). Saint-Evremond among his earlier works produced a Comedie des Academistes, satirising the then young Academy.

[241] Ed. Moland. 7 vols. Paris, 1863. Ed. (in 'Grands Ecrivains' series) Despois, Regnier, and Mesnard. Paris (in progress).

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III. NOVELISTS

[Sidenote: D'Urfe.]

Prose fiction, for reasons which it is not at all hard to discover, is in its more complete forms always a late product of literature. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, France had known nothing of it except the short prose tales which had succeeded the Fabliaux, and which had been chiefly founded on imitation of the Italians, with the late and inferior prose versions of the romances of chivalry, the isolated masterpiece of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the translated and adapted versions of the Amadis and its continuations. The imitation of Spanish literature was constant in the early seventeenth century, and the great wave of conceited style which, under the various names of Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism, invaded all the literary countries of Europe, did not spare France. The result was a very singular class of literature which, except for a few burlesque works, almost monopolised the attention of novelists during the first half of the century. The example of it was in a manner set by Honore d'Urfe in the Astree, which was, however, rather pastoral than heroic. D'Urfe, who was a man of position and wealth in the district of Forez, imagined, on the banks of the Lignon, a stream running past his home, a kind of Arcadia, the popularity of which is sufficiently shown by the adoption of the name of the hero, Celadon, as one of the stock names in French for a lover. He took, perhaps, some of his machinery from the Aminta of Tasso and from the other Italian pastorals, but he emulated the Amadis in the interminable series of adventures and the long-windedness of his treatment. He had, however, some literary power, while the necessary verisimilitude was provided for by the adaptation of numerous personal experiences, and the book has preserved a certain reputation for graceful sentiment and attractive pictures of nature. It was extraordinarily popular at the time and long afterwards, so much so that a contemporary ecclesiastic, Camus de Pontcarre, considered it necessary to supply an antidote to the bane in the shape of a series of Christian pastorals, the name of one of which, Palombe, is known, because of an edition of it in the present century.

[Sidenote: The Heroic Romances.]

D'Urfe belonged as much to the sixteenth as to the seventeenth century, though the Astree was the work of the latter part of his life, and was indeed left unfinished by him. It was shortly afterwards, under the influence chiefly of the growing fancy for literary coteries, that the heroic romance properly so called was born. This was usually a narration of vast length, in which sometimes the heroes and heroines of classical antiquity, sometimes personages due more or less to the author's imagination, were conducted through a more than Amadis-like series of trials and adventures, with interludes and a general setting of high-flown gallantry. This latter possessed a complete jargon of its own, and (though the hypothesis of its power over the classical French drama is for the most part exaggerated) continued to exercise a vast influence on literature and on society, even after Moliere had poured on its chief practitioners and advocates the undying mockery of his Precieuses Ridicules. There were three prominent authors in this style, Mademoiselle de Scudery, La Calprenede, and Gomberville. Mademoiselle de Scudery, known in the coterie nomenclature of the time as 'Sapho,' was the sister of Georges de Scudery, and a woman of considerable talent and more considerable industry. Madeleine de Scudery was born at Havre in 1607, and died at Paris in 1701, her life thus covering nearly the whole of the century of which she was one of the most conspicuous literary figures. She had no beauty--indeed she was very ugly--but the eccentric military and literary reputation of her brother and her own talents made her the centre and head of an important coterie in the capital. Her romances, the earliest of which was Ibrahim, were published under her brother's name, but their authorship was well known. She was extremely accomplished, not merely in the accomplishments of a blue-stocking but in art, and even in housewifery. After her series of romances was finished she published many volumes, chiefly condensed or extracted from them, containing Conversations of the moral kind, which attracted attention from some persons who had not condescended to the romances themselves. It ought never to be forgotten that among the most fervent admirers of her books and of their fellows was Madame de Sevigne, who was certainly almost as acute in literary criticism as she was skilful in literary composition. Her novels, the most famous of their class, are the Grand Cyrus, otherwise Artamene, Clelie, Ibrahim, or the Illustrious Bassa, and Almahide, the latter being partly, but chiefly in the name of the heroine, the source of Dryden's Conquest of Granada. The Grand Cyrus is, at least by title, the best remembered, but it is in Clelie that the best-known and most characteristic trait appears, the delineation and description namely of the Carte de Tendre[242]. Tendre is the country of love, through which flows the river of Inclination watering the villages of 'Pretty Verses,' 'Gallant Epistles,' 'Assiduity,' etc., while elsewhere in the region are the less cheerful localities of 'Levity,' 'Indifference,' 'Perfidy,' and so forth. La Calprenede, a Gascon by birth, was the author of Cleopatre (which ranks perhaps with Cyrus as the chief example of the style), of Cassandre and of Pharamond. Gauthier de Coste (which was his personal name) figures, like most of the notable persons of the middle of the century, in the Historiettes of Tallemant, who says of him, 'Il n'y a jamais eu un homme plus Gascon que celui-ci.' The assertion is supported by some characteristic but not easily quotable anecdotes. The criticism of Tallemant, however, does not apply badly to the whole class of compositions. 'Les heros,' says he, speaking of Cassandre, 'se ressemblent comme deux gouttes d'eau, parlent tous Phebus (the euphuist jargon of the time), et sont tous des gens a cent mille lieues au dessus des autres hommes.' Marin le Roy, Seigneur de Gomberville, who was something of a Jansenist, attended rather to edification than gallantry in his Alcidiane, Caritee, Polexandre, and Cytheree. Though earlier in date he is inferior in power to Mademoiselle de Scudery and to La Calprenede, the first of whom had some wit and much culture, while La Calprenede possessed a decided grasp of heroic character and some notion of the method of composing historical novels. Gomberville, a man of wealth and position, was also a writer of moral works. Putting the artificiality of the general style out of the question, the chief fault to be found with these books is their enormous length. They fill eight, ten, or even twelve volumes; they consist of five, six, or even seven thousand pages, though the pages are not very large and the print by no means close. Even the liveliest work--work like Fielding's or Le Sage's--would become tiresome on such a scale as this; and it is still incomprehensible how any one not having some special object to serve by it could struggle through such enormous wastes of verbiage and unreality as form the bulk of these novels. Even when the passion for the heroic style strictly so called began to wane no great improvement at first manifested itself. Catherine Desjardins[243] (who wrote under the name of Madame de Villedieu) produced numerous books (the chief of which is Le Grand Alcandre), not indeed so absolutely preposterous in general conception, but even more vapid and destitute of originality and distinction[244].

These impracticable and barren styles of fiction were succeeded in the latter half of the century by something much better. The Picaroon romance of Spain inspired Paul Scarron with the first of a long line of novels which, in the hands of Le Sage, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, enriched the literature of Europe with remarkable work. Madame de la Fayette laid the foundation of the novel proper, or story of analysis of character; and towards the close of the century the fairy tale attained, in the hands of Anthony Hamilton, Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy, its most delightful and abundant development.

[Sidenote: Scarron.]

Paul Scarron was one of the most remarkable literary figures of the century in respect of originality and eccentric talent, though few single works of his possess formal completeness. He was of a family of Piedmontese origin and very well connected, his father, of the same name, being a member of the Parliament of Paris, and of sufficiently independent humour to oppose Richelieu. Paul Scarron the younger (he had had an elder brother of the same name who had died an infant) was born in 1610, and his mother did not outlive his third year. His father married again; the stepmother did not get on well with Paul, and he was half obliged and half induced to become an abbe. For some years he lived a merry life, partly at Rome, partly at Paris. But when he was still young a great calamity fell on him. A cock-and-bull story of his having disguised himself as a savage in a kind of voluntary tar-and-feather suit, and having been struck with paralysis in consequence of plunging into an ice-cold stream to escape the populace, is usually told, but there seems to be no truth in it. An attack of fever, followed by rheumatism and mismanaged by the physicians of the day, appears to have been the real cause of his misfortune. At any rate, for the last twenty years of his life he was hopelessly deformed, almost helpless, and subject to acute attacks of pain. But his spirit was unconquerable. He had some preferment at Le Mans and a pension from the queen, which he lost on suspicion of writing Mazarinades. Besides these he had what he called his 'Marquisat de Quinet,' that is to say, the money which Quinet the bookseller paid him for his wares. In 1652 he astonished Paris by marrying Francoise d'Aubigne, the future Madame de Maintenon, the granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigne. The strange couple seem to have been happy enough, and such unfavourable reports as exist against Madame Scarron may be set down to political malice. But Scarron's health was utterly broken, and he died in 1660 at the age of fifty. His work was not inconsiderable, including some plays and much burlesque poetry, the chief piece of which was his 'Virgil travestied,' an ignoble task at best, but very cleverly performed. His prose, however, is of much greater value. Many of his nouvelles, mostly imitated from the Spanish, have merit, and his Roman Comique[245], though also inspired to some extent from the peninsula, has still more. It is the unfinished history of a troop of strolling actors, displaying extraordinary truth of observation and power of realistic description in the style which, as has been said, Le Sage and Fielding afterwards made popular throughout Europe.

[Sidenote: Cyrano de Bergerac.]

With Scarron may be classed another writer of not dissimilar character, but of far less talent, whose eccentricities have given him a disproportionate reputation even in France, while they have often entirely misled foreign critics. Cyrano de Bergerac was a Gascon of not inconsiderable literary power, whose odd personal appearance, audacity as a duellist, and adherence, after conversion, to the unpopular cause of Mazarin, gave him a position which his works fail to sustain. They are not, however, devoid of merit. His Pedant Joue, a comedy, gave Moliere some useful hints; his Agrippine, a tragedy, has passages of declamatory energy. But his best work comes under the head of fiction. The Voyages a la Lune et au Soleil[246], in which the author partly followed Rabelais, and partly indulged his own fancy for rodomontade, personal satire, and fantastic extravagance, have had attributed to them the great and wholly unmerited honour of setting a pattern to Swift. Cyrano, let it be repeated, was a man of talent, but his powers (he died before he was thirty-five) had not time to mature, and the reckless boastfulness of his character would probably have disqualified him at all times from adequate study and self-criticism. Personally, he is an amusing and interesting figure in literary history, but he is not much more. In company with him and with Scarron may be mentioned Dassoucy, alternately a friend and enemy of Cyrano, and a light writer of some merit.

[Sidenote: Furetiere.]

Charles Sorel, an exceedingly voluminous author, historiographer of France, deserves mention in passing for his Histoire Comique de Francion[247], in which, as in almost all the fictitious work of the time, serious as well as comic, living persons are introduced. The chief remarkable thing about Francion is the evidence it gives of an attempt at an early date (1623) to write a novel of ordinary manners. It is a dull story with loose episodes. More interesting is Antoine Furetiere, author of the Roman Bourgeois[248]. Furetiere, who was a man of varied talent, holds no small place in the history of the calamities of authors. He wrote poems, short tales, fables, satires, criticisms. He is said to have given both Boileau and Racine not inconsiderable assistance. Unfortunately for him, though he had been elected an academician in 1662, he conceived and executed the idea of outstripping his tardy colleagues in their dictionary work. He produced a book of great merit and utility, but one which brought grave troubles on his own head. It was alleged that he had infringed the privileges of the Academy; he was expelled from that body, his own privilege for his own book was revoked, and it was not published till after his death, becoming eventually the well-known Dictionnaire de Trevoux. Furetiere's side has been warmly taken in these days, and it has been sought, not without success, to free him from the charge of all impropriety of conduct, except the impropriety of continuing to be a member of the Academy, while what he was doing could hardly be regarded as anything but a slight on it. The Roman Bourgeois is an original and lively book, without any general plot, but containing a series of very amusing pictures of the Parisian middle-class society of the day, with many curious traits of language and manners. It was published in 1666.

[Sidenote: Madame de la Fayette.]

Of very different importance is the Countess de la Fayette, who has the credit, and justly, of substituting for mere romances of adventure on the one hand, and for stilted heroic work on the other, fiction in which the display of character is held of chief account. In the school, indeed, of which Scarron set the example in France, especially in Gil Blas, its masterpiece, the most accurate knowledge and drawing of human motives and actions is to be found. But it is knowledge and drawing of human motives and actions in the gross rather than in particular. Gil Blas, and even Tom Jones, are types rather than individuals, though the genius of their creators hides the fact. It is, perhaps, an arguable point of literary criticism, whether the persevering analysis of individual, and more or less unusual, character does not lead novelists away from the best path--as it certainly leads in the long run to monstrosities of the modern French and English 'realist' type. But this is a detail of criticism into which there is no need to enter here. It is sufficient that the style has produced some of the most admirable, and much of the most characteristic, work of the last century, and that Madame de la Fayette is on the whole entitled to the credit of being its originator. Her pen was taken up in the next century by the Abbe Prevost and by Richardson, and from these three the novel, as opposed to the romance, may be said to descend. The maiden name of Madame de la Fayette[249] was Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, and she was born at Paris in 1634. Her father was governor of Havre. She was carefully brought up under Menage and Rapin, among others, and was one of the most brilliant of the precieuses of the Hotel Rambouillet. In 1655 she married the Count de la Fayette, but was soon left a widow. After his death she contracted a kind of Platonic friendship with La Rochefoucauld, who was then in the decline of life, tormented with gout, and consoling himself for the departure of the days when he was one of the most important men in France by the composition of his undying Maxims. She survived him thirteen years, and died herself in 1693. During the whole of her life she was on the most intimate terms with Madame de Sevigne, as well as with many of the foremost men of letters of the time. In particular there are extant a large number of letters between her and Huet, bishop of Avranches, one of the most learned, amiable, and upright prelates of the age. Her first attempt at novel-writing was La Princesse de Montpensier. This was followed by Zaide, published in 1670, a book of considerable excellence; and this in its turn by La Princesse de Cleves, published in 1677, which is one of the classics of French literature. The book is but a small one, not amounting in size to a single volume of a modern English novel, and this must of itself have been no small novelty and relief after the portentous bulk of the Scudery romances. Its scene is laid at the court of Henri II., and there is a certain historical basis; but the principal personages are drawn from the author's own experience, herself being the heroine, her husband the Prince of Cleves, and Rochefoucauld the Duke de Nemours, while other characters are identified with Louis XIV. and his courtiers by industrious compilers of 'keys.' If, however, the interest of the book had been limited to this it would now-a-days have lost all its attraction, or have retained so much at most as is due to simple curiosity. But it has far higher merits, and what may be called its court apparatus, and the multitude of small details about court business, are rather drawbacks to it now. Such charm as it has is derived from the strict verisimilitude of the character drawing, and the fidelity with which the emotions are represented. This interest may, indeed, appear thin to a modern reader fresh from the works of those who have profited by two centuries of progress in the way which Madame de la Fayette opened. But when it is remembered that her book appeared thirty years before Gil Blas, forty before the masterpieces of Defoe, and more than half a century before the English novel properly so called made its first appearance, her right to the place she occupied will hardly be contested[250].

The precise origin of the fancy for writing fairy stories, which took possession of polite society in France at the end of the seventeenth century, has been the subject of much discussion, and cannot be said to have been finally settled. Probably the fables of La Fontaine, which are very closely allied to the style, may have given the required impulse. As soon as an example was set this style was seen to lend itself very well to the still surviving fancy for coterie compositions, and the total amount of work of the kind produced in the last years of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth century must be enormous. Much of it has not yet been printed, and the names of but few of the authors are generally known, or perhaps worth knowing[251]. Three, however, emerge from the mass and deserve attention--Anthony Hamilton, Madame d'Aulnoy, and above all, Charles Perrault, the master beyond all comparison of the style.

[Sidenote: Fairy Tales.]

Marie Catherine, Comtesse d'Aulnoy, was born about the middle of the seventeenth century, and died in 1720. It is sufficient to say that among her works are the 'Yellow Dwarf' and the 'White Cat,' stories which no doubt she did not invent, but to which she has given their permanent and well-known form. She wrote much else, memoirs and novels which were bad imitations of the style of Madame de la Fayette, but her fairy tales alone are of value. Anthony Hamilton was one of the rare authors who acquire a durable reputation by writing in a language which is not their native tongue. He was born in Ireland in 1646, and followed the fortunes of the exiled royal family. He returned with Charles II., but adhering to Catholicism, was excluded from preferment in England until James II.'s reign, and he passed most of his time before the Revolution, and all of it afterwards, in France. Hamilton produced (besides many fugitive poems and minor pieces) two books of great note in French, the Memoires de Grammont, his brother-in-law, which perhaps is the standard book for the manners of the court of Charles II., and a collection of fairy tales, less simple than those of Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy and more subordinated to a sarcastic intention, but full of wit and written in French, which is only more piquant for its very slight touch of a foreign element. Many phrases of Hamilton's tales have passed into ordinary quotation, notably 'Belier, mon ami, tu me ferais plaisir si tu voulais commencer par le commencement.'

