A History of French Literature

A profound or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employing base means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure left a certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around him as a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note the infirmities of those who took part in the game which he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he see realities through a roseate veil; he neither thinks basely of human nature nor in a heroic fashion: he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to reformation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way of an observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all else a "naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field for investigation, though the life of the provinces and that of the fields (save in their more obvious aspect of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value of his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from the fact that he is not pledged to a system, that he can take up various points of view, and express the results of many moods of mind. Now he is severe, and again he is indulgent; now he appears almost a cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender; now he is grave, and in a moment mirthful; while for every purpose and in every mood he has irony at his command. He divines the working of the passions with a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every outward betrayal or indication of the hidden processes of the heart.

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and authorship, personal merit, women, the heart, society and conversation, the gifts of fortune, the town, the court, men in high station, the King and commonwealth, the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion, customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formal system, those notes on life and studies of society that had gradually accumulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid, too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La Bruyère. "Different things," he says, "are thought out by different methods, and explained by diverse expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument, a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by description, or by portraiture." His book contains all these, and his style corresponds with the variety of matter and method—a style, as Voltaire justly characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque. "Among all the different modes in which a single thought may be expressed," wrote La Bruyère, "only one is correct." To find this exact expression he sometimes over-labours his style, and searches the vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word. In his desire for animation the periodic structure of sentence yields to one of interruptions, suspensions, and surprises. He is at once a moralist and a virtuoso in the literary art.

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the composition of his Mémoires belong to the eighteenth century; but his mind was moulded during his early years, and retained its form and lineaments. He may be regarded as a belated representative of the great age of Louis XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer age by virtue of his sense that political reform was needed, his designs of political reform were derived from the past rather than pointed towards the future. LOUIS DE ROUVRAY, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, was born at Versailles in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could be traced to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis XIII., had been named a duke and peer of France in 1635; from his father descended to the son a devotion to the memory of Louis XIII., and a passionate attachment to the dignity of his own order.

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired some Latin, and was a diligent reader of French history. In 1691 he was presented to the King and was enrolled as a soldier in the musketeers. He purchased by-and-by what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry regiment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had transformed a feudal army into one where birth and rank were subjected to official control; and in 1702, when others received promotion and he was passed over, he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate and happy marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly at Versailles until the death of the King, and obtained the most intimate acquaintance with what he terms the mechanics of the court. He had many grievances against Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the nobility in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; and he justly regarded Madame de Maintenon as his enemy.

The death of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whose party he belonged, was a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the Regent remained his friend. He helped, on a diplomatic mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage of Louis XV.; yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the wrongs of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled on historical grounds to form the great council of the monarchy, and almost as rightful partners in the supreme power. His political life closed in 1723 with the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement at his château of La Ferté-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his wife and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), Saint-Simon died.

When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's Mémoires in a soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived the idea of recording his own experiences, and the Mémoires of Saint-Simon were begun. During later years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated in his hands, but the definitive form which they took was not determined until, in his retirement at La Ferté-Vidame, the Journal of Dangeau came into his hands. Dangeau's Journal is dry, colourless, passionless, without insight and without art; but it is a well-informed and an exact chronicle, extending over the years from 1684 to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur à faire vomir"; its servility towards the King and Madame de Maintenon enraged him; but it exhibited facts in an orderly sequence; it might serve as a guide and a clue among his own reminiscences; on the basis of Dangeau's literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own brilliant recitals and passionate presentations of character. Thus Saint-Simon's Mémoires came to be written.

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic power of observation; nothing escaped his vision, and his passions enabled him to penetrate through what he saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered information from those who knew the mysteries of the palace and the court; great persons, court ladies, even valets and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is true that the passions which often lit up the truth sometimes obscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was welcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on his impartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details. Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a sense of the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feeling of duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity of his imagination.

The Mémoires, the final preparation of which was the work of his elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His manuscripts were bequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose with Saint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before the close of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 that a true editio princeps, substantially correct, was published. The violences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no obstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romantic movement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner something more of habitual concentration the comparison would not be unjust.

