Modern French Literature Wells l-;_ .r< JJfll'versiiy o? California IRVINE MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. (Harv.) / J / 3 5w BOSTON ROBERTS BROTHERS 1896 ] \ 9 Copyright, 1896, By Benj. W. Wells. All rights reserved. SInibcrsitg ^rcss: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. PREFACE. If prefaces did not exist, it would surely be neces- sary to invent them. An author has always some confidence to make to a gentle reader, some shield that he would fain oppose to a captious critic. Of course his work will have to stand for itself ; but the work- man likes to tell what he has tried to do, and why and how he has tried to do it. So, first, my book is not meant for special students, who will naturally resort to those varied French sources from which I have directed little streams to fertilize and enrich what has remained in my notebooks and memory from the read- ing of many years. Nor are these essays intended primarily as an introduction to the study of French literature, but rather as a companion, and possibly a guide, to the better appreciation and enjoyment of those authors who mark progress or change in the evolution of literary ideals since the great Eevolu- tion. Until any book that is worth reading is seen in its true perspective, one will not draw from it its full measure of pleasure or profit. To give some clew to the books that are significant, whether as products or as causes of changed critical standards and sesthetic principles, is what is attempted in these chapters. vi PREFACE. Outside of scholastic and professional circles, men who turn to French for enjoyment or as a subsidiary means of culture read almost wholly the works of this century ; yet, so far as I know, the English attempts to trace the lines of the century's literary development in France are arid and perfunctory, while the French critics, admirable as they are, naturally assume much to be familiar for which a foreigner may grope in vain. No one can be more keenly aware than I how parlous a task it is to attempt systematic criticism of the pres- ent or near past in literature ; but if we are to wait until the world has made up its mind about what it is reading to-day, it will then be reading something else, and our criticism will always lag superfluous in the development of taste ; it will be useful to students, but caviare to the public. Is it not, then, worth while to take Grimm's words to heart, and to " have the cour- age to fail " rather than to leave the task unattempted ? If the critic can be more helpful, he may be content to be less profound, original, or mature. Three introductory chapters sketch the evolution of French literature till the close of the eighteenth cen- tury, that the reader may be reminded of those authors whose influence is still felt and of whom it belongs to the humane life to know. In the more detailed studies that follow, no mention is made of imitators or hack writers, however ephemerally popular, nor of any work that has not literary imagination and artistic form, in order that attention may be concentrated on those writers who stand for something, who mark progress PREFACE. VU or change. In estimating their place and function, I have used freely the critical apparatus cited in the foot-notes, but I have never expressed a literary opinion that is not based on examination of the oriiiinal work though doubtless my position has been modified by the masters of French criticism, and, as I liave used at times, notes made long since and for another purpose, it is possible that I have still unacknowledged debts, to avoid the possibility of which would involve what seems to me an undue sacrifice. Indeed, I should be willing in any case to forego the honor of an anxious originality, if by uniting the prismatic beams of French criticism into a white ray I could assist my readers to a clearer vision of tlie greatest epoch of one of the greatest literatures of the world. It remains for me to express my grateful thanks to all who have aided me in this work, especially to my colleague, Professor William P. Trent, and to the officers of the Boston Public Library, whose generous aid and unfailing courtesy helped to make my book a possi- bility and my labor a pleasure. BENJAMIN W. WELLS. Sewanee, Tennessee, February 18, 1896. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Pages Middle Age and Renascence 1-42 Twelfth ceutury: Romances, lyrics, and fabliaux, 1. Thirteenth century : Lyrics, drama, satire, historical prose, 6. Fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Lyrics and historic prose, 11; The Renascence, 17; Marot, 2-4; llonsard, 27. Drama, history, and theology, 31; RabelaLs, 33. Fiction, 38; Montaigne, 39. CHAPTER n. The Seventeenth Century 43-81 Poetry: Malherbe, 43; Boileau, 48; La Fontaine, .50. Novels, 54. Essays, 57. Philosophy, 57. Memoirs, 58. Letters, 60. Ora- tory, 62. Drama: Corneille, 65; Racine, 71; Moliere, 75; Regnard, 80. Retrospect, 80. CHAPTER IIL The Eighteenth Century 82-118 Voltaire, 82. Lyrics and Epics, 90. Drama: Le Sage, 95; Mari- vaux, 96; Beauraarchais, 99. History, 101. Oratory, 103. Philosophy, 103. Criticism, 106. Fiction: Le Sage, 107; Marivaux, 109; Voltaire, 111; Diderot, 112; Rousseau, 113. X CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. Pages Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand .... 119-151 Literature under Bonaparte, 119. Life and Cliaracter of Madame de Stael, 120: Corinue, 128; Allemague, 129. Life and char- acter of Chateaubriand, 135: Atala, 142; Genie du chris- tianisme, 143; Kene, 145; Martyrs, 147; Itiueraire, 148. Chateaubriand's influence, 148. CHAPTER V. The Romantic School 152-191 Sources and character of Romanticism, 152. Poetry: Beranger, 158; Lamartine, 159; De Vigny, 162; De Musset, 165; Gau- tier, 169. Drama: Dumas, 176; De Vigny, 178; De Musset, 179. Fiction: De Vigny, 181; De Musset, 182; Gautier, 184; Dumas, 187. Decline of Romanticism, 191. CHAPTER VL The Young Hugo 192-224 Early Lyrics, 198. Han d'Islande, 200. Cromwell, 202. Orieu- tales, 205. Dramas from Ilernani to Les Burgraves, 206. Notre-Dame, 220. Second lyric period, 221. Hugo as a politician, 224. CHAPTER VH. Hugo in Exile and ix TnruMPii 225-264 Biography, 225. Fiction: Miscrables, 232; Travailleurs de la mer, 235; Quatre-vingt-treize, 236. Lyric and epic poetry, 237. Philosophic poetry, 253. Gleanings and posthumous volumes, 253. Hugo's work reflects his mind in its substance and its form, 256. His influence and popularity, 260. CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER VIII. Pages The Evolution of History and Ckiticism . . . 265-302 Growth of the historic spirit, 265. Thierry, 266. Michelet, 267. Development of criticism, 272. Saiute-Beuve, 274. Taiue, 278. Renau, 288. Coutemporary critics, 299. CHAPTER IX. The Evolution of Lyric Poetry 303-352 The Parnassians: Banville, 304; Leconte de Lisle, 309; De Heredia, 318; Coppee, 321; Sully-Prudhomrae, 324. The Decadents: Baudelaire, 332; Verlaine, 342. The Symbolists, 350. CHAPTER X. The Evolution of the Drama 353-395 Scribe, 353; Augier, 356; Dumas ^/s, 869; Sardou, 379; Labiche and minor dramatists, 387; the Naturalistic drama, 393. CHAPTER XI. Modern Fiction. — I. The Evolution of Xaturalism 396-431 George Sand, 397; Henri Beyle (Stendhal), 405; Balzac, 414; Merimee, 427. CHAPTER XH. Modern Fiction. — IT. The Naturalistic School . 432-463 Flaubert, 433; The Brothers Goncourt, 440; Zola, 446; Huysmans, 457; Maupassant, 458. xii ■ CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIII. Pages MoDEKN Fiction. — III. Tue Waning of Naturalism 404-503 The Compromisers: Feuillet, Cherbuliez, Fabre, Theuriet, 464; Daudet, 467; Ohuet, 490. Minor novelists, 491. Exotic fic- tion : Loti, 492. The Fsychologists : Bourget, 494 ; Barres, 498 ; Marcel Trevost, 499 ; i-'aul Margueritte, 5Ui. Index 505-510 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATUEE. CHAPTER I. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. Books began to be written in French somewhat later than in English or German, because Latin survived lonoer in Gaul as the lanouao'e of the cultured. The English and the Germans had no classical past to check and discourage efforts in what might seem a degraded dialect ; and so, long after Charlemagne had made his collection of heroic Teutonic ballads, long after Eng- lish hearts had thrilled to the story of Beowulf, French was still an unwritten language, in which the first stammerings of literary expression had yet to be heard, though even in the middle of the seventh century we read that a bishop of Noyou was chosen " because he understood both Teutonic and Romance, " which would show that many that spoke either tongue understood no other. Romance is the indefinite designation of many dia- lects. Wliat survived in literature is essentially Low Latin with greatly maimed inflections, much confusion of vowels and elision of consonants. A few words recall the Celtic that the Latin had almost wdiolly dis- placed in the first century of our era ; many more words were retained from their own mother tongue by the 2 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. conquering Franks. The first to put this new growth to literary use were, naturally, the clergy. The clois- ters furnished the leisure ; the needs of the missionaries and devotees, the motive. Already in the tenth century there were legends of the saints and bits of Bible story that have much simple beauty ; and when once this fountain-head had been opened, it poured a rich and constant stream that has not ceased to flow for eight centuries. There are no such dreary wastes in French literature as those that separate Chaucer from Spenser, or Luther from Lessing. There is hardly a generation since the " Chanson de Eoland " that has not had some work of real excellence to show ; and all this literature, even the oldest, has been readily and easily intelligible. No educated Frenchman has ever needed a long prepara- tion to assimilate the literary content of the " Song of Eoland, " and so early French literature has had more direct influence on the culture of the nineteenth century than early English has had. Surely no predecessor of Shakspere is so present in the minds of modern writers as Raljelais or Montaigne. To indicate as briefly as possible the relation of these early centuries to our own, is my purpose in this chapter. The first popular literature was metrical, both for tlie convenience of the reciter who had to memorize it, and also to admit of a musical accompaniment. And since the minstrel depended on the interest he could evoke, he naturally chose the themes that attracted those who had most to give, and were likely to be most lav- ish in the giving. These were the knights and nobles ; and the deeds of their chivalrous ancestors were the subjects that most effectually touched their pride and loosed their purse-strings. Wlien he was the guest of a cloister, the ..singer might recount the Passion of MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 6 our Lord, of Saint Eulalie, or of Saint Alexis, but in the castle his welcome depended on the local character of his rejjertory. Hence the groups of " Chansons de geste " (Family Songs) that, when compiled and joined to one another with more or less skill, made up the greater part of the literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and continued to be re-edited and further ex- tended in the thirteenth. Such " Chansons " naturally served as a model for those who had recent history to record; and some of these rhymed chronicles — Wace's " Eoman de Rou, " for instance — have a sort of literary interest. About a hundred of these epic songs have survived the rack of time. The most famous of them all is the story of Eoland's death at Eoucesvalles (August 15, 778), wdiich indeed no other chanson resembles or approaches in naive realism and rugged beauty.^ All of them are written in couplets of careful structure, united by assonance or vowel rhyme. The hero is usually, as in Eoland's case, connected with Charle- magne, and with the struggles of Christians and infi- dels ; but there is always fighting of some kind, and women play a very subordinate part. Love is over- laid by the stronger emotions of faith and patriotism in the " Song of Eoland, " and by the mere love of brawling in some of the inferior " Chansons, " which differ greatly in this from the freer inventions that were gradually developed from them as literature and culture progressed. Legends of the British King Arthur had attracted the Normans in England, and were by them brought to France, where most of them had been versified before the end of the twelfth cen- ^ Cp. Lansou, Litterature franfaise, p. 26. Cited hereafter as Lanson. 4 MODEKN FKENCH LITERATURE. tury, mainly by Clirestien de Troyes, to whom, in turn, England owes the " Morte d 'Arthur, " and Ger- many the epics of Hartmann, Wolfram, and Gottfried. These romances, when contrasted with the " Chan- sons, " show a growing culture and refinement, a more developed courtesy, and so a more prominent position for women, who seem already hedged with some chiv- alrous divinity. Idealization shows itself also in the religious background, which in the grail saga becomes very prominent and mystical. Then, too, the form shows more refinement. Assonance is succeeded by true rhyme. But what is most significant is the appeal to a wider public. Tradespeople and bourgeois begin to find a place in the stories, — characters that would have had no interest for the public of the " Chansons, " to whom no minstrel would have ventured to intro- duce them. The " Chansons de geste " had been national, if not local, in tone, and the romances were essentially in accord with the mediaeval spirit; the next stage of development, however, was more purely artificial. Thirst for novelty, aided by the demands of the mo- nastic schools, led to translations and adaptations of classical subjects, especially the legends of Alexander, to one of which in twelve-syllable lines we owe the alexandrine verse that was destined to play a great part in the French prosody of many following centu- ries. Nature, too, l)egins to interest ; and " Bestiaries, " true " fairy tales of science, " such as that age knew, tell of the strange virtues and habits of animals, while other didactic poems recount similar traits of plants and stones. Lyric poetry now begins to be cultivated by the aristocracy. Troubadours in the south and Trouvferes in the north write " Romances " and " Pastou- MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 5 relies, " dealing always with ladies and shepherdesses, nearly always with love, usually of a rather facile character. Meanwhile tlie true, unsanctified esprit gaulois was revealing itself in " Fabliaux, " — short stories in verse, frankly coarse, and often brutal, usually comic and satirical, often cynically skeptical of virtue and with touches of what modern Frenchmen call Uaijue. These tales were written by men, and they are not tender to feminine foibles. No doubt they give too dark a picture of the national morals ; but they are essentially realistic stories of every -day life, in strong contrast with the artificial " Pastou- relles. " They were to the middle and lower classes as natural as the " Chansons de geste " to the knights. Hence they had in them fruitful seeds of life, and exercised a great and lasting influence. They were so true to unspiritualized human nature that they needed little to adapt them to any age or environment. So the " Fabliaux " have been a storehouse whence the novelists and dramatists of later times have drawn some of their best material. The debt of Boccaccio, of De la Salle, of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Moli^re to the old French " Fabliaux " is a striking witness to the truth which all literary history teaches, that " one touch of nature makes the whole world kin. " From the " Fabliaux " to the drama might seem a natural transition, for many of them were in dialogue. But here the initiative came from the effort of the clergy to make the Scripture story more real to the unlettered multitude than painting or sculpture could have done. " Miracle Plays " were already acted in French before the close of the twelfth century ; but they have hardly a trace of literary merit, such as would entitle them to rank with the epics and lyrics 6 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. of the time. The thirteenth century, however, was to produce in all these tields the best that mediaeval literature has to offer, here as in Germany ; and it is interesting to note that in both countries this re- markable age was followed by a stationary if not retrogressive one. Narrative verse in the thirteenth century, though abundant, shows little invention of new subjects. The tales of chivalrous adventure develop the old themes, with classical reminiscences in the spirit of free fancy and romantic fiction, with less energy but more grace and beauty. And beside this survival there rises the prose tale^ drawing its inspiration through Greece by the attrition of the Crusades, as well as from the Latin and the older French epics, which it first equals and then surpasses both in bulk and interest. This indi- cates that while there was still an audience for the minstrel, a reading public was growing that would presently make him superfluous as a narrator and change him to a singer of songs. There is a pretence of didactic purpose in most of the translated tales of the " Gesta Eomanorum " and in tlie oriental " Seven Wise Masters ; " but original didactic writing is usually in versified fables, in Aesop's manner; and in the hands of Marie de France these attain at the outset a remarkable grace and pathos, though tlie best work of this genial lady is in the lais, — short narrative lyrics, perhaps the most original poems of the century. The songs of Thibaut of Champagne are also very delicate and beautiful. Both poets belong to the high aristocracy and to the earlier half of the century, and their numerous imita- tors were thoroughly aristocratic both in their lives and work. The close of the century shows, however, MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 7 a marked shifting of the centre of production. Its chief authors, Euteboeuf and Adam de la Halle, belong, by birth and instinct, to the people, and give a dis- tinctly democratic tone to the drama and to social and political satire. The former is a typical Parisian bourgeois of the period, whom poverty compelled to turn his hand to hack-work of almost every kind, — panegyrics, lives of saints and miracle plays, faUiaux, and crusading songs, — but who avenged himself in days of compara- tive ease by satirical attacks on his taskmasters, chiefly - the clergy and the monks. Some of these, especially the autobiographical " Marriage " and " Complaint, " have still pungency enough to insure their life. But while Euteboeuf was advancing literature on various lines, his contemporary, Adam de la Halle, was so broadening the French drama that he almost seems its creator. He carried it beyond the religious sphere. He took both his scenes and his characters from the life of his own day and of his native Arras, and so " Le Jeu de la feuill^e " (c. 1262) is the first French comedy of manners. Nor was this his only happy hit. In " liobin and Marion " he was first to turn the " Pas- tourelle " into light opera. The invention of these two genres make the century memorable in French dramatic history, though the plays themselves may seem jejune enough to a modern reader. Meantime the fable, under the same democratic impulse, had developed from the apologue to the epopee in " Eenard the Fox, " whose protean forms attest its popularity throughout the Middle Ages.^ Here are told, with obvious sympathy, the tricks by which 1 The original source seems to have been Flanders. See Lanson, p. 89. 8 MODERN FRENCH LITERATUKE. the Fox outwits the authority of the Lion, the strength of the Bear, and the envy of lesser enemies. It thus lends itself easily to the freest social and political satire, of which the moral basis, like that of the " Fabliaux, " is cynical skepticism that mocks honor, duty, loyalty, and has unqualified admiration for worldly shrewdness. The scheme admitted an indefi- nite addition of new episodes, until at last this product of many authors and several generations reached the huge bulk of thirty thousand lines, and seemed likely to die of its own hypertrophy, even while eager imitators were composing new poems on its model. The obvious danger of satirical allegory is artificial elaboration that makes it both unintelligible and wearisome. This is the fault of " Renard, " and in a still greater degree of the " Romance of the Rose, " — a more brilliant poem of nearly equal length, in which the Middle Ages found an exhaustless mine of mi- sogynist irony. The wit is of the keenest, but the allegory is too fine spun ; and delightful as the poem is in parts, few will have the patience to unravel its tangled plot, in this age that cannot digest the " Faerie Queene. " But in its day its fame was very great ; it claimed a translation from Chaucer, and some knowl- edge of its character belongs even to general literary culture. " The Romance of the Rose" is not a homogeneous work. Guillaume de Loris began it in the aristocratic part of the century ; Jean de Meung finished it in the wholly different democratic spirit that marked Adam and Rutebceuf. The former planned a scholarly alle- gory of the Rose of beauty guarded by the virtues from the vices and from the Lover, whom some assist and others hinder in his effort to pluck and bear her from MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 9 the well -defended garden. Guillaume is often truly poetic and occasionally realistic, yet there is small trace in these pretty conceits of anything but serious moralizing. But when Jean took up the parable, in a continuation some four times the length of the original, he maintained, indeed, the essential thread of the allegory, but allowed himself the freest scope for the display of a varied reading and wide learning, and for satirical digressions that enter nearly every field of what was then current in science and speculation, in philosophy, physics, and theology. These give the poem its chief interest to-day, though to the student of mediaeval manners it offers pictures that would be sought in vain elsewhere, and in its peculiar vein it has probably never been equalled. Jean de Meung was the first popularizer of rationalism, of Nature as the guide of life. He is the true predecessor of Rabe- lais, of Montaigne, and of Voltaire ; and though he never ceased to imagine himself a devout Catholic, he is essentially Protestant at heart. Nature, to him, is the source of beauty; to live according to Nature is true morality. If he appears sometimes crude and even cynical in his judgments of those who seem most to contradict Nature, the monks and women, he is iu the main a severe moralist ; and though his work is a strange and ill-ordered medley, he is surely the most orio'inal thinker who wrote in French before the Renaissance. The historical prose of the thirteenth century is probably more read than any of its purely literary productions, perhaps because both Yillehardouin at the beo-innino and Joiiiville at the close of this period were closer students of real life than the poets. Yille- hardouin writes what might pass for a prose chanson de 10 MODEKN FRENCH LITEllATUKE. (jeste if it were not known to be the account of a sober eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade, or, as he more justly calls it, of the Conquest of Constantinople, — for Christians, not Saracens, were its victims. No account of this mad adventure could lack a spice of romance ; but Villehardouin put into it all the childlike naivet(5 of his time, all the energy of a man of action, all the piety of the ages of faith, all the enthusiasm that par- ticipation in a great task could inspire in a generous soul. Thus his Chronicle, as Saintsbury has said, gives a better idea of chivalry and feudalism at their best, than any other single work. It mirrors the life of the Middle Ages, as the " Eomance of the Kose " does its thought. It has much of the charm of Froissart, and will never seem old so long as hearts are young. During the century others continued the tradition, though they did not attain the excellence of the Cru- sader, and toward its close the monks of St. Denis be- gan to compile their official history in French ; but that was not literature. On the other hand, Joinville's biog- raphy of his friend and master, Louis IX. the Saint, has a peculiar grace and charm that six centuries have not made to fade. Louis died in 1270, but Joinville wrote a generation later in advanced old age. The centuiy that separates him from Villehardouin was, as we have seen, one of disillusionment; sentiment was yielding to satire, and this was reflected in history as it had been in the epic and lyric poetry. Joinville is more reflective, more inquisitive too. He is a little skeptical about the merit of fighting for fighting's sake, and has his doubts about the value of knight-errantry. There is a great deal of keen though playful satire in the anecdotes that he recalls of the good king. It seems as though the same moral lassitude which in MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 11 Germany had followed the collapse of Frederic II. 's efibrts for the emancipation of the human mind, the discouraged consciousness of the failure of the Cru- sades, and the growing weight of the ecclesiastical yoke, had here the same effect that it was having in the Empire, driving men to a critical, questioning spirit, to thoughts they were fain to veil in allegory and satire. And Joinville's work is interesting also from a rhetorical side. In him French prose proved its fitness for literary use. It was no longer an experi- ment, and it is essentially on the lines of his style that it grew and perfected itself. Indeed, so long as the mediaeval spirit continued, so long as education and especially classical culture was confined to the few, till the minds of men were enlarged and their horizons broadened, no radical change could be expected in literature. The French had already expressed their tender feelings in lyrics, their heroic aspirations in chansons, their life in the chronicles, their social views in satires. They were restless, questioning, expectant. Under these condi- tions an arrested literary development is almost inevi- table. There might be no decline. Good work might continue to be done on the old lines ; but presently the disillusionment spread and deepened. They felt that the old social system was cracking. It took no prophet to see that feudalism was doomed. But a new literature could arise only with a new enthusiasm ; and that enthusiasm came after two centuries of expectation from the inspiring breath of Italian culture and the classical Eenaissance. In poetry this intervening period counts the notable names of Charles d 'Orleans and Francois Villon Mn 1 Orlc'an.s, b. 1391, d. 1465. Villon, b. U.'Jl, d. about 1463. 12 MODERN FEENCH LITERATURE. a numerous company, whose ingenuity was exercised less over matter than form. It has been said that " their poetry was all technique, and all their tech- nique was difficulty. " They invented a great number of metrical arrangements, more or less artificial, such as the ballade, with its equivocal and retrograde vari- ations, the rondeau, rondel, triolet, virelay, and the chanson royal,^ which some English poets are exer- cising their skill to imitate to-day, so that these men enjoy a sort of esoteric cult and some real revival of popularity. For no one can read D 'Orleans' graceful, nonchalant verses without delight, though their ethical value is of the slightest, and the fickle muse surely deserts him if ever he presumes to be serious. Bitter experience of the uncertainties of politics had made him pay for the honor of a high command at Azincourt with a long imprisonment in England, whence he re- turned a devoted disciple of the god Nonchaloir, and felt no more pressing duty than to set up a poetic court at Blois, where the best talent of the age was soon assembled. As " an idle singer of an empty day, " he had quite peculiar gifts. His favorite subjects are the changing seasons and light-hearted lover's fancies, with counsels against melancholy and care, and exhortations to friendship and good-humor. D'Orldans is never great, but he is nearly always healthy and cheerful. The Parisian Villon strikes a deeper note. He was a greater and a more original poet, though a less worthy man. Poor as Ptuteboeuf, he was even more of a reckless vagabond ; and his best work, like his prede- cessor's, was in satires, — his " Testaments," in which he made mock bequests to various friends and enemies, with autobiographical details and allusions that are 1 These metrical forms arc briefly described in Lanson, p. 142, note. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 13 interesting whenever they happen to be still intelli- gible. The chief attraction of Villon to-day, however, is the short poems interspersed in these long satires, some of which bid fair to maintain their place among the best lyrics of the world. The " Ballad of the Ladies of Long-Ago, " with its refrain, " But where are last year's snows," ^ is familiar to all lovers of poetry. Almost as famous is the " Epitaph in the form of a Ballad which Villon wrote for himself and his Compan- ions when expecting to be hung with them. " In this poem of death there is an antinomy of grim humor and naive pathos that can hardly be excelled. But though in our own day Villon has been called " the first French writer who is frankly and completely modern, " he will always be the poet of the few, the poets' poet, and " caviare to the general. " After his death French poetry grew steadily more artificial, endeavoring to atone by self-imposed restraints for the lack of genius to rise above them, precisely as the Mastersingers were doing in contemporary Germany, and with much the same result. Meantime, in the drama, the brilliant innovations of Adam de la Halle remained unfruitful for a time, while the Miracle Play was developing into the Mystery, where a freer use of allegory and mythology fostered originality and encouraged associations of actors inde- pendent of the clerg3% or at least apart from them. Such companies were quicker to anticipate or respond to pop- ular demands ; and in the fifteenth century they pre- sented not only the " Fall of Troy, " but the very recent siege of Orleans, and the national heroine Joan of Arc, whose ashes were hardly cold. But the esprit gaulois has 1 Mais oil sont les ueiges d'autan (Ballade des dames du temps jadis). 14 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. a natural affinity for comedy, and this century revived also Adam's happy inspiration in its moral allegories, farces, and soties. The first are the most artificial, and their vogue may well seem remarkable to a modern reader. " La Condemnation du banquet " is perhaps the best, yet it is but a wearisome girding at " Glut- tony, " who has for his interlocutors such dramatis persona} as " Dinner, " " Supper, " " Pastime, " " Good- Company, " " I-Drink-to-You, " as well as various diseases and medical appliances, and a chorus to ob- trude the obvious moral. The soties and farces are far more interesting. Some of them are comic monologues, and occasionally they look like parodies on the ser- mons of the time, which themselves are often hardly more than parodies, as one may see in the famous dis- courses of the Viennese Abraham a Sancta-Clara. But the larger part are realistic scenes of middle and low life, full of action and often of brutal buffoonery such as would appeal to the not very delicate taste of the populace. Their spirit, like that of the older faUiaux, is one of social distrust, of shrewdness and trickery. Charity and gentleness are mocked, astuteness is ad- mired. Each man lives in dread of being duped by his neighl)or. But we have a Frenchman's testimony that this is " the lower ty})e of the French nature in its pure vulgarity. " ^ Some of these little farces and jests are so short that they seem meant to precede or follow a more serious performance. Others are long enough for independent production, and have no small comic verve. " Le Cuvier, " for instance, sliows as much dramatic spirit as the best of the old faUiati.v. A yet more noted mediaeval farce is the " Maitre Pathelin" (1470), 1 Lauson, p. 214. MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 15 which, in the seventeenth century, was worked over into a regular comedy that owed its success almost wholly to the vis comica of the original ; and two sequels in the fifteenth century attest its popularity without equalling its merits. All of these plays were written in verse, chiefly for the benefit of the actors who memorized them, but also in deference to tradition. Except in outward form, however, they are essentially prosaic, and must have gained little but monotony from their couplets and long succession of octosyllabic lines. Yet the force of this custom has continued almost to our own day, though the suppler alexandrine has given some measure of relief to comedy and added stateliness to the classic tragedy. The number of farces that remain is very great, and doubtless as many have perished. With them comedy is fairly launched, and has never since ceased to be one of the most popular and important forms of French literature. Meantime the prose tliat would have been in place here, tal^es in Froissart complete possession of the historical field, where Joinville had won only toleration. This courtier and diplomat of the later fourteenth century (1337-1410), who witnessed much of the Hundred Years' War, and busily inquired of all he did not see, was able to draw a picture of the conflict between France and England that became at once immensely popular, and has continued to delight boyhood and old age ever since for its vivid pictur- esqueness of description and its enthusiastic chivalry of sentiment. Froissart is not a meticulously accurate historian, still less a social philosopher; but for a battle, or a pageant, or a tragic scene like the surren- der of Calais, it will be hard to match him in French 16 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. or, indeed, iu any literature. None ever equalled his brilliant and sympathetic picture of chivalry, with all its high-hearted ideals and all its disdain of the mass of humanity. For Froissart the common people hardly exist. But the times were even then changing, and a keen thoutih untrained interest in the condition of the masses is attested by the minute curiosity of Juvenal des Ursins and Jean de Troyes, who wrote, somewhat later than Froissart, the former of the mad Charles VI. , the latter of the shrewd diplomat Louis XL and his scandalous court, that were to furnish to Philippe de Commynes the subject of the Memoirs by which he in- augurated diplomatic history. But perhaps the most important contributor to the literary prose of this century was Antoine de la Salle, author of the graceful " Petit Jean de Saintre, " of the biting " Quinze joies du mariage, " and of the brilliant " Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " " Petit Jean " is a pretty story of chivalrous love, a pure bit of romantic imagi- nation ; for ere this Louis XL had made chivalry a thing of the past in France. The " Fifteen Joys," as its name imjjlies, is a satire on women, as bright and as unjust as the " Eomance of the Eose, " but, unlike that famous poem, of far more tlian antiquarian in- terest, for it is still popular in cheap editions on the Paris book-stalls. Each of the " Joys" tells of some ill-assorted match, and each chapter ends with the misery that will come of it to the husband who " shall end miserably his days. " The poor fellow is either led by the nose, or plundered of his goods, or made a laughing-stock to his friends. Some of the character- sketches are very lively nnd dramatic in form, and they are well worth reading, in spite of their archaic flavor, as specimens of early Eenaissance literature and wit. MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 17 But Antoine de la Salle's great work is the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles, " — a collection of tales gathered, it was said, from the lips of Prince Louis and his courtiers while he was in Burgundy under the protec- tion of Duke Philippe, another lover of the esjJrit gaulois. But neither the future Louis XL nor his courtiers were the inventors of the best of these tales, many of them quite too good to be new. They are drawn in part from old fabliaux, in part from Italian and Latin collections. But, as with Chaucer and Shakspere, it is not in the substance but in the treat- ment that De la Salle's individuality lies, and here his merit is very great. There had been good naive prose in Villehardouin, in Joinville, and in Froissart, but De la Salle is the first prose artist who takes an interest in his art. His work shows growing artistic sense and power. Some of the " Hundred New Tales " are really polished, and it added to their effect that they appealed to a much wider circle than any other form of writing- would have done. If at times they have a frankness of speech that does not accord with squeamish man- ners, their humor on the whole is sound and healthy, and nearly always true to human nature, superior in this regard to Boccaccio's " Decamerone, " though yield- ing of course to that masterpiece in grace of style. It may be remarked that De la Salle's efforts for French prose were ably seconded by the homilists of the time, whose sermons reached another class, and so carried the same seed to other fields. And now we are on the eve of that wonderful and cardinal epoch in the history of the French and indeed of the European mind, the Ptenaissance. ^ That all ^ Tlie remainder of this chapter has appeared in " The Sewanee Eeview" for February, 1896. 2 18 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. literature, and indeed all forms of national life, are processes of evolution, is a truth now almost univer- sally recognized among critics worthy of the name; but there are periods when external influences seem to a superficial observer to interrupt the continuity of development, when changes are more rapid and more radical than at others; and from this point of view the sixteenth century is absolutely unique in French litera- ture. For however varied the expression of that age may be, protestant, pagan, humanistic, there is in it no place and no representative for the manner or the matter of medieval literature. Calvin, Eabelais, and Eonsard drew all of them their inspiration from antiq- uity, all of them were practically ready to make a tabula rasa of the centuries that separate Augustine from Boccaccio, but each went to antiquity with a differ- ent mind, and drew from it a different lesson. Calvin seeks primitive Christianity ; Eabelais Greek natural- ism ; Montaigne the skeptical and practical realism of Eome ; Eonsard turns with a passionate longing to the sun of classic art. So we have to follow out, in this century and in those that succeed, three main tendencies, not indeed without subdivisions and intertwinings, for literary psychology is not a geometric science, and a strict classification attains clearness only by inaccuracy ; but still as elements sufficiently distinct from one another to make it profitable to ask in every case in what pro- portion they enter into each great writer's work and genius. Tliere is first the temper that recoils from the abuses of the Church and from what it regards as the accretions of mediaeval ethics, and seeks to restore from the Bible, and the Fathers that suit their purpose, a " primitive Christianity " to their mind. These are MIDDLE AGE AND KENASCENCE. 19 the Protestants, the Huguenots, sober, serious, earnest, relioious men, whom France will miss from her intel- lectual and still more from her moral life, when she has persecuted and banished them. Uncomfortable, intransigent, morose sometimes and bitter like our own Puritans, but, after all, the moral salt of the earth, whom perhaps one would not like to be one's self, but whom one is quite proud to have had for an ancestor. Then there are the Gallios, — men who see that there is something rotten in the Church of their fathers, but do not think that they were born to set it right; men who love ease, beauty, grace, and have a sort of dilettante joy of life. These are the human- ists, who toy with Theocritus and Horace, are fasci- nated with Anacreon, and have a more distant admira- tion for the truly popular epic of Homer than for the courtly epic of Virgil, but who see in it all a play of fancy, not a philosophy of life. And finally there are the neo-pagans, who find in the bankruptcy of mediae- val ism the bankruptcy of Christianity, who think to have done at once with Saint Augustine and with Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose ambition is a naive hedonism more easy to their age than to ours, w^ho find the old Church more tolerant than the new, and so remain as a rule nominally Catholic, and are seldom called upon to suffer more than temporary inconvenience for tlieir thinly masked heresies. The causes of this sudden outburst of independent thought were numerous, and have been often indicated. The discovery of America, and, still more, the dis- covery of the solar system, had changed man's point of view of his place in Nature. As Faguet^ observes, " The narrow world of the middle ages, with its sky 1 Seizieme siecle, Avaut-propos, p. vii. 20 MODERN FEENCH LITERATURE. very low and its God very close, disappeared almost suddenly. We were living in a little low house, where we were watched from the top of a neighboring tower by a severe and good master, who had given us his law, followed us with his eyes, sent us frequent messengers, protected us, punished us, and held us always in his hand. And suddenly we were living in an out-of-the- way corner of the immense universe. Heaven with- drew into measureless space, and God tied into infin- ity. " That knowledge was indeed too wonderful for that generation. Many lost for a time the feeling of the personality of deity. The science of God might be exalted, clarified, but the love of God grew cold, and men of philosophic mind felt nearer to the school of Athens than to the school of Alexandria or of Hippo, far nearer than to the Angelic or to the Mystic Doctor. It is a commonplace to connect the renaissance with the invention of printing and the spread of classical learning, but even here there is perhaps some misap- prehension. Many of the classics had been known and used by literary men habitually and constantly since the age of Bede. The " Eomance of the Hose " reeks with antiquity of a certain kind ; Villon has even traces of the classic lyric spirit. Of course, when manuscrii^ts of ancient authors were printed, they were more widely read. Eut the point of importance is that they were read in a new spirit and seen in a wholly new liglit. For just at the time when print- ing was invented, and the inventors looked about them for books to print, it happened that the national liter- ature was at a low eljb, having indeed been steadily degenerating since the thirteenth century in France as in Germany, while at the same time it chanced that, through the fall of Cunstantinople and other external MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 21 causes, a vast number of classical manuscripts became for the first time available. Hence the books first mul- tiplied — with some natural exceptions, such as the " Bible " and the " Imitation of Christ " — were the clas- sics ; and these books thus obtained a vantage ground in the minds of the reading public that they could hardly have attained had they been obliged to contest the favor of the once popular writers of the thirteenth century, whom time and the widening of the human mind had now crowded from view. This, again, has been admirably expressed by Faguet : " On one side were the classics and the writings of the sixteenth century, printed, portable, legible, inconceivably mul- tiplied ; on the other side the mediseval books, manu- scripts, hard to handle, to take in, to read, or to find. So printing gradually suppressed the middle ages, and by presenting antiquity and the sixteenth century to eye and mind under the same forms, in the same styles and types, and as it were in the same language, it expressed and asserted emphatically that continua- tion of antiquity by the sixteenth century that was dimly in all minds, and cast, in like measure, the middle ages into the shade as though they had not been. " ^ Herein lies the significance of the word " renaissance," — a new birth of an old life after ages of quiescence which men despise and make haste to forget, almost as much repelled by their own tradition as they are attracted to a foreign past. It was a state of mind unique in history, and full of the germs of political, social, and literary revolution. The three elements — pagan, humanistic, and protes- tant — man if est themselves throughout Europe, but with different degrees and results. In Germany the renas- 1 Faguet, Seizierae siecle, x. 22 MODEKN FKENCH LITERATURE. cence is ethical, religious. The voice of the human- ists is feeble and soon lost in domestic strife, while the pagan element was never deeply rooted among them. Here, therefore, the classical renaissance is deferred for more than three centuries, to spring, like a fully armed Pallas, from the brain of Lessing, and to be the presiding genius of the ideal humanist, Goethe. In England, too, the religious side predom- inates, but always mingled with humanism ; while in the Italy of Boccaccio and the France of Eonsard the movement is more literary, artistic, and at most crypto- pagan, except for the Huguenots, whose spirit in liter- ature hardly extends beyond Calvin and D'Aubigne. Here the normal state of mind is humanistic, eclectic, " with a Christian soul and a pagan art, " — an illogical compromise that reaches its supreme expression in Chateaubriand, though it can be seen almost every- where and always in France, as for instance in Boileau's exclusion of Christian mysteries from the domain of poetry, and in the resulting impersonality of the whole literature of the classic school. The pagan element in the renaissance, on the contrary, has predominated only during a part of the eighteenth cen- tury, though it is fundamentally the spirit of Rabelais, of Montaigne, of La Fontaine and of Moli^re. This sx)irit is opposed equally to Catholicism and to Protes- tantism, while the humanists content themselves with reprobating the latter and its congener, Jansenism. The triumph of the pagan renaissance in the age of Voltaire was, however, short. The spirit of the ency- clopaedists yielded to that of the " Genius of Chris- tianity, " while in our own century the pagan tradition has in it an element of Jansenism, and the Reformers have become Free-Thinkers. Since the Romantic School MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 23 the mark of the period has been a varied individual- ism, so that the Spirit of the Time, when we seek its name, can answer only, " Legion, for we are many. " If now we return to the sixteenth century and seek in it the expression of these various tendencies, we shall find that this age of singular activity owes little to its immediate predecessor, save a style to which De la Salle had given a graceful suppleness and the homi- lists an oratorical flow. In every kind of literary art this century advances by leaps, spurred to activity first and most by the example of the Italian renais- sance, for the ambition of their kings had brought them into repeated and close though disastrous con- tact with that ancient home of art, but impelled also by the revival of learning at home, and by the reli- gious ferment, which was spread by printing and the accompanying diffusion of primary knowledge, and grew, like yeast, by what it fed on. There is noth- ing to compare in the fovirteenth or fifteenth centuries with the prose satire of the " Menipp^e " or the barbed verses of D'Aubignd; nothing to match the lyrics of Marot, still less of Eonsard ; nothing like the criticism of Du Bellay or the dignified drama of Jodelle ; no such fiction as blossomed beneath the dainty fingers of Queen Marguerite; no such wit as Beroald's and Des Periers' ; above all, nothing to match the stern force of Calvin, the marvellous well-spring of Eabelais' humor, or the novel charm of Montaigne's essays. Nor must we forget the numerous translations that now first betray a restless search for new inspirations. The drooping taste for idealized adventure receives a fillip from a version of " Amadis of Gaul," the ^reat ro- mance of Spanish chivalry. Amyot turns into prose that may still arouse admiration, " Daphuis and 24 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Chloe, " that exquisite pastoral of the Greek Longus, as well as Plutarch's lives of the great men of Greece and Eome, that became a repertory for the novelists and dramatists of the next century. It is clear already that we have to deal with a remarkable diversity of genius. Indeed this is, like our own, a century of literary independence, with few rules, save the " Do what thou wilt" of Eabelais' Abbey of Thelema, and no enduring literary schools or traditions. It was not till its very close that the ethical and artistic aspi- rations of the renaissance were chastened and united by Malherbe, who " joined with a somewhat heavy hand antique art to modern rationalism," and, though him- self a little man, owes to greater followers the distinc- tion of being first in the classical period. The poetry of the century, with the exception of a portion, and that perhaps not the best, of D'Aubign^'s verse, is humanistic, continuing with greater resources and greater zeal the study of classic art that was already an old tradition in France. But while the middle ages had sought their inspiration chiefly in the more accessible Latin writers, in Ovid and Boethius, in Livy and the essays of Cicero, Marot, the first of the renaissance poets who need detain our attention, knew and valued Virgil, Martial, Lucian, and the pseudo- Mus^us ; while Konsard, with his fellows of the Pleiad, seems often to have judged the value of an acquisition by its difficulty, prizing Pindar more than Homer, and finding his most genuine delight first in Petrarch, then in Anacreon. Clement Marot (1497-1544) had the happy fortune to unite northern blood to southern birth, and to com- bine many of the virtues of each. In his ethics he was a sort of dilettante reformer, of the type that MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 25 gathered at the court of the broad-minded and tolerant Princess Marguerite, afterward Queen of Navarre, her- self a lyric poet, whose " Marguerites " show a consider- able development of that personal note w*hich the Pleiad, Malherl)e, and Boileau were to deaden in France till the rise of the Eomantic School. Under her patronage Marot furthered religious disintegration by his translation of the Psalms, which was very popular, even after it was condemned by the Sorbonne as smack- ing of heresy. Here the subject lent him a dignity that his other work is apt to lack, being in the main pretty rather than beautiful, light rather than strong, graceful rather than grand. His great service to French verse is that he did for it what the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles " had already done for its prose. He restored naturalism and simplicity. For the artificial excess of ornament and allegory he substituted his native grace and delicacy.^ He is now, and probably will always be, most read for his lighter work, — for his songs, epistles, epigrams, animal fables, and the nonsense verses, the " Coq-a-rane. " And even in these fields he is chiefly known by a very few pieces de resistance of the reading-books and anthologies. All school-boys know " The Eat and the Lion, " most will have read Marot's deliciously naive begging letter to King Fran- cis I. (Epist. 11 and 28); but to one who has read the whole body of his work, the songs, satirical or con- vivial, such as " Fr^re Lubin, " " Dedans Paris, " or " Au bon vieux temps, " will seem more characteristic of his natural diversity, and give us a more human sympathy with one who was always a good fellow, and 1 The instinct of beauty occasionally fails him, yet he falls hnt seldom into such crass naturalism as that of " Le Laid tcton," a com- panion piece to Baudelaire's " Charogne." 26 MODERN FEENCII LITERATURE. always seemed so when it was not for his interest to cut a hwg face. Marot's imitators were usually more serious, always less talented than he, though to one of them, Saint- G(^lais, French verse owes the introduction of the Italian sonnet. The Calvinistic satirist, Agrippa d'Aubign^ (1550-1630), though of a much later period, shared Marot's sympathies rather than those of the free- thinking Pleiad, of whom he is sometimes called a " rebellious " follower. His trenchant satires did much to establish the domination of the alexandrine verse that Eonsard had preached rather than practised. They were also the first worthy work in the manner of Juvenal that France has to show. But even before Marot's death a group of young talents had gathered at the College Coqueret, whose influence was to be temporarily greater and more lasting in some of its phases than that of any which had preceded them. This " Pleiad " of genius supplemented what was best in Marot's naturalism with a fuller measure of the classical spirit, and so set French literature, both in its substance, its form, and its language, in new paths, which those who afterward most blamed their early excesses were most zealous silently to follow. The Pleiad was first in France to preach and practise par- ticular heed to the cadence of the single verse, while lyric poets before them had regarded the stanza as the unit in poetic composition. It was also first to reprove and regulate the once unbridled license of newly coined words and phrases, though even their lil)eral culture went farther in this than following generations were willing to follow. With delicate feeling they laid stress on the choice and place of words in poetic composition, and completed the discredit of an artificial MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 27 and rhetorical style against which Marot had already- raised tlie standard of revolt. But while Marot had the tact to " choose the wheat and let the chaff be still " in the traditional forms, he introduced into literature no new blood. With Ronsard and his brothers of the Pleiad the case is different. They were conscious inno- vators ; their advent could not have been anticipated, and is indeed almost a unique fact in literary history. It was probably in 1541 that Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), then a travelled young soldier of eighteen, left his profession, and the promise of a brilliant career, for studious retirement at Paris and the prized instructions of Daurat, who presently began to gather about him a group of enthusiastic young scholars, such as might have been sought in vain elsewhere in France. Belleau and Baif had preceded Ronsard ; Du Bellay he brought back from a journey to Poictiers; Jodelle and Pontus de Tyard soon joined them to com- plete their "brigade," — a name that their number, seven, led them to exchange for Pleiad, when, in 1549, the group first ventured to break their studious silence, and to proclaim their views and purposes in the " De- fense et illustration de la langue fran(^'aise, " ostensibly by Du Bellay, but really a joint manifesto of the school. The purpose of this famous pamphlet is to urge its readers who have entered the classical camp " to escape from the midst of the Greeks and through the ranks of the Romans, and to come back to the heart of their own well-beloved Prance," that they may bring with them from those foreign literatures what may be profitable to their own. Now, any man who reads widely in the writings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will find the conviction grow that French, as a vehicle of literary expression for the 28 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. renaissance mind, was in need of just that new blood that could be drawn from the school of Petrarch and from the revival of classical studies, the source whence Italy had already drawn its fuller life. The men of the Pleiad were no Chauvinists, but yet they were thoroughly national and patriotic in their aims, and quick to learn from their own errors, as well as from those of their erudite predecessors,^ so that their last work is among their best. In them the humanism of the French renaissance reaches its fullest expression, while of the ethical and philosophic phase of the move- ment they have hardly a trace. Typical of all, except Jodelle, is Eonsard; he alone is still generally read by cultured men, apart from special studies, and of him alone it is necessary to speak here. His literary life was a constant triumph. Almost from the outset, and until his death, he was easily first at court and in the popular esteem ; and he held this place after his death, though in Desportes and less talented imitators among the classical decadents, the blood of the French muse began to run thin, till Malherbe gave a new life to Eonsard 's revival of classic taste by infusing it with the rationalistic spirit. Eonsard asserted his pre-eminence by his mastery of the language and of metre, and by a poetic imagi- nation, without which the most skilful rhymester is only an artisan. In language he encouraged his readers to " a wise boldness in inventing new words, so long as they were moulded and fashioned on a pattern already recognized by the people. " He might have said, with Dante, that language never constrained him to say what he would not ; l)ut he had often constrained lan- guage to say what it would not, though in tliis regard ^ Especially Le Mairc de Beiges, Heroet, and Maurice Sceve. MIDDLE ACxE AND RENASCENCE. 