[Sidenote: Perrault.]

The master of the style was, however, as has been said, Charles Perrault, whose literary history was peculiar. He was born at Paris in 1628, being the son of Pierre Perrault, a lawyer, who had three other sons, all of them of some distinction, and one of them, Claude Perrault, famous in the oddly conjoined professions of medicine and architecture. Charles was well educated at the College de Beauvais, and at first studied law, but his father soon afterwards bought a place of value in the financial department, and Charles was appointed clerk in 1662. He received a curious and rather nondescript preferment (as secretary to Colbert for all matters dependent on literature and arts), which, among other things, enabled him to further his brother's architectural career. In 1671 he was, under the patronage of Colbert, elected of the Academy, into the affairs and proceedings of which he imported order almost for the first time. He had done and for some time did little in literature, being occupied by the duties which, under Colbert, he had as controller of public works. But after a few essays in poetry, partly burlesque and partly serious, notably a Siecle de Louis XIV., he embarked on the rather unlucky work which gave him his chief reputation among his own contemporaries, the Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes, in which he took the part of the moderns. The dispute which followed, due principally to the overbearing rudeness of Boileau, has had something more than its proper place in literary history, and there is no need to give an account of it. It is enough to say that while Boileau as far as his knowledge went (and that was not far, for he knew nothing of English, not very much of Greek, and it would seem little of Italian or Spanish) had the better case, Perrault, assisted by his brother, made a good deal the best use of his weapons, Boileau's unlucky 'Ode on Namur' giving his enemies a great hold on him. After six years' fighting, however, the enemies made peace, and, indeed, it does not seem that Perrault at any time bore malice. He produced, besides some memoirs and the charming trifles to be presently spoken of[252], a good many miscellanies in prose and verse of no particular value, and died in 1703.

His first tale, Griselidis (in verse, and by no means his best), appeared in 1691, Peau d'Ane and Les Souhaits Ridicules in 1694, La Belle au Bois Dormant in 1696, and the rest in 1697. These are Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, La Barbe Bleue, Le Maitre Chat ou le Chat Botte, Les Fees, Cendrillon, Riquet a la Houppe, and Le Petit Poucet. It is needless to say that Perrault did not invent the subjects of them. What he contributed was an admirable and peculiar narrative style, due, as seems very probable, in great part to the example of La Fontaine, but distinguished therefrom by all the difference of verse and prose. The characteristics of this style are an extreme simplicity which does not degenerate into puerility, great directness, and at the same time vividness in telling the story, and a remarkable undercurrent of wit which is never obtrusive, as is sometimes the case in the verse tales. Perrault's stories deserve their immense popularity, and they found innumerable imitators chiefly among persons of quality, who, as M. Honore Bonhomme, the best authority on the obscurer fairy-tale writers, observes, probably found an attraction in the style because of the way in which it lent itself to cover personal satire. This, however, is something of an abuse, and little or nothing of it is discernible in Perrault's own work, though later, and especially in the eighteenth century, it was frequently if not invariably present.

NOTE TO THE LAST THREE CHAPTERS.

Although the list of names mentioned here under the respective heads of poets, dramatists, and novelists is considerable, it is very far indeed from being exhaustive. It may, indeed, be said generally that it is only possible in this history, especially as we leave the invention of printing farther and farther behind, to mention those names which have left something like a memory behind them. The dramas and novels of the seventeenth century are extremely numerous, and have been but very partially explored. In regard to the poems there is an additional difficulty. It was a fashion of the time to collect such things in recueils--miscellaneous collections--in which the work of very large numbers of writers, who never published their poems separately or obtained after their own day any recognition as poets, is buried. Specimens, published here and there by the laborious editors of the greater classics in illustration of these latter, show that with leisure, opportunity, and critical discernment, this little-worked vein might be followed up not without advantage. But for such a purpose, as for the similar exploration of many other out-of-the-way corners of this vast literature, conditions are needed which are eminently 'the gift of fortune.' These remarks apply more or less to all the following chapters and books of this history. But they may find an appropriate place here, not merely because it is from this period onwards that they are most applicable, but because this special department of French literary history--the earlier seventeenth century--contains, perhaps, the greatest proportion of this wreckage of time as yet unrummaged and unsorted by posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[242] Not du Tendre, as it is often erroneously cited in French and English works.

[243] The learned editor of Tallemant des Reaux calls her Marie Hortense. She also wrote verses and plays. There were many other romance writers of the period now forgotten, or remembered only for other things, such as the Abbe d'Aubignac.

[244] I cannot boast of an intimate or exhaustive acquaintance with the 'heroic' romances; but I have taken care to satisfy myself of the accuracy of the statements in the text.

[245] Ed. Dillaye. 2 vols. Paris, 1881.

[246] The full title is Histoire Comique des Etats de la Lune et du Soleil. Cyrano's works have been edited by P. L. Jacob. 2 vols. Paris, 1858.

[247] Ed. Colombey. Paris, 1877.

[248] Ed. Jannet. 2 vols. Paris, 1878.

[249] Ed. Garnier. Paris, 1864.

[250] Madame de la Fayette also wrote La Comtesse de Tende, and interesting Memoirs of Henrietta of England. Zaide was published under the name of Segrais, who was a nouvelle-writer of no great merit, though a pleasant poet.

[251] See H. Bonhomme, Le Cabinet des Fees.

[252] Ed. Lefevre. Paris, 1875. Ed. Lang. Oxford, 1888.

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IV. HISTORIANS, MEMOIR-WRITERS, LETTER-WRITERS

Although the seventeenth century did not witness the acceptance in France of what may be called a philosophical conception of history, and though few or none of the regular histories of the time (with the exception of that of Mezeray) hold high rank as literature, no period was more fruitful in memoirs, letters, and separate historical sketches of the first merit. The names of Madame de Sevigne, of the Cardinal de Retz, of La Rochefoucauld, and at the extreme end of the period of Saint Simon, rank among those of the most original writers of France, while the historical essay has rarely assumed a more thoroughly literary form than in the short sketches of Retz, Sarrasin, and others. The subject of the present chapter may, therefore, be divided into four parts, the historians properly so called (the least interesting of the four), the historical essayists, the memoir-writers, and the letter-writers, with an appendix of erudite cultivators of historical science and of miscellaneous authors of historical gossip and other matters.

[Sidenote: General Historians. Mezeray.]

[253]It is said not unfrequently that the only historical work of this particular period, combining magnitude of subject with elevation and originality of thought and literary excellence of expression, is Bossuet's discourse on universal history. There is not a little truth in the saying. Still there are a few authors whose work deserves mention. The great history of De Thou was written in Latin. But the century produced in Mezeray's History of France the first attempt of merit on the subject. Francois Eudes de Mezeray was the son of a surgeon, who seems to have been of some means and position. Mezeray was educated at Caen (he was born in 1610), and he early betook himself to historical studies. After beginning by supervising a translated history of the Turks, he set to work on his masterpiece, the History of France, which appeared in three huge and splendid folios in 1643, 1646, and 1651. He was accused of treating his predecessors with too great contempt; but this was more than justified by the superiority, not merely in style but in historical conception and attention to documentary evidence, which he showed. Mezeray had been protected and pensioned by Richelieu, but under Mazarin he became a violent pamphleteer and author of Mazarinades. Later, when Louis XIV. was settled on the throne, he published an abridgment of his own history, in which the keen scent of Colbert discovered uncourtly strictures on the fiscal abuses of the kingdom. Mezeray refused to alter them, and was mulcted accordingly of part of his pension. He died in 1683, having earned the title of the first historian, worthy of the name, of France. With due allowance for his period, he may challenge comparison with almost any of his successors, though his style, excellent at its best, is somewhat unequal. Perefixe (who may have been assisted by Mezeray) is responsible for a history of Henri IV.; Maimbourg for a history of the League which has some interest for Englishmen because Dryden translated it. The same great English writer projected but did not accomplish a translation from a much more worthless historian, Varillas, who is notorious among his class for indifference to accuracy. It is indeed curious that this century, side by side with the most laborious investigators ever known, produced a school of historians who, with some merits of style, were almost deliberately unfaithful to fact. If the well-known saying ('Mon siege est fait') attributed to the Abbe Vertot is not apocryphal[254], he must be ranked in the less respectable class. But his well-known histories, the chief of which is devoted to the Knights of Malta, were not wholly constructed on this principle. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy, of which he was secretary, and one of the living Louis XIV., which, as might be expected, is little more than an ingenious panegyric. The Pere Daniel wrote a history of France, the Pere d'Orleans one of the English revolutions; while Rapin de Thoyras, a Huguenot and a refugee, had the glory of composing in a foreign language the first book deserving the title of a History of England. Superior to all these writers, except to Mezeray, are the ecclesiastical historians Fleury and Tillemont. Fleury was a good writer, very learned and exceedingly fair. Tillemont, with less pretentions to style, is second to no writer of history in learning, industry, accuracy, and judgment.

[Sidenote: Historical Essayists.]

[Sidenote: Saint Real.]

The historical essay, like much else of value at the time, was in great part due to the mania for coteries. In these select societies literature was the favourite occupation, and ingenuity was ransacked to discover forms of composition admitting of treatment in brief space and of the display of literary skill. The personal 'portrait,' or elaborate prose character, was of this kind, but the ambition of the competitors soared higher than mere character-drawing. They sought for some striking event, if possible contemporary, which offered, within moderate compass, dramatic unity and scope for something like dramatic treatment. Sometimes, as in the Relation du Passage du Rhin, by the Count de Guiche, personal experiences formed the basis, but more frequently passages in the recent history of other nations were chosen. Of this kind was the Conspiration de Walstein of Sarrasin, which, though incomplete, is admirable in style. Better still is the Conjuration de Fiesque of the Cardinal de Retz, his first work, and one written when he was but seventeen. Not a few of the scattered writings of Saint Evremond may be classed under this head, notably the Letter to Crequi on the Peace of the Pyrenees, which was the cause of his exile, though this was rather political than historical. Towards the end of the century, the Abbe Vertot preluded his larger histories by a short tract on the revolutions of Portugal, and another on those of Sweden, which had both merit and success. It will be observed that conspiracies, revolutions, and such-like events formed the staple subjects of these compositions. Of this class was the masterpiece of the style--the only one perhaps which as a type at least merits something more than a mere mention--the Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise[255] of Saint Real, a piece famous in French literature as a capital example of historical narration on the small scale, and not unimportant to English literature as the basis of Otway's principal tragedy. Cesar Vichard, Abbe de Saint Real, was born at Chambery in 1631, and died at the same place in 1692. He was sent early to Paris, betook himself to historical studies, and published various works, including certain discourses on history, a piece on Don Carlos, and the Conjuration des Espagnols itself, which appeared in 1672. Shortly afterwards he visited London, and was for a time a member of the coterie of Saint Evremond and Hortense Mancini. He returned to Paris and thence, in 1679, to his native town, where the Duke of Savoy made him his historiographer and a member of the Academy of Turin. Not long before his death he was employed in political work. Saint Real's chief characteristics as a historian are the preference before everything else of a dramatic conception and treatment, and the employment of a singularly vivid and idiomatic style, simple in its vocabulary and phrase and yet in the highest degree picturesque. He has been accused of following his master, Varillas, in want of strict accuracy, but in truth strict accuracy was not aimed at by any of these essayists. Their object was to produce a creditable literary composition, to set forth their subject strikingly and dramatically, and to point a moral of some kind. In all three respects their success was not contemptible.

[Sidenote: Memoir-writers.]

[Sidenote: Rohan]

[Sidenote: Bassompierre.]

The memoir-writers proper, who confine themselves to what they in their own persons have done, heard, or thought, are, as has been said, of far more importance. Their number is very great, and investigations into the vast record treasures which, after revolutionary devastation, France still possesses, is yearly increasing the knowledge of them. Only a brief account can here be attempted of most of them; and where the historical importance of the writer exceeds or equals his importance as a literary figure, biographical details will be but sparingly given, as they are easily and more suitably to be found elsewhere. The earliest writer who properly comes within our century (the order of the collection of Michaud and Poujoulat is followed for convenience sake) is Francois Duval, Marquis de Fontenay Mareuil. Fontenay was a soldier, a courtier, and a diplomatist, in which last character he visited England. He has left us connected memoirs from 1609 to 1624, and some short accounts of later transactions, such as the siege of La Rochelle, and his own mission to Rome. Fontenay is a simple and straightforward writer, full of good sense, and not destitute of narrative power. To Paul Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain (1566-1621) we owe a somewhat jejune but careful and apparently faithful account of the minority of Louis XIII. A short and striking relation of the downfall of Concini is supposed to be the work of Michel de Marillac, keeper of the seals (1573-1632), afterwards one of the victims of Richelieu. Henri de Rohan (1579-1638) is very far superior to the writers just named. Of the greatest house, save one or two, in France, he travelled much, distinguished himself in battle, both in foreign and civil war; was once condemned to death, made head for a time against all the strength of Richelieu; was near purchasing the principality of Cyprus from the Venetians, and establishing himself in the east; was recalled, commanded the French forces with brilliant success in the Valtelline, and met his death under Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar at Rheinfeld. Besides his memoirs he wrote a book called the Parfait Capitaine, and some others. The memoirs extend from the death of Henri IV. to the year 1629, and have all the vigour and brilliancy of the best sixteenth-century work of the kind. A further account of the Valtelline campaign is also most probably Rohan's, though it is not written in the first person, and has been attributed to others. Of still greater personal interest are the memoirs of Francois, Marechal de Bassompierre, another of the adversaries of Richelieu, and who, less fortunate than Rohan, languished twelve years in the Bastille. Few persons played a more active part in the first years of the reign of Louis XIII. than Bassompierre, and no one has left a livelier description, not merely of his own personal fortunes, but of the personality of his contemporaries, the habits and customs of the time, the wars, the loves, the intrigues of himself, his friends and his enemies. He has not the credit of being very accurate, but he is infinitely amusing. His memoirs were written during his sojourn in the Bastille. This was terminated by the death of Richelieu, but Bassompierre followed his enemy before very long in consequence of an attack of apoplexy.

In singular contrast to Bassompierre's work are the memoirs of another chronicler of the same time, Francois Annibal, Marechal d'Estrees, brother of the mistress of Henri IV. D'Estrees excludes all gossip, confines himself strictly to matters of public business, and recounts them apparently with scrupulous accuracy, and in a plain but clear and sufficient style. Among the most curious and not the least interesting of the works of this class are the memoirs of Pontis--one of the famous solitaries of Port Royal in his old age. Pontis died at the age of eighty-seven, and had been for fifty-six years in the army. His memoirs, which are strictly confined to his personal experiences, obtained the approbation of two such undeniably competent judges as Conde and Madame de Sevigne, and are by no means unworthy of the honour. The actual composition of the memoirs is said to be the work of Thomas du Fosse. The memoirs called Richelieu's are different from all these, and, notwithstanding their great extent and the illustrious name they bear, of very inferior interest, at least from the literary point of view. Richelieu's talents, it is sufficiently notorious, were not literary; and even if they had been, but little of these memoirs comes from his own hand. They are the work of secretaries, confidants, and under-strappers of all sorts, writing at most from the cardinal's dictation, and probably in many cases merely constructing precis of documents. There is, therefore, no need to dwell on them.