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701 with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speak of any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, it is the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation that idea emerged to the light. At first a religious question was complicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religious question was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadable epic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith afforded material for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet than the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the third chant of his Art Poétique, replied—the mysteries of the Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be tricked out to gratify the fancy.

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the Æneid, written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, in which the revolt against the classical tyranny was formulated, and contemporary authors were glorified at the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau murmured, indignant; Racine offered ironical commendations; other Academicians patriotically applauded their own praises. Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro.

Fontenelle, in his Discours sur l'Églogue and a Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, widened the field of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why may not modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checks the progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients." Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In his dialogues entitled the Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of progress; that we are the true ancients of the earth, wise with inherited science, more exact in reasoning, more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of printing, and by the favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine in his charming Épître to Huet, La Bruyère in his Caractères, Boileau in his ill-tempered Réflexions sur Longin, rallied the supporters of classicism. Gradually the fires smouldered or were assuaged; Boileau and Perrault were reconciled.

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical forms, paid a homage to popular tradition in his delightful Contes de ma Mère l'Oie (if, indeed, the tales be his), which have been a joy to generations of children. With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added to the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years after the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients and the Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progress had separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings of Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a well-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier—indignant at Lamotte's Iliade, recast in the eighteenth-century taste—a new question was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenth century—that of the relative merits of prose and verse.

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versified none the less. The age was indeed an age of prose—an age when the salons discussed the latest discovery in science, the latest doctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm passed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetry of the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramas or elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about that idea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfitting inauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to the past.

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille's sister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns turned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred years which made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelle to develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as the Cydias of La Bruyère, "un composé du pédant et du précieux," was an aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who tried to compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. The origin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy Aspar. His operas fluttered before they fell; his Églogues had not life enough to flutter. The Dialogues des Morts (1683) is a young writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show his wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of great reputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelled disciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, passionless, but curious for all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a dissolver of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the world of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who smiled but never condescended to laugh, an intelligence supple, subtle, and untiring.

In 1686 he published his Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, evening conversations between an astronomer and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned coquetries with science, for which he asked no more serious attention than a novel might require, while he communicated the theories of Descartes and the discoveries of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest way to truth, and that truth at best is not absolute but relative to the human understanding. The Histoire des Oracles, in which the cargo of Dutch erudition that loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened, glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle would show that the pagan oracles were not delivered by demons, and did not cease at the coming of Jesus Christ; innocent opinions, but apt to illustrate the origins and growth of superstitions, from which we too may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of true religion and sound philosophy. Of course God's chosen people are not like unguided Greeks or Romans; and yet human beings are much the same in all times and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was a prophet, since Father Baltus wished it so to be, and held the opinion to be orthodox.

Appointed perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences in 1697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty years the panegyrics of those who had been its members. These Éloges des Académiciens are masterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity—"If I had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible," and "Every one is right." "It is not a heart," said Madame de Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain." It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil and alert.

A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy was constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, of which the first edition was published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the general history of Europe, from the close of the mediæval period, and especially the records in every age of mythologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably and endlessly pursued.

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. In its place came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating sagacity. His vast accumulations of knowledge were like those of the students of the Renaissance. The tendencies of his intellect anticipate the tendencies of the eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had not become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly where reason and research led, and saw no cause why religion and morals more than any other subjects should not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational inquiry. Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone to error than apt to find the truth, why should any opinions be held sacred? Let us ascertain and expose the facts. In doing so, we shall learn the lesson of universal tolerance; and if the principle of authority in matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be considered an evil? Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding, remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a superstition, why should not man guide his life by good sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs with the battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; the disputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the moral licences of men and women are singular and often diverting. Why not instruct and entertain our minds with the facts of the world?

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and sometimes heavy columns of his text; the entertainment will be found in the rambling gossip, interspersed with illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost every eminent writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all that was added to knowledge in his periodical publication, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (begun in 1684). He called himself a cloud-compeller: "My gift is to create doubts; but they are no more than doubts." Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius for criticism as his; and it was light not only for France, but for Europe.