29 the sum of his offending does not exceed two hundred words. However the case may he now in academic France, Eonsard understood for his time exactly what it meant to have a mastery of his own tongue; and though perhaps he strained too much at foreign forms, neglecting the poetic worth that lay in the popular speech, yet in his prose as in his verse there was a viwor and a brilliancy that had not been equalled, and was not exceeded till the appearance of Montaigne's " Essays. " It is curious to note that this crystallization of mod- ern prose which Eonsard inaugurated in France, had its parallels in the contemporary literatures of Ger- many, Spain, and England. In every case it was political unity that gave the first impulse and forced the dialects into subordination to the dominant speech of the com-t. Eonsard began for the French language very much what Luther accomplished for the German, and in prosody also he was an innovator and a re- former. He failed indeed to revive the Pindaric ode, the value of which for modern use he greatly exagger- ated ; but he restored the alexandrine to its place of honor, though he did not always follow his own teach- ing. He was also first to popularize the sonnet, and he introduced an endless variety of lyric stanzas, whose metres were as graceful as they were original. It is here that his best work is to be sought, in the groups called " Amours, " " Gaietds, " and in the later odes, rather than in the classical eclogues and odes, or in the unfinished epic, " La Franciade. " Anthologies never fail to cite " Mignonne, allons voir si la rose, " and the sonnet to Hdlfene beginning " Quand vous serez bien vieille ; " and they seldom omit the " Drenched Cupid, " — a subject borrowed from Anacreon, and 30 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. interesting because it admits a comparison with La Fontaine. But, charming as these are, it is only pre- scription that causes them to be so uniformly preferred to a score of others, filled with the peculiar naivete and flavor of the renaissance that later centuries so seldom recover. " La petite colombelle " yields nothing in the comparison with Catullus that it naturally suggests ; and " Cupid's School," borrowed from Bion, is treated in a way to put the creditor under obligations to his debtor. Then, too, there is " L'Alouette" (the Sky- lark), as characteristic of France and of his century as Shelley's is of England and of his. Eonsard is a poet in the fresh vigor of hope. He is not looking with the Englishman's forlorn hope from some Euganean hill for the " green isles that needs must be in the deep, wide sea of misery ; " his Skylark is a charming bird to be enjoyed, not to be yearned for as the symbol of what she is not. There is hardly ever a morbid strain in his verses, for Eonsard at his best is the poet of a free and healthy naturalism. Hence the last half- century has been peculiarly favorable to a revival of his fame, which has betrayed some enthusiasts into an ex- cessive admiration. He lacked clear aesthetic stan- dards because he lacked intellectual independence ; but the fact remains that no French poet before Victor Hugo is so much in sympathy with the spirit of our age as Eonsard, while at the same time no poet has a more cheerful note or a more needed message to this pessi- mistic generation. Eonsard lived a happy, hopeful life, and the peace- ful current of his declining years was crowned with the " honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," that should accompany it, and with a peaceful and holy death (December 27, 1585). A hopeful, healthy joy of life, MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 31 rarely crossed by a querulous cloud, remained with him, as with Goethe, to the end. Just so far as this temper has prevailed in it, French literature has been strong and helpful. Eonsard did more than any one man to form the literary language of France. It was his humanism, corrected, modified, and then ignored by Malherbe, that dominated the age of Louis XIV. , though it was reserved for our own to restore to him his long neglected honor. " The classical spirit was formed in accord with him, without him, and appar- ently in opposition to him. He had it, he did not inspire it. He is the final type of it, and he is not its founder ; he is its first date, and he is not its source. But that is no fault of his. " ^ In the drama the Pleiad, represented by Jodelle (1532-1573), was less original and more classical in tone. His " Cleopatra " is the first " regular " tragedy, the first that answers to the distorted conception he had formed of the Aristotelian unities, and his " Eugene " is the first " regular " comedy. Both were studied, as was all his work, more from the Latin than from the Greek ; but, defective if not mistaken as was his critical conception, his ideas were so in accord with the French spirit on its good and its weak side, that they were industriously imitated, till at the close of the century (1599) Alexander Hardy began the rehabilitation of the national drama at the Hotel de Bourgogne, till then still occupied by the mysteries of the Confraternity of the Passion. The first noteworthy prose work of the sixteenth century, the " Memoirs " of Philippe de Commynes (1445-1511), belongs rather to the fifteenth; but as they were not published till 1524, his effect on the 1 FagiiBt, Seizicme sibcle, 287. 32 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. literature of the time must be considered v/ith that of the men of the early French renaissance. What strikes one most in the man's writing, as in his life, is his practical and modern common-sense. For the knight-errantry of Froissart he substitutes a diplo- matic shrewdness and a wide curiosity that always fol- lows the what with the why. Successively the servant of Charles the Bold, of Louis XL, and of Charles VIIL, he guarded beneath his diplomacy the naive faith of a man whose own experience is full of riddles that some sort of providence alone is able to solve ; but he joins to this an equally naive belief in shrewdness and a distrust of over-boldness in the affairs of the world. This undogmatic religiosity is a modern trait; so, too, is his curiosity, his democratic sympathies, and the natural restraint of his narrative that rarely passes beyond the limits of his immediate observa- tion. Though himself little touched by the renais- sance, his attitude toward the Church ranks him among the ancestors of the humanists, of whom in- deed there is a long line reaching far back into the thirteenth century. On the other hand, Calvin (1509-1564) represented the new spirit of intransigent reform, the attempted restoration of primitive Christianity. Trained both for theology and law, he joined in after life the doctor to the lawgiver, and became at once the Moses and the Aaron of the chosen people who left the flesh-pots of their French bondage to gather in the Genevan Canaan. With his teaching we have nothing to do here save to note its revolt against medievalism ; but the sober logic and classical polish of his style give him a very high place — if we regard form alone, the highest place — among the prose writers of his century. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 33 It is sober sense enforced with a lapidarian clearness and precision, and therefore lacking somewhat in sym- pathy and imagination, bent on commanding rather than winning assent, on being understood rather than on being loved ; here, too, " the style is the man, " — stern, imperious, lofty, sincere, and sombre,-^ at once borne up and borne down by the all-pervading sense of the immanence of deity. But in the less competent hands of his imitators and successors his style inevi- tably degenerated to pedantic heaviness, though not until it had shown the unguessed powers of French for accurate exposition and subtle disputation. But this century of renascence was distinguished no less and characterized much better by Eabelais, a remarkably keen and learned man, who spent his life in ridiculing with the most bitter satire what he still professed to believe. In his career, as in his work, there appears at first sight a constant vein of insincerity, a Mephistophelian spirit that sees the weak, the laughable, the ridiculous side of that which it holds dearest and holiest ; but when work and life are more closely examined, Eabelais' spirit seems rather that of a profound philosopher who discerns the essential antinomy in all apprehension of human truth, so that he rises far above the mere mockery of Lucian or the diabolic ferocity of Swift. Traces of ,the same philosophic attitude can be found in Reuchlin, in Erasmus, and in other doctors of the Reformation, more learned than bold; but it is in France that this 1 He tries occasionally to lighten his sermons with some metaphor from common life or even with vulgar dialect; but it is heavj- fooling, and one feels that he shakes with awkward reluctance tliis caj) and bells. See for instances, as well as for a keen study of Calvin's doc- trine, Faguet, Seizicme siccle, 127-197, and especially 192-193. 3 34 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. spirit can be most frequently and constantly noted, and the unchallenged leader of its representatives is Francois Eabelais (1495-1553), who is the most com- plete reflection of the too sanguine hopes of the pagan renaissance, of its serious aspirations, its over-hasty generalizations, and its joy of life. Eabelais' satire is put into the form of a burlesque romance of adventures ; but the form is a very thin disguise, and the thread of the narrative is of the slen- derest. Throughout, his real interest is in destructive criticism of the political and social conditions of his time. His mind became constructive only when stirred by the worthlessness of mediaeval education or by the abuses of decaying monasticism. The five books 1 of his great satire, which differ sufficiently from one another to be treated as separate works, appeared at various times between 1532 and 1564, when Eabe- lais had already been eleven years dead, and beyond the reach both of the just indignation and of the petty partisan hate that had pursued him through all his mature years. The first book bears the title " G-ar- gantua, " the others " Pantagruel ; " and it is these that merit both the greatest admiration and the greatest reprobation. They are probably more studied to-day than any other work of the time. They are more witty, more caustic, more yirofoundly skeptical, more unscrupulous, and more unclean than any other book of that age. Indeed their coarseness is perhaps un- paralleled in literature, and serves to hide both the avithor's wit and his political and pedagogic wisdom. That he should have begun life as a monk, while only ^ Erunetiere, Lanson, and other critics hold tliat the fifth book is a Ilugueuot pamphlet of another man and time, though posthumous pajMirs of Rabelais were used in its composition. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 35 his voluntary resignation prevented his ending it as a curate, illustrates the condition of the Church. In the interval between his leaving the Franciscan clois- ter of Fontenay le Conte and his entry into the pres- bytery of Meudon, he had been a Benedictine canon, a wandering scholar, a student of medicine, a scien- tist, physician to a diplomatic ambassador, and a voluntary exile. Kabelais' book as a whole plays less part in litera- ture than some of the characters in it. Gargantua, the giant father of Pantagruel, was generally recog- nized as typical of the good-humored, easy-going roy- alty of Francis I. Panurge, the companion and servant of Pantagruel, and more interesting than his master, embodies, as Saintsbury says, " a somewhat diseased intellectual refinement, and the absence of morality in the wide Aristotelian sense, with the presence of almost all other good qualities. " " He is the principal triumph of Eabelais' character-drawing, and the most original, as well as the most puzzling, figure in tlie book. A coward, a drunkard, a lecher, a spiteful trickster, a spendthrift, but all the while infinitely amusing. " ^ Opposed to him is the lusty animalism of Friar John, whose famous Abbey of Thelema, with its hedonistic motto, " Do what thou wilt, " represents Eabelais' ideal of the " natural life," and the negation of all the restraints, moral and social, that he had learned to know and to hate in his monastic experi- ence. A considerable part of the whole is occupied with Panurge 's debate with himself and with Pan- tagruel as to whether he shall marry, his deliciously humorous recourse to all manner of authorities on ^ Short History of French Literature, p. 186. Encyc. Brit., art. Rabelais, vol. xx. p. 196. 36 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. this matter of universal interest, and his final deter- mination to consult the oracle of the " Dive Bouteille, " w^liich, after various adventures that offer scope to un- bridled satire, finally gives the truly oracular response, " Trinq " (drink), as the solution of this and all other riddles of earth. Of the serious parts of Eabelais' work the best are probably the scattered chapters on the education of Pantagruel, which show great originality and force, and a remarkable anticipation of the modern scientific spirit. But usually, however earnestly Eabelais may feel, his zealous optimism will find some grotesque mask for its expression. Of this comic vein the most striking feature is the unique and astounding vocabu- lary. He will pile up huge lists of cooks or of fan- tastic meats, of dances and of games, or he will take some noun and heap around it all conceivable adjec- tives, sometimes arraying them by the hundreds in columns.^ The reader is led through as devious paths as those of Tristram Shandy's autobiography. There is a psychological analysis of wonderful keenness, a profusion of learning, a carnival of wit and imagina- tion, the loftiest thoughts and the vilest fancies, all woven together into a mighty maze by " pantagruel- ism, " — a militant faith in nature and instinct that by its robust humor and the solvent of its destructive satire becomes the extreme type of the pagan phase of the renaissance, the source of the eighteenth-century ethics and of modern French realism. For independence of all ascetic restraint is Eabelais' philosophy of life, as it had been that of Jean de Meung, and was to be that of Voltaire. But its in- 1 Books i. 22, v. 3.3, bis. Book iii. 26 has a list of 157 adjectives, aud iii. 38 a list of 210. MIDDLE A.GE AND RENASCENCE. 37 consistency with niediteval Christianity seems more obvious to us than it did to him, who remained all his life nominally and doubtless sincerely a Catholic, though to him the yoke was certainly lighter than to most who make a Christian profession. Still there is nothing authentic in his work that can be construed into a direct attack on the faith. His position was like that of Erasmus. He was irreverent at times ; but those who find an evidence of infidelity in this, or in his monumental filthiness of speech, are usually unacquainted with the common language of his con- temporaries and predecessors of the ages of faith. Ex- perience has shown that these things are less matters of morality than of taste and feeling, of age and race. Rabelais had more wit than the rest, and so did better what many tried to do. They have sunk in their mire to oblivion, but the impurity of Rabelais is like an unclean insect wrapped in amber. He must be judged by his time; and even at his coarsest it is always honest fun that inspires his rollicking laugh, never the prurient toying with voluptuousness and the sniggering of the eighteenth-century professors of the science of erotics. The world-wisdom of Rabelais was much that of Goethe. Both were men of vast learning. Goethe had a wider and more delicate culture. Rabelais had, what Goethe greatly lacked, a deeper humor than any other Frenchman, and one of the richest the world has ever known. So the expression of their common thouglit is radically different; but both believed in the worth of life, and that that worth could be realized and en- hanced by the freest development of the whole nature of man, unhampered by ascetic or other artificial tram- mels in ethics or philosophy. Yet it is the fate of the 38 MODERN FKENCH LITERATUEE. humorist that his humor should mask his more serious thought ; and Eabelais, while he has been admired by many and imitated by a few, has not had the in- fluence on the thought or the writing of later genera- tions that might have been anticipated from his great genius. But while Rabelais was thus mocking the inconsis- tent follies of mankind, a group of talented men whom the open-hearted hospitality of Marguerite (1492-1549) had gathered at her court, was developing, by the introduction of tragic sympathy and artistic tinish, the traditions of the prose fabliaux so well inaugurated in the " Cent nouvelles nouvelles. " ^ The year 1558 was made memorable by the publication of the " Hep- tameron, " which sprang from the immediate circle of that royal lady, and by the " Joyeux devis " of Des Periers, the only frank skeptic of his time, whose " Cymbalum mundi " earned him a persecution that drove him at last to suicide (1544). His work hardly marks an advance, except in style, on De la Salle. The anecdotes are short, crisp, witty, but with no trace of growing refinement or culture. The seventy- two tales of the " Heptameron, " on the other hand, are epoch-making in the aesthetics of prose fiction, because they join to the joy of life that pulses with healthy vigor through all the early pagan renaissance, a refine- ment nf manners and morals and a grace of conception that belongs rather to the humanists, and a delicacy of observation and description that is peculiarly its own. Meantime the traditions of Eabelais were continued in the latter half of the century by the " Apologie pour ^ Nicolas de Troyes and Noel da Fail are still earlier imitators of De la Salle, but iutrinsically of less importance. MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 39 Ht^rodote " of the scholarly Henri Estienne, ^ a very amusing attack on the clergy of the time that did much to aid in fixing the classical language of the next century. Then, as a belated fruit of this epoch, there appeared, in 1610, Beroald de Verville's " Moyen de parvenir, " a curious mixture of wit, learning, and vul- garity, with a plenteous store of anecdotes that might have furnished him with another " Cent nouvelles " if he had not preferred to strew them in the freakish dialogue of his mad fratrasie. Between him and Des P^riers, both in style and time, is the Abbd de Bran- tome (1540-1614), ostensibly a writer of contemporary biography, but really a laughing collector of piquant and scandalous stories of the dames de par le monde, told with great gusto and considerable power of char- acter painting, so that his works are reprinted and still read. Prose satire first at this period became an important political weapon in the " Mdnippde," that several lib- eral and patriotic Catholics directed against the League and its desperate defence of Paris in 1593 ; while in his " Essays " Montaigne had already created a new type of prose writing that has gained little at the hands of his successors, for the inventor of the essay is still the most popular essayist. The exuberant hopes of the pagan renaissance, as they appeared in the joyous nature-worship of Ptabelais, had not been fulfilled, and to that period of generous expansion there had succeeded a reaction to easy egoism and unaggressive skepticism. This is the temper in 1 Otherwise knoMTi as Henry Stephens, from his association with the English reformers in 1550. He was the most illustrions of a fa- mous family of French scholars and printers. See Encyc. Brit., xxii. 534 sqq. 40 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE, V/^liich Montaigne chooses the devices "What do I know ? " and " What does it matter ? " He had been a boy of scholarly and sedentary tastes, and carefully trained in the classics. His manhood, though un- eventful, was such as to bring him in contact with all phases of life ; and his ripe experience has as its fruit the " Essays," of which two books appeared in 1580, and the more important third book in 1588. No French work has exercised so great and lasting an inllu- ence on the writing and thought of the world. ^ Mon- taigne here inaugurates the literature of the public confessional, of loquacious egotism. His " Essays " are indeed, as he says, " a book of good faith. " He takes us into his confidence, and rambles on in delicious and not unmethodical desultoriness. The essays sprang, no doubt, from such note-books as scholarly men used to keep in that age, and gradually rounded themselves into their present form from a few connected thoughts. In the last series, however, there is far more conscious composition, and these essays are nearly four times as long as the earlier ones. The subjects are very varied, and the titles are often mere pegs to hang ideas upon. There is not much about Virgil nor even about Latin poetry in the essay on the " Verses of Virgil, " and there is still less about coaches in " Des Coches. " Nowhere is there any trace of searching for subject or effect. He notes what comes into his mind, and as it comes ; he tells us what he thinks abovit what happens to interest him. His work has all the charm of nature and not a little of hidden art. 2 ^ Montesquieu's " Spirit of Laws " had more iiiflnence on politics, and Rousseau's novels on tlie feelings and life of two generations. 2 Montaigne was translated into English hy Florio in time to be used by Shakspere, and Florio has liad many and distinguished sue- MIDDLE AGE AND RENASCENCE. 41 In his style and vocabulaiy Montaigne profited by Eonsard, but he was no blind follower. He saw the danger of indiscriminate innovation. " Keen minds " he says, " bring no new words into the language, but with a cautious ingenuity they apply to it unaccus- tomed mutations. And, " he adds in words that might apply as well to the symbolists of our day as to the rhetoriqueurs of his own, " how little it is in the power of all to do this appears in very many French writers of this century. They are bold enough and disdain to follow the beaten track ; but lack of invention and of discretion ruins them. Their work reveals only a wretched affectation of singularity, with cold and al)surd metaphors that amuse rather than elevate their subject. If only such men can gorge themselves with what is novel, they are indifferent to what is effective. To seize the new they will abandon the usual, which is often the stronger and the more vigorous. " It cannot be denied that Montaigne's average prose is better than the average prose of Eonsard, and his best is almost the best that France has to show. Naturally, therefore, it was the subject of narrow criti- cism by Malherbe and the early Academicians. But while Balzac and Vaugelas fettered and puttered, and while Boileau taught the French muse to pick her cautious way along the strait and narrow path of his coldly objective classicism, while the Pleiad was discredited and Eonsard forgotten save by La Bruy^re, the naturalists of the sixteenth century lived stubbornly on. Eabelais and Montaigne were still cessors. On Montaifijne tliere is an essay in Emerson's " Representative Men" and two excellent books by Paul Stapfer, — " Montaigne," in the Grands €crivains fran^ais, and " LaFaraille et les amis de Montaigne." 42 MODEKN FRENCH LITEKATITRE. widely read, and their unfettered independence did much to shorten the triumph of literary absolutism, just as the tendency of their thought contributed to shorten the reign of political tyranny. It was not until wise rules had been broken together with cramp- ing fetters by the Eomantic revolt that Eonsard was restored to honor by precisely that movement in French literature with which he has least in common ; but no revolution of taste or criticism has ever shaken the universal recognition of the greatness of Eabelais and Montaigne. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 43 CHAPTEK II. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. ^ " At last Malherbe came. " With these words or this thought it has been customary, ever since Boileau's time, to begin the study of the chissical century of French literature. According to him, Malherbe was first in France to introduce a correct cadence into prosody. He first " taught the force of a rightly placed word, and brought back the muse to the rules of duty. " He improved the language so that " it offered nothing rude to the cultured ear ; " he banished en- Jamhemcnt, or the interlocking of verses, and " taught stanzas to close with grace. " ^ This appreciation by one mediocre artisan in verse of the merits of another, if perhaps not altogether " false in fact and imbecile in criticism, " is certainly a great exaggeration ; but it represents fairly enough the sentiment of the age of 1 A considerable part of this chapter appeared in " The Sewanee Review," November, 1894. I have found helpful criticism for the period covered by this chapter in Faguet, xvii. siecle ; Brunetiere, Etudes critiques and Evolution des genres ; Le Breton, Le Roman au xvii. siecle ; Morillot, Le Roman en France ; and Lanson, Litte'rature fran^aise. 2 Malherbe, b. 1556, d. 1628. Boileau's lines paraphrased above are : — Enfin Malherbe vint, et le premier en France, Fit sentir dans les vers une juste cadence, D'un mot mis a sa place enseigna le pouvoir, Et ri'duisit la muse aux regies du devoir. Par ce sage ^crivain la langue pr^par^e N'offrit plus rien de rude a I'oreille epurc^e. 44 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. Louis XIV., while the fateful error it involved was portentous to French lyric poetry for more than two centuries of pseudo-classical artificiality and stagna- tion. The qualities on which Boileau insists are met- rical polish, meticulous accuracy in rhymes, greater diligence in the rhetorical arrangement, and a more anxious care in the choice of words, the whole joining in what might be justly described as a zealous and un- tiring pursuit of the commonplace. As might be an- ticipated, then, Malherbe will never shock, but he will never thrill. There is no flash of genius in the poems, and, so far as can be seen, there was none in the man. Why, then, were these qualities, that fifty years before would not have raised a poet al)ove name- less mediocrity, capable of making a leader in 1600? What peculiar conjuncture made readers turn from the kernel to the husk ? What suffered the genius of Edgnier to be a voice crying in the wilderness, while a vastly inferior poet became the prophet of successive generations till the Eevolution came to make all things new ? To understand this aberration of esthetic taste we must look beyond literature to the political and religious world. The renaissance had been a period of unrest, of reaching out in untried directions of ten- tative effort, of a confident iconoclasm, too, and of strongly developed individualism. This is the spirit of the earlier half of the sixteenth century. Then follows a growing lack of faith in the new learning as a panacea for human ills; but as yet there is no loss of individuality. Each writer strikes out on his own line, cares little for precedent or law in language or metre, so that he can say what he has in liim to say. Originality is more prized than correct diction, THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 45 strenrftli than polish. So while these men left admi- rable work beliind them, each writer's legacy to the world was stamped with a singularity that made it little adapted to form a school or train a succession. The renaissance had sacriiiced the old principle of authority to freedom of inquiry in many departments of intellectual and ethical life. In literature this free- dom resulted in a division of energy, remarkable in its immediate results, but without promise of healthy development and continuous growth. By the end of the sixteenth century the reaction came. The wars of the League had been a cruel de- ception to the high-strung hopes of a new era of peace and good-will, the sphere of human knowledge had been widened beyond the hope of individual grasp, and the limitation of the mind was brought home to it with crushing weight. The intellectual lassitude that resulted found its expression in criticism rather than in fresh creation. Save Eegnier, who appears as one born out of due time, the first half of the seven- teenth century shows no great lyric or epic poet ; and when at last La Fontaine appears, he is a very enfant terrible to his contemporary critics, who praise his defects and bear with his virtues. In prose, too, the best work is critical and analytic. The drama, because more directly in touch with the people, preserved a more independent life, yielding least and latest. But Malherbe expressed the state of mind of the cultured men of the time ; he is the herald of what is typical in the classical school, the " Age of Louis XIV. " His poetry was an art ; it could be learned, weighed, meas- ured. You could calculate the percentages of imperfect or cognate rhymes, of incorrect verses, of words and phrases that presumed to stir the mind from a becom- 46 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. ing balance of calm repose. This age understood this poetry ; but when it saw these very qualities trans- fused by the fire of Eonsard's genius, who had done all that was ever claimed for his pedantic successor, tliat was an individuality that defied mechanical criti- cism, and wearied minds already predisposed to make great sacrifices for order and propriety in the state, and in literature also. This temper of mind, that prefers order and rule to originality and individual- ism, begins to dominate the literature of France with Malherbe ; and it exercised an almost undisputed authority for good and ill till the Eomantic revolt in the third decade of our century. " The rule of rules becomes to resemble one another. " So the lyric innovations of the Pleiad were obscured, and its pedantry superseded by a studied rhetorical impersonality, against which Edgnier fought a losing fight, though his satires are among the most vigorous that French literature has to show, and contain a powerful attack on Malherbe and the upas-tree of his overweening criticism, while several of his short poems are delightful in their pathos or graceful wit Malherbe's merit, on the other hand, is almost wholly formal. He crystallized the language into its classical form. He strove to the best of his ability to prune its unfruitful shoots without impoverishing its vital force, and in this effort he ranked logical clearness above all other qualities. Thus he sacrificed the lyric and Italian element in the Pleiad to eloquence. He aimed to give to the luxuriant but irregular phraseology and prosody of his predecessors artistic restraints that could not fail to further the development of literary form, though Malherbe's worth appears rather in the work of his successors than in his own. Indeed, he wrote THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 47 very little, for the most part occasional verses addressed tu tiie court or aristocracy ; but it is hard to read that little without weariness at a mediocrity whose great fault is that it has not virility enough to err. Per- sonally his biographer and pupil, Kacan, shows him as a man of petty and presumptuous arrogance, — a quality illustrated by his attitude toward Eonsard, whom he first plundered of all that he was capable of valuing and then mocked with systematic depreciation. The spark that helps some of his verses, for instance the " Ode of Consolation, " to an asthmatic life is Eonsard 's ; the spirit that insists on rhyming for eye as well as ear, that forbids the linking of words etymologically connected or of proper nouns, that seeks curiously, as his biographer tells us, " for rare and sterile rhymes, " — that spirit is all his own. And yet perhaps this very exaggeration of correctness was a necessary protest against the careless negligence of genius, and an essen- tial prelude to the more studied harmonies and the more artistic liberties of the great poets of our own century. Without Malherbe we can conceive perhaps of Verlaine, but hardly of Lamartine, of Hugo, or of Leconte de Lisle. Malherbe 's " Art of Poetry," like that of the " Meis- tersinger " in Germany, was something that could be taught on a tally -board; and he had worthy disciples, artisans in verse such as Maynard, Eacan, with some true poetic gift and a more genuine appreciation of nature, Voiture, a graceful but " idle singer of an empty day, " the anacreontic Saint-Amant, and others whose names are shadows. All of these suffered from the artificial conceits that the literary lights of the Hotel Eambouillet had brought into fashion. But the muse that had been thus " brought back to the 48 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. rules of duty " was presently to be drilled in them by a master of deportment more strict than Malherbe had ever been. This man who did most to clip the wings of the French Pegasus was Boileau (16o6-1711), a pedantic Parisian bourgeois, whose critical olitcr dicta were long regarded as sacred by Prench critics and French schoolmasters. He was fairly acquainted with Latin, and his lack of familiarity with the Greek poets may be excused by his obvious inability to ajjpre- ciate them ; though in the curious controversy between the Ancients and Moderns that marked the close of the century in France, and found its echo in the pamphlet warfare of Bentley and Temple in England, he loudly proclaimed the .superiority of the Ancients, and ranged himself with the Cartesians in opposition to the renaissance spirit. The order and self-restraint of the classical aesthetics attracted his scientific mind ; but he never thoroughly grasped the fundamental principles of Greek literary art, and his indifference to the contemporary literatures of other countries was par- alleled only by his ignorance of the earlier writers of his own. He did not conceive his critical canons as relative to his time and his environment, but as abso- lute for all times and all races, and hence he felt that he could neglect the past without loss. Still, if Pioileau lacked a pure and catholic taste, he had much honest and loyal though stubborn and rough good sense, which he savored with a little epicurean real- ism that made his destructive criticism of \\\s, iirecieux contemporaries usually just, though it may have been unnecessary. Especially should one hold in grateful remembrance the quietus given to the ghost of chival- rous romance by his " Dialogue sur les h^ros, " though there had not been much real life in that monstrosity THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 49 since the " Eoman comique " of Scarron. He did in- deed guide the next generation to a true if narrow naturalism ; and tliough he formulated rather than inspired the dramatic art of Molifere and Eacine, he did much to direct their talent as well as that of La Fontaine to its most fruitful channels. He was the dogmatist of the school of 1660 ; and it was his sound common-sense, more perhaps than any other one thing, that spread and prolonged its influence. The positive effect of Boileau's criticism was, how- ever, deadening and narrowing. ^ His rationalistic and Cartesian adaptation of Horace's " Ars poetica " proclaimed with sufficient talent to persuade a degen- erating taste that poetry was artificially raised to a science. He imposed upon many men of no genius, and perhaps stifled the genius of some ; his only great scholar who gained by the teaching was Racine. For his talent could profit by instructions that would have trammelled Corneille and amused Molifere. A few lines from Boileau's " Art of Poetry " will serve to suggest his spirit. In tragedy it is essential, he says, — Qu'en un lieu, qu'en uii jour, un seul fait accompli Tienne jusqu'a la fin le theatre rempli. And then it must not have a Christian basis, for De la foi d'un chrctien les mysteres terribles D'ornements egayes ne sout pas susceptibles. Even in comedy we must have no naturalistic studies. This is to his mind the great error of Molifere, who ^ Boileau's descriptive verses sut^gest to Lanson (p. 483) an " un- sentimeutal Coppee." Sainte-Beuve finds in his poems courage and audacity, but never truth. Cp. " Niueteeuth Century," December, ISSl. 50 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Peut-etre de son art eut reinporte le prix Si, luoins ami du peuple, en ses doctes peintixres li n'eut pas fait souvent grimacer ses figures. Eatlier than study the vulgar foibles of mankind, we should " imitons de Marot I'dlegant badinage," for ele- gance of language is a prime and universal necessity : Sans la langiie, en un ni(jt, I'auteur le plus divin Est toujours, (|Uoie|u'il lasse, un niecbant ecrivain. And if you would be a good writer of alexandrines, your main care should be Que toujours dans vos vers le sens coupant les mots Suspende riieuuhticlie, en martj^ue le repos. Now, Boileau's postulate was sound enough. " Beauty is truth, and truth is nature. " Hence let nature be the sole study. " Tout doit tendre au bon sens, " — everything must tend to sober common-sense ; there should be no vagaries of genius. And in all this Boileau was perfectly sincere ; only to him " nature " was a very narrow segment of the sphere seen throuoh glasses that l)oth colored and distorted it. His " nature " is only wliat is typical, universal ; and his method of attaining it is imitation of classical models and a careful distinction of the classical genres. He applied to form the same principles as to substance. Here, too, he would have no freaks, and novelty was condemned without a hearing. Techni(pie to I'oilcau is second, and hardly second, to inspiration ; and since formal technique tends to stifle inspiration, Boileau's teaching was progressively deadening to the succeeding generations. As different from Boileau as a winding woodland stream from a well-kept canal is La Fontaine, a true THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 51 and naturalistic poet, who calmly ignored the tradi- tional rules of his art and won the hearts of critics who shook their heads. It was imx^ossible to deny his wit and winning grace ; and the unambitious fable or tale in which he clothed them seemed to harbor a less dangerous license than more serious efforts would have done. The court and its critics could pardon the frailty of a sylvan muse, when they w^ould have been pitiless to an error of Melpomene. So La Fontaine preserved and handed down the tradition of metrical liberty to the Romantic poets of 1830. La Fontaine's first work of importance, the first book of his " Contes," dates from 1664 and his forty- third year. Already he had become socially popular, and had been intimately associated with Boileau, Moli6re, and Piacine. More " Contes " (1 666) were followed by " Fables " (1668) ; and the year 1671 shows his versatile genius as editor of a volume of mystically religious verse, as author of "Contes," whose humor was very unrestrained, and of " Fables, " whose equal humor was quite without this gallic spice. These seven years were the best fruitage of his long, easy, and irresponsible life. For La Fontaine seems never to have quite outlived the carelessness of childhood, — a trait that impressed all his friends, and is reflected in the words with which Louis licensed his election to the Academy (1683) : " II a promis d'etre sage. " After this he wrote only " Fables. " His friends took care of him when his wife declined the burden. He died, after a tardy conversion to the religiosity that the aged Louis had made popular, in 1695. Endless anec- dotes tell of his guileless simplicity and absent- mindedness. His intimates called him the " good fellow. " Of them all Moli^re alone, perhaps, justly 52 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. appreciated his literary importance. " Our wits labor in vain; they will not outlive the honhonime," he said when once he overheard Boileau and Eacine chaffing their common friend. And he was right, for he has always been more read than either of them ; and as time goes on, it is felt that he was of greater service than they, — -a consummation doubtless very far from the dreams of either the critic or the tragedian. The " Fables " and the " Contes " have exercised a deep and permanent influence both on French litera- ture and on our own. La Fontaine's miscellaneous work, ^ though often good, is less individual and little read. His " Contes " are essentially fabliaux devel- oped by a studied prosody and delicate feeling for style, coupled with a skill in narration that is the height of art in its apparent ease and naturalness. He is the true continuator of De la Salle, of Des P^'iers, and of Marguerite. Now, neither he, nor they, nor their Italian fellows, recognized what we to-day hold to be fundamental conventions of decency. Their stories deal very largely with subjects not now admitted to polite literary circles, but then regarded as not unbecoming even by such irreproachable ladies as Madame de Sdvignd. The same thing is observable in English literature. If these " Contes " are to be read at all, it must be in the simple, naive spirit in which they were written. There is no sniggering about them, no conscious pandering to vice. They represent a phase in the development of European morals, which we may describe as the persistence of the hedon- 1 Hemon, (Euvres diverges de la Fontaine, gives the ])est of these, notably the "Voyage on Limousin" and tlio jirose version of " Psyclie," tliat ftn- its charming grace of style may ranii. with the best prose of Fenelon and Madame de Sevigne. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 53 istic revolt of the renais.sance between the old faith and the new Cartesian philosophy. ^ It is no longer the lusty joy of life that pulsed in Boccaccio and in Rabe- lais, with their eager love of sense and beauty after centuries of ascetic repression, nor yet the " subtle mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appe- tite, " that we find in Marguerite and Eonsard. The renaissance was no longer a revolutionary force, and what was a passionate cult to Boccaccio becomes in La Fontaine the elfish naturalism of a satyr child. Eead in the spirit of the writer, the " Contes " are charming ; read in the spirit of modern prudery, they are earthly and sensual. Of course, if we choose, we may clasp our hands with the Pharisee and thank God we are not as these men were, or we may fix the difference with- out drawing the comparison. We have no right to judge the work of one century by the moral standards of another. There is no need of any such reserve, however, when we turn to the " Fables. " They were, are, and always will be, wholly delightful in the graceful liveliness of their narration, in the restrained naturalism of their art and the homely worldly wisdom of their unobtru- sive moral. One knows not whether to admire more the varied mastery of the form, the accurate analysis and observation of human nature, or the boldness with which, in the later books, he uses the fable as a cover for political teaching that is sometimes startlingly radical. As Saintsbury has gracefully said : " The child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consum- mate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and ^ 1 Cp. Lanson, p. 552. 54 MODEEN FRENCH LITEKATUEE. life which it conveys. " Thus, in a double sense, these " Fables " are not of one age, but for all ages, and for all men, except it be poets of the type of Lamartine, who could discern only " limping, disjointed, unequal verses, without symmetry either in the ear or on the page," in stanzas where others find a most original and studied harmony. ^ The " Fables " of La Fontaine are familiar to every French school-boy, acquaintance with his work is pre- sumed in all cultivated society, turns of expression and phrases taken from them fall as naturally from the lips and pens of educated Frenchmen as biblical phrases did, and perhaps still do, from New England Puritans. The universal acquaintance with his work influenced and aided the emancipation of poetry by the school of 1830, especially among those who still did homage to Boileau with their lips though their hearts were elsewhere. For La Fontaine is very great, per- haps supreme ; but it is in a kind of poetry that is not great. Therefore, though he is the best fabulist and best story-teller that is known to French literature, he is not a great poet. But he is the one poet of his century whose poetry is still generally read and en- joyed, while Boileau's verses are studied rather as rhetorical models and as essays in criticism. It was natural that the prose of the early part of the seventeenth century should suffer less from artificiality than lyric poetry, the most sensitive of all literary forms ; but it too felt the reaction, and there is nothing to recall the verve of llabelais, the force of Montaigne, or the grace of Marguerite, in the work 1 Rousseau and his age cared too iiincli for their " state of nature" to care for La Fontaine, hut Voltaire toward the close of his life re- gretted the strictures of his youth. See liis letter to Chainfort. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 55 of the first third of the century. In fiction the changed spirit shows itself in the influence of the Italian Pas- torals, and in imitations of those Spanish followers of Gongora who were the chief instigators throughout Europe of the style known to English students as Euphuism. This studied ati'ectation showed itself in France, as elsewhere, chiefiy in chivalrous romances. The immediate model was the Spanish " Amadis," that had been translated late in the sixteenth century. Hence these novels will usually be named, at least by readers of Don Quixote, with a certain mocking shrug. The best of them is D'Urfd's " Astrt^e, " whose chilly heroine tells of the combat in her soul between love and reason, of which the linked sweetness is prolonged through some five thousand pages, during which her love-sick Celadon learns to know himself sufficiently to discern that a pastoral lover " is no longer man, for he has cast off all wit and judgment. " It is but just to say that Celadon's foil, the inconstant shepherd Hylas, is not without humor, and has touches of quite modern hlague. " Astrde " was a pastoral ; the " Grand Cyrus" and " Cldlie " of the Scuderys pictured modern society under the thin disguise of heroic romance. Yet it is only with amused curiosity that one notes to-day the ponderous apparatus of their elaborate allegory, or glances at the explanatory map of " Ten- derland, " with its rivers of Esteem, Gratitude, and Inclination, its villages of Attention, Verses, and Epistles, its lake of Indifference, and its seas of Enmity and Danger. In their day D'Urf^ and the Scuddrys, with other similar though less talented novelists,^ were immensely popular, and that among the most cultured and aris- 1 E. g., La Calprenede, Camus, aud Gomberville. 56 MODEltN FEENCII LITERATURE. tocratic class. Indeed, the picture of society that " Astr^e " painted was the inspiring cause of the first Parisian salon, which met at the Hotel Eambouillet and took its name from its hostess. The raison d'etre of this coterie, like that of Ct^ladon and his mistress, was the attrition of witty conversation in an exclusive society. But narrow as this circle was, both in its principles and its numbers, it exercised a very impor- tant influence on the whole classical period, for by its imnatural straining after rare and curious conceits, it interrupted the development of a simple and direct style. Thus it fostered an artificiality that, in spite of Molifere's satire, was not wholly banished from French literature till the rise of the liomantic School. But so far as the pastoral or heroic romance was con- cerned, if the disease was acute the remedy was speedy. The analogy of other literatures would lead us to expect a reaction from over-strained sentiment to coarse natu- ralism. Of tliis Sorel's " Francion " had given a warning sign as early as 1622, and the old romances received their couj^ de grace in Scarron's " Roman comique " (1651), that drew its inspiration from Rabelais and the Spanish novela picaresca, and found its more artistic sequel in Le Sage's " Gil Bias. " ^ A more independent social study that shows the influence of the realistic school of 1660 is Furetifere's " Roman bourgeois " (1666), a collection of " human documents " for middle-class Parisian life. Meantime the same careful ol)servation was being directed to the study of individual character by Madame de Lafayette, who, in " Mile, de Montpensier, " had discovered that marriage 1 The corresponding English movement, begun Ijy Defoe and con- tinued by Smollett, owes much to both Spanish and French picaroon romancers. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 57 was as appropriate as courtship for artistic treatment, and furnished in her exquisite " Princesse de Cloves " (1678) the starting-point of the psychological novel as distinct from romance. But the critics of the time were far from appreciating the real importance of this very popular book. Indeed, just as realism was thus announcing its advent in fiction, the court coterie, attracted by La Fontaine's " Cupid and Psyche," were seized with a fancy for writing prose fables, fairy tales, of which a vast number were born to an ephemeral life during the closing decades of the century. The best in this shadowy kind is Perrault, the French god- father of " Puss-in -Boots," of " Eed Eiding-Hood, " " The Sleeping Beauty, " and " Tom Thumb. " In the next century this style was continued by Hamilton and many others, and was diverted later by Voltaire to political and philosophical purposes, and to ethical ones by Marmontel ; while the " Princesse de Clfeves " has no direct literary progeny. Outside the sphere of fiction the prose of the century opens with Jean de Balzac, a rhetorical and pains- taking continuator of Montaigne, who did much to smooth the way for the great prose writers and orators that followed. Aided by the prestige of the Hotel Eambouillet, and by the foundation of the French Academy (1634), of which he was a leading member, he set deliberately to work to be to French prose the benefactor that he conceived Malherbe to have been to its poetry ; but his work had value only as a stylistic model. Not so the limpid directness of Descartes and the supple strength of Pascal, the philosophers who illustrate this period. The former's " Discourse on Method " is the starting-point in France of a developed, scientific, argumentative style ; while his " Treatise on 58 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the Passions " is the systematic statement of the psy- chological basis of Corueille's tragedies, whose virile energy of will contrasts with the more feminine senti- ment of Eacine and the School of 1660.^ It was from Descartes as much as from Balzac that Pascal and La Eochefoucauld learned their marvellous mastery over language. Pascal's " Penst^es, " though incomplete, are as clear as they are keen, as logical as they are charming. They combine the mathematical mind with the poet's vision, while his " Provincial Letters " against the casuistry of the Jesuits remain to this day an unmatched masterpiece of caustic irony and crush- ing contempt, clothed in a style of which one knows not whether most to admire the graceful energy or the brilliant wit. Pascal is the leader of the ascetic reac- tion against the naturalism of the sixteenth century and the facile ethics of the Jesuits, but he is also the first of French prose writers who seems thoroughly at home with his rhetorical tools. There has been gradual adaptation to new needs, but French prose has made no great advance, indeed has needed to make none, from his day to ours. After these had gone before, progress became easy in other lines. So Da Ptetz's " Conspiracy of Fiesco " marks a gain in picturesque historical description ; while his lively, keen, and piquant " Memoirs " show an unscrupulous will and a pen sliarpened by use. The worldly wisdom of his maxims yields only to the cruel temper of La llochefoucauld's cynical satire. That the underlying pessimism of these men is fairly representative of a general state of mind, is clear from the reception accorded to their work. La Eochefou- cauld, especially, marks an ethical change in the pop- 1 Cp. Lanson, p. 393. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 59 ular view of life that is an essential prelude to the iconoclastic optimism of the next century. He claims literary notice, however, not only as a representative, but as an individual. Condemned by the failure of the Fronde to retirement, he amused himself and a witty circle of friends, with the luxury of an aristo- cratic seigneur, and with " Memoirs " and " Maxims," in which he pitilessly unfolds the seamy side of life. Personally a good man, affectionate and beloved, he exhibits here the consistent and scornful pessimist ; but he is more an aristocrat than a philosopher. He cares little for system or completeness of analysis. He takes i^p, one Ijy one, such ideas as come to him, and uses them, with prudent reserves, to illustrate his theory, which is, briefly, that every virtue is a product of vices, while these are resolvable into selfishness, " in which all virtues are lost like rivers in the sea. " This conclusion does not excite his anger, but rather amuses his curiosity, and that is much the effect it seems to have had on contemporary readers. Its effect on literary form was much greater. The nature of both influences will appear better from a few cita- tions than from any brief analysis : — Vice enters into the composition of virtues just as poisons do into medicines. Prudence collects and tem- pers them, and uses them against the ills of life. People think sometimes that we hate flattery, but we hate only the way they flatter. It is not always by valor that men are valiant, nor by virtue that women are chaste. Men would not live long in society if they were not one another's dupes. . . . The world is made up of masks. Old men give good precepts to console themselves for being no longer able to give bad examples. 