In the memoirs of Arnauld d'Andilly and of his son, the Abbe Arnauld, the personal interest and the abundance of anecdote and character-drawing which characterise the memoir work of the time reappear; the latter are, indeed, particularly full of them. Those of the father are chiefly interesting, as exhibiting the curious mixture of worldly and spiritual motives which played so large a part in the history of the time. For Arnauld who was the fervent friend and disciple of Saint Cyran, the practical founder of Jansenism in France, was also an assiduous courtier of Gaston d'Orleans, and not too well satisfied with the results of his courtiership. There are memoirs attributed to Gaston himself, but they are almost certainly the work of another hand; their historical value is not inconsiderable, but they have little literary interest. Those of Marie, Duchess de Nemours, and daughter of the Duke de Longueville, are short, but among the most interesting of all those dealing with the Fronde, from the vividness and decision of their personal traits.

[Sidenote: Madame de Motteville.]

More important still among the memoirs of this time are those of Francoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville, a member of the family of the poet Bertaut. She was introduced by her mother, when very young, to Anne of Austria, and soon became her most intimate confidante. The jealousy of Richelieu banished her for a time from the court, and she married M. de Motteville, a man of wealth and position in the civil service of the province of Normandy. Shortly before Richelieu's death she lost her husband; and as soon as Anne of Austria succeeded to the regency she was recalled to court, and spent her time there during the queen's life. She survived her mistress many years, and was a member of the society of Madame de Sevigne. She died in 1689. Her memoirs, which were not published till many years after her death, contain many curious revelations of the court history of the time, for she was not only intimate with Anne of Austria, but also with the unfortunate Henrietta Maria of England, and with La Grande Mademoiselle. With the latter she interchanged some curious and characteristic letters on a fantastic project of Mademoiselle's for founding a new abbey of Thelema. The general style of her memoirs is sober and intelligent, but it is injured by the abundance of moral reflections, in matter according to the taste, but in manner lacking much of the piquancy, of the time. These memoirs are somewhat voluminous, and extend to the death of Anne of Austria. Madame de Motteville, notwithstanding her affection for her mistress, is one of the best authorities for the period of the Fronde, because, unlike Retz and La Rochefoucauld, she was only secondarily interested in the events she relates. Some curious details of the later Fronde are found in the short memoirs of Pere Berthod, of whom nothing is known. Of the Comte de Brienne, who was a favourite and minister of Anne of Austria, and whose book contains much information on foreign, and especially English affairs; of Montresor and Fontrailles, both followers of Gaston of Orleans, and the latter the author of a relation of the Cinq Mars conspiracy, short, but minute and striking; of La Chatre, an industrious courtier and intriguer, and a vivid and picturesque writer, whose work, as will presently be mentioned, became entangled in a strange fashion with that of La Rochefoucauld; of the great Turenne, a worthy follower of Montluc and Rohan in the art of military writing, little more than mention can be made. There are some military memoirs of interest, which go under the name of the Duke of York (James II).

[Sidenote: Cardinal de Retz.]

The works and personages of some other writers demand a fuller notice. Paul de Gondi[256], Cardinal de Retz, who occupies with Saint Simon, and perhaps La Rochefoucauld, the first place among French memoir-writers of the seventeenth century, was born in 1614, and died in 1679. He was a younger son of an ancient and noble house, uniting French and Italian honours, and was early destined for the church, for which probably no churchman ever had less vocation. He intrigued in society and politics, was a practised duellist, and though he was not more than seven-or eight-and-twenty at Richelieu's death, had already caballed against him. His appointment by Louis XIII., almost on his deathbed, to the coadjutorship (involving the reversion) of the archbishopric of Paris, which was then held by his uncle, a very old man of no personal capacity or influence, put into his hands a formidable political weapon, and he was not long in making use of it. He was more than any other man the instigator of the Fronde, that singular alliance of the privileged bourgeoisie of the great towns with the still more privileged nobility against the royal authority as exercised through ministers. The history of this confused and turbulent period is in great part the biography of Retz. It is not easy to see that he had any definite political views except the jealousy of Mazarin, which he shared with almost all his order, an inveterate habit of insubordination, and a still more inveterate habit of conspiracy. The Fronde was and could have been but a failure, and Retz was a failure with it. He was for some time in exile, but at last reconciled himself to the inevitable, and even enjoyed some public employments under Louis XIV. His principal occupation, however, was the payment of his enormous debts, which he effected with an honesty not common at the time among his class by rigorously reducing his expenditure, selling and mortgaging his numerous benefices, and, as Madame de Sevigne put it, 'living for his creditors.' He is said thus to have paid off four millions of francs, a vast sum for the time. Meanwhile he was writing the Memoirs which, like the Maxims of his rival and half-enemy, La Rochefoucauld, unexpectedly gained for him a higher reputation in literature than he could have hoped for in politics. When a mere boy he had shown in the Conjuration de Fiesque no small literary talent, and his sermons deepened the impression. His Memoirs, however, are different in style from both. They are addressed to a lady friend, and contain a most extraordinary mixture of anecdote, description, personal satire, moral reflection, and political portraiture. In the three points of anecdote, portrait-drawing, and maxim-making, Retz has no rival except in the acknowledged masters of each art respectively.

The Memoirs of Guy Joly, a lawyer and the friend and confidant of Retz, in a manner supplement this latter's work. Joly was faithful to his master even in exile, but at last they quarrelled, and the Memoirs do not always throw a very favourable light on the proceedings of the turbulent cardinal. They are very well written. Claude Joly, the uncle of Guy, an ecclesiastic, has also left anti-Mazarin writings of less literary worth.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle.]

Of very great importance historically, and by no means unimportant as literature, are the Memoirs of Pierre Lenet, a man of business long attached to the house of Conde. These memoirs are, in fact, memoirs of the great Conde himself, until the peace of the Pyrenees. Personal and literary interest both appear in a very high degree in the Memoirs of Anne Marie Louise de Montpensier, commonly called La Grande Mademoiselle. The only daughter of Gaston of Orleans and of the Duchess de Montpensier, she inherited enormous wealth, and a position which made it difficult for her to marry any one but a crowned head. In her youth she was self-willed, and by no means inclined to marriage, and prince after prince was proposed to her in vain. During the Fronde she took an extraordinary part--heading armies, mounting the walls of Orleans by a scaling ladder, and saving the routed troops of Conde, after the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, by opening the gates of Paris to them, and causing the cannon of the Bastille to cover their flight. Mazarin never forgave her this, nor perhaps did Louis XIV. When she was past middle age, Mademoiselle conceived an unfortunate affection for Lauzun, then merely a gentleman of the South named Puyguilhem. By dint of great entreaties she obtained permission from the king to marry him, but the combined efforts of the queen and the princes of the blood caused this to be rescinded, and Lauzun was imprisoned in Pignerol. After many years Mademoiselle purchased his release by making over a great part of her immense possessions to Louis' bastard, the Duke du Maine, and secretly married her lover, who was not only younger than herself, but a notorious adventurer. He was basely ungrateful, and she separated from him before her death. Her memoirs, which are voluminous, contain a minute history of her singular life, written with not a little egotism, but with all the vivacity and individuality of savour which characterise the best work of the time. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is that, although entirely occupied with herself and her fortunes, Mademoiselle does not appear either to exaggerate her own merits, or to disguise her faults. She photographs herself, which is not common. Valentin Conrart, a man of letters, who figures repeatedly in the history of the time, who was the real founder of the Academy, who published but little in his lifetime, and who has only recently been the subject of a sufficient study, left memoirs of no great length, but of value in reference to the Fronde. The Marquis de Montglat, of whom not much is known, wrote important military memoirs of the latter portion of the Thirty Years' War, and of the campaigns between France and Spain, which continued until the peace of the Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]

The Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld[257] would have assured him a considerable place in the history of literature, even had he never written the Maxims, and the singular fate of these Memoirs would have deserved notice even had they been far less intrinsically interesting in matter and style than they are. The seventeenth century was the palmy time of literary piracy, and this piracy was facilitated not merely by the absence of any international copyright, but by the common habit of circulating books in manuscript long before their appearance in print. They were thus copied and re-copied, and the number of unauthorised duplicates made it impossible for the author to protect his work. Not unfrequently the difficulties of authors were increased by the custom (inherited from the middle ages) of simultaneously or rather continuously transcribing different works in the same large notebook, without any very scrupulous attention to their separate origin, plan, and authorship. When La Rochefoucauld, after the conclusion of the Fronde and the triumph of Mazarin, retired in dudgeon and disgrace to his estates, he devoted himself to the writing of memoirs, and the fact soon became known. He succeeded once in preventing an unauthorised publication at Rouen. But the Elzevirs (who were as much princes of piracy as of printing) were beyond his reach, and in 1662 there appeared a book purporting to be the Memoirs of M. L. R. F. This book excited much indignation in the persons commented upon, and La Rochefoucauld hastened to deny its authenticity, alleging that but a fraction was his, and that garbled. His denial was very partially credited, and has remained the subject of suspicion almost to the present day. Probably, however, he was warned by the incident of the danger of this sort of contemporary criticism, and no authentic edition was issued. After his death a new turn of ill-luck befell him. A fresh recension of the Memoirs was published, not indeed quite so incorrect as the first, but still largely adulterated, nor was the injustice repaired until 1817, and then not entirely. It is only within the last few years that the publication of the Memoirs from a manuscript in the possession of his representatives has finally established the text, and that laborious enquiries have demonstrated the conglomerate character of the early editions (which were made up of the work of La Rochefoucauld, of La Chatre, of Vineuil, and of several other people, even such well-known writers as Saint Evremond being laid under contribution), and the justice of the author's repudiation. The genuine Memoirs are, however, extremely interesting; they are less full, and perhaps less absolutely frank than those of Retz, but they yield to these alone of the Fronde chronicles in piquancy and interest, while their purely literary merit is superior. The strange bird's-eye view of conduct and motives which characterises the Maxims is already visible in them, as well as the profundity of insight which accompanies width of range. The form is less finished, but its capacities are seen.

Jean Herault de Gourville stood to La Rochefoucauld in something like the relation which Guy Joly bore to Retz, but was far more fortunate. Born at La Rochefoucauld, without any advantages of family or fortune, he began as a domestic of its seigneur. He passed from this service to that of Conde and Mazarin, held public employments which enriched him, became the friend of Fouquet, and escaped the general ruin which fell on the superintendent's friends at his fall, married, it is said, secretly a daughter of the house where he had served in a menial capacity, was recalled honourably to his country, discharged important political and diplomatic offices, lived on equal terms with the greatest nobles of the court, and died full of years, riches, and honours, in 1703. His Memoirs, which were written but a short time before his death, were dictated to a secretary. They are of a somewhat gossiping character, but full of curious information. The so-called memoirs of Omer Talon are really accounts, written in a stilted and professional style, of the proceedings of the Parliament of Paris. Henri de Guise, the last, the least fortunate, but not the least remarkable of his famous family, has left an account of the wild expedition which he made to Naples at the time of the revolt of Masaniello, which is somewhat too long for the subject. The Memoirs of the Marechal de Grammont were composed from his papers by his second son, Louvigny, afterwards Duke de Grammont. The eldest son, Count de Guiche, the most accomplished cavalier of the earlier court of Louis XIV., died before his father. Guiche left a brilliant relation (written some say on the spot and at once) of the passage of the Rhine, an exploit much exaggerated by the king's flatterers, but which was really a brilliant feat of arms, and was mainly due to Guiche himself. Like those of Grammont, the Memoirs of the Marechal du Plessis are not the work of the hero, but in this case a professional man of letters--it is thought Segrais--seems to have been called in. Their somewhat stilted regularity contrasts with the irregular vigour of most of the work mentioned in this chapter. Some anonymous Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du XVII'eme Siecle, though evidently a compilation, are not destitute of literary merit. They seem to be extracted for the most part from works already mentioned. The Memoirs of La Porte, the valet de chambre of Anne of Austria and the youthful Louis XIV., are rather important to history than to literature. Madame de la Fayette wrote Memoirs of Henrietta, the daughter of Charles I., and the first wife of the Duke of Orleans, but they are not equal to her novels in merit. The poet-Marquis La Fare began memoirs on an extensive plan, but only completed a small part of them. Those of the Duke of Berwick are justly considered models of simple straightforward writing, of clear judgment, and of accurate statement. The Souvenirs of Madame de Caylus had the honour of having Voltaire for their first editor, and deserved it. They are purely personal, and might even be called frivolous, were it not for the interest and historical importance of the society whose manners they depict. The memoirs of Torcy give a clear and lucid account of the negotiations in which that diplomatist was engaged. Last of this long list come three works of value, the memoirs of Villars, Forbin, and Duguay Trouin. The last two are among the somewhat rare records of French prowess on sea. Both are somewhat boastful, and the memoirs of Forbin, which are the longer and the more amusing of the two, are suspected of some inaccuracy. They were not, it appears, the unaided work of their nominal authors. The memoirs of Villars are of greater historical importance, and of much literary interest.

[Sidenote: Saint Simon.]

A few authors, not included in the collection the order of which has been followed, have now to be mentioned. Bussy Rabutin, cousin of Madame de Sevigne, and one of the boldest, most unscrupulous, and most unlucky of aspirants after fortune, has left a considerable number of letters and memoirs in which he exposes his own projects and wrongs, and, above all, a kind of scandalous chronicle called the Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules, in which gossip against all the ladies of the court, not excepting his own relations and friends, is pitilessly recorded. Bussy had many of the family qualities which show themselves more amiably in the cousin whom he libelled. His literary faculty was considerable, his brain fertile in invention, and his tongue witty in expression; but he made no very good use of his powers. The Marquis de Dangeau[258] has left an immense collection of memoirs, describing in the minutest detail the etiquette of the court of Louis XIV. and all that happened there for years; but he had hardly any faculty of writing, and his work, except for its matter, is chiefly remarkable because of the contrast which it presents to a book which deals with much the same subject, and which has yet to be noticed. This book, with grave defects and inequalities, exhibits in the highest degree the merits of the class and period of literature which is now under review. These are the skill shown by writers in no respect professional, but trained to expression only by literary amusements and the conversation of the salons; the keen insight into motive and character; the intense interest and power of reflection with which contemporary events are taken in and represented.

Louis de Rouvroy, Duke de Saint Simon[259], was born at La Ferte Vidame, the family seat, in 1675. The family was of very great antiquity and unblemished noblesse, claiming descent from Charlemagne; the dukedom and the peerage--it is to be remembered that peerage in France has, or rather had under the old regime, an entirely different sense from the modern English sense, referring not in the least to the ennobling of the persons enjoying it, but to their admission into a kind of great council of the kingdom which had indeed long lost its active functions, but retained its dignity--were conferred only on Saint Simon's father, a favourite and a faithful servant of Louis XIII. His mother was Charlotte de l'Aubespine, of a family which had much distinguished itself for several generations since the days of Francis the First. Saint Simon was brought up by the Jesuits, went to the wars in Flanders at the age of seventeen, and a year later succeeded to the title and estates by the death of his father. Thus at the age of eighteen he found himself in a position theoretically superior to every man in France except the princes of the blood, and his few brother peers--theoretically, for the rule of Louis did not admit of any real exercise of the privileges of the peerage. Saint Simon, however, began at once to show his devotion to the idol of his whole life--the status of his order--by going to law with Luxembourg, the famous Marshal, on a question of precedence and title of the most intricate kind. At the Peace of Ryswick he left the army, to the displeasure of the king; but he was none the less constant at court, though he could hardly be called a courtier, and though his inveterate stickling for precedence frequently brought down the king's wrath on his head. In 1705 he was made ambassador to Rome, but the appointment was almost immediately cancelled. Many years later, however, a similar, but greater, honour fell to his lot. The death of Louis put power into the hands of Philippe d'Orleans, who was a friend of Saint Simon's, and the latter enjoyed the greatest triumph of his life by bringing about the degradation of the 'Bastards' (the illegitimate sons of Louis), on whom, to the indignation of the peers, the king had bestowed the rank and precedence of princes of the blood. In 1721 Saint Simon went on a special embassy to Spain to arrange the double marriage of Louis XV. to the Infanta, and of the Prince of the Asturias to the Regent's granddaughter. There he was made a grandee of the first class. Soon after his return he gave up interference in public affairs, but he lived for thirty years longer, writing incessantly, and died in 1755.