60 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Our passions are the only orators that alwaj^s convince. If we resist our passions, it is rather by their weakness than by our strength. We all have strength enough to bear the ills of others. If we had no pride, we should not complain that others had it. We easily forget our faults when no one else knows them. . . . We try to be proud of the faults that we do not wish to forget. We promise according to our hopes ; we keep according to our fears. We pardon those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore. The spirit that animates these " Maxims " can be traced in Voltaire, in Stendhal, and most clearly in the French cynic, Chamfort, and his greater succes- sor, the German Schopenhauer. But their value as literature was much greater and wider ; for it should be clear, even from what has been cited, that in these " distilled thoughts " French prose style has attained a pregnant terseness comparable only to the best verses of Corneille. As Voltaire said, the Maxims " accus- tomed men to think and to express their thoughts with a lively, precise, delicate turn ;" and this epi- grammatic quality has ever since been a characteristic of the best writers of France. But with all this progress in various directions French prose still lacked its La Fontaine, its easy, gi'aceful raconteur. This last step was taken in the letters of Madame de Sdvigne (1626-1696), most charming of all correspondents. There are some three thousand of her letters, addressed for the most part to her rather unsympathetic daughter Madame de Griguon, and to her gay cousin, Bussy-Eabutin, author THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 61 of the amusing but scandalous " Histoire amoureuse des Gaules. " In her youuoer days she had been an assid- uous frequenter of the Hotel Eambouillet, but she was shrewd enough not to fall into the vagaries that made its blue-stockings the just butt of Molifere. Married in 1644, she was left a widow in 1651 with a son and a daughter, and after three years of retirement, re- turned to Paris in 1654, to be a literary leader there for nearly forty years. It is not, however, till after the marriage of her daughter, in 1669, that the corre- spondence begins to flow freely with its inexhaustible stream of court news and town talk, varied with bril- liant reportorial sketches of the baths of Vichy. The succession*of letters is interrupted only by rare visits to her daughter, and continues till her death. With the most charming naturalness she " lets her pen trot, bridle on the neck, " " diverting herself as much in a chat with her as she labors with other correspondents. " To her daughter she gives, as she says, " the top of all the baskets, the flowers of her wit, head, eyes, pen, style ; and the rest get on as they can. " As natural as La Fontaine, she is a model correspondent, wholly free from the artificiality of Balzac, or even from that balanced poise that in another field added to the glory of Pascal, and was the chief factor in that of Bossuet. For the ultimate result of the criticism of Balzac and of the Academy, of Vaugelas, and the Hotel Eam- bouillet, is not seen in La Eochefoucauld, nor in Sdvignd, but in the elaborate though superficial periods of La Bruyfere's " Caract^res, " who at his best suggests Voltaire, and in the polished orations of the court preachers of Louis XIV. , whose ambitious energies were roused by the attitude of the king toward Galli- can liberties, and by attacks of able Protestants and Jansenists. Chief among them, and perhaps the 62 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. greatest pulpit orator of modern times, was Bossuet (1627-1704), whose " Oraisons funfebres " and histori- cal pamphlets are masterpieces of clear directness and plastic art drawn from a literary study of the Bible ; while the suppler F(^nelon (1651-1715), once tutor to the Dauphin, betrays in his style a deeper classical study. His " Teldmacpie " was long a model of style for almost all foreign students of French, and had an acceptance at home second only to that of La Fontaine's " Fables. " It is refreshing to find that Fdnelon's theory was even better than his practice ; for he felt and regretted the restraints to which he yielded, and was keen enough to pro])hesy in his " Letter to the Academy " that the only result of such trammels to literature as the pur- ists were striving to impose must be poverty ; and dry rot, such as the close of the century was to see. ^ Other great preachers of the time, whose names are not unknown even outside France, were Massillon, Bourdaloue, and Fiddlier; while allied to them in style and mode of thought is Malebranche, whose chief charm, if not his chief merit, is a language whose picturesque clearness masks the misty concep- tions that it irradiates. He marks the highest devel- opment of the classical style, and contrasts in this, as in his philosophy, with his contemporary Bayle, whose " Dictionnaire " (1697) was to the " Philosophers " of the following century at once a storehouse of most varied learning and the ironical herald of tlieir skep- tical infidelity.^ It was in prose that the language of 1600 had most needed order and reform, and it is in prose that the ^ Lanson's keen analysis of Fe'nelon's character discovers in him an egoistical reactionary, more sentimental than logical, who iiad much in common witli T?onssean, for whom lie contributed to prepare the way. 2 Cp. Brunetiere, Etudes criti(jues, iii. 182 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 63 great permanent advance was gained during this cen- tury. Yet the writers who have left the deepest im- press on the language are not the sententious builders of polished periods, but those who with true artistic sense aimed only to make prose a clear and limpid vehicle of thought. A great gulf separates Sevignd from Montaigne ; but the advance was not due to the rhetoricians, to Balzac and Vaugelas, nor even to the orators, but to the thinkers and raconteurs, who each in his kind had something to say, and cared less for meticulous correctness than for clearness and point. No form of literature in 1600 promised less than the drama. At the end of the century it had become what it has remained, the most important form of French literary expression. It is, therefore, of pecu- liar interest to see whether this great development was due to the classical spirit as represented by Boileau and the critical purists, or whether their influence was not rather a check than a stimulus. A student of com- parative literature, remembering that this is the age of Shakspere and Lope, would look for dramatic activity in France also ; and in the first thirty years of the century, while the lyric muse was learning her mincing steps, and prose was beginning to substitute the rapier for the quarter-staff, the number of play- wrights bears witness to the growing popularity of the drama, due in great degree to the efforts of Hardy (1560-1631), who brought the stage more in touch with the audience than had been possible to the classical lucubrations of the school of Jodelle. Hardy's reforms were quite independent of criticism, and dictated by the necessities of the situation. Him- self attached to a dramatic company and writing plays to be acted rather than read, he cared less for scholarly than for popular applause, and declined with a light 64 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. heart the heavy burden of the " unities. " Moreover, being compelled to various and speedy production, he was led to look for subjects in history and fiction, old and new. With some aid from the Italian, but prob- ably none from the Spanish stage, he dramatized what- ever seemed likely to suit the taste of his plebeian audiences ; and so he introduced to the French theatre an element of fresh life and a partial naturalism that acted like a tonic, and induced other writers of more literary culture than he to offer their pieces to his company. One cannot but regret that he ignored or feared the greater freedom of the English stage, whose traditions would have been of priceless service to Cor- neille and Molihe. But Hardy was no imitator. His virtues were due to his dependence on the healthy sense of the theatre-going masses ; and to this, too, may be attributed his chief vice, bombast and rhodomontade to tickle the ears of the groundlings, — a weakness from which Shakspere is not wholly free. Hardy died in 1G31, a year memorable in the annals of the Frencli stage, for it saw the proclamation ^ of the so-called classical unities of time, place, and action. After much battling and varving fortunes, these found favor with Richelieu in 1635, and by 1640 had estab- lished their fateful and exclusive sway in French trag- edy. This minimizing of dramatic conventions suited the rationalistic and unimaginative spirit of the 'pre- cieux of the Hotel Rambouillet, who now began to take an active interest in tlie drama, and saw in the " unities " their naiTow ideal of nature, good-sense, and rationality. But rules that were proposed in the interest of greater realism were destined to lead before the close of the century to the most deadening artificiality. 1 By Mairet in his preface to " Silvanire." THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 65 The battle of the " unities " had been preceded by the first dramatic work both of Corneille and of Eotrou. The latter produced his first play at Hardy's theatre while still a genial youth of nineteen (162S), and presently joined the dramatic collaborators of Cardinal Eichelieu, where Corneille was his associate, his friend, and, though only three years his senior, finally his master. Eotrou 's really excellent work followed and was obscured by the greater glories of Corneille ; but it is worth noting that in his " Saint-Genest " (1646) he imitated Corneille's favorite " Polyeucte " (1643), in treating on the stage a Christian conversion and mar- tyrdom, quite in accord with the origins of the French drama, but contradicting more recent traditions and arousing the futile anger of the purists. Corneille, if not the greatest, is the first in time of the galaxy that make the literary glory of the age of Louis XIV., though his best work was done before the advent of that monarch. Born in 1606, he was sixteen years older than Molifere and preceded Eacine by a generation. The Jesuits of his native Eouen educated him for the law, but bashfulness increased his distaste for pleading, nnd accident co-operated with genius to draw him to dramatic work. His first play, " Mdlite, " was produced in Eonen in 1629. But neither this nor the dramas that followed during the next seven years, though far superior to anything that had preceded them both in naturalness and vigor, contained more than a promise of better things to come; and this promise pointed rather to the Spanish drama of intrigue and to the comedy of contemporary society than to the true field of his tragic genius. It is hard to realize that the author of " Horace " began his career by a play in which kissing and pick-a-back are prominent features, and single-line repartees, " cat and puss dialogues," as 66 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Butler calls tliem, are bandied about like shuttle- cocks. But it may seem stranger still to find that he felt called upon to apologize for " his simple and fa,miliar style, " saying that he feared the reader would take simplicity for ill-breeding. So strong was the artificial reaction that Malherbe had heralded, even on the popular stage. But Corneille from the first had the courage of his convictions. He never sacrificed nature to rule, nor his thought to a vowel quantity. And he lost nothing by his daring. His earlier plays, enliv- ened by studies from life and the happy invention of the souhrette, won popular success both at Rouen and at Hardy's theatre in Paris. Thus tlie poet was drawn to the capital and the passing sunshine of Richelieu's favor in 1034 This he lost the next year by revising too freely a dramatic concept of the great yet petty Cardi- nal ; but with the public he was a favorite to the last. The contact with the wider life of Paris and his lit- erary associations there awakened dormant powers. " Mddde " appeared in 1635, and in two years he had written the "Cid " (1636), a drama so different from the previous attempts that it hardly bears a trace of the same hand. This work attracted universal in- terest, and placed him at once above all his predeces- sors and contemporaries. Richelieu was jealous ; the purists of the Academy took umbrage, less at the liberties he had taken with his Spanish original than at those he had failed to take. Indeed among the coterie of the i^recicux the perversion of taste had reached such a point that Scudery, a critic of some repute, asserted, and it seems believed, that its subject was ill-chosen, its irregularity unpardonable, its action clumsy, its verses bad, and its beauties stolen. The " Cid " does, indeed, hick the ethical depth and tragic force of " Horace " or " Polyeucte ; " yet, as Boileau THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 07 said, " all Paris has for Eodrigue the eyes of Chim^ne, " and the drama is the most popular on the stage of all his plays. Corneille could not be as independent of cultured opinion as Hardy. The fierce battle that raged round the " Cid " caused him to withdraw for three years to Eouen. But he had faith in his genius, and with his return to Paris in 1639 there begins a period of almost unparalleled fecundity. The Eoman tragedies, " Hor- ace " and " Cinna " (1640), were followed by " Poly- eucte, " a story of Christian martyrdom, — a bold venture, for when it was read at the Hotel Eambouillet, " the Christianity was found extremely displeasing" to these delicate souls, who thought heathenism good enough for literature, which, as we have seen, was also Boileau's conviction. Then came " Pompey " and " Eodogune, " a tragedy of terror which marks the cul- mination of a tendency to exaggeration in passion and character that allies Corneille to the Eomanticists. These, with " Le Menteur, " the first good French com- edy, and its " Suite, " were all written within five years, which embrace about all of his work that is read and prized to-day. There follows a period of arrest (1645- 1652) with some signs of decline, but with flashes of genius as bright as any in his work, and with an occa- sional character of extraordinary vigor such as Phocas in " Hdraclitus. " At length he suspended his dramatic work for seven years (1652-1659), and turned his talent to a versified translation of the " Imitation of Christ," and to critical essays of remarkable frank- ness on his own plays and other dramaturgical work. Between 1659 and 1674 he wrote eleven more trage- dies of unequal mediocrity, though occasional verses showed all the fire of his prime. It was on two of Id 68 MODEKN FKENCII LITERATURE. these that Boileau composed his famous and ill- natured epigram : — Aprcs I'Agesilas, Hclas, Mais apres I'Attila, Hola, But Boileau, who thought Eacine " a very clever fellow whom I had a hard time to teach to write verse," is recorded as of the opinion that the three great writers of his day were " Corneille, Moliere, and — myself. " The opposition that he met from those who followed the school of 1660 was not due to his failing talent, but to the new conception of dra- matic art introduced by Boileau and Eacine. Even in old age he never lost popularity ; but he lived in nar- row circumstances, if not in poverty. " I am satiated with glory and hungry for money, " he said in these last years, with a grimness that seems to characterize his social relations. He would never curry favor, and Eacine tells us he suffered in consequence. He had admirers, but not patrons, and he died in compar- ative neglect in 1684. Indeed the development of taste was leading away from him, and in the next cen- tury his fame suffered a partial eclipse. His own time and ours were more fitted to comprehend and appreci- ate him than the intervening period of iconoclasm and perverted criticism. The first impression made on an attentive reader, even of Corneille's best work, is his unevenness. No poet rises to grander heights than he. If we judge him by his l)cst, he will rank with the greatest; 1)ut many a lesser talent is nujre sustained, and may attain a higher average. Molifere saw this : " My friend Corneille, " he said, " hns a familiar spirit, who in- spires him with the finest verses in the world ; but sometimes the spirit deserts him, and then it fares ill with him. " Tlierefore Corneille lends himself THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 69 admirably to citation. Many of his lines cling to the memory, and any alexandrine with a rush of sound and startling pregnancy of suggestion seems a " Cor- neillian " verse. The latter point may be illustrated ; one must be a Frenchman to feel the former. " I am master of myself as well as of the world, " affirms the Emperor Augustus in " Cinna. " " Eome is no longer in Rome. It is all where I am, " says Ser- torius to Pompey. The assassinated Attila, strangled in his blood, " speaks but in stifled gasps what he imagines he speaks. " What concentrated force in the reply of the father of Horace : " What w^ould you have him do against three ? " " That he should die. " Or in Medea's : " What resource have you in so utter a disaster ? " " Myself ! Myself, I say, and that is enough. " " Follow not my steps, " says Polyeucte, " or leave your errors. " Finally, since these citations might be extended almost indefinitely, consider the closing lines of Cleopatra's curse in " Eodogune" : — To wish you all misfortune together. May a son be born of you who shall resemble me ; and Camille's upon Eome : — May 1 with my own eyes see this thunderbolt fall on her, See her houses in ashes and thy Laurels in dust, See the last Roman at his last sigh, Myself alone be cause of it, and die of the joy.i 1 Je suis maitre cle moi comme de I'univers (Cinna, v. 3). Eome n'est pins dans Rome. Elle est toute oli je suis (Sertor. iii. I ) . Ce n'est plus qu'en sanglots qu'il dit ce qu'il croit dire (Attila, v. 2). Que vouliez-vous qu'il se fit centre trois? — Qu'il mourut ! ( Hor. iii. 6). Dans un si grand revers que vous reste-t-il? — Moi ! Moi, dis-je, et c'est assez (Mcde'e, i. 2). Ne suivez poiut mes pas ou quittez vos erreurs (Poly. v. 3). Et, pour vous souhaitez tous les malheurs ensemble, Puisse naitre de vous un fils qui me ressemble (Rodog. v. 4). Puiss(5-je de mes j-eux y voir tomber ce foudre, Voir ses maisons en cendre, et tes lauriers en poudre, Voir le dernier Roniain a son dernier soiipir, Moi seuie, en Gtre cause, et mourir de plaisir (Ilor. iv. 5). 70 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. It is lines like these, and they are many, that jus- tify Faguet in calling Corneille's language " the most masculine, energetic, at once sober aud full, that was ever spoken in France, " and his verses " the most beautiful that ever fell from a French pen. " It is such lines that induce Saintsbury, with perhaps un- guarded enthusiasm, to call him " the greatest writer of France, the only one who, up to our own time, can take rank with the Dantes and Shaksperes of other countries. "1 It is of them that Voltaire says: " They earned Corneille the name Great to distinguish him, not from his brother Thomas, but from the rest of mankind. " It was said of Corneille's tragedies that they aroused admiration rather than tragic fear. He does not seek to interest us in tlie fate of his characters, but rather in the indomitable will with which they bear it, and in their haughty disdain for it. His is a drama of situations, not of characters. He delights in extraordinary situations and sul)jects, and belongs, as Brunetifere happily puts it, to " the School of the Emphatics. " ^ So it is natural that the " linked sweetness " of amorous talk that takes so large a place in Kacine seems to him rather contemptible. There is no philandering or fine-spun sentiment even in the loves of Chimfene and Eodrigue, and in " Sertorius " Aristie cuts short her lover with the lines : — Let ns leave, sir, let us leave for petty souls, This grovelling barter of sigbs and loves. But tragedy, with the limitations of Corneille's method, forlnds the resource of a minor plot, and involves much talk with little action. So his disdain 1 Encyc. Brit. vi. 419. 2 f:tu(lc.s critiques, i. 310. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 71 of tlie endless subject of talk leaves him often with scenes and sometimes acts where interest hopelessly Hags. Even his noblest work is not without monotony. It is always a like grandeur of soul that he represents, a like admiration that he excites. One w^ho reads many plays of Corneille consecutively finds his appre- ciation dulled, and the public who witnessed them consecutively might have come to the same feeling. Then, too, he has not quite freed the drama from the lyric and epic elements that lay in its origin, but were foreign to its nature. Still there is a permanent qual- ity in his work, as in Shakspere's, — a touch of nature that Eacine, at his best, lacks. The superb declama- tions of Camille, of Auguste, or of Pompey's widow Corndlie, to name no others, will thrill audiences every- where, as long as the antinomies of love and patriot- ism, honor and duty, perplex men's souls. But oratory is far from being the only use of language; and 1)y giving to French when in a very plastic state a sen- tentious imprint, Corneille exercised an influence on the future of his mother tongue very great, but not altogether helpful to its healthy growth and further development. The rival of Corneille 's later years was Eacine, whom Boileau reckoned as his Jjupil, so that we may regard him as representative of the regular academic drama. He had a more stable temperament, his work was more even in character and polished in execution, and by close adherence to rule he long and successfully masked the weaker side of his genius. Such formal correctness suited the age of Louis, as it did that of Anne. But in less skilful hands than his, it sank quickly to a mannerism as dreary as it was con- temptible. It is indirectly due to him that tragedy, 72 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. except for Voltaire, hardly lifts its head from the waters of oblivion between his death and the rise of the Eomantic School. Eacine began his education at Port-Eoyal, and owed to that school the development of literary tastes, and a love for Greek, which furnished the basis of his tragic psychology, while that of Corneille had a more Eoman sturdiuess. He completed his studies at Paris, and at twenty was already author of poems that earned him the rewards of the court and the con- demnation of critics. But he had soon the good for- tune to meet La Fontaine and Moli^re, and was persuaded to try tragedy. His first drama, " The Natural Enemies," a study from ^schylus' "Seven against Thebes, " is in style a feeble imitation of Cor- neille. His next work, " Alexandre " (1665), was also produced under the influence of Molifere, and marked growing power ; but Eacine broke with him that year, and his later pieces were acted in the rival theatre of the Hotel de Bourgogne. He now became the pupil of Boileau, who was inclined to attribute to himself the success of his diligent scholar, — not without some justice, for Eacine's style was of the kind that is formed by criticism and profits by careful elaboration. This was illustrated by " Andromaque " (1667), a play that " made almost as much talk as the * Cid, ' " accord- ing to the testimony of Perrault, rousing the admira- tion of the friends and the scorn of the enemies of Boileau. These latter the dramatist, with the critic's co-operation, presently satirized in the Aristophanian " Plaideurs, " which has unique merits, and shows the author more emancipated in his versification than he had been or was to be. Corneille, like most writers of the earlier half of the THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 73 seventeenth century, had subordinated passion to will ; Eacine and the School of 1660, in accord with the changed temper of the time, subordinated will to pas- sion. Hence critics said that Racine's tragic talent was limited to the painting of love. To prove them wrong he wrote " Britannicus " (1669), which went a long way to prove them right. The piece was not a success, and he returned the next year to the old theme with "B^r^nice," a play that established the ascendency of the young poet over the aging Corneille, who had attempted the same subject. The plays that followed, " Bajazet " (1672) and " Mithridate " (1673), show greater suppleness and strength, but it is still the same well-worn theme. Yet they mark the height of the poet's fame, to which " Iphigenie " (1674) added nothing, while " Phfedre " (1677), exaggerating the de- fects of his qualities, failed to hold the popular favor. He seems to have been threatened with prosecution as a corrupter of morals. ^ Scruples that honor him caused him to withdraw from the stage, as Corneille had done. But his return to it twelve years later in " Esther " (1689) and " Athalie " (1691) showed his genius at its highest point. Indeed some regard " Athalie " as the masterpiece of the entire French drama. The causes of this superiority were also the causes of its lukewarm public reception. Both plays were written for Madame de IMaintenon's great school for noblewomen at St. Cyr. Hence, by a happy neces- sity, love-making was suppressed, and a greater scope was given to action, in imitation of sixteenth-century models, than Boileau would have counselled or ap- proved. This glorious aftermath closed the poet's literary career. He died in 1699. 1 Cp. Brunetiere, f]poques du theatre fran9ai.s, p. 155, note. 74 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. It accords with Eacine's conception of dramatic art that his scenes are Laid in foreign countries, where artificial conventions are masked by the strangeness of tiie environment. But there is no attempt at any local color. The Greece of Agamemnon was not more for- eign to the Versailles of Louis XIV. than it was to the Greece of Eacine's " Iphigt^nie. " This is least felt in " Les Plaideurs, " in " Esther, " and " Athalie, " for here the poet is more free ; but it should be noted that in all his work the artificiality is in the received notion of tragic art rather than in the literary instinct of the man. At his most plastic period he had been associ- ated with Moli^re, and to the last, so far as the con- ventions allowed, he tried to do what Moli^re had done in comedy, — to study and paint with an honest and naturalistic psychology human passions and feelings, dissociated from any relations of country or age. ^ He aims at a noble simplicity. His ideal, as he states it, is " a simple action, with few incidents, such as might take place in a single day, which, advancing steadily toward its end, is sustained only by the interests and passions of the characters," who, as he says elsewhere, " must be neither too perfect nor too base, so that hearers may recognize themselves in them ; not alto- gether culpable, nor wholly innocent, with a virtue capable of weakness, that their faults may make them less detested than pitied. " His interest, then, is in character, not in action ; wliile Corneille always sought the complex crises of history. Now, this conception of tragedy is much more akin to comedy than any that had preceded it. It is a ^ He was repronclicd for tliis hy Fontanelle, wlio fimnd liis charac- ters so " natural " tliat tlicy seemed base. Cp. Bruuetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 319. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 75 study of human passion and weakness, as in Moli^-re ; but liere the pitiless analysis is ])ushed to the point where amused interest yields to dread, and the smile to terror.^ It is this naturalistic portrayal of passions common to all men of all time that keeps Eacine's hold on the minds of Frenchmen, in spite of the con- straints of his form ; for of all Europeans they perhaps are most willing to condone this trammel to the free development of genius. Yet apart from this his talent was not of supreme rank. He had not the tragic grandeur of Corneille,^ still less of Shakspere, and even in his chosen sphere he had not the keen psycho- logical insight of Molifere. We are thus brought to the greatest of all writers of social comedy, incomparably the greatest French writer of his century, and perhaps the greatest name in all their literature, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the first Paris- ian among the great writers of France, in his ethics successor of Ral^elais and Montaigne, and predecessor of the rationalists of the next century, of Voltaire and Diderot; who, on becoming identified with the stage, took, and made immortal, the name of Molifere (1622- 1673). His parents were well-to-do, he was carefully educated by the Jesuits, and his philosophical studies with Gassendi, or early associations with such libertiiis as Lhuillier, left many traces in his work and more in his life. Then, like Corneille, he studied law. But 1 This poiut is ingeniously elaborated by Faguet, 169 sqq. ^ Bruuetiere, Etudes critiques, i. 178, makes tliis judicious com- parison : " The work of Corneille, with all its imperfections of detail, is more varied than that of Kacine. It lias a surer and quicker effect on the stage ; above all, its inspiration is higher, more generous, more elevated bc\'ond the common order and ordinary conditions of life. But how much it costs to confess it whcu we come from reading Racine ! " 76 MODERN rrENCII LITERATURE, presently we find him associated with a dramatic com- pany, " L'lllustre Theatre," which left Paris iu 1646 to try its fortune in the provinces. For some years of wandering and precarious existence, during which the company visited almost all the larger cities of France,^ Moliere furnished their repertoire with light farces, and at length with more finished comedies in the style of the time, — " L'Etourdi" (1653 or 1655) and " Le Ddpit amoureux " (1656). This wandering life was a priceless school to him in the study of middle-class men and manners. The future social comedian could hardly have used these years to better advantage. But the company, or at least Moliere, was now financially prosperous ; and in 1658, after more than twelve years' absence, he arranged for their return to Paris. In spite of borrowed Italian elements, these early comedies had been enthusiastically received, and indeed they were much the best that France could show. But both were now cast in the shade by " Les Prdcieuses ridi- cules, " the first dramatic satire on cultured society in France. The blue-stockings of the Hotel Ptaml)ouillet, or perhaps their bourgeois imitators, who, according to the " Roman bourgeois, " abounded in Paris, their affected language and manners, were held up to such good-humored ridicule that success was immediate and universal. Indeed the play has not yet lost its comic force, for learning has not wholly supplanted the affec- tation of it even among the women of to-day. Equally typical of Molifere is his next play, " Sgana- relle " (1660), the first of those gay yet profound 1 We hear of thorn at Afrpn, Angonlcme, Beziers, Bordeaux, Limoges, Lyons, Montpellier, Nautes, Narboune, Nimes, Eouen, Toulouse. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 77 farces, which still hold the stage because they raise first a laugh and then a thoughtful smile. " Don Garcie, " which follows, marks a relapse to the tradi- tional comedy ; but in " L'Ecole des maris, " though the plot is borrowed from Terence's "Adelphi, " there is a study of character and a pathos in the treatment of the aged lover that bears the print of the time and of Molifere's genius. In February of the next year Molifere himself married a young woman of his troupe, more than twenty years his junior, much to his future sorrow, though she was probably not so black as con- temporary scandal asserted and literary scavengers delight to repeat. In 1662 he touched more dangerous ground in " L'Ecole des femmes," a covert naturalistic attack on hypocrisy and literal orthodoxy, by which he raised comedy from a diversion to a living teaching of a phi- losophy of life. Here first comedy became moral satire, and here first the aristocracy was ridiculed. This unchained a storm of rage, nursed by jealousy, such as actor-poet has seldom faced. He replied to his critics first in the witty " Critique de I'Ecole des femmes " and then in the " Impromptu de Versailles, " where his roused indignation did not scruple to name opponents and caricature rivals whom he scourged with caustic cruelty. In 1664 he renewed his attack on that most contemptible of all vices with three acts of " Tartufe, the Hypocrite, " in which he inaugurates the comedy of characters as distinct from that of man- ners. This open satire of false devotion, which was perhaps also a covert attack on all unnatural moral constraint, earned him from these professors of peace and good-will the pious wi.sh that this " demon in human flesh " might " speedily be burned on earth, that 78 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. he might Inirn the sooner in hell. " It was five years before he was suffered to act the entire play ; but the king's favor remained constant, and Moli5re continued the tiglit with the yet more daring " Don Juan, " while light farces, such as " L 'Amour mddecin, " relieved the serious contest. But, except for " Tartufe," it is with 1666 that the great manner of Molifere begins with " Le Misan- thrope, " which Boileau, Lessing, and Goethe unite to regard as his profoundest study of human character. Slowly but surely it has won its way to the foremost place in popular esteem also, and is now perhaps the most generally read and quoted of all his plays. Alceste, the noble pessimist soured by experience, Philinte, the easy-going social trimmer, the conceited poetaster Oronte, the witty and censorious Cdlimcine are types as enduring as society. Failing health now began to lessen his productivity, though not his wit. Ihit in 1668 he brought out two masterpieces, the extremely witty " Amphitryon, " and " George Dandin, " type of the man who marries above his station and suffers the consequences. Then fol- lowed that wonderful psychic picture " L'Avare, " the Miser. Then for three years (1669-1671), a succes- sion of li^ht farces, among them the immortal " Bour- geois gentilhomme, " marks the recrudescence of his malady; but in "Les Femmes savantes " the poet re- turned to the subject of the " Pr^cieuses, " and with his maturer powers attacked the admirers of pedantry and the affectation of learning, — a subject always new, that in our own day has inspired one of the happiest efforts of tlie modern stage, " Le Monde on I'on s'ennuie. " This was his last important work. Already a con- sumptive cough was wearing him away. On February THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 79 17, 1673, as lie was acting in a new and almost fiercely bitter farce, " Le Malade imaginaire, " he rup- tured a blood-vessel in a spasm of coughing, and was carried from the stage to die. He was buried half clandestinely; for the Archbishop of Paris, feeling perhaps that Moli^re's ethics were as irreconcilable with the received form of Christianity as ever those of Eabelais had been, forbade the clergy to say ]3rayers for him. But he had given liberally of his wealth, and the poor crowded to his funeral ; yet the site of his grave is now uncertain. Molifere came at a propitious time, for comedy had not suffered from the false classicism of tragedy ; and if little of merit had yet been done, there was promise in the general interest, both popular and cultured, in the subject. The danger was that Spanish or classical models might be too slavishly followed. In his hands farce became comedy, and so won a dignity and an independence that gave it the freedom of conscious strength. And at the same time he broke a way of escape from the " alexandrine prison " and the bondage of the unities. Some of his very best work was done in prose, and he never allowed verse to fetter his thoughts or be more than a subordinate means to a higher end. Indeed, he could not have polished his work as Eacine did. In thirteen years he had written twenty-five plays, seven of them serious masterpieces ; he had been stage-manager, actor, and often manager of the royal festivals at Versailles. Life to him had been W' ork, and it w^as fitting that he should die in harness. A man of indomitable energy, no dramatist ever united so much wit with so much seriousness as did Moliere. There is often a pathetic, even a sad, background to his work ; but he never allows this to get the better of 80 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. his healthy humor, which depends for its effect, not on intrigue or phiy of words, but on the unexpected revelations of character that come like Hashes in his plays. And here his satire is directed always against those social faults that disguise or suppress natural instincts, not against the excesses of nature. It is not ambition or even hedonism that he scourges, but hypocrisy, pedantry, amorous old age, prudery, ava- rice, or preciosity. ^ The purpose to hold the mirror up to Nature, that she may see her face and mend her ways, gives even his roaring farces an element of true comedy. But this purpose brings with it a tendency to typify phases of character, as with Eacine, rather than to present tlie complexity of human nature, as with Corneille ; and this disposition was long charac- teristic of i'rench comedy. ^ In the analysis of charac- ter Shakspere is more profound, and he tells a story with far more dramatic force. Indeed, to Molifere the story, for its own sake, is a very minor matter; but Shakspere has less of the direct contact with and in- fluence on contemporary life that is the result of Molifere's naturalistic method and his study of the im- mediate environment. This method was that of his successors, of whom Edgnard only need be named, though his best work is disappointing, whether regarded in the light of what had preceded, or of the French comedy of to-day. For the tendency of the coming age was away from the natu- ralistic position. Yet, as one reviews the seventeenth century and the " classical " period, it is clear that naturalism was characteristic of its most successful 1 Cj). Bruneti(!ro, Etudes critiques, iv. 185. 2 Sucli titles as " The Miser," " Tlie Misanthrope," or Re'gnard's "The Gaml.ler," " The Distrauglit," illustrate this. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 81 work. It began with an attempt to codify and regu- late the iudividual conquests of the sixteenth century. Malherbe in poetry, Balzac in prose, undertook to he lawgivers for language and style. Just in so far as the century yielded, and the mental lassitude of the reaction from the Eenaissance made it easy to yield, to this gospel of artificiality, stagnation followed. In prose it was least possible to crib and confine ; and here there was the most varied development, from w^hich it was easy to purge the chaff and the tinsel. In the drama the yoke was more felt, and in poetry most of all. But those poets and dramatists who were able to rise above these artificial constraints, and to build upon the foundations laid by the giants of the sixteenth century a structure of their own, the independent stu- dents of nature and society, — La Fontaine, Moli^re, in a greater degree Corneille, in a less degree Eacine, — are those who are prized to-day, and prized most for that wdiich the strict " classical " purists would have condemned 82 MODEliN FKENCII LITERATURE. CHAPTEE III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. ^ The eighteentli century is the age of Voltaire in a sense and to a degree that is unparalleled in European literary history. Even Goethe, who has also his " cen- tury, " is less typical, his sway less undisputed, and his excellence, though greater, less diversitied ; for it is the peculiar distinction of Voltaire that there is no department of letters in which he did not hold a prominent place, while in most he stood by common consent at the head. Voltaire is not the author of the best lyrics of the century, but he comes just short of the highest place, being indeed all that a versifier can be who lacks what Horace calls the " divine breath " of poetry. His satires are the keenest, his tales in verse the wittiest, in the language. He is the author of the most correct serious epic and of tlie wittiest comic epic of his time ; he is incomparably its best novelist and its best dramatist. His essays in physics are said to be cred- itable ; and though he was neither a metaphysician nor a theologian, his works on ethics and theology are, and were, more read and prized than those of any of his philosophical or clerical contemporaries. He was far the best literary critic of tliat day, and its most popular historian. Besides this, he was the author of 1 This oliaptor, with slicjlit changes, appeared iu " The Sewanee Review" for February, 1895. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 83 an infinite number of miscellaneous pamphlets, and of a correspondence of appalling volume, almost all of which is interesting, at least, for its polished form. To whatever field of literature we turn, we shall find his mark set up in it. It is not until toward the close of the century that Eousseau, in the ethical and political field, rivals, and for a time overshadows, the philoso- pher of Ferney. Voltaire will introduce us to the century and accompany us through it; liousseau will furnish its natural epilogue. Voltaire (169-4—1778), whose real name of Arouet is seldom given him, was the son of a wealthy and rather distinguished Parisian notary ; but his early training was at the hands of his skeptical and scholarly god- father, the Abb^ de Chateauneuf , and in 1704 he passed into the moulding hands of the Jesuits, who seem to have given him a better education than in later con- troversial years he liked to admit. He still saw much of the Abbe, and was far from cloistered. In- deed, during the first year of his school life he so won the attention and interest of his godfather's friend, the famous Ninon de I'Enclos, that she bequeathed him two thousand livres, — " to buy books," she said. He left school in 1711, and pretended to study law; but all his ambitions were clearly literary, and he was already a member of the noted literary circle, " du Temple. " His father, dissatisfied with such vagaries, sent him first to Caen ; then to the Hague, where he got entangled with a young Protestant lady, to the yet more intense disgust of his parent, wdio actually obtained a lettre de cachet from the king authorizing his son's confinement. But he made no use of it; for Voltaire, always cautious in his daring, returned to Paris and the law, and occupied his mischievous energy 84 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATUKE. in writing libellous poems, until the perplexed father had to send him away once more. It was not till 1715 that he returned to the laxer society of the Re- gency and to his literary circle, whom he presently charmed by his first play, " Qidipe. " But his itching fingers, under the provoking inspiration of the ambi- tious Duchess of Maine, were soon writing epigrams on the Regent himself that invited and justified a brief exile (1716), followed by confinement for ten months in the Bastille and a second short banishment from the capital. Yet, though tlie witty Orleans did not trust Voltaire, he enjoyed him; and late in 1718 the poet was able to produce " CEdipe " with success at Paris, whence political squibs soon drove him for the fourth time, though the good-humored Regent shortly after gave him a pension, and seems to have employed him in the secret diplomatic service from 1722 to 1725. His social position was already assured by the death of his father, who left liim a respectable com- petency ; and he occujjied himself during these years as a literary dilettante with an epic, " La Henriade, " and a second tragedy, " Mariamne. " But in 1725 a quar- rel with the Chevalier de Rohan sent him first to the Bastille, then to England, — an event of such impor- tance to his development that it forms, like Goethe's visit to Italy, the turning-point in his intellectual life. In England Voltaire got, first of all, a very con- siderable sum of money, which he emj)loyed so well in fortunate speculations and investments, that his future life was alwa3^s free from financial care, and, at the last, almost seignorial. This made it possible for him to be more independent of patronage and favor than any literary man in France; and for much of the work THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 85 he- had before him such independence was necessary. Then, too, contact with English character and institu- tions could not but have a deep effect on so mobile a genius. The contrast between France and England, greater then than now, stimulated his mind to more serious thoughts on society and philosophy, and he re- turned to France, more capable, perhaps, than any other Frenchman of seeing the weak sides of her con- stitution and polity, and ready to offer opinions on them, which are often specious, though seldom pro- found. He made also a serious though brief effort to understand Shakspere ; and even if he failed to ap- prehend him, he learned much from the English stage that affected his literary taste and that of the French public also, to whom he was first to introduce one des- tined to have the profoundest influence on the litera- ture of later generations.^ Even more important to his intellectual development was the study of English science and philosophy, especially of Newton and Locke, by which he systematized his views of nature and religion. After several tentative visits, Voltaire returned to France in 1729, where he continued his dramatic activity with " Zaire " (1732) and some inferior plays, wrote his "History of Charles XII.," and began his comic epic " La Pucelle, " the source of much amuse- ment and of much deserved censure through many years of his life. But his restless spirit soon got him in hot water again with a volume of skeptical " Letters on the English," and with the "Temple of Taste," a satire on the poetasters of the time, accompanied by some remarks on Pascal, in which the orthodox scented ^ See Pellissier, La Litterature contemporaine, p. 69, Le Drame shakespearieii. 86 MODEllN FIIENCII LITEKATUKE. clanger and heresy. They had the book burned, but the author hxughed at them from across the frontier in Lorraine. Here, soon after, he settled for some years at Cirey with Madame du Chatelet, the " respectable Emily " of his correspondence, for his hostess; and it is probable that ties closer than Platonic bound them, though Vol- taire's loves, like Jean-Jacques', were always more cerebral than material, and Emily did not hesitate to supplement his affections by more commonplace attach- ments. He had now ample leisure as well as security, and here first he took up the serious profession of authorship. In 1735, with a cheerful self-confidence that was hardly justified, he produced a treatise on Metaphysics less philosophical than controversial ; in 1736 came a popular exposition of the Newtonian system, and " Alzire, " a drama of Peru ; and this was followed by " Le Mondain, " whose outspoken opti- mism, if not essentially anti-Christian, could hardly fail to seem so to the representatives of the French establishment. The result was a long and bitter controversy, traces of which can be found in the allusions to the " Jour- nal des Tr^voux, " to Frdron and Desfontaines, which abound in his epigrams and satires. To-day, how- ever, " Le Mondain " seems far less offensive in its language and tendency than " La Pucelle, " from which he still continued to " snatch a fearful joy, " reading it to friends whenever he got a chance, while he guarded it from publication with ostentatious anxiety. During all these years his pen was tireless. The mass of minor work produced was enormous, and by 1741 he had completed " Mdrope " and " Mohamet, " dramas second only to " Zaire. " THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 87 Meantime, since 1736, he had been corresponding with the philosophic king, Frederic of Prussia, whom he met in 1740 and visited in 1743. Absence had now restored him to the graces of the Parisian court; in 1745 he was made royal historiographer, a post honored by the names of Racine and Boileau ; and in 1746 he entered the Academy. J3ut his literary in- discretions soon obliged him to leave these honors and French soil, still accompanied by the " respectable Emily," whose death at Luneville in 1749 left him a man of fifty-five, famous, rich, but without a home and without a country. It was natural, under these conditions, that he should lend a favorable ear to the invitation of Frederic to come to share, or, as he would interpret it, to lead, the brilliant group of literary men which that great king had gathered at his court. So, after a year of restless wandering and malicious activity that found its chief expression in satirical tales, he went to Berlin in July, 1750. Voltaire's stay in Germany had more influence on the literary men of that country than it had on him. His quarrels and rupture with Frederic (1753) do not concern us. They were too great intellectually to get on well together, but too great also not to admire one another genuinely when apart. In his relations with the literary men of Frederic's circle, Voltaire appears in an unfavorable light, .showing most strongly here, what he never failed to show elsewhere, vanity, spiteful- ness, financial unscrupulousness, a great desire to proclaim disagreeable and dangerous truths, and an equally earnest determination at all moral costs to avoid the consequences of so doing. During his three years at Berlin, Voltaire finislied his famous essay on the Eeign of Louis XIV. , and his 88 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. fiercest literary lampoon, the " Diatribe du Docteiir Akakia, " an insult to his fellow-guest, Maupertuis, which resulted in the severing of their relations, and closed Prussia to him as France was already closed. His " Essai sur les moeurs " now appeared, and made his position even more difficult ; so it was natural that after some travels he should turn to Switzerland, — then, in spite of provincial narrowness, a noble refuge of free-thought. Here he could lead an independent life ; and here, in or near Geneva, he made his " home," the first he liad ever had, from 1754 till his death, nearly a quarter of a century later. At first he lived in the suburbs of Geneva ; but he soon bought a large estate at Ferney, just across the French frontier, and so administered his domain that the population of Ferney grew under his fostering care from fifty at his coming to twelve hundred at his death. But he also prudently acquired various houses of refuge in Savoy, at Lausanne, and in other jurisdictions. He managed liis large domain with patriarchal shrewdness, practised the most open hospitality, and permitted himself the luxury of a private theatre, as George Sand did later at Nohant, and also of a church, for which he ob- tained a relic from the Pope. He dedicated it " To God from Voltaire " {Deo erexit Voltaire), and ostenta- tiously communicated there, much to the vexation of his bishap. He made Ferney what Weimar became a half-century later, — the Mecca of literary Europe. All flocked to do him homage ; few had the temerity to oppose his dicta. His influence, both in literature and ethics, was felt over all the Continent, and main- tained l)y epigrams in meteoric sliowers, and l)y letters that made the circuit of the literary world. These last, of which the complete edition of his works counts THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 89 some ten thousand, were the chief source of his power, and perhaps the master work of his genius. The most enduring works of this period are, first of all, " Candide, " a prose" tale directed" against the re- ceived orthodoxy rather than against anything distinc- tively Christian, and for irony perhaps unsurpassed in modern times; then the " Commentary on Corneille," generously undertaken to relieve the necessities of that dramatist's niece ; but perhaps most of all, the pam- phlets written in defence of liberty of thought and against the tyranny of persecution, as it was even then being illustrated in France in the cases of Calas, of Sirven, of Espinasse, and others. That these men were mostly Protestants was natural, for only Cath- olics had the power to stifle thought, though tlie Huguenots might share the desire. The creed for which they suffered contributed nothing to the inter- est he felt in their wrongs. Indeed he had not a whit more sympathy with the infallible Bible than with the infallible Pope, and, like Erasmus, he had no wish to break with authority on a matter so uncertain, so incapable of proof, and to him so unimportant as orthodoxy, if he could but secure toleration. His often repeated exhortation " Ecrasez I'infame " does not allude, as some have vainly supposed, to the essence of Christianity, still less to the Christ, but to bigoted intolerance based on ignorance and self- seeking, such as he thought he found exemplified in the Jesuits of his time and their helpers, Freron and Palissot; though Voltaire's ethics were really more antagonistic to Jansenists than to Jesuits. They continued the traditions of Ptabelais and La Fontaine, but with a naturalism that is less rationalis- tic than hedonistic. 90 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Many years were passed at Ferney in dignified ease, and Voltaire was a frail old man of eighty-four when the triumphs of Beaumarchais' " Barber of Seville " roused his vanity for a journey to Paris to witness the production of his own just completed " Ir^ne. " Its sixth performance, March 16, 1778, was an unequalled ovation for its laurel-crowned author, and one of the three or four great days of French theatrical history. Soon after, Franklin brought him his grandson to be blessed, and at a solemn st^ance of the Academy they embraced in true sentimental style. He even began another tragedy ; but the old man had over-estimated the power of his body to follow his tireless mind. Presently came a collapse of physical strength so rapid that when the hour arrived when all Catholics desire the last sacraments, he had no longer sufficient self- control to maintain the solemn farce of a lifetime. He motioned the priest away, with a weak sincerity that would surely have cast a gloom over his last moments had it been granted him to recover a con- sciousness of his inconsistency. Dying thus (May 30-31), it was necessary to inter him in haste, before the episcopal inhibition should intervene to exclude liim from consecrated ground. In 1791 the remains were taken to the Pantheon ; hut the sarcophagus, when opened in 1S64, was found empty, the mocker mocking even from the grave. We have now to consider the work of Voltaire, and with it the work of his lesser contemporaries in the various fields of his multifarious activity. In lyric poetry not much could be expected of a period that continued the traditions of classical objec- tivity. ^ The first place during the earlier half of the 1 Cp. Bruiictic'ro, Poc'sio lyriqnc, i. 48. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 91 century belongs undoubtedly to Jean-Baptiste Eousseau (1670-1741), who, like Voltaire, was associated with the coterie " du Temple, " and, like him, was in con- stant trouble because he could bridle neither his tongue nor his pen. He, too, was exiled in 1712, and passed the rest of his life at Brussels, continuing more indus- trious to make enemies than others are to get friends. ' His poetic work is not large. It consists mainly of panegyric or sacred odes, apparently studied from Boileau, and of licentious or cynical epigrams, which show the greater talent of the two, and passed with the classical critics for an imitation of Marot's " dld- gant badinage, " as the odes did of his " Psalms. " But J.-B. Eousseau was neither a great man nor a great poet, and to say that he was the best of his time may excuse from speaking of his fellows. A generation later than Eousseau is Piron (1689- 1773), probably after Voltaire the most brilliant epi- grammatist of France, but too witty to be on good terms with his fellow wits, and too incapable, as his dramas showed, of any sustained effort, though many of the best lines of his sparkling comedy, " La Metro - manie, " have passed into the small change of cultured conversation. Another writer of light verse is Gresset, a " one-poem poet. " His " Vert- Vert, " a parrot who passes from a monastery to a nunnery and picks up phrases far from monastic on the journey, is perhaps the best in its kind since La Fontaine, and shows a more kindly humor than the " Cnntes " of A^oltaire or the work of his other contemporaries. Gresset, for the greater part of his life, was connected with a religious order, and he is one of the very few poets of this time who never pander to vice ; but his character, though gentle, was weak, and the close of his life was wholly 92 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE, under the direction of those who thought the graceful badinage of " Vert- Vert " a matter for fasting and pen- ance. Later fabulists, Florian and Marmontel, pre- served the traditions of the apologue ; but their work has only historic interest. In the honeyed, amorous, or licentious verse of the " glow-worm " type, Voltaire was surpassed, and might well be content to be, by the perfumed lu- bricity of Gentil-Bernard, Dorat, and Parny, the last a Creole who brought at first some breath of fresh life into French verse, but later lost this facile touch, so that his longer poems have been judiciously pronounced " equally remarkable for blasphemy, obscenity, extrav- agance, and dulness. " It must be allowed that if in this century there is no verse that is extremely good, there is much that is extremely bad, and very little that is worse than these later poems of Parny. But the best in this kind are only triflers. Much later and a step higher are the anacreontic Desaugiers and Eouget de Lisle, whose immortal "Marseillaise" is less characteristic than his convivial verses, which mark the true ancestor of Bdranger. In the descriptive school of poetry this century pointed with pride to Delille, the French Thomson, whose insatiate thirst for paraphrase turns backgammon into " that noisy game where horn in hand the adroit player calculates an uncertain chance, " wliile sugar masquerades as " the American honey which the African squeezes from the juicy reed. " Poetry became a puzzle till the revolt of the Komanticists brought plain speaking and the mot- 'pro'pre, into fashion again, substituting virility for these elaborate conceits. It need not be said that Voltaire had cultivated all these fields except the sacred canticle. He had written THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 also the only serious epic of the century worthy to be named, though " La Henriade " is poor enough in its jejune correctness; and his " La Pucelle, " with all its faults, is still the best comic epic of France. His versified " Contes, " though malicious in their ethical bearing, are the wittiest and best told since La Fon- taine, and his satires are hardly second to the best work of E^gnier and Boileau. No man had so great a command of vers clc societe as he. He never rose to true poetry ; that divine spark was denied him. He lacked the sincerity that springs from noble convic- tions. But he produced an enormous mass of what has been justly called the " oie plus ultra of verse that is not poetry. " Yet the taste for a truer poetry was not dead in France. These years saw a revival of interest in the great sixteenth-century poets ; a collection of the old " Fabliaux " was reprinted, as well as the works of Marot, Villon, and Eabelais ; all of which had its reward in the Eomantic School of 1830. But it was reserved for the very close of the century to produce a true poet, and to guillotine him just as he had revealed his promise. Andr(^ Chdnier (1762-1794), Greek by birth, half Greek by parentage, wholly classical in tastes and studies, attained the aspiration of the Classicists. But, in spite of Chdnier's genius, the more fully he realized his ambition, the more artificial he became ; and so he had little influence in sijeeding or retarding the development of the Eomantic School, which indeed was well advanced before the tardy pub- lication of the greater and better part of his poems (1819). In regular tragedy that had languished since the death of Eacine, Voltaire's supremacy was not ques- 94 MODERN FKENCII LITEKATUKE. tioned. ^ Indeed, what deserves mention outside his work does so almost wholly because it points to a revolt from traditions that he was anxious to maintain. Among his fifty pieces the comedies are less good than one would anticipate from the general character of his mind ; even " Nanine, " which he drew from Eichard- son's " Pamela, " is only the best among second-class work. But if lie never thoroughly mastered the tech- nique of comedy, his best trage'dies, some ten, approach more nearly to the correctness of Eacine than any work of an age that had nothing to suggest the grandeur of Corneille, still less the profound psychology of Molifere; he was the inventor of " local color" in tra- gedy, and in the dexterous management of the tragic form he may have surpassed in " Mdrope " and " Zaire " either of his great predecessors. His idea was to per- fect the tragedy of Eacine, itself the most perfect in his view that the human mind had yet produced. This he lioped to attain by increasing the action and height- ening the s])ectacular effect. But while he laid stress rightlv on these elements of interest, he found him- self unconsciously carried away from Eacine, toward the processes of Corneille, and even to the Shakspere he rejected. Yet his reforms seem timid enough to- day, and at the time attracted little animadversion. For a bolder note of revolt had been sounded by Lamotte's attack on the regular tragedy, challenging the authority of the unities and the prestige of the ancients, though in his own best drama, " Inez de Castro," Lamotte had lacked the courage of his convic- tions. These were, indeed, far in advance of his time, and the contemporary tragedians, Crdlnllon fere and • Cp. Brunetiere, Epoques du tlieatre fninrais, p. 240, and Ilistoire et litterature, iii. 95. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 his fellows, kissed the rod of tradition and of Voltaire, thouuh Crdbillon has occasional hursts of more Cor- neillian power than Voltaire ever attains. But he had also more Romantic exaggeration, and his characters show even less of the vmconquerahle mind, the strong will, that distinguished Corneille. Late in the century the standard of revolt was again raised by Ducis, who adapted several plays of Shakspere to French taste, between 1767 and 1792, and broke the way for greater successors. But besides these revolts from regular tragedy, a radical modification of it appeared during this century in the tragedy of common life, which, with a parallel breaking down of the regular comedy to the comedy of pathos, confused the distinctions which had sep- arated the tragedy and comedy of the Classicists. Then the tragedie hourgeoise and the comedie larmoyante inevitablv merged into the melodrama, or drame, fathered by La Chauss^e ^ and ably advocated by Diderot.^ The essence of all this work is that the scenes shall be taken from contemporary life in its serious or serio-comic aspects. But though these be- ginnings of a very large and important section of the modern drama are of great historic interest, intrinsi- cally they present little that is w^orthy to survive. In comedy, Voltaire's best work was outranked both by his predecessor, Le Sage, and by his successor, Beaumarchais, while Destouches, Marivaux, and Se- daine were his not unworthy compeers. Le Sage (1668-1747), wdio is better known as the author of " Gil Bias, " wrote also a multitude of short farces 1 See Lanson, La Chaussce; Brunetiere, Epoques dii theatre fran- 9ais, p. 275 sqq. 2 In his " Essai sur la pocsio dramatiquo," 1 7.58. 96 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. aud operettas which stood in high repute ; while his " Crispin " and " Tucaret " are true comedies, quite worthy of Moliire. Both are prose studies of contem- porary society, — the former more lively than probable, but scintillating with wit and palpitating with comic life ; the latter more seriously critical, a cruel and realistic satire on the moneyed class that was already beginning to contest the social pre-eminence of the corrupted nobility, which in its turn received merited castigation, while provincial narrowness and mercantile pettiness were not spared, and the characters in both plays, as we should expect from his novels, were more completely rounded than the typical figures of Moliere. But if Le Sage, at his best, leads the stage in the former half of the century, Destouches is not far be- hind, and his work maintains a remarkable level of excellence, though he never deserts the typical method of Molifere and Edgnard. His " Philosophe mari^ " and " Les Glorieux " have life in them still. In Dan- court, too, one may trace the evolution of the comedy of condition from that of character. Where Molifere, Rdgnard, and Le Sage had sought to combine various phases of a social vice into the miser, the misanthrope, the gambler, or the financier, he divides the phases among a group of characters, and writes of " Les Agioteurs, " " Les Bourgeoises a la mode, " or " Les Enfants de Paris. " Marivaux was a man of more originality, both for good and ill, in the drama and the novel also. His manner was sufficiently unique to furnish to the lan- guage the word marivaudage, which now stands for a rather etTeminate wit and affectation of simplicity. But Marivaux was better than this word miglit im- ply. He was, above all else, a delicate, subtle, i')rccieux THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 97 psychologist ; and his dramatic mission was the apology of sentiment and the analysis of love, till then hardly attempted in comedy. This gave to women an equal prominence with men in the drama. In Moli^re the tender passion is assumed as a state ; with Marivaux it is a development. His dramas begin with the dawn of love, and end usually with its declaration. As he said himself, " he spied out in the human heart all the nooks where love mi»ht hide when he feared to show himself, and the object of each of his comedies was to make love come out of one of those nooks ; " to whicli Brunetii^re adds that if you substitute jealousy for love, you will define the tragedy of Racine. They are trifles light as air, but delicious in their apparent naivetd and hidden depth. There is, indeed, little or no intrigue, and so there is danger of monotony if his plays 1 be read consecutively ; but it is a relief to find the old theatrical apparatus and conventions laid aside with a light heart for stories that transport us to a delicate and amiable fairyland, where we recognize ourselves as we should like to be. But though the idea of the development of love as a subject for comedy was a most fruitful seed, and all his successors profited by it according to their power, Marivaux founded no school ; for as the century proceeded, the dramatic cur- rent was deflected by the stronger philosophical bent. The desire to sway the feelings and to preach a shal- low, sentimental optimism takes possession of the stage under the banner of naturalism in the Tragedie hourgeoise, or of pathetic sentiment in the Comedie 1 The best are " Le Legs," "Double iuconstauoe," "Jou d'amour et (lu hazard." See Larroumet, Marivaux ; Faguet, xviii. siecle ; Lan- sou, Litterature, p. 639; Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, vols. ii. and iii. ; Bruuetiere, Epoques du the'atre ; Lemaitre, Impressions de theatre, vols. ii. and iv. 7 98 MODERN FliENCH LITERATURE. larmoyante. The development is interesting, but, as has been said, tlie phiys that illustrate it deserve no individual notice. This change is often attributed to Diderot; but the reflected lustre of his achievements in literature and philosophy has probably made men attribute to him dramatic services that belong to his predecessors, no- tably to Marivaux, Lamotte, and Destouches. ^ His plays, " Le Fils naturel " and " Le Pfere de famille, " were unfortunate illustrations of excellent theories, derived in part from the German Lessing, whom in turn they inspired ; but there was nothing new in his ideas, nothing that had not been anticipated for the pathetic comedy by La Chaussde, while in tragedy Lamotte had demanded the use of prose and more action as early as 1721, frankly setting up the English stand- ard for imitation. But if Diderot was neither first to preach nor to practise either the bourgeois tragedy or melodrama, neither was he the most eloquent pro- claimer of the new doctrine, for that leaf must be added to the dubious laurels of Eousseau. Indeed, his original theory that tlie drama should present condi- tions rather than characters, " that the profession should become the principal object and the character only accessory, " was rather retrogressive in its ten- dency, though it helped, perhaps, to turn the drama- tists of the later nineteenth century to the modification of character by profession or environment, which is an important factor in the realistic art of Dumas fils and Emile Augier. More truly and less obtrusively philosophic than the 1 See Ducros, Didomt, I'nris, 1894; Reinach, Diderot, Paris, 1894 ; and a notice of tlu-se books 1)V Leniaitrc in "Journal des dchats" (Ilehd.), 4tli and lltli August, 1894. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 99 men of wliom we have just spoken is Beaumarchais,^ the most important dramatic figure in the latter part of the century, though he was the author of but two really successful plays. Beaumarchais had seen more of social life than any of his predecessors; for though, like Eousseau, the son of a watchmaker, he had in- gratiated himself by skill and good fortune in court circles, where he made a wealthy marriage and in- fluential connections in banking circles, wdiile his " Memoirs, " by their scatliing exposure of the corrup- tion of an unpopular Parlement, made him popular also with the influential bourgeoisie. A visit to England, undertaken in the government interest, had nnich influence on the relations of France to the North American colonies, then about to revolt from England ; and its literary efiect on Beaumarchais was almost as determining as it had been on Voltaire, for it needed only that to his knowledge of society and the reckless- ness characteristic at once of the spirit of the time and of his own, there should be added the art of English comedy to inspire his native wit with the epoch- making " Barber of Seville " (1775) and the " Marriage of Figaro " (1784). Barber Figaro, the hero of both plays, is a light-hearted, versatile, shrewd scapegrace, with a good deal of that worldly philosophy which was assisting in the disintegration of society, and pre- paring the Eevolution which these comedies, by their levelling tendencies, did much to provoke and to has- ten ; though Beaumarchais had probably no more serious purpose than delight in his own wit. He wished to fire a squib and exploded the magazine.^ 1 Sec Lintilliac, Bcaumarrhais. 2 Modern tvpes of Figaro are to be found in Angier's " Les Effronte's" and"Le Fils de Giboyer." The political satire finds a more serious parallel in Sardou's " Ragabas." See Brnnetiere, 1. c. 297. 100 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. These comedies mark a decided advance in the de- velopment of dialogue, which hecomes more i)recise, epigrammatic, and clear-cnt. Beaumarchais' spark- ling verve is sustained in a way till then approached only by Molifere, and hardly attained even by him. Indeed, it will often seem that the author is too prodigal, or that his hearers were men of quicker wits than ours ; for we hardly conceive that such keenness and brilliancy should be fully valued at one reading, still less when heard but once on the stage. If it were not a paradox, one would be inclined to say that the chief fault of Beaumarchais is the monotony of his scintillating brilliancy. But, besides this, in con- struction and the management of intrigue, the plays touched the high-water mark of the century. " Origi- nal, incomparable, inimitable, unique," they earned an unparalleled success, and left a tradition that after four decades of woful mediocrity was revived by Hugo and Dumas, and inspired the operas of Mozart and Bossini. This intervening mediocrity was due in great meas- ure to the deadening effect of sentimentality,^ and to the engrossing interest of politics. From 1789 till the end of the century, plays were more often praised and damned for their sentiments than for their merits. The history of the stage during these years is of great interest, but it belongs no longer to the history of lit- erature. ^ Yet the drama of the century as a whole, though in no sense great, was at least superior to its poetry, and showed surer signs of the Eomantic awakening. 1 Sec Diderot as cited hy Bruiietiere, 1. c. 294. 2 See Lumibre, Le Theatre franeais pendant la revolution ; Wel- schincjcr, Le Theatre dc la rc'volutiou ; and Brunetiorc, Etudes critt(iues, ii. .322. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 101 During this wliole period prose had been encroach- ing on the domain of dramatic poetry, and after its close the alexandrine enjoyed only an asthmatic re- vival. It is in this century that prose becomes the natural vehicle of almost every phase of thought and feeling, occupying a far more varied, vast, and im- portant field than ever before, and for the first time surpassing verse in literary value. This is pre-emi- nently the century of the " philosophers, " the age of scientific inrjuiry and of comparative study of history and institutions. And thoujih it is true that none of these fields belongs to pure literature, many of these works show such intrinsic beauty and had such influ- ence on imaginative prose that no literary study can ifrnore them. The first of the historians of this century belongs rather to the preceding. The " Memoirs " of Saint- Simon (1678-1755) show the unreconciled feudal noble, while his treatment of language is as autocratic as though Balzac and Vaugelas had lived in vain. As a contemporary said, " Saint-Simon saw the nation in the nobility, the nobility in the peerage, and the peerage in himself. " These " Memoirs, " often amusing, some- times exasperating, are always valuable for the history of their time ; but they are not cliaracteristic of its literary or intellectual movement. In Eollin (1661- 1741), on the other hand, the literary instinct wholly predominated. Entirely engrossed in making himself clear and his subject interesting, he does not rise above the amiable raconteur. This would apply also to Voltaire's " Charles XTI. " and " Peter the Great; " but in his " Essai sur les mceurs et 1 'esprit des nations, " Voltaire shows, and is first to show, a genuine effort to study the development of civilization imder 102 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the varying conditions of character and destiny ; and thus, though he could not emancipate himself from the passions of his time nor observe without prejudice, though the age of Louis XIV. was to him " the most glorious epoch of the human mind " in spite of " the tricky and meddling clergy that marred it," though the story of Charles Martel and Eoland " deserved no more to be written than that of bears and wolves," though he saw in religion everywhere and always the chief obstacle to human progress, yet he inaugurated in this essay the science of comparative history. In this field he was almost immediately followed by Montesquieu, — a far more catholic spirit, and without a trace of the iconoclastic optimism so general in his time. Already, in 1721, his " Lettres persanes " had shown him a keen critic of contemporary society, its foibles, its government, and its creed. A more serious and truly philosophic mind appeared in his " Grandeur and Decadence of the Eomans " (1734); and this was but a foretaste of the great " Spirit of Laws " (1748), where the relations of law to government, manners, climate, religion, and trade were discussed with a sweep of vision that embraced every age and country. In it all, however, Montesquieu was a student much more than a reformer, — more eager to see how what is came to be than to think how he can make it better. But though he was not himself a revolutionist, nor incited to change, his book, liy calling attention to the superiority of the English constitution, had an immense and enduring influence in determining the destinies of France and of the whole Continent, which has come more and more to the constitutionalism of which he was the greatest herald. Another historian, who left a far different impress THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 103 on the time, was Mably, whose perversely persistent 'exaltation of a false classicism took a hold on the pop- ular fancy that explains much of the masquerading of the early revolutionary period. More directly political in its tone was Raynal's " Histoire philosophique des Indes, " — a co-operative work, that pretends to be a colonial history and is really a demagogic declamation, of which a single example may suffice. " Cowardly people, imbecile herd, " says the historian, " you are content to groan when you should roar. " Wliat must the philosophic princes have thought of this, the Aus- trian Joseph, the Czarina Catherine, and King Fred- eric, who had trusted the charmer of Feruey when he said that " the cause of the philosoxjhers was the cause of the princes " ? They might see now that the attack on the Church inevitably reacted on the divine right of royalty, and that history was only a pulpit for the " philosophers, " who soon found their voices drowned by the revolutionary orators, Mirabeau, Barnave, Yergniaud, Danton, — a race silenced and superseded by the man of the 18th Bruniaire. Never have self-styled " philosophers " exercised so direct an influence on society as in France at this time. Among them Voltaire holds the chief and cen- tral place ; but the radical group at his left is more witty, keen, vigorous, and loud than the conservatives who make l)ut a poor and timid show in defence of in- herited faith. This new philosophy drew its inspira- tion from England, chiefly from Locke; and, like him, the French metaphysicians aimed to be clear rather than profound, gliding over difficulties and aspiring to systematic completeness at the cost sometimes of com- mon-sense. Voltaire almost boasts of his superficiality. " Throw my work into the fire," he exclaims, " if it is 104 MODERN FRENCH LITERATUKE. not as clear as a fable of La Fontaine. " Or again, " The French have no idea how much trouble I take to give them no trouble. " But he was seldom anxious to push his thought to its legitimate conclusion. He used it as a solvent of old, incrusted prejudices, not as a rule of new life. He remained a deist, and showed more than once tliat his faith was real and not conventional. This antithesis between his philosophy and his creed bore good fruit; it made him the elo- quent and successful preacher of toleration. His successors were more consistent. Condillac forced sensationalism to a dizzy brink, where Diderot and La Mettrie nursed their pure materialism. And from this verge Helvdtius and 1) 'Holbach soon took the step that landed them in a cynical atheism which pro- voked a protest even from Frederic and Voltaire. But they could not banish the spirit they had conjured, a ruthless iconoclasm that found its fullest representa- tive in the " Encyclopedic, " ^ the joint j)roduction of Diderot, D'Alembert, and most of the radical think- ers of the time. The reception given to their work amply testifies that these men were in accord with the people. The forty -five hundred copies of its twenty- eight folio volumes were hardly dry before they were sold, and the last set brought the price of rarity. Vol- taire's contributions are collected in his " Dictionnaire philosophique. " The articles are full of personalities and of mocking irreverence, which he seemed to think justified by the nature of his adversaries and of tlieir cause. Yet they form some of the most characteristic and typical of his whole " hundred volumes," and are still readable in spite of the alphabetical arrangement. ^ An admiralile account of tliis work is contaiued in John Morley's Diderot, i. 113-241. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1:5 Their value, however, is literary and not philosophical, at least in any sense that we now attach to that word. To eighteenth-century France a " philosoplier " is a man disabused of all " the long results of time, " a man who looks at life with shrewd but shallow common- sense. And until it was weighed, this specious optimism was naturally of immense popularity. In- deed the philosophers could truly say that the world was gone after them. The mania for collections, the dilettante study of " natural history, " date from this time. Hundreds busied themselves thus with physics and chemistry, and it was especially for them that Voltaire had popularized Newton's theories in his " English Letters. " In their optimistic hopefulness the puzzle of Nature seemed almost solved. Like Wagner in Goethe's "Faust," they felt they knew much and hoped to know all, — an attitude indicated by the inscription on Buffon's statue at Versailles : " A genius equal to the majesty of Natura " Indeed, as they approach the maelstrom of the Revolution, a ver- ticfo seems to seize on these minds cut loose from the moorings of faith and drifting into unknown seas. "Enlightenment is so diffused," says Voltaire, witli his genial optimism, " that there must be an outburst on the first occasion. . . . Our young men are for- tunate. They will see fine things. " But he looked at the matter always as an aristocrat. " As for the canaille," he said, "it will always remain canaille. I do not concern myself with it. " ^ Eousseau had a truer and profounder foresight. " Eely not, " he says in " Emile," " on the existing social order, forgetting that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and that you cannot foresee nor prevent what may come on 1 See Brunetiere, fitudes critiques, i. 181 sqq. 106 MOPERN FKENCH LITERATURE. your children. The great will become small, the rich poor, the monarch subject. We approach the critical state and the age of revolutions. " Eousseau, not Voltaire, is the seer of the closing century ; and he has put this startling prophecy, not in an historical or philosophical treatise, but in a novel, " Emile, " which, with his " Nouvelle Heloise, " exer- cised a more fateful influence on mankind than any works of pure imagination that literary history knows. So we are brought back from a philosophical agression to pure literature, to the novelists and critics of the eighteenth century. Criticism may, indeed, be briefly dismissed. Voltaire is once more easily first with his " Commentary on Corneille ; " but Diderot's annual " Salons " ^ were epoch-making for the rational study of art, while his dramatic essays popularized a natural- ism that they did not originate, and the " Correspond- ence" '^ of his friend Melchior Grimm with German courts may still be read with interest for its subjective originality. Only these three influenced the future; for La Harpe, in spite of his contemporary popular- ity, is Init the talented representative of a sterile conservatism. In no department of literature was progress more varied or the outlook more hopeful during this entire period tlian in prose fiction, wliich was replacing the drama as the chief literary genre. Le Sage shares with Voltaire the honors of the first rank ; but excellent work was done by Prevost, La Clos, and Louvet, in ^ Brunetiore, op. ci't. ii. 285, criticises them very severely. 2 Tlie ontcr))rise bef^un l)y Rayiial was conducted liy Grimm from 1753 to 1773, and continued ]>}■ Meister till 1790. Diderot and Mme. d'Ejiernay iihn shared in it. The whole is best edited by Tourncux, Paris, 1877 sqq. TIIK EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 107 the psychological novel ; by Crdbillon fils and Eestif de la Bretonne in the tale; by Du Laurens, De la Mettrie, and Diderot in the Shandyesque romance; while Marivaux furnished delightfully amusing trifles, Florian, the gentle officer of dragoons, and Marmontel, the mild pupil of Voltaire, provided didactic sugar- pills, and the Abb(^ Barthdlemy offered a huge bolus of the same tempting character in the six stout volumes of the " Travels of the Young Anacharsis, " which marks a revival of a popular interest in antiquity that is illustrated also by the poetry of Chdnier. And then, with a place quite unique among the novelists of the world, is Rousseau, the prophet of the new era, of sentiment and Nature. Le Sage, though he was no mean dramatist, was much greater as a realistic and satirical novelist, and was, indeed, the first Frencli writer of fiction who lived, or could have lived, by his pen. Like Vol- taire, he was a scholar of the Jesuits, and educated for the law; but while Voltaire drew his inspiration from England, Le Sage turned rather to Spain. The title and idea of " Le Diable boiteux, " his first independent essay (1707), was borrowed from Guevara, though the work itself — in Scott's opinion, one of the profoundest studies of human character — owed more to La Bruy^re. But he is less remembered to-day for this than for the equally keen and more entertaining " Gil Bias " (1715- 1735), — a book singular in that it seems to belong rather to either of two foreign literatures than to its own. For while it has been recognized as a masterpiece in France, it had no roots in the past of French litera- ture ; and its form was so closely studied from the Span- ish novela picarcf^ca, that over-zealous Castilians have actually claimed it as a translation. And as it had no 108 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. ancestry in France, so it had no immediate posterity there, but rather in England, in the work of Defoe and Smollett, though Le Sage anticii^ated many features of the novel of low life and the naturalism of the school of Balzac. In his style, Le Sage set himself against what he called the " strained diction " and " charms more bril- liant than solid " of Marivaux. He wished to be clear, and, above all, not to be affected ; and he moulded to his use a language very direct, terse, somewhat theat- rical, but yet truly popular. If " Gil Bias, " as a novel, seems at times prolix, it is because Le Sage, like a novelistic La Bruy^re, is not content to show a segment of society, but seeks in the varying fortunes of his hero to reveal all its faults and foibles. But he shuns, especially in the admirable third part (1734), the exceptional, and deals with life as he knows it, and with average men, differing thus from some mod- em realists and from his own later work. For there is in this school always a tendency to dwell on the picturesque side of vagabond life, and to study the abnormal in vice rather than in virtue. Le Sage, in- deed, has no touch of the pessimism that pervades the modern Naturalists. Acquaintance with vice is but a factor in bringing Gil to virtue. But in his closer adaptations from the Spanish, " Guzman d'Alfarache " (1732) and the " Bachelier de Salamanque " (1736), there is hardly any expression of moral sympathy at all, — a fact much more interesting than the novels themselves ; for it is the first sign of that weariness of conscience and moral apathy that was presently to reveal itself in Voltaire's "Bucclle," in Diderot's " Neveu de Piameau, " and in the work of tlie later philosophers. By this almost alone can Le Sage THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 109 be connected with the fiction of his century in France. For the growth of the novel was rather on psycho- logical lines. Marivaiix (1688-1768), without being either a realist or a moralist, showed, in his " Specta- teur, " that he was a very keen analyst of human feel- ing ; and the qualities of these essays ai3pear also in his best novels, — " Marianne " and " Le Paysan parvenu. " The former is a delicate, dissection of coquetry ; the latter traces the development of self-assurance and effrontery in M. Jacob, the successful and universal lover, who represents a sort of arrested development of Maupassant's "Bel-Ami," though oftener compared with Molifere's " Don Juan " and George Sand's " Leone Leoni. " In both novels, however, there are carefully drawn pictures of contemporary society, and some scenes of Parisian street life, that suggest the realistic vigor of Balzac. Still, it is the psychological study that absorbs Marivaux's interest and his reader's also. No writer kills off or abandons his characters with more nonchalance when they begin to embarrass him; but, even so, he has brought neither of these stories to an end. In him first we notice the pre-eminence that is given to women, and also the curious concomitance of facile shamelessness with a romantic and sublimated conventional sentimentality, — a note that runs through all the fiction of the century, reaching its height in Rousseau; a double-twisted thread that seldom fails to show itself both in the loftiest and in the basest writers. This peculiar sentimental strain was taken up with much skill and some mixture of romantic idealism in Prdvost's " Manon Lescaut " (1731), admirable in a rather nauseating kind. In a style whose simple 110 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. directness is the highest art, he tells a story in which one knows not whether to wonder most at the complacent love of the hero, who is ever ready to pardon venal infidelity, or at the deathless love of the frail heroine, who can resist all seductions but those of good wine and good clothes. As an analysis of sentimentalism degenerating to the verge of drivelling inanity, the book holds an eminence that may long be unrivalled. Still it must be admitted that both in " Manon " and in his now forgotten " Cleveland, " as well as by his translations of Eichardson, Prdvost did much to illustrate the resources and direct the growtli of romantic fiction. Yet though " Manon " had many successors, it had no memorable ones in the early part of the century. Indeed, its closest coimterpart in the intertwining of sentiment and lubricity, Louvet's " Faublas, " dates from 1786. More closely resembling Marivaux, but without his depth, are the stories of society written for the amusement of an idle and corrupt aristocracy by Crdbillon //s, son of the dramatist, and by the equally immoral but more delicate La Clos, whose " Liaisons dangereuses " is the best in this inferior kind. From amusement to instruction is not a long stop ; but the didactic fiction of this period, though voluminous, is not of striking excellence. It may suffice to name the " gutter-Eousseau," Eestif de la Eretonne, that " genial animal " who is quite unrivalled in the serious pedagogy of his obscene sentimentality; and at the other extreme, Eernardin de Saint-Eierre, in whose didactic idyls, " Eaul and Virginia" and "La Chau- mi^re indienne, " sentiment reaches the acute stage of hyperaesthesia, and the ethics, like Shakspere's med- lars, are " rotten before they are ripe. " Eernardiii, THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Ill however, by his treatment of landscape as " the back- ground of the picture of a human life," is epoch- making in the history of the novel. His shallow sentiment reflects the growing weariness with wit and social artificiality, and was for a time immensely popular; but it was the natural result of Eousseau's teaching, and that will claim attention presently. Meantime a new turn had been given to fiction by Voltaire, — here, as usual, a leader. He took up the conte where Perrault and his followers had left it, and developed from it the tendenz roman, the novel with a social or ethical purpose. His short tales are the most artful and insinuating controversial pamphlets that were ever penned. Self-satisfied optimism in religion and popular thought were never so pitilessly laid bare, so wittily mocked, as in " Candide " (1759) ; political and ecclesiastical reforms were never more effectually preached than in the " Homme aux qua- rante dcus " (1768), with its amusing persiflage of the " single tax ; " the presumption of an unspiritual es- tablished church might laugh at direct attacks, but winced at the scornful masked satire of " Zadig " (1747). No man has done so much in a bad cause with so slight weapons as Voltaire, by the indirect, gliding irony of his allusions to the Scriptures. " I will not moralize and will be read," said Byron; but Voltaire moralized more convincingly than any of his time, and was more universally read also. It is true that here, as elsewhere, he is not consistent. Perhaps he was not anxious to be. " I begin to care more for happiness in life than for a truth, " he said. Intellec- tually, he might be a pessimist and determinist ; but he knew that " the good of society demands that man shall think himself free, " and he acted and preached 112 MODERN FKENCII LITERATUKE. accordingly, — for instance in " Le Mondain " (1736) and " L'Histoire de Jenni " (1775). In this he is a vitilitarian rather than a philosopher. He knows that the mass of readers will not see his inconsistency, while they will feel his keen thrusts at old abuses and creeds, and their pride will be flattered by the frank cynicism which urges them to combine with the writer to draw advantage from the superstitions of the less enlightened. Perhaps no " moralist " is at once so clear and so self -contradictory as Voltaire in these tales, where he seems now deist, now atheist, now radical, now reactionary, now pessimist, now optimist, so that the work as a whole becomes indeed " a chaos of luminous ideas. " The novel with a purpose, thus launched, found a placid cultivator in Marmontel and an eager advocate in Diderot, more consistent in design than Voltaire, but less even in execution ; rising sometimes to a serious and eloquent indignation, as in " La Eeli- gieuse, " tlien descending into the pig-sty of " Les Bijoux indiscrets, " or loosing the bridle of a Shandy- csque fancy in " Jacques le fataliste " and the " Neveu de Rameau, " that so fascinated the attention of Goethe ; or perhaps revelling in the free-lovers' utopia of the "Supplement au voyage de Bourgainville. " As a modern critic, Faguet has observed, Diderot was a type of the French bourgeois, and very far from " the most German head in France, " as it has been the fashion to call him. -^ He had the same facile morality, the same lack of delicacy, the same vulgar inclinations and generous emotions, the same sincerity and industry that stamp the French middle class, which was now 1 The expression is Raiiitc-Bouvo's. Goetlie li.ad said : " lu all that the French blame in him, lie is* a genuine German." THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 113 first coming to tlie front as representative of national life. It is in his novels that Diderot shows most of this fundamentally Gallic mind. While his philoso- phy was a prelude to the theory of evolution, in his fiction he anticipated Eousseau's " state of nature ; " and his cynicism did not shrink from the uttermost conse- quences of his theory, more consistent in this tlian his sentimental successor, who had arrived at similar con- clusions by an independent and less logical process. Yet the " state of nature " is associated rather with Eousseau than with Diderot, for he preached it with a fire of sympathetic enthusiasm that made him teacher and guide of Europe for many years in a deeper sense than Voltaire had ever been, though literary criticism must rank him as the inferior genius. Jean-Jacques Eousseau (1712-1778) was the son of a Genevan clockmaker ; yet up to his fortieth year he had no settled home or occupation, but led the wan- dering life of a sentimental Gil Bias, the shuttlecock of his usually generous emotions. For he had a good heart, ready to open to all, but as ready to take offence, and quick to think itself deceived. No man ever quari'elled so consistently with every one who tried to befriend him, — with Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, the Prince of Conti, and the various lady patronesses of his wanderings. He came at last to a hatred, not of the individual, but of society, which, it seemed to him, had corrupted the individual, and made him unworthy of the lovino; trust Eousseau longed to o-ive. It is n(jt the faults of human nature that grieve him, but the faults of social order against which his sensitive nature chafes. It is in literature, as in society, the revolt of individualism against the classicism of Boileau and the principles of the Bourbon monarchy. So his life 8 114 MODERN FEENCH LITERATURE. becomes a vision of what might be ; a Utopian imagi- nation colors all his philosophy. It addresses itself, not to reason, but to sentiment. It is not the white light of ideas, but the glow of passionate tires. Evi- dence is neglected, probability scorned. The " Social Contract " assumes an origin of society that not only never was, but, a jjriori, never could be. The peda- gogy of " Emile, " though most valuable and sugges- tive, is just as impracticable and visionary. The " Nouvelle Heloi'se " moves in a cloud-land of emas- culate unreality ; while the cynical frankness of his " Confessions " shows how his character was dis- integrated by unresisted imagination, and explains his " misanthropic optimism " by his pathological condition. Dissatisfaction with the order of society was almost universal during the latter half of the century, but, ex- cept in i)hilosophic circles, it was inarticulate and dimly realized. Eousseau made it a popular jmssion, a universal enthusiasm. But the destructive influence of " Indgalite " (1755) far outweighed the constructive effort of the " Contrat social " (1762), which offered no practical remedy and, indeed, stands quite isolated in his writings; for it borrowed elements from Locke's second Essay on Government that the author hardly assimilated or understood, — elements that were incon- sistent with that fundamental dogma of the " state of nature " which runs through all his later work, inspir- ing his " Lettre sur les spectacles " (1758) with the spirit of a modern Tertullian, and dictating the aris- tocratic pedagogy of " Emile " (1762). Rousseau's theory in " Emile " is tliat a child should be left to develop naturally. He allows a tutor, but only to satisfy legitimate curiosity and arrange THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 115 external influence, so as to give " a positive indirect education. " Even the ethics of property are to be taught by object lessons. Ho wishes the intellect sub- ordinated to the sentimental affections and emotions, but he wishes the child to be isolated from other chil- dren, from adults, even from his family, since all these have some of the inherited virus of society. Goethe called " Emile " the "natural gospel of education;" and in so far as the object of all teaching is to produce independent thinking, to teach children and not facts, Rousseau proclaimed a truth always in danger of being forgotten. He was the reforming iconoclast in this field that Voltaire and Diderot were in others. He went too far. Taken literally, his " intuitive educa- tion " was a paradox ; but it was a most helpful one, most timely, and most fruitful, not in France alone, but for all Europe. In the letters of " Julie, la nouvelle Hdloise " (1761), that " Midsummer Night's Dream of a pri- vate tutor," that often suggests Goethe's "Elective Affinities," we have Rousseau's ideas on love, and naturally, therefore, his most popular work, perhaps the most influential novel that was ever w^ritten. Here he put most heart and passion, and most of his morbid personal experience. To be sure, Richardson was his obvious, almost his declared model. ^ From him lie took the epistolary form, the bourgeois char- acters, the prolix digressions, and it was from the England that his fancy saw behind Richardson that he drew Milord Edouard, the philosophic prig, and those astonishing " English mornings, " where people gathered together in gardens that art had aided nature ^ See Texte, Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitanisme lit- tc'raire. 116 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. to turn into nurseries of sentimentality, and there " en- joyed at once tlie bliss of being united and the charm of meditation " in " an immobility of ecstasy. " But what made the " Heloise " a jjower was its feeling for Nature and its spirit of lyric melancholy. Here, too, Eousseau had had predecessors, — Thomson, Gray, Collins, Young, and the other sources of Ossian, — but these " common people of the skies " paled before a passion where recollections of Mademoiselle de Galley and Mademoiselle de Graff enried were fanned to new flame by the presence of Madame d'Houdetot, and inter- penetrated with memories of Madame de Warens, till all became a haunting reality, to which the author sought to lend a central purpose and dignity by a de- fence of the home and of Christianity against his fan- cied enemies, the philosophes and libertins. It is true that the situation he creates is hopelessly artificial. These connoisseurs of rare sentiments and mutual students of their own pathological psychology, these romantic self-tormentors, are so false to Nature that Eousseau can neither procure a normal climax nor suffer his characters to get on without one, but is com- pelled to summon a deus ex machina to cut the tangle in which their perverse sentimentality had involved these paradoxical people in their " enterprise against common-sense. " That there were such men as Saint- Preux in this generation, no one with Werther before his eyes will deny ; but it was the women of the novel, Julie and Claire, that won the book its most passionate admirers and its immense vogue among ladies, wlio felt that their duplex feminine nature, neglected by previous novelists, had been seized as never before. They were flattered by the eminence to which Eous- seau had advanced them, and charmed by the sym- THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 117 patliy that throbbed through his pages. They knew the reality of the acre haiscr that so aniiised Voltaire. Indeed, lioiisseau's women had a more defined individ- uality than French fiction had yet seen. In general, the book was genuine and sincere. It came from a romantic heart, and spoke to thousands of romantic hearts, who also had in rich measure the " gift of tears, " in which Julie so readily dissolved. It roused in them that " general warmth " of which Jean Paul speaks, — that vague, all-embracing, ill-defined, sen- timental philanthropy, which was a cause, and, still more, a directing force in the French Eevolution. " Emile " and " Julie " show sentimentality applied. The " Confessions " exhibit it as raw material. Here one is less repelled by the dogmatic undercurrent, and so can enjoy more fully the artistic charm of the apparently frank and simple narrative of his frailty and his vices, where attention is suspended with great art, events skilfully prepared, and each climax most carefully managed. These " Confessions " are probably most read to-day ; but in the influence they exerted they must yield both to the novels and to " The Savoyard Vicar," a little tractate contained in " Emile," whose emotional, undogmatic, yet fervent faith is the first effect'Tal stemming of the infidel current, and the herald of the equally emotional Christianity of Saint- Piene, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, as Rousseau's feeling for Nature was for that which was most original in their art. For in all Rousseau's works there is a love of Nature, a sense of and appreciation for natural beauty, that was a revelation in French literature. Not only is there nothing before Rousseau ec|ual to the sunrise in the third book of " Emile, " or to his description 118 • MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. of the 'pcrvenclic, but there is nothing to which it can be compared. He gave his countrymen a new sense. This was much ; but far more important was Eousseau's assertion of the long-suppressed rights of individual- ism, of the ego in literature. As a describer of senti- ments and feelings, he surpassed Prdvost, as Prdvost had surpassed Marivaux. Now, this is just the line of demarcation that separates the classical literature from the romantic. Sentimental religion and sentimental politics may be discredited by the logic of events, the recent literary movement may show in its naturalism more of the spirit of Diderot; but individualism, de- scriptions of sentiment and nature, and the mutual I)lay of one on the other, are still the key-note of modern literature. That Eousseau struck that note, that he " emancipated the ego, " gives him a unique place, and inakes his name the most fitting introduc- tion to the literature of the present century. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBKIAND. 119 CHAPTER IV. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBEIAND. The early years of the nineteenth century were unfa- vorable to the literary development of Prance. The Napoleonic era did indeed nurse the childhood of many whose illustrious genius bears witness to the emotions that attended their birth, but these emotions found no immediate and worthy echo. Napoleon might desire to add this to his other laurels ; but the compeller of states could not command the flight of genius, and the lassitude of reaction from the unbridled liberties of the Eevolution invited a tyranny that soon spread from the political to the social and literary sphere. Yet, during the twenty years that separate Lodi from Waterloo, two writers were in their prime whose work contains the germ of nearly every later phase of the literary development of our century. Madame de Staiil and Chateaubriand are the true antetypes of the Eomanticists, the Psychologists, and the Realists, and of the subjective and objective schools of criticism. And they are to such an extent the sufficient complements and supplements of one another, that their contemporaries for the first twenty years of the century need hardly be named in a study of the literary currents of the seventy -five years tliat follow. Madame de Stael's influence on literature cannot be measured by the popularity of her books. It is long 120 MODEllN FKENCH LITERATUKE. since any of lier writings have been widely read, and they are never likely to be so. Yet there has been no generation since her time that has not felt and ac- knowledged the power of her fruitful thought, not in politics alone, but in literature also. Her personality need not long detain us. She was the daughter of Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's youthful tiame, and of the Genevese banker, Neckar, the noted finance minister of Louis XVI. ^ Thvis it happened that she passed her precocious youth in one of the most brilliant literary salons of Paris, where her lively intellect was stimulated, perhaps as much as her vanity, by constant intercourse with some of the keenest wits and critics of that time. Hither came Grimm, author of the " Correspondence with Foreign Courts;" here might be seen Eaynal, of the philo- sophic and demagogic " History of the Indies ; " here, too, the distinguished metaphysicians Thomas and Marmontel. And here the future Madame de Stacl used to sit at her mother's feet, and drink in the strong drink of the debates and discussions around her, storing up silently, like a busy bee, material for the inexhaustible conversations and stinging criticisms of a lifetime, while she nursed ambitions of a future in- tellectual domination over a social circle as brilliant as that which the genius of her parents had gathered. Perhaps no girl of fifteen ever lived in the midst of 5 Slio, was horn in 1705, and died in 1817. Princi])al works: De la litterature, 1800; Delpliine, 1802; Corinne, 1807; De rAlleniagne, 1 813 ; Re'volution fran^aisc, 1818; Dix annces d'exil, 1821 . Biography : Blcnnerhasset, Life of Madame do Stael; Sorel, Madame do Stael (Grands ocrivains franrais). Critical essays : Brnnotiore, Evolution de la critique (Le^on VI.); Fag«et, Politiques et moralistes, i. 12.3; Pcl- lissior, Mouvement litte'raire au xix. sieclc, p. 42 sqii. (cited hereafter as "rollissier"). MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 121 such a vortex of disintegrating ideas, and held the little skiff of her genius steady in the tide. In any case, Madame de Stael became so permeated with the rulino' ideas of her time that she took into herself, and assimilated more perfectly, perhaps, than any other one person, the intellectual spirit of that age ; and to the close of her life it is this, the last generation of the eighteenth century, that she represents, with its philosophy of progressive confident optimism and its belief in ideas and ideals. But Mademoiselle Neckar's intellectual emancipation did not hinder her from a marriage (January, 1786), dictated far more by con- venience than love, with the Swedish ambassador. Baron von Staul-Holstein. Perhaps it was felt that she was not likely to make a love-match. Boisterous and vain in her girlhood, plain to the verge of home- liness from infancy to death, she was so fond of talk- ing that a lover might have found it hard to declare his passion. ^ Even before her marriage, she had grown to be positive and self-assertive, and had written much, thinigh she had published nothing. So, though she had three children, she kept the tenor of her inde- pendent way, and at length (1799) consented to such separation as the law then admitted. Neither husband nor wife cared at all for each other, and neither cared 1 Sorel give.s ns this word-picture: "Expressive features, a com- plexion dark rather than fresh, yet colored and growing animate in conversation, sculpturesque shoulders, powerful arms, rohust hands, as of a sovereign rather than of a great sentimental cocjuette, a high forehead, black hair falling in thick curls, vigoroi;s nose, strongly marked mouth, prominent lips opened wide to life and speech, an ora- tor's mouth with a frank, good-humored smile. All the genius shining in her eyes, in her .sparkling glances, confident, proud, deep, and gentle in repose, imperious when a flash crosses them. But tliat that flash may shine, she needs the tripod and inspiration, — she must speak to seduce and conquer, to make herself beloved " (pp. 18-19). 