The history of his enormous literary productions is curious enough. Nothing was published, and, from the personal nature of most of his work, nothing could well be published, during his lifetime. He died intestate, and with no immediate heirs, and opportunity was taken to impound the whole of his manuscripts, amounting to hundreds of volumes. Extracts from the memoirs were surreptitiously published from time to time during the eighteenth century, but it was not till 1839 that the whole was fully and faithfully given to the world. These memoirs, however, form relatively but a small part of the vast mass of Saint Simon's manuscripts, though they fill twenty printed volumes. Until very recently obstacles of a not very intelligible character have been thrown in the way of publication by the French Foreign Office, to which the MSS. belong; but at length these seem to have been overcome, and three different workers, M. de Boislisle, M. Drumont, and M. Faugere, have been engaged in editing or re-editing different parts of the total. The minor works, however, from the specimens already published, would seem to be of less interest than the memoirs; most of them bearing on the, to Saint Simon, inexhaustible subject of the privileges of the peerage, and its place in the hierarchy of government. To discuss these subjects would lead us out of our way. It is sufficient to say that it is a great mistake to regard Saint Simon as a mere selfish aristocrat in the cant sense. He would have had the kingdom justly and wisely governed for the benefit of the whole nation, but he regarded the nobility, and, above all, the peers, as the pre-destined instruments of government. 'Much for the people, but nothing by the people,' was his political motto.

The importance of Saint Simon in literature is, however, entirely independent of his standpoint as a politician, though that standpoint was not without influence on his literary characteristics. He is valuable to us as, without exception, the most vivid and graphic painter of contemporary history of the anecdotic kind in French or any other language. His style is incorrect, and sometimes barely grammatical, and all his work bears the character of notes, hurriedly dashed off, rather than of a finished and regularly arranged history. Opinions differ as to his trustworthiness in matters of fact, but it is certain, from his positive manner of recounting the incidents and the actual words of interviews at which he could not have been present, and as to which he is not likely to have had more than hearsay information, that his testimony is to be received with caution. His prejudices, too, were extraordinarily strong, and he is in the habit of representing everything and everybody that he does not like in the blackest possible colours. His furious denunciation thus makes a curious contrast to the good-humoured malice of the author with whom he is most likely to be compared--Madame de Sevigne. But all these drawbacks affect only the matter, not the manner of his work. The picture which he has given of the inner life of the court of Versailles during the later years of Louis XIV. is unrivalled in history. Still more extraordinary is the power of single passages, such especially as the famous one describing the Dauphin's death. Saint Simon has often been compared to Tacitus, but his torrent of words very little resembles the laconic incisiveness of the Roman. A much nearer parallel, though with remarkable differences, might be found in the late Mr. Carlyle.

Some memoirs of great extent and interest, valuable as checking Saint Simon and Dangeau (whom Saint Simon annotated), have recently appeared for the first time, at least in a form that is to be complete. They are the work of the Marquis de Sourches[260], a great court officer, and they cover the last thirty years of Louis's reign. Their chief literary peculiarity is the formal and almost official character of the text contrasted with the greater freedom of the numerous notes.

[Sidenote: Madame de Sevigne.]

The most famous and remarkable of all the letter-writers of the time--perhaps the most famous and remarkable of all letter-writers in literature--was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne[261]. She was born at Paris on the 6th of February, 1626, and died at Grignan, of small-pox, on the 10th of August, 1696. Her family was a distinguished one both in war and other ways. Her grandmother was the well-known Sainte Chantal, the pupil of St. Francois de Sales, and her first cousin, as has been mentioned, was Bussy Rabutin. Her father and mother both died when she was very young, and an uncle, not more than twenty years older than herself, the Abbe de Coulanges, took charge of her, remaining, for the greater part of her life, her chief friend and counsellor. She soon became a great beauty, and something of a scholar, though not of a blue-stocking. Menage and Chapelain had, among others, much to do with her education, and she was a member of the celebrated coterie of the Hotel Rambouillet, though her satirical humour saved her from being a precieuse. At the age of eighteen she married the Marquis de Sevigne, of a good and wealthy Breton family. Her husband was, however, a selfish profligate, who wasted her substance with Ninon de l'Enclos, and such-like persons,--though Ninon herself, to do her justice, never plundered her lovers,--and did not pretend the slightest return for the affection she gave him. He was killed in a duel in 1651, leaving her with two children, a daughter, Francoise Marguerite, and a son Charles. After a few years of seclusion she returned to the world, being then in the full possession of her beauty, and only twenty-eight years old. She continued for more than forty years to form part of the best society of the capital, without suffering the least stain on her reputation. The selfish vanity of the superintendent Fouquet made him keep certain of her letters; but though they were discovered in a casket which was fatal to many of his friends of both sexes, Madame de Sevigne came scathless out of the ordeal. In 1669 her daughter, then twenty-two years old, married the Count de Grignan, a Provencal gentleman of the noblest birth, of great estate, rank, and fortune, but already twice a widower, past middle age, plain, and of somewhat embarrassed means, considering the great expenses which, as Governor of Provence, he had to meet. He was, however, a man of good sense and probity, and his wife seems to have been sincerely attached to him. The great bulk of Madame de Sevigne's voluminous correspondence was addressed to her daughter, for whom she had an almost frantic fondness; Charles de Sevigne, though apparently far the more lovable of the two, having but an inferior share of his mother's affection. The letters to Madame de Grignan are for the most part dated either from Paris (in which case they are full of court news and gossip), or from Les Rochers, the country seat of the Sevignes, near Vitre, in which case they are full of social satire and curious details of the provincial life of that time. One very interesting series describes the habits and regimen of Vichy, which Madame de Sevigne visited in consequence of a severe attack of rheumatism. The correspondence thus serves as a minute and detailed history of the author for the last thirty years of her life, except during her rare visits to Grignan, in one of which, as has been mentioned, she caught the illness which proved fatal to her.

It has been said that Madame de Sevigne's letters are very numerous. Those to her daughter especially were garbled in the earlier editions by omissions, and by the substitution of phrases which seemed to the 18th century more suitable than the fresh nature of the originals. The edition cited gives the extant MSS. faithfully. The enthusiastic affection lavished by the mother on the daughter naturally commends itself differently to different persons. It is certain that if it is not tedious, it is only due to the extraordinary literary art of the writer, an art which is at once the most artful and the most artless to be anywhere found. The only other faults of the letters are an occasional crudity of diction (which, however, is, when rightly taken, perfectly innocent and even valuable as exemplifying the manners of the time,) and a decided heartlessness in relating the misfortunes of all those in whom the writer is not personally interested. Madame de Sevigne has been blamed for not sympathising more with the oppression of the French people during her time. This, however, is an unfair charge. In the first place she simply expresses the current political ideas of her day, and, in the second place, she goes decidedly beyond those ideas in the direction of sympathy. Her treatment of some of her own equals leaves much more to desire. The account of Madame de Brinvilliers' sufferings--unworthy of much pity as the victim was--is callous to brutality, and it seems to be sufficient for any one to have ever offended Madame de Grignan, or to have spoken slightingly of her, to put him, or her, out of the pale of even ordinary human sympathy. But no other fault can be found. For vivid social portraiture the book equals Saint Simon at his best, while it is far more uniformly good. The letters describing the engagement of La Grande Mademoiselle to Lauzun, the death of Vatel, the trial of Fouquet, the Vichy sojourn, the meeting of the states of Britanny, and many others, are not to be surpassed in this respect. Unlike Saint Simon, too, Madame de Sevigne has no fixed idea--except that of Madame de Grignan's perfections, which rarely interferes--to prevent her from taking fresh, original, and acute views of things in general as distinguished from mere court intrigues. Her literary criticism is excellent, and if she somewhat overvalues moralists like Nicole and novelists like Mademoiselle de Scudery, who ministered to her peculiar tastes, her remarks on the great preachers, on La Fontaine, on Corneille and Racine, display a singular insight as well as a singular power of expression. She is, indeed, except in politics, on which few persons of her class had at the time any clear or distinct ideas, never superficial; and this union of just thought with accurate observation and exceptional power of expression makes her position in literature.

[Sidenote: Tallemant des Reaux.]

Madame de Sevigne, so to speak, dwarfs all other letter-writers of her time. Yet many of those already mentioned under the head of memoirs left letters which have been preserved, and which are of merit. It is, however, not necessary to specify any except Madame de Maintenon, whose correspondence is voluminous and important both as history and as literature. It has not the charm of Madame de Sevigne, but it displays the great intellectual powers of the writer[262]. Of a very different kind, but not less worthy of notice are the letters of Guy Patin, which are for the most part violent Mazarinades, and full of scandalous anecdotes, but full also of lively wit. Scandal, indeed, was very much the order of the day, as appears from the large and curious collection of broadsheets and pamphlets republished by the late M. Fournier in his Varietes Historiques et Litteraires[263]. These, most of which refer to the present period, form a kind of appendix to historical and biographical writing of the more serious kind. There is, however, one remarkable work which remains to be noticed, and which, for want of a better place for it, must be noticed here, the Historiettes of Tallemant des Reaux[264]. The author of this singular book, Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux, was born at La Rochelle about 1619, and died in 1692. He was of a family not noble but wealthy and well connected, and he himself was able, by marriage with a cousin who was an heiress, to live without any profession, and to purchase an estate and seignory of some importance. Little, however, is known of his life except that he was much at the Hotel de Rambouillet in his youth, and that in his old age he underwent some not clearly defined misfortune or disgrace. The Historiettes were written in the years immediately preceding 1660, and form an almost complete commentary on the persons most celebrated in society and literature for three quarters of a century before that date. There is no other book to which they can be exactly compared, though they have, with much less literary excellence, a certain resemblance in form to the work of Brantome. They are, as published by Monmerque, 376 in number, filling five (nominally ten) stout volumes. Each is as a rule headed with the name of a single person, though there are a few general or subject headings. The articles themselves are not regular biographies, but collections of anecdotes, not unfrequently of the most scandalous kind. Tallemant, though by no means of small ability, appears to have been a somewhat malicious person, and not too careful to examine the value of the stories he tells, especially when they bear heavily on the old nobility, of whom, as a new man, he was very jealous. Yet his sources of information were in many cases good, and his statements are confirmed by independent evidence sufficiently often to show that, if they are in other cases to be accepted with caution, they are not the work of a mere libeller. No one, even in that century of unstinted personal revelations, has taken us so much behind the scenes, and certainly no one has left a more amusing book of its kind or (with the proper precautions) a more valuable one.

[Sidenote: Historical Antiquaries.]

[Sidenote: Du Cange.]

The class of learned investigators into the sources of history cannot be omitted in any account of French literature; though their work was chiefly in Latin, and though even when it was not it was rather of value as material for future literature than as literature itself. This century and the earlier part of the succeeding one were the palmy time of really laborious erudition--the work of the Benedictines and Bollandists, and of many isolated writers worthy of being ranked with the members of these famous communities. The individuals composing this class are, however, too numerous, and, from the purely literary view, too unimportant to detain us. Exceptions may be made in favour of Andre Duchesne, whose collections of French and Norman Chronicles, and his genealogical histories of the houses of Laval and Vergi, are valuable examples of their kind; of Mabillon, famous for his labours in hagiology, in the history of France, and above all in that of Italy; and lastly, of Du Cange. The last-named has a special right to a place here because, both directly and indirectly, he did much towards the rediscovery of old French literature. Du Cange was his seignorial style, his personal name being Charles Dufresne. He devoted himself to the study of the middle ages generally, and particularly of the Byzantine Empire. He edited Joinville, wrote a history of the Latin Empire, and in his most famous work, the Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, contributed not a little to the study of the oldest form of French.

FOOTNOTES:

[253] The following paragraph contains, except as far as Mezeray is concerned, chiefly second-hand information. I have hitherto been unable to devote the time necessary to enable me to speak at first hand of these books, which are very bulky, not as a rule interesting or important in manner, and for the most part long obsolete in matter.

[254] The legend, familiar probably to most readers, is that Vertot required documents for his account of a certain military operation. Tired with waiting for them, he constructed the history out of his own head, and when they arrived made the ejaculation in the text.

[255] This, with some other of the pieces here mentioned, will be found in two volumes of the Collection Didot, entitled Petits Chefs d'oeuvre Historiques.

[256] Ed. Feillet, Gourdault and Chantelauze. Paris (in progress).

[257] Ed. Gilbert et Gourdault. Paris, 1868-81.

[258] Ed. Feuillet de Conches. 19 vols. Paris, 1854-61.

[259] Memoirs, ed. Cheruel. 20 vols. Paris, 1873. Now being re-edited by M. de Boislisle. Miscellaneous works are also appearing.

[260] Ed. Bertrand et de Cosnac. Vol. i. Paris, 1882.

[261] Ed. Monmerque. 14 vols. Paris, 1861-66, to which must be added 2 vols. of Lettres Inedites discovered and published by M. Capmas.

[262] A full and excellently edited selection has been given by A. Geffroy. 2 vols. Paris, 1887.

[263] 10 vols. Paris, 1855-63.

[264] 10 vols. in 5. Ed. Monmerque. Third edition. Paris, n. d.

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V. ESSAYISTS, MINOR MORALISTS, CRITICS

The enormous popularity which the Essays of Montaigne enjoyed could not fail to raise up imitators and followers in the century succeeding their publication. But Montaigne's influence on the production of short pieces, complete in themselves and having for the most part an ethical bearing, was supplemented by the feature of the time so often referred to, the fancy for literary coteries, and for wit combats between the members of those coteries. For this latter purpose pieces of moderate length in prose, corresponding to the sonnets, the madrigals, and such-like things in verse, were well suited. The Academy, too, with its competitions and its ordinary critical occupations, stimulated literary production in the same direction. The essay was therefore much cultivated in the seventeenth century, and not a few minor styles of composition descended from it. Such were the Pensee, a short essay on some definite and briefly handled point; the Conversation, an essay or sketch in dialogue; the Portrait, a sketch of personal character; the Maxime, a condensed Pensee, just as the Pensee was a condensed essay. In these various styles some of the most excellent work existing in French literature was composed during the time which we are at present handling; and four names of the first, or almost the first rank in literary history, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, and Saint Evremond, belong to this division, besides not a few others of less importance. Pascal, indeed, might be almost as well treated in either of the two following chapters as in the present; but if the substance of his work is for the most part philosophical or theological, the form of it seems to fall more suitably under the present head. He does not, however, open the series of Essayists.

[Sidenote: Balzac.]

Something of Montaigne's manner, as well as of his peculiar sceptical doubt, which nevertheless does not transcend the limits of orthodoxy, was continued far into the century by La Mothe le Vayer, a man of talent, but of some deliberate eccentricity and archaism in costume and manners as in style. But the most important name in the history of French prose next after that of Montaigne is that of Jean Guez de Balzac, who occupies nearly the same place in it as Malherbe does in that of French poetry. Balzac was a gentleman of rank and fortune in the province of Angoumois, where he was born towards the end of the sixteenth century, and where he died in 1655. In his younger days he served in some diplomatic employments, then for a long time resided in Paris, and finally retired to his country seat. Balzac's works are almost entirely of the essay character, though they are sufficiently diverse, and for the most part rather artificial in form. The most considerable part of them is composed of letters--not such letters as have been discussed in the preceding chapter, but elaborate epistles written deliberately for the sake of writing, and with a definite attempt at style. Besides these, which are very numerous, Balzac was also the author of discourses on various subjects and of certain nondescript works of an ethico-political character, the principal and best known of which is the Socrate Chretien. In all, his work was sufficient to fill two folio volumes when it was collected[265]. Balzac is a really remarkable figure in literary history, because he is, in his own tongue and nation, almost the first person who deliberately wrote for the sake of writing, and not because he had anything particular to say. The practice is perhaps not one to be commended to the general run of men at any time, or even to exceptional men, except at a peculiar time. But done as it was, and when it was, Balzac's work was really of importance and advantage to his countrymen. The prose literature of the sixteenth century had been admirable, but it had not resulted in the elaboration of any general style of all work. Each writer had followed his instincts, and when those instincts were under the guidance of genius, as they frequently were, many writers had produced admirable results. But the general use of the printing press, and the adaptation of literature to all sorts of journey-work, made it imperatively necessary that the tools should be put ready fashioned into the hands of ordinary workmen instead of each man having to manufacture them for himself. Various steps had been taken in this direction. Guillaume du Vair had already written a Traite de l'Eloquence Francaise; Vaugelas, a Savoyard by birth, was shortly to undertake some valuable Remarques on French grammar and style, which long remained a standard book. But not many examples of deliberate composition had been given. It was these examples of deliberate composition which Balzac furnished, and which, in a lighter and more graceful fashion, and to a more limited circle, were also given by the letters of the poet Voiture. Balzac, as is natural in the first attempts at a polished prose style, has the drawback of being somewhat rhetorical and occasionally ponderous. But the important point is that the mechanism of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph has evidently been considered by him, and that he has succeeded in getting it into very tolerable condition. His sentences no longer run on to the interminable length of earlier writers, or finish in the haphazard manner, neglectful of rhythm, balance, and proportion, also noticeable in his predecessors. The substitution of the full stop for the conjunction, which, speaking generally, may be said to be the initiating secret of style (though of course it must not be applied too indiscriminately), is at once apparent in Balzac's best passages, and he rarely falls into the error which waits on this substitution, the error of scrappiness. His style is perhaps better suited to oratory than to writing; a not unlikely result, since his models were pretty obviously the classical orators. But there can be no doubt that to him in no small part is due the extraordinary outburst of rhetorical power which distinguished the preachers of the latter half of the century. Nor was it long before what was faulty in Balzac's style was corrected by the example of very different writers.

[Sidenote: Pascal.]

Blaise Pascal[266] was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, on the 19th of June, 1623. His father was President of the Court of Aids, but when the boy was eight years old the family moved to Paris. Pascal was one of the small number of extraordinarily precocious children who have justified their precocity by genius equally extraordinary in after-life; but it does not appear that he was forced by his father (who took the whole charge of his education), and it is said that he did not begin Latin until he was twelve years old--a very late age for the time. Mathematics, however, were his chief study and delight, and he early excelled in them, showing also an extraordinary faculty in applying them to physics. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine. But his application to study did not improve his health. He was but five-and-twenty at the time of his famous experiment with the barometer on the Puy de Dome in his native province. He was soon exposed to the philosophical influence of Descartes on the one hand, and the theological influence of the Jansenists on the other, and he felt both deeply. His greatest work, the Provinciales, appeared in 1656. He died on the 19th of August, 1662, having long lived in retirement and asceticism, giving much of his substance to the poor, and abandoning himself almost entirely to religious, mathematical, and philosophical meditation.

We have nothing to do here with his purely mathematical works or those in natural science. The two books by which he belongs to literature, and which have placed him among the foremost writers of his country, are the Provinciales and the so-called Pensees. The former were regularly published by himself in his lifetime, though they were ostensibly anonymous, or rather pseudonymous. The Pensees consist of scattered reflections, which were found in his papers after his death. They were published, but, as has been discovered of late years, with much omission and garbling, and the restoration of them to their authentic form has been effected in comparatively recent times.

The famous title of Les Provinciales is only a convenient abbreviation of the original, which is Lettres Ecrites par Louis de Montalte a un Provincial de ses Amis et aux Reverends Peres Jesuites sur le Sujet de la Morale et de la Politique de ces Peres. This somewhat cumbrous appellation has at any rate the merit of exactly describing the contents of the book, except that Louis de Montalte is of course a pseudonym. The letters were written at the height of the early struggle (which had not yet been interfered with by the secular arm) of Jansenists and Jesuits, and they inflicted on the famous society a blow from which it has never wholly recovered, and from which it can never wholly recover. The method and style of Pascal are entirely original, except in so far as a slight trace of indebtedness to Descartes may be observed in the first respect, and a slight debt to Montaigne and the Satire Menippee in the second. His great weapon is polite irony, which he first brought to perfection, and in the use of which he has hardly been equalled and has certainly not been surpassed since. The intricate casuistries of the Jesuits are unfolded in the gravest fashion and without the least exaggeration or burlesque, but with a running comment or rather insinuation of sarcasm which is irresistible. The author never breaks out into a laugh, never allows himself to be declamatory and indignant. There is always a smile on his countenance, but never anything more pronounced than a smile. Yet the contempt of this is more crushing than that of the bitterest invective. In the later letters indeed the mask of irony is to a certain extent dropped, and a more serious tone is taken. But effective as these are they are not the most effective part of the Provinciales. That part is the earlier one, in which, without dry scholastic argument, without the coarse abuse which the sixteenth century had regarded as inseparable from theological controversy, and at the same time with almost absolute accuracy of statement--for the misrepresentations which two centuries of eager and able apologists for the Order have been able to detect are insignificant--the author carried the discussion out of the schools into the drawing-room, made every man of fair education and breeding a judge of it, and triumphantly brought the judgment of the vast majority of such men on his side. To this day Pascal, with Swift and Courier, is the greatest example in modern literature of irony, excelling Swift as much in elegance and good-breeding as he falls short of him in sombre force, and having the advantage over his brilliant follower at the beginning of this century in depth and nobility of thought.

The Pensees supply the reverse side of Pascal's character, and the supplement to any proper estimate of his literary genius. But from the circumstances already referred to, they are evidence of a less complete though an even more genuine kind than the Provinciales. The scepticism which ate so deeply into the heart of the seventeenth century affected Pascal, though he rarely wavered in point of abstract faith. To few men, however, was doubt more painful, and as no clearer or more piercing intellect has ever existed, so to none was doubt more constantly present. The Pensees in their genuine form exhibit the thoughts to which this conflict of opinion gave rise in him, and are in remarkable contrast with the polished and sedate badinage of the letters. But few if any of them are finally worked up into the form in which the author would have been likely to present them to the public, and therefore, from the point of view of pure literary criticism, they require less notice here than the sister volume.

The revolution, as far as style is concerned, which in point of time is already noticeable in Descartes, has entirely accomplished itself in Pascal. The last vestige of archaism, of quaintness of phrase, of clumsiness in the architecture of the sentence or the paragraph, has passed away. Indeed, it can hardly be said that two centuries have added much to the language except in point of richness and adaptation to the more multifarious needs of the describer in modern times. The style is extremely simple, but it has none of the monotony, the lack of colour, and the stereotyped form which are the great drawbacks of French after Boileau as contrasted with French before him. It is extraordinarily graphic, sparkling with epigram at every point, and yet never sacrificing sense to the play of words. The Pensees (which it must always be remembered were never finally worked up) yield matter which will compare with the carefully concocted Maxims of La Rochefoucauld or of Joubert, while the Provinciales are, as has been said, unsurpassable in their own line. It is probable that most good judges would allot to Pascal in French the place which Dryden occupies in English, that is to say, the place of the writer who combines most of the advantages of the elder and younger manners. But Pascal, who wrote merely to please himself, had this great advantage over Dryden, that his work contains no mere journey-work, and especially nothing unworthy of him. Admirable as it is in style, it is equally admirable in meaning and in adaptation to that meaning, and it has thus both the sources of lasting popularity at command. Dealing, moreover, as it does with subjects of perennial importance and interest, it is almost entirely exempt from the necessity of comment and explanation which weighs down much admirable work of past ages. No man, however indisposed to serious reading, can put down the Provinciales as dull; no man, however unwilling to read anything that is not serious, can complain of levity in the Pensees. There are few authors in any language who unite as Pascal does the claims of importance of subject, charm of style, and bulk, without too great voluminousness of production. He has, moreover, the additional merit of being in a high degree representative of his age. That age had grown too complex for one man to reflect the whole of it, but Pascal and Moliere (with perhaps Saint Evremond or La Rochefoucauld as thirdsman) supply an almost complete reflection.

Saint Evremond[267], who was thirteen years Pascal's senior, and who outlived him by more than forty years, was, in almost every respect except intellectual vigour and literary faculty, his opposite. He was a Norman by birth (Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis was his proper name), and was born in 1610. He was educated by the Jesuits, entered the army early, served through the later campaigns of the Thirty Years' War and in the Fronde, was a favourite of Conde's but fell into disgrace with him, and after the fall of Fouquet, which led to the discovery of his very able and very uncourtly letter on the Peace of the Pyrenees, also incurred the king's displeasure. This displeasure is said to have been aggravated by his notorious membership of the freethinking and materialist school which Gassendi, if he had not founded it, had helped to spread. Saint Evremond was practically if not formally banished, and the time of his misfortune coinciding pretty nearly with the Restoration in England, he made his way thither, was well received by the king and his courtiers, many of whom he had known in their exile, and dwelt in London for almost the whole remainder of his long life. He died in 1703, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His works are almost entirely occasional, consisting of 'conversations,' letters, 'portraits,' short literary disquisitions and tractates on subjects of historical and ethical interest. They display a placid epicurean philosophy which in its indifference to the assaults of fortune is not destitute of nobility, an extraordinary catholicity and acuteness of literary judgment, and remarkable wit and finesse. The Conversation du Pere Canaye, which is of the same date as the Provinciales, is worthy of Pascal for its irony, and possesses a certain air of being written by a 'person of quality,' which Saint Evremond could throw over his writings better almost than any one else. His Portraits, not always flattering, are full of nervous vigour. But his literary remarks are perhaps the most surprising of his works. At a time when English literature was almost unknown in France, and when Boileau ostentatiously pretended never to have heard of Dryden, Saint Evremond, perhaps with some assistance from his friend Waller, drew up some masterly remarks on the humour-comedy of the Jonson school. His criticisms of French plays, as compared with classical tragedy and comedy, are also full of pregnant thought; and some comparative studies of his on Corneille and Racine show a power of detachment and independence which may be due in some part to the cosmopolitanism given by residence abroad, but which is certainly due also to native power. From the point of view of literary history, however, Saint Evremond is perhaps most remarkable as having formed, in conjunction with Pascal and Bayle, a singular trio, which supplied Voltaire with the models[268] whence he drew his peculiar style of persiflage. As far as form is concerned, it may be fairly said that Saint Evremond was the most influential of the three. Like many other men of his time he rarely published anything in the ordinary way, and it was not till very late in life that he empowered Desmaizeaux to issue an authorised edition of work that had either circulated in manuscript or been piratically printed.

[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]

Francois de Marcillac[269], Duke de la Rochefoucauld, was born in 1613 of one of the noblest families of France. His father had just been created duke and peer, the highest honour possible to a French subject, and for many years the son was known under the title of Prince de Marcillac. He was very imperfectly educated, but was early sent to serve in the army and introduced to the court. Young as he was, he was deeply engaged in the various intrigues against Richelieu, chiefly in consequence of his affection for the celebrated Madame de Chevreuse. After Richelieu's death and the comparative effacement of Madame de Chevreuse, he transferred his affections to Madame de Longueville and his aversion to Mazarin. He was one of the chiefs of the Princes' party, and fought all through the Fronde, winning a reputation, not so much for military skill as for the most reckless bravery. The establishment of the royal authority first sent him into retirement, and then reduced him to the position of an ordinary courtier. This last period of his life was distinguished by a third attachment to a lady hardly less celebrated than either of his former loves, Madame de la Fayette, the author of La Princesse de Cleves, in which novel he is said to figure under another name. He was also an intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. In the latter part of his life he suffered terribly from gout, and died of that disease in 1680.

His Memoirs have been already noticed. The more famous and far more remarkable Maxims were published shortly afterwards, and at once attained a wide popularity. The first edition appeared in 1665, and four others were published, with considerable alterations and additions, during the author's lifetime, in 1666, 1671, 1675, and 1678. After his death a sixth edition was published by Claude Barbin, containing fifty new maxims, the authenticity of which is uncertain but probable.

The fullest authoritative edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims contains 504 separate paragraphs, to which, besides the fifty just noticed, about another fifty can be added by restoring those which the author suppressed during his lifetime. The last, which is avowedly a kind of appendix, and on a different plan from the others, extends to a couple of pages. But the average length of the remainder is not more than three or four lines, and many do not contain more than a dozen words. The art of compressing thought and then pointedly expressing it has never been pushed so far except by Joubert, and hardly even by him. All La Rochefoucauld's maxims, without exception, are on ethical subjects, and with a certain allowance they may be said to be generally concerned with the reduction of the motives and conduct of men to the single principle of self-love. In consequence, accusations of misanthropy, of unfairness, of short-sightedness, have been showered upon the author by those who do not like a spade to be called a spade. We have nothing to do with the moral side of the matter here, and it is sufficient to say that La Rochefoucauld is not an advocate of the selfish or any other school of moralists. He is simply an observer, setting down with the utmost literary skill the results of a long life of unusual experience in business and pleasure of every kind. He is a man of science who has got together a large collection of facts, and who expounds and arranges them on a certain coherent and sufficient hypothesis. As a work of literary art the result of his exposition is unrivalled. The whole of the Maxims, even with the doubtful or rejected ones, need not occupy more than a hundred pages, and they contain matter which in the hands of an ordinary writer would have filled a dozen volumes. Yet there is no undue compression. It is impossible ever to mistake the meaning, though the comprehension of the full application of that meaning depends, of course, on the intellectual equipment and social experience of the reader. The clearness with which Descartes had first endowed French is here displayed in its very highest degree. The style, as was unavoidable in work of the kind, is entirely devoid of ornament. Imagery is wholly absent, and though metaphorical expressions abound, they are of the plainest and simplest kind of metaphor. The philosophical language of the day is present, but in no very prominent measure. The motto of the book (at least in the fourth and fifth editions), 'Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices deguises,' is a very fair example of the simple straightforward fashion of La Rochefoucauld's style. Sometimes, but rarely, the author explains his meaning, and slightly lengthens his phrase by repeating the sentiment in a somewhat different form, as thus, 'Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer, et l'on est plus heureux par la passion qu'on a que par celle que l'on donne.' But even here it is to be observed that the explanation is in a manner necessary to take off the air of sententious enigma, which the words 'le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer' might have had by themselves. La Rochefoucauld is never enigmatical, rarely sententious merely, and is almost indifferent to the production of mots. How continually the study of brevity, combined with precision, occupied the author, and how severe he was on any exuberance, can be seen very instructively in the successive alterations of his work. Thus, in the first edition Maxim 295 ran, 'La jeunesse est une ivresse continuelle, c'est la fievre de la sante, c'est la folie de la raison;' but La Rochefoucauld seems to have thought this unduly pleonastic, and it appears later as 'La jeunesse est une ivresse continuelle, c'est la fievre de la raison,' the improvement of which in point and freshness is sufficiently obvious. The result of this process is that the best of these Maxims are absolutely unrivalled in their own peculiar style, and that all subsequent writers in the same style have taken their form as a model. French critics have, as a rule, rather under-than over-estimated the purely literary talent of La Rochefoucauld. But this is due to two causes: first, to the supposed antagonism of his spirit to conventional morality; secondly, to the fact that he somewhat anticipated the writers of the particular period which for a century and a half was the idol of academic criticism. His language is rather that of Louis XIII. than of Louis XIV., and in his words and phrases there is a certain archaism, not to say an occasional irregularity, which critics who look only at the stop-watch apparently find it hard to forgive.

[Sidenote: La Bruyere.]

These critics generally give the palm of style, as concerns writing of this kind, to Jean de la Bruyere[270]. Less is known of the personal history of this author than of that of any contemporary writer of great eminence. He was born at Paris, in August 1645, and his family appears to have been anciently connected with the law. He must have been a man of some means and of good education, for he had just bought himself an important financial post at Caen, when, on the recommendation of Bossuet, he was appointed Historical Preceptor to Duke Louis of Bourbon, the grandson of Conde, in whose household he continued till his death in 1696. He had published his Caracteres in 1687, and was elected to the Academy in 1693.

The works of La Bruyere consist of the Caracteres just mentioned, of a translation of Theophrastus, of a few literary discourses, and (probably) of some chapters on Quietism, written on the side of his patron Bossuet during the great controversy with Fenelon, but not published till after the author's death. The Caracteres alone are of much importance or interest.