122 MODERN FEENCII LITERATURE. that the other did not care. Though the Baron did not die till 1802, he played no part in her intellectual life. The literary career of Madame de Staiil begins with " Lettres sur J. -J. Eousseau " (1788), for whose social ideas she had then an ardent admiration, though she was too persistently optimistic wholly to compre- hend them. Other literary inspiration had come to her girlhood from " Clarissa Harlowe " and from " Werther. " Hence she sympathized with the Kevo- lution till the imprisonment of the king produced a revulsion to an equally indiscreet " incivism. " So she came to abuse her ambassadorial right of asylum ; and fear of the consequences of this rashness led her to leave Paris shortly before the Se})tember massacres (1792), though it is not clear that she was in danger from anything but her overheated imagination. She went to Coppet, near Geneva, and gathered there a coterie of friends and political sympathizers. Still, she did not attract the attention she thought her due; so in the next year she turned to England, and tried to make herself the centre of a more important group, though not without some personal scandal. But Paris always fascinated her; and when the fall of Eobe- spierre (1794) permitted, she returned, and for nine years, interrupted only by brief visits to Coppet, she played a political part, though not so great a one as she imagined. Instinct led her to oppose Napoleon, and her vanity was soothed at the thought that she could irritate one who had sneered at her genius. Her separation had deprived her of diplomatic protec- tion in 1799 ; but she continued to tease the Corsican with biting words, knowing that he could only exile her, and that nothing could give her so excellent a MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 123 vantage-ground from which to shoot her poisoned shafts of wit and nurse the pride of martyrdom. In 1803 the expected order from the consular police banished her from Paris, and naturally directed her attention to Germany, which, as Eichter had said, then " ruled the kingdom of the air, " the land of ideas ; and so, unwearied in her search for noted people to talk to, she came that winter to Weimar, where her fame as a conversationalist had preceded her. Goethe opportunely discovered that his health did not permit him to see strangers. He put her oti' on Schiller, a good deal to the latter's disgust ; for though he found her witty and keen, she seemed to him to have little ideality or poetry and no feminine reserve. Her flow of words overwhelmed him, and when she left Weimar, " he felt, " so he wrote to Goethe, " as though he had recovered from a severe illness. " However, she pro- duced a quite different impression on that rather eccen- tric prophet of German Eomanticism, Wilhelm Schlegel, who became first a kind of literary impre- sario for her conversazione, then a private tutor and secretary, and 'an almost constant member of her household till her death. It is important to bear this in mind, for a large part of her mission was to intro- duce German ideas to France; and it was through Schlegel 's eyes, critical indeed, but far from impar- tial, that she saw both the land and its literature and philosophy. Her book on Germany has suffered in consequence, as will appear presently. Before Madame de Stacl's ambition had been crowned by exile, she had written an essay of minor value on " The Influence of the Passions " (1796), and a more ambitious treatise on " Literature in its Con- nection with Social Institutions " (1800), that shows 124 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the marks of her close association with the politi- cal pliilosopher Constant, best known for his novel "Adolphe," a forerunner of the modern psychologi- cal fiction. But her real power was first seen in " Delphine " (1802), a half-autobiographical story, that naturally deals with the unsounded mysteries of the misunderstood woman, the fcnvnic incomprise. But " Delphine " is hardly read now, and would be read still less, were it not for her second novel " Corinne " (1807), a story for which the travels that followed her exile furnished rich material. Here first in France the novel was made a vehicle for artistic discussion, as she found it already employed in Germany by Goethe and Eichter. In 1808 she broke finally with Constant, with whom association had brought her neither credit nor satisfac- tion ; and during the years 1809 and 1810, with in- creasing religious seriousness, she refreshed her memo- ries of Germany by extended travels there, and used the materials that slie gathered then and before in her most important book, " De rAllemagne. " This she saw fit to publish in Paris, and, for fear that she might be allowed to do so uncensured, she took the occasion to write an exasperating letter to Napoleon, who was stung into confiscating the whole printed edition of a book his own censors had endorsed. The loss fell on her publisher, and, having secured the advertisement of this inexpensive martyrdom, and made Napoleon a little ridiculous by a second and more stringent decree of exile, she consoled herself at Coppet with a Swiss officer, Rocca, whom she secretly married in 1811, she being then forty-five years old and he twenty-two. Then she travelled for two years in liussia, Sweden, and England, where at length her " Germany " ap- MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 125 peared in 1813. Napoleon's fall now opened France to her again ; but she remained much abroad, for her health was gradually failing, and her last book, the " Considerations on the French Pievolution, " was not what she would have made it ten years before. She died July 14, 1817. The impression that Madame de Staiil's personality made on her contemporaries was not attractive. Coquetry is pardoned only to beauty and youth. She was never beautiful, and she had long ceased to be young, while she still continued to urge her presence and her conversation on men of genius, who, like Schiller, found it more exhausting than admirable. Then, when well past forty, she made herself ridicu- lously happy by an absurd marriage. She was not per- sonally liked, even by those who appreciated her talents ; nor was she a great writer, if one considers only her language and style. It is not for either of these that she takes the large place that literary tradi- tion accords her ; it is the contents of her work that has lasting influence and value, though in important particulars even this was not original with her. In- deed, one of the most striking things about her is her inquisitive receptivity. She was always on the alert to learn from everybody, at the risk, or even with the certainty, of boring them. Bat this made her books a remarkable reflection of the world of thought in which she moved. The daughter of Neckar could hardly fail to be in- spired with an indestructible faith in human reason, liberty, and justice. Madame de Stai^l abandoned herself with her whole soul to the militant optimism of the eighteenth century. She conceived herself a prophetess of the religion of humanity ; she believed 126 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. thoroughly in human perfectibility, and thought " the hope of the future progress of our species the most religious hope on earth. " Virtue and happiness were her twin enthusiasms, but which held the key to the other she never clearly saw. Her genius would have placed, with her father, happiness in virtue ; her ima- gination, with Eousseau, placed virtue in happiness. ^ Her first considerable book, the " Literature, " showed " a European spirit in a French mind. " It was an act of faith in the destinies of the nineteenth century based on the out-worn philosophy of the eighteentli. Even the reign of terror could not shake her placid confidence that all was for the best in the best of worlds. " How reason and philosophy constantly acquire new force through the numberless misfortunes of mankind," is her reflection, consoling or exasper- ating as these misfortunes of mankind happen to be ours or our neighbors'. With happy foresight she applied this thought to literature, into which she saw that the democratic spirit would Ining a more ener- getic beauty, a more moving and more philosojihic picture of the events of life. Thus she felt it would " enlarge the bounds of art ; " and if that rendered the drama of Eacine impossible, she, at least, shed no tears at the thought. In this way Madame de Stacl helped to liberate French literature from itself and from the self-imposed fetters of absolute critical canons. But she was also first to widen her literary ideas by contrasting and com- paring them with those of contemporary Germany and England, till then much neglected, especially the German, by those who proclaimed their natural pre- scriptive right to enlighten the world. Her friend- ^ See Sorel, oj). cit. p. 17. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBUIAND. 127 ships were studiously cosmopolitan. " i'roin now on, " she said, " we must have a European spirit. " She was first to practise what she preached, and she had before her a peo^^le sorely in need of the lesson, though prepared for it also, as never before, by the attrition of the Napoleonic wars. No one has described her purpose better than herself. " The sterility with which our literature is menaced, " she says, " suggests that the French spirit needs to be regenerated by some more vigorous sap ; " and this she would bring to her country from beyond the Ehine. For while the French literature, as well as the Italian and Spanish, from which, till then, it had chietiy drawn, were in the main and in their spirit artistic and rationalistic, often even plastic in form and hedonistic in charac- ter, the Teutonic literatures, being less dominated by classical traditions, were more idealistic and indi- vidually subjective. Hence English and German — ■ Ossian, Byron, Goethe, Eichter, and the Schlegels — aided powerfully in the reawakening of egoism that had been begun by Eousseau. That reawakening had been the aim of the " Literature," and was the result of the " Germany. " The French Eomantic movement, one of the great literary regenerations in history, is in large measure the work of Madame de Stael. But this very success is the cause of the neglect into which her works have fallen. She occupied her- self much with the thought, with the ethical content of what she wrote, little with its form. But the thoughts that were new or revolutionary when she uttered them, became commonplaces the more quickly because they found general acceptance. Thus her work appealed to after generations neither by novelty nor by beauty ; and so it has found ever fewer readers, 128 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. though it surpassed in breadth and fulness that of any contemporary author. She is still the only female writer of Erance whose talent is truly masculine. Almost every literary movement of the century can be traced back to her initiative. " She sowed the cen- tury with fertile ideas ; she gave French poetry, as it were, a new soul. " ^ The books by which she did this are pre-eminently " Corinne " and " De rAllemagne. " The former shows the creative artist at the height of her development. It is " the imaginative work of a very sensitive woman, shrewd, a good moralist, and very deft in the manage- ment of intrigue. But her imagination deals only with ideas. She has an inventive, not a creative genius; she knows how to paint only herself. Take away Corinne, and there is not a living character in the story; "2 and the most prominent are the most unreal. Her lovers are absolutely conventional ; not studies of life, but visions from the dreamland of her fancy. Nor was this thought a fault by readers only a generation removed from the " Sorrows of Werther, " who were still breathing the idealist atmosphere of the eighteenth century. This will explain why "Corinne," like Goethe's greater novel, should have a tragic catastrophe. The actual world will always present this aspect to the idealist, who, like Madame de Stael, spends his life in the chase of the butterfly, happiness, and has always an instinctive feeling that intellectual superiority is rather a hardship than a boon, or, in hor own words, that " glory is only the bright shroud of happiness. " 1 rellissier, Mouvement litteraire. See also Brunetiere, Evolution de la critic] no. 2 Faguet, rditiques ct moralistes. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 129 In " Corinne, " as in " Delphine, " the plot is easy, graceful, well-managed, Lut not strong, nor of any great psychological value. Her actors are less studies from life than characters in La Bruy^re's style; and even so, they are rather typical phases of the author's own character. Her personality is ever present and overshadowing to the reader, as it probably was to the writer. But, as has been said, tliis was a personality with which it is difficult to feel much sympathy, and difficult not to feel some impatience. The chief value of " Corinne, " then, is not psychologic, but ethical and assthetic. Eousseau had preached the purifying influ- ence of a return to Nature. Chateaubriand was even then urging, with all the power of his splendid eloquence, a return to the ages of faith and the sympa- thetic study of mediaeval Christianity. As an essen- tial balance and complement to their teaching was Madame de Stael's education of the sesthetic sense, by which a new range of emotions gained recognition in the ethical evolution of literature. " For a whole generous, romantic, and passionate generation ' Co- rinne ' was the book of love and of the ideal. " It is in this novel that the artistic and musical fiction of the next period had its immediate origin. Without " Corinne " there would have been no " Teverino " and no " Consuelo. " " Germany " followed up and developed the ideas of the " Literature " as " Corinne " had done those of " Delphine. " But it had a far deeper effect and wider influence. For with all her unswerving sympathy with the eighteentli century, there was a side of Madame de Stai'l's mind thnt was first developed by contact with German thought, a side that otherwise might never have been developed at all. The ideas thus 9 130 MODERN FKENCH LITPIRATURE. evoked were so new to France that tlieir promulgator received greater credit for originality than was her due. But whether her ideas were original or not is a matter of far less importance than that through her German Eomanticism and subjectivity found a more rapid and less distorted acceptance in France than would other- wise have been possible ; and thus Madame de Stael not only influenced the development of French polit- ical and philosophic speculation, but she unlocked the prison in which the lyric muse of France had pined since Malherbe had " brought her to the rules of duty ;" she was the nurse, if not the mother, of the Eomantic School. " De I'Allemagne " is a book of criticism, but it is not a critical book. With one eye on Germany, she has the other fixed on France, always intent on the moral of her fable, best pleased if it can be barbed with a sting for the Corsican and his policy. So the comparison of this book to Tacitus' " Germania " is trite and obvious. But the likeness hardly extends be- yond the purpose and the title. She had seen much of Germany ; but Schlegel was always at her elbow, and the daughter of the Swiss Protestant had found herself more drawn to the hazy idealism of the German meta- physicians than to the truer spirit of the School of Weimar. It is not of Germany nor of the Germans that tliis book treats primarily or chiefly, and in the part nominally devoted to that country and its people there is least observation and most error. Philosophy and art absorb almost her entire interest. Her naive idealism found in the nebulous metaphysics of Kant and Fichte an antidote for the cold, dry, and not very penetrating light of the French Encyclopa'dists. Her generous enthusiasm had been repelled by D'Holbach MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBKIAND. 131 and Diderot. It was drawn easily, or rather it cast itself with delight, into the vortex of Kant and Jacubi, into a deep but adventurous and audacious idealism that was prone to see things through ideas and to dis- solve facts into thoughts. In this philosophy she saw her very self, her own sentiments and instincts, but conceived and expressed in a way that transcended her power to originate, or indeed wholly to comprehend and transmit. Then, too, as Heine has shown, this system was the natural result of the Protestant posi- tion, so that on this side also it appealed to Madame de Stael, who evolved from it a sort of liberal Chris- tianity, vague and ill-defined, and as far removed from the national Christianity of France as German meta- physics from French philosophy. Thus she contrib- uted to widen and liberalize, though hardly to strengthen and deepen, the philosophic and religious thought of the next generation in France. But in 1804 Madame de Stael found in Germany a literature as sharply contrasted as its pliilosophy to that of France. Emancipated by Lessing and the vagaries of the " Storm and Stress" from foreign influ- ences, and bonds, it was in the full bloom of its second classical period, while it was already clear that French classicism, rejected abroad, was moribund at home. Not only did the Germans allow themselves a more unrestrained subjectivity and a greater freedom both in matter and form, but there were among them two or three men of greater poetic genius than any France had seen since Molifere's day. Naturally these liber- ties impressed her ; she was no longer sure that the eifditeenth century in France marked a literary advance on the seventeenth. Her theory of the drama, once narrowly French, nov/ became broadly Aristotelian; 132 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. and even the Encyclopaedist philosophy seemed now to her to have heeu clouded by combat, while the soli- taries of the seventeenth century had had " a more pro- found insight into the depths of the human heart. " What, then, was her conclusion, her advice to French authors ? She would have them imitate neither tlieir own classics nor the new German stars, for she per- ceived, and was one of the first to grasp, the truth, that literature, to gain a hold on any people, must speak in the spirit, temper, and language of the time, not in a pseudo-classical jargon. " The literature of the ancients is among the moderns a transplanted litera- ture. The romantic, chivalrous literature is indigenous among us ; it is our religion, our institutions, that have made it blossom. " She saw clearly, what Perrault and his fellows had felt dimly a century before, — that modern literature would draw from modern conditions a more natural nourishment for a healthier life. The fundamental idea was true, and the time was opportune for its proclamation ; but the example was not an adequate illustration of it. Neither in Ger- many nor in France was there a long and, above all, not a healthy life in store for the Eomantic revival that dazzled her. She did not see that emancipation from rules could not emancipate from the fundamental laws of taste, and that German Romanticism was as factitious an imitation as pseudo-classicism had been. The true glory of German literature lay, not in the Schlegels, Richter, and Novalis, l)ut in Lessing, Schil- ler, and Goethe; while German philosophy was weak from the very fact that it was not an expression of the true national spirit, but, as Goethe saw and said, " a parasite sapping the strength of the people. " " Dc rAllemagiic " is divided into four parts. Her MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBKIAND. 133 chapters on the country, the people and their ways, are neither very profound nor very accurate ; yet they show an attentive observation and a ready, receptive mind, quick to see what she desired and expected to see. She gives special chapters to Berlin and Vienna, and notes the deep racial lines that separate Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, and Austrians. Indeed, she seems here less a traveller than a student of comparative sociology, and finds herself much more at ease when she can turn from provinces and cities to books and ideas, to " Literature and the Arts, " where indeed lit- erature occupies two hundred and eighty-three pages and the arts eleven. This is the most valuable and fruitful part of the book. Partial and warped as the judgments often are, they revealed to France, and in some measure to England also, an unsuspected mine of wealth, from which foreign nations had drawn little up to that time, and have never since ceased to draw in increasing measure. It matters little that the modern reader discovers some egregious monuments of false perspective, little that she could not discern in Lessing "a dramatic author of the first rank," gave to him le'ss space than to Werner, and to the Schlegels twice as much as to Herder. It matters little, either, that the watery Klopstock is her favorite German poet; that her criticism of the works of Schiller and Goethe accords ill witl\ our later esthet- ics ; that she thinks " Don Carlos " as important as " Wallenstein, " and " Egmont " the finest of Goethe's tragedies. What does matter is that she had a gen- erous appreciation for this foreign literature, and inspired it in others, who afterward corrected her judgments. But though its shortcomings are obvious, it might be hard to find, even to-day, so just a view 134 MODERN FltENCII LITERATURE. of a foreign contemporary literature. " The instinct of the true and beautiful supplied the inevitable im- perfection of her knowledge, " though her optimistic " criticism of the beauties " tended to foster an unsystematic dilettantism. It is possible that Madame de Staiil attributed more importance to the portions of her book that treat of " Philosophy and Ethics " and of " lieligion and Enthu- siasm " than the event has proved them to possess. To be partial and incomplete was more dangerous here than in literature, and German metaphysicians owe her a less debt for the effort to make them intelligible to Frenchmen than they do to Cousin or to Heine. It has been said, and truly, that the history of idealism from 1780 to 1817 is in her works, but that persis- tently optimistic idealism was rather a survival of the eighteenth century than an anticipation of the domi- nant currents of philosophic thought in the nineteenth century. Nor was it a survival of what was strongest and best in that period. As Faguet observes, it had in it more of Montesquieu and of Vauvenargues than of Voltaire, little of Eousseau, nothing of Diderot. It was this partial rellection of the eighteenth century that was confirmed and revivified in her l^y contact with German idealism. But the effect of this attitude of mind on literature, as appears in Germany and in Madame de Staiil, was to dwarf the sense for beauty of form. She, at least, had little comprehension of liter- ary art, whether in the ancient or in the French clas- sics. As has been aptly said, " she represents a moment when the eighteenth century in its decline no longer comprehends antique art, cares no longer for its own, guards and cherishes its philosophic ideas, which it feels will be very fruitful, and, as for a new art, questions, searches, doubts, waits. " MADAME DE STAKL AND CHATEAUBEIAND. 135 For that a new art was to arise from the chaos of the Eevolutiou, that its convulsions were to be the birth- throes of a new critical spirit, was the first article of Madame de Stael's critical creed; and the zeal of her preaching carried such persuasion that, as she had said of Eousseau, " while she invented nothing she set all on fire. " And so, at a moment when France was in the glow of its new cosmopolitanism, she was able to infuse a considerable portion of the European spirit into what had been, till then, a too narrowly national literature. But if De Stael's criticism draws its solvent power from the eighteenth century, her greatest literary con- temporary, Chateaubriand, raises the standard of lit- erary and ethical revolt from it. He joins direct issue with her comfortable theory of perfectibility, and to her deistic optimism he opposes first a skeptical, then a Christian pessimism. " Everywhere that Madame de Stael sees perfectibility, I see Jesus Christ," he writes to Fontanes in 1801; and the sen- timent takes such hold on his emotions that he pres- ently transforms himself into a sworn crusader, more jealous of the honor of the mediieval church than even of his own orthodoxy. But there is a histrionic rift in Chateaubriand's lute, or should we say his dulcimer ? In his life and in his books he poses and parades his art with a colossal egoism which seems to have overawed contemporary critics almost as much as it exasperated their succes- sors. Napoleon is to him "the tyrant who made the world tremble, but who never made me tremble. " He imagines the Emperor's daily anxiety to be to create offices that will bind Chateaubriand's proud spirit to his service. Indeed, he thinks Napoleon's 136 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATUKE. fall due chiefly to liis own " Genius of Christianity. " Instinctively he ranks himself as the associate, the equal, possibly the superior of that compeller of states. Hence Chateaubriand is led to attribute public interest to his private feelings, and in his books the subjec- tivity that the Classicists had carefully suppressed is omnipresent and confessed. Thus he contributed essentially to the revival of egoism in literature that resulted from the teachings of De Stacl. All his heroes are but Chateaubriand in thin disguise. His Christianity is a personal sentiment, not a product of universal reason. What made him a knight of the cross was not the stern beauty of truth, but the poetry of what seemed to his youth a lost cause and the mys- tic charm of mediieval legend. Even in his account of a journey to Jerusalem, the thrilled pilgrim will exclaim : " I weep, but 't is to the sound of the lyre of Orpheus. " Though both De Staiil and Chateaubriand were aris- tocrats, they were strongly contrasted in their lives, and so supplemented each other in their literary influence. She owed her birth to Protestant Switzer- land, he to profoundly Catholic Brittany. ^ And in his boyhood every tiling combined to nurse a spirit opposed in all ways to that which animated Madame Neckar's Parisian salon. He has told us himself, in a most 1 Born at Saint-Malo, 17G8; died, 1848. Works in order of time: Essai sur les revolutions, 1797; Atala, 1801; Genie dn ciiristianisnie, 1802; Atala et ]{eiie, 1805; Les Martyrs, 1800; Itineraire d'nn voy- age de Paris a Jerusalem, 1811; then political ]iainiildets till Mie col- lected edition of liis worlds, 1826-1831, wliich contains tlie '' Natchez" and the " Al)encerrages; " Memoires d'outre-tomtje, 1849-1850. Critical aT)preciations in Lanson, p. 808; in Fa'^net, xix. siecle; in Brnnetiere, T'^.volntion de la ])i)<'sie lyriqne, p. 83; and Evolution de la criti(iuc, p. 180. The biograpliical literature is cited by Lausou. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 137 effective passage, how the warm and simple piety of his mother, the distant reserve of his father, the mys- terious vastness of tlie ueii^hboring ocean, tlie stranoe legends of that simple and childlike people, combined to foster in him the poet and the mystic, and to evoke the religious sentiment. In Brittany he passed his childhood. For his educa- tion he went to IJol and Eennes, towns not too distant to break the Breton spelL He entered the army at twenty, and was tempted to try his fortune in India, a land attractive to his imaginative temperament. But the Eevolution diverted him from this project, and presently sent the young enthusiast to the opposite side of the globe. In 1790 he went to America on a gov- ernment commission, ostensibly to seek the Northwest Passage, which, however, he neither found nor sought. But his journey was far from fruitless to himself or to France ; for he travelled, though not perhaps so extensively as he implies, among the great lakes and prairies of the West, and amid the luxuriant vegeta- tion of semi-tropical Florida, stimulating his vivid imagination by intercourse with Indian tribes and by the solitude of primeval forests. These influences first revealed the poet to himself, and were in their turn revealed in all his future works, but most brilliantly in " Natchez, " in " Eend, " and in " Atala. " Chateaubriand, with a considerable part of the nobil- ity of France, sympathized with the early efforts of the Eevolutionists, for he was convinced that political reform was a necessity. But the excesses of 1791 and 1792 sobered his enthusiasm on his return to France, where his parents arranged for him a hasty and un- happy marriage. This, together with the execution of the king, made him cast his lot with the party of the 138 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. emigres, thougli he was not then or ever wholly in sympathy with the policy of reaction that they repre- sented. But the hopes of the Bourbons were presently crushed at Valmy; and Chateaubriand, sick and wounded, went to England, wdiere he remained till 1800. These seven years of exile could not but have some effect on his literary and ethical views, but he learned much less in England than Voltaire or Beaumarchais had done. He supported himself by translating, and found leisure to write a somewhat pes- simistic and skeptical essay on " Eevolutions, " which is interesting for its youthful declaration of independ- ence from the smug optimism of Condorcet. It was in England, too, that he elaborated " Natchez, " " Eene, " and " Atala, " in which American Indians are idealized in the spirit of Bernardin's " Paul and Virginia " and Eousseau's " natural state. " Therefore in substance all of them lack reality, while in form they hover between poetry and prose in a way tliat may repel modern taste, but greatly fascinated that of his time. Though these books were begun ])efore the puldica- tion of the " Essay on Eevolutions," there is a change to be noted in their ethical position that appears most clearly in his attitude toward Christianity. The " Essay " of 1797 was coldly skeptical ; in 1801 " Atala " was warmly sympathetic. This change Chateaubriand attributes to the death of his mother, in 1798 ; but he is not always a trustworthy witness about himself. He mingles, like Goethe, "fiction and truth;" but, unlike Goethe, he does not say so. Still, however that may be, " Atala " struck a note that set all hearts vibrating; it won immediate and universal popularity. The eloquent descriptions of nature showed that the MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 139 author had rare powers of minute observation, and the use that he made of it roused the dormant spirit of romantic idealism. It gave expression to a mental state that had not yet found a voice in France ; it an- ticipated much in Lamartine and in Hugo. At the opening of the century Chateaubriand had no impor- tant rival ; and even when Madame de Stael claimed a place beside him, he seemed still the leading figure in French letters till Lamartine charmed the w^orld with the fascinating anodyne of his " Meditations. " Encouraged by the reception of " Atala, " he brought the " Genius of Christianity " to a close just at the moment (1802) when Napoleon was on the eve of his official recognition and restoration of the National Church, which, indeed, had been practically restored since 1796. Chateaubriand's book has been called, and is, a brilliant bit of special pleading ; but none the less it served its purpose and Napoleon's. To discuss its author's real convictions is beside our purpose. He himself thougrht his mind " made to believe in noth- ing, not even in itself; made to disdain all, — gran- deurs, pettinesses, peoples, kings ; and yet dominated by a rational instinct of submission to all that was beautiful, — religion, justice, equality, liberty, glory." Hence one might infer that it was an eesthetic rather than a moral attraction that drew him to the Chris- tian Church, into which he could thus carry his pessimism and, indeed, his fundamental skepticism, while all the time he was probably as sincere as he knew how to be, and only gave a striking illustration of the price that rational beings must pay for senti- mental emotions. Logical consistency was never his prominent characteristic, nor is reason the pole-star of the " Genius of Christianity. " But though its argu- 140 MODEKN FRENCH LITEKATURE, ment is often puerile, its passion and its eloquence carried it quickly to tlie hearts of a public weary of the dead-sea fruit of Eucyclopiedist philosophy, a public whose languid will to believe could be more easily thrilled by rlietoric than moved by reason. Author and readers were less interested to find that Christianity was true than that it was sentimentally poetic, beautifully pathetic, artistically sesthetic. This book won Chateaubriand a diplomatic post in Eome, but his intriguing spirit made it necessary to transfer him to Switzerland ; and after the execution of the Due d'Enghien he resigned all diplomatic preferment and criticised Napoleon freely, exposing himself to more than he actually suffered, though his oration at his reception to the Academy occasioned a brief exile, and a newspaper^ that he controlled was suppressed. This check to his political activity re- aroused in him the spirit of travel, but not till he had discovered and proclaimed in " Eend " that maladie du siecle, the morbid toying with melancholy that had inspired " Werther " in Germany, and spread its conta- gion to England in " Childe Harold. " Having left this virulent bacillus behind him, Chateaubriand set out on an Eastern journey; visited Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, Palestine, and, on his return, Tunis and Spain, carrying with him everywhere the same keen but mournful eye that had seen such vivid and sombre pictures in the American forests and prairies, and the same imagination that had shed a romantic halo over all. The direct result of this trip was the " Narrative of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem ; " but he first em- bodied his impressions in " Les Martyrs," which, in- 1 "Le Mercure," founded in 1807. MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 141 deed he besfan before setting out on his iourney. This is a prose epic of rising Christiauity aud siukiug pagaD- ism, that carries its action from the Orient to Gaul, and reaches its climax in the amphitheatre at Rome. "The Last of the Abencerrages, " printed in 1826, was also a belated fruit of this journey. Indeed, practically all the work of Chateaubriand that is still read with pleasure, or with curiosity that it should have excited pleasure, is included in the eleven years 1801-1811. With the fall of Napoleon, his activity as an ethical and imaginative writer yields almost wholly to the demands of party politics, wdiile the purely literary work that then appeared was only what prudence had withheld from the censors of the Empire. Yet in its sphere this political writing is closely parallel in its methods and in its effect to the former ; it shows the same " opulence of imagination and pov- erty of heart. " His first production in this field, " Buonaparte and the Bourbons " (1814), is a sort of " Genius of Eoyalty " modelled on the " Genius of Christianity. " Louis XVIII. thought its bitter elo- quence and hate worth a hundred thousand men to the Legitimist cause. But here, as there, his feeling has more sentimental warmth than logical consistency. He tells us himself that in 1826, in spite of all he had suffered for the House of Bourbon, he was still thought a doubtful Christian and a dubious Eoyalist. Hence it is not surprising to find that he was as inconvenient to his friends when in power as to his enemies when in opposition. Various diplomatic posts were aban- doned for vigorous pamphlet wars on the ministries he disliked, and at the close of the Eestoration period he seemed drifting toward the liberal party. But a 142 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. pessimist is not happy to be in the majority, and the triumph of the Orleanists brought him back promptly to the defence of the lost cause. " I cannot serve pas- sions in their triumph, " he had said. " Always ready to devote myself to the unfortunate, I understand noth- ing of prosperity. " These sentiments were certainly characteristic and possibly sincere ; those who wept over " Een^ " thought them noble and edifying. But as he realized the hopeless case of the Legitimists, he gradually lost heart, and toward the close of his life, though he w^as still the lion of literary salons, he sank into a discouraged silence, occupying his gloomy mood with translating " Paradise Lost " and writino; a life of the ascetic Eancd. He revised and completed also his " Memoirs from beyond the Tomb, " — " Rene with documentary evidence," as it has been wittily called, — a work of quite unique conceit and much political prejudice, but yet of remarkable elo- quence and some historic interest. He died on the fourtli of July, 184S, in the midst of a social revolu- tion that must have shrouded liis pessimism in still deeper gloom. The literary significance of Chateaubriand is to be sought in " Atala, " in " Eene, " in the " Genius of Christianity, " and in the " Martyrs ; " and to understand tlieir effect it is necessary to bear in mind somewhat of their contents. " Atala " is a short idyl of a young Indian girl of that name, who loves Chactas, an Indian captive among her nation. But she is a Christian, and has sworn to her mother a perpetual virginity. Their tale is told by Chactas to Renc-Chateaul)riand as they float together down the broad Ohio. This thoroughly romantic Indian has been in Europe, and has a nature of strangely wedded culture and savagery. A solitary MADAME DE STxVEL AND CHATEAUBElAND. 143 missonary, Father Aubry, completes the dramatis per- sonce of the little tragedy, where duty conquers love, but only by tlie sacrifice of the life of the gentle heroine. The simple and solemn pathos of the story came like a new birth to men whose ears were dulled with the verses of Delille, and its austere Christianity was a revelation to those who had so long tilled their bellies w^ith the husks of Voltaire and Diderot. Slighter even than Goethe's "Werther, " it had a renown almost as wide and as lasting. It was trans- lated into the chief languages of Europe, and is said to have found its way into the very penetralia of the Sultan's seraglio. " Atala " is certainly untrue to savage nature ; its pathos is artificial, but its publication is a date of importance in French literature, for it marks the begin- ning of the Romantic School. The danger was felt in- stinctively by the Classicists, who bitterly attacked its aesthetics; for though it was restrained in comparison to later works of Romantic imagination, they saw tliat it was inconsistent with the spirit of the eighteenth century, even more than with that of the seventeenth. And the work of Chateaubriand that followed only intensified this antagonism ; for what is involved in " Atala " is made the central thesis of the " Genius of Christianity," his most ambitious effort, both literary and ethical, though the elaborate table of contents prefixed to that work promises a more logical treatment than the book realizes, while the apparatus of De- fence, Letters, Notes, and Explanations at the close, suofsests a learned treatise rather than an oratorical plea. The doomas and doctrines of Christiauitv are first discussed; then its poetry, its art and literature, and 144 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. its worship. Each part, too, has the appearance of rigid analysis. Thus the second elaborately compares classical and Christian poetry, and closes with an an- tithetical study of the Bible and Homer. Each sec- tion, also, is analyzed. If the apologist is contrasting pagan and Christian character, he speaks first of hus- bands and wives, then of fathers, mothers, sons, daugh- ters, priests, and warriors ; and in every case he finds that the Christian author has refined and embellished the classic ideals. The true faith is also the more beau- tiful and the more sympathetic. But if this description applies to a great part of the " Genius, " the author rises also at times to veritable theological dithyram- bics, as when, for instance, he undertakes to prove the existence of God from the marvels of Nature ; and some of his finest passages are descriptive panegyrics, such as the remarkable chapters on the Mass that open the concluding part, or the subsequent section on Christian missions, where the little story of " Atala " may have had its original place. Such a book draws more from imagination than from reason, and appeals to the emotions more than to the sober sense of its readers. Here one is asked to con- sider " whether the divinities of paganism have poeti- cally the superiority over the Chi'istian divinities" (1. iv. ch. 4). Here foi (faith) is commended for its supposed connection with foyer (hearthstone) ; the three Graces are adduced to prove the Trinity, and teleology finds its reduction to the absurd in the mi- gration of birds precisely at the time when they are convenient for human food, and in the assumption that " domestic animals are born with exactly enough instinct to be tamed. " Yes, Chateaubriand will ofier the constellation of the Southern Cross as a witness of MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 145 Christianity, and defend tlie celibacy of the clergy by Mai thus' Law ! And yet the student of literary evolu- tion will perceive that it is just such a revindication of the rights of sentiment that was a necessary condi- tion of the revival of the personal forms of literature, and especially of lyric poetry. It is the spirit of the " Genius " that inspires the first utterances of Hugo and Lamartine. Chateaubriand supplements and continues the protest of Kousseau's " Savoyard Vicar " against the Gradgrind materialism of the Encyclopaidists. " Eend " had formed part of the " Genius ;" but it had closer affiliations with " Atala " than with Chris- tianity, and was reprinted separately in 1807, possi- bly, as has been suggested, to induce those to read it who would not read the " G^nie, " and those to read the " G6me " who did not care to find " Eend " there. This mouthpiece of Chateaubriand's dilettante pessimism had been the supposed narrator of " Atala, " and the scene is once more laid in the primeval forests of the Mississippi valley. Chactas reappears ; and there is a mission priest, more human than Aubry, who speaks for Chateaubriand the Christian idealist, while Eene exhibits the hlasc aristocrat, nursing his world-pain like another Werther. This disconsolate young man had passed most of his boyhood " watching the fugitive clouds " and listen- ing to the rain. He had a sister^ who presently turned nun, but natural inconstancy aided prejudice to divert him from a like design. He nursed the germs of melancholy amid the ruins of Greece and Italy. Modern civilization accentuated his idle ennui. He sought the gentle children of Nature, the Indians of 1 Obviously studied from Chateiiubriaiid's owu sister Lucile, who died in 1804. 10 146 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. French Louisiana, who, more sensible and happy than he, had let life slip by, " seated tranquil beneath their oaks,'* their only melancholy an excess of bliss that they checked by a glance at heaven. Still, brief expe- rience sufficed to convince him of his incompatibility even with this society ; and he renounced all intercourse, save with Chactas and the priest, to whom he related his " secret sentiments " and the " lantruid struggles " of his " Eomanesque spirit " against the necessary evil of life. It is these " secret sentiments, " of which those of Eend's sort had always enough and to spare, that were the charm of " liene, " and the literary source and origin of the paralysis of the will nursed by vain dreams, that iiudadie du Steele that has sicklied o'er the thought of so many in France who seemed capable of better things, — of Lamartine, of De Vigny, and iu another way of De Musset and the young George Sand. It blights the Joseph Delorme of Sainte-Beuve and the Antony of Dumas. It may Ije traced also, though masked by the stronger power of Byron, in the dramas of Victor Hugo. This little tale of morbid, introspective pessimism struck a note that swayed the whole fabric of society by the responsive vibrations that it awakened. It did this because, though it was unnatural, it was genuine. The book was affected, but so were the man and the age. If Rend tells us that " people weary him by dint of loving liim, " the private correspondence of Chateau- briand is full of the same aristocratic melancholy, full of assurances that he is " quite blase and indifferent to everything but religion, " dragging dreamily his ennui with his days, and crying for some one to deliver him from the " insane impulse to live. " That sigh of Job, MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 147 " My soul is fatigued with my life, " is the burden and refrain of " Natchez. " " Les Martyrs " exhibits the " Genius " applied to Eomautic fiction. In a cadenced style and epic diction that need only rhyme and metre to make a poem, Chateaubriand has contrasted the morals, sacri- fices, and ceremonial of pagan and Christian worship in the times of Diocletian. Here the reader may find " the language of Genesis beside that of the Odyssey, " and see " the Jupiter of Homer beside the Jehovah of Milton. " But Chateaubriand has fallen into the snare that is stretched for every historical novelist. Not only has he forced chronology and geography in his zeal to include the principal characters of the ante- Nicene church, but he has enlarged his scope so that he takes in the 'pliilosophes of the eighteenth cen- tury, and even the French Eevolution. Julian the Apostate reaches the hand to Voltaire, and Homer to Volney. The result, as his most generous critic has admitted, is a grandiose failure, composite and artifi- cial, original only w^hen it gives up the vain attempt to imitate Dante and Milton, and abandons the reli- gious epic for the historical novel. But even here the author staggers a little under the weight of his anti- quarian lore. He seems intent on describing the whole of the then known world, from Eome to the Theltaid and from the Netherlands to Arcady; and in later editions he fortified the book with prefaces, analyses, and notes, that might find a more appropriate grave in ' the " Eevue des questions historiques. " In its day, however, the book w^as repeatedly reprinted, and critics still couple the name of its hero, Eudore, with Corneille's Polyeucte, to prove how narrowly false it is to exclude, with Boileau, " the terrible mysteries 148 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATUEE. of tlie Christian faith " from the realm of literary art. The " Journey from Paris to Jerusalem" illustrates from another side the same combination of fiction and guide-book, of pseudo-Christian and crypto-pagan. Here the weary dilettante grows dejected at Troy, and discouraged over the past glories of Sparta and Athens, while he nurses his mind to a proper desolation for the ruins of Jerusalem, Egypt, and Carthage. His powers of natural description, always remarkable, are here at their height ; and the sea proves a fruitful inspiration to his mournful muse; but even the best passages are marred by intrusive subjectivity, by what he calls " the secret and ineffable charms of a soul enjoying itself." The "Journey" is Chateaubriand's most cited work ; but the citations are almost wholly con- fined to the objective part of the book, his descriptions of Nature and historical evocations. This brings us to speak of one of the most important and enduring results of Chateaubriand's writing. He is the first recreator of the past, tlie inspirer of the modern popular historian. He iirst drew attention to the literary mine that lay hid in the middle ages and in Christian antiquity, treasures exploited almost too eagerly by the Romanticists. " Imagination, " he had said, " is to erudition the scout that is always reconnoitring." In his hands history became poetry, revealing new possibilities to the student and new fields to literature. The exact studies of his predeces- sors may have contained the truth ; it was reserved for this artist to make that truth live again. But Chateaubriand was also the founder of the modern descriptive school ; and he was able to be this, be- cause, as we have seen, he added to his love for the MADAME DE STAKL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 149 ages of faith a naive paganism, so that, as some one has wittily observed, " his pilgrim stati' changed occa- sionally into a thyrsus. " From this pagan element came an increased love of Nature, an affectionate study of her moods as minute as that of Bernardin, with an idealization and personification of her changing beau- ties that suggest Ossian and presage the Eomantic School, of wiiose advent there had already been signs in Eousseau, Buffon, and Saint-Pierre. But Chateau- briand was first in France to describe scenes with a vivid imagery that conjured before the mind horizons such as his readers had never seen. Whether these hori- zons were true or false, whether his classic Greece or his Merovingian France or his Natchez Indians had anything in history or in fact to correspond to them, is from a literary point of view wholly indifferent. It is enough that they gave a vivid sensation of novelty, and opened all history and nature to the poetic vision of the next generation, as the " Genius of Christianity " had already opened the treasures of its historic faith. Without Chateaubriand it is as hard to conceive Thierry or Michelet as it is Flaubert or Loti. ^ If it was Chateaubriand's ambition " to rival Eous- seau and ruin Voltaire, " he undertook tasks both of which were beyond a man who had neither the robust faith of the one, nor the mocking confidence of the other. And yet he marks the close of a period of literary evolution that had begun with the Pleiad two centu- ries and a half before, and he marks also the beginning of a new era. He, probably more than De Stael, per- suaded the new generation that it was safe to break with tradition, with those imitations of imitations that ^ Cha^eaiihriand's influence on lyric poptry is discussed by Bru- netiere, Evolutiou de la poe'sie lyiique, i. 83-96. 150 MODERN FEENCII LITEKATUKE. had been sapping the life of French literature since the close of tlie seventeenth century. He convinced them of what she had taught Ly implication, — that, since literature must be in touch with the people, French literature, if it would be to France what Greek and Latin were to Greece and Italy, must be national in its aspirations and Christian in its spirit. But to do this was to point the way to the greatest literary achievements of the next generation. This has been clear to nearly all the French critics that have followed. " He changed, " said Villeraain, " in the moral order a part of the opinions of the cen- tury ; he brought back literature to religion, and the religious spirit to the spirit of liberty ; he has been a renovator in imagination, criticism, and history. " This may seem an exaggeration ; and yet Sainte-Beuve is, perhaps, too cautious when he damns him with faint praise as " the most striking of his contemporaries at the beginning of the century, " for Nisard is willing to grant him " the initial inspiration as well as the final impulse of all the durable innovations of the first half of the century in poetry, history, and criticism ; " and Brunetifere is constrained to admit that he held for those decades " a literary royalty comparable only to tliat of Voltaire. " So there was a measure of truth in Fontanes' bold words to Napoleon, that Chateau- briand shed glory on his reign ; and in the tribute of the historian Thierry, who, writing in 1840, declares that all the typical thinkers of the century " had met Chateaubriand at the source of their studies, at their first inspirations. Not one but should say to him, os Dante to Virgil : ' Thou leader, thou lord, and thou master. ' " Thus in Chateaubriand and in Madame de Stai;l we MADAME DE STAEL AND CHATEAUBRIAND. 151 should recognize not only the beginning, but the source of the literary evolution of our century. Prom her came its new ideas, from him its new ait. His style has left its mark on French poetry, history, fiction, on the very language itself. To George Sand he seemed " the greatest writer of the century. " De Vigny and Hugo, Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, even Lamartine. saw in him their model, " the incomparable artist. " It was not till Naturalism rose with its cold, white light that his star began to wane. 152 MODEKN FKENCM LITEKATUEE. CHAPTER V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. In 1823 a company of English actors undertook to present in Paris the masterpieces of Shakspere. They were hissed, hooted ; an angry spectator shouted that Shakspere was the aide-de-camp of Wellington ; others translated their feelings into action, and threw at the stage such missiles as came to hand with so much vio- lence that an actress was injured. To hate England was the ABC of patriotism ; Germany was hardly more popular, and a literary reform that seemed to savor of either was condemned in advance. It is harder for the conquered to he generous than for the conqueror; and in the years that followed Waterloo, those who preached a narrow nationalism in literature, the classicism of the seventeenth century as inter- preted l)y the eighteenth, had an easy task in rousing the prejudices even of the cultured. Yet already there "were signs of change in popular feeling. While the Classicists diligently ploughed and harrowed their sterile fields and reaped their stunted crops, the younger generation was dissatisfied and restless. At first the spread of these feelings was checked by a curious though not unnatural coincidence. Up to that time the liberals in politics had been reac- tionaries in literature, while the literary reformers handicapped their cause with a sentimental devotion to throne and altar. One sees this in the new spa- THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 153 pers of the time ; but, best of all, in Hugo's youthful poems — " his follies before he was boru, " as he used to call them — and in his Eoyalist " Odes and Ballads. " Something of the same spirit can be found in all the future leaders of the Eomantic School. Thus, for a time, independence and individualism in literature became identified with medisevalism and the ultra- Catholic Eestoration. But it was soon seen that this connection was purely fortuitous. In the year after the English actors had been driven from the stage, the foundation of the " Globe " new'spaper testified that the new spirit accorded with the most ardent patriot- ism ; and prejudice was hardly dispelled before writers of the younger school — Thierry, Thiers, Guizot, and Mignet in history. Cousin in philosophy, Lamartine and Hugo in poetry — showed to the world that the genius of France was ready to break with its outworn past. Several elements combined to make these years favorable to a revolt from tradition. The rising gen- eration had passed their youth in a time when classical studies and the amenities of literature were neglected or obscured by the rush of events and the glories of the Empire. The energies nursed in a time of action were directed now to the field of imagination, and claimed a broader scope than had sufficed for their elders. 1 This movement of the world-spirit was by no means confined to France, and the cosmopolitanism that had been preached by De Stael aided it by trans- lations from the English and German Piomanticists. As early as 1809 Constant had adapted Schiller's 1 So Hugo says : — Nous froissons dans nos mains, h('las inoccup(?es, Des lyres a defaut d'tpt^es, Nous chantons comme on conibattrait. 154 MODERN FKENCH LITERATURE. " Wallensteiii " to French taste; Sclilegel's " Lectures on Dramatic Literature " were translated in 1814, and in the same year the Spanish " Komance of the Cid " was done into French. A little later Raynouard edited an anthology of the Troubadours, and Scott's essay on them w^as translated. In 1821 Shakspere and Schiller were turned into French, and Byron soon fol- lowed, with such a numerous company of works of like tendency that enumeration is at ouce tedious and superfluous. ^ The ferment of independence spread rapidly. All the young men were for liberty, and their talents made them each year more and more the lions of the literary salons, while the conservative " periwigs " grew less supercilious and less confident. In 1827 the tide had set so decidedly that the season's dramatic success was achieved by a company of English actors, among them Kean, Macready, and Kemble ; and in December of that year the impression of their performances was fixed and formulated by Hugo's profession of dramatic faith in the preface to his " Cromwell. " From this point to 1830 the Romantic emancipation of the ego makes a constant crescendo culminating in the epic conflict in which Hugo's " Hernani " served as a mod- ern body of Patroclus, till the Revolution of July (1830) crowned the Romanticist triumph. For liter- ary reform was now wholly identified with the liberal movement in politics, while the reactionaries had be- come involved in the popular condemnation that swept away the Legitimist throne. After 1830 the emancipa- tion of individualism had only itself to fear. It could develop unchecked on the stage and in the press. But 1 See Lanson, Litteraturo franraise, p. 916, for further titles, and also Brunotiere, Etudes critiques, i. 279. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 155 its unchallenged rule was very brief ; indeed, as a sys- tem, it passed into history with the hasco of Hugo's " Burirraves " in 1843. Yet it has never ceased to be au all-pervading influence in the whole period that follows. It has fostered and almost transformed the study of history ; it is the inspiration of the modern novel of whatever shibboleth. ^ A school implies a master and rules or principles ; but it is hard to say who was the master or what were the rules of this group of writers who asserted so vig- orous a life and enjoyed so brief a triumph. Hugo is greatest among them ; but he is not a master, for the very essence of the movement lies in the free scope that it claims for the development of individuality in the assertion of the rights of imagination, whose wings reason had clipped since Malherbe's day. Their early strength, the bond of their cohesion, lay in the protest against what they thought the mummeries of Classi- cism, and men might share this who shared nothing else. Hence we find sculptors and painters among the foremost to "respond to Hernani's horn," for they felt that dramatic liberty involved their own. They could be rallied for any attack on artistic conventions. The very first verse of " Heruani " was meant and taken as a challenge to metrical precedent ; and repeated contemptuous allusions to old age in the same piece voiced a like sentiment. The iconoclasts were as extreme as the conservatives. Shouts of " Down with Racine ! " enlivened the the- atres ; while Gautier, with a band of long-haired, youthful enthusiasts, danced a saraband around the ^ See Bniiicticre, Epoques du theatre fran(;'ai.s, .340, and Zola, Eomanciers natnralistes, p. .376, who complains, there and elsewhere, that he cannot get liis feet out of the Romantic snare. 