The design of this curious and celebrated book is taken, like its title, from Theophrastus, but the plan is very much altered as well as extended. Instead of copying directly the abstract qualities of Theophrastus and his brief, pregnant, but somewhat artificial and jejune description of them, La Bruyere adopted a scheme much better suited to his own age. He took for the most part actual living people, well known to all his readers, and, disguising them thinly under names of the kind which the romances of the middle of the century had rendered fashionable, made them body forth the characters he wished to define and satirise. These portraits he inserted in a framework not altogether unlike that of the Montaigne essay, preserving no very consecutive plan, but passing from moral reflection to literary criticism, and from literary criticism to one of the half-personal, half-moralising portraits just mentioned, with remarkable ease and skill. The titles of his chapters are rather more indicative of their actual contents than those of Montaigne's essays, but they represent, for the most part, merely very elastic frames, in which the author's various observations and reflections are mounted. The result of this variety, not to say desultoriness, combined as it is with the display of very great literary art, is that La Bruyere's is a book of almost unparalleled interest to take up and lay down at odd moments. Its apparently continuous form and its intermixture of narrative save it from the appearance of severity which the avowed Maxim or Pensee has; while the bond between the different chapters, and even the different paragraphs, is so slight that interruption is not felt to be annoying. Even now, when the zest of personal malice, which, as Malezieux remarked to the author, made him sure beforehand of 'plenty of readers and plenty of enemies,' is past, it is a most interesting book to read; and it is especially interesting to Englishmen, because there is no doubt that the English essayists of the Queen Anne school directly modelled themselves upon it.

It has been objected to La Bruyere that he is less of a thinker than of a clever writer, and there is truth in the objection. He was possessed of a remarkable shrewdness, common sense, and soundness of taste; thus, for instance, he protests energetically against the foolish pedantry which rejected as obsolete many of the most useful and most picturesque words in French, and so sets himself directly against the dominant and very unfortunate literary influence of his time, that of Boileau. Yet he himself wrote in the fashionable style, and in the language rather of Racine than of Corneille. A further objection, also a just one, is that his characters are too much of their age and not of all time. This objection, indeed, applies to almost all writers after 1660, except Moliere, and La Fontaine, and La Rochefoucauld. But La Bruyere (though there are some sarcastic insinuations which seem to hint that his range was wider than he chose to show) is as unwilling to disentangle himself from Versailles and Paris as his English followers are to extend their gaze to something beyond 'the town.' Nor is there the force and vigour about La Bruyere's moral reflections that there is about La Rochefoucauld's. They are frequently commonplace, sometimes even platitudinous, and the author occasionally falls into what is perhaps the most dangerous pitfall for a moralist and social satirist, the adoption of stock butts and types. It is indeed most probable that La Bruyere was one of those who, according to a famous phrase of his enemy and successor, Fontenelle, 'may have their hands full of truth, but may not care to open more than their little finger.' He was not, like La Rochefoucauld, a great noble with the liberty of the Fronde in his mind, but a man of no exalted rank, living in the most absolute period of Louis the Fourteenth's rule. His remark that 'les grands sujets sont defendus' is a pregnant one, especially when it is remembered how near to the 'grands sujets' (as, for instance, in his oblique denunciation of the misery of the French peasantry) he sometimes goes. But his style, though looser than that of his forerunner, and destitute of the character of sharp and enduring sculpture which is impressed on the Maxims, is a model of ease, grace, and fluency without weakness[271].

FOOTNOTES:

[265] He has not recently been re-edited, but a selection was published in 1822.

[266] Editions of Pascal are numerous, but a complete and definite one is still wanting. Of the Pensees, etc., the editions of Faugere, Havet, and Rocher may be mentioned; of the Provinciales, the edition of 1867.

[267] Ed. Giraud. 3 vols. Paris, 1866. (A selection only, but containing almost everything of importance.)

[268] Perhaps Anthony Hamilton should be added, as a channel of communication with Saint Evremond and some of the seventeenth century coterie-writers.

[269] Ed. as before noticed. The Maxims have been constantly reprinted by themselves.

[270] Ed. Servois. Paris, 1865-1882.

[271] Under the head of this chapter, in an exhaustive history, not a few classes of writers might be ranged. Such are, besides great numbers of miscellaneous writers of criticism from Corneille in his Examens downwards, the classical commentators, editors, and translators. Few of these have left a very enduring reputation. In the earlier part of the century Perrot d'Ablancourt, a fertile translator, may be mentioned. His work was so free that his versions were called 'les belles infideles,' but Boileau himself admitted that he was a master of French style. In the latter part the best-known and perhaps the most remarkable name is that of the still famous Madame Dacier. Many of the early members of the Academy, and some who never attained to its ranks, have left a reputation more anecdotic than strictly literary, such as Menage (a representative of the class), Cotin, Costar, Bautru, etc. But they can only be alluded to here. Law also contributed in the person of Patru, a writer for the most part on professional topics, but occasionally on literature, who is ranked by Boileau with Perrot d'Ablancourt in respect of style.

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VI. PHILOSOPHERS

The history of literature and the history of philosophy touch each other only at certain points of their course. There are periods (the nineteenth century itself is perhaps an example) when the study of philosophy is almost divorced from style. There are others when the two are intimately wedded. Nowhere is this latter more the case than in the seventeenth century, and in France. Much of the most excellent writing of the time was directed to philosophic subjects. But it so happened that the great reformer of philosophy in France was also the greatest reformer of her prose style, and that his greatest disciple carried philosophical writing, as far as style is concerned, to very nearly, if not quite, the highest pitch which it has yet attained in French. We shall not have to concern ourselves in more than the very slightest degree with the subject of the writings of Descartes and Malebranche, but they have as legitimate a place in the history of French literature as they have in that of European philosophy.

[Sidenote: Descartes.]

Rene Descartes[272] was born at La Haye in Touraine on the 31st of March, 1596. His family belonged by descent to the province in which he was born, but by occupation and official position (as well it would seem as by possessions) to Britanny. It was of noble rank, though only of noblesse de robe, and possessed enough landed property to leave estates and territorial designations to two sons. Thus Rene was Seigneur du Perron, though, quite contrary to the wont of the day, he never made use of the title. He was of weak health both at this time and afterwards, and, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not begin his studies very early. In 1604 he was sent to the Jesuit College of La Fleche, and remained there nearly eight years. After a short stay at home he was sent to Paris, where he divided his time between ordinary pursuits and amusements on the one hand, and hard study on the other. In 1617, when he had just attained his majority, he joined the army as a volunteer, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War soon gave him plenty of employment. He visited various parts of Europe, partly on duty, partly as an ordinary traveller. First he served for two years at Breda under Prince Maurice of Nassau, pursuing the same mixture of study and routine employments. Then he went to Germany, where in his winter quarters his great philosophical idea, as he has told in memorable words, flashed across him. He served in various parts of the empire, and in Hungary and Bohemia, but left the army in 1621 and went to Holland, experiencing on the way a curious and dangerous adventure. After a year at the Hague he went home, and was put in possession of his share of his mother's property. He visited Italy, where he made a pilgrimage to Loretto, then returned to France, and dwelt in Paris for some time; resuming however his military character for a while, and serving at the siege of La Rochelle. At last, in 1628, being then thirty-two years old, he left the service finally, and gave himself up wholly to the study of philosophy. For this purpose he retired to Holland, where he was still somewhat restless[273]. But his chief centres were successively Amsterdam, Egmond, not far from Alkmaar, and Endegeest, within easy distance of the Hague. He returned to France more than once, and was asked to settle at court, receiving from Mazarin a pension of 3000 livres. But the troubles of the Fronde made Paris a distasteful and unsuitable residence for him. He then accepted, at the end of 1649, an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden and went to Stockholm, where the severe weather and the gracious habit which the queen had of summoning him for discussion at five o'clock in the morning (he had all his life when not on active service made a point of not rising till eleven), put an end to his life, by inflammation of the lungs, on Feb. 11, 1650.

The works of Descartes are numerous, though few of them are of very great extent. He wrote a treatise (not now extant) on the art of fencing when he was but sixteen; and during the succeeding years small treatises on different points, chiefly of mathematics and natural theology, constantly issued from his pen, though he was not a ready writer. The works which alone concern us here are his famous Discours de la Methode, 1637, and his letters. The Meditations, of equal importance philosophically with the Discours, and the Principia Philosophiae, a rehandling of the two, were originally published in Latin. No attempt can here be made to give any account of Descartes' mathematical, physical, and metaphysical speculations, or of the means by which he endeavoured to work out his great principle, that all knowledge springs from certain ideas clearly and distinctly conceived, and is deducible mathematically, or rather logically, from these principles.

Until and including Victor Cousin, who, though his own style has some drawbacks, was a keen judge and a fervent admirer of the best classical French, French writers have always regarded the style of Descartes as one of the most remarkable, and above all the most original in the language. There cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of any one historically acquainted with that language, and accustomed to judge style critically, that the opinion is a thoroughly sound one. Of late, however, there have been dissidents, and their opinion has been strangely adopted by the latest English biographer of Descartes[274]. Controversy as a rule is out of place in these pages, but on this particular point, involving as it does one of the most important questions in French literary history--the proper distribution of the epochs of style--an exception must be made. According to Mr. Mahaffy's view it is Descartes' few letters to Balzac which have gained him a reputation for style, but he is 'seldom more than clear and correct;' he is 'seldom grand, not often amusing.' The temptation to enlarge on this singular definition of style as that which is grand or amusing must be resisted. Those who have followed the foregoing pages will perceive that the refusal to recognise in a writer who is 'seldom more than clear and correct' (Descartes is a great deal more than this, but no matter) the characteristics of a master of style arises from ignorance of what the characteristics and drawbacks of French style had hitherto been.

Prose style may be divided, as conveniently as in any other way, into the style of description or narration, and the style of discussion or argument. The former deals with the imagination, with the passions, with outward events, with conversation; the latter with the reason only. The former propounds images, the latter ideas. The former constructs a picture, the latter reduces words to their simplest terms as symbols of thought. French had been making very rapid progress in the former division of style, though there was much left to be done; in the latter it was yet entirely at its rudiments. Before Descartes there are three masters of this latter style, and three only, Rabelais, Calvin, and Montaigne. There is little doubt that Rabelais might have anticipated Descartes, had it not been for the fact, first, that, except on rare occasions, he chose to wrap himself in the grotesque; and, secondly, that he came before the innovations of the Pleiade had enriched the language, and the reaction against the Pleiade had pruned off the superfluity of richness. Calvin was also exposed to this second drawback, and had besides a defect of idiosyncrasy in a certain dryness and heaviness allied with, and partly resulting from, a too close adherence to Latin forms. Montaigne again, like Rabelais, deliberately refuses to be bound by the mere requirements of argument, and expatiates into all sorts of digressions, partaking of the other style, the style of description. If any one will take the famous passage of Descartes already referred to (the passage in which he describes how being in winter quarters, with nothing to do and sitting all day long by a warm stove, he started the train of thought which ended or began in Cogito ergo sum), and, having a good acquaintance with the three authors just mentioned, will imagine how the same facts and arguments would have appeared in their language, he will not find it difficult to realise the difference. The grotesque by-play and the archaic vocabulary of Gargantua, the garrulous digression and anecdote of the Essays, are not more strikingly absent than the jejune scholasticism which is the worse side of Calvin's grave and noble style. The author does not think it necessary to attract his readers with ornament, nor to repel them with dry and barren marshalling of technicalities. All is simple, straightforward, admirably clear, but at the same time the prose is fluent, modulated, harmonious, and possesses, if not the grace of superadded ornament, those of perfect proportion and unerring choice of words.

As a prose writer Descartes is generally compared to his contemporary, and in some sort predecessor, Balzac, and his advantage over the author of the Socrate Chretien is stated to lie chiefly in the superiority of his matter. This is not quite the fact. Balzac had, indeed, aimed at the simplicity and classical perfection of Descartes, but he had not attained it; he still has much of the quaintness of Montaigne, though it must be remembered that in comparisons of this kind censure bestowed on the authors compared is relative not positive, and that Descartes could no more have written the Essays than Montaigne the Discours. Descartes has almost entirely discarded this quaintness, which sometimes passed into what is called in French clinquant, that is to say, tawdry and grotesque ornament. It is a peculiarity of his that no single description of his sentences fully describes their form. They are always perfectly clear, but they are sometimes very long. Their length, however, as is the case with some English authors of the same century, is more apparent than real, the writer having chosen to link by conjunctions clauses which are independently finished, and which, by different punctuation even without the omission of the conjunction, might stand alone. The mistake of saying that Descartes is nothing more than clear and correct can only arise from an imperfect appreciation of the language. Let, for instance, his condemnation of scholastic method in the Discours be taken. Here the matter is interesting enough, and the comparison with the gorgeous but unphilosophical disdain which Bacon is wont to pour on the studies of the past is interesting also. But we are busied with the form. In the first place, any one must be struck with the modernness of the phrase and style. With insignificant exceptions there is nothing which would not be most excellent French to-day. Further examination of the phrase will show that there is much more in it than mere clearness and correctness, admirably clear and correct as it is. There is no 'spilth of adjectives,' as it has been termed. The words are just so many as are necessary for clear, correct, and elegant expression of the thought. But it is in the selection of them that the master of style appears. The happy phrase, 'La gentillesse des fables reveille l'esprit;' the comparison of the reading of the best authors not merely to a conversation, but a conversation etudiee, in which the speakers 'show only their best thoughts;' the contrast between eloquence and poetry (too often forgotten by the writer's countrymen); the ironic touch[275] in the eulogium on philosophy; all these things show style in its very rarest and highest form--the form which enables the writer to say the most, and to say it most forcibly with the least expenditure of the stores of the dictionary. One sees at once that the requirement of one of the greatest French writers of our time, that the master of style 'shall be able to express at once any idea that presents itself requiring expression,' is fully, and more than fully, met by Descartes; and one sees also how the miracles of expression which Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Bossuet, were to produce became possible, and who showed them the way. It may be asserted, without the slightest fear, that the more thoroughly Descartes is studied with the necessary apparatus of knowledge, the more firmly will his claims in this direction be established.

It is not superfluous to call attention to the fact that the Discours de la Methode appeared within a few months of the Cid. Thus it happened that the first complete models of French classical style in prose and verse, and two of the most remarkable examples of that style which have ever been produced, were given to the public as nearly as possible contemporaneously. This fact, and the brilliant group of imitators who almost immediately availed themselves of the examples, prove satisfactorily how powerful were the influences which produced the change, and over how wide a circle they worked. As the influence of Descartes was thus no less literary than philosophical, it followed naturally enough that his school (which soon included almost all the men of intellectual eminence in France) preserved literary as well as philosophical traditions. This school, so far as it concerns French literature, may be said to have produced two remarkable individuals and one remarkable group. The group was the school of Port Royal; the individuals were Malebranche and Bayle.

[Sidenote: Port Royal.]

We are not here concerned with the religious fortunes of the community of Port Royal[276]. It is sufficient to say that it was originally a nunnery at no great distance from Versailles, that it underwent a great religious revival under the influence of St. Francis de Sales and Mere Angelique Arnauld, and that, chiefly owing to the inspiration of the Abbe de St. Cyran, there was engrafted on it a community of Solitaires of the other sex, who busied themselves in study, in religious exercises, in manual labour, and in the education of youth. The society was early imbued with Jansenist principles, which brought it into violent conflict with the Jesuits, and eventually led to its persecution and destruction. It was also the head-quarters of a somewhat modified Cartesianism, and this, with its importance as a centre of literary instruction and its intimate connection with many famous men of letters, such as Pascal, Nicole, and Racine, gives it a place in the history of literature. The most remarkable work of an educational kind which proceeded from it was the famous Port Royal Logic, or 'Art of Thinking,' which seems to have been a work of collaboration, Arnauld and Nicole being the chief authors. This, though open to criticism from the point of view of the logician, had a very great influence in making the methodical treatment and clear luminous exposition which were characteristic of the Cartesian school common in French writers. Of the two authors just mentioned, Arnauld was the greater thinker, Nicole by far the better writer. He was, in fact, a sort of minor Pascal, his Lettres sur les Visionnaires corresponding to the Provinciales of his greater contemporary, while he was the author of Pensees, which, unlike Pascal's, were regularly finished, and which, though much inferior to them, have something of the same character. The intellectual activity of Port Royal was very considerable, but most of it was directed into channels which were not purely literary, owing partly to incessant controversies brought on by the differences between the community and the Jesuits, partly to the cultivation of philosophical subjects. The age was perhaps the most controversial that Europe has ever seen, and the comparative absence of periodicals (which were only in their infancy) threw the controversies necessarily into book form, as letters, pamphlets, or even volumes of considerable size. But no very large portion of this controversial matter deserves the name of literature, and much of it was written in Latin. Thus Gassendi, the upholder of Neo-Epicurean opinions in opposition to Descartes, and beyond all question the greatest French philosopher of the century after Descartes and Malebranche, hardly belongs to French literature, though his Latin works are of great bulk and no small literary merit. The Gassendian school soon gave birth to a small but influential school of materialist freethinkers. What may be called the school of orthodox doubt, which had been represented by Montaigne and Charron, had, as has been said, a representative in La Mothe le Vayer. But this special kind of scepticism was already antiquated, if not obsolete, and it was succeeded, on the one side, by the above-mentioned freethinkers, who were also to a great extent free livers[277], and whose most remarkable literary figure was Saint Evremond; on the other, by a school of learned Pyrrhonists, whose most remarkable representative in every respect was Pierre Bayle.