156 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. statue of that courtly tragedian before the faces of a shocked bourgeoisie. Behind this impatience of control, the unreasoning self-assertion of youth conscious of its strength and over-sanguine of its powers, there was a calmer and more reasoning desire for a freer expression of emotion and art, especially in lyric and dramatic poetry. It was, then, in the nature of the movement that each genius should develop independently. Hugo, the greatest of them, will demand a place apart. Others, like Stend- hal, appear more fitly among the precursors of Natural- ism; others, like Sainte-Beuve, among the critics of the century. The school, if one may call it so, had its nucleus in Charles Nodier (1783-1844), a fanciful and romantic sentimentalist, with whom were associ- ated first De Vigny and the Deschamp brothers, then Lamartine, Hugo, and Sainte-Beuve, who has described this " C^nacle, " for so they called themselves, as " Eoyalists by birth, Christians by convenance and a vague sentimentality. " Their first organ was the " Muse francaise ; " and their aim was to nurse and rouse the old monarchical spirit, the spirit of mystery and spiritual submission, as we find it voiced in La- martine's " Lac " and " Crucifix, " in De Vigny 's " Eloa " and "Moise, " and in Hugo's early "Odes and Ballads. " In form, however, these men soon came to demand the fullest independence. They avoided imitation even of the most admirable work ; they would not put their new wine into old bottles. And presently, in the exigencies of controversy, they began to claim that even in their own day the Classicists had not represented the people, — a view that had far-reaching results; for this democratic impulse, once stirred, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 157 turned the school slowly but surely from legitimacy to liberalism, from the Bourbons and the Orleanists to the Eevolution and Napoleon. Lamartine sings of universal emancipation; Hugo, of the Vendome Col- umn. ^ These wider sympathies won them a wider popularity, and drew to them, even before the Revo- lution of July, the valuable alliance of De Musset, M^rimde, and the elder Dumas; and to these were added a little later the distinguished names of Gautier and Gdrard de Nerval. The Eomantic movement owed much to England, more probably to Germany, most of all in its ideas to De Stael, in its aesthetics to Chateaubriand, in whom all unite to admire the incomparable artist. Hugo, at fourteen, resolves to be " Chateaubriand or noth- inii. " 2 So far as Romanticism is the declaration of literary individualism, the negation of classical dogmatism, it is in large measure the result of " L'Allemagne ; " but from its positive side, in its reassertion of the rights of imagination, it is far more the revival of the emotions of Cliristianity in a society whose fearful experiences had inspired a will to be- lieve without altogether satisfying its reason. Chris- tianity to these Romanticists is not the robust faith of Bossuet, but the lassitude of men weary of negation, seeking food for a re-aroused spiritual nature. To this mental state the " Genius of Christianity " was a revelation of beauty and art. " The' cross raised by Chateaubriand over every avenue of human intelli- gence," to borrow Hugo's phrase, cast its shadow over the " Odes and Ballads, " which palpitate with a medi- 1 Contrast, in the "Odes et Ballades," book i. 11 and ii. 4 with iiL 3, 5, 6, 7. 2 V. Hugoraconte, ii. 106 (July 10, 1816). 158 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. seval faith ; it inspires the spiritualism of Lamartine and the young De Vigny ; and if De Musset seems ratlier to echo the eighteenth century, it is no longer with the confident sneer of Voltaire. This spiritualism combined with that individualism to foster a literary subjectivity ; and to this also De Stael and Chateaubriand had pointed the way. Now, any attempt " to realize beauty by the expression of character, " unless it is upborne, as in Hugo, by colos- sal egoism, is apt to become introspectively morbid, melancholy, pessimistic, loving best, like Coleridge's Genevieve, " the songs that make her grieve, " and so in sharp contrast to the objective optimistic calm of the Classicists. There is a tendency to flee from the grievousness of life to the sentimental contemplation of Nature, after the manner of Eousseau and Bernardin, to seek solitude where Classicism had sought life. Hence these writers nurse their emotions on the medi- aeval Christian past, while Greece and Eome had been more sympathetic to the School of 1660 and to the eighteenth century. But in substituting national tra- ditions and Christian legends for the ancient and pa- gan (mes, the Romanticists first brought literature in touch with the masses of the people. Such are the general characteristics of Romanticism ; but no writer reflects all its phases, nor were all equally imbued with its spirit. This finds its most natural expression in lyric poetry, which it is well to study before considering the effect of Romanticism on the drama and fiction. First in time among the poets are B(^rangor, who cannot be reckoned as in full sympathy with the movement, and Lamartine, who drew away from it after his early successes. These may serve to intro- THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 159 duce an attempt to show the evolution of Eomantic poetry as it appears in the verses of De Musset, De Vigny, and Gautier. Bc^ranger, in a vast number of songs that deal with love, wine, politics, and espe- cially with Napoleon, whose legend he did much to establish, continues the song-writers of the eighteenth century, though he is far more cleanly and much more popular. It is as impossible for him as for them to be wholly serious. A spice of Gallic mockery lurks even in his songs of patriotism and democracy, though he strikes here his deepest and most original notes. ^ Perhaps B(5ranger was too democratic in his nature and convictions to develop a truly independent lyric individuality. His belief in the wisdom of the ma- jority is almost a creed ; but this insured his accept- ance by the multitude. He reflects faithfully the temper of the great middle classes ; and these maintain his popularity to-day because they find in his verses the completest echo of their own Voltairianism, a hero- worship spiced with Hague, and love of good-cheer, while they are not offended, as more cultured men might be, at his mannerisms of language and style. Lamartine, on the other hand, is pre-eminently an aristocrat both by birth and instinct. ^ He, too, was no thorough-going Eomanticist, but he made great and 1 E. g., Le Vieux drapeau, La Bonue vieille, L'Alliauce des peiiples. See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, i. 60. 2 Born 1 790 ; died 1 869. His principal volumes are — Poetry : Me'di- tations, 1820; Xoiivelles me'ditations, 1 82.3 ; Harmonies poetiques et reli,c;ieu.ses, 1830; Jocelyn, 1 836 ; La Clmte d'lm ange, 1838; "Recueille- ments poetiques, 1839. Prose: Voyage en Orient, 1835; Histoire des Girondins, 1847; Graziella, 1852. Criticism : Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, i. 190; Brunetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 107, and Histoire et litterature, iii. 239; Fagiiet, xix. siecle, p. 73 ; Rod, Lamartine (Classiqties populaires) ; Descharuel, Lamartine ; Lacretelle, Lamartine et ses amis. 160 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. essential contributions to tlie lyric evolution of that school. He was of old Royalist family, and had the education of a Catholic noble. After the Restoration he entered the army, which he soon exchanged for the diplomatic service, though not until he had pub- lished the " Meditations," — verses that accorded less with the profession of arms than with the weary tem- per of this time of exhaustion, the to-morrow of Water- loo. Its success showed how completely it expressed the state of mind of cultured France. Forty -five thou- sand copies were sold in less than four years. That Lamartine was happily married in 1822, and busied with diplomacy till 1830, seemed rather to foster than check his sentimental melancholy. After the Revolu- tion of July, he made a journey to the Orient, and returned in 1833 to take an active part in politics, where his oratory earned him distinction, and his gen- erous though unpractical patriotism won him esteem. In 1848 he withdrew from the Republic, of which he had been the quickly discredited chief, and passed his last years in indigence, relieved toward the close by the generosity of the Imperial government which he had opposed. Lamartine 's poetry belongs almost wholly to the early period, and is, as he himself says, a direct result of the study of De Stacl, to whom he owed more than any other Romanticist. It is usually lyric in form, almost always so in sentiment. It deals with the relations of man to an idealized Nature rather than to his fellow-men. Indeed, Lamartine has but one note, and that not an inspiring one. His verses preserve much of the verbal mannerisms of the former generation; they flow in an ever -broadening and somewhat shallow stream, from the " Meditations" to the diffuse epic THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 161 parables of " Jocelyn " and the " Angel's Fall. " It is hard for the modern reader to realize, still harder to comprehend, the ardent admiration that hailed each succeeding volume; for, great as is the bulk of his verse, his message was all in his first poems, and gained nothing by repetition. He was a noble-minded but melancholy and somewhat sickly idealist, nursed in the school of Eousseau, who in early life had no crosses to stir his vigor ; and when these came in later years, they discovered none to stir. So at his best " he touches but does not penetrate the heart, " and at its worst his sentimentality is nauseating. He ac- knowledges himself " incapable of the exacting labor of the file and of criticism ; " so, while his verses flow as naturally as the gentle rain from heaven, their ethe- real mushiness drowns the germs of healthy realistic action. True passion never descended to such depths as " My letter is not ink, but written tears, " or " These verses fell from my pen like drops of evening dew. " Eeal suffering has a different throb from the rhythmic pulsation of his " Laments, " and his smug " Medita- tions " provoke in our day more exasperation than sympathy. But in 1820 the French people were weary and heart-sick, and none appealed to them as did Lamartine. He brought home to the heart of cultured France the hazy religiosity of Cliateaubriand and the equally hazy Nature-worship of Eousseau ; and while there was in the public this mood to comprehend him, Lamartine 's popularity was secure. But when this mood yielded to a more energetic spirit, the poet soon sank to the place of a writer whom few read, though all conven- tionally admire. After the collapse of his political fortunes, he seems to have felt, what others had felt 11 162 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. long before, that his poetic vein was worked out. And his later work suffered from the speed with which he was constrained to produce it. " Graziella " and other short tales are graceful, but weak ; the " Voyage en Orient ", is too rhetorical, and the " History of the Girondins " is both declamatory and demagogic. Yet Lamartine still merits serious study, less for what he is to any group of readers to-day than for what he was to a former generation, — the most complete reilection of their sentiments and aspirations. A sturdier man in every way, and in his earlier poetic period more in sympathy with the spirit of Eomanticism, was De Vigny,^ distinguished not only in poetry but also in the drama and in fiction. He was of a military family, and, like Lamartine, connected with the army from 1815 to 1827, — twelve years of piping peace that seem to have disgusted him with the profession. He was already an author of good report, and emancipated from material cares by a wealthy iparriage, when he published his first volume of poems, two years after Lamartine 's " Meditations. " This book is valualjle intrinsically, but its importance to the evolution of French poetry lies in three poems, — " La Neige, " which is the first grandiose poetic evocation of the middle ages, and " Le Cor, " written at Tioncesvalles during the Spanish war (1823), which, with " Moise, " is the first attempt in French to treat philosophic subjects in epic and dramatic form. 1 Eorn 1799; flied 1863. Poetry: Tol'mes, 1822 ; Poemes .antiques et modernes, 1826 ; Les Destinees, 1864. Prose : Cinq-Mars, 1826 ; iStello, 1832 ; Servitude et grandeur militaires, 1835 ; Journal d'un poete, 1867. Criticism : Rrunctierc, Pocsie lyriqne, ii. 3 ; Litterature contem- porainc, 31 ; Faguet, \ix. siecle, 124; Paleologuo, T)e Vigny (Crands &rivaiiia franf;ais) ; Dorison, De Vigny, poete philosoplie, and De Vigny et la poesie politi(|ue; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contcmporains, i. 32C, and Nouvcaux lundis, vi. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 163 The epic " Eloa, " that followed in 1824, was more in the tone of Lamartine, and doubtless served as a model for his "Angel's Fall." Here the heroine, a sister of the angels, born of a tear of the Saviour, falls from her native grace by a sympathy so universal as to embrace even the Spirit of Evil. The style of this poem, as of the earlier " Moise " and " Le D(^luge, " shows the influence of the young Hugo, but reacted with greater power on that poet's later manner; while " Dolorida, " another short narrative in verse, inspired, like " Le Cor, " by his Spanish campaign, seems to have left its impress on De Musset's youthful " Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie. " The Eevolution of 1830 produced essential changes in De Vigny's genius; and his small posthumous vol- ume, " Les Destinies," reveals him at the height of his power as a lyric pessimist and philosophic poet who felt his function to be " to represent thoughts, epic, philosophic, dramatic. " So, in a sense, he became a " Symbolist," from whom the school of that name have learned much and might learn more. Espe- cially in " Le Mont des oliviers " and " La Maison du berger, " there is a purposeful objectivity, a grappling with the problems of life, as they present themselves, old foes with new faces, to our century, more vigorous than would have been looked for in the author of " Eloa. " But the general note of these " Philosophic Poems " is gloomy skepticism, w4th desperate exhorta- tions to self-reliance, since there is nothing else on which to rely. At first his changed mood found expression in the drama and in fiction, that will claim our attention pres- ently. After 1835 he published nothing, wrapping his pessimism in a stern silence, taking for himself 164 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. the rule of " Stello " to separate the poetic from the political life, since " the application of ideas to things is but time lost for the creation of thoughts. " This self-contained calm contrasts strangely with the eager utterance of the inner circle of the Komanticists. With him, as with his Chatterton, " continual revery killed action. " ^ He has been said thus to occupy a middle ground between De Musset and Chdnier; bub his thoughtfulness, somewhat chilling at times, sug- gests rather Madame de Stael, and artistically he has much in common with Chateaubriand, though he is more coldly impersonal and probably much more sin- cere in his pessimism, — if indeed the morbid senti- ment of " Kend " should be dignified with the name of pessimism at all. If we may trust De Vigny's " Journal " and his posthumous poems. Nature seemed to him " a tomb, " where it was the part of wisdom " to respond with a cold silence to the eternal silence of God. " ^ " Peaceful despair is true wisdom, " he says elsewhere. " Good is always mixed with evil ; evil alone is pure and unmixed. " " Extreme good is ill, extreme ill never good ; " while " hope is the source of all cowardice. " So broods this self-tormentor, who " loves the majesty of human sufferings, " — a verse that he declares to be " the sense of all his philosophic poems. " To him the real is less 1-eal than tlie symbol, the seen than the unseen. " The dream is as dear to the thinker as all that he loves in the actual world, and more terrible than all ^ Curiously cnout^h, UTihappv love, the very cause of the fecundity of Lamartine and 7)e Mussot, Avas the reason of his sileuce. See I'ale'ologue, pp. 80-105. - Le juste opj)osera le dcdaiii a I'ahseuce, Et no ri'pondra plus (jue par uu froid silence Au silence e'teruel de la divinite. THE KOMA.NTIC SCHOOL, 165 that he fears. " His very genius seems to him a fatal gift; glory only "immortalizes misfortune." His Joshua is " pensive and pale," because he is God's elect; his Moses, " mighty and solitary. " If at times, under the cruel deceptions of love, he seemed to lose faith in his idealism, his pessimism remained always noble, restrained, sympathetic, manifesting itself not in appeals for condolence but in pitying care of all who were near and dear to him. But this lofty poetry, interpenetrated with the stern despair of pessimistic idealism, will always be unintelligible to the many. As a poet, De Vigny appeals to the chosen few alone. In his dramas his genius is more emancipated from himself ; in his novels, most of all. It is by these that he is most widely known, and by these that he exercised the greatest influence on the literary life of his generation. But his philosophic poems will be his monument, cere perennius, when all else shall be forgotten. Lamartine and the young De Vigny stand on the threshold of Ptomanticism. With De Musset we are in its full efflorescence. No poet ever announced his advent with more of the genial sense of youth than he. " He makes his entry with a bright song on his lips, spring on his cheeks, his eye candid and proud, smil- ing at existence, the elect of genius and affianced to love. " ^ His is the poetry of Nature, — that gushing of simple passion that mocks all rule and " sings of sum- mer in full-tlu'oated ease, " or quivers with the pain of his heart's reopening wounds. But to this rich blos- soming of his spring-time there came an early autumn and a long winter. At thirty De Musset was already an old man seeking in artificial stimuli the fountain 1 Pellissier, Mouvement litteraire au xix. siecle. 166 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. of a youth that would not spring again. The zeal of his house had eaten him up; his passion had burned itself out and burned out his heart with it. He had done his work ; it mattered little to literature or to him whether the curtain had fallen on his life's drama in 1841 or in 1857. A Parisian, born in 1810, ^ of noble and cultured family, he was a most precocious and excitable child and a wayward youth. He printed his first volume in 1829, and his last of note in 18-41. Durintf this brief interval he produced many lyrics of tlie highest value, dramatic work of quite peculiar charm, and stories worthy to rank with the best of that brilliant decade. More than any of his fellows, he was a poet by inspi- ration, not by art. He sang "because he must;" he was a law to himself. His sportive genius even went out of its way to ridicule or to offend " the rhyming school that cares only for form. " It would seek, or at least it would not shun, irregularities, solecisms, and venturesome similes, of which the famous com- parison of the moon to the dot on an i is only an easily quotable example. In this, as in much else, " De Musset was a child 1 Died 1857. Chronology of the principal works — Poetry: Contes d'Espagne ct d'ltalic, 1830; Holla, 1833; Les Nuits, 1835-1837. Dra- mas : Caprices de Marianne, 1833 ; Lorenzaccio, Fantasio, On ne hadine jjas avec, Tainour, 1834 ; Le Chandelier, 1835 ; II ne faut jnrer dc rien, 183G. Fiction: Confession d'un jeune homme du siijcle, 1836; Conte.s, 1837-1844; La Mouche, 1853. The sixteen years, 1841-1857, show two or three lyrics of the first rank, several good dramas and stories, but nothing that marks growth. Criticism : Bruuetiere, Poesie lyrique, i. 257, and Epoques du theatre francjais, 349 ; Fagnet, xix. siecle, 250 ; Barine, De Musset (Grands ecrivaiiis fran<7ais) ; Paul Lindan, Alfred dc Musset (Berlin, 1870); Palgrave, Oxford Essays; Saiute-Beuve, Portraits contem- poraius, i. 397. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 167 all his life, and a spoiled child. " Extreme in all things, he would work excessively, only to yield more completely to utter idleness and his lower nature. Like Eousseau, and all who have nursed themselves in hypersensitiveness, he suffered acutely from self- deception and disillusionment. So, in the spirit of Eomantic devotion, he accompanied George Sand to Italy (1834), only to be tortured by an estrangement (1835) that lay in the nature of things and cost her few pangs, while it marks the cardinal point in his career. 1 Here lay his power, but also his weakness. " Strike the heart, " he said ; " genius lies there. " To bare his heart, to display his emotions, is witli him in- stinct rather than design. Hence his power of inven- tion is not strong. He was no thinker, like De Vigny ; but he painted wonderfully what he had felt subjec- tively, and what he felt supremely was the hollow worthlessness of the only love he knew. Love and passion were the Alpha and Omega of his life. In his " Confession " he says : " I did not conceive that one could do anything but love. " If, now, such a nature is possessed by egoistical skepticism, genius will not save the man, though it may the work. Faust's " eternal womanly " has no power to draw such souls upward and on. It drew De Musset, as it has others whom we shall meet, to intellectual and moral decay, of which the successive steps can be traced in his dramas and his lyrics. His first work, " Les Contes d'Espagne et d 'Italic," shows reckless daring in the choice of brutal subjects of crime and debauchery, quite in the spirit of Le Sage, 1 She made it the subject of a novel, " Elle et lui," which provoked "Lui et elle," an iiidi2;naut reply, from Do Musset 's brother Paul. The matter is full}' and impartially treated by Barine, pp. 57-90. 1G8 MODERN FKENGH LITERATURE. with much freshness and hrio, and a dash of dandified impertinence in verses that mocked the foibles of the older Eomanticists, and suggested to his contempora- ries the Byron of " Don Juan. " But he repelled the flattering comparison. " My glass is not large, but I drink from my own, " he said. However, he presently abandoned this style for the more subjective strain of " Les Voeux st«^riles " and " Eaphael, " and for the decla- mation of " Namouna " and " Eolla, " both very eloquent at times, though fundamentally immature. Already he is playing with the passionate fire that, after the separation from George Sand, will fill his heart with the throbbing passion of "Les Nuits, " which, with the " Ode to Malibran " and the " Letter to Lamar- tine " (1836), mark the highest point of his lyric development, — a time of sad but in the main sober resignation, that had overcome the spirit of revolt, and had not yet yielded to the lethargy of debauchery. Even his second volume had shown the overflowing confidence of youth a little checked by experience. Li " Eolla, " one of the strongest and most depressing of all his poems, the skeptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lucid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. And the same note that has here a brazen ring sounds with more subdued sadness in the four " Nuits " and in " Espoir en Dieu. " ^ For I)e Musset had not the cour- age to follow his aspirations. Seeds of disease, fos- tered by a wild and reckless life, sapped his will even while his genius still shone bright. But if his lyric production grows more sparing and in form less Eomantic, occasional outbursts, such as " Le Ehin allemand, " show that at times he couhl still gather 1 "Ptolla" is dated 18.33; the "Nuits," 1833 to 1837 ; "Espoir," 1838. THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 1G9 up all his powers. Yet, in the next years, both the lyric and the drama were laid aside for prose fiction, to which we shall recur presently. He resumed the drama, in 1845, with the charming " II faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee ; " hut the comedies that followed were far below his earlier standard. His lyric work had now almost wholly ceased, and one is more than once tempted to wish it had ceased altogether. ^ It was of the nature of Eomanticism to encourage the most varied individualization. It might be hard to find in literature a more radical divergence than that of De Musset and Gautier; for just as one was, in Leconte de Lisle 's contemptuous ]3lirase, the " show- man " of his heart's emotion, so the other w^as a con- scious artist, objective in aesthetics as in morals, judging his work from the intellectual side, enjoying his art for its own sake. It is more true of Gautier than of any considerable French poet, that he seems to write for the sake of writing, for the joy that he finds in the art of manipulating the language. Born in Provence, Gautier ^ was educated at Paris, 1 The chronology of the "Contes" is: Emmeline, 1837; Deux mai- tresses, Fre'dcric et Beruadette, FiLs dii Titieii, Margot, 1838 ; Croisilles (his best), 1839; Merle blauc, 1842; Mimi Pinsou, 1843; Pierre et Camille, 1844; La Mouche, 1853. 2 Born 1811; died 1872. Poetry: Poe'sies, 1830; AlLertus, 1832; Come'die de la mort, 1838; Emauxetcamces, 18.53. Fiction: Les Jeunes France, 1833 ; Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835 ; Fortunio, 1838 ; Roman de la momie, 185G ; Capitaine Fracasse, 1861-1863; Spirite, 18G6. Travel: Tra los montes, 1843 ; Zigzags, 1845; Italia, 1852; Constanti- nople, 1854; Loin de Paris, 1864; Quand on voyage, 1865; Rnssie, 1866; L'Orient, 1876. Criticism: Les Grotesques, 1844; Histoire du romantisme (written in and after 1830). See Du Camp, The'ophile Gautier; Baudelaire, OSuvres, iii. 151; Brunetiere, Poe'sie lyrique, ii. 41, and the literature there cited. 170 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. and at first gave himself to painting, cultivating a literary taste by much reading, especially in the rich literature of the sixteenth century, in Marot and the Pleiad, — a training to which Sainte-Beuve attributed the sureness of his metrical touch. He was led by these studies to write critical essays that attracted some attention ; but his literary advent dates from 1830, when his first volume appeared in the midst of a political revolution. Although his verses won him the praise of Hugo, and admission to the Cdnacle, yet his work remained chiefly critical. He made him- self the centre of a school of ultra Eomanticists, the fiamhoyants, as they were wont to call themselves, who with long hair and flaring waistcoats delighted to provoke the impotent rage of the grisdtres and 2?cr- ruques, the greyl)eards and periwigs, as they called the belated adherents of Classicism. Under his leadership this band of artists, musicians, and struggling writers fought the battles of emancipation in more than one Parisian theatre with an enthusiasm of which he has left a delightfully humorous account in his so-called " Histoire du Romantisme. " Presently this battle ceased for lack of combatants ; and the irony of fate made Gautier for a time secre- tary to the novelist Balzac, a post that must have been inconceival)ly uncongenial to one of his tastes and temperament. He soon abandoned it, but the discipline was not without influence on his future novels. Then, as soon as better fortune permitted, Gautier travelled gladly and widely. He visited Spain, Algeria, Italy, Constantinople, and Eussia, and made from his experiences books that are classics in the picturesque literature of the world. Meantime a few dramatic attempts had only reminded him of the THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 171 limitations of his genius. His novels and tales are more interesting, and perhaps most read ; but it is his poetry that gives liim his prominent place in the lit- erary evolution of the century. In all his work one is impressed first and most by his extraordinary love of beauty and by his wonder- ful power of language. Then one notes that he is radically differentiated from the Romantic and possi- bly from the true lyric spirit by the objective soiilless- ness of his poetry, by what Brunetifere calls " its lack of personal sensation or conception. " And finally, as one reviews his work, one finds him shrinking everywhere from the ugly, especially as symbolized in death, and yet ever morbidly recurring to it in the midst of the joys of sense, — a thing not uncommon with our modern literary hedonists. It is just here that these men miss the classical note. In vain they emulate the careless joy of Theocritus or Anacreon. They cannot efface their Christian birthmark ; they cannot be or act as though it were not. They may close, as Gautier did during the Eevolution of 1848, their shutters to the world and its sympathies, until they see in a Belgian landscape only " an awkward imitation of Piuysdael," until form alone comes to have meaning and value, and the poet does not punctuate his manuscripts, that noth- ing may disturb the worship of his fetish words ; yet a vein of iconoclastic bitterness alw\ays mars the stat- uesque repose. In the struggle ' against environment the cultus of art for art is apt to become one of art for artificiality, a snare that even Hugo did not wholly avoid. Gautier came to attach signification not only to the meaning and sound of words, but to their very vowels and consonants, though he never descended to the freaks of the modern Symbolists. As he said 172 MODEEN FKENCII LITEKATURE. himself of one of his characters, " he lived so much in books and painting that he ended hy finding Nature herself no lunger true ; " and while he was dividing this cummin-seed, the intrinsic interest of his sub- ject and even its moral bearings became indifferent to him. Formal beauty was all in all. From the first, the precision of his verse attracted the keen ear of Sainte-Beuve. " There is a man who carves in granite, " he said of the " Tete de mort " in 1829. Gautier's first long poem, " Albertus, " may re- sist and hardly repay analysis ; but as a series of weird, vivid, fantastic pictures, the orgy at Beelzebub's court and the gallows-humor of the close are quite worthy of that sixteenth century from which he drew his inspi- ration. This was a freak of strong but morbid im- agination, and the " Oomddie de la mort, " suggested perhaps by the " Ahasv^rus " of Edgar Quinet, sliows preoccupation with the same gloomy subject. In this poem of uncanny fascination, life in death and death in life are exhibited in a series of brief but impressive pictures. The worm talks to the bride who died on her wedding-day, and prints the first kiss on her lips ; the skull of Eaphael tells the poet of the fair Fornarina ; Faust has discovered that living is loving, and Don Juan that virtue is the solution of the world's mys- tery ; Napoleon regrets that lie did not rather " sport with Amaryllis in the shade " than conquer the con- tinent. One and all s])eak of lost illusions, but no- where in this poem of death is there a hint of life beyond the grave. Gautier had, however, another string to his lyre. His " Paysages et interienrs " are charming pictures of the cheerful side of life and of natural beauty. But he regards nature more in its exterior aspect and THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 173 less in its relations to man than Lamartine or Eous- seau would have done. And this is true also of the " Emaux et camt^es, " poems as delicate and as cold as their title suggests. Not even the toys of a dead child will persuade the poet to do more than paint with an infinitely delicate brush a picture that may work its own way to the heart. Never was poet so wrapped up in his art, so bent on catching the outward form, so indifferent to the spir- itual meaning of things ; and his most zealous disci- ples have been most eager to imitate his limitations. And yet, in the vagaries of the new individualism, it was well for the future of French poetry that these masterpieces of elaborate correctness should be set for an example before others who had that love of humanity without which the best poetry is but a soundiug brass and a tinkling cymbal. That touch of Nature was best represented among the Eomanticists by the righteous indignation of Barbier's " lambes, " — satires on the ignoble side, social and political, of the generation that came to the front with Louis Philippe. Eomanticism, being in its essence lyric, naturally revived satire; and the "lambes" awaited their equal till Hugo's " Chatiments " en- larged the borders and deepened the bitterness of poetic wrath. But though lyric poetry was the natural stronghold of Eomanticism, general agreement made the drama the battle-groiind between the conservatives and the reformers. All the members of the Cdnacle, whatever the bent of their talent, joined in this attempt to carry the war into the heart of the enemy's country. Here Classicism was most strong] y intrenched ; here the old rules had been most strictly enforced; here 174 MODEKN FRENCH LITEKATUllE. the effect of the new liberties could be most plainly seen; here the public could pronounce an immedi- ate and unmistakable verdict; here alone, at least in France, could literary propagandism be effectually prosecuted. The classic stage certainly invited, almost cried for, reforms that the innovators of the eighteenth century had not been able to secure. In 1820 De Edmusat remarks the disgust of audiences for dramas in classic form. It seemed to him " as thouoli all means of causing emotion liad lost their effect. People recog- nized them and were weary of them. " Some drama- tists had already attempted, and some critics, among them Lemercier and Stendhal, had preached a return to natural methods, and preferred Shakspere to Eacine. There was indeed little absolutely new in the dramatic theories elaborated by the critics of the " Globe, " and proclaimed in Hugo's preface to " Cromwell " with an eloquent daring that found an echo in De Vigny's in- troduction to his translation of " Othello " (1829). But they were the first to make effective the demand for a deeper and fuller study of character, for individuals in place of types ; they first announced their readiness to exchange the classical indefiniteness of time and place, that befitted the enunciation of universal truths, for dramatic illusion in elaborate reproductions of local and temporal conditions. But for this the historical drama offered the best excuse and opportunity. Their aim was to specialize and diversify what the Classi- cists had generalized. To do tliis, they were obliged to extend the time of the dramatic action beyond tlie single day that might suffice for the already formed characters of Eacine. The " unity of place " was even more easilv abandoned, and " unity of action " yielded THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 175 to unity of interest.^ No one lias stated this better than De Vigny. The new drama, he thinks, should deal with long periods of time, entire lives. The characters are to be introduced with only the germs of the passions from which the tragedy is to grow, and destiny is to be shown gradually enveloping its vic- tims. All is to be as in life. There are to be no messengers, as with the Greeks and Eacine. Action is to take the place of talk about action. The Roman- tic aspiration is to present " a whirl of events ; " Hugo desires " a crowd in the drama. " In their zeal for " local color," the Eomanticists had had predecessors as radical as they ; but they were led by it to a further step of great importance. The tragic dialogue of the Classicists is all pitched on one key. The slave, if he does not actually use the language of the emperor, must at least be dignified. Even in comedy Boileau reproaches Molifere with travestying his characters. But now each person was to talk in the language of his station, at least so far as the still obligatory alexandrine admitted, though lyric measures were allowed for passion and distress, and royalty might at times appear, as Lemercier puts it, "en ddshabilld. " The pu1)lic could have asked more, but it seems to have welcomed this instalment of liberty. The Eomanticists made no pretence of desiring dramatic realism. To their minds " an impassable barrier separated reality according to art from reality according to Nature " (De Vigny). On the stage all effects were to be heightened, magnified. The noble should be sublime, the ugly grotesque. They knew 1 For the predecessors of the Romanticists in these liberties, see Bruneticre, Epoques du the'atre fraucais, p. 319. 176 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. that such exaggeration tended back to the Classical types, hut they hoped to maintain a middle ground of idealized reality. So while the Komantic movement proclaimed a radical revolution, it ended in a moder- ate reform. Indeed, in some of its phases, especially in the essentially lyric intrusion of the personality of the author, it was less realistic than the Classical drama itself. In this field Hugo is greatest, Dumas most popular.* This latter, who was also the most fertile and widely read of the Eomautic novelists, united the blood of an innkeeper's daughter and of a general, himself the son of a marquis and of a Creole. He sustained the tradi- tions of his family by marrying an actress, though his well-known son was an illegitimate child. The family of young Dumas were poor, and he was sent in 1823 to seek his fortune in Paris, where indeed he speedily found it ; for in six years he achieved a dramatic success that made him one of the most pop- ular writers of his generation. He had begun with stage trifles, but was roused to more serious efforts by the visit of the English actors in 1827. He then wrote " Christine," one of his very few dramas in verse, which he alleges would have been acted at the national Theatre Franc^ais in 1828, had it not been for a cabal. As it was, his " Henri III.," in vigorous prose, produced in February, 1829, was the first successful drama on tlie new lines ; and though the author lacked the prestige of De Vigny to win critical recognition for his theories, he did what De Vigny had failed to do, — he carried his audience by storm, and gained a financial success till then unrivalled in the history of the stage. "Henri III." had certainly the vigor of overflowing THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 177 genius, a contagious love of life and action, a boundless fertility of invention, that were thoroughly character- istic of the author. It mattered little to the public that his historical studies were of a very " impres- sionist " nature, and, as he said himself, " a mere nail to hang his pictures on." To them it mattered little, either, that critics found fault with his psychology or with his notions of mine and thine. The crowd was pleased, and paid its money cheerfully. Yet " Henri III." has less literary value than any drama of Hugo, less than De Vigny's " Chatterton," or several of De Musset's comedies ; but it educated a public which, because it had been educated, ceased to care for it. The Revolution of July followed, and Dumas' first drama after it is the malodorous "Antony," -where the historic thread is dropped for a romance of modern life, that Dumas may graft on the tree of literature the vigorous shoot of illicit sexual relations that has borne such varied dead-sea fruit in succeeding genera- tions. " Antony " is an apology for adultery and a de- fence of suicide. Its success was more one of sensation tlian of esteem, and the author returned to the histori- cal drama, to attain in " Le Tour de Nesle" (1832) the ne plus ultra, of sentimentalism and his greatest popu- lar triumph, though hardly one of which he had cause to be proud, since some of its most telling effects had been borrowed without acknowledgment. He followed this with a considerable number of sensational dramas,^ but was gradually diverted to the more profitable field of prose fiction, though his inexliaustible fecundity never quite abandoned the stage. But he could not 1 The best are Kean, 1836 ; Paul .Tones, 1838; Mailemoiselle de Belle- Isle, 1839; Un Mariage sous Louis XV., 1841; Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr, 1843. 12 178 MODERN FliENCH LITEEATUEE. equal his early efforts iii this genre, which, though far from great, were most useful in popularizing iiomantic ideas among those whose pecuniary aid was a condition of material success. De Vigny's " More de Venise," which dates from the same year as " Henri III.," was the most faithful translation of the great English dramatist that France had yet seen ; and so it served as a powerful plea for masculine vigor and directness of speech, as opposed to the weak conventionalism of Soumet and Delaviijne. A veritable tempest raged over Desdemona's " hand- kerchief." So vulgar a word shocked the conservatives, who would have had it called a " tissue," and pro- tested loudly against this defilement of the poetic vocabulary, as they did also against some metrical liberties with the alexandrine muse, that seemed little less than sacrilege to the disciples of Boileau. In " Othello " De Vigny had violated too many prej- udices to win great success ; and his little comedy that followed, " Qiiitte pour la peur," hardly deserved any, Nor can his " Mardcliale d'Ancre " claim notice, except as the introduction to his study of the age of Louis XIII. that was soon to produce " Cin(|-Mars." The dramatic strength of De Vigny centres in " Chatter- ton " (1835), a plea for poetic idealism that com- mands admiration though it is too pessimistic to be enjoyed as a work of dramatic art. The play was drawn from his own " Stello," and was in prose, till then rarely used in tragedy ; but in the mouth of the Eng- lish boy-poet De Vigny has placed speeches that lack nothing but the form of pure poetry. To the Lord- Mayor who cavils at the uselessness of the poet in the ship of state, Chatterton replies with a noble flash, " The finger of the Lord points the course ; he reads THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 179 it in the stars." ^ So far, however, as Chatterton could read the celestial signs in his own case, they pointed to suicide, by wiiich his pride thought to avenge itself on society for its disdain. Perhaps tiiis very morbid pride was what attracted De Vigny to the subject. But his treatment of it is very powerful, and keeps the play alive to-day, though, as Sainte-Beuve remarked, " it touched the nerves rather tiian the heart." In those days nerves were certainly more delicate than now. We read that at its climax " there was a cry of horror, of pity and enthusiasm. The audience rose and remained standing for ten minutes ; the men clap- ping, the women waving their handkerchiefs." But De Vigny probably perceived the limitations of dra- matic Romanticism too clearly to seek to follow up his tragic success. De Musset was of equal and higher dramatic origi- nality.2 It is unfortunate that his first play, " Les Nuits vendtiennes," should have fnllen before a well- organized opposition exasperated by the recent success of Hugo's " Hernani ; " for by this he was diverted from the stage, though he had more genuine dramatic talent than any other member of the school. This first essay showed his complete accord with the fundamental Eomantic conception that tragedy must mingle witli comedy on the stage as in life ; but with him mingling was not juxtaposition but interpenetration, and he had too delicate a taste to yield to the extravagances of Dumas and the lesser Eomanticist^. Nursing his genius on the study of Shakspere, and writing for the publisher rather than the stage, his work shows con- 1 Act III. scene 6. 2 See especially Lemaitre's preface to Jouast's edition of De Musset's Theatre, and also Brunetiere, Epoques du theatre fran9ais, 357. ISO MODEKN FKENCH LITEKATUKE. staut progress from the " Storm and Stress " of " A quui reve les jeunes filles " and " La Coupe et les Ifevres " to " Fantasio;' " Lorenzaccio," and " Les Ca- prices de Marianne," the only one of tliese comedies that is still frequently acted. Here, as in his essay " De la tragddie " (1838), he refuses absolute allegiance to the lioniantic or Classical principles, and seeks by a judicious eclecticism to combine the outward appear- ance of restraint with the new liberty to associate the weird and terrible in human life with its higher comic aspects, as had been done by Shakspere. De Musset, perhaps more than any other contempo- rary dramatist, certahily more than any of his French predecessors, understood the presentation of complex characters, especially of such as illustrated the con- tradictions of his own nature. To this power he added a ready wit, and made his plays sparkle with dialogue unequalled since Beaumarchais. But, though nearly all this work was done between 1833 and 1835, it had no immediate effect on the development of dra- matic art, for none of these plays were acted till 1848, and they did not establish a definite place on the stage till tlie later years of the Second Empire. From about 1865 their influence can be traced as a corrective to the excessive naturalism of the school of Balzac, — a vindi- cation of the rights of fancy to roam with the airy, trip- ping grace and elegance that make the charm of the Italian Renaissance, of the sonnets of Petrarch, the comedies of Marivaux, and the undiscovered country of Watteau's shepherds. In this De Musset showed more real originality and a truer dramatic genius than De Vigny or Hugo. Two or three of his comedies con- tain the quintessence of Eomantic imaginative art, and will probably hold the stage longer than any THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 181 dramatic work of this school ; for they show most and best the unchecked freedom of fancy which joined with the spirit of realistic comedy to produce the mod- ern French drama.^ In prose fiction, as in the drama and in poetry, the distinctive characteristic of Eomantic work is its sub- jectivity and its unbridled imagination, both of which show themselves in the historians and critics of the movement, but are naturally most marked in- the novelists, who from this time become more and more the dominant element in French literary life. All the Eomanticists of whom we have spoken — Hugo, Gautier, De Vigny, Dumas — are more widely known and more generally prized to-day for their prose fiction than for their verses ; though, except in Dumas' case, these are of far higher literary value. In "Cinq-Mars "De Vigny gave French literature its best historical novel, which he based on a most minute study of more than three hundred volumes, while he vivified all with a flight of fancy and sweep of narration that he never equalled. In his concep- tion of the romance he owed much to Walter Scott; and he might have profited still more from him, for while "Cinq-Mars " is an excellent piece of picturesque imagination, it is exceedingly poor history. It is vi^dd, dramatic, delicate in details, firm in delineation, or perhaps one should say distortion, of character. For neither Richelieu, nor his secretary Joseph, nor De Thou, nor King Louis, is true to history ; and they are hardly more true to human nature. They seem rather chang- ing masks than mobile faces; types, personifications, rather than men. But, with all its faults, " Cinq-Mars " ^ Cp. Bruiietiere, Epoques du theatre frauyais, p. 348. 182 MODERN FKENCII LITERATUEE, remains a very brilliant stndy of a critical period in the social and political life of France. De Vigny wrote also little biographical tales of Gil- bert, Chatterton, and Chdnier, — three poets " snatched away in beanty's bloom," — • and a group of military stories, " Servitude et grandeur militaires," of great nobility and pathos. Here lie spoke of a career that he knew both by experience and family tradition. The self-abnegating heroism of the soldier had a pecu- liar charm for his stern temperament ; and he dwelt with afi'ection on the glory and pathos of military life at a time when almost every Frenchman had shared the thrills of the victories and the gloom of the defeat of their great emperor. " Here," says a kindred spirit, John Stuart Mill, " the poem of human life is open before us, and M. de Vigny does but chant from it in a voice of subdued sadness . . . the sentiment of duty to its extremest consequences " There is remark- aljle artistic restraint in " Le Cachet rouge," a bit of psychology from the Eeign of Terror ; and the chapter in " La Canne de jonc " that describes the meeting of Pope and Emperor is the stylistic gem of a book that will rank very high among the rhetorical master- pieces of France. De Musset's prose occupies more space than his lyrics or his dramas ; but it has far less value, and owes its chief significance to the clearness with which it exhibits the progress of his ethical disintegration. In " Emmeline " we have a rather dangerous juggling with the psychology of love. Then follows a study of simultaneous love, " Les Deux mattresses," quite in the spirit of Jean Paul. Three sympathetic excur- sions into Parisian Bohemia follow,^ and then " Le ^ Frederic et Beriiadettc, Miiiii I'iu.s(Hi, Le Secret de Javottc. THE KOMANTIC SCHOOL. 183 Fils de Titien " and " Croisilles," carefully elaborated historical novelettes ; the latter overtlowiug still with Eouiantic spirits, and contrasting strangely with " La Mouche," one of the last liickerings of his imagination. "Margot" bears marks of George Sand, and "Le Merle blanc " is a sort of allegory of their rupture, based on the Ugly Duckhng of the nursery. Finally, " Pierre et Camille" is a pretty but slight tale of deaf-mute love. More ambitious but less interesting is De Musset's "Confession," the immediate result of his unhappy Italian experience. It shows even in 1S36 whither the shrhiking from all moral compulsion and self- control was leading him. He sees his ethical weak- ness, but attributes it, perversely enough, to the spirit of an age made sick by Napoleon, whose fall had " left a ruined world for a generation weighted by care," who "struggled to fill their lungs with the air he had breathed." " During the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers brought into the world an ardent, pale, nervous generation." Thus De Musset would account for his own lack of will; but surely it was rather the spacious times of the Empire that left the impulse of their energy on the literary men of a generation of which Hugo is more typical than De Musset. His talent appears to more advantage in later critical essays, especially the witty letters of Dnpuis and Cotonet, that satirize modern marriage, the journalists, the novelists, and especially the critics of tlioroughbred Eomanticism. Indeed, he does not fail to send a few Parthian shafts even at the high-priest of the movement, — at Hugo himself. As in poetry, so here, the sharpest contrast to De 184 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Musset is Gautier, to whom in fiction as in verse form is the paramount interest, while psychology is subor- dinated or suppressed. In the whole range of his work there is not one clearly drawn character ; and were it not for the dreary, muddled efforts of Mademoiselle de Alaupin's Albert to explain himself, one might say there was no attempt at one. This was in some degree true of I)e Musset ; but Gautier's tales lacked the in- vention, feeling, and emotional mtensity of the other's work, good or bad. It has been said that his novels start from nothing, and end where they began. He enters the field with "Les Jeunes France," stories mildly satirizing the vagaries of his own school, freaks of luxuriant fancy in which we miss a single touch of nature. Nor shall we find it in the frankly hedonistic "Mademoiselle de Maupin," ^ exquisite in style, but so ostentatious in its disregard of moral conventions as to close the Academy forever to one who would surely else have won a distinguished place among those " Immor- tals." More in the playful satyr vein of " Les Jeunes France" is "Fortunio," which he calls "a hymn to beauty, wealth, and happiness, the sole trinity that we recognize." But the hymn is not inspiring. His Fortunio is so cold, so selfish, that the reader cannot sympathize with the gentle Musidora's devotion, still less with her despairing suicide. There is a taste of dead-sea fruit in Gautier's feast. "Vanity of vani- ties" is tlie real, though unexpressed, moral of this book. And yet in 1863 Gautier writes : " ' Fortunio' is the 1 Du Camp (Gmitior, p. 1 10) says that Maileinoiselle or ratlior Madame de Maiijiin was an historical character, who sang at tlie Paris < )p(Ta, went tliroiiffh a large jjart of Europe in male attire as au adventuress, and died in 1707 in a conveut at the age of 44. THE ROxMANTIC SCHOOL. 185 last work in which I have freely expressed my true thought. From that point tlie invasion of cant and the necessity of subjecting myself to the conventions of journalism have thrown me into purely physical de- scription." For the next twenty-five years the great bulk of his work was in artistic, dramatic, and literary criticism, uncongenial but remunerative. He had be- gun such work some years before with critical essays on the " Grotesques " of the sixteenth century, whom he had treated with genius, msight, exaggeration, and inaccuracy. He had also written conteniiDorary criti- cisms of Hugo and others who " answered to Hernani's horn." But in 1836 he became a staff-critic of "La Presse," and later of the official "Moniteur" and " Journal ; " and to these he contributed some two thou- sand articles,^ wasting precious genius on work that was inevitably ephemeral. But from this constant drudgery he snatched time to compose and polish the most perfect of his poems, and to write short stories where fancy could supply his lack of sustamed imagi- nation. Among these the best are " Avatar," a weird tale of the transmigration of souls ; " Jettatura," a tragedy of the evil eye ; and " Arria Marcella," a phantasmagoria of revived Pompeii. The phantom love that inspired "Albertus" reappears in "Omphale," in "The Mummy's Foot," "The Opium Pipe," "La Toison d'or," and, above all, in "La Morte amoureuse," which in form is one of the most perfect tales in the language. He attempted 1 See their titles in Spoelberch de Louvenjoul, Histoire des cenvres lnsh lirecchcs, yellow stockings, and russet shoes." Many lyrics, especially among the " Orientales," are of purely Spanish inspiration. 196 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. hidden beneath so many causes, that comes to us from the contemplation of existence." ^ In any case the boy had suffered no great loss by delay, for he speedily distinguished himself at school, and was already busy with poems, — " follies before I was born," as he called them in later years. Among these was an epic of Koland of Eoncesvalles, who was to inspire some of the noblest verses of the "Ldgende des sifecles." Then there was a " Deluge " in Miltonic style, as well as plentiful sketches of tragedies, melodramas, and comic operas. Forced by his father to technological studies that he abhorred, he wrote in his diary at fourteen, " I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing," — a sentiment that marks at once his ambition and his epoch. While still at school and but fifteen, Hugo competed for an Academic prize with a poem on " The happiness tliat study procures in all situations of life." Hono- rable mention was awarded to his three hundred verses ; and thus, though subordinated to the not very illus- trious Loyson and Santine, he won the notice and patronage of some Academicians who assisted his liter- ary beginnings. Of far greater influence on his devel- opment, however, was his growing aifiliation with the group of young and enthusiastic aspirants to fame who formed the Cdnacle of 1824. It was under their stimu- lus that he wrote his first novel, " Bug-Jargal," though he did not cast his lot fully with them till 1826. The story was afterward remodelled ; but even in its boyish 1 Et les l)ois ct les champs, ilu sage seul eompris F(jiit l\^diicati«ii do tons lf!s grands es))rits ! . . . Et nous feroiis gcrincr i]v. tontos jiarts on lui I'our riioninic, ti'istci off(tt jM'rdii sous tant de causes, Cette pitie qui uait du spectacle des choses. (Les Rayons et les ombres, xix.) THE YOUNG HUGO. 197 form 1 it shows the promise of some of his most strik- ing qualities. It has the same dose juxtaposition of the tragic and the grotesque that is found in his later work ; the same love of the moth for the star that is the mainspring of " Ruy Bias " and " Notre-Dame ; " the same chivalrous honor that summons Hernani to his death ; and a generous share of those " moving accidents by flood and field, of hairbreadth 'scapes in the immi- nent deadly breach, of being taken by the insolent foe," and of the vivid descriptions attendant thereon, that mark " Les Misdrables" and " Quatre-viugt-treize." The scene of " Bug-Jargal " is Hayti; the time the insurrection of the Blacks in 1793 ; the hero a negro prince and slave, whose magnanimous heart is won by the blue-blooded charms of Marie, the daughter of a wealthy planter and soon to be the wife of D'Auverney, an officer, and the narrator of the tale. To rescue her, even for his rival, this chivalrous African devises nu- merous feats of self-sacrificing heroism, and crowns all by giving his life for his love. But of more interest than this sentimental slave is the negro kinglet Biassou, the savage chief of the rebels, and the villanous dwarf Habribrah, whose weird end as he is swept away in the torrent of a cavernous abyss is a masterpiece of Ro- mantic imagination, worthy to take a place beside the famous fight with the devil-fish in " The Toilers of the Sea." But during these early years the tendency of Hugo's talent is toward lyric poetry rather than fiction. In 1819 he won three prizes at the Jeux Floraux of Tou- louse, — annual poetic competitions, such as are still held in Wales ; and his odes were of such intrinsic merit as to win him the epithet " sublime child " from Soumet, • Repriuted iu "V. Hugo raconte," ii. 181-223. 198 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. or, as he liked to think, from Chateaubriand himself.^ Thus encouraged, the young author, in spite of very slen- der resources, abandoned his technological studies, and, while ostensibly studying law, co-operated in founding a literary journal, " Le Conservateur littdraire," a strange title for the herald of Eomanticisni. But though this venture came at an auspicious time and had the sup- port of the rising genius of Lamartine, he was soon obliged to abandon the costly experiment. A few months later his mother died. Then Ins father, dis- gusted that he should have abandoned his profession, withdrew his allowance ; and between losses and dep- rivations the young poet was reduced for a year to considerable straits, which were the harder to bear as he was impatient to marry Ad^le Foucher, a child- friend of the Feuillantines. Eeminiscences of these gloomy days and of a duel in which his atrabilious stub- bornness had involved him linger in the Marius episodes of " Les Misdrables " and in the duel of " Marion de Lorme." He had now a book of odes ready for the press ; but no publislier would take it, even as a gift, and he could not afford to print it at his own expense. It was due to the generosity of his brother Abel that " Odes et po(5sies diverses" appeared in 1822. The book paid expenses, and left the author some seven hundred francs. But it (lid much more than that, for it attracted the attention of King Louis, who liked to tliink himself a patron of letters, and accorded the author a pension of two thousand francs. Witli this and hope Victor mar- ried Adfele in October, 1822 ; and liis courage was jus- tified by a domestic life happy and unclouded to its close. 1 V. Hugo raconte, ii. 235. THE YOUNG HUGO. 199 These early poems show Hugo's strength and weak- ness, but each m a still undeveloped form. He could not have heralded his future career as a writer better than by such brilliantly rhetorical lyrics, for both the lyric and the rhetorical strain ran through all his epics, his dramas, his satires, and his prose. And in these very first notes the youth of twenty shows that he knew already both what he wanted to do and how he proposed to do it. " He would put the movement of the ode in ideas rather than in words," he said ; that is, he would prefer harmony between thought and metre to symmetry of form, neglect of which was tlie corner-stone of the Eomantic " liberties." But in his case Genius was justified of her child. His verses sing themselves to the attentive ear with a happy concord of sound and sense, and a richness of rhythmic melody that till tlien had been approached only by the " Medi- tations" of Lamartine. Then, too, following in the steps of Chateaubriand, Hugo discarded mythology, with all its apparently antiquated apparatus, and made his ap- peal to those religious sentiments, universally under- stood and generally shared, that Boileau had thought incapable of poetic treatment. But Hugo went further than Chateaubriand. " Poetry," he declares in his preface to the Odes of 1822, is " that which belongs to the inner nature of all things." This definition made his work subjectively individualistic, sometimes with more artificiality than sincerity ; and though we see now that lyric poetry is in its nature sul)jective, this position challenged in the France of 1822 a tradition venerable by two centuries of alnised power. However, the verses of this first volume hardly illustrated the new position, and in their metrical form there was little to attract the criticism even of strict Classicists. 200 MODERN FKENCH LITERATURE. ' These odes breathe the ardent royalism that he had learned at his mother's knee, and an equally ardent but less clearly defined Catholicism, — partly also an inheri- tance from the hrigande of Nantes, partly no dovdjt a convention necessary for a young man who would be "Chateaubriand or nothing." In "La Lyre et la harpe " ^ he opposes Christian poetry to pagan quite as the " Genius of Christianity " had done ; his " Liberty " ^ is that in which Christ has set us free, and he has some not wholly perfunctory praises of chastity and martyr- dom. He tells us that " his songs fly toward God as the eagle toward the sun, for to the Lord I owe the gift of speech." But, after all, one detects less dignity and true feeling here than in the poems that throb with political passion, always intense in Hugo through all the kaleidoscopic changes of his life. Perhaps the high- water mark of these first odes is in the closing stanzas of " Buonaparte ; " but he soon surpassed himself in "Les Deux iles " (1825), and the superb Ode to the Vendome Column written in 1827 is one of the finest pieces of his earlier manner.^ But the Christian odes not only lacked the majesty of these political verses, they lacked also the warm tenderness of the domestic poems and recollections of childhood,* which deepened with the birth of his daughter Leopoldine (1826), and remained one of Hugo's most sympathetic and popular traits, A year after the first odes were printed, Hugo again ventured on journalism in the short-lived " Muse Fran^aise." He had also completed a novel, but it was so very Romantic that for the present lie pre- ferred anonymous publicaticjn. This was " Han d'ls- 1 Odes iv. 2. ^ odos ii. 0. 3 Odes i. 11 ; iii. 0, 7. ■* For instuuce. Odes v. 9, 12, 17. THE YOUNG HUGO. 201 lande," of wliicli lie said truly that the only thing in it based on personal experience was the love of a young man, and the only thing based on observation the love of a young girl ; that is to say, it was the immediate literary result of his betrothal and mar- riage. But for the rest, and the greater part, Hugo drew on the fountain of imngination that had flowed so freely in " Bug-Jargal." Tlie scene is laid in far Norway, where Hugo had never been, and the central figure is a monster such as Hugo had never seen. Han, even less human than Biassou, consorts with a polar bear, who assists the energies of his double brain to the destruction of a regiment that has offended him. Here, as in " Bag-Jargal," there is vivid imagination, with skill in the narration of scenes of terror and feats of breathless daring; but both stories are differen- tiated from the mere tale of adventure by a grotesque humor that gives them a marked individuality. On the other hand, the pathos is forced and ineffective ; but the same might be said of all such efforts in this generation, which exhibited its emotions with what seems to us a morbid delight. Hugo's creative imagination reappears, as free and vigorous but more refined and chastened, in the " New Odes and Ballads " of 1826. Here first he allied him- self openly with the Eomanticists, attacked the cur- rent and we may add fundamental restriction of the genres, and demanded " liberty in art," — whatever that may mean. In practice it seems to have amounted to the emancipation of his lyric individuality. His versification and rhythm already begin to echo his j)ersonality,i and several poems show the beginnings 1 E. p;., "Le Pas d'armcs du roi Jean" and "La Chasse du burgravo." (Ballades xi., xii.) 202 MODEKN FEENCII LITER ATUKE. of that sympathetic study of the inediseval mind that is associated with Eomanticism.i Hugo now held the first place among the younger poets. The king had increased his pension, and made him a member of the Legion of Honor, and by 1827 all recognized in him the standard-bearer of the move- ment. This leadership he asserted and confirmed by his first drama, " Cromwell," and especially by its elaborate preface, full of dramaturgical observations more opportune than new, for they had been timidly taught by Lemercier in France, were already recog- nized in England as essential elements in the Shak- sperean drama, and had been deduced with convincing logic by Lessing for the German stage. But if the pref- ace to " Cromwell" was not original, it was very fruit- ful, and it was moreover the best piece of French prose that the century had yet produced, although the dog- matic emphasis that wraps startling assertions in an endless train of brilliant metaphors does not always suffice to hide the writer's superficiality or even some- times his ignorance. The kernel of this elofpient outburst appears to be that literature had outlived the lyric and epic forms and had reached the age of the drama, which, because it was more true to nature, had greater power to move and sway the hearts and minds of men. As a matter of fact, we know that precisely the contrary was true, — that the Eomantic movement wns essentially lyric, and that the century has been pre-eminently lyric in its verse and epic in its prose ; but Hugo thouglit " the drama the only complete poetry of our time, the only poetry with a national character." To give this " com- plete poetry " scope, the stage must have larger liberty, 1 E. g., " Une Fee " and " La Ronde du sabbat." THE YOUNG HUGO. 203 especially in suljject; the tragic and comic must be mingled, and the grotesque placed beside the sublime should show, as in Shakspere, the irony of destiny. He did not aim, as La Chaussde had done in the eigh- teenth century, at a fusion of the genres but at an alternation, and so far as this tended to make the in- terest centre in character, he followed Diderot, though perhaps unconsciously. He made an effective plea also for the extension of the tragic vocabulary, the results of which have been already noted. He never departed, however, from the fundamental conventions of the sta*i-e, and those who hailed the " brute and savage nature " of his realism did him an injustice. His drama is quite as far from that of the new Naturalists, and much farther from a natural drama than the tragedies of Eacine or the comedies of Moliere. For Hugo was never a dramatist ; he was a lyric poet who wrote dramas. The psychological develop- ment of his characters is extremely weak. Antithesis, pushed to the verge of credibility and even over it, is the only complexity that they possess, and the minor personages have not even that factitious interest. The action seems in constant danger of stranding, and is indeed kept afloat only by the heroic measures that we associate with the melodrama. It is a little sur- prising, after the oracular declarations of the preface, to find "Cromwell" timid in its treatment of the unities of time and place, which are subordinate, and rash only in casting away the fundamental unity of action. The scene is confined to thirty-three hours and to London. Such unity of action as the play possesses hangs about the question. Will the Protector be King ? a question posed in Act L, affirmed in Act II., 204 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. denied in Act III., reaffirmed witli hesitation in Act IV., and denied in Act V. Mr. Swinljurne's somewhat hysterical admiration declares this play " sufficient to establish the author's fame for all ages in which poetry and thought, passion and humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfec- tion of structure, facile force of dialogue, and splendid eloquence of style continue to be admired and en- joyed." ^ But surely the judicious reader — if ha})ly readers of "Cromwell" can be called judicious — will see in this huge mass, whose length, though not that alone, excluded it from the stage, no masterpiece of any kind, l)ut rather the first essay of a man of genius who has felt the power of Corneille and Sbak- spere and attempts an imitation of their processes. Indeed, whole scenes recall passages in "Hamlet," " Julius CiBsar," and " Macbeth ; " and the would-be Corneillian style is often antiquated and forced, while occasionally it falls to the level of the mock-heroic. What is most interesting to note here, in the evolution of the drama, is the great number of persons brought on the stage contrary to French tradition, as well as the cultivation of " local color," which though, as usual with the Romanticists, untrue to fact, is vivid and successfully maintained. But in this very year the " Ode to the Vendome Column " should have shown Hugo that his strength and that of Romanticism lay in lyric poetry. It struck tlie key-note of the best work of his prime, and it showed also tliat the glories of tlie Napoleonic legend were beginning to dispel the prejudices of a Royalist nurture and the teachings of sober reason. Provoked by an insult to tlie marshals of Napoleon, it was 1 Victor Hugo, p. 1 1. THE YOUNG HUGO. 205 written while his blood was at white heat ; but if the ode bears marks of emotiou, it bears none of haste. Such lines as those that prophesy how "Vendue shall sharpen its sword on the monument of Waterloo," or recall how Germany bears printed on its forehead " the sandal of Charlemagne, the spur of Napoleon," ^ had been till then approached only by Corneille, And this ode is no isolated iiight, though before Hugo had completed another volume of lyrics he turned once more to the drama and produced " Amy Eobsart," a play taken from an episode in Walter Scott's " Kenil- wortli," which failed on the stage and was not printed till many years later. He wrote also " Marion de Lorme," which the censorship would not suffer to be either acted or printed, thanks to a fancied allusion to the then reigning Charles X. ; and so it happened tliat " Cromwell " was followed not by works that only the fame of their author preserves from oblivion, but by " Les Orientales," one of the most original of all his volumes of verse, — a collection that Brunetifere calls " the gymnastics of a talent in training, studies in design, color, and speed ; " while Swinburne pronounces it "the most musical and many-colored volume tliat ever had glorified the language," though the careful reader will not seldom find the mark of Eomantic artificiality where he sought the mint-stamp of genuine poet-gold. Hugo's Orient is that of Byron and Ali Pasha, but it 1 Tout s'arme, et la Vendee aignisera son glaive Sur la pierre de Waterloo L'histoire . . . Montre emprcints anx donx fronts dn vantonr d'Allemagne La sandale de Charlemagne, L'cperon de Napole'on. (Odes, III. vii. 4.) 206 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. is also the Moorish Orient of Spain, some breath of which lingered in his recollections of childhood ; most of all, however, it is tlie Orient of his imagination. On the whole, the Spanish pieces are the truest and Lest ; but " Les Djinns," the most remarkable single poem in the volume and one of the most striking pieces of metrical art in the world, is more Turkish tlian Mau- resque. " Le Voile," too, an Albanian tale of jealous family honor, is astonishingly brilliant in its render- ing of a purely fictitious local color. But in " Voeu " and in " Sara labaigneuse " there is a plaintive delicacy and a luxurious joy of girlish life that strike a more realistic Spanish note. As a piece of riotous fancy, the ode " Fire in the Sky," a dance of Sodom and Gomor- rah whirling to damnation, surpasses in terror as it does in art the prose of " Han " or of " Bug-Jargal." Very striking and with a touch of philosophic sym- bolism is " Mazeppa," borne away in a rush of des- tiny on his fiery horse, as a youth l)y his genius, but overcoming and conquering at last. Yet these word-pictures are fruits for whose enjoyment the foreigner must strive and climb. Let us pass to that which, though less exquisite, hangs on lower branches. The "Orientales" were followed by " Hernani," a drama not often acted, but still read by all who care for the history of tlie stage or for French literature, because it marks the trium])h of Eomanticism, — a triumph extorted from the Bourbon dynasty only a few months before they went hence to be seen no more. "Hernani," as has been said, was not the first Romantic drama, but it stood for a principle, as Dumas ' " Henri III." liad not done. The story of the conflict over it has often been told, but by none more graphically than THE YOUNG HUGO. 207 by Gautier, its protagonist.^ The play had been ac- cepted by the Theatre Fran^ais in October, 1829 ; but it took nearly six months to overcome the opposition of individual prejudice and Academic tradition. Delay only heated the passions of both sides ; and it was with confident though calculating generalship that Hugo published his determination to employ no claque of hired applauders, for by this he made the play a stand- ard of battle around which every Komanticist might fight for tlie cause of individual emancipation. He thus secured a devoted band of enthusiastic young men who delighted to enflame classical prejudices, not alone by their views, but by their clothes. Historical is the garb of Gautier, who led his cohort to the first per- formance in green trousers, a scarlet vest, black coat trimmed with velvet, and an overcoat of gray with green satin lining, the whole set off by long wavy curls. Among his fellows were Balzac the novelist, Delacroix the painter, Berlioz the composer, and many lesser champions of "liberty "in the liberal arts. The op- position was more numerous and hardly less intense. Unreasoning support was met with equally unreason- ing condemnation ; and from February 26 to June 5, 1830, the battle raged nightly, till there was not a verse that had not at some time been applauded or hissed. The result, if not a victory for " Hernani," was a victory for all that it represented. The fetters of the unities, as Boileau understood them, were broken. No further organized effort was made to resist the retrograde evolution of the Eomantic drama to its collapse with Hugo's " Burgraves " in 1843. Metrically and stylistically " Hernani " was epoch- 1 Histoire du rom.antisme. See also Paul Albert, Les Origiues du romautisnie, and Coppee, La Bataille d'Heruaui. 208 MODEKN FEENCII LITERATURE. making. Hugo was far more radical here than in his odes, and he boasts justly of his services m restoring the mot proiorc, the concrete noun, to a place of honor. Now first, as he says, wliat Delille and his fellows would have called the " olfactories " became a nose, " the long golden fruit " a pear ; he " crushed the spirals of paraphrase," and "said to Vaugelas, You are only a jaw-bone." ^ Then, too, his prosody was here more free, — perhaps as a result of his study of Goethe's alexandrines in the second part of "Faust," which Hugo read at this time, out as a drama wliether of plot or of character the phiy was fatally weak. Since Schiller's " Eobbers," all outlaws had been magnani- mous ; but Hernani had a pundonor that even Castil- ians found exaggerated. Hernani owes liis life to Don Paiy Gomez, and has promised to hold it at his calL Both love Dona Sol, who, as a Eomantic heroine, naturally prefers the bandit to the duke. But as Her- nani is about to enjoy the fruition of his love, his rival recalls his promise by a signal on the horn, and honor forces the bridegroom to take the poison that his bride generously shares. This close has much pathos, but it is rather elegiac 1 J'ai (lit a la narine: Et maia! tu n'est qu'un nez! J'ai (lit au long fruit d'or: Mais tu n'est qu'une poire! J'ai (lit ii Vaugelas : Tu n'es qu'une machoire! . . . J'ai de la pt^riphrase ('■cras^ les spirales. (Contemplations, I. vii.) An cxamjile of tliese " spirals " may not be without interest. Du Belloy, in his " Siege de Calais," which a contemporary critic calls " one of the two most lachrymose successes of the eighteenth cen- tury '' (its date is ITO:")), wants to say that dog's meat was dear; he says it thus : — Le plus vil aliment, r(''but de la mis^re, Mais aux dcrnicrs abois ressourcc terrible et cbi'rc, De la fid(''lit(' respectable soutien, Manque ii I'or prodiguc du riche citoj'en. THE YOUNG HUGO. 209 than dramatic. Indeed, Hugo is never as successful in passages of love or humor as in rhetorical eloquence and in satire. So here the crown of the drama is the long monologue of Charles V. at the tomb of Charle- magne, and one of the most striking passages is the description of a series of portraits ; but neither mono- logue nor description advances the action, nor does the amorous dialogue of the closing scene, which owes its interest to the epic strife of implacable hatred and undying love. It is quite true that this strife is founded on a situation strained and dramatically un- real ; but the same stricture would apply to the whole Eomantic drama, not alone in France, but also in Germany. To tlie Naturalistic mind much of the sentiment of "Hernani" has become mawkish, and many of the tirades seem mere beating the air. The conventions of Italian opera may maintain the popularity of Verdi's " Ernani ; " but Hugo's play has ceased to attract the great public of the stage, and it met with but a cold reception at its recent revival. The theatrical public has not the same literary training as the reading pub- lic, and, in the nature of the case, it can neither dwell on what it enjoys, nor pass lightly over the foibles and weakness of Eomantic exai^^geration. But if the cultured reader makes the Eomantic equation at the outset, and does not judge the work by strictly dra- matic standards, he will not fail to feel the charm of a generous warmth of emotion, a throbbing overflow- ing life that thrills through all, and he may summon in vain his memories of Corneille to find a scene where tragic admiration is so nobly roused as by the emperor in the cathedral vaults of Aix-la-Chapelle, as he stands by the tomb of the great Charlemagne. 14 210 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. It will be clear that " Hernani " lacks unity of action. Precisely the best scenes have no connection with the central situation. The whole fifth act might be spared.^ Now, the cause of this lack of unity in action is clear, and a recognition of it will help in jvidging Hugo's other dramas. Hugo has always a thesis at heart, a part of his own individuality to display ; and he cares more for this than for the development of character or dramatic action. Therefore he tends constantly to exchange the dramatic for the lyric or declamatory strain. Therefore, more and more with each succeed- ing drama, his characters become symbols, till at last in " Les Burgraves" they are proclaimed by the author himself to be such. Therefore, in every play situations are laboriously contrived, scenes and even acts are crudely inserted, that Hugo may declaim behind the mask of his hero. And it is noteworthy that it is just these, the most undramatic passages, that are best worth remembering. Since the virtues and vices of "Hernani" reappear in all the dramas of Hugo's first period, it is convenient to treat them together, that we may reserve for the close his lyrics in verse and in prose. He had said, in a preface to " Hernani," that this " was only the first stone of an edifice that existed complete in his mind." Only the whole would show the value and appropriate- ness of this drama, as of a Moorish porch to a Gothic cathedral. There is a certain trutli in his antithesis. 1 This was the main point of " N, T, Ni," one of tlie many parodies of tlie time. Afte^r the fourtli act, at tlie first jierformance, the spectators, ahetted no douht hy tiie claque, prepared to leave the liouse, when the manager apy)eared hefore the curtain and said : " Gentlemen, perhaps you thought tlie play over. Any one would liave thought so ; but there is another act, for the second and true denouement." See Eire, op. cit. p. 502. THE YOUNG HUGO. 211 " Hernani " is more distinctly Spanish in its nniform tone, less Gothic in its contrasts of fair and foul, tragic and comic, grotesque and sublime, tliau any of the plays tliat followed it ; more even than the earher " Marion de Lorme," to which the Involution of July now opened the theatre. Though one cannot, with Dumas, regard this play as Hugo's best, it is in many v/ays the most interesting of his dramas. The scene is the Paris of Louis XIII. and of Eichelieu; the subject, rehabilitation of the courtesan Marion by her true love for Didier, the rather dubious hero of the play, a sort of rechaujfe, of Een^, pessimistically sentimental and as absolutely foreign to the age of Louis XIII. as to ours. Didier has been involved in a duel, and is sentenced to execu- tion ; but Marion saves him, placating the judge by the sacrifice of her painfully regained virtue, preferring the life of her lover to his esteem. He, however, spurns lier sacrifice, and will not be saved at such a price. So ended the "Marion de Lorme" of 1830. Later Merim^e persuaded Hugo to sijften the conclu- sion by an exquisitely pathetic scene in which Marion and Didier take leave of each other forever. Such a drama can have little charm for English taste, and the beauties of the execution have never won it a wide circle of readers among us. In France, however, " Marion " became the mother of a numerous family of dramas and novels that dwelt with morbid delight t»n the possible reclamation to purity of mind and heart of fallen women by love. At first the emotional generosity of the Eoraantic spirit caused the balance to incline toward a charity wider even than Hugo's ; but after a quarter of a century of ladies with and without camellias, a more sober mind returned with Augier's " Mariage d'Olympe." 212 MODEKN FRENCH LITEEATURE, It has been already said that the duel in " Marion " was taken from the experience of the struggling poet. Traces of his father's campaign in Vendue can be found in all his longer works for the next three years. During the rage of that civil strife a Eepublican sol- dier returning from service on the Ehine had been shot by an ambushed peasant, who, when he plundered the corpse of the murdered man, discovered his own son. Then the mother took her own life, and the father gave himself up to the Eepublicans with the certainty of a speedy execution. This idea, a beloved child unwittingly killed by a parent, forms the tragic conclusion of " Notre-Dame," and reappears in the dramas " Le Eoi s'amuse " and " Lucrece Borgia." " Le Eoi s'amuse " is a drama striking in itself and in the prominence tliat it gives to the Gothic inter- mingling of tragic and grotesque, as of the saints and imps on a cathedral tower. The plot of the play is familiar through Verdi's opera" liigoletto ; " but though it appeared under the more liljeral censorship of the Orleanists, it shared the fate of " Marion," being pro- hiljited after a single performance by the King, who thought he discerned in it allusions to his father, Philippe Egalitd, of Eevolutionary ill-fame, — allusions that were not flattering, as indeed how should they be ? But the royal decree revealed the poet in a new and very congenial capacity. In the legal pro- ceedings that ensued, he made an a])peal for the liberty of the press that showed him without a living peer as an emotional orator. Wlietlier "Le Eoi s'amuse" would have succeeded in 1832 we cannot know. On the modern stage it had the same respect- ful but lukewarm reception that fell to " Hernani," and for the same reasons. THE YOUNG HUGO. 213 But though its extravagance stands in the way of its present success, "Le lloi s'amuse" is well worth careful reading ; for it is perhaps the most Hugoesque of all his dramas. The play suggests manifold points of comparison, and nearly as many of contrast, with Lessing's "Emilia Galotti." We are shown King Francis I., rich, careless, sparing neither the feelings nor the rights of any in his reckless hunt for pleasure, whose favorite jingling rhyme, Souvent feninie varie, Bieu fol qui s'y fie, is the apt expression of his easy virtue. He is not bad nor malicious, only thoughtless and libertine. In his wanton humor his eye falls on the fair daughter of his deformed dwarf, Triboulet, who combmes with a museum of vices the one virtue of passionate love for his child, — a love that Hugo at- triljutes to this toy and sport of royal favor precisely because no one would ever associate it with him. Triboulet discovers the king's fancy, and, frantic with paternal jealousy, determines to kill him. But his daughter immolates herself to save her royal lover. Triboulet's accomplices sew her body in a sa*ck and cast her through a window. He stands below to gloat over his victim; but just as he prepares to throw the body into the river, he is startled by hear- ing the king himself pass by, humming his familiar air. And so the mimic world wags from utter frivolity and ferocity to extremest misery, as the awful truth dawns on the father; and the curtain falls on her unveiled corpse, and Triboulet lying in a swoon beside her. Here contrast is ])ushed to the uttermost ; the most generous and exalted sentiments are put in the mouth of Triboulet, just as they had been attributed the year 214 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. before to his counterpart, Quasimodo, the hunchback of " Notre-Dame," in a way that could not but make the judicious grieve, though before this tragedy of paternity both criticism and parody were silent. In the preface to " Cromwell " Hugo had pronounced verse the fit vehicle for dramatic expression. With "Lucrezia Borgia"^ he turned in 1833 to prose; and into that more facile form he cast in the following years " Marie Tudor " and " Angelo." This concession to Naturalism was received with varied feelings by his fellow Eomanticists.2 It is clear, however, that given the Eomantic drama as Hugo conceived it, with its exalted and sublimated passion, its exaggerated emo- tions and antitheses, and its fundamental distortion of nature, its best medium will be verse, because it, too, is artificial ; just as prose is the fit medium for the social comedy of our day. But though their form was an aes- thetic error, these prose dramas have intrinsic interest, and they served also as helpful precedents to writers who would have found the alexandrine a clog even with the new suppleness that Hugo had given to it. Into the plots of these plays we need not enter. "Lucrexia Borgia" broadens the charitable mantle of " Marion," to show how maternal love may redeem the deepest moral obliquity. Here also the parent is the unconscious cause of the child's death, and only its name connects the drama with history. One notes, however, with pain a concession to the melodrama, a sensational " supping full of horrors," to tickle the ears of the groundlings. The curtain fell amid popular applause on eight corpses ; but sager criticism saw from 1 T'nis ])lay is tlie foiindatioii of Donizetti's opora of like name. 2 Gautier loyally averred that lingo's prose was as good as his verse ; but only, he added, because it was his prose. THE YOUNG HUGO. 215 the first that there was here a marked fall, both ethical and esthetic, from the standard of " Marion " or even of "Hernani." And in the dramatic action, also, there was more wanton strength than supple deftness. " Marie Tudor " showed a further decline, for it was not even a good melodrama. Hugo says he wished to show a queen who should be "great in her royalty and true m her womanhood." But his Mary is a cari- cature, and not a dramatic one, and the spectator's suspense is of a kind that cannot be dignified with the name of tragic. The play lacks unity, and seklom deviates into scenes of interest.^ "Angelo" is better constructed, but its scope is too all-embracing. This drama purports to have no less a mission than to present "universal femininity" in two types, "the woman in society and the woman out of society," and in two men, to show " all the relations that man can have with woman on the one hand, with society on the other." Such a programme might seem to make criticism superfluous ; and, indeed, the plot, melodra- matic a outrance, with its sleeping draughts and poisons, marks, like the caverns and secret doors of other plays, the author's lack of dramatic sense. It may be true that as sensational plays " Angelo " and "Lucrezia" are as good as "Hernani" and "Le Eoi s'amuse;" but that merit would give none of them more than a transient life. When the charm of form in poetic dialogue and declamation was taken away, what remained lost nearly all its purely literary value. Hugo had overestimated the place of the stage as a pulpit for ethical preaching, or at least he had over- estimated his power as a preacher. 1 "V. Hugo raconte," iii. 183 sqq., contains a painfully fatuous ac- count of tlie reception of " Marie Tudor." 216 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Soon after Hugo had freed his bosom of this peril- ous stuff', there bloomed in his hand a little flower, a lyric drama, slight and frail, almost forgotten to-day, — his "Esmeralda," an exquisite libretto for an opera taken from his own " Notre-Dame." Perhaps this return to the metrical form, slight though it was, may have aided in persuading him that his dramatic aspirations required the aid of his poetic genius; for he returned to verse in "Euy Bias," which, though far from faultless, ranks next to "Hernani" in popular esteem, and above it in the opmion of some critics. It certainly shows his dramatic theories in their ex- treme development. Nowhere are the contrasts be- tween grave and gay, tragic and grotesque, pushed to such violent and rapid alternation as here, both by precept in the preface and by practice in the play. In his own words : " The two opposite electricities of tragedy and comedy meet, and the spark that darts between them is ' Euy Bias.' " In his preface the author seeks, as usual, to explain the esoteric meaning of his piece ; but if he succeeds in making himself clear, it is only by making his play fundamentally ridiculous, however admirable its iso- lated parts may be. He wishes, he tells us, to show how society has changed in Spain since Hernani's day ; how beneath the nobility " a shadowy something stirs, great, sombre, unknown, — the people. The people, that possesses the future but not the present, orphaned, poor, intelligent, and strong ; placed very low, aspiring very high ; with the mark of servitude on its back, and in its heart the premeditations of genius ; the people, valet of great lords, and in its abjection loving the sole image in this crumbling society that represents to it authority, charity, fruitf ulness," — of such a people his Ruy Bias is to be the type and symbol. THE YOUNG UUGO. 217 This promises much ; but the briefest sketch of the story will show to every attentive reader ^ the most complete lack of intelligence, of truth and life. The plot is farcical, and the attempt to build a tragic action on it lacks common-sense. " The Greeks and Turks are nearer to us, both by their acts and sentiments, than the Spaniards or the French of Victor Hugo." And yet there is in " Euy Bias " a superb poetic evocation of a decaying monarchy, and the monologue of the lackey prime-minister on the glories of Charles V. is a piece of declamation worthy to rank with that of Charles himself at the tomb of Charlemagne. But these admirable passages would be as appropriate in " Les Chatiments " or " La Ldgende des sifecles " as in this drama, and when we disengage the story itself from its poetic adornments, we find ourselves in a maze of pueril- ities which it is quite unnecessary to unravel here. The truly fantastic morality of a play where a lackey loves a queen and wins the pardon of his presumption by poisoning himself, will more than counterbalance in sober minds its superb eloquence. Yet it would be unjust to say with Vinet that " Euy Bias is a jest, a parody, with no idea, no inspiration, and no interest." On the contrary, in the first act there is more skill of dramatic structure than Hugo had ever shown, and the action is set m motion with remarkable celerity and deftness. The second act does indeed fail to fulfil this dramatic promise, but it gives us an exquisite idyl of passion roused in a neglected heart by the mystery of an unknown lover. In the third act the absurdity of the climax is redeemed by most eloquent declama- tion. The fourth act the critic may indeed feel con- strained to abandon as a dramaturgical error. Hugo 1 Cp. Lanson, p. 959, who makes substantially the same statement. 218 MODEllN FKENCH LITEKATUllE. intends a farcical interlude, but his wit is too elephantine in its gambols. But in the fifth act one's impatience at the sentimentality of the lackey and the queen is mollified by lyric jDassages of great pathos and lines of true Corneillian force ; the outpourings of a genius that, whatever the form of its expression — song, drama, novel, or essay — was always lyric in its essence. Thus regarded, " Kuy Bias " is the best of Hugo's dramas. It remains to speak of " Les Burgraves," which closes the brief course of the Eomautic theatre. Hugo may have grown weary, after " Euy Bias," of forcing his genius into this uncongenial channel; for five years separate these plays, during which he published a vol- ume of verse and an account of a journey to Germany in his peculiar lyric vein. This journey furnished the scene and in some measure the inspiration of "Les Burgraves." It does not add to the eagerness with which the reader essays this drama of four genera- tions to be told in an oracular preface that it is "a philosophic abstraction . . . the palpitating and com- plete symbol of expiation ; " nor is there much hope of dramatic unity in a work that is proclaimed to be " laughter and tears, good and evil, high and low, fa- tality, providence, genius, chance, society, the world, nature, life," above all whicli, the confident author con- tinues, " you feel that something grand is soaring." He proposes to give a complete picture of the German middle ages as his fancy conjures it before him. " His- tory, legend, tale, reality, nature, the family, love, naive manners, savage faces, princes, soldiers, adven- turers, kings, patriarchs as in the Bible, hunters of men as in Homer, Titans as in ^scliylus, crowded all at once on tlie dazzled imagination of the author," who seems to seek to reconvey to the spectator his own mental confusion. THE YOUNG HUGO. 219 To trace the chain of sensational effects by which this forlorn hope of the Romantic drama sought to galvanize the interest of a weary public would be ahke tedious and unprofitable. One is shown a stolen child, a son who just misses being a parricide, a girl in a trance as in " Angelo," coffins on the stage as in " Lucrezia ; " there is a cavern, too, and an imperial ghost to stay the murderous hand and unite the lovers. No wonder such a play achieved an utter fiasco. When characters announce to the audience " I am murder and vengeance," we have passed from the reform to the second child- hood of the drama. Hugo's epic conception was grandiose, but it was irre- concilable with the limitations of the dramatic genre. To these fundamental limitations Hugo refused to con- form. He was no longer content to mingle the tragic and the comic ; he injected into the drama history, philoso- phy, the epic, and the lyric ; and to make his dramatic action carry such foreign elements, he was forced to stimulate it by sensational tricks in constantly increas- ing measure, until Pegasus sank under the burden and the dosing. But if the drama could not carry such burdens, he had no further use for it. He would not seek an audience that had abandoned him for the timid classical revival of Pon sard's School of G-ood Sense. Indeed, it was not in the drama alone that Romanticism as a dogmatic theory of literature was bankrupt. As Nanteuil told Hugo, " There were no more young men," in 1843, such as had made the success of "Hernani" in 1830 ; and so the poet was led for a time from litera- ture to politics, from which ten years later he returned to letters, another and a far stronger man. But before we follow him there, somewhat must be said of his work in lyric poetry and prose fiction during this his essentially dramatic period. 220 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. The year that followed " Hernani " was made illus- trious by " Notre-Dame " and by " Les Feuilles d'au- tomne." The lyrics of the latter volume equalled any that Hugo had yet written, and were not soon sur- passed. " Notre-Dame " is an historical novel, less erudite perhaps than " Cinq-Mars," but more poet- ically vivid, having indeed a " Gothic intensity of pathos," though the reader will hardly find in it that " Grecian perfection of structure " which Mr. Swinburne admires. The student may pick many a flaw in his picture of Paris in the days of Louis XL, and still more in his description of mediaeval society; but he will not with all his documents, even if he be a Michelet, produce facts that will efface in our minds the outlines of Hugo's fancy, or make the Paris of 1482 other to us than the Paris of Esmeralda. The plot is of the slightest. Esmeralda, the fair gypsy, is loved by a priest fiercely, by a soldier gayly, by a hunchback monster passionately, and is finally executed as a sorceress through the unwitting inter- vention of her own mother, — Hugo's favorite situation. But far more living than any of these people is the cathedral itself, ever present as a symbol of the society over which it broods.^ Very vivid also are the pictur- esque crowds and the vagabond life of the Cour des Miracles, with its nimble cripples and clairvoyant Idiiid, its polyglot language, strange customs, and weird super- stitions, that give us the illusion of Naturalism itself. While therefore as a novel " Notre-Dame " is of the slightest, it is a marvel of reproductive imagination. By far the best parts are those in which the author abandons wholly and frankly the thread of his narra- 1 This symbolical use of inanimate objects is frequently employed with great effect by Zola and Ibsen, and latterly by Daudet. THE YOUNG HUGO. 221 tive to tell of ancient Paris, of the cathedral, of the wily and perverse Louis XL, of the ancient law courts, or of the relations of mediaeval architecture to the invention of printing.^ He declared that to inspire the people with a love of their national monuments was " one of the chief ends of his book and mdeed of his life." And his wish was in so far fulfilled that a more intelligent care for historic buildings and mon- uments dates from the Eomantic movement; and to this nothing contributed more than " Notre-Dame," where the studies of an enthusiastic lover of the past were vivified by a style that if it had been learned from Chateaubriand was none the less Hugo's pe- culiar possession. This was the only important prose work of the early period, however ; for " Claude Gueux," which followed in 1835, was but an eddy in his literary productivity. It repeated the Quixotic protest against capital punishment begun by the "Der- nier jour d'un condamnd " (1828), a bit of intense im- agination much praised in its day, and repeated at intervals in and out of season through his whole life. The " Feuilles d'automne," as is natural in a devel- oping poetic genius, showed more care to avoid the faults and excesses of earlier work than to strike out into untried paths. But the public had advanced toward his aesthetic position ; and so the new volume found a wider and readier acceptance than any that had gone before, though, when it is regarded from the summit of his poetic achievement, it seems to mark progress only in a fuller mastery of metre. Neither the lights nor the shadows are as strong here as formerly ; and it is precisely in this chiaroscuro that Hugo excels, as he showed in the " Orientales." The 1 Books iii. 1,2; v. 2 ; vi. 1 ; x. 5. 222 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. more domestic subjects of the " AutumQ Leaves," the sentiiiients and aspirations of the fireside, are much less favorable to his genius. But if the collection is dis- appointing in itself, it bears several marks of promise in the broadening of the poet's mind. Here, first, in " Dedain " he adds to his lyre " the brazen cord " that was to ring so nobly in the poetry of his exile. Here, too, can be traced, in " La Prifere pour tons," the instinct of universal sympathy that circles the miseries of the world, foreshadowing " Les Misdrables " and the later romances. This sympathy seems sometimes to extend beyond mankind into a pantheistic aspiration to "min- gle his whole soul with creation," as though the poet would make his inner world of throbbing images and feelings fruitful by contact with all external nature. Four years occupied with dramatic and critical work separate the "Autumn Leaves" from the "Twilight Songs," the most varied of all Hugo's lyric volumes. Here light, social, occasional pieces obscure poems of the highest order on which the reader comes quite unawares and unprepared, so that repeated reading and close observation alone will prevent some grain escap- ing with the chaff. Many of these verses are surely anterior to the " Orien tales," and some seem to belong to his "follies before he was born." Several bear an elegiac imprint, and show a tendency to mystic adora- tion that he certainly did not feel in 1835, for at no time before his exile had he been so aggressively bitter and morosely pessimistic as then,^ and bitterness and pessimism are the dominant notes of what is new in the "Chants du crdpuscule." They are the source of those regrets of vanished youth, of the time when his " thoughts, like a swarm of bees, flew upward 1 Cp. Dupuy : V. Hugo, p. 87 (Classiqucs populaires). THE YOUNG HUGO. 223 toward the sun . . . when pride, joy, ecstasy, like pure wine from a rich vase, overflowed from my seventeen years." Then liis mind was free, he says ; but now he is " torn with rage " at critics who " outrage him in all liis work," and at the censorship, " that bitch with low forehead that skulks behind all power, vile, crunch- ing ever in her filthy jaws some fragment of thy starry robe, Muse ! " ^ Already the f olhes of the Orleanists are beginning to rouse in him the revolu- tionary liberal, with enough of the poet mingled with the democrat to make him prefer to the piping peace of Louis Philippe the glorious labors of Napoleon, whom distance is already beginning to crown with a luminous halo of legend. This mental state explains wliy Hugo's satire has now become more frequent and threatening ; and the conviction that the civilization of the small minority is bought with the suffering of the mass of mankind has given to his universal sym- pathy a socialistic coloring. Yet for several years these germs remained quies- cent. The "Inner Voices," his next volume of verse, has little that is satiric, socialistic, or political. It marks rather a deepening of that communion with ^ Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles, Mes pensees volaieut an soleil . . . Oil I'orgeuil, la joie et I'extase, Comme uu vin pur, d'un riche vase, Dcbordaient de mes dix-sept aus . . . Moi qui de'cliire taut de rage . . . Quelque bouche fletrie Daus tous uies onvrages m'outragea. (A Mile J., Hues 41-42, 17-19, 7, 109-11.) Cette chienne au frout has qui suit tous les pouvoirs, Vile, et macliaut toujours dans sa gueule souillee, O muse ! quelque pan de ta robe etoilce. (A Alphouse IJabbe, at the close.) 224 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Nature that could be traced in the " Autumn Leaves." Here is his first song of the sea, which no French poet has loved and rendered as he has done. Here, too, is that striking picture of Nature as a nursing mother, symbolized in " La Vache." Even where we might listen for the " brazen cord," as in " Sunt Lachrymse Eerum " or "Al'Arc de Triomphe" we catch rather an elegiac than a Pindaric strain. And yet one must go back to the " Orientales " to find such vigor and grace of language, such pregnant and picturesque lines as are set like jewels in some of these descriptive lyrics. One more volume, " Sunbeams and Shadows,'" com- pletes the poetic output of the first period. Though published after the German journey, it bears little trace of a changed temper or broadened mind. Here, even more than in the " Inner Voices," one finds self- restraint, delicacy of touch, less of the thunder, more of the murmuring brook and whispering breeze. ^ The satire, too, is dominated by the generous warmth of universal sympathy, a little shallow in its breadth, that was to give the key-note to his political activity in the next decade. It was by this that his genius was diverted from the stage and the lyre to tlie tribune and to political agitation. The ten years from 1843 to 1853 are marked by no literary work of im- port. But when destiny, kind in its apparent harsh- ness, sent Hugo into exile and so gave him back to literature, it was seen how essentially tliis experience had enriched and deepened his nature. Indeed, when he turned to politics, the best that was in him to give was not only ungiven Ijut unsuspected and unrealized, 1 The most strikinj,' pieces of tliis type are "Tristesse d'fllyiuiiio," " La Statue," the verses on Palestrina, and tlie account of his boyhood at the Feuillautines (Les Rayons et les ombres, nos. 34, 36, 3.5, 19). HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 225 CHAPTEK VII. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. The decade that separates " Les Burgraves " from " Les Chatiments " marks a vital change in the mind of Victor Hugo and in the character of his work. Even the most superficial examination of the kind and amount of his production makes this obvious. In the first fifty years of his life drama takes the first place, there is more poetry than fiction, and nearly a quarter of the whole hulk is made up of miscellaneous travels, memoirs, and essays. In the second period fiction advances to the first place ; poetry is immediately he- hind, and is closely followed by political satires and pamphlets, which are hardly literature in the highest sense, though tliey often contain pages of the greatest eloquence. Essays and the drama count but one volume each. The lyric was now recognized as the best field for the display of his powers, and even in the prose fiction it takes a much larger place than in " Notre-Dame " or " Bug-Jargal." ^ In all departments the work of the second period shows a new strength and earnestness. The causes of this added depth and force are to be sought in his ^ The " edition definitive," from which all citations are here made, counts seventy volumes, including the autobiographical "V. Hugo racontc." Of tlioso t-wcuty-six are prior, tliirty-four posterior, to 1852. Poetry counts, respectively, six and fourteen volumes ; fiction, five and fifteen ; drama, nine and one ; political prose, two and ten ; miscella- neous prose, four and four. 1.5 226 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. domestic and political experiences. The death of his daughter Ldopoldine, drowned with her young husband at Yille(iuier in 1843, was the first great sorrow of his life, and left an impression as enduring and as fruit- ful as the loss of Hallani on Tennyson. It was per- haps to escape from these sorrowful meditations that he sought distraction in the struggles of the political arena, to which his untrained but generous mind was attracted by the socialism of Proudhon and Fourier, who had roused in the substratum of French thought a vague but intense enthusiasm that was presently to find expression in the Eevolution of 1848. From 1835 one can trace an increasing democratic tendency in Hugo's writing. His interest in politics grows yearly more active ; and when he is received into the Academy in 1841, his inaugural address is political rather than literary. That Louis Philippe made him a peer in 1845 did not change his sympathies, and the Revolu- tionists promptly elected him a member of their Con- stituent Assembly in 1848. One cannot view Hugo's career as a practical politi- cian with much satisfaction, though the Revolution was not so fatal to him as to Lamartine. At first, power or the presage of danger that lay in the incon- gruous composition of the Assembly itself caused in him a conservative reaction. He favored Louis Napo- leon, and opposed all the economic schemes of the radi- cals, though he refused to sanction political prosecutions and pleaded eloquently for the abolition of the death penalty. Yet in the next year the caressing flattery of Girardin dexterously converted him into a radical orator and journalist, most vehement to adore what he had burned and burn what he had adored. But his bitter and elo(iuent attacks on Napoleon and Mon- HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 227 talembert could be tellingly answered by quotations from his own speeches ; and this made him distrusted by his new allies, while he seemed grieved at their suspicion, and quite unconscious of the deviousness of his course. ^ Thus the co^tp cVetat of 1851 was a moral good fortune for Hugo. It saved him from himself, and made of one who seemed a political turn-coat and vis- ionary a martyr and a hero whose voice penetrated from his island exile into every corner of France. His " Histoire d'un crime " is an eloquent account of those stirring days, but it shows how his efforts to organize resistance to the usurped authority of the false Bona- parte were distrusted by his fellow Eepublicans. He fled to Brussels, whence the Belgian government soon invited him to move to the more hospitable protection of England. He took up his residence as near France as possible, in the Channel Islands, — first in Jersey, then, at the suggestion of the English government, in Guernsey, till the collapse of the Second Empire at Sedan brought him back to his country to share the darkest days of the young Eepublic's " Terrible Year." He had consistently scorned every offer of amnesty from the successful adventurer whose perjury he had branded, and he remained to the last true to the ring- ing words of his early exile : " Though but one remain unreconciled, that one shall be I." ^ These years of exile steeled his mind to greater hardness. The temper of his arms was first revealed by the presence of a powerful and despised enemy. His patriotism- found new fire in his country's shame. Already hi 1852 he had given a foretaste of his mor- 1 See Bire', V. Hugo apres 1830, ii. 116-204. 2 Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-la. (Lcs Chatimeuts, p. 349.) 