[Sidenote: Bayle.]

Bayle was born in the south of France in 1647, and, like almost all the men of letters of his time, was educated by the Jesuits. He was of a Protestant family, and was converted by his teachers, his conversion being however so little of a solid one that he reverted to Protestantism in less than two years. After this he resided for some time in Switzerland, studying Cartesianism. In 1675 he was made Professor of Philosophy at Sedan, a post which he held for six years, moving thence to Rotterdam. Here he began to write numerous articles and works in the periodicals, which were slowly becoming fashionable, especially in Holland. They were mostly critical, and dealt with scientific, historical, philosophical, and theological subjects. Bayle's utterances on the latter subject, and especially his pleas for toleration, brought him into a troublesome controversy with Jurieu, and in 1693 he was deprived of his professorship, or at least of his right to lecture. He then devoted himself to the famous Dictionary which is identified with his name, and which, though by no means the first encyclopaedia of modern times (for Alsten, Moreri, Hoffmann, and others had preceded him within the century), was by far the most influential and most original yet produced. It appeared in 1696, and brought him new troubles, which were not however of a serious character. He died in 1706.

The scepticism of which Bayle was the exponent was purely critical and intellectual. He was not in the least an enemy of the moral system of Christianity, nor even, it would appear, an enemy to Christianity itself. But his intellect was constitutionally disposed to see the objections to all things rather than the arguments in their favour, and to take a pleasure in stating these objections. Thus, though he was after his religious oscillations nominally an orthodox Protestant, the tendency of his works was to impugn points held by Protestants and Catholics alike, and though he was nominally a Cartesian, he was equally far from yielding an implicit belief to the doctrines of Descartes. His most famous work is the reverse of methodical. The subjects are chosen almost at random, and are very frequently nothing but pegs on which to hang notes and digressions in which the author indulges his critical and dissolvent faculty. Nor is the style by any means a model. But it is lively, clear, and interesting, and no doubt had a good deal to do with the vast popularity of his book in the eighteenth century. Bayle had a strong influence on Voltaire, and though he had less to do with his follower's style than Saint Evremond and Pascal, he is nearer to him in spirit than either. The difference perhaps may be said to be that Bayle's pleasure in negative criticism is almost purely intellectual. There is but little in him of the half-childish mischievousness which distinguishes Voltaire.

[Sidenote: Malebranche.]

Cartesianism was not less likely than its opposites to lead to philosophical scepticism, but in the main its professors, taking their master's conduct for model, remained orthodox. In that case, however, the Cartesian idealism had a tendency to pass into mysticism. Of those in whom it took this form Nicolas Malebranche[278] was the unquestioned chief. He was born at Paris, where his father held a lucrative office; in 1638, and from his birth had very feeble health. When he was of age he became an Oratorian, and passed the whole of his long life in study and literary work, sometimes being engaged in controversies on the compatibility of his system--the famous 'Vision in God,' and 'Spiritual Existence in God'--with orthodoxy, but never receiving any formal censure from the Church. Despite his bad health he lived to the age of seventy-seven, dying in 1715. A curious story is told of a verbal argument between him and Berkeley on the eve of his death. He wrote several works in French, such as a Traite de Morale, Conversations Metaphysiques, etc., but his greatest and most remarkable contribution to French literature is his Recherche de la Verite, published in 1674, which unfolds his system. From the literary point of view the Recherche is one of the most considerable books of the philosophical class ever produced. Unlike the various works of Descartes it is of very great length, filling three volumes in the original edition, and a thousand pages of close type in the most handy modern reprint. It also deals with subjects of an exceedingly abstract character, and is not diversified by any elaborate illustrations, any machinery like that of Plato or Berkeley, or any passages of set eloquence. The purity and beauty of the style, however, and its extraordinary lucidity, make it a book of which it is difficult to tire. The chief mechanical difference between the style of Malebranche and that of his master is that his sentences are shorter. They are, however, framed with equal care as to rhythm and to logical arrangement. The metaphor of limpidity is very frequently applied to style, but perhaps there is hardly any to which it may be applied with such propriety as to the style of Malebranche.

FOOTNOTES:

[272] Not fully edited yet. Cousin's edition is the fullest, but the important French works figure in many popular collections and are easily accessible.

[273] He was 'as restless as a hyaena,' says De Quincey, not unjustly.

[274] Professor Mahaffy, Descartes. Blackwood, 1880.

[275] 'La philosophie donne moyen de parler vraisemblablement de toutes choses, et se faire admirer des moins savants.'

[276] Sainte-Beuve, Port Royal. 6 vols. Paris, 1859-61.

[277] These men, such as Saint Ibal, Bardouville, Desbarreaux, and others, figure largely in the anecdotic history of the time. In the persons of Theophile and Saint Evremond they touch on literature: but for the most part they were chiefly distinguished by revolting coarseness and blasphemy of expression, and by a childish delight in outraging religious sentiment, which was often changed into abject terror or hypocritical compliance as death approached. They were commonly called philosophes, a degradation of the word which was not much mended in the next century, though it then acquired a more strictly literary meaning.

[278] Ed. Simon. 1854.

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VII. THEOLOGIANS AND PREACHERS

There is no period in the whole course of French literature in which theological writers and orators contribute so much to literary history as in the seventeenth century. The causes of this energy can only be summarily indicated here. They were the various sequelae of the Reformation and the counter-reformation, the latter of which was in France extraordinarily powerful; the influence of Richelieu and Mazarin in politics, which assured to the Church a great predominance in the State, while its rival, the territorial aristocracy, was depressed and persecuted; the personal inclination of Louis XIV., who made up for his loose manner of life by the straitest doctrinal orthodoxy; but perhaps most of all the accidental determination of various men of great talents and energy to the ecclesiastical profession. Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Flechier, Mascaron, Claude, Saurin, to name no others, could hardly have failed to distinguish themselves in any department of literature which they had chosen. Circumstances of accident threw them into work more or less wholly theological.

[Sidenote: St. Francois de Sales.]

This peculiarity of the century, however, belongs chiefly to its third and fourth quarters. The first preacher and theologian of literary eminence in this period belongs about equally to it and to the preceding, but his most remarkable work dates from this time. Francois de Sales was born at Annecy in 1567. He was destined for the law, and completed his education for it at Paris, but his vocation for the church was stronger, and he took orders in 1593. He soon distinguished himself by reconverting a considerable number of persons to the Roman form of faith in the district of Chablais, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century preached at Paris, and latterly at Dijon. He was soon made bishop of Geneva, an episcopate which, it need hardly be said, might almost be described as in partibus infidelium. But in the south of France, in Savoy, and in Paris itself, his influence was great. His chief works are the 'Introduction to a Devout Life' (1608), the Traite de l'Amour de Dieu, 'Spiritual Letters' (to Madame de Chantal), and sermons. His style is by no means destitute of archaism, but it is clear, fluent, and agreeable. He and Fenouillet, bishop of Marseilles, with other preachers whose names are now forgotten, were the chief instruments in recovering the art of sacred oratory from the low estate into which it had fallen during the heat of the religious wars and the League, when it had been disgraced alternately by violence and buffoonery. But the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde were again unfavourable to theological discussion, except of a quasi-political kind, and the best spirits of this time threw themselves into the unpopular direction of Jansenism. The 'Siecle de Louis Quatorze' proper, that is the period subsequent to 1660, was the palmy time, from the literary point of view, of theological eloquence and discussion in France.

[Sidenote: Bossuet.]

Of the authors already named Bossuet deserves precedence in almost every respect except that of private character. Jacques Benigne Bossuet[279] was born at Dijon, in 1627, of a family of distinction in the middle class. He went to school to the Jesuits in his native town, and finished his education at the College de Navarre in Paris, receiving his doctor's degree and a canonry at Metz in 1652. He soon distinguished himself both as an orator and a controversialist, preached before the king in Advent 1661, and in 1669 was appointed to the bishopric of Condom. His subsequent appointment to the post of tutor to the Dauphin made him resign his bishopric; but on the completion of his task (in virtue of which he had been elected to the Academy in 1680) he was made almoner to the prince, and in the following year received the bishopric of Meaux. He was soon after engaged in the Gallican controversy, in which he defended not so much the rights of the Church as the claims of the royal prerogative. The most unfortunate incident of his life was his controversy with Fenelon. Bossuet, though thoroughly learned in some respects, was not a man of the widest culture, and the whole region of mystical theology was unknown to him. He, therefore, mistook certain utterances of the archbishop of Cambray, which were neither new nor alarming, for heterodox innovations, and began a violent polemic against him. Supported by the king, he was able to obtain a nominal victory, but the moral success rested with Fenelon, and still more the advantage in the literary duel. Bossuet died in 1704. His works were very numerous, and of very various kinds. His first reputation was, as has been said, earned as a controversialist (his principal adversaries in this respect were the Protestant ministers Ferri and Claude) and as a preacher on general subjects. On his appointment to the see of Condom, however, he struck out a new line, that of funeral discourses (oraisons funebres), and produced, on the occasions of the death of the two Henriettas of England, mother and daughter, of the great Conde, of the Princess-Palatine, and of others, works which are undoubtedly triumphs of French eloquence, and which, with the exception of the best passages of Burke, are perhaps the only things of the kind comparable to the masterpieces of antiquity. His controversial work is equal in perfection of execution to his oratory, the Exposition de la Doctrine de l'Eglise Catholique, and still more the Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes, being deservedly regarded as models of their kind, notwithstanding the obvious fallacy pervading the latter. Of his other works the most remarkable (perhaps the most remarkable of all if originality of conception and breadth of design be taken into account) is his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle jusqu'a l'Empire de Charlemagne. This has, though not universally, been held to be the first attempt at the philosophy of history, that is to say, the first work in which general history is regarded and expounded from a single comprehensive point of view, and laws of a universal kind drawn from it. In Bossuet's case the point of view is, of course, strictly theological, and the laws are arranged accordingly.

Bossuet's character was unamiable, and, despite the affected frankness with which he spoke to the king, it will always remain a blot on his memory that he did not seriously protest either against the loose life of Louis, or against his ruinous ambition and lawless disregard of the rights of nations. There is, however, no doubt whatever of his perfect sincerity and of the genuineness of his belief in political autocracy, provided that the autocrat was a faithful son of the Church. He was a Cartesian, and was probably not unindebted to Descartes for the force and vigour of his reasonings, though he was hardly so careful as his master in enlarging the field of his knowledge and assuring the validity of his premises. The extraordinary majesty of his rhetoric, perhaps, brings out by force of contrast the occasionally fallacious character of his reasoning, but it must be confessed that even as a controversialist he has few equals. The rhetorical excellence of the Oraisons and the gorgeous sweep, not merely of the language but of the conception, in the Histoire Universelle, show him at what is really his best; while many isolated expressions betray at once an intimate knowledge of the human heart, and a hardly surpassed faculty of clothing that knowledge in words. Bossuet no doubt is more of a speaker than a writer. His excellence lies in the wonderful survey, and grasp of the subject (qualities which make his favourite literary nickname of the 'Eagle of Meaux' more than usually appropriate), in the contagious enthusiasm and energy with which he attacks his point, in his inexhaustible metaphors and comparisons. He has not the unfailing charm of Malebranche, nor that which belongs in a less degree, and with more mannerism, to Fenelon; he is very unequal, and small blemishes of style abound in him. Thus, in his most famous passage, the description of the sudden death of Henrietta of Orleans, occurs the phrase 'comme un coup de tonnerre cette etonnante nouvelle,' a jingle of words as unpleasant as it is easily avoided. But blemishes of this kind (and it is, perhaps, noteworthy that French is more tolerant of them than almost any other language of equal literary perfection) disappear in the volume and force of the torrent of Bossuet's eloquence. It is fair to add that, though he is almost always aiming at the sublime, he scarcely ever oversteps it, or falls into the bombastic and the ridiculous. Even his elaborate eulogy (it would hardly be fair to call it flattery) of the great is so cunningly balanced by exposition of the nothingness of men and things, that it does not strike the mind's eye with any immediate sense of glaring impropriety. The lack of formal perfection which is sometimes noticeable in him is made up to a greater degree almost than in any other writer by the intense force and conviction of the speaker and the imposing majesty of his manner. It is pretty certain that most attempts to imitate Bossuet would result in a lamentable failure; and it is not a little significant that the only two Frenchmen who in prose have shown themselves occasionally his rivals, Michelet and Lamennais, are among the most unequal of writers.

[Sidenote: Fenelon.]

The contrast between Bossuet and his chief rival was in all respects great. To begin with, Fenelon was a much younger man than Bossuet, belonging it might be said almost to another generation. He inherited some of the noblest blood in France, while Bossuet was but a roturier, and this may have had something to do with the more independent character of Fenelon. Bossuet was a vigorous student of certain defined branches of knowledge, but of general literature he took little heed. Fenelon was a man of almost universal reading, and one of the most original and soundest literary critics of his time. Fenelon felt deeply for the misery of the French people; Bossuet does not appear to have troubled himself about it. Finally Bossuet, with all his merits, had grave faults of moral character, while to Fenelon--quite as justly as to Berkeley--every virtue under heaven may be assigned. Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon[280] was born at the castle of the same name in the province of Perigord, on August 16th, 1661. He was educated first at home, then at Cahors, and then at the College de Plessis at Paris. He finally studied in a theological seminary for some years, and did not formally enter the Church till he was four-and-twenty. He then devoted himself partly to the poor, partly to education, especially of girls, and his treatise on this latter subject was his first work. In 1687 he was appointed preceptor to the Duke de Bourgogne, son of Bossuet's pupil, and heir to the throne. For the duke he wrote a great number of books, among them Telemaque (or at least the first sketch of it). In 1697 he was appointed archbishop of Cambray. Into his connection with Madame Guyon, the celebrated apostle of quietism, and his consequent quarrel with Bossuet, there is no need to enter further. Whichever of the two may have been theologically in the right, there are no two opinions on the question that Bossuet was in the wrong, both in the acrimony of his conduct and the violence of his language. In the latter respect, indeed, he brought down upon himself a well-deserved punishment. Fenelon was the mildest of men, but he possessed a faculty of quiet irony inferior to that of no man then living, and he used it with effect in the controversy against Bossuet's declamatory denunciations. When, at last, the matter had been referred to the Pope, and judgment had been given against himself, Fenelon at once bowed to the decision and acknowledged his error. Louis, however, had many more reasons for disliking him than the mere odium theologicum with which Bossuet had inspired him. Fenelon was known to disapprove of much in the actual government of France, and the surreptitious publication of Telemaque completed his disgrace. He was banished from court and confined to his diocese, in which he accordingly spent the last part of his life, doing his best to alleviate the misery caused on the borders by the war of the Spanish succession, and dying at Cambray in 1715.