228 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. dant wrath both in justifying a joint appeal to insur- rection that had been issued by the radical leaders, and in the pamphlet " Napoleon le petit," whose scur- rilousness is excused both by its vigor and its subject. But these paled before " Les Chatiments," in which the lyric unites with the satiric to produce a classic that will long survive the Empire that evoked it. This book, like " Napoleon le petit," enjoyed the advertisement of police prohibition during the whole imperial period, and no doubt contributed materially to nurse the spirit that brought the Second Empire to the disaster that justified the poet's severity. But exile gave him calmer hours also, and to these we owe the " Contemplations," a collection of lyrics similar to "Les Eayons et les ombres," but closing in a nobler strain ; while a little later, in 1857, Hugo is able to show, in his first " Legend of the Centuries," the high- water mark of his achievement in the lyrical epic. Then, in 1862, the long-expected romance " Les Misd- rables" justified the intent expectation of ten nations, — for nine translations appeared on the same day as the original, an event unparalleled till then in the annals of fiction. This interest was judiciously whetted in 186.3 by the unavowed autobiography, and in 1864 he essayed once more what he called literary criticism in " William Shakespeare," an introduction to a translation of the English poet, and, as was to be anticipated, much more visionary and oracular than logical or precise. Then follows the Indian summer of Hugo's muse, his " Chansons des rues et des bois," to be succeeded by another social and pseudo-philosophic novel, "The Toilers of the Sea." He was now so unquestionably the foremost of French writers tliat the Empire could not well get along without him, and visitors to the HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 229 Paris Exposition of 1867 found the Guide to that pageant provided with a preface by the distinguished exile. So these kst years of banishment were less a grief than a balm to his amour propre. His steadfast attitude won sympathy for his literary work. The success of "Hernani" on its revival in 1867 was cer- tainly beyond its dramatic desert, and that of " Lucre- zia Borgia " in 1870 is unquestionably to be attributed to personal esteem, for only a year before the same public had received with unwonted coldness his fan- tastic novel, " L'Homme qui rit." As the Empire tottered to its fall, Hugo's interest in politics became more absorbing. His two sons joined with his son-in-law Vacquerie and the now notorious Eochefort to publish "Le Rappel," a radical journal. To this the exile frequently contributed, and so pre- pared for himself an enthusiastic reception in Paris whenever the inevitable revolution should invite his return. But 1870 revealed once more and almost immediately the hopelessly unpractical nature of his political ideas, by his appeal to the triumphant Germ^ans to desert the men who had led them to victory, found a republic, and ally themselves to the French, whom they had always distrusted and now despised. Nor was Hugo satisfied with this sky-rocket. In February, 1871, the electors of Paris had chosen him by a great majority to be their delegate to the National Assembly ; but here the violence of his speeches against the inevit- able peace roused that body to such a pitch of impa- tience that in March he shook its dust from his feet. A few days later he lost a son and brought the body to Paris, just as the Commune was achieving its first success. He remained here long enough to pro- test against the destruction of the Vendome Column, 230 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. to wliicli it will be remembered he had dedicated two odes. Then he made his way a second time to Brussels, and was a second time invited by the government to leave it, barely escaping the violence of a Belgian mob for his defiance of international law. He went to Luxemburg, and later to Paris, where he failed signally in the elections of 1872, perhaps because his experience of the Communists had made him more conservative, perhaps because their experience of him had made the electors of Paris more cautious. But if he might not be the chosen tribune, he was already the poet-laureate of the Third Eepublic. A hundred thousand copies of " Les Chatiments " were sold within a year, it was publicly read in the theatres, and several of his plays, notably " Ptuy Bias," were revived with much success. In his new capacity he now put forth " L'Annde terrible," a national and patriotic volume that made a French critic exclaim with just pride that Germany had no such poet to sing her victory as France to glorify even her disaster. He followed this with a romance of the first Revolution, " Quatre-vingt-treize," which, like " Les Misdrables," appeared simultaneously in ten languages, though it did not gain the success of that work. But this was due more to the evolution of public taste than to any falling off in the powers of the author, who now turned to collecting his political memoirs and to a persistent campaign of letters and addresses that eventually secured his election to the Senate, though only liy a narrow majority and on a second ballot. In this capacity the old man of seventy-four distinguished himself by zealously advocating a scheme for general amnesty, then so inipractical)lo that it secured but six votes. But in 1877 he was able to do his country a HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPII. 231 real service by holding up before the conspirators of the Sixteenth of May his " History of a Crime " by which France had been betrayed in 1851. Meantime the second, though inferior, part of the " Legend of the Centuries " showed him still the great- est poet of France, and in " L'Art d'etre grandp^re " he touched the chords of domestic pathos almost as art- lessly as in the "Contemplations." But not content with these multiplied titles to literary renown nor heeding the warning of the years, he published a series of so-called " Philosophic Poems," ^ followed these with the two volumes of " Les Quatre vents de I'esprit " and " Torquemada," while he left unpublished other dramas and poems that have sufficed to fill several volumes. He died in 1885, in the season of roses, as he had foretold.^ His great age, reaching out into a new gen- eration from an epoch that had passed away, could not but impress the popular imagination, the more as his talent, his presence, and his personal physique had in them something of the monumental and grandiose, so that his death stirred a wave of popular sympathy such as perhaps has been the lot of no writer since literature began. His body was exposed in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Thronging thousands gathered around it, and made his funeral a pageant that royalty might envy and could not parallel. The Panthdon, that French temple of fame, was abandoned by the patron saint of Paris to make room for its popular hero.^ ^ Le Papo, La Pitie supreme, Les Peligioiis et la religion, L'Ane (1878-1880). 2 L'Ainieo terrible, Janvier, i. ^ Hugo died without the sacraments of the churcli. Tlie clergy therefore protested against his burial in the vaults of a consecrated building, and, when the protest was unlieeded, abandoned it, not for tiic first time, to secular uses. 232 MODEKN FllENCH LITERATURE. This chronological review of Hugo's work may serve as an introduction to a study of it in its categories, from which alone one can estimate the poet's place or the nature and limitations of his genius. Here we may dismiss immediately the political speeches and pamphlets, for all their eloquence and bitterness is distilled and refined in the wormwood of "Les Chati- ments ; " nor need allusion be made to memoirs and letters, for these belong rather to biography than to literature. Fiction and poetry remain. By his novels Hugo is best, and often solely, known among us ; these, then, may introduce us to the works that make him one of the greatest lyric poets of the world. The generation that separated " Les Misdrahles " from " Notre-Dame " had, as we have seen, radically changed Hugo's sociology and politics. So while " Notre- Dame " was above all an evocation of the past, " Les Mis^rables " reveals the author with his eyes on the present and his heart in the future. " So long," he says in his preface, " as there shall exist through the fault of our laws and customs a social condemnation that creates artificial hells in the midst of our civilization and complicates a divine destiny by human fatalism; so long as the three problems of the century — the degra- dation of man by the proletariat, the fall of woman by hunger, the arrested development of the child l)y igno- rance — are not solved ; so long as social aspliyxia is pos- sible in any place, — in other words and from a wider point of view, so long as there shall be on eartli igno- rance and misery, books like this cannot be useless." It may be doubted, however, whetlier Hugo has made an important contribution to the l)anishment of ignorance and misery from tlie world by this series of scenes loosely strung together by their connection HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TEIUMrH. 233 with the convict, manufacturer, and philantliropist, Jean Valjean, and relieved, like " Notre-Danie," by digressions and lay-sermons that hamper the narrative but best reward the reader. Into the details of this narrative it is unnecessary to our purpose to enter. The strength of the work lies not in its romantic nor in its psychological interest, though there is power and truth in his analysis of the veil of ostracism that separates the convict from his fellows and almost forces him to crime ; and individual scenes, such as Valjean's escape from Thernadier, the defence of the barricade, and the flight through the sewers, are exe- cuted with great vigor, while parts of the description of the battle of Waterloo reveal the poetic imagination of Hugo in all its glory. The ten volumes of this vast romance lack continuity and proportion. If the work is regarded as a whole, Flaubert may be right in denying it either truth or grandeur ; and m parts the style is, as he says, " inten- tionally mcorrect and vulgar." As in the dramas, the contrasts are sharp in subject, scene, and style, and the story is but a thread on which Hugo strings his many- colored beads. Antiquarian lore, political reminis- cences, social vaticinations, realistic "slumming," with dialectic studies that show much curious observation, interrupt the narrative, which is itself half philosophic and half idyllic. The whole is a chaos of glowing eloquence, deep emotion, weary stretches of common- place, and a few treacherous quicksands of bathos that reveal a cyclopean lack of humor. He takes for his philosophic background volimtary expiation and re- pentance that produce a moral regeneration by the revelation of a higher life. Such a background ad- mirably sets off humanitarian pleas, and democratic if 234 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. not socialistic sentiments ; for it is sentiment rather than reason with Hugo that makes the poor and op- pressed seem right, and the dominant and rich wrong. This emotional tone unites with directly autobio- graphical portions and a subjective style to give the whole a lyric character. The psychology is not based on observation, nor correlated with the actual condi- tions of life. Valjean is a Utopian who shows neither wisdom nor prudence. We feel that his visionary magnanimity would be neither natural nor profitable in life, and it threatens to be wearisome even in ro- mance. But the minor characters show still more of that inevitable tendency of subjective fiction to the symbol and the type that w^e have noted already in Hugo's earlier drama and fiction. Enjolras poses persistently as the apostle and martyr of uncom- promising democracy, Javert is at once more and less than human in his reverence for constituted author- ity, and the grisette Fantine is declared to be the symbol of joy and modesty, " innocence floating on error," and " still preserving the shade that separates Psyche from Venus." Marius is Hugo's youthful self, a type of young energy nursing democratic aspirations on imperial memories. But all of these together have not the life of the charming little gamin Gavroche, the classical study of the Paris street-boy ; for into this charactei Hugo put his poet's heart, and the touch of sympathy that makes the world kin. This and the epic descriptions familiar to every lover of French lit- erature will carry " Les Misdraljles " through many generations of readers and revolutions of popular taste, although even in the year of its appearance Hugo's novel was of a type of fiction already discredited. Here, as throughout his second period, he barred the HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUiMPH. 235 current of a literary evolution that he did not avert or dellect.i The epic and lyric elements in Hugo's fiction are even more strongly marked in " The Toilers of the Sea," inspired by the poet's life at Guernsey and his intimate daily contact with " the men who go down to the sea in ships and know the mystery of the great waters." An oracular preface tells us that Eeligion, Society, and Nature are the three struggles of mankind and also its three needs. " A triple necessity weighs on us, of dogmas, laws, and things." Former romances had dealt with the first and second; this should show how the fatality of things " is mingled with the su- preme fatality, the human heart." But these high- sounding phrases must not be taken too literally ; for indeed the cause of all the tragic catastrophe is the heroine's lack of common honesty and the hero's lack of common-sense. Gilliat's emotions are as deep as the ocean. Derucliette is as treacherous and co- quettish as the sea. But, once more, what we enjoy is not the psychology of character nor the story, but the long description of the perilous and solitary quest of Gilliat on the Douvres, where throughout prose has suffered a sea-change, and throbs and thrills with the far-resounding waves. Yet, as a whole, " The Toil- ers of the Sea " is inferior both in power and in inter- est to " Les Miserables " and to " Notre-Dame." The imagination may be more grandiose, but the subject is more petty. Hugo needs either a wider canvas or an historical perspective. The latter he provided for his next novel, " L'Homme qui rit ; " but he saw fit, with strange perversity, to import into the English court of Elizabeth the extravagances of " Han d'lslande," and 1 TIic metaphor is Bruneticre's. 236 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. even the unparalleled efforts of liis publishers could not avert its rejection by a public now in the full- blooded confidence of the Naturalistic spring. The busy times of republican reconstruction were hardly passed, however, before Hugo, piqued by this check, returned to historical fiction. Taught by ex- perience or guided by instinct, he now chose the period suited of all others to his genius and environment, and gave to the world in " Ninety-three " one of the most remarkable historical evocations of French litera- ture. The time is the crucial year of the First Re- public; the scene, the civil war in Vendue, to which Hugo was attracted both by his nature and nurture, for his parents united the blood of the contending factions. In this novel one notes indeed the growing mannerisms of old age, with the unevenness of style and looseness of construction common to all of Hugo's novels, but one finds also more intensity of action, more real palpitating life, and a truer tragic catas- trophe than in any of his earlier romances. The Ven- ddan hero Lantenac is not too heroic for a Breton noble, nor is his nephew Gauvin too sentimental for a Eepublican of the " Feast of Pikes." The unique epoch justified and demanded a more than human heroism and magnanimity. In Cimourdain, to be sure, one recognizes with no special pleasure the Javert of " Les Mis<5rables," the uncompromising pur- suer of an ideal, — in this case the incarnate Republic, — who, like his prototype, ends his life by suicide, as if to teach that a life of law without sentiment seems to the Romantic mind impossible and self- destructive. But, as before, in "Ninety-three," what leaves the freshest impress on the mind are the minor characters HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMrH. 237 and incidents, — the peasant woman with her three children that run like a golden thread through these scenes of fire and blood; the delightful old trooper, Kadoub ; pictures of political Paris suggesting the magic-lantern slides of Carlyle. The weird procession of the guillotine, the cannon aboard ship broken loose and spreading terror and destruction, the sieges of Dol and of La Torgue, take here the place of the fight with the devil-fish in the "Toilers," and of Waterloo and the Barricade in " Les Miserables ; " and the climax, in spite of some rather rank flowers of rhetoric, is unusually effective and affecting. In- deed, " Ninety-three " is Hugo's best novel, though its place in literature is less unique and probably lower than that of " Notre-Dame " or of the redemption of Jean Valjean. But it is time to leave these lower walks and ascend to the heights of Hugo's genius. Tor in his poetry this second period is much more than a convenient divi- sion ; it marks a distinctly new manner. Romantic it is still, but now rather in the nobler form of an idealist's protest against the cloud of skepticism in the mind and weariness in the will that characterized the Second Empire. So " Les Chatiments " of 1853 are as different from " Lea Eayons ct les ombres " of 1840 as tempered steel is from polished iron. His politi- cal experience, followed by the enforced calm and the bitter indignation of exile, gave his verses from this time an intensity of conviction that seems sometimes to echo the earnestness of a Hebrev/ prophet. While Gautier sought excuse and forgetfulness in his doc- trine of art for art, and taught that impersonality was essential to the highest reaches of poetry, these " Scourgings," throbbing and aglow with passion, anger, 238 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. hatred, but burning too with a lofty and trustful patriotism, raised the protest of their ringmg halt to the surrender of the noblest prerogative of literature. But it was only in exile that such lyrics were possi- ble, only in exile that French thought was free. " Les Chatinients," printed in Belgium and smuggled across the frontier in countless incorrect and garbled editions, concealed sometimes, it is said, in plaster casts of the emperor they scourged, aroused a fearful joy in countless readers. But among the poets of France the currents of development, though divergent, were away from Hugo. Here, too, he barred but did not deflect the course of lyric evolution. Nearly all the satires of " Les Chatiments " were written between December, 1851, and the end of the next year; a few are anterior to that date, a very few are a little later. Evidently he " sang because he must ; " his wrath was absolutely sincere. And yet critics have not failed to observe that he had rather less reason than others had to feel it. He had con- tributed as much as any man save Beranger to the re- vival of the Napoleonic legend ; and when De Vigny and Lamartine had tried to stem the tide whose consequences they foresaw, his second ode to the Vendome Column had sought to cover them with contempt. He had actually printed a special cheap and popular edition of his Bonapartist odes, in which he talks about regilding the altar of Napoleon's mem- ory, by whose death France is left a widow. Nor had he been wholly unwilling to co-operate with Louis himself, until he found L^niis unwilling to co-operate with him by rewarding his efforts with a cabinet posi- tion. ^ But Hugo had a happy faculty of forgetting 1 Cp. Bill', op. cit. ii. 192. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 239 his iuconsistencies ; and whatever part disappointed ambition may have had in his change of political position, he was untiinching- in his new convictions, and so sincere in his belief in himself that he hardly realized that he was exposing his own conduct to in- vidious criticism by his reckless denunciation of the supporters of the Empire. One other small reserve must be made before we can wholly praise " Les Chatiments." In his violent emotion Hugo sometimes falls into strange errors of taste, and mistakes incoherent excitement for eloquent emphasis. Then, too, the uninformed reader will sus- pect what the well-informed reader knows, that his denunciation is sometimes unjust or merely vitupera- tive ; and this, even more than exaggeration, is fatal to satiric effect. Several pieces and many lines of this sort mar Hugo's " Scourgings," ^ the more because of their general high range of excellence ; for, as Mr. Swinburne has said,^ these ninety-eight poems between the prologue " ISTox " and the epilogue " Lux " roll and break and lighten and thunder like the waves of a visible sea, and execute their chorus of rising and descending harmonies with almost as much depth, variety, and musical force, with as much power, life, and passionate unity, as the breakers on the shores where they were written. 1 See, for instance "Un Autre " fp. 169), where Hugo calls the talented journalist Veuillot " a hypocritie Zoilus " whose mother was a Javotte and whose father was the devil. He even has the a.stonish- ingly bad taste to mock him for the poverty of his student years. It is natural to compare these verses, as Brunetiere has done (Pocsic lyrique, ii. 81), with Voltaire's on Fre'ron in " Le Pauvrc dialde " and " La Capitolade." On the causes and justice of Hugo's wrath, see Eire', especially op. cit. ii. 192, and "V. Hugo apres 1852," pp. 42-55. 2 Op. cit., p. 56. 240 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. The clauses of the proclamation in which Xapoleon announced the success of his coup d'etat furnish the external division of the satires ; and the pieces are ordered with great skill, so that they will bear con- nected reading without monotony. The most pathetic and elegiac poems alternate with the noblest verses that wrath could inspire. What can be more touching than the grandmother's lament over the body of the little child killed by the volleys of that fatal Pourth of December (p. 81)? What more exquisite than the simple story of the exile and death of Pauline Koland (p. 27), or the songs of the banished and of those they left behind them (pp. 64, 209) ? What more beautiful than the calm repose of his "Dawn" at Jersey (p. 175), or what more strong in its epic simplicity than the opening lines of " Expiation " (p. 223), surely the finest piece in this rich treasury, with its terrible pic- ture of the retreat from Moscow, through which runs like a shiver the refrain : " It snowed. It snowed " ? What more intense than the lines on Waterloo that follow, and what more galling than their bitter con- clusion that the only adequate expiation for Napo- leon I. is the contemplation of Napoleon III. ? What more stinging verses were ever penned than that other contrast between the great and the little Napoleon (p. 311), where each strophe hisses with added con- tempt its refrain " Petit, Petit " ? What more grew- some than the picture of the half-buried victims of the street-massacre (p. 37), or than his call to the people to rise, like Lazarus from his tomb (p. 77) ; or, finally, what more noble than his appeal to God to strengthen his hand for vengeance (p. 101), and to the oppressed to be moderate in their destined triumph : " Let Cain pass by, he belongs to God " (pp. 151, 156) ? How HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 241 stirring is his patriotic appeal to the flags of the first Empire ! What cahu consolation, what confidence in the ineffable love of the all-upholding arms, breathes in " Stella " (p. 283) ! And, finally, where in Hugo, or in all French verse, shall we find such a rush and sweep of contemptuous scorn as in " La Eeculade " (p. 295) ? These lyrics have frequently an epic element, and in a few pieces the satire takes a dramatic form.^ Here, with the bold personification of a mediaeval miracle- play, the Cellars of Lille, the Garrets of Eouen, the Prison Ships, a Tomb, Justice, Eeason, Honor, and the Marseillaise stamp in laconic epigrams their condem- nation of Napoleon, and Conscience teaches Harmodius that " he may kill that man with tranquillity." Note- worthy, too, is the consolation that the exile sought and found in increasing measure in nature and in the sea, whose mysterious fascination grew on him from the drowning of his daughter, in 1843, till it reached its climatic expression in " The Toilers of the Sea." Especially does one note this temper in the closing section of " Les Chatiments ; " for in " Lux " all vitu- peration, denunciation, and bitterness are laid aside in a grand vision of peace on earth and good-will, where ■ God shall take the rope of the alarm bell and bind with it the thoughts of men in an eternal sheaf, where each shall labor for all, and all rejoice in the work of each. Eternal hope conquers all doubt with its cer- tainty and all vengeance in its magnanimity. This serener temper inspires also " Les Contempla- tions " with a peculiar charm that makes this collec- tion, or at least its latter division, the noblest purely lyric poetry in French. The earlier part contains 1 Pages 69, 73, 147, 195 uf tlio IGiuu edition. 16 24!2 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. only verses written prior to 1843, which might have been mentioned in connection with " Les Eayons et les ombres " had there been any particular necessity of discussing them at all, save in their contrast to the maturer poems of the later manner. The second volume of the " Contemplations " opens with " PauciB Meie," memorial verses to Ldopoldine, among which are the best of Hugo's elegies.^ But only one poem of this group rises above the kind of excellence that was to be found in the poems of 1840 ; and this, " Les Deux cavaliers," ^ is an exception that proves the rule, for it was written in 1853. Here indeed, as Brunetiere points out, the poet begins to seek his effects less in clearness of design and high relief of form than in the mingling play of light and shade, in the science of chiaroscuro. " He tries to thicken the shadow, to Mash liglit on it, and then to let it sink again into its obscurity." And the manner here foreshadowed is characteristic of all the later poems, and is among the causes of their lyric pre-eminence. The central subjects of the " Contemplations " of this island exile are, not unnaturally, death and the sea, botli united in the domestic tragedy of Villetpiier. As miglit be expected, Hugo's notions of the future life are generously indefinite. He is sure that death is an unfolding of a fuller being, but that does not "unteach him to complain," as may be seen in the simple pathos of tlie lines addressed to his wife in 1855. In the main this reachini^ out into the un- known is confined to " Pauce Mea^.." In the last part the l)reatli of the sea is uku'c felt as daily contact willi its moods iin])resses it on his thought; but ' For inslaiicc, " 'rniisniis aj)ros," " V^'iii, villi, vici," "A Villc(iiiier." '^ Bonk iv. no 12. ('ii. Rruiietierc, I'ocsie lyri(jiie, ii. 88-97. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 243 while he sees in it the angry waste, the limitless gulf, the infinite sepulchre, yet this very aspect of ocean seems to have inspired Hugo, as it did Wordsworth, with that fortitude and patient cheer which gave him confidence in his genius and his mission, — one might be tempted to say, too great confidence, were it not that Hugo's estimate of himself anticipated that of posterity. He thought — and the mass of Frenchmen seem to agree with him — that the poet ought to be a shepherd of the people, a curate of souls, and he thought, too, that his ideal was fully realized in him- self; so through these years of exile he grew more intent on the substance of his message, less meticu- lous as to its form. Thus his work, alike in form and substance, became more intensely individual, the veri- table " memoirs of his soul." And we may imagine the seer's contempt for the disciples of formal correct- ness and polish. He would rather, he said, be " gro- tesquely useful " than a literary mandarin, and he condensed his scorn of such toying with the eternal verities into the words : " The vase that will not go to the fountain merits the hoots of the jugs." In 1857 Hugo published two volumes of his " Legend of the Centuries," which were supplemented in 1877 and completed in 1883.^ Then followed the " Chansons des rues et des bois," a true St. Martin's summer, a bursting of spring buds before the frosty but kindly winter of the poet's old age. There may be no genuine passion in these songs, any more per- haps than in the "Zuleika" of Goethe's " West-Ost- liche Divan ; " Init there is a joyous, naive naturalism that in spite of occasional lapses of taste is not witli- 1 As tlie poems of the three publications are redistributed in the complete edition, it is more conveuieut to treat tliem together later. 244 modi:i;n French literature. out a curious cliarm. The metrical movement, too, is wonderfully free and unrestrained. The poet seems to renew lus youth, and pipes as the linnets sing, with easy sylvan familiarity and country good-humor, in idyls whose simplicity is marred but rarely by overloaded fancy or obtrusive learning. Almost perfect in this kind is the " Country Holiday near Paris," ^ with its faintly suggested historical background and the bustling city left behind. In the " Contemplations " the poet's hom- age to Nature had been deep ; here it is gentle, elegiac. lie watches the sower at dusk, and " feels what must be his faith in the useful flight of time." ^ More than once this sympathy with the natural instincts and purely physical life of man wakens in him an echo of the French Eenaissance, and we seem to be listening to Ronsard. Seven years separate these " Songs of Wayside and Wood " from " L'Annee terrible," but they are sepa- rated by more than time ; for just as his exile had stirred his genius to profounder depths between 1852 and 1859 than were sounded in the next ten years, so the terrible months of his country's disaster (from Sedan, in September, 1870, to the fiery destruction of the Commune in May, 1871, and the poet's brief flight to Belgium), the daily memento of defeat in the presence of the insolent conquerors, the humiliation of borrowing money abroad to buy liberty at home, — all these things roused in Hugo emotions as intense as those of 1852, and rekhidled the wonted fires beneath his seventy years. But if Hugo had been bitter in his denunciation of the triumphant emperor, lie scorned, with a noble though perhaps a somewhat histrionic magnanimity, to 1 Chansous, I. iv. 2. ^ lb., U. i. 3. HUGO IN PLXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 245 insult him in defeat. No partisan alloy should mar the true ring of his patriotism. His book is a diary, retiecting day by day the anguish and the anger of his heart at the national humiliation and the fraternal strife. He remembers whose son he is, that the play- thing of his infancy was the acorn of a sword-hilt. If he describes with terrible ghastly vividness the deserted battletields where the dead lie in pools of blood, writhed in distorted forms beneath the snow, yet he has more envy than pity for those whom fate permits to die for their country and not to survive its defeat.^ With true patriotic instinct, in spite of all the past eighteen years, he sees in Germany the spirit of reaction in jealous combat with the spirit of progress and enlightenment, which it now seems to the author of the " Scourgings " that France has never ceased to represent. He wishes he were not French, that he miglit choose to be so now.^ Darkness and evil have indeed achieved a transitory triumph, but he is confident in the victory of the vanquished, — the ul- timate conquest of matter by the ideal, of force by 1 lis gisent dans le champ terrible et solitaire, Leur sang fait une mare affreuse sur la terre, Les vautours monstrueux fouillent leur ventre ouvert ; Leurs corps farouches, froids, e'pars sur le pre vert, Effroyables, tordus, noirs, ont toutes les formes . Qiie le tonnerre doune aux foudroyes c'normes lis sont luis et sanglants sous le ciel pluvieux : O morts pour mon pays, je suis votre eiivieux. (L'Annee terrible, Decembre, \ iii.) 2 Je voudrais n'etre pas fraiicais pour ])ouvoir dire Que jo te choisis, France, et que dans ton martyre, Je te proclame, toi que ronge le vautour, Ma patrie et ma gloire et mon uni([uc amour. (lb., Decembre, vii. Cp. also ix.) 246 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. reason. Just as a robin has built its iiest in the mouth of the monumental lion of Waterloo, " peace in the horrible jaws of war," so this defeat shall not be ruin but genesis, France shall be a spark to kindle the German forest to a blaze that shall enlighten the world, and "trembling kings shall see liberty gush forth from the lance-thrust in her side." ^ But into these political visions there comes, like the sound of a distant choir, a far-off echo of the domestic poems of the " Autumn Leaves ; " for Jeanne, his little granddaughter (now Madame Ldon Daudet), shares and cheers the weary months of the siege of Paris.2 This contrast between the domestic and public life of the poet is managed with great effect, and the verses on the death of his son (Mars, iii., iv.) pre- pare the way for poems whose wide sympathy em- braces even the errors of the Communists. " I cannot read," pleads an insurgent arrested in his attempt to burn the National Library. Hugo is sure that if we could penetrate beneath this Communistic rage, we should find its discords dissolving into the solemn chant, " Let us love one another." In the face of the orgies of burning Paris he still resists with all his power the " tragic widening of the tomb," he still pleads for the abolition of the death penalty.^ But if deep calls to deep from the " Chatiinents " to the "Terrible Year," it is natural that this higher inspiration should be less lasting in the aged Hugo, i Et la paix dans la gueule horrible de la guerre . . . Est-ce un ccroulemenf? Non. Cost une genese . . . ])u coup lie laucc a ton cote' Les rois tremblants vcrront jaillir la lihcrte. (L'Annee terrible, Juillet, iii., xi. 2, and xi. 1.) 2 lb., Septcnibre, v., Novembre, x., Janvier, xi., Juin, xviii. 3 See Avril, v., vi., i.x. ; Juiu, i., viii., xii., xiii. ; Juillet, ii. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 247 and indeed in his next volume it had quite spent its force. " L'Art d'etre grand-pfere " is a continuation and development of the poems to Jeanne. Here, with childlike, not to say childish simplicity, he tells of " the sovereignty of innocent things," and how, " amid all our ills that come like veils between us and heaven, the contemplation of a deep and starry peace is good and healthful to our minds." ^ He watches Jeanne asleep, and finds consolation for his political anxieties and disappointments in the fancied visions of her in- fancy. His grandson Georges entices from him the rather banal sentiment that " our sons' sons enrapture us." It was well perhaps to w^rite, but was it well to print, tliat toy comedy with its nursery stammerings ? But, what is far more serious, many of these poems lack the ring of genuine feeling ; and nothing wearies more surely or more quickly than the suspicion of mock simplicity. Occasionally, indeed, we catch and welcome a gleam of politics and even a faint echo of satiric thunder, while with the past and the present there is mingled in larger measure than heretofore the future, the new and possibly regenerate world in which these grandchildren will do their life-work. The style of these pieces, like their subjects, aims at simplicity, but it is not always natural. Short sen- tences and elliptical constructions mark all the poetry and prose of these later years, but nowhere do they be- come such mannerisms as here. Take for instance the following lines from a poem on the beach at Guernsey. ^ Certe il est salutaire et bon pour ]a pensee T)e contempler parfois a travers tons nos niaux, Qui sont entre le ciel et nous comme les voiles, Une profondo paix toute faito d'otoiles. (L'Art d'etre graud-pere, I. ii.) 248 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. Conjunctions are almost wholly suppressed, quite half the verbs are omitted, and we get effects like this : " Port noises. Whistles of engines under steam. Mili- tary music coming in puffs. Bustle on tlie quay. French voices. Merci. Bon jour. Adieu. It must be late, for, see ! my red-breast comes close up to me to sing. Noise of distant hammers in a forge. Water splashes. You hear a steamer puff. A tug enters. Immense panting of the sea." ^ Here Hugo is not aiming at vigor, but at fresh simplicity. He adapts himself easily to his self-imposed limitations, using such words and images as he might have used to Jeanne or Georges as they tripped along beside him, but not wholly without glimpses of the grander powers that were revealed that very year in their full splendor in the second " Legend of the Centuries." This cyclic poem may be best considered here, though its concluding part did not appear till six years later. Its subject is human progress through all the centuries that separate Cain from Robespierre ; its inspiration a robust faith in human destiny, that "sums up all aspects of humanity in one vast movement toward the light;" or, as he himself expresses it, his book shows " the slow and supreme unfolding of Liberty . . . the rising of mankind from the shadow to the ideal." It was, as he said, a slow growth, like a cedar-tree made ^ Bruits do ports. SifHements des machines cliauffecs. Miisi(|ne niilitairu arrivant par Imiiffui'S. Broulialia siir Ic. (jiiai. Voix framaiscs. Merci. Boiijiiiir. Adieu. Sans doutc il est tard, car voici (2ne vient tout jires do inoi cliantcr nion rons^e-t^ori^e. Vacarme do marteaux lointains dans nno forj^o. L'oau clapoto. On entcnd haleter nn stcamor. Une moucho cntre. Souffle iinmonso do la mer. (L'Art il'etre grand-pore, I. xi.) HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH. 249 to endure, and indeed it contains Hugo's best title to poetic immortality; for while the later volumes may show some falling off in vigor, they bear witness to a tenacious persistency in upbuilding the original con- ception. To this he introduces tlie reader by " The Vision whence sprang this book" (i. 9) where to his typifying mind, that makes each individual a symbol, history presents itself as a series of pictures illustrat- ing his own ethical creed. One sees here how much of the primitive man, of the myth-maker, there was in Hugo's nature.i To him all human life seems under the dominance of a universal antinomy. Fate and God. But if this thought lights up the obscurity of his " Vision " of the centuries, it is at the expense of their continuity. What had first seemed a wall is broken into an archipelago on which his fancy sees a charnel palace, built by fatality, habited by death, wliile over it hover the wings of hope and the radiance of liberty. Out of this vision springs his " Legend of the Cen- turies," his " bird's-eye view of the world." He begins naturally with mythology, with Hebrew and Indian legends ; then turns to the Olympians and their struggle with the Titans, in which he sees the conflict of mind with the forces of nature. But in vanquishing the powers of earth these gods enjoy only a mournful triumph ; for the world has lost its glad- ness, the Bacchantes have torn their Orpheus, and " the lions mourn the absence of the giants," until at last titanic Nature reasserts itself and cries to the stupefied Olympians, " gods, there is a God." ^ 1 Cp. Lanson, p. 1030. 2 See " Les Temps paniques " and "Le Titan," especially vol. i. pp. 77, 78, 80, 94, of the edition definitive, IGmo, to which all subsequent references apply. 250 MODEKN FRENCH LITERATURE. These Greek divinities, creatures of idealist aspira- tion, reappear later in the "Legend" as symbolic of the optimistic pantheism of the Eenaissance. In "Le Satyre " the light-hearted faun, a materialistic hedonist with the "immodest innocence of Ehea " (iii. 5), confronted by the Olympians, sings unabashed of divine chaos, " the eager spouse of the infinite " (p. 14), and bids the gods give back to mankind the age of gold (p. 15), from which beneath their rule the race has degenerated, " burning and ravag- ing where it should fertilize" (p. 17). But there shall be a renascence from this fatality. Casting aside the cloven foot, "man shall usurp the fire, mount the throne" (p. 21), the Real shall be born again, that world which the gods have conquered but not comprehended. Then there shall be "place for the radiance of the universal soul . . . One light, one genius everywhere, an all-embracing harmony." And the Faun closes his rhapsody with the cry : " Give place to the all ! I am Pan. Jupiter, kneel ! " (p. 23). Against this intoxication of democracy and arro- gance of natural instinct, Hugo introduces Mahomet to assert the pre-eminent moral verities, the personal oneness of God, and the reality of the higher law. Asceticism, too, has its place, though a small one, in the poet's vision. The Christian sentiment that all is vanity is turned to his democratic purpose more than once ^ to show that if all is not vanity, kings and con- querors certainly are. The worm of destruction exists to re-establish equality, " to preserve the balance ;" but 1 For instance, the close of the " Sept merveilles du monde," i. 283, and " L'^popcc du vcr," ii. 3, with " Le I'octe au ver," ii. 25. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMrH. 251 over " the incorruptible life," the things of the mind, it has no power.^ He takes his types of royalty from the monstrosi- ties. Xerxes, Clytemnestra, Attila, the French Philippe le Bel, the Spaniards Sancho and Alphonso,^ best suit his purpose. Among his heroes the Cid holds the first place for his magnanimous loyalty and filial devotion.^ With the Franks, Charles and Roland,* are associated the less familiar names of Welf, Aymerillot, and Evi- radnus,^ in whom are incorporated the medieval or possibly Quixotic spirit of men who were "kings in India and barons in Europe," when "at the waving of their swords the cries of eagles, combats, clarions of battle, kings, gods, and epics whirled in the gloom," to be silent of grotesquer feats.^ Then follow several pieces on the Turks that recall the brilliant colors of the " Orientales " thirty years before," and introduce vivid pictures of the feudal cruelty and oppression that followed the heroic age. Such are " Les Quatre jours d'Elciis " (ii. 217), and the tragic stories of Angus and of the cliildren of 1 11 fant bicn que ]o ver soit la pour Tcquilibre (ii. 9). La vio incorruptible est hors de ta frontiere . . . Tu n'y peut rien (Le Pocte au ver, ii. 25). 2 i. 109; i. 10.5; i. 125; i. 169; i. 137. 3 i. 137-161, 209, 233, 249. 4 i. 207,217; ii. 33. 5 ii. 193; i. 223; ii. 55. 6 Rois dans I'lnde ils ^taient en Europe barons, Et les aifjles, les cris des combats, les clairons, Les batailles, les rois, les dieiix, les epopees, Tourbillonnent dans I'onibre au vent de leurs ^pdes (ii. 30). Here too we may find archangels wipinj^ their swords on the clouds (ii. 189) and ancient chiefs strangliug kings and using their bodies as clubs to kill emperors (ii. 92). '' Especially Zim-Zizimi (ii. 97) and Sultan IMourad (ii. 111). 252 MODERN FKENGII LITERATUIIE. Isora,^ whose murderers suffer only from avenging Providence, since for such monster kings as Tiphaine and Radbert there is no justice on earth. In more modern times the Armada evokes a noble poem (iii. 41), there are fierce satires on royalty and especially on Napoleon III. that recall the finest lines of " Les Chd- timents," ^ while the glories of the First Empire are recalled by the memory of his father's magnanimity and of his uncle's heroism, and by the return of the ashes of the great Emperor (iv. 23).^ Here, too, are utterances of the noblest patriotism, together with pathetic pictures of childhood and somewhat nebulous pseudo-philosophic visions.^ Though the " Legend " is ostensibly epic, there runs through it all a personal element that allies it to lyric verse ; and, as r>runeti(ire remarks, this has inlhieneed the choice of subjects as well as their treatment. The passion of the poet is nearly always to be felt, his thesis nearly always obvious. So the whole lacks the serenity of a true epic, the more because the poet's convictions are less intellectual than moral. He is borne along by his feelings, not the master of them ; he is less a Baconian observer than an Orphic seer, a sort of " primordial force ; " but these are the very qualities that make him, as the same keen critic ob- 1 L'Aigle du casque, ii. 137 ; La Confiance du maniuis Fabrice, ii" 2 E. g., Los Mangours, iii. 109 ; La Colore du hronze, addressed par- ticularly to Morny, iv. 07 ; aud Le Prisonnior (IJazaine), iv. 85. lu " La Vision de Dante," iv. 1.39, Pius IX. is made to share the bad emi- nence of Na])oloon. •1 Apres la bataille, iv. .51 ; Lc Cinietiero d'Eylau, iv. 55. ^ E. rr., L'Elcgie (Lcs fleaux, iv. 97 ; Aprcs les fourches daudincs, iv. 89 ; Le Crapaud, iv. 131 ; Les Petits, iv. 197 ; Viugtiome siccle, iv. 217 ; La Tromj)ette dc jugemeut, iv. 247. HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TKIUMPH. 253 serves, " nut perhaps the greatest poet, but the greatest lyrist of all time." More directly, though hardly more profoundly, philo- sophic than the " Legend," are four poems, published between 1878 and 1880, — " Le Pape," " Eeligions et la religion," "L'Ane," and " La Pitid supreme," which may be considered together so far as they need to be consid- ered at all. The first of them is the least unintelligible. His ideal Pope should symbolize the eternal conscience of God, should unite all the elements of idealism and virtue as Huf^o conceives them. He should abandon all human pomp and pride, leave Eome itself, and having rebuked, like his Master, tlie sycophants of the East, should stoop to the lowliest charity, gather in his train the outcast and the poor, reconcile men and nations, preach the mutual duty of rich and poor, of aid and of gratitude, advocate Christian socialism, condemn capital punishment and retaliation, and, in short, realize Hugo's idea of a true " Imitation of Christ," such as he thought illustrated by himself. " Eeligions and Eeligion " undertakes to show tliat any creed narrowly comprehended by human prejudice is worse in its effect on moral character than all un- belief. The counterpart of this paradox is presented in " L'Ane," which would prove that false science is worse than none ; and having fallen into the paradoxi- cal vein, Hugo borrows another from Danton to make us believe, in " La Piti^ supreme," that the executioner is more worthy of pity than the victim. Even the poet's most enthusiastic admirers are wont to glide lightly over these errors of the old man eloquent. Hugo had still in his portfolios materials for the last volume of his " Legend " and for " Les Quatre vents de I'esprit," parts of which are as good as all but his very 254 MODEEN FRENCH LITERATURE. best. As its title suggests, this last of tlie poet's col- lections shows his work in tlie four fields of satire, drama, the lyric, and the epic. The first is, as usual, the best ; for he is riglit in saying that " hatred of evil and love of the just had been the weapons of his youth, and his shields contempt and disdain," with w^hich he had striven to battle against every oppressor of mind and body.^ Perhaps the most interesting among these pieces is the final statement of his attitude toward the established Church and his once cherished middle ages (i. 111). This confession of faith or of the lack of it sur- prises at once by its vigor, its boldness, and its nebulous indefiniteness. Admirable, too, is his picture of a rich church-warden who " knows that a good God is quite essential to keep the hungry people quiet," and is " proud to feel tiiat in his devotion he is taking the masses in his leash and God under his patronage." ^ One dwells the longer on this first part because Hugo's dramatic "wind" blows with much less vigor, and hardly ad- vances the little skiff of his genius toward the ever- fleeting goal of his dramatic ambition. The lyric section, like the satiric, embraces the work of forty years, and hence of very varied moods. There are poems where all Nature has a gloomy voice and the • 1 Vol. i. pp. 5, 25 (edition of 1882, to wliich refercucc is hereafter made). 2 i. .34. The lines cited are: — C'est que le peuple vil croira, le voyant croire, C'est qu'il faiit abrutir ces gen.ht seem in contradiction. No religion, according to him, has any basis in science. Intellectually Kenan knows of "no free will superior to man's that acts in any cognizable manner," but yet he accepts all religions as good within their limits of idealism. Only tlie compromisers are an ojffence to him. He feels nearer to the Ultramontanes than to the Neo-Catholics. The result of this attitude is to draw a sharp line between the domains of science and faith. There can be no antagonism where there is no contact. Hence he has done the church of his youth a great service, among those who have comprehended him, by illustrating how a man may possess a faith that does not possess him,^ and by Opposing the un- pliilosophic attitude toward the church of Voltaire's " Ecrasez I'infame," that still sways the democratic masses of France. Here his influence has been most definite and most happy, for it has been a voice for religious peace and toleration. Such views of philosophy and religion imply pride of intellect and a sense of superiority to his fellows, — ■ 1 For passages of similar tenor, see Bourget's essay, p. 62 sqq. 2 The antithesis holougs to Auatole France. 296 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. in other words, an aristocratic temperament. He does not think the mass of mankind fit to enjoy his pleasures or hold his creed. He dreads democracy in society and politics. 1 " All civilization is the work of aristocrats," says the Prior in "Caliban," and in the same play Prospero thinks labor should be the serf of thought, though " democrats find the doctrine monstrous." " Noli me tangere is all we can ask of democracy," he says elsewhere ; and he shudders at the Americanizing of society, to countervail which he dreams of an intel- lectual oligarchy who shall so hold in their sole control the still unguessed forces of science that they " will reign by absolute terror, because they will have the existence of all in their hands." This aristocratic spirit appears also in the contemptuous irony of his suggestion that Flaubert's Homais, the typical pro- vincial philistine, may after all be the best theologian ; and it is this that gives its sting to his dissection of Bdranger's convivial prayer, where glass in hand the poet begs his lady-love to Lever les yeux vers ce raonde invisible, Ou pour toujours nous nous reunissons, as a melancholy proof of the " incurable religious mediocrity " of France.^ But whether Eenan is a dilettante, a mystic, or an aristocrat, he is always a fascinating writer to the thoughtful. His style is like his mind, subtle, sinuous, apparently clear, and yet escaping the ultimate analysis and eluding the appreciation of ordinary readers, who miss such ornaments of diction as arrest their attention 1 See " Caliban," " Eaii dc Jouvence," and " lleforme intellectuelle et morale," this last written in view of the disasters of 1871. 2 Questions conteniporaiues, p. 467. THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 297 in Hugo and Miclielet. The greater number admire him for his skill in saving sentiment to their lack of faith, but choice spirits discern in him one of the greatest and most varied masters of Trench in this century. A distinguished critic, Mr. Saintsbury, has called his style "a direct descendant of that of Eousseau through Chateaubriand," but its charm seems rather to lie in a peculiar vague suggestiveness and spirituality. Even from a purely formal side it shows less affinity with these writers than with the Hebrew Scriptures and the Latin and Greek classics, while in its vocabulary, ex- cept perhaps in the latest pieces, it is severely simple and restrained. But he manipulates these limited re- sources with such skill that rhythm, metaphor, and direct description always seem to contain more than meets the ear, their outlines dissolving, as some critic has delicately said, like those of Corot's landscapes, till they seem a realization of Verlaine's aspiration : " ! la nuance, seule fiance." Bourget cites a passage from Eenan's essay on Celtic poetry that is at once an example and a description : — Jamais on n'a savoure assez longuement ces vohiptds de la conscience, ces reminiscences poetiques, ou se croisent a la fois toutes les sensations de la vie, si vagues, si profondes, si penetrantes, que, pour peu qu'elles vinssent a se prolonger, on en mourrait, sans qu'on pCit dire si c'est d'amertume ou de douceur. Such phrases as " voluptds de la conscience " and their delicate definition as " reminiscences at once vague and deep and searcliing and overpowering, and yet neither sweet nor bitter," should show how far Eenan is from being a direct descendant of Eousseau. Eenan's influence is at present the strongest single 298 MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE. element in French literature. " In him more than in any of his contemporaries," says Mr. Monod, "breathed the soul of modern France." To him is directly due the reawakening of religious curiosity, which leads to such analyses as Daudet's " L'Evangeliste " and " La Petite paroisse," as Bourget's " Nouveaux pastels," and Huysmans' " En route." But it owes less to any teach- ing of his than to the example of his dilettantism, which in his imitators becomes a skeptical power of varied enjoyment of the results of a previous, positive, creative period. Doubtless Kenan is not the originator of this " state of soul " which is the natural result of the overwhelming complexity of Parisian civilization, but his peculiar training made him its ablest and frankest exponent, and so he has become a leader, a prophet, to many in this perplexed fin de sieclc, which slirinks with the dread of old experience from what one of its ablest essayists calls " the horrible mania of certainty." French thought, or at least French crit- icism, seems " weary of all except of understanding." ^ It finds its satisfaction only in protean inconsistency, that supplies ever new and changing points of view. It denies the supernatural with easy tolerance, born of a conviction that no faith is worth a struggle, much less a martyrdom. It is therefore no favorable sign that so much of the best talent of France should turn to criticism. Never in its history has systematic criticism been more rigorously dogmatic, or psychological criticism shown more exquisite power of appreciation, than now, and never has critical work been followed with so much interest or met with such reward. A volume of psy- 1 Bourget, Essais, 61, attributes this sentiment to Virgil in a similar period of Latin culture. THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 299 chological studies in literature established the fame of Bourget; the weekly articles of Sarcey, France, and Lemaitre are literary events ; the scholarly conferences of Brunetifere hold the close attention of crowded lec- ture rooms ; and these are but the first among many equals.^ Among the immediate followers of Taine, Zola alone showed great force or originality as a critic, though he is much more dogmatic than judicious, and is far from practising in his novels the theories that he advocates in his critical essays.^ Also related to Taine, though fundamentally antagonistic to Zola, is Brunetifere. He shares with Zola Taine's objectivity and pessimism ; but he adds to this a logical synthesis that Zola, as a critic, does not possess. This, with his delicate taste and a learning alike minute and immense, borne lightly by a style that is always keen and cutting and some- times superciliously contemptuous, has made him more popular with the public than with his fellow critics.^ He is the most thoroughgomg of critical evolutionists, 1 It would be unjust not to name, though hut in foot-note, Emile Faguet (born 1847), editor of the " Classiques populaires " and author of a series of critical studies of the chief writers of the sixteenth, seven- teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Among younger men, E. Rod, G. Pellissier, author of the perspicuous " Mouvement litteraire au xix. siecle," and several volumes of literary essays, and G. Lauson, whose " Histoire de la litterature fran^aise " is one of the best popu- lar literary histories in any langua