Fenelon was an industrious writer. Few of his finished sermons have been preserved; but these are excellent, as are also his fables written for the Duke de Bourgogne, his already-mentioned Education des Filles, and his Dialogues des Morts, also written for the Duke, in which the form is borrowed from Lucian, but in which moral lessons are substituted for mere satire. Like Bossuet, Fenelon was a Cartesian, and his Traite de l'Existence de Dieu is a philosophico-religious work of no small merit. In literary history he is remarkable for having directly opposed the victorious work of Boileau. He has left several exercises in literary criticism, such as his Lettre sur les Occupations de l'Academie Francaise, one of the latest of his works; his Dialogues sur l'Eloquence, and a contribution to the famous dispute of ancients and moderns in correspondence with La Motte. He regretted the impoverishment of the language, and the loss of much of the energy and picturesque vigour of the sixteenth century. In his controversy with Bossuet, though the matter is not strictly literary, there is, as has been noticed, much admirable literary work; but his chief claim to a place in literary history is, of course, Telemaque, which work he had anticipated by the somewhat similar Aventures d'Aristonous. It has often been regretted that classics in any language should be used for purposes of instruction in the rudiments, and hardly any single work has suffered more from this practice than Telemaque, for learners of French are usually set to read it long before they have any power of literary appreciation. A continuous narrative, moreover, is about the least suited of all literary forms to bear that process of cutting up in short pieces which is necessary in education. The pleasure of the story is either lost altogether, or anticipated by surreptitious reading on the part of the pupil, after which the mechanical plodding through matter of which he has already exhausted the interest is disgusting enough. Yet it can hardly be doubted that if Telemaque had not, in the case of most readers, this fatal disadvantage, its beauties would be generally acknowledged. Its form is somewhat artificial, and the author has, perhaps, not escaped the error of most moral fiction writers, that of making his hero too much of a model of what ought to be, and too little of a copy of what is. But the story is excellently managed, the various incidents are drawn with remarkable vividness and picturesqueness, the descriptions are uniformly excellent, and the style is almost impeccable. Even were the moral sentiments and the general tendency of the book less excellent than they are, its value as a model of French composition would probably have secured it something like its present place side by side with La Fontaine's Fables as a school-book. It is fair to add that in the character of Calypso, where the need of the author for a 'terrible example' freed him from his restraints, very considerable powers of character-drawing are shown, and the same may be said of not a few of the minor personages.

[Sidenote: Massillon.]

The third greatest name of the period in this class of men of letters is beyond all question that of Massillon. He, like Fenelon, belongs to the second, if not the third, generation of the Siecle de Louis Quatorze, being nearly forty years younger than Bossuet. He was a long liver, and his death did not occur till far into the reign of Louis XV., when the reputation of Voltaire was established, and the eighteenth-century movement was in full swing. But his literary and oratorical activity had ceased for nearly a quarter of a century at the time of his death. Jean Baptiste Massillon[281] was a native of Hieres, and was born on June 24, 1663. His father was a notary, and he himself was destined for the same profession; but his vocation for the Church was strong, and he was at last permitted to enter the Oratorian Congregation. His aptitude for preaching was soon discovered, and when very young he distinguished himself by Oraisons Funebres on the archbishops of Lyons and Vienne. He was of a retiring disposition, and, wishing to avoid publicity, joined a stricter order than that of the Oratory, but was induced, and indeed ordered, by the Cardinal de Noailles, who heard him preach in his new abode, not to hide his light under a bushel, but to come to Paris and do the Church service. He obeyed, and was established in the capital in 1696. His fame soon became great, and he preached before the king more than one course of sermons. He was appointed bishop of Clermont in 1717, and in the same year preached the celebrated Petit Careme, or course of Lent sermons, before Louis XV. In 1719 he was elected of the Academy. He preached his last sermon at Paris in 1723, and then retired to his diocese, where he spent the last twenty years of his life, dying of apoplexy at the age of eighty, Sept. 28, 1742.

Massillon has usually, and justly, been considered the greatest preacher, in the strict sense of the word, of France. Only Bossuet and Bourdaloue could contest this position; and though both preceded him, and he owed much to both, he excels both in sermons properly so called. Bossuet was, perhaps, a greater orator, if the finest parts of his work only are taken; but he was, as has been said, unequal, and in the two great objects of the preacher, exposition of doctrine and effect upon the consciences of his hearers, he was admittedly inferior to Massillon. The latter, moreover, has, of all French preachers (for Fenelon, it must be remembered, has left but few sermons), the purest style, and possesses the greatest range. His special function was considered to be persuasion; yet few pulpit orators have managed the sterner parts of their duty more forcibly. Massillon's sermon on the Prodigal Son, and that on the Deaths of the Just and the Unjust, are models of his style. It is, moreover, very much to his credit that he was the most uncompromising, despite his gentleness, of all the great preachers of the time, and, therefore, the least popular at court. Louis the Fourteenth's famous epigram, to the effect that other preachers made him contented with them, but Massillon made him discontented with himself, was somewhat comically illustrated by the fact that, after the second course of sermons preached before him, that of Lent 1704, the preacher, though then in the very height of his powers, was never asked again to preach at court. We are, however, more concerned with the manner than with the matter of his orations. He had (after the example of Bourdaloue, it is true) entirely discarded the frippery of erudition with which most of his predecessors had been wont to load their sermons, as well as the occasional oddities of gesticulation and anecdote which had once been fashionable. His style is simple, straightforward, and yet extremely elegant. In the commonplaces of French literary history of the old school he is called the Racine of the pulpit, a compliment determined by the extreme purity and elegance of his style, but not otherwise very applicable, inasmuch as one chief characteristic of Massillon is an energy and masculine vigour of expression in which Racine is, for the most part, wanting.

[Sidenote: Bourdaloue.]

If we have postponed Bourdaloue to Massillon, despite the order of chronology, it has been in accordance with Bourdaloue's own remark when Massillon made his first reputation, 'He must increase, but I must decrease.' This remark is characteristic of the disposition of the man, which was as stainless as Massillon's own. Louis Bourdaloue was born at Bourges on the 20th August, 1632, and was thus not many years the junior of Bossuet. He entered the Society of Jesus early, and served it as professor of philosophy and kindred subjects. But his superiors soon discovered his talents as a preacher, and he was sent to make his way before the court, where he became a great favourite, especially with Madame de Sevigne, who was no mean critic. He died in 1704.

The chief characteristic of Bourdaloue's eloquence is a remarkable absence of ornament, and a strict adherence to dialectical order. None of the great French preachers admit of logical abstraction and precis so well as he. Another peculiarity is his preference for ethical subjects. More than any of his contemporaries he was an expounder of Christian morality, and his sermons are wont to deal with simple virtues and vices rather than with points of devotional piety. He was, like Massillon, and even more than Massillon, absolutely fearless and uncompromising, preaching against adultery in the very face of Louis XIV. in his early days, and sparing no vice or folly of the court. But, perhaps owing to the somewhat severe and exclusively intellectual character of his oratory, it does not appear to have produced the effects, salutary doubtless for the hearers, but somewhat inconvenient for the preacher, which attended the more cunningly-aimed attacks of Massillon.

The example of the three great preachers--Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon--raised up many imitators, some of whom, such as De la Rue, Cheminais, and others, were popular in their day. There are, however, four orators--two Roman Catholics, and two belonging to the French Protestant Church--to whom is usually and rightly accorded the second rank, while sectarian partiality sometimes claims even the first for them. These were Flechier, Mascaron, Claude, and Saurin.

[Sidenote: Minor Preachers.]

Esprit Flechier was born at Pesmes in 1632. For a time he was a member of the congregation of the Brothers of Christian Doctrine, which, however, on an alteration of its constitution by a new superior-general (he had been introduced to it by his uncle, who held that office), he quitted. He then went to Paris and tried various methods of gaining a livelihood, such as writing verses in Latin and French, and teaching in a school. In these early days he indulged in various forms of miscellaneous literature. The most curious and interesting of these works is a little account of the Grands Jours d'Auvergne, a sort of provincial assize which he visited. This has much liveliness, and the sketches of character and manners show a good deal of skill. But at length he found his proper sphere in the pulpit. He acquired reputation by his Oraison Funebre on Turenne. He became a member of the Academy (being admitted on the same day as Racine); and he was appointed, first, to the bishopric of Lavaur, then to that of Nimes, where, in a very difficult position (for the revocation of the edict of Nantes had exasperated the Protestants, who were numerous in the diocese), he made himself universally beloved. He died in 1710. The most famous of Flechier's discourses are those on Madame de Montausier (the heroine of the Guirlande de Julie[282] and the idol of the Hotel de Rambouillet), that on Madame de Montausier's husband, and that on Turenne. Flechier represents a somewhat older style of diction and expression than either of his great contemporaries, Bossuet and Bourdaloue; and his style, unlike some other work of this older school, is not characterised by many striking occasional phrases, but his sermons as a whole are vigorous and well expressed.

Jean Mascaron was born at Marseilles in 1634. It is worth noticing that almost all these orators came from the south of France. He preached frequently before the king, and did not hesitate to rebuke his vices, notwithstanding or because of which he was appointed to the bishopric of Tulle, whence he was afterwards translated to Agen. He died in 1703. Mascaron is chiefly remembered for his Oraison on that same death of Turenne which gave occasion to so many orators. He is usually reproached with a certain affectation of style, and there is justice in the reproach.

Of the two Protestant divines who have been mentioned Claude was the less distinguished, though he sustained on pretty even terms a public controversy with Bossuet himself. Jacques Saurin was of less political influence with his own sect, but he possessed greater eloquence, and critics of his own persuasion in France and Switzerland have equalled him to Bossuet. His works, moreover, long continued to be the most popular body of household divinity with French Protestants. He was born at Nimes, 1677, and was thus considerably younger even than Massillon. The revocation of the edict of Nantes (which had formed the subject of some of Claude's most famous discourses) prevented him from making a name for himself in France. He was at first appointed, in 1701, after studying at Geneva, to a Walloon congregation in London, but soon moved, in consequence of weak health, to the Hague. He there became a victim of the petty dissensions which seem to have been more frequent among Dutch Protestant sects than anywhere else, and to the vexation of these is said to have been partly due his comparatively early death in 1730. He left a very considerable number of sermons and some theological treatises. He was admittedly a great orator, excelling in striking pictures and forcible imagery.

It will have been observed that, though this age contributes more to theology of the literary kind than almost any other, its most memorable contributions are almost exclusively oratorical. Incidentally, however, much that was intended to be read, not heard, was of course written. But less of it has been thought worthy the attention of posterity. The chief theological names in this department have already been named in naming those of the other. Of the school of Port Royal, who preached little but wrote much, J. J. Duguet, a man of great talent and saintly life, deserves mention.

FOOTNOTES:

[279] Bossuet's works are extremely voluminous. The most important of them are easily obtainable in the Collection Didot and similar libraries.

[280] There is a fairly representative edition of Fenelon in five vols. large 8vo. Didot. Separate works are easily accessible.

[281] Edition as in Fenelon's case. Selections of all the orthodox sermon-writers are abundant.

[282] This was an album to which the poets of the day, from Corneille downwards, contributed verses, each on a different flower.

INTERCHAPTER III.

SUMMARY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE.

The tendencies of the period which has been surveyed in the foregoing book must be sufficiently obvious from the survey itself. They had been, as far as the unsatisfactory result of them went, indicated with remarkably prophetic precision by Regnier in lines quoted above[283]. The work, not merely of Malherbe, which the satirist had directly in view, but of Boileau, who succeeded Malherbe and completed his task, had tended far too much in the direction of substituting a formal regularity for an elastic freedom and of discouraging the more poetical utterances of thought. In prose, however, the operation of not dissimilar tendencies had been almost wholly good. For it is in the nature of prose not to admit of too absolute regulation, and it is at the same time in its nature to require that regulation up to a certain point. If the French vocabulary had been somewhat impoverished, it had been considerably refined. All good authorities admit that the influence of the salon-coteries and the precieuses--mischievous as it was in some ways--was of no small benefit in purifying not merely manners but speech. A single book, the Historiettes of Tallemant des Reaux, shows sufficiently the need of this double purification. French literature has at no time been distinguished by prudery, but from the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century (for, as has been pointed out, the courtly literature at least of the middle ages is free from this defect) it had added to its liberty in choice and treatment of subjects a liberty which amounted to the extremest licence in the choice of words. It had become in fact exceedingly coarse. The poetry of the Pleiade was not as a rule open to this charge, but the early poetry and prose of the seventeenth century must submit to it. One effect of the process of correction and reform was a decided improvement in this matter.

But the vocabulary was by no means the only thing that underwent revision. Other constituents of literature shared in the same experience, and much more beneficially, for the expurgation of the dictionary was unfortunately made to involve the weeding out of many terms which were not open to the slightest exception, and the loss of which deprived the tongue of much of its picturesqueness. No such concomitant defect attended the reformations in grammar which, begun by the grammarians of the sixteenth century, were pursued still more systematically by Vaugelas and his followers. There can hardly be too much precision observed in matters of accidence and syntax; while it is desirable that the vocabulary should be as rich as possible, provided that its terms are vernacular or properly naturalised. The same may be said of some at least of the reforms of Malherbe in prosody and the minutiae of poetical art. So too the advance made to something like a uniform orthography was of no small importance. The result of this general criticism was the group (or rather groups, for they may be divided into at least two, the earlier comprising Descartes, Corneille, Pascal, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, Bossuet, Madame de Sevigne, La Fontaine, and Moliere, in other words, most of the greatest names) illustrating the so-called Grand Siecle, or Siecle de Louis Quatorze. The two names that stand first in this list, Descartes and Corneille, represent at once the initial change and in addition the greatest accomplishment in the direction of change effected by any individual. The others worthily followed where they led. This group, as has been more than once pointed out, does not shine in poetry proper. But it has hardly a rival in prose and in that measured and declamatory or easy and pedestrian verse which is half prose, half poetry.

Long, however, before the century ended, the evils which invariably attend upon a critical period, especially--it is paradoxical but true--when it is at the same time a period of considerable creative power, began to manifest themselves. These evils may be briefly described as the natural results of the drawing up of too straight and definite rules for each department of literature, and the following with too great exactness of the more brilliant examples in each kind. The one practice leads to what is called, in Sterne's well-known phrase, 'looking at the stop-watch;' the other, to an endeavour to be like somebody. It was not till the eighteenth century that these evils were fully patent; and then, though they were somewhat mitigated in departments other than the Belles Lettres by the eager spirit of enquiry and adventure which characterised the time, they are evident enough. The mischief showed itself in various ways. Besides the two which have been already indicated, there was a third and subtler form, which has produced some curious and interesting work, but which is obviously an indication of decadence. Those who did not resign themselves to the mere recasting of old material in the old moulds, or to simple following of the great models, were apt to echo, aloud or silently, La Bruyere's opening sentence, 'tout est dit,' and to draw from this discouraging fact the same conclusion that he did--that the only way to innovate was to vary in cunning fashion the manners of saying. In itself there might be no great harm in the conclusion, especially if it had led to a revolt against the narrow limits imposed by current criticism. But it did not, it only led to an attempt to innovate within those limits, which could only be done by a kind of new 'preciousness'--an affectation in short. This affectation showed itself first (though La Bruyere himself is not quite free from it, enemy of Fontenelle as he was) in Fontenelle, who was a descendant of the old precieuse school itself, and reached a climax in the author from whose name it thenceforward took its name of Marivaudage.

Thus the literary produce of the seventeenth century was better than its tendency. The latter has been sufficiently described; a very few words will suffice for the former. In the special characteristics of the genius of French, which may be said to be clearness, polish of form and expression, and a certain quality which perhaps cannot be so well expressed by any other word as by alertness, the best work of the seventeenth century has no rivals. Except in Corneille and Bossuet, it is not often grand, it is still seldomer passionate, or suggestively harmonious, or quaintly humorous, or even picturesquely narrative. But the charm of precision, of elegance, of expressing what is expressed in the best possible manner, belongs to it in a supreme degree. There are not many things in literature more absolutely incapable of improvement in their own style, and as far as they go, than a scene of Moliere, a tirade of Racine, a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, a letter of Madame de Sevigne, a character of La Bruyere, a peroration of Massillon, when each is at his or her best. The reader may in some cases feel that he likes something else better, but he is incapable of pointing out a blemish. If he objects, he must object to something extra-literary, to the writer's conception of human nature, his political views, his range of thought, his selection of subject. When the one supreme question of criticism formulated by Victor Hugo, 'l'ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?' (not 'aimez-vous l'ouvrage?' which is the illegitimate question which nine critics out of ten put to themselves), is set in reference to the best work of this time, the answer cannot be dubious for one moment in the case of any one qualified to give an answer at all. It is good, and in very many cases it could not possibly be better.

FOOTNOTES:

[283] p. 267.

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